THE FOLLOWING OVERVIEW is intended to give the reader an insight into the historical depth and geographical breadth of the forty-nine essays collected in Menschliche Tragikomödie, the major and representative work of Scherr's late period. Quotations are taken from third revised and expanded edition (12 vols. [Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1884]; abbreviated as MT). While the overview provides extensive summaries of the first seven volumes (twenty-nine essays), only the titles and a few essential details are provided for the final five volumes. It is hoped that this is sufficient to show that the essays evoke a context of world history, beginning with classical antiquity and culminating in Scherr's own time. Scherr makes his essays cohere by means of a relay structure of references to historical persons, such that a person mentioned briefly in one essay may become the focus of a subsequent essay.

Volume 1

“Aspasia” classical Greece, ca. 450 BC

Aspasia of Miletus was a courtesan and the concubine of the Athenian statesman Pericles. Her status as a resident alien freed her from the legal restraints on women in Athens, enabling her to host symposia attended by great minds. This highly educated, gracious, and emancipated woman played a vital role in society when the cultural life of Athens was at its zenith.

“Thusnelda” Germany, first century AD

Thusnelda is the only woman in early Germanic history about whom anything is known. Her relationship with the chieftain Hermann (Arminius), who defeated the Roman legions at the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9, recorded in the Germania of Tacitus, is the first historically attested German love story. Scherr contrasts the unprincipled chieftain Segest, Thusnelda's father, who collaborated with the Romans, with the unfashionably principled Hermann in order to criticize the cult of success and the anti-idealist realpolitik of his time. Viewed from the standpoint of realpolitik Hermann is a “Prinzipienreiter” (MT, 1:46), a pedantic and old-fashioned stickler for principle. The same term is used of Innstetten in Fontane's Effi Briest (1895). Thusnelda herself is an embodiment of Germanic individualism and of the will to self-determination (“Selbstbestimmungstrieb,” MT, 1:35)—for the sake of the man who loves her, she rebels against the legal and state authority embodied by her father, Segest.