Wilhelm Waiblinger

I had intended to continue posting on my reading of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life, but before doing so I began some cross-checking in my copy of Die Goethe Chronik by Rose Unterberger in order to see what else Goethe was up to when he was meeting Eckermann. Poetically speaking, it appears that the most important thing in Goethe's life in the second half of 1823 was his meeting of Ulrike von Levetzow during his "Trinkkur" in Marienbad beginning in July, which produced Trilogie der Leidenschaft. Before that, however, before Goethe left for Marienbad, he received a copy from Boisserée of Wilhelm Waiblinger's epistolary novel Phaeton, accompanied by a letter from Waiblinger.

Waiblinger is not well known today, although I discovered this past summer that there are three English translations of his life of Friedrich Hölderlin: Friedrich Hölderlins Leben, Dichtung und Wahnsinn. Phaeton was written under the influence of his acquaintance with Hölderlin while Waiblinger was a student in Tübingen. Hermann Hesse wrote a lovely story about an outing of Waiblinger and Hölderlin entitled "In Pressels Gartenhaus."

This past summer I read and reviewed the latest translation of the Hölderlin biography, by Will Stone, for the Times Literary Supplement. For those who are interested, it appeared in the double issue of August 24 & 31, 2018. Like many Romantic poets, Waiblinger died young, after contracting malaria in the Pontine marshes and also undergoing bloodlettings. The Hölderlin biography was published in 1830, a year after Waiblinger's death in Rome. There is a nice precis of Waiblinger's own life and work at the Bibliotheca Augustana, from which the image above is taken.

According to Rose Unterberger's Goethe Chronik, Goethe mentions in his diary of July 16, 1826 receiving a letter from Waiblinger enclosing a copy of his Erzählungen aus der Geschichte des jetzigen Griechenlands. No further evaluation of either Phaeton or the Tales.

Goethe's shoes

As I have frequently mentioned on this blog, Goethe turns up in the darndest places. The previous post led me to a new one. Herewith a little pre-Christmas cheer. The shoes pictured above, with the iconic silhouette of Goethe in the tongue, are a product of a company called Saucony. According to Nice Kicks,  the little pieces of architecture seen in the photo below are "inspired by the Goethe Museum in Dusseldorf," of which (again according to Nice Kicks) Goethe was "the founder."

To top it off (or is it "bottom everything off"?): "Sporting a red rose and grey colorway, the sneaker has a premium suede upper and a white midsole. Making the sneakers even more unique, Goethe’s poems are printed in a variety of places like the heel panels, insole and laces." (My emphasis.)

 As always, click on photos to enlarge.

Eckermann's Goethe

Johann Peter Eckermann

Work on a novel has kept Goethe Girl very busy with little time to think about blogging. Still, there is always a hankering to look at something concerning Goethe, and recently I had Amazon send me Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. It is the kind of book that I can pick up and read a discrete section and feel satisfied that I have learned something new about Goethe, even if filtered through the eyes of a person who seems to have given up everything, even the love of his life, to wait attendance on his hero. By the time I have written more posts on this subject, I may be able to come to my own conclusions about Eckermann, around whom the consensus seems to be mixed.

Margaret Fuller, who did much to transmit enthusiasm for Goethe and for German literature to Americans in the early 19th century, made the first English translation of the Conversations. She was self-taught in German, and, as I browsed her translation online, there were a few places where I was pulled up short and checked the German. I have a feeling it was less of failing to understand the meaning than that she was rapidly translating and did not go back to check things. There was one place, however, where I was struck by a very strange sentence. It appears during Eckermann's inaugural reception, on June 10, 1823, in the house on Frauenplan. He is escorted upstairs to meet Goethe, who soon appears. And here is the sentence in Fuller's translation:

"Goethe soon came in, dressed in a blue coat, and with shoes."

No fooling! Goethe wore shoes!

And then I checked the German. And here it is:

"Es währte nicht lange ... so kam Goethe, in einem blauen Oberrock und in Schuhen ..."

Is Goethe Girl missing something here?

Goethe travels

The travels in the title of this post do not refer to Goethe's own travels, a subject I will write about at some point. It concerns the travel of "Goethe," the person, the concept. I have posted on various occasions concerning the many places outside of literature or German letters that Goethe pops up (including in Korea), but today I would like to consider his presence in Japan. Goethe, it seems represents an icon of style, to judge by the life style magazine, launched in 2006, entitled GOETHE.

Make that ゲーテ

As I glean from the "About Us" function on the webpage of the magazine (with helpful assistance from Google Translate), the market niche is "the positive and motivated business person." Why Goethe? Here again, only slightly edited, I let the magazine speak for itself:

"Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -- The world writer who everyone knows.
Actually it has a variety of faces such as politicians, natural scientists, theater director.
In addition, travelers and those who love women (broken hearted at the age of seventy-eight years old at the age of 73 was also broken heart!).
Ideal for such a way of life like Goethe, a magazine to enrich life."

Lionel Messi

Indeed, who else better exemplifies such ideals as Goethe? And the aim of a person influenced by Goethe:

"Desire to become acquainted with business persons like themselves.
It is a Salon where "knowledge," "learning" and "experience" will help one's ambition for success.
At the Goethe "Salon," acquire the necessary knowledge, interact with many people, a place full of intellectual curiosity and vibrancy."

The Langen Foundation

The issues of the magazines include portraits of very successful men and women, including Lionel Messi, who is the richest soccer player in the world, with a net worth of $400 million. But also the architect Anda Tadao, whose Wikipedia entry is extremely impressive. Above is an image of one of Ando's commissions, the Oriental Art Museum at the Langen Foundation in North Rhein-Westfalia.

Delacroix's "Faust" lithographs

Auerbachs Keller

Today I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with friend Philippe from Reutlingen. He comes every year at Thanksgiving, and we spend at least one day at the Met. I spend a lot of time at the Met, as I continue to do editorial work there, but when I accompany a friennd I really pause and look at the works of art. In this season the Met has outdone itself. But that is nothing new. Besides the Masterpieces of Dutch Art in the Robert Lehman wing, there is a spectacular show of Armenian art, focusing on the Christian influence, with manuscripts from as early as the eleventh century. I will post some pictures later. Also in the Lehman wing is a small exhibit of Tintoretto portraits.

Faust and Mephisto in the Harz Mountains.

The Delacroix exhibition is one of the blockbusters for which the Met is famous and handles so well, even if lots of paintings by Delacroix in European collections did not travel, as they are too fragile. Still, an interesting selection. What most struck me is that Delacroix, despite being consider a Romantic artist, is so thematic in his choice of subjects. Most of the themes are historical or biblical/mythological. Although he came of age after the fall of Napoleon, there is no painting commemorating that period, not even the French Revolution. I am not a student of his oeuvre, however, and it could be that the Louvre, which is a co-producer of this exhibition, has some "contemporary" works.

Ich bitt' Euch, nehmt Euch meiner an!

An entire room was devoted to the Faust lithographs by Delacroix. I post photos of a three here, one only in detail: a scene featuring Mephisto as he and Faust travel in the Harz Mountains. I particularly like the scene of  Mephisto giving the student ("was man schwarz auf weiß besitzt/ kann man getrost nach Hause nehmen") some bad advice. The Goethezeitportal has a good piece on the series, with the Delacroix series seen in postcard format. (As always, click on images to enlarge.)

Gingko in the snow

This is becoming an annual thing, if a post last year on the subject constitutes the beginning of a series. Really cold weather causes leaves to fall practically overnight. The first snow fell on Manhattan two days ago. Entering Central Park, I captured the fate of the gingko again. Click to enlarge.

Dark falls so early now. I walked home shortly after 5 p.m. Manhattan looks at its best at night, with all the electric illumination, but the resulting photo from my little Nikon camera offers an eerie prospect.

The representational Goethe

Bouguereau, The Shepherdess (1889)

I have been neglectful about posting in recent months, as most of my waking thoughts are given over to the novel I am writing. For those who do not know Goethe Girl, it may be of interest to learn that, before Goethe came into her life, she published two novels. That occurred ages ago, after which, for reasons not to be gone into here, she went to graduate school and wrote her dissertation on Goethe. The dissertation concerned the pre-Weimar Goethe, before Goethe betook himself to Weimar and never looked back. My focus was on the poetic genre known as the idyll -- alternately, pastoral -- which appears throughout Goethe's oeuvre, from the Rococo lyrics of the Leipzig student years to the Philomen and Baucis episode in the last scenes of Faust. Like other traditional genres, the idyll is set in a communal world and displays reverence for the order of that world as well as for the regular movements of the heavens, the changing seasons, the regularity of festivals and harvests. Any ripples that disturb the regularity of the pastoral world -- a lost ribbon, a lost sheep -- are part of a larger wave of time in which everyone and everything are merged in a continuous human cycle.

Hermann Ramberg, Hermann and Dorothea

Such a conception of life was being undermined already by Goethe's time, a breakdown that also undermined traditional poetic genres. Who writes an epic in the style of Milton anymore? Goethe had a great fondness for traditional genres, however, and thus he often drew on the idyll, but in doing so the idyll is always portrayed as endangered. One example is Hermann und Dorothea. in which the French Revolution casts its shadow over the loving interlude of wooing a wife And, of course, Philomen and Baucis must be destroyed in order to make way for progress, the most modern of modern conceptions.

While this theme of the destruction of the idyll runs through Goethe's oeuvre, the move to Weimar brought about a departure in his poetic production. Goethe gradually left behind the "Genius" mentality that characterizes the production of the pre-Weimar works. Indeed, I have often thought about what Goethe might have been like had he not secluded himself for another fifty-plus years in the backwater of Weimar. Evidently, Goethe thought he had a lot to learn there, but what he produced was eigenartig: exclusive to himself. Goethe was of course familiar with the works of contemporaries, but one only has to consider his novels after The Sorrows of Young Werther to understand that he was not working the vein that has played such an important role in the conceptualization of the modern novel. I am thinking in particular of the British tradition.

I was again looking through Hermann Hesse's essay "Dank an Goethe" (1932), in which Hesse also refers to the split, if one can call it that, between the pre-Weimar poetry and what came thereafter. Hesse writes that he came to know Goethe as a boy, when it was easy to succumb to the power of the early lyrics and to Werther. That Goethe was "der Sänger, der ewig junge und naive," who brought "samt dem Duft von Wald, Wiese und Kornfeld, und in seiner Sprache, von der Frau Rat her, die ganze Tiefe und die ganze Spielerei der Volksweisheit, die Klänge von Natur und Handwerk, und dazu einen hohen Grad von Musik" (the scent of the forest, of meadow and cornfield, and, in a language inherited from his mother, the entire playfulness of folk wisdom, the sounds of nature and of craftsmanship and, in addition, a high degree of musicality).

Goethe and Carl August on Swiss journey, 1779

Yet in time Hesse also began to encounter a different Goethe: the great writer, the humanist, the ideologue and educator, the critic and the literary man, the friend of Schiller, the collector of art, the journal founder, the author of countless essays, the correspondent. This is not the fresh, youthful poet we know from his Sesenheim lyrics. Indeed, his appearance (attested in contemporary portraits, but even more so in contemporary accounts) is bourgeois, somewhat stuffy, official, miles distant from the wildness of Werther. Hesse doesn't say so, but this was Goethe "becoming Goethe," a transformation that took place only after he went to Weimar. This Goethe was what has been called "suprapersonal" ("überpersönlich). He became a representational person, somewhat like in Habermas's use of that term.  Though this be madness, according to Hesse, yet there was method in it: "die Ermöglichung und Begründung eines vom Geist regierten Lebens, für ihn selbst nicht nur, sondern für seine Nation und Zeit" (the facilitation and justification of a life dominated by Spirit, not simply for himself, but for his nation and his era).

Image credit: Goethezeitportal; Die Weltwoche (AKG Images, Keystone)

Goethe and Music

Schubert's autograph of a simplified accompaniment to his "Erlkönig"

One of my favorite German radio programs is HR2's "Doppelkopf." A recent program featured the well-known Goetheaner Dieter Borchmeyer. Doppelkopf's mandate, according to the website, is "Interessante Zeitgenossen –– Menschen, die etwas zu sagen haben, unterhalten sich 50 Minuten lang mit einem Gastgeber über ihre Arbeit und ihr Leben." Each program also includes musical selections chosen by the guest. The Borchmeyer program began with the sounds of Schubert's setting of "Erlkönig," featuring the "Getrammel" that Goethe noted when the piece was performed for him by Maria Szymanowska in the early 1820s. As was noted, the 18-year-old Schubert had sent the piece to Goethe in 1815. It is usually reported that Goethe sent the package back unopened, but Borchmeyer contends that this should not be interpreted as rejection of the work by Goethe so much as by the fact that Goethe was simply overburdened by the large number of such requests that daily arrived in his mailbox.

Goethe heard Wilhelmina Schröder sing "Gretchen am Spinnrad," but Borchmeyer contends that Goethe was a "musical lay person" who could scarcely have got the point of a composition simply by reading the notes. And in any case he adhered to a "Liedaesthetik" that was dominant until at least the 1860s, according to which "es wurde ganz klar gesagt, daß das Lied ein Strophenform hat, die besagt, daß die Form musikalisch abgebildet werden muss." Goethe was an opponent of naturalistic imitation in music and held that the composer should develop a “Symbolik für das Ohr."

Mendelssohn serenades Goethe

Any impression that Weimar was a backwater and that Goethe lacked understanding of developments in the world of music beyond its confines was dismantled by Borchmeyer, who noted, among other things, the different musicians who arrived at Goethe's door. These included Paginini, the young Mendelssohn (as portrayed, opposite, by Moritz Oppenheim) and the young Clara Wieck, and Spontini. Goethe's contribution to productions of opera was also noted. Borchmeyer called Goethe "ein Pioneer in der Bühnenwirkung von Mozart." As for the story about Beethoven and Goethe, Borchmeyer calls Bettina “eine geniale Lügnerin” who invented a meeting that did not take place. If Beethoven was not 100 percent to Goethe's taste as a person, he recognized his artistic greatness: “Energischer, zusammengefasster, innerlicher habe er keinen Menschen erlebt.”

There was of course a discussion of the rendering of Goethe's poems and other writings, especially from Faust II, but I was particularly intrigued by what Borchmeyer said of Goethe's contribution to "Entstehung der Liebe" in literary form in the 18th century, especially on the example of Gretchen at the spinning wheel. In this connection, Borchmeyer mentioned Goethe's self-censorship concerning the wording in Faust I of the famous line: "Mein Busen drangt sich nach ihm hin." In the Urfaust, it reads, “Mein Schoss, Gott! drängt sich nach ihm hin.” Unfortunately, Schubert could not do anything about this, as he only knew Faust I, and the  “körperliche Erweckung der Leidenschaft des jungen Mädchens, das immer steigert” is weakened.

There is an excellent entry in the Goethe-Handbuch, by Günter Hartung, on Goethe and music, which covers in more detail the symbiosis between Goethe's poetry and its musicality, but Hartung dismisses the influence of Catholic church music on Goethe. Borchmeyer, however, finds that the Italian Journey is just as much a discovery of music as it was of art. He mentions in particular the effect of a piece of Renaissance music, Allegri's Miserere, a setting of Psalm 51, that Goethe heard during Holy Week in the Sistine Chapel. Whatever Goethe may have thought about Catholicism, its liturgical music fascinated him.

I recommend going to the podcast itself for other topics covered in the discussion, including Goethe's "Tonlehre," and also reading Hartung's more detailed description. This was a project that arose, according to Hartung, in connection with increasing scientific interests on Goethe's part by the beginning of the 19th century.

Goethe's aura

I return here to Goethe and Bettina, the subject of a 1924 essay by Hermann Hesse that I have come across in my research for my book review. Hesse begins the essay by alluding to the earlier legends surrounding  Goethe's relationship with Bettina, which have ceased with the appearance a few years earlier of the edition of the original correspondence underlying Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kind.

In a previous post, I discussed Milan Kundera’s account of the relationship between Goethe and Bettina. Hesse likewise notes the practically one-sided nature of the correspondence, but he is more sympathetic to Bettina. He contrasts the numerous, long, and loving letters she wrote, which received only short, terse, and scarcely cordial replies from Goethe, often no reply at all. There is in Bettina’s letters much that is beautiful, heartfelt, effusive, while in Goethe’s there is hardly anything worth reading. Not only did Goethe not reciprocate the touching, abiding, soulful love that Bettina felt for him until her death, but he also seems not to have completely recognized or understood it. Indeed her long letters, full of verbose enthusiasm, annoyed him, with his occasional responses lending a chilly note. Had she not come recommended by Goethe’s aged mother, he probably would have dismissed her at first encounter. Goethe’s error was that he could not say no, but also not yes, with the result that the “relationship” dragged on for years as a brittle affair. If there is any blame to be ascribed, it is Goethe’s.

And yet, Hesse writes, the edition is important for documenting two lives over two decades. We see Bettina transformed from a cheeky young woman to a wife and mother. As for Goethe, we witness his aging, his dismantlement, his increasing stiffening and isolation (Altwerden, Abbauen, zunehmende Versteifung und Vereinsamung), indeed his total dying out (Absterben), which is itself a poignant and sublime spectacle. For Hesse, the “aged Goethe” is illuminated here. Bettina's letters embrace him in a cloud of adoration and love, urge him to forget how old he is, and dare him to be infected with affectionate youthfulness. Initially such wooing is met with a few friendly words, even a smile or two, but soon there arrives the slow, inexorable distancing, so that one is not surprised, after the contretemps with Christiane, that Goethe had not a word to say about Christiane’s lack of self-control and simply cut off Bettina and her husband.

After Christiane’s death, Bettina resumed her letters to Goethe, with a new, affecting tone, which the “young Goethe” would not have withstood, but the present Goethe is unresponsive. No more letters from his side, though he did receive her in Weimar.

This new series of one-sided series of professions of love, of wooing, of “seelische” tributes is, however, eloquent negative testimony to a process in Goethe that might be ascribed to aging, but that really represents weariness (Müdewerden). While Bettina’s youthful voice continues to sing extravagantly, the other voice is absent. Goethe as such no longer exists. He has become a secretive (geheimnnisvoll) old man in the process of depersonalizing himself and disappearing completely into anonymity. This is not the effect of decrepitude, as is clear from his continuing studies and other attainments in these final decades. But he is no longer a person (er ist kein Person mehr); he is not one to whom one can direct songs of love or worship. One has the feeling that the voice of the world no longer reach his ears.

Bettina's last encounter with Goethe was in Weimar, in 1824. The great one, as Hesse writes, is a physically small and peevish old man who, in the course of the evening, keeps repairing to an adjacent room from which one can hear the sounds of him pouring himself a glass of wine. But it is not Goethe who speaks on this occasion, not the lips of an old man wet with wine; he is now a Nameless one, a no longer Personal one (der Namenlose, nicht mehr Persönliche, in den er sich verwandelt hat).

What seems to interest Hesse is the fatal, uncanny, indeed unearthly effect of an outsized Genius like Goethe. The letters reveal the tendency of the aged Goethe to die to the imprisonment of an almost totally over-cultivated personality (aus der Haft einer nahezu überkultivierten Persönlichkeit zu sterben) and to grow into a super personal and anonymous being (ins Überpersönliche, ins Anonyme hinüber zu wachsen) And while we sense that Goethe is no longer a person, not the lover or recipient of her letters and of her adoration, we see that she is a creation, an emanation of him. Consider, for instance, the beginning of the correspondence, in which she appears as a small, spirited boat striving to reach a far mountain: it is the boat that is active, the mountain is passive. But if we recognize that the mountain is magnetic, then the relationship is reversed. It is Goethe who generates the atmosphere in which everyone else participates. This quality of sucking up everyone else (Aufgesogensein) is clear if we consider those person less active (than Bettina) and less important who cluster around Goethe: Riemer, Eckermann, Meyer, even Zelter. Why do they live on? Why are their letters published, why do we read them? Why, after a century, does this “Gespensterlicht” still flicker around their marginal existences? Because, from each of them, a small bit of Goethe’s radiance emanates.

I render the last part of the essay in Hesse’s lovely prose. After considering that everything that Bettina wrote may have been a fib, a lie, Hesse writes:

Ist es nicht ganz einerlei, was Bettina sagt, ist denn nicht sie selbst, ihre ganze Beziehung zu Goethe, ihr Weinen und Knien in einem Zimmer neben jener Weinflasche, ist dies alles zusammen denn eine Eigenwelt, mit eigenen Gesetzen, mit freiem Willen zu Lüge oder Wahrheit, ist es nicht vielmehr ein Luftkreis um Goethe, ein Faden seines Geistesnetzes, eine Ausstrahlung seines Zentrums?

Picture credits: Getty Images

Artists monumentalized

The neglect of Goethe on this blog this summer is due to my summer reading of Hermann Hesse in connection with a review I am writing of the English translation of a German biography of Hesse. Goethe comes across over and over in Hesse's writings, and hundreds of times in the biography. I estimate that the figures most frequently referred to by Hesse and that serve as touchstones for him are Goethe, Novalis, Nietzsche, and Mozart. This past day I have been reading "Klingsor's Last Summer," which Hesse wrote in 1919, when he had moved to Ticino. Hesse was apparently subject to frequent mood swings, and this story captures the volatility of the character of the artist Klingsor. In one scene, he and his friend, a fellow artist named Louis the Cruel (Louis der Grausame), have gone on an outing that leads them to the garden of an inn where they enjoy fish, rice with mushrooms, and peaches with maraschino cherries. (Hesse is big on the details of food and drink.) Naturally, lots of wine is drunk. The subject, as is often the case with Hesse, is civilizational decline. Goethe and Schiller come up in the discussion. (I quote here the German, as the English translation of the new biography has not yet appeared.)

Es fällt mir ein, daß jetzt da die zwei Maler sitzen, die unser gutes Vaterland hat, und dann habe ich ein scheußliches Gefühl in den Knieen, wie wenn wir beide aus Bronze wären und Hand und Hand auf einem Denkmal stehen müßten, weißt du, so wie der Goethe und der Schiller. Die können schließlich auch nichts dafäur, daß sie ewig dastehen und einander an der Bronzehand halten müssen, und daß sie uns allmählich so fatal und verhaßt geworden sind ...

He goes on to curse all the professors who periodize and transform great artists and writers into monuments.

The Goethe and Schiller monument in the above photo is in Syracuse, New York. It was produced in 1911, based on the original by Ernst Rietschel.

Malcolm Point hike

The post below was supposed to appear on my Sointula blog. I must have been so tired from the trek yesterday that, when I downloaded my photos at 11 p.m. last evening, I posted the following account here. For more on my summer sojourn in Sointula, go to that blog.

********

Today Milan, Lauren, and I went for a hike at Malcolm Point, which can be seen in the above map. It was a vigorous trek, for which I purchased a pair of good hiking shoes at the thrift store yesterday for $2.00. Worth every sent, although the soles were somewhat slippery when I climbed -- or slid -- down the last part of the trail to the beach. Any piece of wood I might have grabbed hold of was so soft that it immediately broke up in my hands when I grabbed hold of it.  I was too busy holding on to the rope to take pictures of my effort to reach the bottom. Herewith some pictures from our trek. (Click to enlarge.)

It can be seen that I am fascinated by the moss along the trail. It is in places so soft and puffy underfoot that you feel like you are walking on pillows.

One little bear

Two little bears

Three little bears

On the trail

Milan and Goethe Girl

Milan and Laura

Goethe and Hermann Hesse

Goethe Girl in Sointula

I am again in Sointula, on Malcolm Island in British Columbia, where I have spent the last five summers. I call it my summer idyll.  (If anyone is interested in my activities here, go to my Sointula blog.) While working on my novel, I also attend to a couple other projects, one of which is a review of a biography of Hermann Hesse by Gunnar Decker that will be published in English translation by Harvard University Press in the fall. I taught Hesse's Demian in an undergraduate course many years ago and have also read Peter Camenzind and Siddhartha. In order to immerse myself deeper into Hesse's oeuvre, I brought several other Hesse novels with me. The past few days I have been working my way through Steppenwolf.

Working is the operative word. How much nihilism and negativity can you tolerate as a reader? How much do you want to read about the  existential crisis of alienated males? Such features are present in nuce in Peter Camenzind (a really beautifully written book), but by the time of Steppenwolf (1927) they have been extensively worked out. I fear it will become worse in succeeding novels. Today, however, I came across a very amusing episode in which Goethe plays a role.

Portrait of Hesse by Ernst Würtenberger (1905)

Already before I had reached this episode it seemed obvious that Faust's remark concerning "the two souls" that inhabit his breast applied to these alienated men populating Hesse's work. I am not going to bother (at least not now) with the secondary research on Hesse and Goethe. Allow me simply to review the episode.

Harry Haller is the so-named Steppenwolf, totally out of sorts with bourgeois society and against which he rages ad nauseum. At the same time, he longs for human companionship and love. He has all the prejudices of the highly educated against bourgeois propriety and bourgeois self-satisfaction, which provokes very bad behavior at the home of a young professor of East Indian languages who has invited him to dinner. Practically the first thing he notices, after the maid has received him, is an etching of a Goethe portrait atop a small round table. There was no sign in it of Goethe's fiery expression, not a trace of his solitude or tragic nature, no demonic quality. Instead, the image is one of control and moral uprightness (Biederkeit). In the course of things, Harry insults the professor's wife, who was fond of the portrait.

Steppenwolf, ca. 1970

Harry storms out and is engaged in a night of wandering through the town, going from bar to bar. Very late he finds himself drawn to a restaurant-bar (Wirtshaus) in which dancing is going on. It is here that he meets a young woman, maybe a prostitute or maybe simply the kind of female who makes money dancing with customers in such places. He falls into conversation with her, and she gives him a lesson or two concerning his childlike behavior. Because he has never learned to dance, he refuses to dance with her. She promises to return to him after she has danced with another customer and tells him to take a nap. So, in the midst of the loud music and all the noise at such a place, he does fall asleep and has a dream about Goethe.

The portrait of Goethe in the dream reminded me of the Goethe of Milan Kundera's novel Immortality, on which I posted earlier. In the dream Harry is a journalist who has an audience with His Excellency. Goethe appears, "small and very stiff," wearing the medal of some order on his "Klassikerbrust." He addresses Harry as follows: "You seem not to be in agreement with us and our efforts?" To which Harry replies in the affirmative: "You are too solemn for us, too vain and pompous. Essentially too insincere" (zu wenig aufrichtig). Goethe smiles in response, his officially closed lips open, and the words of the poem "Dämmerung senkte sich von oben" pours from his mouth, which disarms Harry to such an extent that he is ready to kneel down at Goethe's feet.

Still, Harry goes on to complain. Despite recognizing and feeling the dubiousness, the hopelessness of the human condition, the glory of the individual moment and its miserable withering away, the imprisoning character of everyday existence, etcetera, etcetera, in short all the hopelessness, exasperation, and burning despair of the human lot -- why on earth did Goethe nevertheless preach the opposite, express belief and optimism, extol persistence and meaning?

Goethe is unruffled, continues to smile, and asks Harry if he is repelled by Mozart's Magic Flute. In Goethe's words: "Die Zauberflöte stellt das Leben als einen köstlichen Gesang dar, sie preist unsere Gefühle, die doch vergänglich sind, wie etwas Ewiges und Göttliches, ... predigt Optimismus und Glauben." Goethe is not offended by Harry's irritated response, that Mozart lived only to the age of twenty-eight and did not experience the demands of persistence, order, and rigid dignity. "It may seem inexcusable," Goethe says, that he reached the advanced age of eighty-two, but he always had a great desire for old age (Dauer) and feared death. The battle against death, along with the unconditioned and obstinate desire for life, however, are principles by which all outstanding men have operated. His own desire in this respect was the same at twenty-eight as at eighty-two. And even though there was plenty of playfulness in his nature, he also became aware that play (Spiel)  must also have an end.

Lotte and Werther dance

This is a minor summary, and I advise going to the original. It goes on in this vein, with Goethe refusing to take Harry seriously, but instead to start prancing around cheerfully. Harry, who had refused to dance with the young woman, concedes that at least Goethe had not failed to learn that social art.

Images: Creating the 19th-Century Ballroom

Goethe everywhere

I have mentioned on many occasions that Goethe crops up in unsuspected contexts. Today I came across another intellectual touchstone. As always when checking out a work of non-fiction, I consult the index to see if Goethe is mentioned, and today I came across a reference in a biography of Thomas Henry Huxley, which appeared in the well-known Twayne's English Authors Series in 1969. The biography was written by my friend Albert Ashforth, who died this past year. Al had been an English professor before he became a writer of novels about the war on terror, and his first book had been the Huxley biography.

Huxley, a supporter of Charles Darwin's work on evolution against the outrages of clerics and others, called himself "Darwin's bulldog." Huxley is an early example of a public intellectual who promotes certain ideas, which, if repeated often enough, become familiar to people and lead to the ideas being institutionalized. There is some doubt whether Huxley actually accepted the theory of evolution, but he was skeptical of theology and abhorred "humbug." As Al writes in his Huxley bio, "Huxley's differences with Christian ecclesiastics were almost without exception academic, centering generally on abstruse points of theology; on the essential there was no quarrel." As Huxley himself wrote in 1892:

"I have a great respect for the Nazarenism of Jesus. But the only religion that appeals to me is prophetic Judaism. Add to it something from the best Stoics and something from Spinoza and something from Goethe, and there is a religion for men."

Huxley's salute to Goethe underlines the penetration of Goethe's ideas in Britain in the 19th century, which was the subject of my blogpost last year in connection with Greg Maertz's book on Goethe in Victorian Britain.

Goethe and Bettina

Goethe and "Bettschatz"

 Just the other day I pulled Immortality by Milan Kundera off of the shelf. I have always been drawn to the “Mitteleuropa” point of view of his novels and their situatedness on the 20th-century historical stage: more is at stake than the family dysfunction of so many American novels. I also like the philosophical heft. As a reviewer once wrote, his characters are vessels for ideas. Goethe has a featured role in Immortality, but I already loved it before I wrote my dissertation on Goethe, having first read the novel when it appeared in English in 1991. In Immortality, Germany's great poet is a vessel for ideas about immortality and love. Kundera subjects these ideas to his ironic, even cynical gaze, via the documented relationship between Goethe and Bettina Brentano, later von Arnim. It is a story of what famous people have to suffer: everyone wants a piece of them. As Gabriel Annan wrote in a review of the novel: “The narrator’s tone is debonair. But his view of the world is pitch black.”

Some back history, which Kundera gets right. Goethe first met Bettina in the spring of 1807. She was twenty-two, about the same age as Goethe when he fell for her mother, Maximilian, back in his youthful Frankfurt days. This earlier infatuation with her mother may have led Bettina to imagine that she could be Goethe's daughter. As Kundera writes, the feeling grew in her that “she had some sort of secret right to the great poet, because in the metaphoric sense (and who should take metaphors seriously if not a poet?) she considered herself his daughter.” In any case, she developed what might be called hero worship for the great man. She was a small person and played on being a child, a figure like that of Mignon in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novel. She liked to sit on the floor; later she wrote that she had sat on Goethe's lap. They met very few times: in Kundera's reckoning six times in the course of twenty years. But she wrote him fifty-two letters, in which she addressed him with the familiar “you” form. These letters were the basis of the book she published after Goethe's death, Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kind. As Kundera points out, it was not until 1920 that the authenticity of the correspondence was questioned, when the original letters were discovered and published.

Amid the avalanche of words in her letters to Goethe (to which he only occasionally responded and with ministerial brevity), she also presented herself as a lover. In a letter from 1809 she wrote, “I have a strong will to love you for eternity.” For Kundera, Bettina is a Western type that he characterizes as Homo sentimentalis: feelings raised to the category of value. Bettina was in love with the idea of love, love as an emotion, not with a love relation. In her letters she does not ask his opinions or share ideas with him. The word “soul” appears 50 times in the letters, “heart” 119 times, but not in an anatomical sense. Kundera calls this love “extra-coital”: it exists outside of marriage.

“The gallery of Goethe's loves” (Frederika, Lotte, Lily, Ulrike) usually excludes his wife, Christiane: “The public refuses to see Christiane as one of Goethe's love simply because Goethe slept with her. For love-treasure and bed-treasure were mutually exclusive entities.” The dismissal of Christiane has deep roots, starting in the culture of Weimar, but Bettina added some fuel to it. It is with an encounter between Christiane and Bettina at an exhibition of paintings that Kundera begins his story. The date is September 13, 1811. There was a disagreement about the merits of the paintings, and the upshot was that Christine knocked the glasses off of Bettina's face. It was a very rude thing to do, but Christiane knew that Goethe had approved of the paintings that Bettina was criticizing. Moreover, Bettina's husband was a prominent figure among the Romantic poets to whom Goethe had an aversion. Christiane was also probably sick and tired of Bettina flirting with Goethe.

Goethe cut off contact with the Arnims then and there, which caused Bettina go on a tear  in the salons of Weimar, saying of Christine: “That fat sausage went crazy and bit me!” As Kundera writes, true or not, it has become an “immortal remark," cementing an unflattering image of Christiane.

Bettina is also the source of another anecdote affecting Goethe's afterlife. In 1839 (seven years after Goethe's death), she published an account that she said she had straight from Beethoven. For a few days in 1812 the two men were both at the spa of Teplitz in Bohemia. While they were out taking a walk together, the carriage carrying the Russian empress and her entourage passed them. Goethe doffed his hat to the royal company, while Beethoven pulled his hat down over his forehead. Again, the account is not substantiated by documentary evidence, but it has had long legs. As Kundera writes, “it enchanted everyone and became famous.” The outcome was a new story, cementing an image of Goethe as a reactionary, “a servant humbly bowing by the side of the road.” Another image Bettina sent into the world was that of Beethoven “striding forward with his hat pulled down over his forehead … marching down the centuries.”

In the 20th century, Romain Rolland became “a witness for the prosecution of the eternal trial conducted against Goethe.” For Rolland, the self-professed progressive intellectual, the Teplitz episode was an allegory: Beethoven as a radical, Goethe as a reactionary. Kundera finds the anecdote nonsense, even preposterous. Beethoven, after all, had not hesitated to compose for royalty; he even wrote a Polonaise for the Empress of Russia. An alternate allegorical picture would interpret Beethoven striding past the Empress as a statement on behalf of creativity: works of art are immortal, unlike wars or aristocratic costume balls. (Goethe would have felt the same way, but would have been more circumspect.) Those who applaud Beethoven fail to understand his pride as an artist: they are, as Kundera writes, for the most part people blinded by politics. Romain Rolland “would surely have bowed much more deeply than Goethe, if he had encountered Stalin on a path in Teplitz.”

Rolland (along with Rilke and Paul Eluard) also criticized Goethe for not properly loving Bettina and instead preferring his wife. Christiane was described by Rolland as “jealous,” “fat,” “ruddy and corpulent,” and “importunate.” This is surprising for an admirer of the proletariat:

“Why did it never occur to the friend of the proletariat to elaborate the anecdote with the glasses into an allegory, in which a simple woman of the people rightly punished the arrogant young intellectual while Goethe, having taken his wife’s part, strode proudly forward with head held high (and hatless!) against an army of aristocrats and their shameful prejudices?”

Picture credits: SWP.de; Interlude; Alamy Stock Photos

Europe and the world

Europe and the world

I have been working longer than is sane on an essay on Fritz Strich and Goethe's concept of world literature. Actually, not so much Goethe's concept but, rather, Strich's interpretation of that concept. Strich published in 1946 the first major study of the subject of world literature, Goethe und die Weltliteratur. Interestingly, in the century and a half after Goethe's death, despite practically every aspect of his life and work being investigated, his ideas on world literature stirred very little philological interest. Indeed, Hans Pyritz’s edition of the Goethe-Bibliographie, published in 1965, does not even devote a section to world literature. With the appearance of Strich's work in 1946, world literature scholarship took off.

The term "world literature," however, was already a buzzword by the end of the 19th century, but usually in the context of comparative literature or in reference to the great books of "the world" or to the circulation of books beyond their country of origin. The world literature publishing industry, as represented by anthologies and college textbooks, has likewise left the Goethean context far behind. The focus continues to be the "great books of the world," of all times and places. Thus, the Norton Anthology of World Literature includes (in volume 3), among others, the writings of Martin Luther, John Milton, The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, and "Indian Poetry after Islam." This is very sloppy intellectual work. In Goethe's conception, world literature concerned the active and continuous exchange of and encounter with living literary works of other nations. They were something like news in a bottle that had been cast in the ocean and turned up on another shore, bringing us information about the ways and folksways of other peoples. The distinction between then and now, however, is that when one read books of other cultures in translation, we understood that they had once been in a particular native language, which, as John Noyes has written, also conveys a particular cultural history.

Map of European languages

But what if no written cultural history exists in your native language, say, if you grow up in the those parts of the world that, until recently, had no written language? If you want to enter the public sphere as a writer, today most likely you will learn to express yourself in a so-called "world language": English, Arabic, Chinese, French, or Spanish. To what extent do these language, as powerful and as extensive as they are, continue to express a cultural history? Historically and concurrently, the most privileged writers in this respect have certainly been European ones. In Goethe's time, they wrote in their native languages, transmitting a cultural history of "Europe," which forms the basis of what is called and often criticized as the humanities. Moreover, European writers still enjoy large “native” publics and, therefore, continue to write in their own languages: Italian, Danish, Hungarian, Polish, and so on.

The interest of Strich in this respect was his focus on national difference and national language, which was not quite Goethe's focus. Indeed, Goethe was turned toward the world, but his world was mostly a European one. As Strich wrote, already in an essay in 1930 on world literature, Europe is not the world.

Images: Clker art; Pinterest

Goethe and Gottfried Arnold

Gottfried Arnold: I bet that's a name you haven't heard in a long time. How about Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-historie (“Impartial History of the Church and of Heresy”), published in Frankfurt in 1699–1700? The two hefty volumes, consisting of 2,300 double-column folio pages, was a comprehensive work on varieties of religious heresy, going back to Apostolic times, and was written when, it might be said, there were fewer heresies than now. Anyone who has studied Goethe's early years and works -- before he went off to Weimar -- will have come across Arnold's name and work. Somehow the title sticks in your mind, even if you haven't looked into the subject. Goethe seems, like many a young person, to have experienced religious scruples. At a certain stage, he was also in the company of Pietists, who were in many ways anti-ecclesiastical. As I have discovered, he was quite taken with Arnold's volumes, which seem to have stood in his father's library.

It came about this way. For a long time now I have been trying to thin out my large collection of books, which includes a number of issues of Horizon magazine, which was published by American Heritage from 1959 to 1989. Compared to today's arts and letters coverage (e.g., that of the New York Times), Horizon was a quite a distinguished venture, with really excellent writing. Going through my copies for a final time, I found in the Spring 1964 issue an essay entitled "Four Faces of Heresy" by H.R. Trevor-Roper. Yes, that historian, writing in comprehensible English for what was not an academic publication.

Trevor-Roper's light tone on a weighty subject is present at the start: "An account of religious heresy in a single essay!" And then he moves on to the heavy stuff: "Only once in history, to my knowledge has so vast a subject been comprehended in one work, and that was published by the Lutheran pietest priest Gottfried Arnold in 1699." Trevor-Roper goes on to indicate that the work was not well received by the religious establishment, with Arnold being accused of being an "impertinent disturber of the peace of the Church." The reason: "Arnold, on the whole, took the side of the heretics."

As I have mentioned on this blog on numerous occasions, Goethe turns up everywhere. And there he was, at the start of the second paragraph of Trevor-Roper's essay: "But Goethe (and who would not wish to be on the same side as Goethe?) thought differently. When Arnold's book fell into his hands, he was enchanted by it. It had, he wrote, a great influence on him. Now he saw the heretics of history in a new light. 'I had often heard it said,' he wrote, 'that every man came in the end to have his own religion, and now it seemed to me the most natural thing in the world that I should devise my own; which I did with great comfort ...'"

The quotation here is from book 8 of Goethe's autobiography, Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit), written many, many decades after the years in which he was involved with the Pietists. After reading this, I went through Der Junge Goethe, the five-volume edition of his pre-Weimar writings, but could find no direct mention by Goethe himself regarding Arnold's work from his youthful period. Still, even if Goethe did a lot of research when writing his autobiography, he had an excellent memory.

The essay by Trevor-Roper is worth a read. (And American Heritage is now attempting to digitize past issues of Horizon, if one would wish to contribute to a worthwhile endeavor.)  Heresies fall into four categories: puritan, messianic, mystical, and rational. Trevor-Roper makes the point that it was in the economically advanced areas of Europe that the Protestant Reformation emerged. Later, it was those from the non-established Church, Quakers and Baptists, who made the industrial revolution in England, while the Pietists of Saxony began the industrialization of eastern Germany. What some would have called heresy then was for others intellectual speculation. And, yet, while "heretical" thinking allowed science to progress and led to religious toleration, heretics have done nothing for art. So, writes Trevor-Roper:

"The wealth and patronage which spends itself in art has always been at the disposal of the established church, not of its persecuted critics, and this economic fact has often become a moral attitude: heresy, which is essentially intellectual, disdains appeals to the senses. Moreover, the puritan spirit, which is so powerful in heresy, is positively opposed to art. ... The artistic product of two thousand years of heresy is nil."

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917)

It is hard to imagine that the current moment is one that hates the senses, but currently approved sexual attitudes certainly lack a spiritual element. Perhaps that lack of spirituality contributes to much of the anti-art with which we are surrounded today. I wonder what Goethe would think of it all.

Picture credit: Tate Modern

Alexander von Humboldt anew

Voyages aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent

 A new book on Alexander von Humboldt has appeared (so far only in the UK), the second in the last few years. (Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature was published in 2015 to great acclaim.) Entitled A Longing for Wide and Unknown Things: The Life of Alexander von Humboldt, its author is Maren Meinhardt.  I came across a review of it today in the Literary Review, an English publication that was the first out of the gate on reviewing the English translation of Rüdiger Safranski’s most recent book on Goethe (discussed here in my blog: ). The title of the Humboldt review is "He Never Sat an Exam," which refers to AvH’s slowness as a young scholar, indeed, per the reviewer (Peter Moore), his reputation as an “unpromising boy.” Wilhelm, his brother, was the genius in the family.

Humboldt is somewhat like Goethe, in popping up in the most varied contexts. Besides Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World, a few years back I read An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, a very charming novella by the prolific Argentinian writer César Aira. The landscape painter in question was Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858), one of a number of German painters who traveled to the New World during the "century of peace" following the Napoleonic wars. Rugendas's travels took him to the Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonial territories. The novella concerns Rugendas's attempt to portray the landscapes of the Caribbean and Central and South America according to the physiognomic theories of Humboldt. The term “physiognomy” is suggestive of Lavater, of course, Goethe’s erstwhile friend, neither of whom is mention in the novella.

Views of the Cordilleras, pl. 41

Rugendas, as portrayed in the novella, is continually making sketches that will then be integrated into a meaningful "totality," a Naturgemälde. The backdrop is the imposition of the European colonial vision on the non-European continent and people, which leads to the "episode" that changes the life of the painter Rugendas.

According to the publisher’s page on the new Humboldt biography, the author and her two daughters retraced Humboldt’s footsteps in Ecuador in the summer of 2014. Very impressive. I once followed in Goethe’s footsteps in Sesenheim.

Image credits: Cambridge University Library; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Der Duckenfaust

Goethes Entenhausener Klassik

Interesting program on BR Fernsehen recently: “Was Goethe über Big Data wusste.” It was premised on Goethe having sent Faust on “eine rastlose Jagd nach der Zukunft.” When Goethe created the pact with Mephisto, he was aware that “Verweile doch, du bist so schön” was a thing of the past. Some of the topics investigated on the program were artificial intelligence, the financial world, big data,” interspersed with scenes from a production of the play. Some familiar faces among the interviewees: Manfred Osten, Michael Jaeger, Peter Sloterdyck, and Carsten Rohde, along with new (to me) folks: Jürgen Schmidhuber, whose goal (according to the program) is to make the entire universe more intelligent; and Katharina Zweig.

Carsten Rohde, who works at the Klassik-Stiftung in Weimar, is shown in the very impressive and modern “stacks” of the K-S, pulling out various editions of Goethe’s works, the most fascinating of which, for me anyway, was a comic book concerning the adventures of “Doctor Duchtus.” Disney and Goethe: quite a conjunction. The image at the top of this post (with link) is from a site that offers copies of Hier bin ich Ente, hier darf ich's sein.

Rohde has a nice post on the K-S blog concerning the penetration of Goethe’s language into modern German discourse, even among people who have never read Goethe’s works, for instance, in the advertising slogan of a Lübeck bakery: Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt und morgens ohne Brötchen lebt.