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Finally, however, the choice fell on his rival Gutzkow, in spite of his obvious unsuitability for the practical work of dramatist.
This I actually heard Gutzkow say; moreover, I saw that he really meant it! After this I felt I had done with him. It was not long before I had equally little to do with all the painters, musicians, and other zealots in art belonging to our society. At the same time, however, I came into closer contact with Berthold Auerbach.
No wonder, then, that thinking men, like Heine and Gutzkow, were fairly forced by circumstances into playing the game. No wonder that their tales, novels, and dramas became in many cases editorials to stimulate and guide public thought and feeling in one direction or another.
Gutzkow wrote three comedies which in point of continued popularity have outlived all his other numerous contributions to the German stage: Sword and Queue , The Prototype of Tartuffe , and The Royal Lieutenant . The second of the three has the best motivated plot; the first and third have, by virtue of their national substance, their witty dialogue, and their droll humor, proved dearer to the heart of the German people.
There were many other charming girls, too, and my aunt, besides old friends, entertained the leaders of literary life in Dresden. Gutzkow surpassed them all in acuteness and subtlety of intellect, but the bluntness of his manner repelled me.
Valuable and interesting to me at this time were the representations of the best dramas of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Gutzkow, at the Berlin theaters. I thus heard plays of Shakspere which, in English-speaking countries, are never presented, and, even into those better known, wonderful light was at times thrown from this new point of view.
A man of the latter type was Gutzkow, who was often with us; he had been summoned to Dresden by the general management of our court theatre, to act in the capacity of dramatist and adapter of plays.
Menzel's student connection with the Jena Burschenschaft, his early published protest against the emptiness of recent German literature, and his polemic, entitled German Literature, and aimed at the imitators of Goethe and at Goethe's own lack of interest in German unification, attracted young Gutzkow, who had also been a member of the Burschenschaft, and prompted him to write and publish in his student paper a defense of Menzel against his critics.
A group of men, including, among others, Ludwig Börne, Heinrich Heine, Heinrich Laube, Theodor Mundt, Ludolf Wienbarg, and Karl Gutzkow, dominate the literary activity of Germany from the beginning of the fourth decade to about the middle of the nineteenth century.
Several of his pieces had recently met with great success: Zopf und Schwert, Das Urbild des Tartuffe, and Uriel Acosta, shed an unexpected lustre on the latest dramatic repertoire, and it seemed as though the advent of Gutzkow would inaugurate a new era of glory for the Dresden theatre, where my operas had also been first produced. The good intentions of the management were certainly undeniable.
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