Primary source 2: through the eyes of Heinrich Mann’s Herr Hessling

One type of source that interests me is the literary. In 1919, Heinrich Mann (1871-1950) published his novel, Der Untertan (often translated as The Loyal Man or The Man of Straw). On the right, interestingly enough, is a poster from the 1951 GDR production of the book. It is a story about a boy who grows up in the late Kaiserreich. What strikes me about this literary source is how Mann first presents the world of Diederich Hessling through the eyes of Hessling as a young boy. Most critics immediately make the link between this character and the idea of blind obedience, but Mann portrays a richer picture of a small German town. Hessling’s perception of home and neighborhood is populated by scary figures: his father, the minister and doctor among others. When he goes to Berlin as a student he is confronted with the world beyond his distant home. The figures change and the perception of fear becomes less explicit, involving the professors, the fraternity brothers (with almost no talk of his classes and work), his military training, a young woman, the woman’s father and a chance glimpse of the Kaiser in passing, which stirs Hessling to excitedly identify himself with the monarch. When Hessling returns to his home town, the figures change once again, this time: his father’s old assistant at the family-run factory, one of his father’s workers, a socialist labor organizer (and likely troublemaker), the young Jewish lawyer Judassohn, the old gentlemen, their Gesellschaft, their ladies’ circles, the old liberal 1848er, the 1871 veterans, and the judge he faces while accused of “insulting his Majesty”.

The types of fears change with the cast of characters. The minister makes his appearances. The doctor is not much of a presence anymore. Hessling would claim perfect health anyways. Now his fear involve things like his “person” and its relationship to his society: his military service, business, workers, sexual relationships and “politics”. The talk there is about the nation above and beyond his liberalism. So from this reading of Mann’s book, Germans were placing their values in question. As Hessling puts it to the old gentlemen in town when they want to know, “liberal yes, but the nation above all else”. That would remain an uneasy arrangement up until the Great War: a nation not quite above the values of liberalism and the values of liberalism already a bad word in some mouths. However, these “politics” were not at a point of absolute truths, unequivocally worth tearing the nation apart. There were still enough people open to the idea of some form of cooperation. The First World War opens up the question of violent young men returning from the war to brutalize their nation and society, but the war would also, at least initially, make the possibility of more democratic and social reforms more possible in many small German towns and cities. So I begin building my presentation of primary sources.