Scandalous Family Relations: Dealing with Darwinism in Wilhelm Raabe's Der Lar

When Darwinism emerged as a new historical narrative in the 1860s, one topic quickly grew to be the focal point of the debate: the descent of humans from lower animals. In his 1859 On the Origin of Species, Darwin had only hinted at the implications of his selection doctrine for humans, knowing that such an idea would meet with considerable resistance from the public. It was not until his 1871 The Descent of Man that he formally proposed human descent from an apelike predecessor. By that point, several other scientists, notably T.H. Huxley (Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature 1863) and Ernst Haeckel (Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte 1868) had already published on the subject, painting a vivid picture of man's simian origin. On the other end of the spectrum, the religious and traditional sectors of the public were outraged by the denial of the Biblical creation story that Darwin's theory had inaugurated. But there was also opposition within the scientific community-the influential pathologist Rudolf Virchow famously delivered an anti-Darwinian lecture on Menschen- und Affenschadefi in which he emphasized the lack of fossil evidence for a common ancestor of man and ape and called Darwinian evolution theory an interesting hypothesis. By the 1870s, when the scientific battle between Haeckel and Virchow was still raging,2 the cultural debate had only just started to consider the impact of Darwinian science on social arrangements and on the philosophical and psychological worldview of the individual. Darwin's writings were perceived to have enormous political and social consequences, as they seemed to comment not only on man's relationship with the animal kingdom, but also on the standing of the so-called primitive races within the family of nations, the problem of social classes, and the role of men and women in human society.3 In the 1876 edition of his famous Thierleben, zoologist Alfred Brehm phrased the psychological threat posed by the confrontation of the self with its animal nature as a problem of relation and distance: Der Mensch, leiblich ein veredelter Af fe, geistig ein Halbgott, will nur das letztere sein und versucht mit kindlicher Aengstlichkeit, seine nachsten Verwandten von sich abzustoden, als konne er durch sie irgendwie beeintrachtigt werden. (39) So profound was the psychological impact of man's proposed descent from apes that half a century later, in 1916, Sigmund Freud would name it one of the two primary wounds to human narcissism (the other being the heliocentric model of Kopernikus).4 Wilhelm Raabe's 1889 story Der Lar picks up the idea of the ape as a "close relative" that Brehm had outlined in his Thierleben, by placing a life-sized, stuffed, white-handed gibbon or "lar" (short for the Latin Hylobates lar) at the center of the narrative.5 The stuffed ape, owned by the eccentric veterinarian, Dr. Schnarrwergk, as part of his natural history collection, does not only symbolically import Darwinian discourse, but imagines its literal significance in terms of space and relationship: by observing how the various human characters relate to the monkey in their midst, the text explores various degrees of involvement and closeness between the two species, jestingly turning the problem of "man's place in nature" into the question of "ape's place in culture." Just as Darwin himself had often expressed evolutionary theory in terms of spatial metaphors like his "tree of life" diagram, Der Lar expresses the problem of relation to nature through a spatial trope that works both factually and figuratively, representing Darwinian concepts on the level of tangible scientific sample as well as on the level of abstract ideas. What is more, the text seeks to transport scientific knowledge to the sphere of everyday bourgeois life, testing its relevance, possible meanings and consequences in the medium of the realist text. What Raabe's story is struggling with might be best described in terms of two levels of Darwin's theory that seem to be, as H. …