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Carl (Friedrich Georg) Spitteler (1845-1924) - pseudonym Carl Felix Tandem |
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Swiss poet, winner of the 1919 Nobel Prize for Literature for his masterpiece, Olympian Spring (final version in 1910). Carl Spitteler even evolved his own metrical scheme in the vast and original work. The epic poem depicted the rise of new gods to consciousness and power. In several works Spitteler dealt with the antagonism between creativity and the world. Spitteler's Prometheus and Epimetheus (1881) inspired the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Es war in seiner Jugendzeit — Gesundheit rötete sein Blut und täglich wuchsen seine Kräfte —. Da sprach Prometheus Übermutes voll zu Epimetheus seinem Freund und Bruder: Carl Spitteler was born in the town of Liestal, near Basel. The family moved to Bern in 1849, when his father was appointed treasurer of the new Swiss confederation. However, the young Spitteler remained in Basel with his aunt. Spitteler began to write poems at the age of seventeen, but his first talent was rather for drawing. Through painting and music he eventually found his way to literature. His first effort was a drama on the subject of Saul, with which he struggled for three years, and then gave up. Under the influence of the
historian Jakob Burckhard, who was his teacher at the Basel Pädagogium,
and the philologist Wilhelm Wackernagel, Spitteler became interested in
Ariosto and the Italian Renaissance. In 1863 he entered the
University of Zürich, where he studied law and theology. Between the
years 1865 and
1870 he studied theology in Zürich, Heidelberg, and Basel, but was not
considered orthodox enough to sit for the theological examination.
Spitteler passed with the highest honors the theological examination at
Basel in 1871. After declining an offer to start a career as a Protestant minister in Arosa, Spitteler went in 1871 to St. Petersburg at the invitation of General Standertskjöld. He worked there eight years as a tutor in Finnish families and visited Finland many times. Spitteler lead a quiet, ordely life, filled with work and writing Prometheus und Epimetheus (1881), which he had started while a student in Heidelberg. Composed in Biblical prose, this prose epic contrasted ideals with dogmas, personified by two mythological figures. Prometheus is an individualist who opposes his brother, King Epimetheus, an example of the herd instincts inside of us; he loses his soul. Epimetheus recalls Prometheus from exile to drive away the powers of evil. The story closes with the return of the brothers to their home in a lonely valley. This enigmatic work, published at Spitteler's own expense under the pseudonym Carl Felix Tandem (and ten years later with his own name), did not gain much attention, except when Spitteler was accused of having borrowed themes and figures from Friedrich Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra. In Spitteler's poem, Prometheus is the superman. Nietzsche read the book, recognized something of a kindred spirit in Spitteler, and recommended him to the editor of the Munich periodical Kunstwart in 1887. Spitteler took up again, in Meine Beziehungen zu Nietzsche (1908), the accusations, emphasizing his ignorance of Nietzsche's work when he wrote his poem. Having become well acquainted with Nietzsche's ideas during the polemic, Spitteler reviewed his work in
the Berner Bund in 1888. Nietzsche, who was on the brink of insanity,
mentioned Spitteler in the autobiographical Ecce Homo: "An essay on Beyond Good and Evil, by Dr. V.
Vidmann in the paper called the Bund,
under the heading "Nietzsche's Dangerous Book," and a general account
of all my works, from the pen of Herr Karl Spitteler, also in the Bund, constitute a maximum in my
life—I shall not say what. . . . The latter treated my Zarathustra, for instance, as "advanced exercises in style,"
and expressed the wish that later on I might try and attend to the
question of substance as well; Dr. Widmann assured me of his respect
for the courage I showed in endeavouring to abolish all decent feeling.
Thanks to a little trick of destiny, every sentence in these criticisms
seemed, with a consistency that I could but admire, to be an inverted
truth." (Ecce Homo (Nietzsche's Autobiography), translated by
Anthony M. Ludovici, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911, pp. 56-57) During his stint as a tutor, Spitteler learned Russian so well
that
he spoke French with Russian accent. Das Bombardement von Åbo.
Eine Erzählung aus Finnland (1889) reflected his experiences of
the
Russia of his day, but it told about the Finnish theater of the Crimean
war (1853-56), After the death of his father, Spitteler returned to
Switzerland
after the death of his father. Abandoning all hope of making poetry his
living, Spitteler held a mastership in a school in Neuveville
on Lake Basel. With his friend Joseph Viktor Widmann he kept
a girls' school for a short time. He worked as a journalist for Grenzpost
(1885-86) and then as a staff member of Basler Nachrichten.
From 1890 to 1892 he edited the Neue Züricher Zeitung. In
the 1880s he also published poetry, including Extramundana (1883)
and Schmetterlinge (1889). No conscientious writer ever strives to be very original. If he has a significant personality, he will only too easily be more original than either he or his readers care for. Where this is not the case, there is no better road to a healthy originality, to a truly individual quality, than to do each of his tasks in an honest and forthright way. He who always does this, and (e.g.) writes prose intelligently and simply, differentiates himself strongly from the great majority, for there is nothing rarer than what is at once simple and accurate. ('Orininality,' in Laughing Truths by Karl Spitteler, translated by James F. Muirhead, with an Appareciation of the Author by Romain Rolland, London and New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1927, p. 209; original title: Lachende Wahrheiten, 1898) In 1883 Spitteler married Marie Op den Hooff, who had
been his
pupil in Neuveville. When his wife's parents died and left in 1892 a
sizable inheritance, the family moved to Lucerne, where Spitteler
devoted himself entirely to writing. His breakthrough work, the epic
verse Der olympische Frühling,
appeared in several installments between 1900 and 1905, and was
revisited in 1910. To surprise his readers and critics, and to prove
that he could employ even the Naturalistic style, he wrote Conrad
der Leutnant (1898). The story, about father-son conflict,
is told in the space of twelve hours. With the publication of Felix Weingartner's pamphlet Carl
Spitteler, ein künstlerisches Erlebnis (1904,
2nd. ed. 1913) the poet started to receive recognition outside
Switzerland. In England he remained relatively unknown even after being
awarded the Nobel Prize. Only one scholar, Professor J. G. Robertson at
the University of London paid serious attention to his work; he called
Spilleler "the most forcible and original personality among the poets
of the Nietzschean era". ('Some Reflections on
Spitteler's "Prometheus und Epimetheus"' by A. H. J. Knight, The Modern Language Review, Vol.
27, No. 4, Oct., 1932) Spitteler's dichotomy between Prometheus and Epimetheus was
picked up by Carl Jung, who created in his book Psychological Types
his introvert / extrovert distinction. Jung also sent a copy of his
book to the author. Spitteler did not respond immediately but later
referred to the book during a lecture and said that his Prometheus
and Epimethus meant nothing, "that he might just as well have
sung, "Spring is come, tra-la-la-la."" (Memories, Dreams, Reflections
by
Carl Jung, revised and edited by Aniela Jaffé, translated from the
German by Richard and Clara Winston, Glasgow: Collins, 1979, p. 234) “Wanting to have the last word, Jung brought up the issue after Spitteler's death. (1933):
"Spitteler, for example, stoutly maintained that it was one and the
same whether the poet sang of an Olympian Spring or to the theme: "May
is here!" The truth is that poets are human beings, and that what a
poet has to say
about his work is often far from being the most illuminating word on
the subject." (Modern Man in Search of a Soul by C. G. Jung, translated by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1933, p. 186) Gottfried Keller said of Prometheus: "What
the poet wishes to say I do not know after reading his work twice; but
in spite of all obscurity and indefiniteness I feel it all with him,
feel the deep poetry that it contains." (quoted in Essays And Addresses On Literature
by J. G. Robertson, London: G. Routledge & Sons,1935, p. 95) Olympian Spring, an epic in five books, was a combination of mythology, fantasy, and religion. As Carl Jung said, Spitteler transformed the "waxing and waning of the gods into a myth of the seasons." (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 192) Written in iambic hexameter which was not a popular form of poetry, the story described colorfully mythical figures as they journey to Olympos, fight for power, and tangle themselves in intrigues. In the last book Zeus sends Heracles on a mission to the world: "Dummheit, ich reize dich! Bosheit, heran zum Streit! / Laß sehen, wer da bändigt, welchen Zeus geweiht!" (Olympischer Frühling, Jena, Diederichs, 1920, p. 350) ("Stupidity, I challenge thee! Malice, on the fight! / Let's see who'll master him whom Zeus hath sanctified!") The epic was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and compared to Milton's achievements. Spitteler's autobiographical Imago (1906) told
about a
conflict between artistic creatitity, personified in the character of
Victor, a young poet, and middle-class
restrictions, exemplified in his
former beloved and muse, who has turned into a neurotic housewife.
Through the love story of these opposites Spitteler explored the
unconscious. It is no surprise, that the novel had a
success among psychoanalysts – Sigmund Freud named his journal Imago
and Jung used the term in 1912. Spitteler himself was not happy with
the work. Rejecting the method of dream analysis Spitteler once
said,
"Dreams cannot be told; they dissolve when the rational mind tries to
grasp them in words." The name of the main character has an obvious
symbolic meaning: he triumphs over all the obstacles he had to
encounter. In Meine frühesten Erlebnisse (1914) Spitteler
returned to
his childhood. Satisfied with life as a writer, he stayed aloof from
politics. However, at the beginning of World War I, Spitteler advocated
in his famous speech Unser Schweizer
Standpunkt (Our
Swiss Standpoint) the view that
Switzerland should not take sides with Germany or
France, but to keep the same distance from all the sides. Worried about
ethnic nationalism that had emerged, he encouraged his fellow
countrymen to remain united. "My whole so-called political career (which I do not regret)
computes, out of a term of seventy years, precisely one hojur and ten
minutes," he stated at a banquet given in his honor in 1915. "That
hour,
unique and exceptional, has no continuation, for I have nothing either
to add or to retract." ('Carl Spitteler, Poet-Citizen'
by F.V. Keys, in The North American
Review, Vol. 214, No. 790, Sep. 1921) When
Spitteler
received the Nobel Prize he was nearly seventy-five years old, and his
name was not very familiar outside the German-speaking world. Due to
illness he was not
able to attend the ceremony. Romain Rolland
proclaimed that "Spitteler is to my mind the greatest European poet,
the only one today who approaches the most famous names of the past. .
. . Strange blindness of th world to pass by the living flame of the
genius of the most inspired poet without even divining its splendour." (quited in The Nobel Prize Winners in Literature by Annie Russell Marble, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1925, p, 212) Karl Spitteler died
on
December 28, 1924, in Lucerne. Prometheus der Dulder
(1924, Prometheus the Sufferer), his last work, was a new and
rhymed version of Prometheus und
Epimetheus. For further reading: 'Introduction' by Marianna D. Birnbaum, in The Bombardment of Åbo: A Novella Based on a Historical Event in Modern Times by Carl Spitteler (2022); Carl Spitteler: Essays zu Leben, Werk und Wirkung by Dominik Riedo (2017); Carl Spitteler, 1845-1924: Dichter, Essayist, Journalist/Musikkritiker, Pflanzenkenner, politischer Mahner, Cineast, ausgewählt, eingeleitet und kommentiert von Fritz Schaub (2013); Totalitat Des Mangels: Carl Spitteler Und Die Geburt Des Modernen Epos Aus Der Anschauung by Philipp Theisohn (2001); 'Spitteler, Carl,' in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 4, edited by Steven R. Serafin (1998); 'Spitteler, Carl,' in World Authors 1900-1950, Vol. 4, edited by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); 'Spitteler, Carl,' in Nobel Prize Winners, edited by T. Wasson (1987); Carl Spitteler by W. Stauffacher (1973); Spitteler's "Olympischer Frühling" und seie epische Form by O. Trommel (1965); Essays and Addresses on Literature by John George Robertson (1935); The Tyranny of Greece over Germany by E.M. Butler (1935); Spittelers Weg und Werk by R. Faesi (1933); 'Carl Spitteler,' in Studies from Ten Literatures by Ernest Boyd (1925); 'Carl Spitteler, Poet-Citizen' by F.V. Keys, in The North American Review, Vol. 214, No. 790 (Sep., 1921) Selected works:
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