Merlin tries to teach his faith to King Artus and his circle, who embody the frivolous, irresponsible, though refined, conduct of the nobility, essentially the same nobility whom von Stein accused of injuring the nation and Immermann satirized and exposed in Muenchhausen.  They decide to seek salvation in the primitive idealism of India, appointing Merlin their guide.  Merlin, however, succumbs to the silly Niniana, the personification of wanton desire.  She makes him tell her a fated word, after promising not to repeat it.  She thoughtlessly repeats it.  He now loses his superhuman power, i. e., the power of absolute spiritual integrity, and becomes subject to the limitations of earth, like a common man.  He can no longer lead Artus and his court, who perish of their own spiritual vacuity.

The end of the play is unsatisfactory.  The hero’s surrender to the lust of the flesh, undoubtedly suggested by Goethe’s Faust and consistent in Goethe’s poem, is foreign to the conflict of this play, which, not being human, as is that of Faust, but an abstract antagonism of general historic principles, should have been solved without the interference of the mere creature weaknesses of the hero and the mere creature sympathies of the reader.  Immermann planned to untie the knot in a second part, which was to treat of the salvation of Merlin; but he never carried his purpose beyond a few slight introductory passages.

IMMERMANN’S “MUeNCHHAUSEN”

BY ALLEN WILSON PORTERFIELD, PH.D.  Instructor in German, Columbia
University

Immermann first thought of writing a new Muenchhausen in 1821, the year of his satirical comedy, The Princes of Syracuse, which contains the embryonic idea of this “history in arabesques.”  Conscientious performance of his duties as a judge and incessant activity as a writer along other lines forced the idea into the background until 1830, the year of his satirical epic, Tulifaentchen, in which the theme again received attention.  In 1835 he finished Die Epigonen, a novel portraying the social and political conditions in Germany from 1815 to 1830, and in 1837 he began systematic work on Muenchhausen, continuing, from a different point of view and in a different mood, his delineation of the civic and intellectual status of Germany of his own time.  The last part of the entire work was published in 1839, having occupied, intermittently, eighteen of his twenty years of literary productivity.  The first edition was exhausted one year after publication, a second appeared in 1841, a third in 1854, and since 1857 there have been many of all kinds, ranging from the popular “Reclam” to critical editions with all the helps and devices known to modern scholarship.