Waves E-Book

Eduard von Keyserling

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 295

Beschreibung

First published on the eve of the First World War, Keyserling's masterpiece offers a vivid portrait of a society on the verge of dissolution. A group of German aristocrats gathers at a seaside village on the Baltic Sea for a summer holiday in the early years of the twentieth century. The characters represent a cross-section of the upper classes of imperial Germany: a philandering baron, his jealous wife, a gallant cavalry officer, the elderly widow of a general, a cynical government official, a lady's companion. Their lives, even on holiday, are regulated by rigid protocol and archaic codes of honour. But their quiet, disciplined world is thrown into disarray by the unexpected presence of Doralice, a young countess who has rebelled against social constraints by escaping from an arranged marriage and running away with a bourgeois artist. Gary Miller's new translation will find a new generation of readers for this neglected German classic.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Introduction

The Translator

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Copyright

Introduction

When the writer Eduard von Keyserling died in 1918, Thomas Mann, in an appreciation published in a German newspaper, remembered him fondly as the author of “elevated, modest, pure and immortal stories,” and then went on to predict confidently that Keyserling would “always be loved.”1 Most readers at the time probably agreed with Mann’s assessment. After all, Keyserling’s books were widely read (especially during the war years), they were held in high regard by many of his fellow writers, and most of them were reissued in new editions in the 1920s. And yet one hundred years later, Keyserling is not beloved; he is in fact almost completely forgotten. To be sure, in the German-speaking world his books remain in print, he is acknowledged as the author of one or two “minor classics,” doctoral students still produce the occasional dissertation devoted to him, and every couple of decades highbrow critics attempt (with limited success) to revive his reputation. But among English-speaking readers, Keyserling is probably one of the best writers that no one has ever heard of. Which is a shame, since he was one of the finest German prose stylists of his generation – a restrained yet witty and ironical writer whose work is marked by a powerful sensuality and is filled with psychological insight.

The reasons for Keyserling’s present-day obscurity are not hard to find. Stylistically, his works do not fit into any easily recognisable category: he is neither a nineteenth-century realist nor a twentieth-century modernist, but rather a transitional figure with one foot in each of those eras. He also suffers from the disadvantage of never having produced a big book; no matter how accomplished, a novel of fewer than two hundred pages will strike many readers as insubstantial, as lacking in importance. But the best explanation for the eclipse of Keyserling’s reputation is the perceived narrowness of his subject matter. Keyserling had the bad luck (in terms of his literary reputation) of being an aristocrat who wrote books about aristocrats. Most of his characters are, like him, titled nobles from the Baltic Provinces or nearby East Prussia; and nearly all of his stories are set in the castles and drawing rooms and gardens of the landed nobility in the years just before the First World War.

Keyserling almost never mentions politics, or war, or social problems, or even current events.2 Because his work is so restricted in terms of both geography and caste, it is easy to dismiss him as a writer of only regional interest, or as a mere chronicler of high society. But that would be unfair. His aristocratic characters, with their titles and uniforms, their monocles and opera glasses, their fussy etiquette and elaborate code of honour, may appear more than a little ridiculous to modern readers; but Keyserling understands that, by focusing on a group of people desperately trying to preserve their privileged way of life in a time of rapid social change, he is uncovering truths that apply to all of humanity, not just to aristocrats. By sticking with the same subject matter in book after book, Keyserling admittedly sacrifices breadth; but he gains even more in terms of depth, subtlety, and complexity. He is no reactionary, he has no desire to restore or prop up a collapsing social order. He is sympathetic to the plight of his noble characters, but also willing to criticise them sharply. And he knows perfectly well that they are doomed to extinction – that is part of what makes them an interesting subject. There is no denying, though, that the collapse of the old political and social order in 1918 had the effect of instantly rendering Keyserling’s entire body of work, in the eyes of many readers at the time at least, obsolete or (even worse) quaint. Keyserling’s literary reputation, then, was a victim of bad timing. Today, though, with another whole century of events to provide additional perspective, it is perhaps easier to achieve a more nuanced assessment of Keyserling’s achievement than it was in the years immediately following his death.

Keyserling cannot be fully understood or appreciated without knowing something about his background. This is true for most authors, of course, but it is especially true for Keyserling, a writer who is not easily distinguished from his characters, a man whose own life was filled with enough incident and tragedy that he could easily have been a character in one of his own stories. The key biographical detail, the factor that explains so much else about his life and work, is his place of origin. Keyserling was born and grew to manhood in the duchy of Courland, in what is today western Latvia but was at that time a backwater province of the Russian Empire. It was a lightly-populated land of dark forests, tilled fields, pastures, tiny villages, and lonely manor houses. The Baltic Sea, with its desolate beaches and dunes, was not far away. Under the spell of the idyllic landscape and the charmingly old-fashioned way of life, the German writer Kurt Tucholsky, who was stationed in Courland during the First World War, described the province as “unspeakably German.”3 Speaking in purely demographic terms, he had it all wrong – ethnic Germans were a tiny minority in Courland, making up only about six percent of the population. But Tucholsky was not counting heads – he was speaking of the political, cultural, and economic dominance of the Courland Germans. They were, after all, the ruling class of the province: landowning aristocrats, prosperous merchants, government officials, educated professionals. This small elite was in turn surrounded by a vast sea of Latvian speakers – the peasants, servants, and manual labourers who were a subject people because their ancestors had been conquered by crusading German knights during the Middle Ages.

After having survived for centuries as an independent state or as an autonomous duchy within the Kingdom of Poland, Courland was finally absorbed into the Russian Empire in 1795. For the time being the tsars were willing to grant the German language a protected status in the public life of Courland and the other Baltic provinces, but this would not last. For all of the pride they took in their ancient lineages, their titles, their castles, and their estates, the Baltic German nobility were in reality in a rather precarious position. In an age of intense nationalism, they had to worry about both revolution from below and Russification from above. No doubt aristocracies everywhere in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century felt themselves to be embattled, but this was doubly true in Courland. This reality goes a long way to explain the behaviour of Keyserling’s aristocratic characters: they are snobbish, status-conscious, exclusive, fearful of change, and insistent that archaic codes of honour and conduct be maintained in all of their particulars not because they are confident of the unassailability of their position, but because they know (even if they do not speak the fear aloud) that they could be swept away and lose everything in an instant.

Keyserling was born in 1855 as the seventh of eleven children to parents whose families possessed vast, sprawling estates in Courland. Although they lived in the middle of nowhere, at least by the standards of the court nobility of Vienna or St. Petersburg, the Keyserlings were an unusually cultured family – they had a long history, going back more than a century, of friendships with artists, writers, musicians, and scientists. Eduard von Keyserling was by no means the first member of his family to turn his hand to scholarship or literature. (The philosopher Hermann von Keyserling, who achieved some fame in the 1920s and 1930s, was a cousin.) Young Eduard was rather pale, delicate, and ugly; but he was also bookish and imaginative, and much doted upon by the theology students attached to the household as tutors. Keyserling, like all male members of the family, bore the title of Graf (“Count”). Surrounded by loving parents and siblings and dutiful servants, and living in a manor house grand enough that it was deemed a “castle” in the local parlance, Keyserling appears to have enjoyed a sheltered and happy childhood.4 Later in life he would look back fondly on his youth in Courland, and there is no evidence that he wasted much thought on the Latvian peasants, only recently released from serfdom, who toiled on the family estates. It is important to remember that, even though his most important literary works were produced in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Keyserling was very much a product of the mid nineteenth century.

As a younger son, Keyserling was under little pressure to marry – in fact, it often made financial sense for the younger children of large noble families to remain single since this prevented the excessive division of the patrimony. But if he was not going to marry and settle down as a lord of a manor, then he needed some sort of occupation.

There were a number of traditional careers open to a Baltic nobleman: he could, for example, serve the Russian state as an army officer or as a government official or as a diplomat. Keyserling’s health, however, was too delicate for any of those occupations; an academic or legal career was a more realistic option. And so when he enrolled as a student at Dorpat (modern Tartu, Estonia), the local German-speaking university, he studied law (which was practical) along with literature and art history (which he presumably preferred). But Keyserling’s academic career, which had always been rather unfocussed and intermittent, came to an abrupt end in 1878, when he left the university under a cloud of scandal after being expelled from a student association for making personal use of some funds that had been given to him for safekeeping.5 Keyserling had actually replaced the missing sum in full in a timely manner, but because he used different banknotes his deceit was revealed. This seemingly minor infraction – dismissed as a “trifling affair” by one of his relatives – was taken seriously enough by the local nobility that Keyserling was ostracised from their ranks for years. And so, like a number of characters in his later books, Keyserling as a young man suffered the most severe punishment (short of a duel) employed against those who violated the aristocratic code: ostracism, expulsion from polite society. This unfortunate incident had a major impact on Keyserling’s life in a number of ways. In addition to encouraging him to leave his homeland and seek his fortune abroad, it also shaped his later career as a writer. Anyone who reads Keyserling cannot help but notice that he writes about aristocratic society with the authority of an insider: he describes its rituals, its norms, its prejudices, and all of its other particularities with the kind of detail that only one who has lived in that world can muster. But he also writes about this same world dispassionately, as an objective observer; having been cast out, he is both an insider and an outsider – a neat trick for any writer.

Following the abrupt end of his university career at Dorpat, Keyserling, seeking new horizons, moved to Vienna, where he lived and studied for a number of years. During his time in Vienna he published his first literary works, including two novels influenced by naturalism (the literary craze of the day), dabbled in socialism (the political craze of the day), and lived the lifestyle of a bohemian artist. Little of this took. In fact, Keyserling was later eager to forget this whole chapter of his life.6 He continued to write, of course, but he quickly turned his back on naturalism. As for politics, dismayed by the infighting within the socialist camp, and by the gap between theory and practical policy, he abandoned Marxism and grew deeply sceptical of any and all utopian schemes.7 Still, his years in Vienna were not entirely wasted – it was there, after all, that he found his vocation as a writer.

Keyserling did not find a permanent home until 1895, when he moved to Munich. Berlin may have been the political capital of the new German Empire, but Munich was undeniably its unofficial artistic capital. Artists, writers, composers, and anyone else put off by the aggressive vulgarity, shallow materialism, and rampant militarism on display in Berlin, flocked instead to the capital of Bavaria, where they could enjoy cheap rents, a sensual Catholic aesthetic, and the company of other like-minded individuals.8 Keyserling, already having decided on a literary career, settled in an apartment in a Munich suburb. He soon became a fixture at the coffee houses and cafés where writers and artists gathered, regaling his companions with anecdotes in his distinctive sing-song Baltic German accent. Keyserling lived with two older spinster sisters who accompanied him to Munich and who took care of him. And by this point in his life, he needed to be taken care of. The first symptoms of an incurable illness, presumably syphilis, had appeared in 1893, and would steadily worsen as the years passed. The disease attacked both his spinal cord and his eyesight; by 1908 he was completely blind and mostly confined to a wheelchair or a corner of the sofa. Keyserling tried to hide his afflictions for as long as possible, not out of vanity but because he could not bear to be the object of pity. When he went for a walk, it is said, the servant who accompanied him whispered into his ear not only the names of any acquaintances that he encountered on the street, but also details about the colour or style of the dress of the ladies so that, when they exchanged greetings, he could offer them a compliment.9 Like the well-bred nobleman that he was, he kept up appearances to the very end.

Nearly everyone who met Keyserling in Munich was struck by the contrast between his alarmingly decrepit physical appearance and the sweetness of his disposition. Felix Salten (the future author of Bambi) wrote an account of his encounter with Keyserling in a Munich café just after the turn of the century: “At first glance he appeared grotesque, but a second glance inspired trust. His tall, rail-thin, narrow-shouldered body appeared to be trembling with sickness, to be staggering with weakness. I was moved, and was tempted to leap to his assistance; but the noble equanimity of his demeanour seemed to say: it is nothing.”10 There is a well-known portrait by the artist Lovis Corinth that confirms Salten’s description and vividly suggests the physical toll that illness had already taken on Keyserling by the time it was painted in 1900. The subject sits awkwardly in a chair, stoop-shouldered and sunken-cheeked and swollen-lipped, his eyes staring vacantly into space. Keyserling, who could still see well enough to inspect the finished portrait, sadly admitted that it was an excellent likeness

It was in Munich that Keyserling, now a sickly middle-aged man, came into his own as a writer. When he had first arrived in the city, he had pursued a career as a playwright, with only very modest success (four of his five plays closed after just a few performances).11 Realising that his talents did not lie in that direction, he abandoned drama and turned his hand to prose fiction. By 1903, when he published Beate und Mareile, he had found his medium, the long story or short novel, and his subject matter, the decline of the aristocracy. All of the books for which Keyserling is remembered today were written from this point on, during the last fifteen years of his life. Although his writing matured and deepened with the passing years, his style and themes remain largely unchanged. As he grew older and his health worsened, Keyserling was increasingly isolated and lonely. (Part of this isolation was his own fault. In his early Munich years he was friends with the playwright Frank Wedekind, the author of Spring Awakening and the scandalous Lulu plays. But eventually Keyserling felt compelled to sever ties with Wedekind on moral grounds, explaining, with a wave of his hand, that “such geniuses should not exist.”12) Having lost his sight, he now dictated his books to his devoted sisters (who were authors in their own right). Having little else to live for, Keyserling now devoted himself fully to his literary endeavours. He was much too discreet, too gentlemanly, too stoical, to speak openly of his own pains and personal disappointments, but these things, sublimated and transformed, could be poured into his art. The last ten years of his life, when he was an invalid, were in fact his most productive period as a writer. (There was also a practical explanation for his surge in literary activity in his last years: cut off by war and revolution from the revenue from his family estates in Courland, he was short of cash and needed to supplement his meagre income.13)

As a stylist, Keyserling has been compared with everyone from Turgenev to Proust, but the writer to whom he is most often compared is Theodor Fontane, the great German novelist of the late nineteenth century. And the two men do indeed have a great deal in common: both were late bloomers, coming to the writing of fiction only towards the end of their lives; both, in book after book, meticulously described and analysed the lives of the upper classes; both were always more interested in individuals than in social problems; and both were critical of what they saw as a decline of moral standards and proper behaviour in an increasingly vulgar and grasping age.14 But there are some differences. Fontane, though intimately acquainted with aristocratic life in Berlin, was ultimately an outsider – the son of a small-town apothecary. His depiction of the nobility – sometimes affectionate, sometimes critical – is that of a detached but sympathetic observer.15 Keyserling, on the other hand, was a member of this world, he knew it inside and out. For him, the stakes are higher, he cannot be quite as detached as the bourgeois Fontane. Another difference between the two men is generational: although they were born less than thirty years apart, they belong to different centuries. The early signs of moral and spiritual decay that Fontane identified in his works in the 1880s and 1890s have turned into full-blown rot in the stories and novels written by Keyserling during the first two decades of the twentieth century. As a result, Keyserling is both more cynical and more pessimistic than Fontane. And although the subject matter and concerns of the two authors are similar, their writing styles are not. Fontane is still for the most part working in the great realist tradition that dominated novel-writing in the nineteenth century, whereas Keyserling’s books are shorter, stranger, more idiosyncratic, and more lyrical. Thomas Mann, when comparing the two authors, concluded of Keyserling: “His work is narrower, more delicate, more advanced, more fastidious, it has a nervous pulse; the view of life has become colder, the irony livelier, the language more precise, the general disposition more uncomfortable, more artistic and more cosmopolitan – one senses the Europeanisation of German prose since 1900.”16 In other words, though Keyserling is most often linked with Fontane, a nineteenth-century writer, Mann, the greatest German writer of the twentieth century, recognised Keyserling as something of a kindred spirit.17

Keyserling is a writer who defies easy categorisation. There have been occasional attempts to label him as an avant-garde or radical writer, but when forced to categorise him, most literary scholars have traditionally described him as a “literary impressionist.” Members of this literary school, which emerged in the late nineteenth century, were inspired in part by the impressionist movement in art. The all-knowing narrator disappears from their books; instead the story unfolds as a series of fleeting impressions – physical sensations, snatches of dialogue, dreamscapes, inner musings, shifting emotional states, descriptions of the natural world, and brief moments of action. Needless to say, this is all highly subjective. There is in fact no objective reality – we see everything through the lens of the characters’ fragmented perceptions. Keyserling does not go as far down this road as some of the other literary impressionists – he still remains a fairly conventional storyteller in some respects – but he nevertheless discards much of the clunky superstructure (and length) of the realist novel. Everything is distilled. There are only a handful of characters, and not much happens; every scene, the reader feels, is included for a reason. Hermann Hesse, an admirer of Keyserling’s work, recognised just how powerful these terse, economical passages could be, when he wrote, in 1909, that Keyserling “understands how to describe a summer afternoon so that as the bright sunshine turns to twilight one has the sensation of a whole lifetime.”18 The essence of the stories is not found in the plot (which is rudimentary), but rather in the language, which vibrates with tension and energy. Keyserling’s use of dialogue is masterly. The suppressed emotions and internal turmoil that the characters are trying so hard to conceal are revealed involuntarily, as it were, in their speech. This is all portrayed with great subtlety and nuance by Keyserling, who suggests rather than states his themes.

The great German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who was probably more responsible than anyone else for Keyserling’s modest revival in the German-speaking world in the last twenty years, got at the essence of what makes Keyserling’s work distinctive when he argued that he was “an unusually sensual writer.”19 Keyserling’s stories overflow with sensory perceptions: almost every passage is infused with shifting patterns of colour and light, with the sound of wind or rain or conversation, with the fragrance of a perfume or the smell of the sea. It is almost too much to take in. And as many critics have noted, as he lost his sight, as he became more and more isolated from the world, his books became even more sensual, even more voluptuous. No longer able to see, or even to leave his apartment, he filled his prose with the sensory riches he could no longer experience firsthand.20

Waves is probably Keyserling’s most famous novel, written in 1911, in the middle of his mature period. Unlike most of his stories, it is not set in a castle or a manor house; instead the action takes place in a small fishing village on the Baltic Sea. An assortment of German aristocrats, including the extended Buttlär family and its dependents, have arrived to spend their summer holiday by the seaside. They represent a sort of cross-section of the German upper classes on the eve of the First World War: an adulterous baron, his jealous wife, an imperious matriarch, a dashing young cavalry lieutenant, a blushing bride, an elderly lady’s companion, a cynical government official, and so on. It reads like the cast of characters from a farce, or an operetta. But for Keyserling, who lived most of his life among such people, these characters are not cardboard cutouts: they are flesh and blood human beings who are, in certain respects, trapped by their own privileged social position. Because of their wealth and education, they have greater freedom than any other social class; but because they are bound to obey a rigid and increasingly archaic code of conduct, they actually have less freedom of action than the middle and lower classes. This dynamic creates a terrible tension. The lives of the aristocrats in Waves are dominated by the need to keep up appearances, to follow elaborate rules of etiquette, to adhere to a strict code of honour. Any deviation from rigid propriety is potentially fatal, especially if the offence involves a violation of conventional sexual morality (and the offender is a woman). Even on holiday, the aristocratic characters in Waves are on guard. As they sit under umbrellas in their beach chairs or promenade down the strand, they are still patrolling the boundaries of their caste.

Any hope of a quiet summer is dashed, though, when the holidaymakers discover that there is a renegade in their midst. Doralice, a beautiful young Countess who has escaped from a loveless marriage by running away with an artist, has rented a farmhouse in the village along with her new (lower class) husband, Hans Grill. Even though the Buttlärs were previously acquainted with Doralice, their first instinct is to refuse to acknowledge her presence. The family matriarch, the Generalin von Palikow, explains the strategy in the simplest of terms to her daughter: “We simply decree, Madame Grill does not exist.” But this is easier said than done, and eventually every member of the Buttlär family, the women as well as the men, is drawn into Doralice’s dangerous orbit.

Most of the aristocratic characters in Waves, it must be understood, are living in a fairly advanced state of decadence. The aristocratic code of behaviour, taken for granted by earlier generations, has begun to break down. The younger generation, in particular, feels increasingly confined, trapped, imprisoned; they worry that they are missing out on life, they are waiting impatiently for something exciting to happen. In the meantime, they are moody, self-absorbed, restless, and easily bored. Although surrounded by comfort and luxury, they search constantly for new diversions and distractions.21 They yearn for happiness, but if they cannot have that they will settle for unhappiness; at least then they would feel something. (And in time they might come to relish their suffering as evidence of their sensitive and refined natures.) Decadent aristocrats of this sort appear not just in Waves, but in all of Keyserling’s stories and novels, which makes him an important if unheralded contributor to the literature of decadence. Keyserling does not embrace decadence as an alternative lifestyle, nor does he view it as a necessary rebellion against materialism and conformity and philistinism, as did so many other writers in this period, but he is nevertheless fascinated by it.22 He understands that exhaustion and ennui and listlessness are defining characteristics of his age (at least among the sort of people that he writes about), and he is eager to describe these symptoms and to offer a diagnosis of the malady (even if the prognosis is grim).

Aristocratic decadence manifests itself not only in the behaviour of the characters in Waves, but also in their physical appearance: Keyserling’s pampered aristocrats are pale and sickly, with overly fine features; they are full of nervous energy but have little stamina; they grow feverish when excited, and suffer fainting fits. It is no coincidence that Hans, the artist from a peasant background, is the only character who possesses much in the way of vitality.23 (Like many writers of his era, Keyserling assumes that peasants are closer to nature, and therefore healthier and less neurotic than the upper classes.) The physical decline among the aristocratic characters is most pronounced in the three Buttlär children, who are so delicate that they blink at bright light and feel dizzy when they gaze at the sea. The son and heir, fifteen-year-old Wedig, is so feeble that his parents will not even allow him to step into the sea; he must be content with salt water baths. The older members of the family, by contrast, are sounder of both mind and body; the descent into decadence is not so pronounced with them. And so, predictably, the Generalin von Palikow, the oldest member of the family, serves throughout the story as the voice of reason. Her criticisms of the younger generation, one suspects, are shared by Keyserling himself. (It cannot have escaped Keyserling’s notice, though, that he himself – blind, crippled, syphilitic, childless, and living in seclusion and genteel poverty – could be viewed as a living incarnation of aristocratic decadence. Indeed, he is almost like something out of Death in Venice, published by Thomas Mann, as chance would have it, just one year after Waves.)

In a Keyserling story, sooner or later, one of the characters rebels against the rigid code that is supposed to regulate his (or her) behaviour. The tension has become unbearable, they must free themselves. This rebellion, which usually takes the form of an illicit (and sometimes adulterous) love affair, is the motor that drives the plot forward.24 In Waves, Doralice’s dramatic act of rebellion (told in flashback) actually takes place before the beginning of the story, but it is still the catalyst for everything else that happens in the book. By running away from her elderly nobleman husband, Doralice has ripped up the aristocratic social contract; she has done the unthinkable. Her very presence at the seashore is so disruptive that, like a stone tossed into a quiet pond, it creates ripples that spawn additional acts of rebellion (or attempted rebellion) among the other characters. But these rebellions fail, they end in disappointment or outright tragedy, as is pretty much always the case in Keyserling’s stories. The aristocratic code may be increasingly anachronistic and, in the eyes of outsiders, ridiculous, but it is still more powerful than one individual’s desire for freedom.25 What is more, Keyserling (and his readers) may feel that at least some of these rebellions should fail, since they are launched by pampered narcissists who have not thought through the consequences of their actions. For although he is quite clear-eyed about the cruelty inflicted by such a rigid code, Keyserling also sees the advantages of such a system of well-defined norms and expectations.

As any reader of his novels will quickly discover, for Keyserling, the physical setting of his stories is often just as important as the characters or the plot. The extended descriptions of the natural world in Waves – sea and surf, beaches and dunes, woods and meadows, sunsets and moonrises – are not included merely to add atmosphere, or to create a picturesque backdrop; they also convey meaning, they point up Keyserling’s themes.26 Most of the symbolism in Waves revolves around the contrast between land and sea – this is Keyserling’s leitmotif. The sea represents freedom, life, vitality, naturalness, and expansiveness, but also, somewhat paradoxically, danger and death (complete freedom can lead to disaster). Dry land, on the other hand, stands for confinement, artificiality, social rituals, dreariness, and boredom (but also security). The sea is omnipotent and omnipresent and indifferent to humanity, whereas the land is pinched and narrow and entangled with human affairs. The action in the book alternates between exhilarating scenes set at sea, where the characters are swimming or boating and conversation is hardly necessary; and awkward scenes that take place on land, where the characters are trapped in formal social rituals and miscommunication abounds. And then there are the numerous scenes that take place on the beach, where both forces are at work.

The best example of how this dynamic plays out takes place in the very first chapter. Walking on the beach one night, Doralice takes it into her head that she would like Hans to hold her in his arms above the breaking waves, as if he were a hammock, so that she can dangle her fingers in the foam without actually immersing herself in the sea. In other words, she wants to have it both ways: she wants the freedom and excitement of the sea, but at the same time she still desires the safety and predictability of the land. Like many of Keyserling’s characters, she is caught in a dilemma: she does not want what the land represents, but she probably needs it. She likes the idea of being the sort of modern liberated woman who runs away with an artist, but she still yearns for the safe, comfortable existence of a pampered Countess. Later that same evening, she admits to Hans that hovering between land and sea was tiring: she cannot have it both ways after all. Hans, by the way, has a similar problem combining land and sea. Throughout the story, he attempts repeatedly to paint a picture that will include both Doralice and the sea on the same canvas – a sort of synthesis, he explains. Of course he fails; it cannot be done.

At first glance, Doralice would appear to be an iteration of one of the most familiar (and misogynistic) characters in literature: the femme fatale, the alluring temptress who leads men to their doom. And there is no denying that Doralice, without necessarily intending it, wreaks havoc in the lives of nearly all the men who come into contact with her. At one point in the story she even comes to the painful recognition that others might view her as some sort of monster. But is this how Keyserling wants us to view her? Far from being a monster, Keyserling’s sympathetic depiction of her plight makes it easy to view Doralice as the victim of a patriarchal social order that has nearly destroyed her. A feminist interpretation of the novel is not only plausible, but for some readers it may be the only way of thinking about the story that makes any sense. It is hard not to notice, for example, that all of the men in Doralice’s life try to control her, try to transform her into their ideal wife or lover. Her first husband, the elderly Count, praises his young bride constantly for attributes that she does not yet possess but that he wishes her to acquire. In other words, he pretends that she already is what he wants her to become. Doralice rebels against this training (as she calls it) by running away with Hans Grill, the artist who has been hired to paint her portrait. But even though he is a bohemian artist, a free thinker who spouts radical political slogans, Hans is just as determined as the old Count to control Doralice. Instead of a remote castle, Hans offers Doralice a cosy house in the suburbs of Munich, where she will while away her mornings until he returns at midday from his studio in the city. (Hans, the bohemian artist, has rather bourgeois aspirations when it comes to his future domestic life.) When she asks plaintively what she will be doing all morning while he is away, he can only reply that she will be “imposing her character on the household.” By running away with Hans, then, Doralice has merely substituted one controlling man for another, and one prison for another. And the same pattern repeats itself with all of the men that she encounters in the book. It turns out that Doralice, and indeed all of the female characters in Waves, are trapped in ways that the men are not, and Keyserling’s recognition of this fact is one of the reasons why his work is still of interest today.

If Doralice is the most important character in the book, the most poignant one is probably Privy Counsellor Knospelius, a high-ranking government official who has rented a cottage in the village close to the other holidaymakers. Witty and cynical and eccentric, he serves as an audience for the other characters, and as a commentator for the reader. He is also pretty obviously a stand-in for the author. Both Keyserling, the author, and Knospelius, the character, are lonely, middle-aged bachelors (who have long surnames beginning with the letter K); both men are physically deformed in some way (the Privy Counsellor is a hunchback); and both men are insiders who observe the behaviour of the aristocracy with the fascinated detachment of outsiders. Knospelius, who suffers from insomnia, tries to distract himself by taking walks on the beach at dawn, going out on the boats with the local fishermen, planning elaborate entertainments, and by spying on the doings of his neighbours. No longer possessing much of a life force of his own, he draws his energy from the people around him.27 One can only hope that Keyserling had a higher opinion of his role as a writer and observer than this rather grim portrait of the Privy Counsellor might suggest.

Waves