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82 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE ticularly in the sentimentalism of Frau Sorge and Der Kat^ensteg; what he does (in his less reputable work at least) is to transfuse the German pretence of moral goodness with French cynicism. Maupassant's translator was Georg Freiherr von Ompteda, and Ompteda strove doggedly to be the German Maupassant; the German novelist who made the most of Maupassant's technique and pose was, however, Heinz Tovote. HEINZ TOVOTE (1864-1946) and GEORG VON OMPTEDA (1863-1931) were both natives of Hanover. The glaring difference between them is that while Ompteda takes over from Maupassant the cult of piquancy and abnormality his sexuality is, comparatively speak- ing, sane and normal, while Tovote is genuinely decadent. Their portraits alone proclaim this radical difference: Ompteda's solid square face and clipped hair contrast with Tovote's elegant pointed beard and shock of well-groomed hair. Fallobst (1890) is a collec- tion of Novellen dejfined by Tovote himself as 'Novellen der Wurm- stichigkei?', and this 'wormeatenness' is equally high to the nostrils in Ich, nervose Novellen (1892); what Tovote gives us in these tales is a series of hectic short studies of the fixed ideas or obsessions of nervous people. For instance: two young people ripening to the crisis of fruition have their blood chilled by the sight of a horse's blood spilt in an accident (this is of course less telling than Maupassant's story of a husband who ceased intercourse with his wife because one day when she was ill he was sickened by the faint odour of physical decay which met his nostrils as he bent over her). Tovote made his reputation with his novel Im Liebesrausch (1890), the hero of which is an aristocrat who marries a carter's daughter, a girl with a past: as a waitress she was Lucie Nagel, as a sort of lady she is Kitty Nail. Georg von Ompteda scores by his illumin- ation of the life of officers; and in this respect his trilogy of novels Deutscher Adel um 1900 (Sylvester von Gejer, 1897; Eysen, 1900; Cacilie von Sarryn, 1901) may prove to have permanent importance as pictures of social conditions. In this trilogy the influence of the Goncourts is pointed out by critics; but this influence too is less discernible in Ompteda than in Tovote, in the sense that Tovote's creatures are more literally (to quote Edmond de Goncourt's self- definition) machines a sensations rendered with an accent fievreux. Sylvester von Gejer describes the life of a Saxon officer from the cradle to the grave; his tragedy is that he is poor and that his efforts to perfect his character are hampered by fits of nerves.