God’s Profit: Gottfried Keller’s Literary Engagement with the Core Values of Swiss Protestantism

Abstract

This thesis analyses themes of Christianity, secularisation and the place of the Swiss Reformed Church in relation to the rapid economic development and the transformation of Swiss society to capitalist modes of production in Gottfried Keller’s prose work. The focus is the novel Der grüne Heinrich and the novella cycle Die Leute von Seldwyla which both frame his creative work. Furthermore, I refer to Züricher Novellen, Martin Salander, Das Sinngedicht and Sieben Novellen in order to illustrate my argument. Gottfried Keller is acknowledged as a great realist of 19th century Swiss society. While considerable critical attention has been paid to Keller’s work, aspects remain to be elucidated in greater detail. Gottfried Keller, a Swiss writer who spent considerable time in Munich, Heidelberg and Berlin, reveals in his works the twin influences of the Judeo-Christian and the Enlightenment-Classical traditions. Keller revised the beliefs instilled in him by his mother and his Swiss Reformed background as a student of such eminent thinkers as the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, the anthropologist Jakob Hentle, the physiologist Jacob Moleschott as well as the literary historian Hermann Hettner. Feuerbach can be seen as a lynchpin in a line of philosophers from the Enlightenment and is therefore central for the development of a left-wing philosophy, theology and anthropology. However, despite Keller’s break with traditional Christian beliefs, the essence of the Christian message of the Bible: equality, tolerance and the love of one’s neighbour, remain strong moral categories in the intellectual context of his work. I argue that Keller confronts this message critically with the practical influence the precepts of the Swiss Reformed Church have in 19th century Swiss society. Keller reveals these precepts as an ideological framework for the justification of inequality and social exclusion in the competitive world of economic rivalry. The role of the Swiss Reformed Church changed as it became implicated in the introduction and advancement of capitalist principles into traditional Swiss society. Swiss society in the early days, and famously in the national legend of Wilhelm Tell, had understood itself in terms of a community-based ethos, as a community in which the good of the individual was inseparable from that of the group. Central to this ethos was a body of symbols of traditional Swiss life. In the traditional village the central church spire symbolises the role of the church as custodian of the soul. The forest surrounding the village provides food, wood and shelter. The traditional family union is sanctioned by the church whose values are transmitted to the children by the mother. The rituals of religious and civic life express community interaction and mutual support. With the accession of capitalist modes of production in Switzerland relatively late in the 19th century, as pre-capitalist labour output ceded to more centralised structures of accumulation of surpluses from production, profit maximization, investment and labour rationalization, the traditional self-understanding of the Swiss was subjected to pressure and change. As the church came to both participate in and represent newly emerging capitalist values of private ownership, profit and maximization of labour, it implicitly abandoned its traditional role as a site of community values, civic and rural charity and support. Gottfried Keller represents this process in his works implicitly and explicitly comparing past and present experience and social development, loss and gain in the modernization of his country. Keller presents the Swiss Reformed Church as the provider of the ideological framework and bearer of change in mentality from community to individualism. He exposes the processes in which the Swiss Reformed Church dominates social and cultural life. The Swiss Reformed Church dominates attitudes to marriage and the family and introduces the all- pervasive power of money into all aspects of social, cultural and individual life, and thus, legitimises the profit focus. Religious rituals, for example confirmation, marriage and funerals, become occasions of social importance, underpinning both the place of the individual and the power of the Swiss Reformed Church in society. I argue that the failure to find friends or happiness in marriage, which is a common feature in the lives of Keller’s protagonists, is a result of Swiss Reformed demands on friendship and the institution of marriage. While friendship is closely connected to social prestige and position, marriage remains an unresolvable bond reserved for the prosperous in order to procreate and transfer their accumulated wealth to the next generation. The Swiss Reformed Church in Keller’s work has not lost its influence over educational institutions. The spirit of Calvinism is revealed in the emphasis on punishment and exclusion. Access to education remains restricted to those favourable to the aims of the Swiss Reformed Church. Keller traces Swiss attitudes to art back to the Bildersturm of the Swiss Reformation. Swiss Reformed frugality is opposed to the lavishness of the realm of art. Art can only be reconciled with the precepts of the Swiss Reformed Church as a path to profit accumulation. Failure in the realm of art is not solely due to a lack of artistic skill, but represents a failure of the realm of art to provide a viable option for self-fulfilment. The profit orientation of the Swiss Reformed Church provides the ideological framework for the exploitation of natural resources. Keller evokes the traditional structure of spiritual and community life detached from mechanisms of maximum profit in the relationship of the Swiss to their communally owned forests in the mountains, the birthplace of their traditional democracy. Increased economic exploitation of the Swiss forests in Keller’s work leads to new problems for both the communal owners and the forest dwellers, who are social outsiders excluded from the established society centred in the traditional community around the Swiss Reformed Church. The Swiss Reformed Church encourages the mechanisms of maximum profit necessitating a dependent workforce, free to be moved about for economic purposes and unprotected by the traditional bonds of a community. Moreover, the Swiss Reformed Church contributes to outsiders’ lawless state through its refusal to legitimise them as members of the established community. In Keller’s work, the Swiss Reformed Church is well positioned to reach all aspects of society and distribute the message of the reconciliation of profit and Christianity. Indoctrination becomes a subtle process that reaches from the family through religious rituals from the private sphere into the world of commerce, art and public life. The precepts of the Swiss Reformed Church make the rapid changes in society, the destruction of the conventions of community and care plausible and acceptable. The Swiss Reformed Church as an institution is symbolised by its inflexible stone edifices, which provide the illusion of a centre for the community, but this centre is no longer real and viable: it only symbolically represents past traditions. Its foundation has been destroyed by the secular and profit-oriented framework of the Swiss Reformed Church.