Schleiermacher’s lecture permits a much more detailed social and historical specification of this agenda. He concludes with {103} some explicit references to “we Germans,” remarking that “our nation,” “because of its respect for what is foreign and its mediating nature” (88; “seiner vermittelnden Natur” (243)), uniquely satisfies the “two conditions” necessary for foreignizing translation to thrive, namely “that understanding foreign works should be a thing known and desired and that the native language should be allowed a certain flexibility” (81). This is the understanding of foreign works sought by educated “Germans” like Schleiermacher, a university professor and minister in the Reformed church, who feels that the German language possesses the “flexibility” to support foreignizing translation since it is undeveloped, lacking a definite “mode of expression,” not yet “bonded” to the “classical,” a “partial mother tongue”: “our language, because we exercise it less owing to our Nordic sluggishness, can thrive in all its freshness and completely develop its own power only through the most many-sided contacts with what is foreign” (88). Since the category “foreign” here is determined by the educated, Schleiermacher is using translation to mark out a dominant space for a bourgeois minority in early nineteenth-century German culture.
As Albert Ward observes of this period,
literature was […] a predominantly bourgeois art, but it was only a small part of this section of the community that responded most readily to the classical writers of the great age of German literature. […] Writers like Goethe and Schiller found their public in the Honoratioren of the large towns, in the university-trained professional men, the ministers of religion, teachers, doctors, and lawyers, in what might be termed the elite of middle-class society. “High literature” was then even more than now a thing for a small group of scholars.
Ward demonstrates the cultural and economic marginality of German “literature,” both classical and romantic, by referring to sizes of editions and sales figures amid some striking testimonies from contemporaries in the publishing industry:
Karl Preusker, who came to Leipzig as a bookseller’s apprentice in 1805, names in his autobiography the authors most in demand at that time; the most classical (as we understand the term today) of {104} the authors on his list is Zschokke, “whereas the works of Schiller and Goethe were sold in only meagre quantities.”
Schleiermacher, who associated with the leading German romantics, briefly shared a Berlin apartment with Friedrich Schlegel, and contributed to the Schlegel brothers’ small-circulation journal, the Athenaeum, was entirely in agreement with Goethe when developing his theory of foreignizing translation. In an essay on “Wieland’s brotherly memory” published in February of 1813, four months before Schleiermacher’s lecture, Goethe wrote:
there are two maxims in translation: one requires that the author of a foreign nation be brought across to us in such a way that we can look on him as ours; the other requires that we should go across to what is foreign and adapt ourselves to its conditions, its use of language, its peculiarities. The advantages of both are sufficiently known to educated people through perfect examples. Our friend, who looked for the middle way in this, too, tried to reconcile both, but as a man of feeling and taste he preferred the first maxim when in doubt.
In siding with this “feeling and taste” for “what is foreign,” Schleiermacher was valorizing an elite bourgeois cultural discourse of literary refinement against the larger, more heterogeneous culture of the middle and working classes. “The average middle-class reader,” Ward points out, “wanted works which were within his own experience and range of emotion, reflecting his own interests and not conflicting with the demands of his morality” (Ward 1974:133). Whereas Schleiermacher’s lecture on translation is quite scholarly in citing only Greek and Latin writing (Plato, Cicero, Tacitus, Grotius, and Leibniz), the wider middle-class readership favored Gothic tales, chivalric romances, realistic novels both sentimental and didactic, biographies of exemplary men, travel literature. This audience was reading translations as well, but the greatest percentage consisted of translations from French and English novels, including the work of Choderlos de Laclos and Richardson. Schleiermacher himself had translated Plato, while other romantics—Voss, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Hölderlin—translated Homer, Sophocles, Dante, and Shakespeare. They were very much aware that they were translating {105} for a relatively narrow audience, even a coterie, and like Schleiermacher, they saw this social fact as a value that improved their “literature” and endowed it with cultural authority. Friedrich Schlegel boasted that “[readers] are forever complaining that German authors write for such a small circle, often in fact for themselves as a group. I find this a good thing. German literature gains more and more in spirit and character because of it” (Ward 1974:191 n.46).
Schlegel’s comment shows that this is not only a bourgeois, but a nationalist concept of literature—“German.” And Schleiermacher’s theory of foreignizing translation reveals a similar ideological configuration: it is also pitched against a German nobility that was not literary and had long lain under French cultural domination. Aristocratic culture eschewed scholarly research and wide reading in past and contemporary literature; “the few courts which did take an active interest in literary affairs,” Ward notes, “were characterized by a predominantly bourgeois atmosphere” (Ward 1974:128). In aristocratic education, “the accent was on languages, particularly French, and often to such an extent that many noblemen could express themselves better in that language than in their mother tongue” (ibid.:123). In a letter from 1757, the aesthetician and dramatist Johann Christoph Gottsched described an audience with Frederick II, during which he informed the Prussian king of the serious threat to literary culture posed by the Gallicized nobility:
When I said that German writers did not receive sufficient encouragement, as the aristocracy and the courts spoke too much French and understood too little German to be able to grasp and appreciate fully anything written in German, he said: that is true, for I haven’t read no German book since my youth, and je parle comme un cocher, but I am an old fellow of forty-six and have no time for such things.
Some fifty years later, Schleiermacher’s lecture on translation engages in the cultural struggle for a German literature with an equally bold criticism of Frederick II. Schleiermacher represents the king, however, not as Gottsched’s anti-intellectual oaf, but as a German intellect limited by his utter dependence on French:
[2]
Sheehan 1989:157–158 describes the different German cultural constituencies during this period.