7 - Self and Other: Joseph von Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild

Summary

Joseph von Eichendorff was born into a Catholic family in Upper Silesia in 1788. The Eichendorffs were landed gentry who had recently taken residence in a castle (Lubowitz). As Eichendorff grew older, however, it became clear that it would not be financially viable for him or his brother, Wilhelm, to continue as “gentleman farmers.” He studied in Halle and Heidelberg at the height of Romanticism, ending up in Vienna when he was twenty-one, where he spent time with the Schlegels and with Adam Müller, among others. Although he passed the civil service exam and served in the military, he was unable to find a government position and moved to Breslau, where he took a low-paying job. During these years his father died, the castle was sold, and he wrote the novella Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue), which can indeed be read allegorically as an attempt to mourn his status as a member of the nobility. In 1821 he secured a prestigious position as a Catholic councillor to the royal government in Danzig. The wish to become a gentleman farmer, his continued devotion to Catholicism, and his long march toward becoming a bureaucrat are all details of an extremely conservative biography. His devotion to civil service may have been a means of holding on to his noble status by working in the service of the king. This royalist tendency appears in some of his later, explicitly political writings.

In a 1957 essay on Eichendorff, Theodor Adorno responded to the German nationalistic tendency to emphasize only the conservative tendencies in Eichendorff's work: “Die ihn preisen, sind vorab Kulturkonservative. Manche rufen ihn als Kronzeugen einer positiven Religiosität an, wie er sie, zumal in den literarhistorischen Arbeiten seiner Spätzeit, schroff dogmatisch behauptete. Andere beschlagnahmen ihn in landmannschaftlichem Geiste. [. . .] Sie möchten ihn gewissermaβen rücksiedeln, ihr ‘er war unser’ soll patriotischen Ansprüchen zugute kommen” (Those who sing his praises are primarily cultural conservatives. They invoke him as the chief witness to a positive religiosity of the kind he set forth in rigid thematic fashion, especially in the literary-historical works of his late period. Others lay claim to him in the name of a regionalist spirit. [. . .] They would like to resettle him in his native region; their ‘he was ours’ is intended to support patriotic claims).