Death, alienation, meaning and the lack of it, anxiety over the roles individuals inhabit, and human experience as something worthy of preserving and building upon, yet still limiting in its attempts to surpass itself. These are just some of the critical elements of 20 th Century existentialism as I understand it. At the center of it is the bafflement at the apparent contradictions of the human experience – we are born alone and die alone. Yet, we all play our part in social games with roles we inhabit within societies that thrive on following certain traditions, customs, and ‘imagined orders’ as would thinkers like Benedict Anderson (1983) denoted social constructs such as nations, institutions, or modes of exchange. God of the previous Enlightenment era is dead or, at least, on a faraway vacation, not to be seen or heard of. Everything an individual is left with is his own experience of aloneness, and the dilemma is: how to justify these social constructs and our societal roles if we are the ones who create them in the first place? Referencing Nietzsche as one of the pioneers of the new modern existential wave in philosophy, Atkinson et al. (2011) write that existentialism is “a philosophy based on the experience of the individual in a godless universe” (p.421, Kindle Edition). When I look at the writings of Jean-Paul Richter and Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann, this definition seems the most fitting. When reading these two authors, emotions that resurface during the experience are those of alienation, death anxiety, and the dread of the realization of seeing beyond every day’s banality of social roles, customs, or traditions. Hence, I argue that both authors try to tackle these feelings by offering their versions of mental adjustment. I will also show where those authors differ and where they find common grounds.

What is all this for? After all, it all seems like a bad theatre play – a tragedy mixed with comedy. If there is no God to impress, why even bother to play our part? This seems to be the fundamental question that the protagonist of The Nightwatches - Kreuzgang, asks himself repeatedly. Right from the start, the reader understands that Kreuzgang is alienated from the rest of the public. He works at night when the rest of the people goes to sleep or retreat to their private homes. The distance between Kreuzgang and the rest of the society is visible from the beginning of the novel. He even relishes the feeling of this alienation when he writes: “for among the many sleepers I seemed to myself like the prince in the fairytale, in the enchanted city where an evil power had transformed every living being into stone, or like a lone survivor after a universal plague or deluge” (p.1). Kreuzgang seems to imply right from the start that he is on the side of heroes in his story. Scholars like Ernest Becker (1973) imply that the problem of human 2 life is a problem of heroism. Becker writes that “man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with” (1973, p. 26). One way to resolve that dilemma is to place oneself in the position of the hero of one’s own story because heroism is a reflection of this nihilistic realization that we are mortal and death is waiting for us all and that we have no one to spare us of this terrifying realization (Ibid). Therefore, even a nihilist has to feel centered in something. Kreuzgang seems to be centered on his own uniqueness. He is “the prince in the fairytale,” the rest are controlled by “an evil power” (Ibid). It reminds me of the modern conspiracy theorists. They are the ones who understand and see beyond the illusion of reality; they know who is pulling strings. The rest of us are just humansheep living just like those characters in The Nightwatches – unaware of deeper realities. Kreuzgang, in the novel, encounters people and their stories as he sees them from his detached perspective of someone living outside their frameworks. He lives at night, and they live during the day. This alienation is the enabler, a necessary tool for seeing their identities as just acting roles. The contrast between the night and the day is also essential. A night here may represent privacy, the hidden, the unconscious, the nothingness, and ultimately death. Throughout the book, the image of masks and theatre is invoked repeatedly by the narrator. This seems to be another important element preceding the 20 th Century existentialism. It is this looking behind the “I,” behind the identity of an individual, that seems to be the source of the nihilism—the negation of the self, of identity, of life itself. Kreuzgang seems to negate all experiences he encounters. In his final analysis, everything is just a pretense. Nothing has a meaning, and, at best, everything is only the futile revolt against this ultimate truth.

This theme is illustrated, for example, in Nightwatch 8, when Kreuzgang encounters a poet hanging himself in his garret by the rope made out of his refused manuscript. He opens the chapter with his critical evaluation of poets: “Everything must turn out too petty against the measure of their [poets’] ideal, for it reaches beyond the clouds, and they themselves cannot survey it all and must cling to the stars as provisory border points,” writes Klingemann (p.57). In a way, Kreuzgang always seems a sort of resigned, as if accepting this ordeal. Yet, another crucial element of the existentialism of the 20th Century – renunciation of meaning and accepting the cruel yet absurd impersonal nature of the universe, nature, the existence. The satire that is mainly aimed to expose the arbitrary nature of this existential revolt against meaninglessness is at the center of the novel. It reminds me of Albert Camus’ Stranger in many ways, where the main character Meursault shares many common characteristics of Kreuzgang. Like him, Meursault is 3 also resigned and indifferent towards the absurdity of life situations around him. Camus also saw that life is essentially about performing meaningless tasks with no particular meaning in the grand scheme of things, yet we are ‘doomed’ to perform them (Atkinson et al., 2011).

Finally, there are two other vital tools that Klingemann uses in the novel that he shares with Jean-Paul. Those are the images of graveyards and dreams. Hence, Klingemann, just as JeanPaul, uses these tools to contemplate death and the unconscious. In Nightwatch 14, Kreuzgang describes falling in love with Ophelia in the mental hospital. He writes that he was “almost happy” (p. 106). But then the dream (the unconscious anxiety of his own mortality, as I see it) came and destroyed this new feeling of happiness. “The storm raged wildly about the madhouse” (Ibid, p.106); Kreuzgang describes the dream and continues to his last image of it when he writes: “Beyond myself, I tried to annihilate myself—but I remained and felt myself immortal! . . .” (p.107). Images of the void, nothingness, and the feeling that one cannot escape oneself lie at nihilism’s emotional foundation. However, can oneself be really a true nihilist? If nihilism is about negating everything right up to its foundation, shouldn’t the foundations themselves be negated as well? This is a thought that occurred to me while contemplating that the author himself – Klingemann, must have thought that writing this novel has some meaning. Otherwise, why bother writing this all down? Even his protagonist Kreuzgang carries on with his life, giving the reader accounts of all his thoughts and stories. As if finding the meaning in sharing them.

Kligemann’s The Nightwatches tackles many existentialism themes – death anxiety, or existential dread, meaninglessness, or the limitation of the roles we play. “The more strongly and securely a person maintains his composure, the sillier does everything arcane and marvelous appear to him, from the Order of Freemasons to the mysteries of another world”, Kreuzgang tells us in the Nightwatch 16 (p.119). There is an absurdity in his interpretation of the stories of his watches, an absurdity that competes with the satire at some places of the text. All the stories seem to begin with genuine bafflements and curiosity. However, they end in the impersonal absurdity of ‘godless’ and meaningless life. The only genuine and authentic feeling Kreuzgang believes in is his profound separation from the rest of the society, from people, and himself. Kreuzgang, the watchman, seems to be obsessed with negation rather than affirmation. In the end proving, that nihilism is only incomplete existentialism. Behind all voluntary negations, there are some involuntary affirmations. Life without affirming anything is simply not possible. Existentialism of the 20th Century seems to acknowledge this impasse of nihilism and tries to offer a roadmap for the affirming part. For instance, Camus acknowledges the nihilist part of the equation that existence is devoid of any predestined meaning. However, he goes a step further in 4 stating that since humans are conscious beings who cannot live without constructing and finding meaning, we are forced to create it for ourselves, fully knowing that the meaning is constructed, hence not ultimate (Atkinson et al., 2011). So, the way out of the nihilistic trap is to take responsibility and courage to create meaning worthy of following. Kreuzgang seems to refuse that responsibility in the novel. Similarly, I understand Sartre’s famous ‘existence precedes essence’ quote in this way. The fact that we exist is the foundation for meaning, not vice versa. In the historical context, existentialism seems to get traction when masses of people suddenly get confronted with en masse suffering and death, which, on the surface, really evokes meaninglessness in times of bloody revolutions and world wars. Perhaps Klingemann’s Nightwatches also reflect the author’s reaction to both the failed enlightenment’s overemphasis on reason alone and the failure of its counter-philosophy of romanticism.

There are similarities between Klingemann’s writings and Jean Paul’s writings. However, also some interesting differences in the style and approach of the nihilistic attitude. One minute difference is in the number of characters, both in dreams and in the stories of Jean-Paul and Klingemann. For example, Jean-Paul’s The Campaner Thal is essentially an adventure of the author and his friend Karlson, which he recounts to another friend (and other readers). Kreuzgang in The Nightwatches is alone, addressing his stories to the anonymous reader. Even the dreams are more ‘peopled’ with characters in Jean Paul’s writings. For example, in his Dead Christ dream, children are rising from their tombs, there is Jesus Christ, and so on. In Kreuzgang’s dream, he is alone in nothingness. In this way, I would say Jean-Paul is alienated not so much from the people around him but from his idealism – his vision of God. I would also say that Jean-Paul’s writings are closer to Romanticism than Klingemann’s Nightwatches, which is more nihilistic at its core. For example, in ‘The Dead Christ’, Jean-Paul gives an account of his powerful dream while he “was lying upon a quiet hillside in the sun” (p. 261). In the dream, he wakes up in the cemetery where children rise from their graves, and Jesus appears to tell him and the children that they are alone; he did not find his father in the whole universe. After the dread of the dream, Jean-Paul really wakes up and writes that a sense of relief of living in his own reality where he still can worship God overpowered him: “And my soul wept for joy that it could still worship God—my gladness, and my weeping, and my faith—these were my prayer” (p.265).

Earlier in the same text, Jean-Paul explicitly states: “It would cause me less pain to deny immortality than to deny God’s existence” (p. 260). As if he states that he needs an illusion to live by while in this mortal reality. It is as if Jean-Paul was at the stage before nihilism, just peeking through to see what lies in the center of existence – the void. As if God was his last 5 defense against that existential dread of nothingness. In The Campaner Thal, Jean-Paul is in constant discussion with his friend Karlson, who represents a more nihilistic approach. Jean-Paul was, as if, in the stage of negotiation with nihilism, refusing to accept its outcome of complete negation of everything. One could say that it is a cowardly approach. However, paradoxically, to me, it is more ‘truthfully’ existentialist because it seems he understands that pure nihilism is an unlivable ideal to live by. “I cannot tell you, dearest Victor, how horrible and fearful the eternal snow of annihilating death seemed to me, placed beside the noble form it should have covered; how frightful the thought: if Karlson is right, the last day has torn this never happy, innocent soul from the prisons upon the earth to the closer ones beneath it: a man too often carries his errors as his truths only as word arguments, not as feelings” (The Campaner Thal, p. 60).

In conclusion, both authors express in their writings some crucial elements of the later existentialist’s wave – confronting death in their thoughts, seeing through people’s roles/masks, seeing the absurdity that playing these roles encompass for us humans. This absurdity confronts us with questioning our own identity and life purpose. Both Klingemann and Jean-Paul often use dreams as powerful tools connecting individual and social reality with unconscious fears and anxieties – feelings with thoughts. Yet, another important element of later existentialism. They also show individuals’ powerlessness in facing much more powerful and impersonal forces of nature/existence. They question both God’s existence and cold reasoning. Especially in “The Dead Christ,” Jean-Paul attacks cold philosophical debates arguing for Atheism. He points out what is really at stake – people’s feelings and beliefs at their most visceral level. One can think and talk abstractly about grief, god, existence, or fear, but one cannot completely detach himself from his own feelings and emotions. This is another crucial element of upcoming existentialism – focusing on personal experiences rather than abstract debates in philosophy. As Becker (1973) writes, “I suggest that if everyone honestly admitted his urge to be a hero, it would be a devasting release of truth. It would make men demand that culture give them their due - a primary sense of human value as unique contributors to cosmic life” (p.5). It seems that there is a gradual evolution of this realization where first there is the Romanticism of Jean-Paul’s approach, then the stage of nihilism exhibited in Klingemann’s writings, and then the third stage – existentialism, admitting we have no choice but to accept the meaninglessness and its limitations while constructing our own ‘heroic’ projects to tackle it.

References:

Atkinson et al., (2011). The Philosophy Book. London, UK: Dorling Kindersley Limited. Kindle Edition. pp.419-422; 549-551

Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. New York, US: THE FREE PRESS. pp. 5-26

Klingemann, E. A. F. (1971). The Nightwatches of Bonaventura. London, UK; Chicago, US: Chicago University Press. pp. 1-119

Richter, Jean Paul, F. (1897). “The Dead Christ Proclaims That There Is No God.” In: Flower, fruit, thorn, pieces; or, the wedded life, death, and marriage of firmian Stanislaus siebenkaes, parish advocate in the burgh of kuhschnappel. London, UK: George Bell And Sons. pp. 260- 265

Richter, Jean Paul, F. (1864). The Campaner Thal, And Other Writings. Boston, US: Ticknor And Fields. pp. 4-62