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Updated: June 28, 2025
By W.H. RIEHL Translated by FRANCES H. KING No time is so rich as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in humorous original types of a distinct genre, who built for themselves a world apart. Everywhere in this period we meet with eccentrics by profession, who with deliberate intention play, as the actors say, a "charged" character-part.
Professor of the German Language and Literature, Washington University Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl was born May 6, 1823, in Bieberich on the Rhine, of parents so poor that after his father's early death his mother had to deprive herself of every comfort in order to enable the lad to go to the university.
And the analogy, or rather the causal relation between the physical geography of the three regions and the development of the population goes still further: “For,” observes Riehl, “the striking connection which has been pointed out between the local geological formations in Germany and the revolutionary disposition of the people has more than a metaphorical significance.
Riehl, a great German critic, says: "He is more successful in the delineation of masses and groups than in the portrayal of emotional scenes; his rendering of the national struggle between the Spaniards and Mexicans in 'Cortez' is, for example, admirable. He is likewise most successful in the management of large masses in the instrumentation.
Riehl well observes that the feudal system, which made the peasant the bondman of his lord, was an immense benefit in a country, the greater part of which had still to be colonized—rescued the peasant from vagabondage, and laid the foundation of persistency and endurance in future generations.
Riehl would even hark back to wholly out-dated and discarded customs, provided they seemed to him clearly the outflow of a vital class-consciousness. For instance, he would have restored the trade corporations to their medieval status; inhibited the free disposal of farming land, and governed the German aristocracy under the English law of primogeniture.
This ethnographical outline Riehl fills up with special and typical descriptions, and then makes it the starting-point for a criticism of the actual political condition of Germany. The volume is fall of vivid pictures, as well as penetrating glances into the maladies and tendencies of modern society. It would be fascinating as literature if it were not important for its facts and philosophy.
If, however, the eye for natural scenery only sees bona fide, as the jurists say, then it follows that it saw correctly for its age. Whether our grandchildren will laugh at us because we saw thus and not otherwise need not disturb our peace of mind, for no present has any kind of guarantee that it will not be laughed at by the immediate future. By W.X. RIEHL
The predisposition to draw large inferences coupled with that pronounced conservatism detract in a measure from the authenticity of Riehl's work in the department of Social Science, which to him is fundamentally "the doctrine of the natural inequality of mankind." That Riehl, despite his conservative bias, is not a reactionary out and out has already been stated.
As a romancer he falls far short of Gustav Freytag, whose Pictures of the German Past served Riehl obviously for a model, and of Jeremias Gotthelf, in whose manner, though perhaps unconsciously, he likewise strove to write.
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