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Shifting Viewpoints Cervantes in Twentieth Century and
Early Twenty First Century Literature Written in
German 1st Edition Gabriele Eckart Digital Instant
Download
Author(s): Gabriele Eckart; Meg H. Brown
ISBN(s): 9781443864350, 1443864358
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.19 MB
Year: 2013
Language: english
Shifting Viewpoints
 Shifting Viewpoints:
Cervantes in Twentieth-Century
and Early Twenty-First-Century Literature
Written in German

By

Gabriele Eckart and Meg H. Brown

 Shifting Viewpoints:
Cervantes in Twentieth-Century and Early Twenty-First-Century Literature Written in German,
by Gabriele Eckart and Meg H. Brown

This book first published 2013

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Gabriele Eckart, Meg H. Brown

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5135-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5135-0

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1

Chapter One Don Quixote in Germany’s Weimar Republic

1900-1933 .................................................................................................... 9
Ernst Toller’s Der entfesselte Wotan
Ernst Jünger’s Das abenteuerliche Herz

Chapter Two Don Quixote in Exile Literature ...................................... 27

Part 1 Bruno Frank (Cervantes) and Others
Part 2 Thomas Mann (“Meerfahrt mit Don Quijote”)
Part 3 Gustav Regler (Ohr des Malchus and Juanita)

Chapter Three Don Quixote in West Germany..................................... 67

Part 1 Wolfdietrich Schnurre (“Wir sind Don Quichotte und Sancho
Pansa”)
Part 2 Paul Schallück (Don Quichotte in Köln)
Part 3 Margarete Hannsmann (Chauffeur bei Don Quijote: Wie hap
Grieshaber in den Bauernkrieg zog)

Chapter Four Don Quixote in East Germany ....................................... 87

Part 1 East German Poetry
Part 2 Fritz Rudolf Fries’s Stannebein Novels (Das Luft-Schiff
and Die Väter im Kino)
Part 3 Günther Rücker (Der Nachbar des Herrn Panza)

Chapter Five The Reception of Cervantes in Post-Wall Germany ... 135

Part 1 Erich Loest (“Wider die Dunkelmänner unserer Zeit”),
Martin Mosebach (Meister Peters Puppenspiel), and Others
Part 2 Volker Braun (Der Wendehals oder Trotzdestonichts and
Machwerk oder das Schichtbuch des Flick von Lauchhammer)
vi Table of Contents

Chapter Six Don Quixote in Austria .................................................... 167

Part 1 Joseph Roth (Die Büste des Kaisers)
Elias Canetti (Die Blendung)
Part 2 Franz Kafka (“Die Wahrheit über Sancho Pansa”)
Stephan Wackwitz (Die Wahrheit über Sancho Pansa)
Part 3 Wilhelm Muster (Der Tod kommt ohne Trommel)
Part 4 Peter Handke (Der Bildverlust: oder Durch die Sierra de
Gredos)

Chapter Seven Don Quixote and The Conversation of the Dogs

in Switzerland ........................................................................................ 221
Part 1 Maja Beutler (Das Werk oder Doña Quichotte)
Part 2 Zsuzsanna Gahse (Berganza)

Final Thoughts ......................................................................................... 249

Index ........................................................................................................ 253

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As professors of both German and Spanish, the intercultural relations

between the German speaking countries and Spain have fascinated us for
many years. For this book project we have received a tremendous amount
of emotional support from our husbands Terry Heins and Barry Brown,
whose patience knows no bounds. Colleagues and friends have provided
vast support in time and cheerful assistance, and we would like to express
our gratitude to them. They include Reika Ebert, Jake Gaskins, Douglas
Phelps, and Phil Feger.

This book has evolved over a number of years; shorter versions of

different chapters have been presented at various conferences, such as

Meg Brown. “Thomas Mann’s Interpretation of Don Quixote: ‘Voyage

with Don Quixote.’” South Atlantic Modern Language Association
Conference. Atlanta, Georgia. 5 November 2010.
Gabriele Eckart. “The Reception of Cervantes’s Works during the Weimar
Republic.” Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association
Conference. Scottsdale, Arizona. 7 Oct. 2011.
Meg Brown. “Paul Schallück’s Don Quichotte in Köln.” Rocky Mountain
Modern Language Association Conference. Scottsdale, Arizona. 7 Oct.
2011.
Gabriele Eckart. “Fritz Rudolf Fries’s Reception of Don Quixote in the
Novels Das Luftschiff and Die Väter im Kino.” Ninth Annual Southeast
Coastal Conference on Languages and Literatures. Statesboro,
Georgia. March 2012.
Meg Brown “Echoes of Cervantes’s Don Quixote in Works by
Wolfdietrich Schnurre und Margarete Hannsmann.” Rocky Mountain
Modern Language Association. Boulder, Colorado. 12 Oct. 2012.
Gabriele Eckart “Cervantes in Germany in the 20th Century.” Mid-
American Conference on Hispanic Literatures. Saint Louis, Missouri.
Sept. 2002.

In addition, earlier versions of different chapters have been published in

refereed scholarly journals. The following is a list of the articles published
by Gabriele Eckart:
viii Acknowledgements

“‘To Blur the Sign:’ Miguel de Cervantes’s Speaking Dog in Zsuzsanna

Gahse’s Berganza.” Glossen 37 (2013). Used with permission from
Glossen.
“Defending SED Party-line: Günther Rücker’s Play Der Nachbar des
Herrn Pansa.” Glossen 36 (2013). Used with permission from
Glossen.
“Peter Handke’s Reception of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote in the
Novel Der Bildverlust.” The Comparatist 37 (2013). From THE
COMPARATIST. Vol. XXXVII. Copyright © 2013 by the Southern
Comparative Literature Association. Used by permission from the
University of North Carolina Press.
“Wackwitz Reading Kafka Reading Cervantes: Die Wahrheit über Sancho
Panza.” Glossen 35 (2012). Used with permission from Glossen.
“The Reception of Cervantes’s Don Quixote in Wilhelm Muster’s Der Tod
kommt ohne Trommel.” CIEHL (Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios
Humanisticos) 17 (2012). Used with permission from CIEHL.
“Cervantes’s Don Quixote in GDR Poetry.” Glossen 32 (2011). Used with
permission from Glossen.
“The Reception of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and The Conversation of the
Dogs in Post-Reunification German Literature.” Glossen 31 (2011).
Used with permission from Glossen.
“Don Quichotte und Sancho Pansa in der deutschen Nachwendeliteratur.”
Literarische Koordinaten der Zeiterfahrung. Ed. Joanna Lawnikowska-
Koper and Jacek Rzeszotnik. Wroclaw: Neisse Verlag, 2009. 177-86.
“Cervantes in the German-Speaking Countries of the Twentieth Century.”
Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America. 23.2 (2003). Used with
permission from Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America.
“La Ana de Maja Beutler–¿un Quijote femenino?” Taller de Letras 31
(2002). Used with permission from Taller de Letras.

All of the parts of the book that were previously published as articles
appear here in substantially revised and expanded form. We thank the
anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of these articles for their
input. We are also grateful to Southeast Missouri State University for
granting a one semester sabbatical leave in 2010 to Gabriele Eckart to do
research in German libraries for this project.
 INTRODUCTION

Miguel de Cervantes’s reception in the German-speaking countries

forms a highly interesting tale. Since 1617, when Niclas Ulenhart adapted
Cervantes’s novella Rinconete y Cortadillo (1613) and especially since
1648, when Joachim Caesar came out with the first partial translation of
Don Quixote of la Mancha (1605) into German, Cervantes’s works have
excited some of the most important writers in Germany, Austria, and
Switzerland to a degree that they have engaged in an intertextual dialogue
with his works. Especially Cervantes’s protagonist Don Quixote, who
sallies out into the world with a raised lance to change it in the name of his
ideals, has been an important factor in literature written in German.
Reading this literature as it was created over the centuries, it seems as if
many German-speaking writers just could not resist the temptation to use
Don Quixote or Sancho Panza, his squire, to serve their different aesthetic,
cultural, and political aims. Some writers, especially in periods of
disillusionment, for instance after World War I or in East Germany after
the Fall of the Wall in 1989, saw Quixote, who does not give up his ideals
in times of disbelief, as a champion for their causes. Others used the figure
of Quixote to reject political idealism as they sympathized with the more
earthly Sancho. However, other works of Miguel de Cervantes, for
example, some of his Exemplary Novels (1613), have also inspired
German writers. Think, for instance, of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s narrative News
from The Latest Destinies of the Dog Berganza (Nachricht von den
neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza, 1814), Zsuzsanna Gahse’s
narrative Berganza (1984), and Fritz Rudolf Fries’s story The Dogs of
Mexico City (Die Hunde von Mexiko-Stadt, 1997), all three of which are
strongly influenced by Cervantes’s novella Conversation of the Dogs (El
Coloquio de los Perros).
Since much has been written about the reception of Cervantes’s works
in Germany during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries,
we intend to examine in this study only the German, Austrian, and Swiss
literary reception of Cervantes in the twentieth century and the first decade
of the twenty-first century. Aside from research on the Spaniard’s
influence on Thomas Mann, there is a dearth of research regarding
Cervantes’s influence on the literature written in German-speaking
countries after 1900. We have researched the literature of this time period
2 Introduction

thoroughly, discovered surprising references and adaptations, and intend to

show in this study that several of Cervantes’s works actively influenced
the literature of twentieth- and twenty-first-century German-speaking
writers. We think that this undertaking will be very pertinent to widening
the scope of intercultural studies. Walter Grünzweig writes that
“interculturality” has become a catchword in such disciplines as sociology,
international education, and communication during the last decades. In
Germany, a Society for Intercultural German Studies was founded “in an
attempt to challenge the monocultural traditions and practices of the
literary discipline by highlighting its multicultural context” (Grünzweig 2).
Our study is in this line.
Cervantes’s influence, as is well known, has not been limited to the
realm of literature in German-speaking countries. As Gernot Gabel has
recently documented, it can be seen also in art, in music, in film, in
advertising, and in popular culture. In this study, we only intend to
examine the creative reception of Cervantes’s works by German-speaking
literary authors, hoping that somebody else will pick up the staff and
explore Cervantes’s influence in other areas of culture from 1900 on.
While our investigations are the first to deal comprehensively with the
topic of the Cervantes’s reception in twentieth- and twenty-first-century
literatures written in German, they are rooted in the research of
Cervantes’s presence in the German speaking countries before 1900. Of
great importance is Gerhart Hoffmeister’s Spanien und Deutschland:
Geschichte und Dokumentation der literarischen Beziehungen (1976),
which constitutes a valuable study of an intercultural phenomenon. As
Hoffmeister shows, Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote was first read in
Germany as a satire against the novels of chivalry in the tradition of
Amadís de Gaula. Therefore, also the first German “Donquichottiaden,”1
such as Wilhelm Ehrenfried Neugebauer’s Der teutsche Don Quichotte
(1753), were written with the intention of demonstrating the danger of
reading novels and adapted Cervantes’s main protagonist as a ridiculous
figure who was unable to differentiate between fiction and reality. With
German Romanticism, this interpretation changed. The brothers Schlegel,
Schelling, and others considered Don Quixote the Romantic novel par
excellence based on the fact that the two major forces of life, “the prose in
the person of Sancho and the poetry nobly represented by Don Quixote”
(“die Prosa in der Person Sanchos und die von Don Quijote edel vertretene
Poesie”; W. Schlegel quoted in Hoffmeister 342) are fighting and uniting
with each other in this text. In addition, the novel was considered a model
for the expression of “progressive [. . .] Universalpoesie” (Hoffmeister
125) and the mixture of heterogeneous elements in a literary text that the
 Shifting Viewpoints 3

Romantics dreamed of. Also noteworthy is Schelling’s Romantic

interpretation of Don Quixote as a philosophical novel that delineates the
conflict of the ideal and the real (see Hoffmeister 125). In Cervantes
scholarship, the two different readings of Don Quixote of la Mancha
during Enlightenment and Romanticism are referred to as “hard” and
“soft” readings, respectively.
Hoffmeister observes that Hegel tries to reconcile both the
Enlightenment’s satirical and the Romanticism’s heroic interpretations of
Don Quixote, by stating:

Don Quixote is completely self-assured in his madness and his cause; or,
perhaps, this is his madness, that he is and remains so self-assured of it.
Without this inner peace not disturbed by reflection of the content and
success of his actions, he would not really be Romantic. . . . Similarly, the
whole work is a [. . .] mockery of the Romantic knighthood.
(Don Quijote ist ein in der Verrücktheit seiner selbst und seiner Sache
vollkommen sicheres Gemüth, oder vielmehr ist nur dieß seine
Verrücktheit, daß er seiner Sache so sicher ist und bleibt. Ohne diese
reflexionslose Ruhe in Rücksicht auf den Inhalt und Erfolg seiner
Handlungen wäre er nicht echt romantisch. . . . Ebenso ist das ganze Werk
[. . .] eine Verspottung des romantischen Ritterthums.) (Hoffmeister 126)

As will be seen in the following chapters, German-speaking authors of the

twentieth and early twenty-first century who creatively modify Don Quixote
still vacillate between a hard and a soft reading of the text, regarding Don
Quixote as a fool or a hero, implying that they see Cervantes’s famous
novel as either a satire or a statement of Romanticism. In this study, we
attempt not to take sides–neither classifying reception documents into
appropriate or inappropriate reactions to Cervantes’s text nor collecting
critical views in order to arrive at some comprehensive “superinterpretation.”
Rather, our emphasis is on the question of how an author creatively uses
Cervantes’s novel that was “the world’s first bestseller” (Egginton) to
come to terms with his or her own preoccupations in a given socio-
political context.
Since most German writers of the Romantic era did not speak Spanish,
they depended on German translations of Cervantes’s texts. Many read
Ludwig Tieck’s Don Quixote-translation that gained worldwide fame.
However, translations, as is well known, reflect the intentions of the
translators and are therefore documents of reception. Based on the fact that
Tieck translated Cervantes’s novel the Romantic way (Don Quixote being
more a hero than a fool), his Leben und Taten des scharfsinnigen Edlen
Don Quijote von la Mancha (1799/1801) contributed to the “victory of
Romanticism” (“Sieg der Romantik”; Hoffmeister 127) in Germany.
4 Introduction

In 1958, Werner Brüggemann provided a detailed and convincing

study of Cervantes’s reception in literary works of this period, titled
Cervantes und die Figur des Don Quijote in Kunstanschauung und
Dichtung der Deutschen Romantik. Some of the texts, in which
Brüggemann discovers intertextual encounters with Cervantes, are Tieck’s
Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798), Novalis’s Heinrich von
Ofterdingen (1802), Klingemann’s Nachtwachen des Bonaventura (1804),
Eichendorff’s Ahnung und Gegenwart (1815), Jean Paul’s Komet (1820),
as well as several narratives by E.T.A. Hoffmann. Most of these texts
engage in an intertextual dialogue with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, some of
them with Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels. Also Heinrich Heine read
Cervantes enthusiastically. In his Reisebilder, for instance, the narrator
sees himself as a reversed Don Quixote who wanted not to restore, but to
destroy the past (see Hoffmeister 126).
Another study that furnished valuable information for us was Lienhard
Bergel’s “Cervantes in Germany” (1969), although his statement that the
period in which Cervantes was “an active ingredient in German life” (343)
ended with Heine and Immermann and that afterwards he became
exclusively the object of philological specialists is not valid. Consider
Thomas Mann’s famous essay “Meerfahrt mit Don Quixote” (1934),
Bruno Frank’s novel Cervantes (1934), Ernst Jünger’s text Das
abenteuerliche Herz (1929), Paul Schallück’s novel Don Quichotte in
Köln (1967), to name just a few texts published after Heine and
Immermann and before 1969 when Bergel’s study came out. Granted,
without the flood of literary texts that refer to Cervantes published after
the fall of the Wall in 1989, we might not have decided to write a whole
book on Cervantes’s reception in twentieth- and twenty-first-century
literature written in German.
Of great importance for us in a different way are Durán and Rogg’s
Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote (2006), Ertler and
Rodríguez Díaz del Real’s El Quijote hoy: La Riqueza de su Recepción
(2007), and D’haen and Dhondt’s International Don Quixote (2009)–
volumes with different studies on the reception of Don Quixote in other
European literatures such as in Belgium, England, Hungary, or Italy. All
three volumes constitute valuable state-of-the-art studies of parallel
intercultural phenomena.
The first part of this investigation examines the creative reception of
Cervantes in German-speaking countries from 1900 to the end of World
War II. The highlight of this period is Thomas Mann’s well-known
narrative “Meerfahrt mit Don Quixote” (“Voyage with Don Quixote”).
The critical reception of Cervantes in essays by Bloch and Lukácz only
 Shifting Viewpoints 5

will be hinted at. The examination of literary texts written in West

Germany, in East Germany (the GDR), and after the fall of the Wall will
follow in the next chapters. Since also Austrian and Swiss writers
responded to Cervantes in very interesting ways, there will be a chapter on
each country’s literature since 1900. Sometimes, however, a document of
reception will appear in a “wrong” chapter, for instance Stephan
Wackwitz’s narrative Die Wahrheit über Sancho Pansa (1999), a text that
creatively reworks Kafka’s famous parable, has the same title as Kafka’s
text, and refers to Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote. Instead of discussing it
in Chapter Five where it belongs (it was written after the fall of the Berlin
Wall), it will be dealt with in Chapter Six (Don Quixote in Austria) since
Kafka’s oeuvre is considered part of Austrian literature. Also, Gustav
Regler’s documents of Cervantes reception are hard to place in a certain
chapter since the texts are published before and after 1945.
The final chapter of the book presents a brief summary and evaluation
of the results of the intercultural processes examined in the previous
chapters.
Three problems that we encountered in researching the reception of
Cervantes in the works of German-speaking writers after 1900 should be
pointed out. First, two lines of literary reception sometimes intersect and
are difficult to keep apart, such as in Gustav Regler’s travelogue
Verwunschenes Land Mexiko (1954), where the narrator uses both Don
Quixote and Faust in his discussion of what is happening in contemporary
Mexico. Second, sometimes it occurs that writers who refer to Cervantes
in their creative work seem to have been influenced more by other (not
necessarily literary) adaptations or interpretations of Cervantes than by
their own readings of Cervantes’s texts. A good example is the literature
written in German by authors who fought in the Spanish Civil War, for
example Rudolf Leonhard’s Der Tod des Don Quijote (1938). On their
way out of Hitler-Germany, crossing France to Spain, some of them saw
Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s film Adventures of Don Quixote (1933). Since it
critically refers to the Nazi’s book burning, the film could only be
produced and shown in France, not in Germany, during this time. It is
impossible to answer the question of what those authors exactly
remembered from their reading of Cervantes’s novel or from their
watching Pabst’s film when they “saw” Quixote in the trenches of the war
and wrote about it. The third problem we encountered is the question how
to limit the scope of literary texts that show a proximity to a text written
by Cervantes. Since Don Quixote of la Mancha is considered to have
inspired the creation of the modern novel, the text’s influence can be seen
almost everywhere. We decided to examine only literary texts that either
6 Introduction

engage in an intertextual play with a text written by Cervantes or a literary

text of an author who expressed in interviews, letters, or commentaries
that a protagonist was intentionally modeled after a protagonist created by
Cervantes. An example of the first kind is Peter Handke’s novel Der
Bildverlust (2002); an example of the second kind is Ernst Toller’s
comedy Der entfesselte Wotan (1923).
In our attempt to make this book accessible to a greater audience, we
are writing it in English. Therefore, all English translations originally
written in German or Spanish are our own unless we indicate by referring
to a published English translation of the original work. We also provide
the translation of the titles into English, either our own translation or the
title of the published English version of the work, for greater
comprehensibility. Since we do offer many quotations, we will consistently
use the ellipses within brackets whenever we omit words so as not to
confuse the reader with the quoted author’s use of his or her own ellipses.
Processes of literary reception are complex and need to be studied from
different angles. Therefore, this book can only be a first step towards the
investigation of Cervantes’s literary reception in the work of German-
speaking writers since 1900.

Note
1
A “Donquichottiade” is a text that either has Don Quixote and/or Sancho Panza
as protagonists in a new context or introduces new protagonists who are created
“according to the model of Cervantes’s figures” (“nach dem Muster der
Cervantesschen Vorbildfiguren”; Habel 79).
 Shifting Viewpoints 7

Works Consulted
Bergel, Lienhard. “Cervantes in Germany.” Cervantes across the
Centuries. Ed. Angel Flores and M.J. Benardete. New York: Gordian
Press, 1969. 315-352. Print.
Brüggemann, Werner. Cervantes und die Figur des Don Quijote in
Kunstanschauung und Dichtung der Deutschen Romantik. Münster:
Aschendorff, 1958. Print.
Cervantes, Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote of La Mancha. Trans.
Walter Starkie. New York: Penguin Books, 1964. Print.
D’haen, Leo, and Reindert Dhondt. International Don Quixote.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Print.
Ertler, Dieter, and Alejandro Rodríguez Díaz del Real. Ed. El Quijote hoy:
La Riqueza de su Recepción. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2007. Print.
Durán, Manuel, and Fay R. Rogg. Fighting Windmills: Encounters with
Don Quixote. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Print.
Egginton, William. “‘Quixote,’ Colbert and the Reality of Fiction.” New
York Times. 25 Sept. 2011. Web. 13 Oct. 2011.
Gabel, Gernot U. Don Quijotes Spuren in Deutschland: Materialien zur
Rezeptionsgeschichte. Köln: Kleine Schriften der Universitäts- und
Stadtbibliothek, 2005. Print.
Grünzweig, Walter. Constructing the German Walt Whitman. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 1995. Print.
Habel, Thomas. “Wilhelm Ehrenfried Neugebauers Der teutsche Don
Quichotte. Zur Don Quijote-Rezeption und Fiktionskritik im deutschen
Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Gelebte Literatur in der Literatur. Ed.
Theodor Wolpers. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986. 72-109.
Print.
Handke, Peter. Der Bildverlust oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos.
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Print.
Hoffmeister, Gerhart. Spanien und Deutschland: Geschichte und
Dokumentation der literarischen Beziehungen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt,
1976. Print.
Kafka, Franz. “Die Wahrheit über Sancho Panza.” Hochzeitsvorbereitungen
auf dem Lande, und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlaß. New York:
Schocken, 1953. 76-7. Print.
Leonhard, Rudolf. Der Tod des Don Quijote: Geschichten aus dem
Spanischen Bürgerkriege. Zürich: Verlagsbuchhandlung Stauffacher,
1938. Print.
8 Introduction

Marín Presno, Araceli. Zur Rezeption der Novelle Rinconete y Cortadillo

von Miguel de Cervantes im deutschsprachigen Raum. Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 2005. Print.
Neugebauer, Wilhelm Ehrenfried. Der teutsche Don Quichotte.
Faksimiledruck nach der Ausgabe von 1753. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag,
1971. Print.
Pabst, Georg Wilhelm. Adventures of Don Quixote. Perf. Feodor Chaliapin
and George Robey. VAI, 1933. Videocassette.
Regler, Gustav. A Land Bewitched: Mexico in the Shadow of the
Centuries. Trans. Constantine Fitzgibbon. London: Putnam, 1955.
Print.
Schallück, Paul. Don Quichotte in Köln. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,
1967. Print.
Toller, Ernst. Der entfesselte Wotan. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 2.
München: Hanser, 1978. 249-302. Print.
Wackwitz, Stephan. Die Wahrheit über Sancho Pansa. München: Piper,
1999. Print.
 CHAPTER ONE

CERVANTES IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC:

ERNST TOLLER AND ERNST JÜNGER

During the Weimar Republic, Miguel de Cervantes, although he did

not become as famous as during German Romanticism, inspired important
German writers to interact with his texts, especially with Don Quixote. As
Araceli Marín Presno notes, the 300th anniversary of the novel’s
publication in 1905 was the occasion for the press, scholarly journals, and
universities to appreciate this literary work. As a consequence, older
translations of the text were revised, edited, and published. Beginning in
1910, in Hamburg there appeared a journal called Don Quijote published
to promote the study of Spanish. The 300th anniversary of Cervantes’s
death in 1916 was the occasion for a celebration in honor of Cervantes in
Munich (Marín Presno 185); the journal Berliner Tageblatt published a
special issue dedicated exclusively to Cervantes. Given the fact that this
anniversary fell in the middle of World War I, it is not surprising that
German writers of the post-war period used Cervantes’s protagonist with
the famous raised lance to take a stance regarding German politics of the
day. In fact, it seems that there were altogether closer affinities between
the Spanish baroque and the Weimar period; Cervantes is only one
example. See, for instance, the connection “of the 1920s cult of
objectivity” (Lethen 36) to the tradition of manuals for social conduct
epitomized by Baltasar Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1653) that
Schopenhauer had translated into German or, above all, the resonance of
the Spanish pícaro figure for German modernist writers. Bernhard
Malkmus writes that the reason for this resonance was the “spirit of
competition, chaos, con trickery, fluid identities and social fatalism that
has been described as the trademark of the Weimar Republic” (5).
In 1919, Peter Scher published the following poem in the renowned
journal Simplicissimus:
10 Chapter One

Don Quixote Reproaches the Ideologists

They come riding on their scrawny horses

and show their foolishness in front of the knight;
he, high up on Rocinante, smiles bitterly
and seems to be enlightened by Sancho.

After he made up his mind, he turns dignified

from the paunchy fellow to the ideologists
and feels moved to the judgment:
the foolishness was good and without reproach–

however, there is one thing, gentlemen–he rises up in the stirrups–

that I don’t approve of, to tell you quite frankly,
you men of today let the common man take the beating.
In my time, we let ourselves be thrashed.

(Don Quixote rügt die Ideologen

Sie reiten an auf ihren dürren Pferden

und üben ihre Narrheit vor dem Ritter;
er, hoch zu Rosinante, lächelt bitter
und scheint von Sancho aufgeklärt zu werden.

Nun, schlüssigen Urteils, kehrt er sich mit Adel

vom ruppigen Dickwanst zu den Ideologen
und fühlt sich zu dem Urteilsspruch bewogen:
Die Narretei war gut und ohne Tadel –

Doch eins, ihr Herrn–er hebt sich scharf im Bügel –

hat meinen Beifall nicht… ganz unverhohlen…
Ihr Heutigen überlaßt dem Volk die Prügel…
zu meiner Zeit ließ man sich selbst versohlen.) (588)

The term “foolishness” (“Narretei”), without doubt, refers to the so-called

November Revolution in Germany–a chain of political revolts in 1918 that
removed the monarchy and paved the way to the establishment of the
Weimar Republic. However, leaders of the communist Spartacus League
used the agitated atmosphere and chaos to proclaim socialism in Germany.
Revolutionary groups who insisted on establishing a socialist state in
Germany similar to the Soviet model revolted against the social
democratic government; the revolts were brutally crushed by the old
military forces in January 1919. The poet Scher, through the mouth of Don
Quixote, probably attempts to communicate his thought that, although he
approves of a socialist revolt (“the foolishness was good and without
 Cervantes in the Weimar Republic: Ernst Toller and Ernst Jünger 11

fault”), under the given circumstances it was unwise of the Bolshevist

leaders to instigate those revolts in which many people lost their lives.
However, seen from today’s perspective, Scher’s claim that only the
common man took the beating is not true if you think of Spartacist leaders
like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who were murdered by
members of the military forces during those events.
The following comparison between Ernst Toller’s and Ernst Jünger’s
reception of Don Quixote will show completely different interpretations of
Cervantes’s main protagonist in the politically heated atmosphere of the
Weimar Republic, where many -isms like nationalism, militarism,
socialism, and others were in their heyday. While both authors share an
affinity to Cervantes, in Toller’s comedic play Wotan Unchained (Der
entfesselte Wotan, 1923) the quixotic figure of the main protagonist is a
fool created for the purpose of parody, while Jünger identifies with the
idealist Quixote whose madness he sees sympathetically. In his literary
journal The Adventurous Heart (Das abenteuerliche Herz, 1929), Jünger
celebrates the Spanish character into which he is projecting a part of
himself as a hero. Interestingly, these different interpretations, on the one
hand satirical, on the other hand idealistic, confirm that Fernando Varela
Iglesias is right in claiming that the “pendulum-like vision [between]
realism and idealism in the perception of Quijote” (“visión pendular
[entre] realismo and idealismo en la recepción del Quijote”) (43) is still
continuing in the twentieth century.
Toller, imprisoned after his active participation in the November
revolution, wrote the play Wotan Unchained in jail under harsh conditions.
Although the name Quixote is not mentioned in the play, Toller in his
commentary clearly points out that the main protagonist, the unsuccessful
barber Wilhelm Dietrich Wotan, is designed to be a quixotic figure:

That is what has become of Don Quixote nowadays: not strong enough
anymore to live his dream trustingly and also not a robust black marketer
who understands what he is doing all the time. A mixture of idealist and
coward. A figure that makes us laugh.
(Das ist in der neuen Zeit aus Don Quichotte geworden: nicht mehr kräftig
genug, um seinen Traum gläubig zu leben, und wiederum kein robuster
Schieber, der kontinuierlich das, was er tut, durchschaut. Mischung von
Idealist und Jämmerling. Eine Figur, die uns heiter macht.) (364-5)

Indeed, Toller’s demagogue Wilhelm Dietrich Wotan, who becomes a victim

of his own imagination and sets out for a “hero’s journey” (“Heldenfahrt”;
254), seems to be a mere caricature of Cervantes’s character Don Quixote.
Wotan is a petty-bourgeois nationalist and megalomaniac: “Humankind
12 Chapter One

languishes for a dictator. Okay, then! People, you find me ready!” (“Die
Menschheit lechzt nach dem Diktator. Wohlan denn! Volk, Du findest
mich bereit!”; 298). At a first reading, this protagonist reminds us of the
“local matador of the Bavarian right wing people” (“der Lokalmatador der
bayrischen Rechten”; “Der Dichter und Pazifist”), Adolf Hitler. Critics of
Toller, who claimed that he underrated Hitler by trivializing him in this
comedy, seem at first glimpse to be correct in their criticism. However, as
Cecil Davis observes, Toller does not actually and directly intend Wotan
to represent Hitler. Instead, a crazy fellow-prisoner whom Toller met
during his captivity in Niederschönenfeld prison inspired Toller to create
the character of Wotan. Although the play “includes a series of startling
minor anticipations of the Hitler story” (Davis 301), the critic goes on to
say that it must be read as a “swindler-comedy extended into politico-
prophetic satire through the working of the author’s imagination upon the
contemporary Germany of 1923” (302). Hermann Korte, who also argues
against Wotan representing Hitler, affirms that although the creation of
Toller’s comedy fell in the year of Hitler’s November attempted coup,
Toller had already finished the play in spring of that year; therefore, it was
not written “under the impression of the event” (“unter dem Eindruck des
Ereignisses”; 118). After a more careful reading of the play, it seems to be
correct that Wotan, instead of being a Hitler-caricature, “was a type of
wide, perhaps universal validity, though flourishing in the atmosphere of
Germany” (Davis 299). This universal validity, according to our
interpretation, stems from Wotan’s quixotic character.
Having failed as a barber in post-War German society, Wotan, inspired
by his reading of exotic novels and messianic Expressionist literature
distributed by “Krause’s reading circle” (“Krauses Lesezirkel”; Reimers
145), dreams of starting a German colony in Brazil’s Amazon forest.
Eloquently, he pretends to have legally started an “Emigrants’ Co-
operative” (“Auswanderergenossenschaft”) (Toller 295) for that purpose.
During the play, while Wotan is recruiting emigrants from different social
groups who feel disillusioned after the lost war, he starts to believe in his
own pretension and sees himself as a colonial hero fighting natives. His
squire Sancho Panza is split into two different characters. The first is
Wotan’s assistant Schleim (“Slime” in English), a failed businessman and
selfish opportunist who will encourage Wotan in his delusions and desert
him as soon as there is trouble. The second is Wotan’s wife, Mariechen,
who functions as a realistic counterpoint to Wotan. Even after Wotan,
pushed by Schleim, files for divorce to be able to marry a rich woman,
Countess Gallig, whose money he would need for his colonial adventures
in the jungle of Brazil, Mariechen will support him. When Wotan is in jail
 Cervantes in the Weimar Republic: Ernst Toller and Ernst Jünger 13

at the end of the play, she will bring him dainties from her kitchen and, at
the same time, carefully try to wake him up to reality. Kirsten Reimers
correctly describes the different functions of Schleim and Mariechen:

Schleim is carrying out what Wotan invents. He is Wotan’s alter ego, the
realist moment of deceit, the director according to Wotan’s plan. This way,
he represents another kind of realist corrective. While Mariechen is
warning Wotan about the consequences of his dreams […], measuring the
realization of his dreams against her experiences and his failure […],
Schleim seduces the barber to illegality, acting according to his
experiences as a black marketer.
(Schleim führt aus, was Wotan erspinnt. Er ist Wotans Alter ego, das
realistische Moment des Betruges, der Regisseur nach Wotan’s Konzept.
So stellt er eine andere Art des realistischen Korrektivs dar: Während
Mariechen Wotan vor den Folgen seines Träumens warnt […], die
Verwirklichung seiner Träume an ihren Erfahrungen und seinen
Mißerfolgen mißt […], verführt Schleim den Friseur zur Illegalität, er geht
dabei von seinen Erfahrungen als Schieber aus.) (121)

In other words, while both characters attempt to bring Wotan in touch with
reality, their vision of this reality is very different. Mariechen’s is based on
the every-day life of the lower middle-class, Schleim’s on his experiences
in the world of black marketers. Although Wotan has a premonition of the
fact that Schleim is pushing him into a dangerous direction–“You are my
evil spirit” (“Sie sind mein böser Geist”; Toller 288)–he follows him
blindly.
The trouble with Wotan’s Brazil-project starts when a telegram arrives
from the Brazilian consulate warning people against Wotan’s “fraudulent
enterprise” (“Schwindelunternehmen”; 299). Schleim, who had encouraged
Wotan to proceed in his illegal actions, simultaneously had carefully
avoided taking responsibility. Now, Schleim plays dumb and protests:
“Fraud! Deceit! Go away, obnoxious barber!” (“Schwindel! Betrug! Gehn
Sie mir weg, verkrachter Frisör!”; 299).
He even asks for money: “According to our contract I deserve a salary
for one year. I’ll take it.” (“Nach unserm Vertrag bekomm ich Gehalt für
ein Jahr. Ich nehms mir”; 299). Contrary to Cervantes’s Quixote, Wotan in
the end does not wake up from his delusions. He declares war on the
country of Brazil. After his arrest, in prison, he is writing his memoirs
drenched with his visions of German superiority, a book which he
foolishly believes that the “smallest Negro tribe in the Congo will have
translations printed in their dialect” (“kleinste Negerstamm am Kongo
wird Übersetzungen im heimischen Dialekt drucken lassen”; 302).
Wotan’s last statement shows that by now he truly has become mad: “I
14 Chapter One

have a mission! Europe cannot decline as long as Wotans are alive!” (“Ich
habe eine Mission! Europa kann nicht untergehen solange Wotans leben!”;
302)
The most important similarity between Wotan and the Spanish
Quixote, besides the fact that they both have become mad, is their passion
for reading books. Wotan does not indulge in reading novels of chivalry as
Don Quixote did three hundred years earlier; he reads, as was mentioned
already, exotic novels and Expressionistic literature. Reimers states,

Wotan’s lofty style of speech is determined by this reading. In Krause’s

reading club, the Messianic Expressionism shrank to the quality of a dime
novel; the literature that wanted to wake up and change human kind
became a cheap product of consumerism […].
(Wotans pathetischer Sprachstil ist durch diese Lektüre bestimmt. In
Krauses Lesezirkel ist der messianische Expressionismus auf das Niveau
eines Groschenromans herabgesunken, aus der Literatur, die die
Menschheit aufrütteln und umgestalten wollte, ist ein billiges
Konsumprodukt geworden […].) (145)

Wotan, as Quixote before him, is also partially blind and deaf to everyday
reality, such as when, right at the beginning of the play, he hears
nightingales singing. Mariechen corrects him: “The chickens are cackling”
(“Die Hühner gackern”; Toller 255).
To sum up the most important differences between the Spanish and
German quixotic protagonists, Wotan has two Sanchos instead of one: the
crooked Schleim and the ill-educated but caring wife, Mariechen. Like
Quixote, Wotan is also given to oratorical outbursts and engages in
lengthy speeches to win over his interlocutors. However, contrary to
Quixote, Wotan, as Toller himself writes in his commentary, is not “strong
enough to live his dream trustingly” (“kräftig genug, um seinen Traum
gläubig zu leben”; 364). Therefore, Wotan’s “heroic journey”
(“Heldenfahrt”) is only a melodramatic verbal expedition; the hero turns
out to be not more than a loudmouth. Nevertheless, instead of being
laughed at as Cervantes’s hero is, Wotan “finds in all classes helpers who
are ready to join him in his mad venture” (Durzak 94). After the lost
World War I and the failed revolution, they all seek a way out of
ideological or economic misery. One of those helpers is a Jewish banker,
and another is an anti-Semite officer who dreams of establishing a
dictatorship in Brazil’s jungle. In addition, at the end of the text, in
contrast to Don Quixote, Wotan does not recant his folly.
As several critics have pointed out, Toller’s play is a parody, “not a
simple parody of one particular style or genre but an attempt to weave into
 Cervantes in the Weimar Republic: Ernst Toller and Ernst Jünger 15

a single comic pattern a number of distinct critical threads” (Davis 302).

One of the most important of those threads is the Richard Wagner parody
in the tradition of Carl Sternheim’s “petit-bourgeois pseudo-Wagnerian
anti-heroes” (Davis 304). While the language of Sternheim’s parody is still
ambiguous, “part parody, part pre-Expressionist earnest” (Davis 304),
Toller’s is clearly that of parody.
Wotan, the main protagonist’s name, is also the name of the principal
Germanic god in Wagner’s famous Ring; Wotan symbolizes the greed for
wealth and power. As a great parodistic stroke, Toller’s play opens with
the god Wotan in Valhalla wearing a helmet with huge horns. Riding a
fire-breathing black horse and swinging a lasso, he drags the main
character on stage and has him bow before the audience. Davis wrote after
having studied photographs of early productions that Toller’s madman is
dressed in exaggeratedly Wagnerian style. Toller’s parodistic intention is
clearly laid out with the words, “Let what once was a tragedy become a
farce” (“Was einst Tragödie, werd zur Posse”; Toller 253). One strand of
parody that enriches the comic effect is the musical. As a part of the
Wagnerian parody, Toller “has cast the play in a four-movement
symphonic mold: Allegro Andante Scherzo Furioso–Rondo Finale
preceeded by the Wotanisches Impromptu as Prelude” (Davis 306). This
mock-symphonic pattern, as Davis shows in detail, reflects the movement
and tempo of Toller’s plot. In addition, there is the sound of hunting-
horns, barrel-organ music, naval song and wind band, as well as jazz. It is
comical when Wotan, who sees himself as a savior, hearing a Jazz band,
declares, “Music of the Spheres! Music of the Spheres!” (“Sphärenmusik!
Sphärenmusik!”; Toller 281).
However, the quixotic Wotan can also be read as a parody of the
emperor Wilhelm II, of his megalomaniac subjects, as well as of the
“expressionist drama of proclamation” (“expressionistische […]
Verkündigungsdrama”; Korte 125) as Toller had written it himself in his
earlier years. Indeed, the parody of all three of them is blended so strongly
that it cannot be decided “if Wotan in specific scenes represents the
emperor, a harmless subject, or a powerfully eloquent expressionist” (“ob
Wotan in den einzelnen Szenen den Kaiser, einen harmlosen Untertanen
oder einen wortgewaltigen Expressionisten darstellt”; Korte 127). Wotan’s
first name is Wilhelm, his moustache looks like that of Wilhelm II, and his
specific way of speaking (ellipsis, missing articles, frequent verbalization
of nouns, inflation of exclamation marks, and others) seems to be a copy
of the emperor’s speech pattern. However, his middle name is Dietrich. As
Reimers points out, this name reminds the reader of the literary prototype
of a subject during the Wilhelm II regime, Diederich Heßling from
16 Chapter One

Heinrich Mann’s novel The Loyal Subject (Der Untertan, 1918). Pointing
at the double role of the figure Wotan, the critic concludes:

So, due to his first names the barber [Wotan] becomes a caricature of the
ruler and his subject in one person. He is a product of Wilhelminian
society–both as a subject as somebody searching for leadership and
meaning […] and as a dictator, praised by the masses that are searching for
a dictator.
(So wird der Friseur [Wotan] durch seine Vornamen zur Karikatur des
Herrschers und des Untertanen in einer Person. Er ist ein Produkt der
wilhelminischen Gesellschaft–sowohl als Untertan als jemand auf der
Suche nach Führung und Sinn […] wie auch als Diktator, hervorgehoben
durch die Massen, die einen Diktatoren suchen.) (133-34)

However, Wotan’s and his followers’ language is also that of expressionism.

Reimers remarks, “Toller consequently caricatures his own figures of
redeemers and has us laugh about their messianic dreams of a
‘transformation’ of human kind” (“Toller karikiert konsequent seine
eigenen Erlösergestalten und gibt die messianischen Träume einer
‘Wandlung’ der Menschheit der Lächerlichkeit preis”; 147). When
Countess Gallig, for instance, “drools over Wotan as the (expressionist)
bearer of salvation,” stating that God himself would have entered the
human world in Wotan’s figure, it can be read as a “parody of the idiom of
Georg Kaisers’s plays” (Durzak 96).
From his prison cell, Toller had written to Kurt Wolff in February
1923 about how he conceived the idea of writing this play:

A comedy is beginning to take shape. I would never have thought that I

could write a comedy. You have to have seen the naïve and intricate, the
silly and sad Quixoteries of the human heart, and to have developed at least
a grain of smiling wisdom–otherwise the attempt to write a comedy is a
simple-minded effort at fooling yourself. A writer of comedy must have
the eye of a misanthrope and the all-embracing love of women–all in one.
(Durzak 91)

That Miguel de Cervantes possessed both, the very critical eye and the
love towards people, attracted Toller’s attention. It has been said that
Toller’s Wotan-play is one of the “poetically most accomplished”
comedies in German literature of the 1920s (Grimm 48). This
accomplishment might have to do with the fact that Toller, as Cervantes
did over three hundred years before him (see Durán and Rogg 20),
probably projected a part of himself into his main protagonist. With biting
humor, Toller criticizes his own expressionist “figures of redeemers”
 Cervantes in the Weimar Republic: Ernst Toller and Ernst Jünger 17

(“Erlösergestalten”; Reimers 149) whose messianic claim in the figure of

Wotan is unmasked as “greed for power” (“Machtgier”; Reimers 149).
It should have become evident by now that Ernst Toller’s Quixote-
reception is a so-called “hard reading,” i.e. it is in line with the
Enlightenment tradition of reading Don Quixote as a parody of chivalric
literature and a satire of the strange forms of human behavior that come
from imitating its heroes. According to this tradition, Don Quixote, an
anti-hero who in vain tries to convince the world that “his madness is a
higher form of sanity” (Byron 424), is only ridiculous.
In complete contrast to Toller’s interpretation of a quixotic character
for the purposes of satire and parody, Ernst Jünger takes the idealism and
heroism of the Spanish knight-errant seriously. This puts Jünger’s
interpretation in the Romantic tradition, according to which, as Varela
Iglesias points out, “the madness loses its ridiculous character and
becomes the ideal objective, the true reality” (“la locura pierde su carácter
ridículo y se convierte en la meta ideal, en la verdadera realidad”; 50).
Thus Jünger’s is a so-called “soft reading” of Don Quixote.
In Jünger’s early narrative Combat as an Inner Event (Der Kampf als
inneres Erlebnis, 1922), the first person-narrator is a soldier during World
War I. On a short vacation, strolling through the French town of Mouvaux,
he feels worn out. In this situation, it suddenly occurs to him how Quixote
must have felt after lost battles:

I am so tired, so weary of things that I wish I were dead. A soldier, a

knight-errant, a Don Quixote who splintered many lances and whose
fantasies dissolve into a scornful laughter. I feel clearly that there is an
extraneous, a horrible meaning behind everything that happens.
(Ich bin so müde, so überdrüssig, daß ich wünschte tot zu sein. Ein
Landsknecht, ein fahrender Ritter, ein Don Quixote, der manche Lanze
zersplittert und dessen Trugbilder in höhnisches Gelächter zerfließen. Ich
fühle mit unzweifelhafter Klarheit, daß irgendein fremder Sinn, eine
furchtbare Bedeutung hinter allem Geschehen lauert.) (Jünger, Der Kampf
68)1

Identifying with the knight-errant who, after a defeat is at the brink of

losing his belief in his “fantasies” (“Trugbilder”; Kampf 68) and thus in
the meaning of his life, the narrator senses a transcendence behind the
tragic reality of war. Although he cannot define it, he respects it and looks
up to it with awe. The firm belief in this transcendence–a kind of non-
personal substitute for a god of war that is hovering over history–keeps the
young soldier going.
Seven years later, in the first version of The Adventurous Heart (Das
abenteuerliche Herz, 1929), the first-person narrator remembers his
18 Chapter One

favorite books that he read as a youth. He admits that he liked the “knight
of the sad countenance” (“Ritter von der traurigen Gestalt”; 57) even more
than the main characters of Stendhal’s and Balzac’s novels. He explains
why: “When […] this book of a man for whom the sword and the pen lay,
due to a deeper necessity, next to each other fell into my hands, I could not
find a trace of humor in it. I read it with a real Spanish seriousness” (“Als
mir […] dieses Buch eines Mannes in die Hände fiel, dem Schwert und
Feder mit tieferer Notwendigkeit beieinanderlagen, da fand ich keine Spur
von Humor darin. Ich las es mit einem wirklich spanischen Ernst”; Jünger,
Das abenteuerliche Herz 57). While other readers might not be thrilled by
a book without traces of humor, the young Jünger loved it mainly because
of that. This remark is an indication of the fact that the author tended to
embrace idealism from the beginning. He loved Cervantes for having
dramatized the serious commitment of a man to a cause even if it is a lost
cause as in Quixote’s case. As Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller point
out, the fact that Quixote is fighting for a ridiculous cause driven by the
noblest motives and with exceptional engagement signifies an “unheard of
provocation” (“beispiellose Provokation”; 230) for Jünger. Don Quixote’s
cause is ridiculous because it is lost. By the time Jünger wrote The
Adventurous Heart, he seems to have decided that it does not matter if a
cause is lost or not.
Such a total commitment to a cause, whatever it is, requires wholeness.
Miguel de Cervantes himself, being a soldiering writer and writing soldier,
embodies it. For that wholeness he attracts Jünger to the extreme. As
Jünger’s further life will show, he will follow this ideal by being an
exemplary soldier on the one hand and aestheticize combat in his prose on
the other. However, not just the cause is different from that of Quixote
(German nationalism instead of knight-errantry), but also the character of
combat has changed; this makes it hard to understand the extent of
Jünger’s commitment. As Klaus Mann wisely observes, “You have to be a
hysteric romantic like Ernst Jünger to take a fancy to the bleak horror of
the battle of material” (“Man muß ein hysterischer Romantiker wie Ernst
Jünger sein, um an den öden Schrecken der Materialschlacht Gefallen zu
finden”; 362-3).
Also, ignoring the preponderance of irony in Cervantes’s text–irony is
something “cheap and low class” (“billig[ ] und plebejisch[ ]”; Das
abenteuerliche Herz 55) according to Jünger–the author believes that the
figure of Don Quixote was Cervantes’s alter ego. Probably therefore, he is
unable to accept the ending of the novel Don Quixote at which the
protagonist wakes up from his fantasy world before he dies. In the third of
Jünger’s Letters of a Nationalist (Briefe eines Nationalisten, 1927),
 Cervantes in the Weimar Republic: Ernst Toller and Ernst Jünger 19

published under the pseudonym Hans Sturm, Jünger remarked, “Something

I always resented about Cervantes: that he has his hero die in bed and by
renouncing knight-errantry” (“Eins habe ich Cervantes immer übel
genommen: daß er seinen Helden im Bette und unter Verleugnung der
fahrenden Ritterschaft sterben läßt”; Sturm 8). Such a triumph of reason
over idealism is nothing but “desertion” (“Fahnenflucht”; Kindt and
Müller 234) for Jünger. How much he would have preferred to see Don
Quixote die in battle because of Jünger’s conviction that “the downfall is a
great thing” (“der Untergang ist eine große Sache”; Kindt and Müller 233).
In the following example, Jünger goes on to elaborate on his idealistic
reading of Don Quixote:

That a barber was hiding behind the Knight of the Moon and that it is
actually nonsensical to slash wineskins with dagger blows–in God’s name,
I did not notice that. In awe, I participated in the consecration of the
weapons; and trembling, I joined Don Quixote in the horrible night before
the windmill adventure.
(Daß sich hinter dem Ritter von Monde ein Friseur verbarg und daß es
eigentlich unsinnig ist, Weinschläuche mit Degenhieben zu zerfetzen–ich
habe es, bei Gott, nicht gemerkt. Ich nahm an der Waffenweihe voll
Ehrfurcht teil und machte unter Zittern und Zagen die furchtbare Nacht vor
dem Walkmühlenabenteuer mit.) (Das abenteuerliche Herz 57)

Jünger’s admission that it does not make sense to destroy wineskins with
dagger blows can be interpreted as a confirmation of Varela Iglesias’s
observation that, although in the twentieth century the two extremely
different versions of Don Quixote readings are repeated (realism of the
Enlightenment, Romantic idealism), this time the idealistic reading is
much more differentiated than during Romanticism, “paying more respect
to the realist interpretation” (“más respetuoso con la vertiente realista”;
57). Nevertheless, in Jünger’s reading the idealism still overpowers any
nuance of realism; it is still a very soft reading. An example is Jünger’s
vision of Sancho Panza:

That they tossed Sancho on a blanket up in the air appeared to me as a

bitter injustice done to a courageous comrade in arms and an honest friend.
Every time when the sword came out of the sheath or the lance was put in
to show what knight-errantry was to the cowardly, I was proud of my Man
of the Mancha.
(Daß sie Sancho auf Bettlaken prellten, das stellte sich ungefähr in der
Weise dar, daß einem wackeren Waffengenossen und ehrlichen Kumpan
bitteres Unrecht geschah. Jedesmal, wenn das Schwert aus der Scheide
fuhr oder die Lanze eingelegt wurde, um dem Gemeinen gegenüber
20 Chapter One

Zeugnis zu geben für ritterliche Art, war ich auf meinen Herrn von der
Mancha stolz.) (Das abenteuerliche Herz 57)

In Cervantes’s text, Sancho calls himself “a peaceable, sober, quiet man”

(Cervantes 150); he behaves often cowardly. In world literature, he has
become a symbol for common sense and earthliness with a touch of
fearfulness over the last three hundred years. Jünger, however, for whom
every man is a born soldier, sees Sancho as a “courageous comrade in
arms” (“wackeren Waffengenossen”; 57). As in similar cases of idealistic
interpretations of Cervantes’s novel, idealism seems to constitute the
meaning of life as such. As Varela Iglesias observes referring to Emilia
Pardo-Bazán, who also interprets Don Quixote in an idealistic manner,
there are “overtones of existential angst […] in the passionate way in
which this author defends Don Quixote’s ideal of knight-errantry”
(“sobretonos de angustia existencial […] en la apasionada defensa que esta
autora hace del ideal caballeresco de Don Quijote”; 51). Such overtones
can also be found in Jünger’s interpretation: those of a writer and soldier
who is clinging to his idealistic cause of German nationalism as a
transcendental anchorage.
In the following, Jünger is going on to remember his first-time reading
of Cervantes’s novel: “However, what I still today like as much as I liked
then is that this man was no longer young when he discovered the reasons
behind the world” (“Aber was mir heute noch genau so gefällt wie damals,
das ist, daß dieser Mensch kein Jüngling mehr war, als er die Hintergründe
entdeckte, die die Welt besitzt”; Das abenteuerliche Herz 57). This remark
is in line with the feeling of transcendence that Jünger had described seven
years earlier in his text Combat as an Inner Event. The author continues
describing his fascination with Don Quixote:

It is dramatic to see the twig of folly starting to get green on this already
dry and barren life and, driven by an inner fire, growing into a jungle that
surrounds it impenetrably. In those days, I believed that you had to be old
to become an expert in such great and noble deeds; and today, I know that
the old fools are the best.
(Das ist ein Schauspiel, wie das Reis der Torheit auf diesem schon dürren
und angetrockneten Leben zu grünen beginnt und, von innerem Feuer
getrieben, zum Urwald wird, der es undurchdringlich umstellt. Damals
glaubte ich, daß man alt sein müsse, um sich auf so große und würdige
Taten zu verstehen, und heute weiß ich, daß die alten Narren die besten
sind.) (Das abenteuerliche Herz 57)
 Cervantes in the Weimar Republic: Ernst Toller and Ernst Jünger 21

This statement shows that, as was mentioned before, Jünger does not deny
that Don Quixote is a fool, but interprets his foolishness as a higher form
of reason, as a way of participating in a kind of Hegelian Absolute.
Also noteworthy is how differently Toller and Jünger handle the word
“jungle”. For Toller’s Wotan, the jungle in Brazil is an alien realm to be
colonized; in Jünger’s case the word is used as a metaphor for protection,
something positive. In the following paragraph, Jünger elaborates on the
dangers from which this “jungle” is supposed to protect a man:

To be sure, the right folly, just as the right humor, is a very serious matter.
Both have to do with faith, the one with the faith in the spiritual, the other
with the faith in the moral foundation of the world. But, if it ever was hard
to keep the faith, then it was now in our so highly praised time. The pale
followers of the Enlightenment […] already broke into our early dreams.
Praised be the one who would succeed in striking up the faith in the lively
fullness of the world and the colorful, meaningful and fateful play that
moves it despite the idolaters of reason and the charlatans of science.
(Allerdings ist die rechte Torheit, ebenso wie der rechte Humor, eine sehr
ernste Angelegenheit. Beide hängen eng mit dem Glauben zusammen, die
eine mit dem an den ideellen, der andere mit dem an den moralischen
Grund der Welt. Aber wenn es einmal schwer war, sich den Glauben zu
wahren, dann war es in unserer so hoch gepriesenen Zeit. Der blasse
Nachtrupp der Aufklärung […] brach schon in unsere frühen Träume ein.
Wohl dem, dem es gelang, den Götzendienern der Vernunft und den
Scharlatanen der Wissenschaft zum Trotz den Glauben an die lebendige
Fülle der Welt zu knüpfen und an das bunte, sinnvolle und schicksalhafte
Spiel, das sie bewegt.) (Das abenteuerliche Herz 57-8)

It is obvious that the danger that threatens Jünger’s idealistic vision of

human wholeness in the name of a cause is almost everything that comes
with the Enlightenment tradition: reason, realism, science, and democracy;
Jünger without doubt points his finger critically at the tumultuous times of
the Weimar Republic. So does Toller, as we remember. However, their
reasons are completely different. Jünger abhors the fact that Germany has
lost its monarchy after having lost the war and that he has to live in a
democracy. By contrast, Toller, a former revolutionary, has nothing
against that; he would not want to live in a monarchy. Nevertheless, Toller
is disillusioned about the fact that this republic’s reality–a “world of
jobbers and profiteers” (Durzak 86)–is not perfect. Therefore, he satirizes
it in his comedy, parodying at the same time his own former exaggerated
revolutionary idealism that might have contributed to its imperfection. On
the other hand, the republic as such repelled Jünger because it favored
rationalism and common sense. Taking Don Quixote’s idealism as
22 Chapter One

seriously as possible is a clear indication of Jünger’s decision to keep the

lance raised in the name of the absolute spirit; the fight for an ideal must
go on. Unfortunately, this ideal for Jünger meant German nationalism, a
cause that led him to embrace fascism in his younger years.2
Readings of Cervantes’s novel as different as Toller’s and Jünger’s are
evidence of the fact that the text, according to Marthe Robert, “suggest[s]
a multiplicity of possible meanings among which the reader himself is
forced to choose” (5). She continues:

Is [Don Quixote of la Mancha] a satire of an impotent and irresponsible

idealism inimical to life, a reading that suggests an opposition between
Don Quixote’s vague notions and the honest materialism of Sancho Panza?
Or is it a heroic defense of all lost causes, of the absolute virtues of faith,
magnanimity, and the passion for justice […]? (5-6)

For Ernst Toller it is the first, for Ernst Jünger the second. That they chose
to read Cervantes’s text so differently has to do, as we have seen, with
their opposite stance within the socio-historical context. As Kindt and
Müller suggest, today we are not examining such world-famous books
such as Hamlet, Faust, or Don Quixote and their adaptations “in order to
find out their ‘true meaning’ but, instead, to gain a privileged access to the
view of the world and human beings of the recipients and their time” (“um
deren ‘wahren Sinn’ zu erforschen, sondern um einen privilegierten
Zugang zum Welt-und Menschenbild der Rezipienten und ihrer Zeit zu
gewinnen”; 230).
To sum up, although the comparison of Toller’s and Jünger’s Quixote-
reception is somehow strained by the fact that we compare fiction (Toller)
and autobiographical writing (Jünger), the differences are programmatic,
especially in the context of the tumultuous times of the Weimar Republic.
Toller’s comedy is a parody and satire in the Enlightenment tradition of
Don Quixote interpretations; Jünger reads the figure of Don Quixote in the
tradition of German Romanticism as an “embodiment of heroism”
(“Verkörperung des Heroismus”; Kindt and Müller 250). To put this
difference into the context of German literary history, the following
analogy may be used: Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg3 criticized
Wilhelm Ehrenfried Neugebauer’s hard reading, i.e. Enlightenment
interpretation, of Cervantes’s novel in The German Don Quixote (Der
teutsche Don Quichotte, 1753) by complaining that the dignity that
Gerstenberg sees in Cervantes’s hero is missing. According to the critic,
Neugebauer painted Don Quixote’s enthusiasm for chivalric ideals so
negatively that it seems contemptible to the reader. Creating one of the
first soft readings of Cervantes’s text in Germany, Gerstenberg claims that
 Cervantes in the Weimar Republic: Ernst Toller and Ernst Jünger 23

Quixote’s “ravings [can] be ridiculous, but never contemptible”

(“Schwärmereyen [können] wohl lächerlich, aber selten verächtlich sein”;
Habel 83). Ernst Toller’s interpretation follows that of Neugebauer’s by
creating a contemptible quixotic anti-hero who has no dignity whatever.
Jünger’s, on the other hand, follows that of Gerstenberg by pointing to
Don Quixote’s sublime dignity.

Notes
1
Only the first edition of this text (1922) contains the reference to Don Quixote; in
volume seven of Jünger’s “Sämtliche Werke,” published in 1979, it is missing.
2
Another renowned writer of the Weimar Republic who connected to Cervantes’s
novel seeing Don Quixote idealistically as the eternal soldier is Edwin Erich
Dwinger, who later became a Nazi. In his novel We are Calling Germany (Wir
rufen Deutschland, 1932), he tells the story of several German men who have been
prisoners of war during and after World War I in Russia and are struggling now to
adjust to life in Germany during the postwar years. Interestingly, Dwinger’s
narrator calls one of them, the former officer Merkel, “our unhappy Don Quixote”
(“unser[...] unglückliche[r] Don Quichote!”; 438). This character has been a
passionate soldier and would prefer to remain a soldier for the rest of his life;
however, he argues against war now. According to his point of view, too much
technology, such as gas tanks and airplanes, has started to play an important role in
combat; consequently, there is nothing heroic any more about it. The narrator, an
alter ego of the author, understands and respects Merkel’s point of view and speaks
of him sympathetically. However, since the narrator thinks that war is necessary
for Germany’s defense, he treats Merkel with a touch of irony, as a Quixote who,
although his cause is noble, has lost touch with reality.
3
Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg was a German poet and critic (1737-1823)
who helped to introduce the Storm and Stress period.
24 Chapter One

Works Consulted
Byron, William. Cervantes: A Biography. London: Cassell, 1978. Print.
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote of La Mancha. Trans. Walter
Starkie. New York: Penguin, 1964. Print.
Davis, Cecil. The Plays of Ernst Toller. Amsterdam: OPA, 1996. Print.
“Der Dichter und Pazifist verteidigt die Literatur.” Die Zeit, 17 September
2010. Web. 16 April 2011.
Durán, Manuel and Fay R. Rogg. Fighting Windmills: Encounters with
Don Quixote. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Print.
Durzak, Manfred. “From Tragedy to Farce/Toller’s Comedy of
Revolution: ‘Wotan Unchained.” Review of National Literatures 9
(1978): 86-100. Print.
Dwinger, Edwin Erich. Wir rufen Deutschland. Jena: Eugen Diederichs,
1932. Print.
Grimm, Reinhold. “Die Komödienproduktion zwischen 1918 und 1932.”
Studi Germanici 14 (1976): 41-70. Print.
Habel, Thomas. “Wilhelm Ehrenfried Neugebauers Der teutsche Don
Quichotte. Zur Don Quijote-Rezeption und Fiktionskritik im deutschen
Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Gelebte Literatur in der Literatur. Ed.
Theodor Wolpers. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986. 72-109.
Print.
Heuß, Theodor. “Shakespeare und Cervantes.” Die Hilfe 22 (1916): 257-
60. Print.
Hoffmeister, Gerhart. Spanien und Deutschland. Berlin: Erich Schmidt,
1976. Print.
Jünger, Ernst. Das abenteuerliche Herz. Sämtliche Werke. Erste Fassung.
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, Vol. 9, 1979. 29-176. Print.
—. Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis. Berlin: Mittler + Sohn, 1922. Print.
Kindt, Tom, and Müller, Hans-Harald. “Zweimal Cervantes: Die Don-
Quijote-Lektüren von Ernst Jünger und Ernst Weiß. Ein Beitrag zur
literarischen Anthropologie der zwanziger Jahre.” Jahrbuch zur
Literatur der Weimarer Republik. Ed. Sabina Becker, Eckhard Faul,
and Reiner Marx. 1 (1995): 230-54. Print.
Korte, Hermann. “Die Abdankung der ‘Lichtbringer’: Wilhelminische Ära
und literarischer Expressionismus in Ernst Tollers Komödie ‘Der
entfesselte Wotan.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 34.1-2
(1984): 117-32. Print.
Lethen, Helmut. Cool Conduct. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002. Print.
 Cervantes in the Weimar Republic: Ernst Toller and Ernst Jünger 25

Malkmus, Bernhard. The German Pícaro and Modernity. New York:

continuum, 2011. Print.
Mann, Klaus. Der Wendepunkt: Ein Lebensbericht. Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer, 1963. Print.
Marín Presno, Araceli. Zur Rezeption der Novelle Rinconete y Cortadillo
von Miguel de Cervantes im deutschsprachigen Raum. Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 2005. Print.
Reimers, Kirsten. Das Bewältigen des Wirklichen: Untersuchungen zum
dramatischen Schaffen Ernst Tollers zwischen den Weltkriegen.
Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000. Print.
Robert, Marthe. The Old and the New: From Don Quixote to Kafka.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Print.
Scher, Peter. “Don Quixote rügt die Ideologen.” Simplicissimus 23. 46 (11.
Feb. 1919): 588. Print.
Sturm, Hans [Ernst Jünger]. “Briefe eines Nationalisten.” Arminius 8, 11
(1927): 8-9. Print.
Toller, Ernst. Der entfesselte Wotan. In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 2.
München: Hanser, 1978. 249-302. Print.
Varela Iglesias, Fernando. “Realismo e idealismo en la recepción del
Quijote. Una visión pendular.” El Quijote hoy: La Riqueza de su
Recepción. Ed. Klaus-Dieter Ertler and Alejandro Rodríguez Díaz.
Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2007. 43-77. Print.
 CHAPTER TWO

DON QUIXOTE IN EXILE LITERATURE:

BRUNO FRANK, THOMAS MANN,
GUSTAV REGLER,
AND OTHER EXILED WRITERS

The twentieth century was a tumultuous time for Germans, and several
German authors who went into exile in the years around World War II saw
a connection to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but their interpretations of
what Cervantes’s figures could mean in their relative circumstances varied
tremendously. This chapter will explore these diverse understandings of
the concept Don Quixote in order to reflect on how formidable political
systems can produce a spectrum of interpretations.

Part One
Bruno Frank and Selected Other Exiled Writers
One of the first authors who left Germany after the burning of the
Reichstag in February 1933 was Bruno Frank; in his Swiss exile in 1934,
he wrote Cervantes, “an extraordinarily suggestive book” (“un libro
extraordinariamente sugestivo”; González Ruiz 8). In 1935, the English
translation, A Man Called Cervantes, was selected as the prestigious
“Book of the Month” (“Buch des Monats”; Sease 354). In this historical
novel, Frank contrasts the life of Miguel de Cervantes with that of his
contemporary, King Philip II, both quixotic figures of a very different
kind. Klaus Mann states in his review of Frank’s novel, “Embittered, the
Catholic Philip fights against both [religious indifference and protestant
heresy]–like Don Quixote against the windmills” (“erbittert kämpft der
katholische Philipp gegen beide [Indifferenz in Religionsdingen und
protestantisches Ketzertum]–wie Don Quijote gegen die Windmühlen”;
“Bruno Franks” 155). Mann continues commenting on Frank’s portrait of
Philip II of Spain:
28 Chapter Two

He must go under because he wants “the Unconditional, the almost

Impossible”–he, too, is a Knight of the Mournful Countenance, and in this
respect he is related twice to the unknown adventurer and poet, his poorest
subject: as a contrast and as a majestically changed brother of his hero.
(Er muss unterliegen, weil er “das Unbedingte, das fast Unmögliche” will–
auch er ein Ritter von der traurigen Gestalt, und so jenem ihm unbekannten
Abenteurer und Dichter, seinem ärmsten Untertan, seltsam doppelt
verwandt: als Kontrast und als majestätisch veränderter Bruder seines
Helden.) (“Bruno Franks” 155)

Klaus Mann is correct; in Frank’s novel both men, who never met, the
powerful monarch and the poor writer, have quixotic features. The critic
explains,

The merciless, royal Don Quixote, in whose monk cell the smells of blood
and incense are mingling, the pitiless ascetic who rules half of the earth
and despises it, hates life for the sake of a holy illusion. The other,
however, the good one who always has been toiling on this earth, the
beaten-up one, our friend–he loves life anyway. He remains kind, as
experienced as he is and although it was he who was able to show for all
times that one mostly toils in vain and that finally one is only laughed at
and become a ridiculous figure no matter how much one endured.
([D]er unbarmherzige königliche Don Quijote, in dessen Mönchszelle sich
Blutgeruch mit Weihrauchduft vermischt, der gnadenlose Asket, der die
Erde halb beherrscht und völlig verachtet, hasst das Leben um einer
heiligen Illusion willen. Der Andere aber, der Barmherzige, der sich auf
dieser Erde immer nur geplagt hat, der Gebeutelte, unser Freund–er liebt es
trotz allem. Er bleibt gütig, so erfahren er ist, und obwohl gerade er, gültig
für alle Zeiten, darstellen konnte, dass man sich meistens umsonst plagt
und dass man schließlich nur Gelächter erntet und eine lächerliche Figur
wird, so viel man auch ausstand.) (“Bruno Franks” 155)

Frank’s differentiation between the two quixotic figures, one a cruel

fanatic, the other a “devout man with courage, imagination, and mercy”
(“gläubiger Mann von Mut, Phantasie und Erbarmen”; Frank 153), is
foreshadowing the depictions of two types of communist Don Quixotes in
the literature of some exile writers who had been communists and later had
broken with communism, deeply disillusioned, writers such as Gustav
Regler. The holy book that ruled both types of quixotic figures’ lives was
not a novel of chivalry, for instance, Amadis of Gaul, nor the Bible, but the
Communist Manifesto. On the one hand, there is the quixotic “exponent of
the absolute truth” (“Vertreter der reinen Lehre”; Kolbe 14), a Stalinist
like Erich Mielke1, for example, who is mercilessly purging the International
Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) for Trotskyites. On the
 German Exile Literature 29

other hand, there is the so-called “renegade” or “apostate” (“Renegat”)

who secedes from the communist “substitute-religion” (“Ersatzreligion”;
Kolbe 14) and quits being a soldier of the world revolution; but he goes on
to fight bravely against fascism because, by not giving up his belief in a
better future, he is still a utopian. In contrast to the first type, instead of a
communist classless society, this future should be a democracy. In
Regler’s case, that would be a time for mankind “when men will once
again be judged by their achievements and not by their ideology” (Regler,
Land Bewitched 43).
The split between the one type of quixotic character and the other
within the communist movement became visible in the 1930s. In his letter
of resignation to the German Communist Party in 1938, Arthur Koestler
criticized the moral degeneration of the Party, writing, “The Moscow
Trials and the events in Spain forced Party members either to believe the
unbelievable or abase their intellects. The ‘Trotskyite-Nazi conspiracy . . .
is gradually beginning to occupy for us the role The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion2 occupies in the minds of the Nazis’” (Cesarani 148). In the
case of the absolutists in the habits of communist thought, for instance
Stalin or Mielke, “to believe” has become a starry-eyed utopianism, in the
name of which they attempt to force reality to conform to their holy books;
in doing so they commit crimes. The others, such as Regler or Koestler,
still believe in a better future and fight for it courageously. But in not
being willing to abase their intellects in order to believe the unbelievable,
they keep their humanity.
The references to Miguel de Cervantes that we investigate in the
sections on exile literature are so diverse that it is hard to find a frame of
any kind, be it in regard to weltanschauung, to literary genre, or to what
country the works in which Cervantes’s works are referred to have been
written. Only the language is the same: German. The most outstanding
contributions are Gustav Regler’s novels and Thomas Mann’s fictional
essay “Voyage with Don Quixote” (“Meerfahrt mit Don Quixote”).
Regler stands for many other German language writers who were in
Spain during its civil war and referred to Don Quixote in their texts
(diaries, novels, essays, poems) to describe this experience. Erich Arendt3,
Carl Einstein, Ludwig Renn, Rudolf Leonhard, Eduard Claudius, and
Bodo Uhse are just a few of such writers. By traveling or even fighting in
Spain, these exile writers not only crossed the plains of La Mancha but had
a firsthand experience of the cultural climate that had given rise to
quijotismo, as the Spaniards call Quixote’s spurning of the real in the
name of the possible. In Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s novel The Short
Summer of Anarchy (Der kurze Sommer der Anarchie, 1972) about the life
30 Chapter Two

of the famous Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, one of the

eyewitnesses remembers, “I saw how anarchist workers embraced young
communists. They have learned a lot, these eternal Don Quixotes” (“Ich
sah, wie anarchistische Arbeiter Jungkommunisten umarmten. Sie haben
viel gelernt, diese ewigen Don Quichotes”; 170). In The Aesthetics of
Resistance (Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, 1975), Peter Weiss’s narrator
describes a room in Spain, in which his narrator and the famous physician,
Hodann, discuss the Spanish anarchists’ role in the war; paintings that
describe scenes from Cervantes’s novel are decorating the walls around
them and seem to reflect the content of their conversation (242). In
Albacete, the same narrator watches a street performance by Spanish
anarchist soldiers from the “batallón de talento” about Don Quixote’s
adventures. He concludes, “As work changed its nature completely due to
armament, the notion of culture was taken out of its isolation and put in
the middle of the sphere of action of a guerilla” (“Wie die Arbeit durch
Bewaffnung ein gänzlich verändertes Wesen erhalten hatte, so war der
Kulturbegriff aus seiner Isolation herausgeholt und mitten in den
Handlungsbereich einer Guerilla gestellt worden”; Weiss 208-9).
Enzensberger and Weiss were not in Spain during the civil war;
however, as their sources whose experiences they reproduce in the novels
indicate, Don Quixote must have been everywhere during this time. Bodo
Uhse highlighted in his speech at the Writers’ Congress in Madrid in 1937
that the German soldiers of the International Brigades knew Cervantes’s
famous novel. We should add that those volunteers who did not read the
book might have seen G. W. Pabst’s film adaptation Adventures of Don
Quixote with the famous singer Feodor Chaliapin in the main role that was
a big hit in France and Great Britain after its release in 1933. Although this
study is not about film, it should be mentioned that Pabst’s final scene
about the burning of Quixote’s beloved books envisioned the Nazis’ book
burning ceremony that happened only shortly after the shooting of the
film. In other words, what happens to Don Quixote on the screen might
have related to those German writers’ own life experiences. In the case of
writers who probably did both read the book and watch the film, it is
impossible to answer the question of what depiction of Quixote they had in
mind when they “saw” him with his lance raised in the trenches of the war
fighting for or, perhaps at times, against them. The possibility of Don
Quixote fighting against volunteers of the International Brigades refers to
the bloody conflict between communists and anarchists within the trenches
of the Republic during the civil war. About the anarchists as Quixotes,
Rainer Rumold contends:
 German Exile Literature 31

If the quintessential Spanish figure of Don Quixote is a recognized

anarchist-bohemian model, to which none other than Bakunin himself
confessed, then it was Spain that with Durruti’s anarchist movement to
many intellectuals like [Carl] Einstein had become–for a moment–identical
with its myth. (72)

For such reasons, German communist writers sometimes refer to Spanish

anarchists negatively as Don Quixotes. However, not only Quixote’s habit
of spurning the real in the name of the possible is typical of the Spanish
anarchists but also his asceticism. The hidalgo is a frugal eater and his
concept of love is platonic. Enzensberger quotes Hugh Slater observing
that “many anarchists are non-smokers and vegetarians. Some reject any
kind of alcohol. Every form of excess is out of the question” (“viele
Anarchisten sind Nichtraucher und Vegetarier. Manche lehnen jeden
Alkoholgenuss ab. Jede Art der Ausschweifung gilt als indiskutabel”;
286). Also, Juan Ferrer’s portrait of Durruti, from which Enzensberger
quotes, reads like that of Cervantes’s main character if we see him as a
soft-hearted hero, not a cruel one:

His ideas were not for amusement; he wanted to realize them. That
explains what they later called his heroism. Of course, he acted out of
instinct, perhaps he even was blinded, but at the same time his
temperament was that of a good man, and I mean with that: his first and
last impulse was always solidarity.
(Seine Ideen waren für ihn kein Zeitvertreib; er wollte sie in die Tat
umsetzen. Das erklärt, was man später seinen Heroismus genannt hat.
Gewiß, er handelte aus dem Instinkt, er war vielleicht sogar ein
Verblendeter, aber zugleich war sein Temperament das eines guten
Menschen, und damit will ich sagen: seine erste und letzte Regung war
immer die Solidarität.) (Enzensberger 291)

However, there is not a clear line between the groups of characters who
are referred to as Quixotes in the texts of writers who were in Spain during
the civil war. Sometimes communist authors call other communists Don
Quixotes, also positively, for instance, Kantorowicz’s description of Egon
Erwin Kisch. Or sometimes they see the Spanish soldier who fights for the
Republic in general as a Quixote, no matter what his weltanschauung. A
good example for the latter is Rudolf Leonhard’s Quixote’s Death: Stories
from the Spanish Civil War (Der Tod des Quijote: Geschichten aus dem
Spanischen Bürgerkrieg, 1938). Leonhard writes,

Does Don Quixote die? In any case, he will always rise, also in this fight,
also after the victory: 4 moving, but not erring in the country, in the midst
of the people that have closed the slums, proud as always, but secure of his
32 Chapter Two

pride and the reason of it, with sparkling eyes and firm skin: as the Knight
of the fiery Countenance.
(Stirbt also Don Quijote? Jedenfalls wird er immer auferstehen, auch in
diesem Kampf, auch nach dem Siege: fahrend, aber nicht irrend im Land,
mitten im Volk, das die Hungerhöhlen zugeschüttet hat, stolz wie immer,
aber sicher seines Stolzes und des Grundes seines Stolzes, funkelnden
Auges und mit praller Haut: als Ritter von der feurigen Gestalt.) (8)

There is no doubt that Leonhard’s term “Knight of the fiery

Countenance” includes all soldiers who fought for the Republic against
Franco, regardless of their political convictions.
One of the most interesting references to Cervantes’s text found in this
group of writers who were in Spain is Alfred Kantorowicz’s wishful self-
description as a Don Quixote in his journal Spanish Diary of War
(Spanisches Kriegstagebuch, 1966). In one episode, the famous author
Egon Erwin Kisch is visiting the military unit in which Kantorowicz is
staying at the time. Kisch, because of a broken leg, arrives riding on a
mule. With the help of some boxes to climb on and several soldiers’
support, Kisch manages to climb back on the mule when he is leaving.
Being fat, it looks so funny that some bystanders “laughed uncontrollably”
(“lachten sich schief”; 238). Kantorowicz goes on to remember, “As soon
as he sat on top, he said grandly ‘Don Quixote’” (“Kaum saß er oben,
sagte er würdevoll ‘Don Kischote’”; 238). While the tall and slim
Kantorowicz, who looks much more like Quixote than Kisch does, is
leading the mule with its heavy rider up the hill, one soldier takes a picture
of this scene. Kantorowicz comments, “So it happened that a picture was
taken of us as ‘Don Quixote and Sancho’ although figuratively we should
have changed the roles” (“So wurden wir als ‘Don Kischote und Sancho’
fotografiert, wiewohl wir figürlich die Rollen hätten tauschen sollen”;
(238). To change the roles not just figuratively, but also in character–i.e.,
Kantorowicz not representing Sancho, but his master–indicates the
author’s wishful thinking that he himself would represent Don Quixote.
Keeping Bruno Frank’s two types of Quixotes in mind, we should ask,
which of the two figures would Kantorowicz like to personify? There is a
hint to this answer in his memory of a soldier called August Hartmann,
who comes close to fitting Kantorowicz’s “fantasy of a selfless, honorable,
comradely, and humane communist” (“Wunschvorstellung vom selbstlosen,
ehrenhaften, kameradschaftlichen und menschlichen Kommunisten”) or, to
phrase it differently, a “hero of conviction [. . .] of our time” (“Glaubensheld
[. . .] unserer Zeit”; Kantorowicz 92). A “hero of conviction” is Quixote;
and with adjectives like “selfless, honorable, humane,” Kantorowicz
would certainly like to be such a hero. Besides this August Hartmann-type
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