Secularized Zigeunerromantik: Literary Gypsies and Realism in Storm and Stifter

German literary realism is traditionally viewed as extending over two phases. The first, featuring the immediately post-Hegelian, post-Goethean generation, extends from one failed revolution around 1830 to another in 1848. The second, featuring both the veterans of that epoch and the tyros of the new, reaches from 1848 or so until around 1900. The first phase, exemplified by an author like the much-imprisoned and much-censored Karl Gutzkow — part journalist, part ideologue, part writer of fiction — is generally characterized by literature of political agitation, be it progressive or reactionary. The second, exemplified by an author like Gustav Freytag — in equal measure journalist, ideologue, and fiction writer — is of a fundamentally more pragmatic and accommodating bent. The difference of mentality is clear. But whether members of Gutzkow’s politically activist or Freytag’s conservative and pragmatic post-1848 cohort, German realists were united in thinking little of German Romanticism and even less of Zigeunerromantik . They did so, of course, because they thought of Romanticism, with Heine, as having lost contact with the firm foundation of reality, and considered their own aesthetic as remedying precisely that defect. Now this did not mean that they censored Gypsies from their literary production. Far from it. But inevitably, as we shall see, they inclined in their versions of the Romany presence to emphasize the earthbound dimensions of Gypsy life at the expense of the transfiguring energies which adorn the portrait of Gypsy life in the Romantic productions of, say, Arnim and Brentano. Yet oddly, even under realism’s antagonistic régime, Zigeunerromantik — surely the transfiguring quintessence of the Romantic project — did not so much die as live on in another guise, as an ambiguous discourse of the other still available for citation under the new rules. In both strands of realist writing gender, art, and nation are thus, perhaps to our surprise, again the dominant semantic potentials released from this source. One line of realists, in a strand of writing extending throughout the century but here exemplified by an early work of Theodor Storm and later work of Adalbert Stifter, exploits a very restricted range of the spectrum of association afforded by Zigeunerromantik , its semantic potential either as code of the mythical femme fatale or as a symbol of aesthetic beauty — as a resource for reflection on gender and art. Another line of realists, from Gottfried Keller to Wilhelm Raabe, Victor von Strauss, Gustav Freytag, and Karl May, takes a far more complex stance. These authors engage critically with Zigeunerromantik as a representative strategy and channel the resource into extremely ambitious explorations of Germanic identity after the cultural and political earthquake of 1848. The present chapter considers Storm and Stifter.