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 Affenschadel (1) 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: 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)