Christian Fürchtegott Gellert

This post is going to be all over the place.

In my work on the "young" Goethe, i.e., his oeuvre before he went to Weimar at the age of twenty-six in 1775, I would come across the name and work of Gellert, a professor in Leipzig, whose classes on literature and essay writing Goethe attended while a student there. Gellert was one of the major writers in the generation at mid-18th century. Among other things, he was the author of plays and a short novel, The Life of the Swedish Countess G____, one of the first German novels to imitate Richardson's epistolary style. His Fables were one of the most popular works of that century. There was, however, no copyright protection for authors (Goethe would later be instrumental in securing that right for authors in Germany), and Gellert himself profited little financially from this popularity. Ten years after his death, the German publisher Wendler brought out an edition of the Fables and made a fortune of 10,000 Thalers.

I have mentioned many times that my research on Goethe, especially now that I am writing a book on him, leads me in many directions and down many alleyways, and thus this post on Gellert. My curiosity about a work by the writer Berthold Auerbach on Goethe's "Erzählungskunst" led me to Auerbach's own collection of "folktales (Volkserzählungen), in which appears "Gellert's Last Christmas" (1857). Reading this tale I seemed to encounter something new about the world in which Goethe came of age, in this case, the matter of religion in the age of Enlightenment.

According to the Wikipedia article on Auerbach (1812–1882), he was the founder of the German "tendency novel," one that uses fiction to influence readers on social and moral matters. Moral, in the case of the tale of Gellert's last Christmas (his death occurred in 1769), is not of the kind we now associate with public matters (immigration, abortion, etc.), but is really about individual conscience and the scruples that can plague humans in the rounds of everyday life. In fact, I found the tale really difficult to read at times. The two main characters are Geller, professor of moral philosophy, and a a poor farmer, both of whom are plagued by inner demons to such an extent that the moment they feel positive about something, they are quickly besieged by negative thoughts. Sound familiar?

Gellert reads his letters

The farmer enjoys a warm beer on arriving in Leipzig

The farmer and Gellert meet

The farmer's wife prepares dinner

The tale begins with Gellert returning home from the university. We soon learn that he suffers from depression, though not so called in the tale. (The term in  German is Schwermut.) His servants greet him at the door, they clearly care for him, and he settles at his desk with his pipe and reads letters that have arrived today, some from friends, others from people asking for advice or for his help. One of the letters, from a friend, causes such joy that he stands up and cries, "How fortunate I am to have such a friend." He is an affable man, for whom being in the presence of good men and contemplating the good is true bliss. But quickly dark spirits intervene. As a professor of moral philosophy, he has his scoffers, and when he is alone like this they enter his room, peer over his shoulder when he is writing, and laugh at what they see. Ideas that he hopes will elevate the behavior of others are perverted by them into folly and madness. The acclamation of friends makes him joyful, while the antagonism of his opponents engulfs him in sadness. Not to forget,he is also very poor, despite the popularity of his writing.

Similarly, the poor farmer constantly compares himself with others who have more, including his own brother. He too is dissatisfied with himself, tortured by "dark thoughts." His story opens as Gellert goes to bed and he rises from his bed, goes out in the dark night to feed his livestock. The  story revolves around his decision after abruptly coming across a poem by Gellert that is in a book on a table and open to that particular page. It lifts his spirits so much that he decides to make Gellert the gift of a wagon load of wood on Christmas eve. The farmer is very poor, so the gift is a true sacrifice, but in doing so he meets Gellert at his quarters in Leipzig and learns that carrying out one's daily duties with integrity, rejoicing with his wife and children -- what more is needed for a good life?

There is some nice imagery in the tale. As the farmer makes his way from his farm to the city with his load of wood, he thinks of times past when a man like himself might have been transporting the wood for the stake on which people of other religions would be tied before being burned to death. And this in turn makes him think of the dark monsters sitting on the necks of those whose beliefs tortured them and led to their deaths. Indeed, Auerbach's portrayal of the mental struggles of the two figures in the tale are somewhat hard to read. What is interesting is that the monsters against whom they struggle are not the "traditional" ones of the Catholic faith -- heaven, hell, the devil, the better angels --  but seem a secularized version of Protestantism: being "good" in everyday life is presented as an ongoing internal struggle against demons that constantly urge us to do the opposite of what is good for our souls (although the word is seldom used here) and betray our "better" self.

Oeser's monument to Gellert

Goethe mentions Gellert in a few places in his autobiography, never slightingly, although noting in particular the red ink with which the professor drew attention to Goethe’s poetic extravagances (too many mythological figures). The one professor with whom Goethe was on close terms when he was a student was Adam Friedrich Oeser (1771–1799), who was an important mediator between Goethe and Winckelmann's conception of antiquity. Goethe was, as Nicholas Boyle writes, an assiduous student in Oeser’s drawing academy. The classes took place in the “old castle,” which was also “an important meeting place,” where young Goethe, a “rich, talented, and well-connected young amateur” became personal friends of the family. Oeser was responsible for many artistic projects at this time, including ceiling paintings. When Goethe was in Weimar, Oeser had important commissions from Anna Amalia for the Wittums Palace there, and he also illustrated Wieland’s works. He was also known for monuments he created, which included one for his close friend Gellert after the latter's death.This monument was the subject of a poem by Goethe, written in 1776, presumably at the time Oeser was commissioned to produce the monument.

Als Gellert, der geliebte, schied,
Manch gutes Herz im Stillen weinte,
Auch manches matte, schiefe Lied
Sich mit dem reinen Schmerz vereinte;
Und jeder Stümper bei dem Grab
Ein Blümchen an die Ehrenkrone,
Ein Scherflein zu des Edlen Lohne,
Mit vielzufriedner Miene gab:
Stand Oeser seitwärts von den Leuten
Und fühlte den Geschiednen, sann
Ein bleibend Bild, ein lieblich Deuten
Auf den verschwundnen werthen Mann;
Und sammelte mit Geistesflug
Im Marmor alles Lobes Stammeln,
Wie wir in einen engen Krug
Die Asche des Geliebten sammeln.

Gellert image credit: Harvard Museums

Goethe and the Elegiac Tradition

I subscribe to the TLS, which does pretty good coverage of German literature and history, including Goethe. (I have even written a few reviews in the TLS on Goethe, which you can check out online.) But I also read literary coverage generally. Often reviews of other literary traditions lead me to consider Goethe, which was the case with a recent review: The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of Memory, Mourning and Consolation, edited by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan. The reviewer, Alan Jenkins, gave a very tough review, tough in the sense of focusing on the shortcomings of the volume (a Penguin Classics), in particular its omissions.

The origin of the genre was an ancient Greek one: a song of mourning or lament and, in addition, composed in a specific meter, “the elegiac couplet or distich.” Jenkins made it clear that in the transmission of the genre over the centuries covers a wide territory of subject matter. For instance, the Anglo-Saxon “The Seafarer” does not lament the death of an individual but instead reflects “gravely on serious matters of life and death”; likewise Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which Jenkins considers the best example of this type:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
         The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
         And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

At first glance, one cannot say of Goethe’s Roman Elegies, written between 1788 and 1790, that they are laments. Composed in elegiac distichs, they portray Goethe’s experience of sensual love in the Eternal City. At the same time, that background, Rome with its ancient monuments, is no more. Goethe’s “love affair” with the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans was a life-long one, so it might be said that even the Roman Elegies are saturated with sadness at the passing of that world.

"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Jim Stovall

But Goethe also penned an elegy back in 1767, when he was sixteen years old, which is indeed a poem about loss and is more in line with the elegies discussed in the TLS review. Indeed, I wonder if Goethe was aware of Thomas Gray's elegy, which was published in 1751, as his is entitled “Elegy on the Death of the Brother of My Friend" (Elegie auf den Tod des Bruders meines Freundes) and which was set in a churchyard. Herewith a link to the original; unfortunately I could find no English translation, which is an indication of the low esteem in which the poem is held in Goethe scholarship. The poem was never published, and was not discovered until 1895, decades after Goethe’s death, in a handwritten manuscript of nineteen poems, the so-called Buch Annette, prepared by the friend in the title of the poem, namely, Ernst Wolfgang Behrisch, Goethe’s confidant and mentor while he was a student in Leipzig. (You can find many posts on this blog in which Behrisch is discussed.) Apparently, Behrisch had a very nice handwriting, which can be seen in the image at the top, which is one of the poems in the collection of poems, most of which concern Goethe’s love interest while he was a student in Leipzig.

To do some research for this blog post, I went back and looked into the work of scholars I had not consulted since writing my dissertation on the “young Goethe,” in this case Heinz Kindermann and Eugen Wolff. The former’s work concerns the “Rococo Goethe,” the latter the “historical” development of Goethe’s poetry. Both scholars regard the poem as a “new direction” in Goethe’s poetic production, a move away from the subject of romantic dalliance that featured shepherds and shepherdesses toward a more sober tone.

The story the poem tells concerns a marriage abandoned, not as in Clavigo (see previous post), but because the prince whom Behrisch’s brother served required it of him. It is not specified what the demand was, but the bridegroom was honor-bound to observe it. There is a slight suggestion that he committed suicide, thus prefacing a theme found, as Kindermann and Wolff write, in The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Goethe does a nice job of telling the story, moving step by step, in the first verse setting the scene in a darkened courtyard featuring an an oak tree that has been felled by a storm. It is here that the brother’s body lies buried. A few verses on we read that his betrothed also lies buried, or as Goethe writes, her “heart” lies buried here: “Never did a heart suffer so.”

"O Gott, bestrafest du die Liebe
Du Wesen voller Lieb und Huld?
Denn nichts als eine heil’ge Liebe
War dieser Unglückseel’gen Schuld”

Her hope was to go with her beloved to the altar; instead the prince, in the fashion of tyrants, tore him from her side. Goethe doesn’t dwell on what the prince demanded, only that the lover’s heart was pierced. So that it did not appear that he abandoned his promise to marry her, his death serves as a sign of his fidelity.

“Leb’ wohl, es wein bey meinem Grabe
Jed’ zärtlich Herz gerührt von meiner Treue,
Dann eil’ die stolze Tyrannei,
Der ich schon längst vergeben habe,
Daß sie des Grabes Ursach sei,
Unwillig fühlend, schnell vorbey”

For my part, I don’t think one can attribute much in the way of personal experience on Goethe’s part: he never met Behrisch’s brother. Since the brother had a burial in a cemetery, he obviously was not a suicide. Moreover, research shows that the bride actually died a year before. The elegy seems to have been a “finger exercise” on Goethe’s part, and the “new direction” that scholars perceive in it is an indication of Goethe trying out every literary form he came across. It did not lead to further ventures in this genre until after his return from Italy in 1788, after which began an intensive immersion in the works of Greek and Latin poets and also in the metrical forms of the ancient literature. (Here is a great piece in the Goethe-Lexicon site.) Thus, the Römische Elegien and such works as Hermann und Dorothea (about which see my earlier post). The elegiac tradition, in the sense of lament and mourning, found a place in English literature. According to the TLS review, however, at least two German poets are featured in translation in the book under review: Rilke’s 9th “Duino Elegy” and Paul Celan’s “chilling ‘Deathfugue.’” Clearly there is more to say about the German tradition.

Image credits: Jim Stovall

Goethe and Marriage

 

As usual, I am caught up in many things, including an article on Goethe's 1774 play Clavigo, which I am completing (the footnotes took ages) for publication. It is not a play that we in the U.S. hear much about, and at the time of its publication there were people in Germany who didn't believe it was by Goethe. It appeared in the same year as The Sorrows of Young Werther while Götz von Berlichingen had also drawn much attention to Goethe's talent the year before. Goethe got the idea for Clavigo from an account by the French writer Pierre Beaumarchais, who is well known today for the plays The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. Before he wrote those plays, however, before Rossini and Mozart turned them into world-famous operas, Beaumarchais had caught Goethe's attention and indeed that of many people in the year 1774 with an account entitled Mémoires contre Goezman. It concerned a trip Beaumarchais had made to Spain in 1764, during which he sought, on behalf of a French financier, to "obtain for him and thus for France the much coveted license to sell slaves to the Spanish empire, which at that time was open for purchase," in addition to seeking to establish a monopoly for a French company to trade for twenty years in Louisiana. Such was the age of the Enlightenment in France.

But there was a side purpose to his trip, namely, the attempt to rescue the honor of his younger sister Marie-Louise. This sister had been engaged to the Canary Islands native José Clavijo y Fajardo, who, having arrived with no previous reputation in Madrid, was befriended by Beaumarchais's sisters who lived there. Clavijo began publishing a weekly paper in the style of the English Spectator entitled El Pensador, and by 1763 came to be regarded as an "enlightened journalist of Madrid," and also to have succeeded in rising to the position of keeper of one of the archives of the king of Spain, which would allow him to marry the younger sister. According to Beaumarchais, "He was promised the first honourable employment at court which became vacant. He outmanoeuvred all other claimants to my sister’s hand.  . . . The wedding was held back only by the need to wait for the employment which had been promised to this author of pamphlets. At the end of a delay of six years on one side and many cares and kindnesses on the other side, the job appeared and the man vanished."

Goethe read the memoir after its publication and spent the spring of 1774 writing the play Clavigo. Clavigo in his play is not the outright scoundrel that Beaumarchais portrays in his memoir, and Goethe himself did not write a revenge tragedy. Instead, he wrote a play about an ambitious man who abandoned his promise to marry Marie because marriage stood in the way of his freedom to pursue his literary career and rise in the esteem of the world. I imagine Clavigo to have looked like the figure above in Goya's 1820 painting of Tiburcio Pérez Cuervo (1785–1841), a Spanish architect who (according to the wall label at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) was responsible for several of the institutional buildings in Madrid.

Goethe's Clavigo appears to possess charisma and good looks. He never appears in public, according to his friend Carlos, without on his arm "eine stattliche, herrliche, hochäugige Spanierin ... deren volle Brust, ihr glühenden Wangen, ihre heißen Augen die Welt ringsumher zu fragen schienen: bin ich nicht meines Begleiters wert?" The magazine Clavigo edits is well loved by women.  In the fourth act of the play Carlos tells him how astonished women in Madrid would be were he to marry Marie, who is a nobody.

This is a long way to getting around to the subject of this post: "Goethe and Marriage." It was a subject that was on Goethe's mind in 1774. He was twenty-five, had finished his legal studies in Strassburg, which was followed by an apprenticeship at the imperial court in Wetzlar (where he fell in love with Lotte Buff), and was living in the parental home in Frankfurt and taking part, if without enthusiasm, in legal work. In Book 15 of his autobiography, which concerns the year 1774, Goethe claims that his parents already had their eyes on a local girl for him to marry. The scholar H. J. Meessen has drawn attention to the number of marriages taking place around Goethe. In 1773, for instance, Lotte Buff finally became Lotte Kestner, his sister Cornelia had married. Maximiliane von la Roche was about to approach the altar. Marriage, however, must have been a vexing topic for ambitious, bourgeois men. Even Herder, after two years of writing what would be called love letters to Caroline Flachsland, took a long time wedding her, until he found a position to his liking.

 In 1775, Goethe fell in love with a young woman (she was sixteen) named Lili Schönemann. (Be careful of the Wikipedia entry: lots of errors.) The poems and letters Goethe wrote at the time reveal that his passion for her was very real, which led, according to Dichtung und Wahrheit, to their engagement. Marriage, however was ultimately doomed because of status incompatibilities between him and Lili: he was Lutheran, she Reformed. She was also from a wealthy mercantile family, with a patrician way of life, unlike inhabitants of the Goethe household. Back then, those differences did matter, and in part 4 of the autobiography, he claims it was those differences that ended the engagement. Book 4, however, also concerns his decision to accept the invitation of Duke Carl August to visit Weimar. In the article I just finished on the play Clavigo, I have drawn attention to the parallels Goethe created in his account of the relationship with Lili in the autobiography and the relationship between Clavigo and Marie Beaumarchais in Goethe's early play, in which Clavigo faces the dilemma between marriage and a courtly career. As always with Goethe's autobiography: poetry or truth?

By the way, I do not know if the above quote, attributed to Goethe, is the real thing. If anyone knows the source, please write.

 

Goethe and Refugees, 2

This is the concluding part of the previous post on the subject of refugees and émigrés during the French Revolution in Goethe's works. As with Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, discussed in the earlier post, I am not dealing with the poetic character or literary values of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. (Another time perhaps!) As preparation for my participation on a panel at an 18th-century conference (see previous post), I am simply drawing attention here to what strikes me as interesting aspects of the subject of “refugees” in these works.

Goethe and Lili

One thing I did not mention in the previous post was that Goethe was personally familiar with an émigré of the type described in Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten. Her name was Lili Schönemann, and in an article I recently completed I have described her as the “last love” of Goethe’s youth. He and Lili met in January 1775, a meeting described in Dichtung und Wahrheit, in the Schönemann home in Frankfurt, where the 16-year-old Lili was playing the piano. The letters and poems Goethe wrote that year reveal that he was deeply in love with her. In his autobiography (published decades later) he writes that they did not marry because of “family differences.” Among the differences: Goethe’s family was Lutheran, Lili’s “Reformed.” Goethe does not draw attention to this, but the Reformed were in origin the French Calvinists whose conversion to Protestantism led to the French religious wars of the 17th century. The Huguenots, as they were called, fled France in the 17th century and took up residence in England, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, even the U.S.

Huguenot strongholds in France

 Lili Schönemann, like the figures described in the previous post, was also an émigré who left France in the wake of the revolutionary events. Her husband was a wealthy banker, baron von Türckheim, with whom she lived near Strassburg. In 1792, when things got out of hand with the French Revolution, he was deposed from his office as mayor. The family Türckheim also had a  farm near Strassburg, where they stayed for a while, but as the violence increased, her husband feared he would be among the Revolution’s victims. It was a tricky business, though perhaps not so hard for a single man to evade the frontier posts manned by revolutionary authorities. Lili, on her own, dressed as a farmer’s wife, along with her four children, also managed to escape and meet up with her husband in Mannheim. Goethe did not meet Lili at this time, but he was aware of her experience.

In 1795, as Schiller was getting ready to publish his journal Die Horen, he asked Goethe for a contribution. The result was the Unterhaltungen. You might say that the material was already there for Goethe to draw on. I would not say that the baroness in the Unterhaltungen is a stand-in for Lili; as in many of Goethe’s works, she may have simply provided the inspiration.

It’s worth noting that the wars that initially produced refugees in Europe were of a religious nature, in the 16th and 17th centuries; since the French Revolution, however, wars have been of a political nature. The kernel of the story of Hermann und Dorothea, however, which concerns “political” refugees, has a religious background, indeed a Huguenot one, and it is here that Lili may have played a role.

First, a short summary of the refugee situation in Hermann und Dorothea.

There are six characters in Hermann und Dorothea: the proprietor of the Golden Lion and his wife, their son Hermann, the village pastor, the apothecary, and Dorothea, who is among the refugees who have been driven through their small city by the French Revolution. Hermann’s mother sends him with food for their relief. Hermann encounters Dorothea, and “his heart at once goes out to her.” Indeed, it is love at first sight. On his return, he tells his mother that, if he is not permitted to marry Dorothea, he will never marry at all. His father had long tried in vain to persuade him to marry the wealthy neighbor’s daughter, and when the mother reports the son’s resolution, he at first indignantly refuses to accept a wife lacking a dowry. However, consultations among the father and the pastor and the apothecary lead to a happy ending.
 
Just when you think Goethe has invented something new, we find that there is a source! Here is that source as reported by the venerable Gutenberg organization. The Protestants referred to in the passage below are, of course, Huguenots, forced to leave Austria, but who then found welcome in Prussia, where foreign labor was welcome:

Salzburg Protestants on the way to Prussia

“The basis of [Hermann und Dorothea] is a historical incident. In the year 1731 the Archbishop of Salzburg drove out of his diocese a thousand Protestants, who took refuge in South Germany, and among whom was a girl who became the bride of the son of a rich burgher. The occasion of the girl's exile was changed by Goethe to more recent times, and in the poem she is represented as a German from the west bank of the Rhine fleeing from the turmoil caused by the French Revolution. The political element is not a mere background, but is woven into the plot with consummate skill, being used, at one point, for example, in the characterization of Dorothea, who before the time of her appearance in the poem has been deprived of her first betrothed by the guillotine; and, at another, in furnishing a telling contrast between the revolutionary uproar in France and the settled peace of the German village.”

The expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants was well known to Goethe. According to the site Salzburg Exiles: “The expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants created a sensation in the Protestant states of Europe. At least 300 different books and pamphlets were written about the migration in 1732–1733, celebrating the faith and perseverance of the Salzburgers.”

Image credits: Tales of Goethe; Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)

Goethe and Refugees

Unterhaltungen dt. Ausgewanderten onstage in 2016

The East Coast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ECASECS) is holding its annual conference at the end of October, for which I will be traveling to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It’s an opportunity to hear what one’s colleagues in 18th-century studies are up to. Samuel Johnson always seems to hold a special place in the conferences, as there are a number of Johnson scholars in the society. German is usually underrepresented at these conferences, but I will be making a presentation on a panel on the theme of refugees and emigrés in the 18th century, specifically their representation in Goethe’s works. Goethe wrote two works that thematize the subject.

One is Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, from 1795; the other Hermann und Dorothea, from 1797. The two works present a contrast in terms of the people affected by the revolutionary events, but the refuges are all “culturally” German, individuals and families who have been living in what is now part of France (since WWI), but which when Goethe was writing was more mixed with French and Germans. The territory is now  Alsace-Lorraine, on the left bank of the Rhine. A major city is Alsace is Strassburg, where Goethe went to study in 1770. Most of the people at the university were Germans, although you have to recall that in 1770 Germany itself was not a united nation. In the wake of the French Revolution and, later, the violence of 1792 (Robespierre was executed that year), many of these people fled to the German side of the Rhine.

The characters in the Unterhaltungen are nobles, who are referred to as “émigrés,” the kind of people you might think would flee the Revolution, even when forced to abandon considerable possessions. The group that makes up the cast of the Unterhaltungen have settled on an inherited estate on the German side. There are six major characters, all more or less individualized. The situation is different in Hermann und Dorothea. If you have seen pictures on TV or in the newspapers of anonymous groups of people crossing the southern border of the U.S., you will have an idea of the stream of refugees that are passing through a German town, to a destination not quite specified. Clearly, their future is in doubt. And as always with Goethe, what he wrote has a present-day resonance.

And as always with Goethe, there are lots of threads to pull together. Thus, this post will focus on the Unterhaltungen, which will be followed soon (crossing my fingers) by a post on Hermann und Dorothea.

The title of the Unterhaltungen — “Conversations of German Emigrés” — points to what is at stake among the refugees: how to have a civilized conversation when the participants are of totally different political views. The leader of the the group of the small caravan is a baroness (“von C”), a widow in “middle years” known for her accomplishments, especially in the domestic sphere, and who would like to maintain “good spirits” among the group even in a moment of fear and need. And while the pleasant region in which they have settled is interrupted by the thunder of canons, depending on the direction of the winds, no one can stop talking about the events of the day. The result is dissension in the company, which is divided in its opinions. It should be mentioned that among those who fled the revolutionary wars, many were still in favor of the aims of the French Revolution. I found online a letter from 1792 by a man named Johann Alois Becker to a friend. Becker was in Mainz, which was occupied by supporters of the Revolution:

“Finally, our people began to reject their chains and gain human dignity. Soon we will be free. A few days before the French attacked our city, I already felt a great joy. Freedom and equality finally won in Mainz! The French finally arrived to remove our despots, and the first of them was our prince-bishop, who had fled a few days earlier. I confess that I am delighted at the sight of the immense despair that gripped our noble lords. They were panicked at the approach of the French and piled everything they could carry and fled the city.”

And so it is in the Unterhaltungen that two characters come into conflict over the Revolution’s goals.

One is the Privy Councilor (“Geheimrat”), whose wife was in earlier years a close friend of the baroness and who is of the party that is partial to the old system. The other is Karl, son of the baroness, who has been dazzled by the word “freedom” and has already disturbed the serenity of the group with with his passion for the Revolution. At first the discussions between the two are carried on with some balance, but when the blockade of Mainz turns into a siege and one fears for the residents of that city, their opinions are expressed with unfettered passion. One subject was the fate of the Jacobins who had remained in the city: punishment or release, depending on the seriousness of their actions. The Privy Councilor was of the first (“hang them all”), to which Karl took great exception.

The arguments between the two become extremely partisan and intense, and the Councilor hopes that the Jacobins will receive their punishment, which he believes will be judiciously (unparteiisch) rendered. Karl is outraged. He hates the word “unparteiisch” and evaluates the insurrectionists as people who have not had the advantages of the ruling classes and will see their hopes stolen. The Councilor jokes, but with some bitterness, about idealizing a situation, while Karl intones against those whose thinking is reactionary. His mother tries to calm him down, without success; likewise the Councilor's wife. But their attempts are thwarted by her husband who points out the inexperience of youth and about the tendency of kids to play with fire. Karl is so outraged that he declares his wish that revolutionaries be successful with their weapons and urges the Germans to join partners with them and put an end to slavery.  He is convinced that the French will look at the Germans as their own and not sacrifice them, but will treat them with honor and confidence. The Councilor says it’s ridiculous to think that the French, for even a moment, in the event of capitulation or whatever, would care for the Germans. His hope is that, in the event of an Allied victory (Prussians, Austrians), the Jacobins all be hanged.

Karl rejoins that he hopes for the return of the guillotine in Germany and that no guilty head would be spared. To which the Councilor speaks of finding himself for a second time exiled by one of his own “countrymen,” and realizes that there will be less mercy from his fellow Germans than from the New Franks. He thereupon announces that he and his wife are leaving the company.

Sound familiar?

Karl promises to behave better in the future, but the baroness is not convinced that people can contain themselves (“Entsagung”) in these matters.  She demands from here on out that people behave with more decorum in her house. Although she cannot change people’s opinions on world events that affect everyone, as everyone operates on his own sentiments, in “society” one must sacrifice one’s own idiosyncracies, not in the name of virtue, but simply for politeness, the way in which, from childhood on, we encounter a person on the street. If nothing else, the smoke by day and the flames at night should remind us, she says, that our homes and our possessions may be destroyed and should avoid bringing into discussion subjects that make others uncomfortable or upset them. Thus, she calls for an “amnesty,” banning the events of the day from their conversations. If politics drives out civil discourse, how can “einen guten Ton” be established? Pull your strengths together and become instructive, useful, and especially sociable! There are so many subjects that we can learn from and share with others: travel, history, poetry, philosophy, science.

Are there any lessons to be had from this?

To be continued.

Image credit: Thilo Beu

Goethe's Clavigo

Goethe's Clavigo

Clavigo and Marie meet after a long absence

Lots of things have been going on since my last blogpost that have kept me from posting regularly, even though what has kept me occupied has concerned Goethe. In fact I have been immersed in Goethe, trying to get my “Goethe book” off the ground. But I also had to bring to completion an article on Goethe’s early (1774) play Clavigo. (So many footnotes to deal with!) From my graduate studies onward, my work has focused on the “young Goethe.” In considering the pre-1775 work, however, one cannot ignore a late work, namely, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe’s autobiography of the years before he went to Weimar at the end of 1775, which he only began planning in the early 19th century. I am not the only scholar who is skeptical of much of what he writes  about his youth and the creation of his early poetic works. My article on books 5 and 6 of Dichtung und Wahrheit, which has just appeared in the Goethe Yearbook (vol. 31), addresses the “truth” versus the “poetry” of the Gretchen episode in those books. It is entitled “The End of the Affair: Goethe’s Gretchen ‘Roman.’” My contention is that the charming love “affair” with Gretchen, which the autobiography relates as occurring in 1763–1764, was a fictionalization of Goethe’s relationship with Käthgen Schönkopf from 1767 to 1768 when he was a student in Leipzig. By setting the Gretchen episode in his adolescence, Goethe underlined the immaturity of the poetry prompted by his acquaintance with Käthgen, namely, anacreontic poetry, a style he would abandon, especially the “Lüsternheit” (lasciviousness) represented by the poems in the “Annette” collection.

My article on Clavigo does something similar with the final books of DuW, in particular Goethe’s account of the origin of the play itself in 1774 as well as his portrait of his final youthful love affair with Lili Schönemann in1775. Goethe himself points in DuW to this issue of poetic re-creation, attributing to his friend Merck the following characterization of himself: “Dein Bestreben, … deine unablenkbare Richtung ist, dem Wirklichen eine poetische Gestalt zu geben.”

Also keeping me busy is another Goethe late work, Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Refugees).  The theme of the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in October is “Conflicts and Transitions in the Global Eighteenth Century.”  My friend and colleague Linda Merians has organized a panel for the conference —“Conflicts and Transitions:  Refugees and Refugeeism” — on which I will speak on Goethe’s tale of German-speaking exiles fleeing France after the French Revolution. Exiles: sounds like a timely topic. More later.

Image credit: Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Clavigo, by Goethe"

Jena anew: Novalis

The Blue Flower

My previous post was all over the place. As I wrote, the Jena circle and its influence is a complex story. The cast in the opening paragraph of the post includes people whose names are unfamiliar to most of us today, but whose works, as I wrote, had major influence on writers outside of Germany. Today, I want to draw attention to Novalis, whose real name, Friedrich von Hardenberg, shows his aristocratic background. Had he lived longer (he died at not even thirty years of age in 1801), he might have become a serious rival to Goethe in his influence. (Although he lived a longer life, the same might be said of Friedrich Hölderlin, who in 1806, at the age of thirty-six, succumbed to mental illness.) Among other things, Novalis is associated with the image of the "blue flower," and it is this image on which Penelope Fitzgerald drew in The Blue Flower, a novel about Novalis's life.

I won't go into the details here, but there is much about Novalis's work and life that would appeal to "young" people. The image below, for instance, apparently an album cover, is a perfect one for the inspiration felt by a German "romantic rock band" from Hamburg, who (according to Amazon) "specialized in taking romantic, atmospheric symphonic rock pieces and interspersing them with harder rocking material, dynamic keyboard flourishes, and harmonic guitar interplay."

But I have just come across a New York writer named Matthew Gasda who is inspired by another aspect of Novalis's legacy. I leave it to readers of this post to do their own research on Gadsa, but he seems to be well known among theater folks in New York. My interest here is his Substack, which goes by the title "Novalis." The contents of "Novalis" are what the Romantic writers called "fragments." The journal I mentioned in the earlier post, Atheneaum, published numerous fragments by Novalis who said, according to Andrea Wulf, that his "nature" consisted of "moments." It was (again per Wulf) Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel who elevated the fragment to a literary genre, and the Jena writers deployed them in order "to publish the greatest variety of ideas in a very few pages" -- and, moreover, in succinct and efficient form. Here is Novalis: "Friends, the soil is poor; we must scatter seed abundantly for even a modest harvest."

With that said, let me quote a few of Matthew Gasda's very pithy "fragments" from a recent entry on his Substack. In the second one, in particular, I hear echoes of Fichte:

Effectively, what people want out of supposedly transgressive downtown New York in 2024 is Disneyland for bored adults. Lights up early. Not much drinking or smoking, just stimulants. The vague possibility of sex and a lot of gossip and self-promotion.

The clout economy incentivizes laziness. You become an entrepreneur of the self rather than a committed artist, a craftsperson. The temptation is to produce one, maybe two things, get enough of a reputation (clout) and then produce memes and gossip and derivative products of the self associated with the original works.

Image credits: Das Goetheanum