the days of his boyhood, and whom he
characterizes as 'a professor of humour, of
knowledge of human nature and of human
kindness', as one of those great masters -
besides Max Reinhardt and Wilhelm
Furtwangler - who had taught him how to
direct a play. The son of the famous
political economist Werner Sombart tells
us that his father not only read but analy
zed all Dickens' works. But otherwise only
our intellectuals know anything about
Dickens although occasionally A Christmas
Carol is made into a play as a Christmas
treat for our youngsters and you may come
across comics about Oliver Twist in Ger
many. And our intellectuals treat Dickens
like a minor classic - that is, they pretend
to know him, but their knowledge is often
rather superficial. Of course, dissertations
on Dickens' works are regularly published
at our universities and scholars continue to
write learned articles on him, but in spite
of this you cannot say that Dickens is
really alive in present-day Germany.
Summing up, it can no doubt be said that
Dickens' influence on German literature
was considerable, and that his works were
extremely popular with the German rea
ding public of the nineteenth century.
Although he is not forgotten at all in Ger
many now, his fame has steadily declined
here since the turn of the century.
It goes without saying that his name never
meant as much to the Germans as that of
Shakespeare. And books like Pickwick,
Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, which
were the favourites of the public at a time
when Dickens' fame had reached its zenith
in Germany, never achieved the importan
ce of Gulliver's Travels or Robinson Cru
soe. Although Dickens' contribution to the
development of the German realistic novel
should not be underestimated, the impact
of Richardson's novels on German literatu
re was certainly more important. And
though the same can perhaps not be said of
Sterne and Goldsmith, it is certainly true
of the Gothic Novel and of the historical
novels of Walter Scott.
But among later novelists of the nineteenth
century, Dickens' position in Germany
was, for about a hundred years from the
beginning of his career, unique. Among
young German readers Frederick Marry-
at's and Fenimore Cooper's novels may, at
times, have approached the popularity of
Dickens' works, and, with the general
public, perhaps Jane Eyre or an occasional
success like Bulwer-Lytton's The Last days
of Pompeji or Oscar Wilde's The Picture
of Dorian Gray.
All this has changed, however, since the
end of World War II. the German reader,
if he is at all interested in the English
novel of the nineteenth century, would
perhaps rate Vanity Fair as high as any of
Dickens' novels. Many German intellec
tuals of our time would certainly prefer
Wuthering Heights or Middlemarch or
Moby Dick to any of Dickens' works. And
- where the twentieth century is concer
ned - they would certainly consider Henry
James's or James Joyce's art, and perhaps
even that of Virginia Woolf, or William
Faulkner, as far superior to that of Dic
kens. And in the opinion of the general
reader Ernest Hemingway or even Graham
Greene would no doubt get the better of
Dickens.
At an international level most German
readers would certainly now place Tol
stoi's novels, and probably even those of
Balzac and Marcel Proust and Thomas
Mann, above Dickens'.
There seems little hope, at present, that
Dickens will ever achieve again the positi
on he once held in Germany. It will need a
good deal of education to make Germans
realize that in his own country Charles
Dickens is now regarded as one of the
greatest novelists in the English language,
that some critics consider him in fact to be
the greatest English novelist of all times
and that this gives him a high rank, in
deed, among writers of the whole world.
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