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Green Henry is a vivid and absorbing representation of Gottfried Keller's ideals and philosophy, written in poetic language and a realistic style that documents the emergence of an artist and the development of a man. Partly autobiographical, the narrative recounts the experiences of the title character (green after the color of clothing he always wears) through confinement and ostracism at boarding school, apprenticeship with a painter in Munich, his divided affection for two women, and the acceptance of his duty toward his country and fellow citizens. First published in 1855, and substantially revised in 1879, Green Henry is infused with the author's imaginative responsiveness to beauty and deep understanding of the human soul. Admired by Nietzsche (who called Keller the only living German writer) and included by Harold Bloom in The Western Canon, it is one of the undisputed masterpieces of world literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Green as Money, Green as Moss
Henry Lee, the narrator-hero of this translated German classic, got his nickname as a child in school because of his clothing, made by his widowed mother from the green cloth of his dead father's old uniforms. But "Grüner Heinrich" is green in more ways than one. Green is explicitly the color of Hope in this novel by the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller, and Hope is often all that Green Henry has to live on. Green is also symbolic of Nature, of the trees and alpine meadows that sustain Henry's will-to-live; Keller's verbal evocations of evergreen Nature in his native Switzerland are truly magnificent in German, and they are well rendered by translator A.M. Holt into English. Foremost, nevertheless, is the 'popular' connotation of the color green as symbolic of naive inexperience, the meaning expressed by the slang word "greenhorn". And 'ach du lieber!', is our Henry ever a greenhorn! He's green as a boy raised by a doting mother - and as a city boy sent to develop among his sturdier country cousins - and green as a youth who tries to make himself popular by joining in mischief despite feeling guilty, thereby getting himself unfairly expelled from school - green again in his aspiration to become a great artist more or less merely by declaring himself one - and greenest of all in Love. Four, count 'em four!, beautiful and fascinating girl-women are the idols of Henry's worship in the course of this novel. All four are in fact realistically depicted as worthy of some idolization; author Keller should be credited with creating some of the most impressively plausible heroines of 19th C literature. Meanwhile, something in our Green Henry attracts the devotion of each of the four women to him, and yet the relationships are never consummated, either emotionally or physically. Green symbolizes virginity for the young man, also, despite a good deal of understated debauchery in Henry's years as a student in old Nuremburg.

"Grüner Heinrich" is regarded as one of the master works of German fiction. It's included by the redoubtable critic harold Bloom in the "canon of Western classics." If you take this recommendation and read it, assuming you enjoy it, you'll have at least a month to nurture your gratitude toward me; that is, it will take you a month or more to read it. It's very long - 700 pages of small type - and discursive, with as many interpolated tales and fables as Don Quixote. Several lengthy chapters are devoted to Henry's fantastic dreams, surreal and symbolic but not precisely crafted to advance the narrative. The largest part of Henry's narrative of his years in Nuremburg is devoted to the romances of his two closets friends there, misadventures in which Henry himself is only a bumbling sidekick. Honestly, I fear that most 21st C readers will be patience-challenged by Keller's placid, philosophical, parenthetical discourse. And yet, this is a great book. It's precisely "the still water that runs deep." It has integrity above all. Though Henry is a greenhorn and a bit of a fool throughout, his constant introspection sculpts as complete a portrayal of a human personality as any in literature.

The events of author Gottfried Keller's early life coincide with Henry Lee's in many particulars, but 'Green Henry" is not merely an autobiographical novel. Keller was a quirky fellow - frail, depressive, withdrawn, not much liked, with a weakness for prolonged drinking bouts. His character Henry shows the optimistic resilience of green willow. One could speculate that Keller portrayed himself more as he wished to be than as he knew he was. In any case, he chose to shape his character's 'autobiography' as fiction and as the embodiment of his philosophical meditations about religion, duty, morality, and civil society. Keller was himself a disciple of the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, whose influence in the mid-19th C was enormous. Feuerbach was a Hegelian; he's considered the most important transmitter of Hegelian though to Karl Marx, but very little of his thought was related to economics. Feuerbach scandalized his contemporaries by dismissing the idea of human immortality. In the novel Grüner Heinrich, the fourth of Henry's feminine idols becomes the spokeswoman for Feuerbach's ideas about religion and mortality, ideas that Henry adopts with his usual equivocating innocence.

A good reason to read this vast novel is that it depicts the 'intellectual grid' of European (specifically German) culture during the first half of the 19th C, an era that clung to ancient myths and to Enlightenment ideals equally, without noting how irreconcilable they were.Henry's Nuremburg was still the Goliardic medieval world of 'The Student Prince". Henry himself blunders into a duel. The folk festivals of Switzerland and Germany that Keller describes were still vividly part of the life of real communities, and not anachronistic recreations for tourists. There were no tourists! Let me tell you, an absence of tourists has by now become a rare pleasure of life in Europe. Keller's descriptions of now-extinguished festivals and folkways are lively and colorful, enjoyable enough to pay the reader for any impatience with Henry's philosophical digressions.

Grüner Heinrich is a 'Bildungsroman' in structure -- a 'novel of education' of the genre launched by Goethe in his masterpiece "Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre".There are enough similarities between Green Henry and Wilhelm Meister to make it clear that Keller intended his novel as a philosophical sequel to Goethe's. The first third or so of Green Henry was drafted as a complete novel, ending with Henry's suicide in imitation of Goethe's hero Young Werther. That draft was not well received by anyone, but some five or six years later, Keller rewrote and expanded his book into the current epic tale. The division is still obvious; the story leaps unapologetically from Henry's adolescence in Switzerland to his futile and frustrating career as a would-be artist in Germany. The suicide was cancelled, thank you! Henry does emerge from his bewildered youth - his greenery - as a full-formed human being with realistic goals in life.

My earlier mention of Don Quixote was not completely gratuitous. The 'Bildungsroman' was the literary heir of the Picaresque novel, and our greenhorn knight errant Henry tilts at windmills aplenty in the course of his education.

The "worldview" portrayed in this novel is gone. Extinct. Utterly supplanted. Pre-Darwinian. The religious doubts that Henry experiences are not the same as "we moderns" experience. Henry's world is stable, unchanging, sempiternal, self-maintaining as a Swiss clockwork. Evolution and contingency have no place in it. This may well amount to the best of all reasons for reading Grüner Heinrich, that it richly presents the archaic worldview of Romantic Europe, and thus exposes what a shock, what an earthquake of perception, such a culture must have experienced with the arrival of modernity. ... Read more

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Die Klassiker der deutschen und weltweiten Literatur in einer einzigartigen Reihe. Lesen Sie die besten Werke großer Schriftsteller und Autoren auf Ihrem Kindle Reader.

Gottfried Keller begann seinen Roman zu planen, nachdem er 1842, als Maler gescheitert, aus Münchennach Zürichzurückgekehrt war. Mit der Niederschrift begann er erst sieben Jahre später, als ihm ein Stipendium Aufenthalte in Heidelbergund Berlinermöglichte. 1854 erschienen die ersten drei Bände (396, 456 und 359 Seiten), 1855 der vierte Band (483 Seiten), alle im Braunschweiger Vieweg Verlag. Keller war mit seinem Roman nie glücklich; er beklagte seine "Unförmlichkeit" und wollte diese ausmerzen. Deshalb erarbeitete er Ende der 1870er Jahre eine zweite Fassung des Romans; sie erschien 1879/80 im Stuttgarter Verlag Göschen. Die ursprüngliche Fassung wird seither als die "erste Fassung" des "Grünen Heinrichs" bezeichnet.

In seiner ersten Fassung beginnt der Roman mit dem Auszug Heinrichs aus der Schweiz. Seine Mutter packt ihm den Koffer, er nimmt Abschied von den Handwerkern, die im Haus der verwitweten Mutter wohnen; es wird deutlich, dass sie alleinstehend ist. Auf der Reise begegnet Heinrich in Süddeutschland einem Grafen mit Frau und Tochter, "überbürgerlichen Wesen", die ihn faszinieren. In München findet er ein Zimmer, packt seinen Koffer aus - und in demselben befindet sich ein Manuskript, in dem Heinrich seine Kindheitserinnerungen festgehalten hat, und die werden nun eingeblendet (de facto wird zurückgeblendet, wie heute in fast jeder Filmbiografie).(aus wikipedia.de) ... Read more

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This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts treffen sich in Zürich Künstler, Wissenschaftler, Musiker und gescheiterte Revolutionäre, so auch Gottfried Semper, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Richard Wagner, Gottfried Keller, Jacob Burckhardt u.a. Der Autor beleuchtet anhand von zahlreichen Dokumenten, welche wechselseitigen Einflüsse diese Begegnungen auf die jeweilige Arbeit der Beteiligten hatten. Konzeptionen von "Gesamtkunstwerk" wurden ausgedacht und formuliert, neue ästhetische Theorien, die bis heute ihre Wirkkraft haben, wurden entwickelt. ... Read more

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This Book Is In German. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more