So, Panizza was a theologian. But he was one in the same sense in that E. T. A. Hoffmann was a musician. Hoffmann understood music no less than Panizza did theology. But what remains from him are not musical compositions, but the literary work in which he plays with music as the spirit home of mankind. And it is precisely this spirit home of mankind that is dogma for Panizza. The transformation from the beginning to the end of German Romanticism is reflected in this relationship. Panizza was no longer, as Hoffmann was, carried on that broad wave of enthusiasm for primal times, for poetry, folk traditions, and the Middle Ages; his intellectual affinities are with the European decadents. And among those, the closest to him was Huysmans, whose novels so unwaveringly play on medieval Catholicism and especially its complement, the black masses, the beings of witches and devils. But that is why it would be so wrong to imagine Panizza as an “artist,” a man of l’art pour l’art, as Huysmans was. To first state the negative: there is no one who writes worse. His German is dissolute in a way that is unprecedented. When he begins some of his tales, almost all told in the first person, with a description of his state, how he marches along some icy rural road in Lower Franconia as a tired, ragged journeyman — everything that follows could truly be taken for the notes of a traveling journeyman, due to the sloppy language in which it is written. Admittedly, there is no contradiction here: despite everything, and at all costs, it must be taken for that of a great storyteller. The storyteller is less a writer than a weaver. Storytelling — and here we refer back to our opening remarks — is, in contrast to novel writing, for example, not a matter of education but of the folk. And Oskar Panizza’s art is rooted in folk. One should read his genial Church of Zinsblech or The Inn of the Trinity to understand what a rooted-in-the-soil decadent is.9
Let us stay for a moment with this last novella — even if only to get to know one aspect of Panizza, who appears like a student, or perhaps one should say trustee, of E. T. A. Hoffmann in Christian dogma, through his cast of characters. The tired wanderer Panizza finally stops at an inn, slightly off the road and not marked on any map, where he soon abandons the attempt to explain the place’s strange inhabitants. It is enough to mention here that an old, irascible Jew and his unworldly, hectic son, immersed in his theological studies, are housed there together with a Jewess, Maria, who is described as the boy’s mother. The narrator partakes of a gloomy, silent evening meal among this disconcerting group, then goes to his room on the second floor and sneaks back down at night in order to peek into the forbidden chamber, which he had passed in the evening but was not allowed to enter. He opens the door, the moon fills it, and between the half-opened shutters he sees how a dove, fearfully beating its wings, is trying to escape into the open. And now comes the actual Hoffmannian inspiration in all of this. In a shed adjoining the house, a creature is kept, a person with horse’s hooves, who continually bangs against his enclosure with an iron force, making the walls tremble, and now and again, at certain turns, as if on cue, bursts into repellent laughter.
Here is the dualist metaphysics that Panizza so completely shares with Hoffmann and that, following the inner necessity of which we have spoken, takes the form of a contrast between life and automaton. It has given him the story of the “People Factory,” where people are manufactured with clothes already grown on.10 It takes a still unmistakably theological turn in the following passage of The Immaculate Conception of the Popes: “The pope pulled … a glass-like, idiotic-looking doll out of the mouth of every person as soon as he died. The doll was transparent, and a balance sheet of all the deeds — both good and evil — of the person in question were contained in it. This doll, which was a small person, had two wings of starched fabric glued to its back and was let walk or fly. It was directed by that new realm created by the pope outside the world. There, the doll would be immediately received and laid in a big, shiny, clean brass scale, which had two equal scale pans. The doll’s good deeds weighed heavily, the bad ones lightly. On the other scale pan sat an equalsized normal doll, in whom good and bad deeds were exactly equally balanced. If the new arrival was only one grain lighter than the normal doll on the other side, it meant that the bad deeds outweighed the good.” It was sent to hell. However, “The dolls who were heavy enough were mercifully allowed to climb down from the scale and run into heaven, coelum, about which more anon.”11
This art would be an anachronism if, as many assumed, it only amounted to invectives against the papacy. But it is anachronistic in no different a sense than the Bavarian painters around Murnau and Kochelsee, who, up until a few years ago, painted their holy images on mirrors. A heretical painter of holy images: that is the shortest formula for Oskar Panizza. His image-fanaticism was not even extinguished at the heights of theological speculation. And it was combined with a keen, satirical insight, just as Hoffmann practiced it on the holy canon of the philistines. Both heresies are related. In both of them, however, satire is only a reflex of poetic fantasy, which safeguards its ancient rights.
“E. T. A. Hoffmann und Oskar Panizza,” GS, 2.2, 641–8. Translated by Lisa Harries Schumann.
Broadcast on Southwest German Radio, Frankfurt, on March 26, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript “Frankfurt Radio, 26 March 1930,” and for this date the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung listed, from 6:05–6:35 pm, “Parallels I: E.Th. Hoffmann and Oskar Panizza. Lecture by Dr. Walter Benjamin,” as the first in a series called “Parallels.”
1 For Wednesday, March 26, 1930, the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk-Zeitung announced the opening of a series entitled “Parallels” with the listing, “Parallels I: E. Th. Hoffmann and Oskar Panizza. Lecture by Dr. Walter Benjamin.”
2 See Hoffmann, Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern [The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr] (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1820–1822); Der goldne Topf: Ein Märchen aus der neuen Zeit [The Golden Pot: A Modern Fairy Tale] (Bamberg: Kunz, 1814); Prinzessin Brambilla: Ein Capriccio nach Jakob Callot [Princess Brambilla: A Capriccio after Jacques Caillot] (Breslau: Max, 1821); Meister Floh: Ein Märchen in sieben Abentheuern zweier Freunde [Master Flea: A Fairy-Tale in Seven Adventures of Two Friends] (Frankfurt: F. Wilmans, 1822).