Arthur Rundt’s Engagement with African American Culture

At the end of her abbreviated life, Marylin, the main character in Arthur Rundt’s eponymous 1928 novel, writes down these lines from an African American spiritual in a note: “Oh, some a dese mornin’s bright an’ fair, / I’m goin’ to lay down dis heavy load. / Gwine to take my wings an’ cleave de air, / I’m goin’ to lay down dis heavy load.” These poetic words gain tragic poignancy when Marylin’s ex-husband, in the vain and remorseful hope of reuniting with her, finds them written on a slip of paper. These lines end the novel and stand in stark contrast to the novel’s spare, prosaic opening sentence: “Marylin had a twenty-five-dollar–a-week job in Chicago.” The path from sober beginning to somber ending is twofold: Marylin copes with the “heavy load” of racism, while we, as readers, first sense, then process a disillusioning tale of anti-Black racism in New York a century ago that persists to this day.

But, before we get to the intricacies of Marylin’s fateful story, let us pause and reflect on her last lines, which concluded Arthur Rundt’s prescient novel of 1928, predating even Nell Larsen’s much-heralded novel Passing (1929). Rundt translated these lyrical lines into his native German, recasting them in standardized language, departing from the colloquially tinged language of African American spirituals. As translators of Rundt’s novel, we would have lost something had we merely translated his rendering back into English. Instead, we draw on a kind of “urtext” of the spiritual “By an’ By,” grounded in the fluid oral tradition of the antebellum United States:

Marylin had a twenty-five-dollar-a-week job in Chicago.

Every morning she took the same L train to her office from her northwestern neighborhood in the city to the station at the corner of Wabash and Madison.

But what good did it do Philip to take the same train every day, to wait for this very same train six stops before Madison, and to leave it at the same time as Marylin?

The trains going into the Loop are so packed that you have to be happy just to be able to catch one. Then to arrange getting on one particular car, maybe just so you could be standing near a certain person, that’s totally out of the question.

Usually Marylin had a seat, so she must have gotten on several stops back in a neighborhood where the seats weren’t all already taken.

Philip had to be content with getting a spot to stand near the car door so he could hop out and pick her out in the crowd, then follow her along Madison for a couple of blocks.

He knew she took a left onto Dearborn and disappeared a few steps later into the entrance of one of the skyscrapers.

It was his daily game of chance whether, in some way or other—he had no clue exactly how—he might exchange a word or two with this girl.

Someday, he thought, his chance would have to come.

Philip knew Marylin to be wearing two dresses. The one she most often wore was sleeveless. That was the one he first saw her in. Her slender arms that might have been those of a fifteen-year-old had caught his eye. And when he was following after her on the crowded street, almost all he saw were these delicate childlike arms gently swaying back and forth, suspended from her shoulders.

In the surrounding hubbub Marylin strode slowly and confidently to the entrance as if knowing she would arrive on time. Her unforced upright gait increased this impression of calm.

Three weeks into his efforts Philip encountered the girl one afternoon as she was going home, and now he redoubled his efforts in this game of chance. From this point on he waited for her at the end of the workday up at the L station where the trains departed Madison heading northwest.

IN PREPARING MY OBSERVATIONS on and considering the possible directions for musical studies in relation to eighteenth-century (German) studies, my choice of departure was browsing issues of the international journal Eighteenth-Century Music. My premise was that a simple perusal would provide a sense of how musicologists and musical historians have shaped the field over the past decade or so. Eighteenth-Century Music is a relatively new journal; its first biannual volume came out only in 2004. This fact alone is surprising for a number of reasons. In the words of Richard Taruskin, “the eighteenth century provides the unshakeable bedrock of our scholarly and performing canons—canons that started forming precisely during the eighteenth century …, and continue, for better and worse, to sustain our musical occupations and institutions.” Following Taruskin's line of thought, one wonders why it took so long to establish an international journal of and for eighteenth-century music? One might argue that precisely because the music of the eighteenth century carries such a foundational weight for the field of musicology as a whole, it does not need special or specialized attention. Assuming that this is the case, the journal's existence then indicates, as a flipside and first observation, a shift within the larger field of classical musicology: no longer is eighteenth-century music the omnipotent authority; rather, it has become merely a foundational platform within the field of musicology.

Taruskin's extensive review of The Cambridge History of Eighteenth- Century Music (2009) also helps to develop a second observation. He begins his major argument with the bold statement that “since the late 1960s the status of the eighteenth century as a music-historical period has been very much in question.” The reason for facing this uncertainty derives from the fact “that all attempts at writing the history of eighteenth-century music … have been misguided because all had been looking for ways of connecting the style of Bach and Handel to the style of Haydn and Mozart.” In the recent past, one way of overcoming or at least sidestepping this trap has been to organize musical history by genre, as the Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music and the New Oxford History of Music have both done. Pursuing this method is, at least in the eyes of Taruskin, “a deplorable decision, because it prevents (or absolves) this purported history of eighteenth-century music from ever engaging with the historiographical problems.”

This is an important bilingual work on Shakespeare reception in the Germanspeaking world, and a significant addition to Roger Paulin's The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1914 (2003), his edited essay collection Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert (2007), as well as Hans-Jürgen Blinn's Shakespeare-Rezeption: Die Diskussion um Shakespeare in Deutschland (1982), the latter mainly providing documentary resources. In light of these three previous contributions, John McCarthy's Shakespeare as German Author stands out in regards to the time span it covers (focusing on the late eighteenth to midnineteenth century), its thematic focus on literary and theater reception, and its emphasis on theories of translation and cultural transfer.

At nearly a third of the book, McCarthy's contribution serves not only as an introduction, but a crucial chapter in its own right. His meticulous research on the making of Shakespeare as a German “writer alongside Goethe and Schiller in full accord with the German spirit” is presented through the discussion of three texts by Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Joachim Eschenburg, and Georg Gottfried Gervinus. These texts are the “primary markers” for introducing Shakespeare into German-speaking culture in the years 1750–1850. McCarthy's chronological overview of the German-speaking Shakespeare reception will be of great value for both newcomers and those well-versed in the topic, since all three texts have long been overlooked by scholars despite their valuable theoretical reflections on the aesthetic issues that Shakespeare's plays presented at the time. Another strength of McCarthy's essay is that he broadens his evaluation of Shakespeare's reception history by incorporating two frameworks: cultural transfer, which also takes into account theoretical considerations of translation, and “communicative communities.” McCarthy's essay alone makes the volume worthwhile and, as a whole, this book will be indispensable for anyone interested in researching Shakespeare translations in the Age of Goethe.

Till Kinzel's essay, “Johann Joachim Eschenburgs Shakespeare zwischen Regelpoetik und Genieästhetik,” rightly opens the book's chronological trajectory. After all, Eschenburg's thirteen-volume collection of Shakespeares theatralische Werke (1775–82) completed “Wieland's project of translating all of Shakespeare's plays.” Kinzel's well-written and well-researched essay takes its main cue from Eschenburg's Über W. Shakespeare (1787), “the first scholarly monograph on the poet written in German,” and situates Eschenburg's theoretical interest in literary criticism within a larger network of friends (among them Lessing) and foes on Shakespeare plays.

THE FIFTEEN ESSAYS IN THIS VOLUME present and document the emancipation of German studies from Germanistik over the past half a century. They do so, however, in an unusual way: the individual scholars were part of a vanguard group that transformed our discipline. They now bear witness to this dynamic process. The colleagues reflect back on their own academic careers as far as the profession as a whole is concerned, and thereby bring to mind a pluralistic history from the inside. In short, the scholars give testimony to the profession and to the capacious discipline of German studies that it has become.

Thus this volume complements the recent Taking Stock of German Studies in the United States, edited by Rachel J. Halverson and Carole Anne Costabile-Heming in 2015, with its primary focus on aspects of teaching German as a foreign language. Likewise, this collection of essays should be seen in light of its predecessors, among them German Studies in the United States, edited by Peter Uwe Hohendahl in 2003, or its corresponding Teaching German in America, edited by George F. Peters in 2002. Both of these latter-named works provide comprehensive handbooks, and both are published by professional organizations, the former on behalf of the Modern Language Association (MLA), and the latter by the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG). If these two handbooks together are all-inclusive in nature, special accounts such as that of the Brandeis Symposium of 1997, published by Stephen D. Dowden and Meike G. Werner in 2002, focused on Jewish critics and their relationship to German Literature, or thematized the discipline in crisis mode, as John van Cleve and A. Leslie Willson did in their Remarks on the Needed Reform of German Studies in the United States in 1993. With less alarming overtones but equally concerned and committed were John McCarthy and Karin Schneider in The Future of Germanistik in the United States: Changing Our Prospects, their edited volume based on a symposium at Vanderbilt University in 1995.

“It's a fine country you're coming to, Sir; just too many of these damned nigras! If only we had one Dutchman of your blond kind for ten of these black devils, it would be paradise. It's a blessed country, Sir, this Georgia, the jewel of the South, and so the jewel of the world!”

The blond, blue-eyed gentleman—despite his impeccable elegance, even at a hundred paces, one could spot him as a European “greenhorn”— listened in bemusement to his fellow traveler. He enjoyed the boundless self-satisfaction of Americans, who, no matter whether they came from New York, Illinois, California, or in this case Georgia, praised their native state as paradise on earth. At the same time, the tirades against blacks— which became increasingly harsh and brutal for every degree of latitude he traveled further south—irritated him. Brushing his hair off his forehead with his stubby fingers, he said with a shrug: “Just what do you all want from these poor Negroes? I've gotten to know them as barbers, shoeshine boys, servants, conductors, and deckhands, and I find them quite handy, considerably more polite than the hired help of our own skin color, and they are always in a good mood and jocular. I actually quite like them.”

With great virtuosity, the American spit right past the German into the spittoon.

“First of all, sir, my compliments on your excellent English. More refined English than us here stateside. By God, these Germans can do anything, and whatever they can do, they do right well.—However, with all due respect, you just do not understand the situation with the Negroes; you're talking rubbish there. One Negro is good as a barber, a shoeshine boy, or waiter, very good even, but in bunches they are bad, very bad. When they live in bunches, they are worse than beasts! And they are beasts, and it is unfortunate that those damned Yankees—may they go to hell, even though they are hardworking fellas—have gotten them to thinking that they are not brutes but human beings, just as good or even better than the evil white man who doesn't even grant they are human. Well, that might work in the North where they can be waiters or barbers or house servants, but here in the South it is a different story.