Maria Henriette de la Cherois Crommelin (1849-1930), known as May Crommelin, was a descendant of a Huguenot refugee family that had settled in Great Britain in 1690, one of her ancestors having been invited by William III to establish the linen industry in Ireland. Her family’s Irish connection – May Crommelin herself was born on the family estate of Carrowdore Castle in County Down, Northern Ireland – probably explains
her relation to Aunt Agnes, who was in all likelihood, like Zur Mühlen’s grandmother, from the family of the Blackers of Carrickblacker, County Armagh. Completely forgotten now, Crommelin was a prolific and in her time popular author. Between her first novel, Queenie, published in 1874, when she was 25, and her last, published in 1924, when she was 75, she wrote over two dozen novels and collections of short stories, in addition to children’s books and travel books. One of a long line of intrepid British women travellers (Over the Andes from the Argentine to Chile and Peru appeared in 1896), she was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. When Zur Mühlen met her, she was at the height of her popularity.
p. 40
Jerome K. Jerome
Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927), best known as the author of the still widely read Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1899) and Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), produced a number of novels as well as plays and collections of short stories and essays. A contemporary and friend of J. M. Barrie, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, and Israel Zangwill, he was probably one of the English-language authors read to Zur Mühlen by her grandmother. He quickly became one of her favourites. She translated several of his stories and also wrote his obituary for the Frankfurter Zeitung (1927, no. 437A, p. 649), two years before Ende und Anfang appeared in instalments in the same newspaper.
pp. 45-46
Kürenberger
Most likely not “Der von Kürenberg” or “Der Kürenberger,” an Austrian poet of the mid-twelfth century, but Ferdinand Kürnberger (1821-1879), a child of working-class parents, who became one of Austria’s leading journalists. His feuilletons were famously critical of the old Habsburg Empire in general (“Asiatic, retarded, lazy, and stupid”) [“asiatisch, zurückgeblieben, faul, dumm”] and of Viennese society in particular: “In the shadow of a scepter whose sway extends from Donauschingen to Smyrna, Vienna is developing relentlessly into a world-city, but while we have become inhabitants of a world-city, we have acquired none of the urbanity of world citizens.” Kürnberger also wrote plays, novellas, and novels. Karl Kraus, the famous Viennese critic and satirist of the next generation, sometimes referred to him as his
most important predecessor.
Kürnberger was already writing for various newspapers when the October 1848 Revolution broke out in Vienna. Having taken part in it, he fled to Germany after it was suppressed, but soon landed in prison anyway for having allegedly participated in the Dresden uprising of the following May. In 1855 he published Der Amerika-Müde, based on Nikolaus Lenau’s American experience. Ostensibly a novel, it was also a critical study of modern democratic and capitalist societies through the eyes of its idealistic hero Moorfeld, who, arriving in New York full of enthusiasm for a New World he expects to be radically different from Old Europe, discovers
that “the crowning blossom of human progress,” “the savior that one day will redeem us all,” while certainly different from Old Europe, is a land where all are equally grasping and obsessed with gain and where the first lesson one is taught is indeed “not German metaphysics” but that “time is money” and that “wasting” it in unremunerated activities is equivalent to throwing money away. (Der Amerika-Müde.
Amerikanisches Kulturbild [Frankfurt a.M.: Meidinger Sohn & Cie., 1855], in the series Deutsche Bibliothek, Sammlung auserlesener Original-Romane, vol. 8, pp. 1, 2, 19)
Kürnberger’s way of looking at his world – unblinkingly, without illusion, and with provocative realism – can be gauged from the cynical observation of one of the characters in Der Amerika-Müde: “Long live the freedom of the press! Yes, yes, my dear Sir, the freedom of the press is the jewel of our enlightened and happy land.
An enslaved press is an excellent instrument of emancipation, for then the public forms its own judgment. But a free press is an invaluable instrument of tyranny.
The mob believes it and parrots what it is told.” (p. 190) “Press freedom and press abomination are directly connected,” the narrator had already noted at the beginning of the novel (p. 8). Usually accounted a liberal, Kürnberger did not shrink from unmasking liberal hypocrisy and attacking liberal shibboleths. Hence the press itself, for which he worked on and off for most of his life, became a prime object of criticism in as much as it served to disseminate political clichés. For the political slogan [“die politische Phrase”], he declared, “is a dangerous toy” [“ein gefährliches Spielzeug”]. In the 1860’s when he served as General Secretary of the Schiller Foundation, what he picked out from Schiller’s writings (and paraphrased in his own way) was almost the opposite of the idea people usually associated with the most loved and admired poet of German neo-classicism. Literature should not restore wellbeing to people, Schiller held (according to Kürnberger), but should “destroy their sense of wellbeing,” it should “inkommodieren” them [cause them discomfort]. Likewise Revolution should never allow itself to become institutionalized in a new order. In phrases reminiscent of Stirner, Kürnberger warned that “the avenger whom the people itself awakens, can never hold an office and incur obligations; he can never be engaged, patented, privileged; he can never be a subscriber to anything; he can only be totally free and he can never act except of his own free will.” The critic did not allow himself any illusions about his own activity. “I have been enlightened about the Enlightenment itself,” he once remarked. Criticism and satire are not effective in themselves, he added. They change nothing. Power will not yield to truth, but only to the pressure that will follow widespread recognition of the truth.
While the corrosiveness of his criticism doubtless appealed to Zur Mühlen’s father – and to the rebellious young Countess herself – it is unlikely that either endorsed his German nationalism, which manifested itself in contempt for the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire and, in particular, for its Slavic (“Asiatic”) components and which culminated in enthusiastic celebration of the Prussian victory over France in 1870. Germany has long been despised and the German worker treated like a domestic animal, the revolutionary of 1848 wrote – without irony – in August 1870, but “Now our Messiah has come! Nothing on earth is greater than the German name.” To Zur Mühlen, in contrast, as her novel Ewiges Schattenspiel (We Poor Shadows) makes especially clear, the multi-ethnic character of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire was a positive quality,
while in the novel Reise durch ein Leben (A Life’s Journey), the patchwork quilt is a symbol of the only unity individuals and nations can or ought to strive for.
(Sources: Karl Riha, Kritik, Satire, Parodie [Opladen: Wetdeutscher Verlag, 1992];
Andrea Wildhagen, Das politische Feuilleton Ferdinand Kürnbergers [Frankfurt, Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 1985]; Wolfgang Klaubacher, “Ferdinand Kürnberger und Adolf Fischhof: zwei ehemalige `Märzkämpfer` in deutschnationaler Euphorie,” in Klaus Amann and Karl Wagner, eds., Literatur und Nation [Vienna, Cologne, Weimar:
Böhlau, 1996]).