German Authors and Genres

Writer Robert Löhr has devoted himself to historical material, which under his pen unfolds a remarkable life of its own. In an interview with Goethe.de, he explains the charm for him of stories about history.

Mr. Löhr, in February 2010 you published your third historical novel, “Das Hamlet-Komplott” (The Hamlet Conspiracy). The first, “Der Schachautomat” (The Chess Machine), tells of the most brilliant scam of the eighteenth century. In your “Erlkönig-Manöver” (Erlkönig Maneuver) you have Goethe, Schiller, Kleist and others join in a secret mission against Napoleon. And in “Das Hamlet-Komplott“?

The novel is a continuation of the Erlkönig-Manöver. Once again a group around Goethe and Kleist goes into action against Napoleon. This time they disguise themselves as a troupe of itinerant actors – and Shakespeare too gets into the act.

What attracts you to historical material?

First, the escapism: historical material transports the reader as well as myself to another world. There weren’t necessarily fewer problems then than now, but they were different problems. Art has to stir things up, certainly. But I admit that in reading I put entertainment to the fore.

Then the themes that are treated in historical material are more fundamental: they are about archaic things such as love, honor, death, revenge. By contrast, the issues today are mostly quite trivial. Not that I rule out writing a novel in a contemporary setting someday soon ...

Time machine to 1800 Weimar

Your novels deal with the classical-romantic era ...

Yes. If Germany ever had a Golden Age, it was the time of Goethe. Politically, Germany had hit rock bottom, but culturally, especially in literature and philosophy, it was on Olympus. Sometimes it seems to me as though all the important writers and thinkers lived around 1800. If I had a time machine, I’d certainly set it for “Weimar, 1800”.

After two hundred years of literary studies, can we approach Goethe and Schiller at all unselfconsciously?

I’ve done it without asking myself the question. And I enjoyed it. When I send Goethe and Schiller across the Rhine as gunmen against Napoleon, I’d call that “unselfconscious”.

Goethe and Schiller re-thought

What sources did you use?

In addition to the relevant biographies I read above all the works of the characters, though the complete works only of Kleist and Schiller of course. They not only died young, but are also consistently worth reading. I did nothing but read for nearly a year. You notice it because my language has changed and become more old-fashioned.

Your novel the “Erlkönig-Manöver” begins with a fight scene at an inn, in which Goethe and Schiller cheerfully get into the act. In a few words, how would you describe “your” Goethe and “your” Schiller?

Goethe is the wise old observer who every now and then loses mocking barbs at his surroundings. Politically, he’s the “courtier”, pragmatic and stoic. In the course of the story my Schiller, on the other hand, re-kindles the revolutionary fire of his youth and fights for the Enlightenment and truth. He is much more hopeful than Goethe – and all the more disappointed by politics in the end.

When in doubt, go against historical fact

How true are your stories?

The political situation that forms the background of my novels, Germany at the time of Napoleon’s campaigns, is as true to fact as are the relationships of the characters to each other. This applies to the friendship between Goethe and Schiller, Kleist’s ambivalent relation to Goethe, and the ménage à trois of Goethe, Bettina Brentano und Achim von Arnim. From then on the fiction, or rather the “alternative history”, begins.

And how important is historical truth for you?

When in doubt, I always give priority to the story, not the history. If I were to keep strictly to historical fact, the result would be a conventional historical novel. And reading one of them you often have the feeling you’re holding a textbook in the hand. Or, in words of Schiller, whose dramas often bend history: “History is generally only a magazine for my imagination, and its objects have to acquiesce in what they become in my hands”.

Quotations from the works of the models of your poet-characters gush from their mouths. How would you respond to the charge that world literature thus degenerates into corny jokes?

Literature remains alive only when you engage with it. Even if as corny jokes! Anyone who wants his Goethe behind glass and pickled in alcohol in a museum should keep away from my books.

Are you planning something new?

I’ll probably devote myself next to a German myth: the Wartburg. So I’ll be staying in Thuringia. In particular, it will be about Luther’s stay at this “most German of castles” – and the legendary minstrels’ contest there in the Middle Ages.