The Dipped Magic Wand: On Max Kommerell’s “Jean Paul”

Translator’s Introduction

In 1934, under the pseudonym K. A. Stempflinger, Walter Benjamin published in the Frankfurter Zeitung the review “Der eingetunkte Zauberstab: Zu Max Kommerell’s ‘Jean Paul,’” on the work of literary critic Max Kommerell.1 I have translated it here, where it appears for the first time in English. My corresponding essay, “The Hero and the Magician: Walter Benjamin’s Jean Paul,” also appears in this issue of e-flux journal; it responds to the context and climate surrounding discussions of heroic forms as overtures to German fascism in the 1930s.

“The Dipped Magic Wand” presents as an extremely dense text, and hence its English translation might benefit from some contextualization. Many of the central figures the essay touches on have scarcely been translated into English, or have been forgotten entirely in contemporary Anglophone reception. Consider the limited selection of English translations of the poetry of Stefan George, with whom everyone from Lukács to Adorno, as well as lesser-known figures like Eric Unger, engaged. George, not himself a central figure in “The Dipped Magic Wand,” is nonetheless an essential reference point, since Kommerell was a member of George’s Secret Germany circle from 1921 to 1930. Much of Benjamin’s criticism of Kommerell overlaps with his criticism of the George circle. 

Then there is Max Kommerell, whose oeuvre has hardly received any attention in English aside from studies by Paul Flemming.2 Giorgio Agamben has called Kommerell “certainly the greatest German critic of the twentieth century after Benjamin, and perhaps the last great personality between the wars who still remains to be discovered.”3 Given Kommerell’s membership in the Nazi Party, Benjamin’s engagement with Kommerell’s work is closely related to his studies of fascism, in particular his 1930 essay “Theories of German Fascism,” largely a critique of Ernst Jünger’s notorious essay “Total Mobilization.” As one critic notes, Benjamin

refers to this proximity in a letter to Scholem, whom he informs of his plan to juxtapose Ernst Jünger’s anthology War and Warriors [Krieg und Krieger] with Max Kommerell’s book The Poet as Leader in German Classicism [Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik] in a radio lecture.4

Although Kommerell is mostly unknown in English, the recent selection of Benjamin’s work published in On Goethe, edited by Peter Fenves, contains a commendable retranslation of Benjamin’s first essay on Max Kommerell, “Against a Masterpiece.”5

The topic of “The Dipped Magic Wand” is Max Kommerell’s book on the German poet Jean Paul, yet another figure who is hardly read in English. But here again, this is changing: Sublunary Press has recently published half a dozen books by Jean Paul in English translation, suggesting a renewal of interest in his truly singular body of work. Jean Paul—kindred spirit of someone like Laurence Sterne, and perhaps a precursor to Robert Walser—was a contemporary of Goethe and was at the time considered by many to be the superior writer. Yet over time, the image of Goethe as the definitive German poet prevailed. By focusing on the work of Jean Paul, both Benjamin and Kommerell can be said to be performing a rescue operation of an author who risked being forgotten in the shadow of Goethe. Both Kommerell and Benjamin focus heavily on Jean Paul’s most natural talent: humor. While Kommerell’s book gives a compelling account of this humor, he also sees it as posing a “peril” to art by deviating from the enlightened, serious work of someone like Goethe.

And finally, there is the passing reference to Salomo Friedlaender in this essay, one of approximately seven references to the author in all of Benjamin’s work. As the story goes, in the early 1920s, Benjamin prepared a book on politics called The True Politician (Der wahre Politiker). To be included in this work was a response to Salomo Friedlaender’s critique of Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia. The work was lost, but through the few references to Friedlaender throughout Benjamin’s writings we might glean a hint of why he considered this rather eccentric author to be so important for a study of politics. A major selection of the work of Salomo Friedlaender (who published his literary work under the pseudonym “Mynona”) was released in English translation in 2024 by Rowman and Littlefield.6

Even if the reader of the following translation has engaged with one or several of the aforementioned figures, the dense prose of the essay presents formidable challenges to reading. Nonetheless, as the translator, I hope the essay can help breathe life into a new constellation of thinkers informing the work of Walter Benjamin.

—Hunter Bolin

***

When Stefan George compiled from the tradition of German poetry an authoritative three-volume selection, he dedicated one volume exclusively to Jean Paul. It took decades of patience for German readers to deserve the entitlement inherent in the image of Jean Paul that determined this choice. Figures less significant for Germanness than Jean Paul have long since been monumentalized in the much-contested series of works erected by George’s disciples. Max Kommerell counts among them only indirectly. His teacher in the narrower sense is Friedrich Wolters. And a certain distance from the founder of the circle might have been indispensable for a valid portrayal of Jean Paul. In fact, Jean Paul proves more repellent than others in the canon of concepts and images the disciples (sometimes all too adroitly) operated by.

With his book The Poet as Leader in German Classicism [Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik], Kommerell unmistakably marked the distance separating his work from his ideological allies, but also from the academic guild. However questionable this early attempt to render the classical authors as founders of a heroic age of the Germans, it nevertheless earned something hardly any German literary historian could lay claim to in recent times: authority. This authority proved itself most in Kommerell’s mastery of physiognomic portrayals, in the dynamic tension of his cognition that gauges not only the characters, but also the historical constellations in which they encountered one another. In the life of Jean Paul, however, there is only one such constellation. It therefore subjects Kommerell’s ability to a major test. He has passed it. And his work—especially for a reviewer who again finds himself fundamentally at odds with the author’s convictions—demands to be faithfully reproduced in its broad strokes. And doing so does not preclude sketching another Jean Paul in faint strokes.

The unique historical constellation in Jean Paul’s life was his encounter with the masters and poets of Weimar. He may have foreshadowed such an encounter in the preface to The Invisible Lodge, where he addressed them as his “nobler readers, whose dreamt and at times glimpsed shapes [Gestalten] I saw wandering and beckoning like genii upon the heights of the Beautiful and the Great.” It is well known that he was received with little hospitality at the foot of those heights. Not many of his encounters in Weimar were worthy of poetic form; the most tangible of them was an incident with Goethe, who, seated next to Jean Paul at a table, turned his plate for a quarter of an hour after being miffed by a remark the poet made about the tragic. Kommerell scarcely lingers on the anecdotes of this time. Paul Nerrlich was more detailed, preserving traits that could offer material for serious reflection today. One such trait is the following: “At court concerts only noblemen were admitted to the hall, while the gallery was reserved for commoners. When Jean Paul was informed that he too would be admitted to the hall if he wore a rapier, he refused, regarding it as a degradation.” Such details are nowhere to be found in Kommerell’s work. But he is well within his expertise, portraying figures in the pathos of their distance, in the heat of conversation. “Whoever today,” he writes of Goethe and Jean Paul, “in judging their works, is inclined to rank the pupil above the teacher, must picture the two figures as they sit in chairs in Herder’s study conversing: the one squirming around like a newt, hardly aware of his dignity, with watery eyes and a gigantic child’s forehead; the other with the expression of innate priesthood in his face, softened by the almost feminine sweetness of his mouth and by the music in all that came out of it … and with the dark eyes whose incurable sadness may even then have recalled the gaze of Demeter’s head in mourning.”

With such images, the thought that may have led to the author’s most significant concept dawns on him: the idea of the humorist, which the chapter titled “Predecessors” opens with. The humorist is an anthropological type governed by the law of “inadequate embodiment.” He is the creature of the first joke, a joke “not made by these buffoons, but one that makes them.” This false embodiment is fundamental to the humorist’s experience, which, as fatal destiny, must be laughed off. “For the philosopher,” Kommerell adds, “being stuck in a body is not fate, but an illusion [Schein] … Of the two, might the humorist, the laughing philosopher, possess a deeper seriousness?” At this point, he turns to Fichte. Jean Paul, he claims, sought to both appropriate and explode the philosophy of the Wissenschaftslehre [doctrine of scientific knowledge] in one tremendous joke—a joke told by a character named Leibgeber. Leibgeber is said to have “posited” Fichte, who then becomes the author of the Wissenschaftslehre. Three elements converge in the humorist: exile from one’s own body; versatility of the ego, which can lodge in any stranger; and thinking, which is both the framework and the content of this process. “The experience of the inescapability of the ego and the experience of the devious elasticity of the spirit only appear to contradict one another.” This elasticity extends into the boundless. The poet records more than the accordion-like folds that the humorist’s ego draws on, more than the beautiful dream-figures in which it prepares eternal lodging for itself without ever being at home in them temporally. The cosmos itself is no more remote to him, no more inhospitable. For “Jean Paul did not think himself into the world, like some thinkers do, but away from the world.” In Logbook of Giannozzo the Balloonist, he takes his greatest distance from the world.

In this rarefied atmosphere, Paul Scheerbart—author of The Dance of the Comets and the Astral Novellas—would later make himself at home. His friend Mynona discerned within the eccentric tension of the Ego a concept he called “creative indifference”—the point of rest [Ruhepunkt] around which the world’s scales balance. It is no accident that Mynona compiled the useful collection Jean Paul als Denker [Jean Paul as Thinker], allowing Jean Paul’s own voice to emerge. It would be unjust to deny that Kommerell also detected this dimension of humor. As Kommerell notes: “Jean Paul discovers in the all-encompassing, breaking, self-measuring Ego the celebrated infinity of the new poetry.” Yet Kommerell finds it more convenient to look not into those spatial expanses revealed by distant vision, but rather into the darker realms most prized by profound thinkers. Significantly, he interprets the humorous writer’s fate—Jean Paul’s self-made destiny—as a peril that the Germans as a whole may fall prey to: “the danger of a philosophically overstrained self-reflection, indeed the danger of an era. What Jean Paul invented a figure of is none other than this iniquity [Bewusstseinsfrevel].”

From here it is but a small step—albeit a misstep—toward defaming thought itself. As has rightly been observed, the awareness from which German idealism—and Jean Paul along with it—speculates is “not sharpened intellect or clarity of reason … but the pleasure and torment of aesthetic self-reflection.”7 Yet how easily one might confuse the two! Especially the author, and even more so his age! Kommerell, however, does not succumb, though he doesn’t entirely reject the tension either; he hesitates and seeks resolution in a heroic mindset. “Jean Paul’s dream figures,” he wrote years ago, “only seem bloodless until their earthly brethren tread upon our soil.” And now he brings his poet closer to Nietzsche. In doing so, he accomplishes at least one thing: he accords justice to the destructive aspect of humor. Scathing criticism is reserved for those complacent spirits who imagine they can “join the eternal repository of German humor and even cheer the flimsiest jest” merely because “behind it lies a ‘golden soul.’” These comfortable souls have claimed that such humor spared the poet “from the fate of Kleist or Hölderlin.” But on closer inspection, that humor—far from being the gentlest of his inner destructive forces—was itself something Jean Paul needed shielding from. Schoppe, the thinker seized by madness, teaches “what an experience of thought is,” and thus, according to Kommerell, reaffirms his poet’s kinship with Nietzsche.

Thus the author traces the history of laughter down to Nietzsche. Even more unassailable and significant is how he situates it as far back as Socrates. The importance and caliber of his work can hardly be conveyed more succinctly than in this lengthy quotation:

One might call Socrates the first humorist the world has known. What stunned the Greeks was that he treated himself with humor. It wasn’t that he lacked self-respect … but that Greek self-regard was tied to one’s figure [Gestalt]. Socrates distanced what was venerable in himself—his own figure, in the Greek sense—he toyed with it, even surrendered it. This was outrageous … Socrates in Athens and Jean Paul in Weimar: two major troublemakers and enfants terribles, all the more vexing the more they moved and mattered! A man who renounces himself might be tolerated by Athens’s elite—or Weimar’s gentlemen of spirit—as a court jester, but what happens when he rises above them and outweighs them? No one tolerates having their own intellectual domain sublated, especially when they built it themselves, and least of all if that man is Johann Wolfgang Goethe. The Weimarians, having cultivated a form of spiritual aristocracy, were particularly humorless. Hence history provided the material for two grand comedies … one written: Aristophanes’s The Clouds; the other merely lived.

But it was truly lived in the Biedermeier period [1815–48]. For Kommerell, this marks the moment when the bourgeoisie “ceases to have symbols and succumbs to pure interiority … Only with this does pure exteriority also emerge. Style resides between the two. One may love or criticize the Biedermeier period—it is the bourgeoisie expressed as style; after it, the bourgeoisie endures without style.” This is a curious perspective on the final third of the nineteenth century—a period of a “style-less” bourgeoisie. Setting that aside, what does Kommerell actually mean when he refers to Biedermeier as a “style”? Blowing hot and cold, he offers nothing decisive. He stands at the boundary of what heroic historiography can grasp. The zeitgeist so vividly invoked by Jean Paul must eke out its existence as a mere placeholder. Kommerell does not let it speak. He avoids perceiving it, and rightly so. For what this zeitgeist proclaims is the collapse of classicism’s demand upon the German bourgeoisie: the reconciliation with feudalism through aesthetic education and the cult of beautiful semblance [Schein]. It changes nothing that these classical demands were thwarted not by bourgeois defiance but rather by reactionary forces. Goethe inscribed the classical law of mankind’s formation into Mignon’s song: “Let me seem [scheinen] until I become.” One of Jean Paul’s last fictional characters—the apothecary Enoch Marggraf, who spins an impenetrable web of deceit and delusion around himself and others—appears as a sinister caricature of that incantation verse. And it is no accident that the apothecary conjures a princely throne for himself and others. Goethe’s patron goddesses of semblance [Schein]—Ottilie, Mignon, Helena—have fallen, and by the time the Biedermeier bourgeoisie settles under Jean Paul’s protectorate, it is within an entirely different world of semblance. Indeed, they did feel him to be their protector, and his success—which Kommerell gives no interpretation of—finds its reason here. Admittedly, Kommerell has succeeded in pinpointing one aspect of this world of beautiful semblance [Scheinwelt] found in Biedermeier: in this period, everything spiritual strives to slip into the spectral [Geisterhaft], with mirror images and wax figures becoming instruments of fate [Gerätschaften des Verhängnisses], not only in the knight and bandit books, but also in Jean Paul’s works. Kommerell has brilliantly demonstrated that the signs of disintegration in Jean Paul’s work are a lower-class undertow that insists within the speculative idealism of the upper classes. But the day-side of semblance—which most intimately belongs to its night-side—is barely touched. In the Biedermeier, beautiful semblance no longer suffices unto itself as in classicism; rather, it appears as a counterpart to illusion, meant to dispel it. The semblance of the magic fairy tale scarcely brushes this epoch. Perhaps because this consoling semblance emerged from strata that the heroic conception of history is reluctant to descend into: popular tradition.

The art of the Biedermeier period is steeped in such traditions, and Jean Paul’s notebook was its archive.

Kommerell fails to acknowledge this unmistakably baroque poet’s obvious kinship with the baroque era of German poetry, a fact that no study of his work or his time can overlook. In the drama of fate [Schicksalsdrama], the Biedermeier period witnessed the resurrection of the bloody or ghostly events of the baroque stage; its magical and fairy tales saw the late flourishing of allegory’s power to transform and estrange things from their essence and turn them into symbols; in the operatic language of the baroque poets the period heard echoes of a kind of music-box lyricism. All of this converges in Jean Paul—“a straggler across the centuries,” for as the apothecary Marggraf followed in the footsteps of Don Quixote, so does Jean Paul follow the genius of German baroque poetry. As in the fairy tale “Schwan kleb an,” only an endless chain of little people, mainly German petty-bourgeois women, became attached to him. In Jean Paul, the baroque motifs once flaunted about in learned poetry transfigure into something florid, unassuming, and agreeable. This does not prevent them from being bequeathed to the time as inheritance, as tradition. None has more lavishly wielded this inheritance than Jean Paul. This wide-ranging, sovereign creativity makes a closer look into his source indispensable.8

It is not through form [Gestalt] but rather through transformation that creatures can offer themselves inexhaustibly to poetry from this source. Its essence is that of fantasy, which leads form into transformation [Gestalt der Umgestaltung]. This does not happen without simultaneously deforming form. This process of deformation [enstaltendes Geschehen] is the raw material of Jean Paul’s poetry, and is precisely where it borders on the dreamworld. Yet Kommerell has only the slightest inkling of the cloudy core of this process, nothing more. He merely brushes against it when he speaks of the “delicate, multicolored borders” that characterize the poet’s reality. He expresses it, but only figuratively: “The smallest of his creations comes into being the moment a hue of feeling saturates the fabric of a comparison.” And indeed, the intuition of fantasy [Phantasieanschauung]—the antithesis of all formative imagination [gestaltende Einbildung]—is at home in the world of color. For every form, every contour perceived by man, there corresponds in him a capacity to produce it. The body in dance, the hand in its gestures, mimics it and appropriates it. But this ability reaches its limit in color; the human body cannot generate color. Color does not correspond to the human body creatively, but only receptively: in the colorfully shimmering eye. Pure color is the medium of fantasy, not the strict canon of the shaping [gestaltende] artist. Its cloudy home, in which forms do not so much take shape but rather disfigure [sich weniger gestalten als entstalten], is the realm of change. “Where has it gone,” says Jean Paul, “the colored cloud that for thirty years drifted past this I, and which I called childhood, youth, life?” What seems playful on one side inclines towards the sacred on the other. Under the sway of pure fantasy, art that alienates itself from form perhaps only anticipates images of the thousand-year kingdom. Kommerell is not mistaken when he writes: “Taken as a whole, Jean Paul’s judgments are chiliastic, which is why Herder loved to take his names Johannes and Richter allegorically.” And with an indelible stamp the author finally describes Jean Paul’s relationship to Goethe: “How can we situate Jean Paul? He proved himself right in a different way—not as a leader, but like a wise child or a saintly old woman.”

Jean Paul was a creature who “could only become acquainted with the state, with custom, profession, woman, and business in the form of defeat.” For this, he was awarded “the dipped magic wand,” which “changes the form of the material world with a single stroke.” The magic wand in question is that of fantasy; the moisture that wets it is humor, which one can imagine bubbling up from an abysmal source. It springs forth at the foot of a blossoming cliff in Biedermeier. Reclining back against a sky-blue goddess, the poet rests there with his melodious hands. Whatever the muse inspires him with is recorded by a winged child seated beside him. Harps and lutes lie scattered about. Dwarves in the mountain’s bosom play horns and violins. And in the sky, the sun is setting. This is how Lyser once painted the landscape in whose colorful fire Jean Paul’s figures traipse and transform. In Kommerell’s depiction, the poet’s head protrudes naked against the grey backdrop of eternity.