Stifter, Witiko, and Biedermeier
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:author: Matěj Cepl
:date: 2016-09-25T20:11:50
:status: draft
:category: faith
:tags: Christianity, morality, spiritualWarfare, historicity, culture, review

Novel “Witiko” is to the average Czech reader a bizarre
combination of things which seemingly do not fit together at all:
this classical novel of the German literature written in German
by a man who was born in what is today Czechia, but the whole
book is rather passionate Czech patriotic story about the Czech
duke `Vladislav II.`_ (1110–Januray 18, 1174). The main hero of
the story is young noble which eventually growth to be `Vítek of
Prčice`_, founder of the most mighty noble family in the Bohemian
history, Vítkovci (of which the most important was `The House of
Rosenberg`_).

Stifter was known to be the master of the landscape descriptions
and he is obviously a big patriot of Böhmerwald_ (Šumava)
mountains in the Southern Bohemia. The results are absolutely
charming descriptions of the Šumava’s landscape (which
unfortunately takes a bit from the action of the story).

.. FIXME put some more comments on the book itself here

However, even more interesting than the content of the book is
its form. Stifter was one of the major representatives of the
Biedermeier in literature. That is a strange phenomenon which
I have never considered seriously. Although when thinking about
it, it feels extremely familiar and natural to me, or perhaps
because of it, I have very hard to describe it coherently.

* M. C. Putna: Biedermeier as a post-Baroque idyll and foundation
  of heimat-kultur (or God und Boden kultur as a softer variant
  of Blut and Boden). Což je zajímavé, protože to je vlastně
  napětí mezi bourgeois (rozuměj městským) a vesnickým stylem.

* Idyll and rejection of any internal conflict because whole idea
  was based on covering actual internal conflict of the time:
  falling apart of the Baroque universe after the Napoleonic
  wars, arrival of atheism, industrialism versus artificial
  restoration of the *Ancien Régime* by the Vienna Congress.

  About Stifter: “And yet passion is not eradicated, but
  sublimated in the original.”

* https://goo.gl/xJyuNu

First of all, of course, Biedermayer is a resistance to
romanticism. Where the romantic hero is overpowered by his
emotions, lives in the internal conflict, and he ends in the
tragedy, in Biedermayer there are no conflicts, there are no
dangerous emotions, the end is always happy.

When I say there are no internal conflicts, it does not mean
there are no negative persona (although quite often even that is
the case, find anything negative in the “Mozart on the Journey to
Prague”!), but if there is one (Načerat in Witiko), there are no
deep psychoanalytical dives, he just decided clearly and
rationally that he wants to get hold of power and so he makes
clear-headed steps to get to his dream. Witiko in the novel falls
in love with a girl, he promises her to make himself somebody to
be worthy of her love, and he then goes and just does it, and she
calmly waits on him for many years. In the end, as he promised,
he comes to her and marries her.

* Biedermeier as anti-romanticism

* Biedermeier as repressed unpoliticism, how similar to the Czech
  historical literature of the Communist era.

* Biedermeier as source of the Jerome Klapka Jerome’s *ordnung* in The
  Three Men on the Bummel … all those German tomcats studying
  appropriate regulations were reading Stifter before.

* Biedermeier as a version of stoicism, where the external is all what
  matters, internal is irrelevant and hidden.

* Biedermeier also on the Communist era note … internal has to be
  hidden, because it is dangerous, and only the external facade (most
  appropriate one) can be presented.

* Biedermeier as a version of the internal emigration.

* ``devlin`` presents “Mozart on the Journey to Prague” by Eduard Morike
  as a typical Biedermeier literature work. (which completely baffles
  reviewers on
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6605406-mozart-s-journey-to-prague,
  who just don’t see the point of the book).

* Masaryk’s “small work” [“práce drobná”] and Havel’s “Anatomy of
  a Reticence” [“Anatomie jedné zdrženlivosti”] (1985) is a pure
  Biedermeier.
  http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=eseje&val=4_aj_eseje.html&typ=HTML

* Gemütlichkeit_, including acceptance, being natural, environment of
  friedliness and coziness.

* saving, homely and family joys (preferable to the worldly glory), but
  also distrust (in future, in politics) … a bit opposite to the
  Fukuyama’s Social capital and Trust (well, no, Germans are
  super-social capitalists, aren’t they?)


.. _`Vladislav II.`:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislaus_II,_Duke_of_Bohemia
.. _`Vítek of Prčice`:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witiko_of_Pr%C4%8Dice
.. _`The House of Rosenberg`:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Rosenberg
.. _Böhmerwald:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Forest
.. _Gemütlichkeit:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gem%C3%BCtlichkeit