The Translator’s Invisibility

Our great king received all his finer and higher thoughts in a foreign language, which he had most intimately appropriated for this field.

{106} He was incapable of producing in German the literature and philosophy he produced in French. It is to be deplored that the great preference for England which dominated a part of the family could not have taken the direction of familiarizing him from childhood on with the English language, whose last golden age was then in bloom, and which is so much closer to German. But we may hope that he would have preferred to produce literature and philosophy in Latin, rather than in French, if he had enjoyed a strict scholarly education.

(Lefevere 1977:83)

Here the vernacular nationalism in Schleiermacher’s cultural politics becomes more evident: the king is taken to task not so much because he is not “scholarly” (he is in fact portrayed as being genuinely interested in “literature and philosophy”), but because he doesn’t write in German, or in a language “closer to German” than French. Whereas Gottsched seems to be lamenting the dearth of literary patronage (“sufficient encouragement”) because the Prussian aristocracy is Francophone, Schleiermacher is more concerned about the unequal cultural production in German and French: “He was incapable of producing in German.”

Schleiermacher’s criticism of the king is a nationalist protest against French domination in Germany, and it is consistent with his intense activity in the Prussian movement for German unification during the Napoleonic wars. As Jerry Dawson makes clear,

the war between France and Prussia in 1806, with the resulting collapse of the Prussian armies and the humiliating peace terms dictated to Prussia by Napoleon, proved to be the final factor needed to turn [Schleiermacher] to nationalism with a complete and almost reckless abandon.

(Dawson 1966:51)[3]

“Germany” did not actually exist at this time: West of the Rhine were several petty principalities, which, after 1806, Napoleon organized into a “confederation”; east was the dominant German-speaking monarchy, Prussia, now dominated by the French. The Prussian defeat caused Schleiermacher to lose his appointment at the University of Halle, and he fled to Berlin, the Prussian capital, where he lectured at the university and preached at various churches. His sermons urged political and military resistance against the French armies, developing {107} a cultural concept of nationality based on the German language and legitimized with Protestant theology. In 1813, three months before his lecture on translation at the Berlin Akademie der Wissenschaften and eight months before Napoleon was finally defeated at the Battle of Leipzig, Schleiermacher delivered a sermon entitled “A Nation’s Duty in a War for Freedom,” in which he represented the war with France as a struggle against cultural and political domination. If victorious, he exhorted the congregation, “we shall be able to preserve for ourselves our own distinctive character, our laws, our constitution and our culture” (Schleiermacher 1890:73).

In June, the month of his lecture, Schleiermacher wrote a letter to Friedrich Schlegel in which his nationalism turned utopian:

My greatest wish after liberation, is for one true German Empire, powerfully representing the entire German folk and territory to the outside world, while internally allowing the various Länder and their princes a great deal of freedom to develop and rule according to their own particular needs.

(Sheehan 1989:379)