Gutzkow shows himself as having certainly profited from Balzac, more ostentatiously than his compatriots like Heine and Börne. His tribute to Balzac's characterization tricks are the best part of this book, especially the unhappiness of marriage tempted by impossible true love, which Gutzkow could've lifted right out of Duchesse de Langeais. It is there that we can see why he gets the reputation for bringing French-style realism to German literature, albeit at times a flatteringly direct impersonation thereof.
The book works best when Cäsar is Gutzkow's hilarious mouthpiece. My favorite part is when Wally and he fall in love over ideas. Gutzkow reminds us of the difference between French realism and German naturalism: the Germans, no matter how serious they're being, always have the heart full. It reminds me of some moments from my own youth.
However I can't say that Gutzkow succeeded fully in connecting the dots that he set up. Imagine if Gutzkow's homie Büchner had lived, maybe he'd have paid Gutzkow back for publishing Dantons Tod with a solid edit.
The book certainly tested my German, but I'm not sure if I ever got a really good idea of why Wally is so conflicted/interested/perplexed by Christianity. Is it nineteenth-century hysteria or ennui? The scene where she and Cäsar commiserate about their love being locked up in other marriages is clear enough, and she seems jealous of his unreligious wedding since it's between a Jewish and a Christian, but then what?
In the last third we get a series of earnest cracks by Gutzkow, disciple of Hegel, at a critique of Christians' various philosophical problems, but it's distributed throughout Wally's diary, then a huge philosophical narration in the form of an article from a friend; a trick with which Balzac only gets away at the FRONT of his books and not in the last twenty percent. At least now I learned where Thomas Mann learned to pull shit like that. Gutzkow seems to have lost the grip on plotting through philosophical swamps that Balzac and Stendhal used to steer their stories.
After the story ends, nevertheless, in the HUGE section for zeitgenössischen Literaturstreit, are some really good documents from the time that're worth reading. Notable are Gutzkow's indignant response to the cultural forces who called his book heretical and dangerous, which contains raging sentences that would make Marx shut up, grin and take a breath; and Hermann Marggraf's hilariously backhanded defense of the book and its readership. I guess I have a German sense of humor inherited from my grandparents: no matter how thick a German text is, I always know when they speak with the best intentions, even and especially while blasting the subject's shortcomings.
I suppose all in all that the book is best read as an indictment and a grito against the lack of freedom in nineteenth-century Germany, who never had a revolution and by 1850 was seething, fed up, with absolutism and religion. The book is just as risky and admirable for its courage as anything by Heine and the rest, Marx and the rest; just not that fun to read. ( )