ABSTRACT
In the new historical novel we get a symbolic interpretation of history. Whether-except, perhaps, in the scholarly handling of Ricarda Huch – there is always the advance which is claimed on the archaic Professorenroman of Dahn and Ebers is open to question: MAX BROD’S (1884-) Tycho Brahes Weg zu Gott (1916) for instance – probably the most morally satisfying and philosophical of them all – is in style hardly less naive than that of Ebers. A difference in the problem there certainly is: whereas the archaeological novel made a show of erudition, the new historical novel illuminates, in intention, the state of mind or the character of people famous in history. Moreover, whereas the archaeological novel portrayed the hero and his period as chronologically isolated, the new historical novel interprets the present by shifting its problems to past times. In Tycho Brahes Wegzu Gott there is a contrast of two types of intellect: the onrushing Danish astronomer and the cool and patient Kepler; it is a history, not of stirring events, but of Tycho’s brain-storms ending in a moral victory by complete abnegation of self (Wandlung); it is the seeking of God that matters, not the scientist’s seeking of truth. This is the aim and purpose, too, of Rëubini, Fürst der Juden (1925) and Galilei in Gefangenschaft (1948), two novels which the author groups with the Tycho Brahe novel as a trilogy. In 1939 Max Brod emigrated to Palestine as a Zionist and was appointed director of the Hebrew theatre in Tel Aviv. Here he devoted himself to editing the great edition of Kafka (pp. 452-3). The background of his novel Unambo (1949) is the recent Arab-Jewish war. There is symbolical interpretation of biblical history in Der Meister (1952); the hero of the novel, Jeschua (that is, Jesus), rebels against Roman rule and, betrayed by Jehuda (Judas), dies fpr love of his native land. In Armer Cicero (1955) the Roman orator, after his divorce from his first wife, marries his seventeen-year-old Publilia and is thereafter a slave to senile eroticism. After the Ides of March he proclaims war against Antony, but is forced to flee from Rome, and is overtaken by assassins outside his villa at Formiae. Max Brod has written one drama: Lord Byron kommt aus der Mode (1929; see p. 33). Not the least readable of his works is Heinrich Heine (1934).
