Abstract
Up until now the main source of information about the life of the controversial yet unread (or controversial because unread) thinker, Ludwig Klages (1872–1956), was the biography by Hans-Eggert Schröder, published in two volumes in 1966 and completed in a third volume by Franz Tenigl in 1992. This indispensable and fascinating work was nevertheless something of a patchwork, interweaving a narrative crafted by Schröder with passages attributed to Klages, but unsourced. So it is significant that, in the Klages Nachlass in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach am Neckar, Heinz-Siegfried Strelow has discovered the typed manuscript, long believed to have been lost, of an autobiographical work by Klages himself, which he referred to as his Gedenkblätter.
As Strelow notes in his helpful introduction, the Gedenkblätter offer ‘a typical example of the lively and, in part, highly original style of Klages’s writing’ (p. 9), but they also offer fresh insight into his life, as much as through what they do include (for example, his ecstatic, visionary experiences as a boy) as what they do not (his friendship with Stefan George, for instance, receives little discussion, and there is no mention of his friendship with the artist Lilly Charlemont). In some chapters, Klages refers to himself in the third person, perhaps influenced by Goethe’s monumental exercise in autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit; and the descriptions of his visionary ecstasies are remarkably reminiscent of passages in Carl Jung’s Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken (although the complex editorial history of that work brings it closer to Schröder’s Ludwig Klages: Die Geschichte seines Lebens).
In the course of these Gedenkblätter we are told of the reasons for his decision to study chemistry – and then abandon it; learn about his friendship with Friedrich Huch; and gain insight into the remarkable lyric output of Hans Hinrich Busse. Klages gives his perspective on the break in his friendship with Theodor Lessing; offers his account of his relationship with Franziska zu Reventlow; and evokes, against the backdrop of her estate at Lubocheń, the social world around Rose Plehn. And a lengthy section explores his relationship with his sister, Helene, and his niece, Heidi, whose astonishing account of the death of Helene and a sense of her persistence in the natural world ends with an invocation of not just Chinese philosophy but Chinese tales and legends.
In his introduction, Strelow highlights Klages’s role as a pioneer of ecological thought, most famously reflected in his address written for (although not actually delivered in person to) the Freideutscher Jugendtag held on the Hoher Meissner just outside Kassel in October 1913, entitled Mensch und Erde (re-edited on the occasion of its anniversary by Jan Robert Weber and published by Matthes & Seitz in 2013). And Strelow is also forthright in his rejection of those compromising moments in Klages’s writings where his critique of Judeo-Christian monotheism tips over into anti-Semitic polemic, focusing instead on Klages’s intellectual achievement as a thinker who, in Strelow’s words, showed how ‘reality is not the copy of a spiritual ordering, but the world itself, something vital and active, which in itself has meaning, value, and dignity’ (p. 12).
This volume is rounded off and, indeed, enriched by 23 pages of photographs documenting Klages’s life. So what emerges from this volume is a much clearer sense of the complexities of his personality, and especially his gifts as a literary stylist. In the opening chapter, Klages relates how the house where he was born in the Warmbüchenstraße in Hanover stood opposite the city’s oldest graveyard. Here, among the gravestones decorated with funerary urns and flaming hearts that were typical of the late eighteenth century and the age of Romanticism, was one that caught the attention of the young Klages – a grave covered by a massive stone slab that bore the inscription, ‘Closed Forever’. ‘But look’, Klages writes, ‘the growing power of a seed had broken through the stone, a magnificent tree towered over the burst open slab’ (pp. 19–20), and he goes on to relate a local legend, according to which the corpse buried in this grave had thus obtained revenge on the person who had murdered him and sought to cover up his misdeed by sinking it deep below the surface. This image captures perfectly the essence of Klages’s vitalist outlook, and perhaps, too, some of the ambiguities of his own slow emergence from decades of scholarly neglect.