A.6: Jacobs, des Handwerksgesellen, Wanderungen durch die Schweiz / The Wandering of Jacob the Journeyman through Switzerland
Political Panorama
Gotthelf`s novel Jacobs, des Handwerksgesellen, Wanderungen durch die Schweiz -The Wandering of Jacob the Journeyman through Switzerland- (divided into two parts, 1846/47) describes the fate of a wandering journeyman from Germany who, along his travels, gets involved with the maelstrom of both a highly politicised atmosphere as well as political unrest. While both German handicraft associations and early socialists among the ranks of the journeymen agitate politically, some Swiss radicals utilise the Jesuit priests’ calling to the theological priestly seminar as well as the institution of higher education (“Höhere Lehranstalt”) of Lucerne in a propagandistic manner, so as to promote the Federal State. The novel is an attempt to sketch a panorama of the political developments in the first half of the 1840s.
A craftsman’s novel – and yet not
The novel was prompted by a request from one Gotthilf Ferdinand Döhner (1790–1866), the chairman of the Educational Literature Association (“Volksschriftenvereins”) of Zwickau. Döhner was looking for suitable, didactic popular novels and most likely had hoped for a typical craftsman’s novel wherein a youth would attain mastery of his craft through diligence, patience, perseverance and Christian faith. Instead, Gotthelf provided him with a conversion story. The heart of the storyline evolves not around an industrious craftsman, but instead it centers on Jacob, a credulous and haughty craftsman who lacks in life experience. Jacob wanders through Basel and via Zürich, Bern, and Fribourg to finally reach Geneva. Gotthelf shows the gradual moral brutalisation of the protagonist, who is exposed to the influences of contemporary agitators, leading to his involvement into the Geneva unrest of 1843. It is only from here on that the satirical novel starts to extend beyond the confines of political agitation and its consequences and become an actual craftsman’s novel with the patterns corresponding to an ascending order for the protagonist. As he reaches the rock bottom of his moral degradation, the turning point is reached as well: the German Jacob turns away from the host country’s political occurrences and, after the higher morals (and God) have revealed themselves to him amidst the setting of the mountainous realm of the Oberland, he gradually reaches moral maturation.
Basic political statement
Even as the narrative flow approaches the generic pattern of the craftsman’s novel in the second half, it remains a means of a fundamental political debate to a large extent. Gotthelf takes an even more determined stand on his Christian position against the political radicalism and early socialism and does so in a much starker manner than in any other text of his. The political developments of the 1840s, described by Gotthelf from his critical perspective, are the central theme of his Jacobs … Wanderungen. But even if Jacob is partly sucked into the maelstrom of the events described, the entanglements of everyday politics are far less addressed than the cleavage between Christianity and socialist ideologies, even as the latter invoked the Bible as a point of reference. Gotthelf casts a critical eye on the mechanisms of opinion forming within German handicraft associations. He then confronts, and thereby challenges, the concepts of ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’as they evolved in the 1840s with a humanitarian Christian world view. Thus, the novel is a contribution towards the larger discussion on early socialism. This was even more pertinent to Gotthelf since a fair number of proponents of the early socialist theories rooted their ideals of social utopias and their realisation in Biblical principles. Hence, Gotthelf’s novel addresses the disputes with socialism and communism about interpretative primacy on topics of human and social developments. Thus, he joins a common discourse that was held amongst numerous theologians in Switzerland at that time.
Edition
The HKG presents the edition of the novel in two volumes. The text-volume was published in October 2012. The commentary volume by Patricia Zihlmann-Märki und Christian von Zimmermann followed in 2016, it provides annotations on language and topics and sheds light on the historical and philosophical-ethical contexts of the novel.