“You can go to hell with your Chinese bridge”: August von Kotzebue's Most Successful Play Menschenhaß und Reue and the European Garden Revolution

Summary

ALTHOUGH AUGUST VON KOTZEBUE, born in Weimar in 1761, could certainly boast having been the best-known, most-performed, and indeed one of the most widely read playwrights of the Goethezeit, nowadays he has been almost completely forgotten— perhaps with the exception of the historical significance of his assassination at the hands of Karl Ludwig Sand in 1819. In fact, Kotzebue serves as an exemplary case of the processes of what Simone Winko calls “Negativkanonisierung” (negative canonization), largely regarded only as an author of trivial works written for entertainment, unworthy of serious scholarly discussion. Yet recent research has corrected Kotzebue's image, showing instead that his texts warrant proper study using all the tools of literary analysis. Studying the contours of this willingly combative writer does not just present a clearer impression of the literary landscape of the so-called “Sattelzeit” (saddle period); but if we give greater scrutiny to Kotzebue's understanding of literature and theater and pay closer attention to his texts we gain valuable insights into how a very capable playwright achieved enormous success by producing plays that took an active part in the intellectual debates of his day while always remaining dramaturgically conventional. His most famous play, Menschenhaß und Reue (Misanthropy and Repentence), for example, illustrates a successful balance of entertainment and moral improvement, shows dramaturgical finesse, and is in step with new techniques of psychologizing characters through the use of gestures; it also contains numerous intertextual references that root it in the literary and philosophical landscape of its time. Moreover, Kotzebue's sophisticated and calculated use of stage directions in the printed text indicates that he also had a reading public in mind and therefore tailored the text neatly to this readership's needs.

In the following I shall argue that in Menschenhaß und Reue, Kotzebue alludes to an entire conceptual framework with which contemporary audiences across Europe would have been very familiar. This play's success at the time was assured not least by Kotzebue's choice of setting: by locating the action in a landscape park modeled on the English garden he brought together a wealth of discourses connected to the so-called Garden Revolution.