Goethe at Christmas Anno Domini 1776

I have been Tweeting entries from Goethe's diary, day by day, now in the year 1776. Today's diary entry mentions Goethe's attendance at a "Christbescherung" or "handing out of Christmas presents." According to the Commentary volume for the diaries, it was Anna Amalia's custom on this day to invited members of her inner circle for gift giving. Here is a description of the occasion (go to Google Translate if necessary):

In einem geräumigen Zimmer waren Tische, Gestelle, Pyramiden und Baulichkeiten errichtet, wo jeder Einzelne solche Gaben fand, die ihn theils für seine Verdienste um die Gesellschaft belohnen und erfreuen, theils auch wegen einiger Unarten, Angewohnheiten und Mißgriffe bestrafen und vermahnen sollten.

One would like to know what the "bad habits" and "blunders" certain individuals were admonished or punished for.

The last part of Goethe's diary entry records his mood: Druck Wehmut und und Glauben: "pressure, melancholy, and belief (or faith)."

Picture credit: AKG-Images

"Things Go Better with Goethe"

The title of this post is a New York Times headline over a feature by Martin Walser that apeared in the Sunday Book Review in the year 1986. (The translator is noted as Leigh Hafrey.) That was a year when the New York Times actually deserved its reputation. Among other things, it featured pieces by writers who really knew what they were talking about, in contrast to the presently favored blowhards, who merely opinionate. The piece by Walser is also quite long, long pieces having been abandoned by the NYT in favor of large print and large photos, even on the front page.

I digress.

Walser begins by noting the appropriation of Goethe's words for commerce, prophecy, self-help, and general all-around good feeling. The first example he cites bearing Goethe's words occurs in the advertising copy for a medical journal that appeared in FAZ: ''Goethe'': ''Beginnings are always hard; they often don't lie ready to hand . . . and what everybody wants will emerge only slowly.''

Walser goes on to give examples of other Goethe wisdom in various national and personal contexts, but his aim is to point out the way Goethe has come to seem a model of how to live. As Walser writes: "Everyone who quotes Goethe becomes a little bit like Goethe. If I doubt I can make this assertion on my authority alone, I draw support from Goethe: 'The virtues we appreciate are rooted in us as well.'"

The heart of Walser's piece is quite serious and takes us through Goethe's life stages via his literary production, especially Wilhelm Meister. I quote herewith a small portion:

At Weimar, Goethe housed himself in a snail's shell grand enough to be the cosmos. If, as was the case with Socrates, not a line of his had survived, nothing but the letters and diaries of his contemporaries to tell us how he lived and what he said on this or that occasion, we would still have a sense of him.

Goethe only took his autobiography up to the day in 1775 when he received the invitation to go to Weimar. With that, for him, the most important questions had been answered. He probably would have been less of a model for the German people if he had gone to Italy then, as his father and he himself wanted. He was actually on the way; one can imagine he would have become just another artist burning himself out on the Roman Corso in one disguise after another, as contemptuous of the world as he was narcissistic. He would in any case have encountered few real obstacles. His Wilhelm Meister novel would have remained an art novel - Wilhelm would have lived out his coming of age under interestingly rarefied circumstances.

But Goethe, though he was already considered a genius for ''Gotz'' and ''Werther,'' chose - no doubt in response to his deepest instincts - the more difficult environment. He faced real obstacles and engaged in self-fulfillment not for its own sake, but in confrontation with a kind of duty - an almost Schillerian abstraction for Goethe's sense of the absolutely real. That is how I see him - he was always drawn to what was most alive. Not to a life running free, but a life still suppressed, still disoriented, one that demands more than it has, has a right to more than it is given - that is, a life as yet unsure of its claim to legitimacy. In that situation, one has to help oneself without knowing how. Life is at its most lively when it still lacks something.

Having posted several times on the practice of quoting Goethe in various contexts, I now regularly run quotes through Google Translate. The one in the image at the top of this post strikes me as inauthentic:

Sie müssen nicht um die Welt reisen, um zu verstehen, dass der Himmel überall blau ist.

It doesn't have enough gravity to come from Goethe. What do you think?

Goethe's diaries again

Lenz, ca. 1776

This post is going to engage in nit-picking and revisit a recent post concerning Friedrich Hildebrand von Einsiedel, part of Carl August's circle of male friends and one of Goethe's closest associates in the early Weimar years. In that post I mentioned a letter of mid-November from Goethe to von Einsiedel (WA IV, 120).

As I interpreted the letter, Goethe was having a hard time getting Einsiedel into doing his part for his role in Die Mitschuldigen. I repeat here what Goethe wrote:

Du mußt in einer verfluchteten Hypochondrie stecken. Ich wollte schwören, dir wärs gut, wenn du dich nur ein bissel angriffst. ... Die Andern spielen brav und ich weis absolut keinen Söller. Und weis, daß du ihn gewiss gut spielen würdest.

Today I was reviewing Goethe's diaries for the last few days of November 1776, which touch on Lenz's departure from Weimar. On November 29, Goethe wrote the following in his diary:

Dumme Briefe von L[enz]. Kalb abgeschickt.

The commentary volume to the diaries has this to say:

"Wohl in Goethes Auftrag versuchte Johann August von Kalb, Lenz von der Notwendigkeit zu überzeugen, Weimar zu verlassen."

As if to verify that von Kalb was the bearer of the bad news, the commentary is as follows:

"Siehe Lenz an Kalb, 29. November 1775 (LB 2, 55): Ich danke Ihnen mein verehrungswürdiger Freund und Gönner für die unangenehme Bemühung die Sie meinethalben übernommen und versichere daß mir eine Ordre wie die auch wenn ich sie verdienet durch die Hand die sie mir überbrachte, versüßt worden wäre."

So far so good. But the above diary entry from November 29 continues as follows:

Einsid. hartes Betragen.

Citing a letter of November 28 (WA IV, 123) from Goethe to Einsiedel, the commentary on this passage connects this mention of Einsiedel to Lenz's departure from Weimar:

"Friedrich Hildebrand von Einsiedels Verhaltensweise erklärte sich wohl aus Carl Augusts und Goethes Entscheidung, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz aus Weimar auszuweisen."

It may be that Einsiedel was upset about Lenz's departure, but that letter, which I also quoted in my earlier post, may simply refer to Goethe's continuing difficulty with Einsiedel's participation in Die Mitschuldigen. Indeed, Goethe uses the same words in the November 28 letter as in the mid-November letter:

Einsiedel, ich bitte dich, strecke deinen Stumpfsinn an die Rolle! Die Andern machen's brav ...

Note the repetition in the two letters of "Die Andern machen's/spielen brav." Of course, it depends on the interpretation of the word "Stumpfsinn." I read it to mean that Goethe was saying that Einsiedel was not putting his heart into his role in the play. Or was he instead saying that Einsiedel was upset about the treatment of Lenz and should get over it? Any suggestions?

What happened with Lenz in Weimar is one of the unsolved mysteries.

Goethe wisdom

 The Goethe Society of North America has a list serve, and requests frequently appear on it for sources of Goethe's writings, thinking, life, and so on, and, in particular, quotations that are said to have been uttered by our great poet. John Noyes, colleague of mine in the GSNA, posted today a request from a colleague of his for assistance in finding the source of a line attributed to Goethe. I am posting the request, quoted below, in part.

“I’m working on a project on energy at the *** this year, and I’ve been searching in vain for a Goethe citation that Vaclav Smil uses as an epigraph: Energy will do anything that can be done in the world. The full citation in English, which appears thousands of times online, seems to be Energy will do anything that can be done in the world: and no talents, no circumstances, no opportunities will make a two-legged animal a man without it.  I have been unable to track down a source in German or English. I had a similar problem with a line from Benjamin Franklin & concluded that the Franklin citation must be apocryphal.  My other friend, who wrote his dissertation on German Classicism, says that pithy Goethean sayings (like Franklin’s maxims) are as common as bratwurst in Teutonic circles and one loses track of origins. If you have any idea about how to track down this one, I would be most grateful.”

Interestingly, Google Translate offers a very good translation of the English. In fact, it sounds very much like Goethe to me:

Energie wird alles tun, was auf der Welt getan werden kann: und ohne Talente, ohne Umstände und ohne Möglichkeiten wird ein Zweibeiner ein Mensch ohne sie sein.

I am not sure, however, about the quote in the image at the top of this post, which, as Googled Translated, sounds a little too corny to me: "Jeden Tag sollten wir mindestens ein kleines Lied hören, ein gutes Gedicht lesen, ein exquisites Bild sehen und, wenn möglich, ein paar vernünftige Worte sprechen."

Just for fun, here is the result of Google Translating into German two quotes from Donald Barthelme's Eckermann pastiche that I posted on earlier. I like the second one a lot:

Ich bin heute Abend mit Goethe vom Theater nach Hause gegangen, als wir einen kleinen Jungen in einer pflaumenfarbenen Weste sahen. Jugend, sagte Goethe, ist die seidige Apfelbutter auf dem guten Schwarzbrot der Möglichkeit.

Kunst, so Goethe, sei die 4-prozentige Verzinsung der kommunalen Lebensbindung.

If anyone has an answer to the GSNA request, please let me know.

Goethe's diaries

I have been tweeting from Goethe's diaries for the year 1776. Interesting, that this is the year that the United States had its birth, on July 4, with the Declaration of Independence. Goethe's diary shows no awareness of this event, nor do his letters. He had barely been six months in Weimar on that date. I have the Metzler edition of the diaries for the years 1775 until 1787, along with the commentary volume, which offers information concerning people and places that Goethe reduced to abbreviations. For instance, in my last Tweet is the abbreviation "Eins," which represents Friederich Hildebrand von Einsiedel, one of Carl August's close associates (along with Wedel, who is also mentioned in that Tweet). There was what might be called a "Männerkreis" around the young duke, of which Goethe quickly became an integral member.

Einsiedel seems to have been an aesthete: a "Schöngeist." He played the violincello in the Liebhaberorchester, and took on many roles in the Liebhabertheater. He played the role of Söller in Goethe's play Die Mitschuldigen, which had its premier at the Liebhabertheater in Weimar in January 1777. The play opens with Söller breaking into the room of one of the guests at an inn. He is dressed as a "Domino" (he has told his father-in-law, the owner of the inn, that he was going to attend a masked ball).

According to the entry on Einsiedel in Effi Biedrzynski's Goethes Weimar, Einsiedel had a somewhat labile personality, which is suggested in Goethe's correspondence's with him about his part in the play. In mid-November he wrote to Einsiedel as follows:

Du mußt in einer verfluchteten Hypochondrie stecken. Ich wollte schwören, dir wärs gut, wenn du dich nur ein bissel angriffst. ... Die Andern spielen brav und ich weis absolut keinen Söller. Und weis, daß du ihn gewiss gut spielen würdest.

Toward the end of November, he wrote him again about his concerns:

Einsiedel, ich bitte dich, strecke deinen Stumpfsinn an die Rolle! Die Andern machen's brav ...

In investigating such individuals, one gets some insight into what Goethe's life was like in these early Weimar years, in which he underwent an immense transformation, personally and poetically. I try to imagine how he "managed" such aristocrats, people who could be genial, but also rather hidebound, like the society described by Proust in Swann's Way.

Picture credit: Berlin Programm

Goethe and Charlotte von Stein

Slip-covered edition of Lotte meine Lotte by Die Andere Bbliothek

I have been Tweeting various entries from Goethe’s diaries, beginning with the Weimar era. Goethe started a Weimar diary on March 11, 1776, as follows: “Herzog und H.D. die verwittibte Herzogin die nach Gotha ging biß Erfurt begleit’. Beim Herzog geschlafen.” Since I started posting Tweets on September 5, illustrating them with images of people or subjects mentioned, all the Tweets reflect the day they were written in 1776. Occasionally I throw in a passage from Goethe’s letters, especially those to Charlotte von Stein. Which has led me to reread the letters, in the edition from the Andere Bibliothek (Lotte meine Lotte: Die Briefe von Goethe an Charlotte von Stein), which I reviewed in the Goethe Yearbook (vol. 23, 2016), alongside Der Briefschreiber Goethe by Albrecht Schöne.

The letters, upward of 1,700, are often only notes that were transmitted by a servant during the day or in the evening, accompanying an exchange of food (Feldhühner, Wildpratsbraten, Phasen) or of flowers and fruit. On an almost daily basis they mention concerts, plays, excursions. Goethe passes on gossip, tells her how he slept and of his tooth aches, and is much concerned for her health and sleep as well. According to my edition of his correspondence in the Weimar edition (WA IV,3), she is the recipient of the vast majority of letters he wrote between 1775 and 1778, beginning in early January of 1776, in other words within days of his arrival in Weimar. Johanna Falmer, with whom he had been corresponding before he left Frankfurt, gradually falls out of the picture.

My edition of Lotte meine Lotte is papered with post-its on which I express my astonishment at his importuning of her. By the end of January, he is addressing her per “Du”:

Liebe Frau, leide dass ich dich so liebe habe. Wenn ich iemand lieber haben kann, will ich dir's sagen. Will dich ungeplagt lassen. Adieu Gold, du begreiffst nicht wie ich dich liebe hab.

The contemporary German poet Jans Volker Röhnert, who wrote the afterword to the Andere Bibliothek edition, speculates that the letters represent a “gesteigerter Werther.” Rather than expressing his ardor for a beloved Lotte via William, Goethe now addresses himself directly to a similarly-named, likewise unavailable lady of much higher station. How many ways can one say “I love you”? It can be hard reading: “Ja liebe Lotte ietzt wird es mir erst deutlich wie du meine eigne Hälfte bist und bleibst. Ich bin kein einzelnes kein selbständiges Wesen.”

I hazard that there is another epistolary precedent to these letters, aside from The Sorrows of Young Werther, namely, the Leipzig letters of November 1767 to Ernst Wolfgang Behrisch. Those letters, ecstatic professions of love for Katharina Schönkopf scenically dramatized over several days, were clearly a case of literary role-playing. In the case of Charlotte von Stein, the role playing went on for a long time.

Interestingly, when Goethe was on the road, when he lacked the opportunity for the daily “conversation,” his need for communication is more objectively rendered. whether it concerns climbing the Brocken or exploring the Harz; the second Swiss journey in 1779, with Carl August; the diplomatic mission to Brunswick in 1784, also with Carl August (letters in French, nicely translated); or excursions to mines and in pursuit of his geological interests. They are evidence that Goethe had many registers in which he was able to express himself.

Rereading these letters led me to look at Nicholas Boyle’s Goethe bio anew, in which Boyle offers a cogent discussion of why Goethe stayed in Weimar and of the liaison with CvS. Regarding the former, it had in part to do with Goethe’s “pedagogical” tendency, which I noted in an earlier post in regard to the Conversations with Eckermann. That tendency was also on view in Goethe’s letters to Cornelia from Leipzig, and the duke was of course Goethe’s most important student. Boyle doesn’t mention Rousseau’s Emile, although much has been written of the influence of Rousseau on Goethe’s literary works. At a certain point, however, even after the duke was “educated” sufficiently, Goethe may simply have got used to the place. Boyle quotes from a letter Goethe wrote in which he is reflecting on his situation and which includes the following sentiment: “A man who changes his situation always loses his travel and removal expenses, both morally and economically.” Boyle gives the reference  (HABr i,414), but does not mention the date or the recipient. (I don't have that edition of the letters at home.)

"Sichtung und Klarheit"

The title of this post concerns a volume of journalistic pieces so titled by Jörg Drews that I’ve been making my way through. The pieces originally appeared in the Suddeutsche Zeitung from 1984 to 1999. I was drawn to look at the book because of the subtitle (Kritische Streifzüge durch die Goethe-Ausgaben und die Goethe-Literatur der letzten Fünfzehn Jahre). Drews was a literary critic for the SDZ and later a professor of literature and literary criticism at the university in Bielefeld, and his compass and judgments are an indication of the different nature of German journalism from that in the U.S. Drews' remit was to evaluate the publication of new editions of Goethe’s works as well as scholarly literature. So far, the volume has introduced me to works with which I was not familiar (Isabella Kuhn’s Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften und das sogenannte Böse) and reintroduced me to familiar names, especially in early Goethe scholarship (e.g., Viktor Hehn).

Like all of us involved in Goethe scholarship, Drews sounds a note that is all too familiar. I quote here the entire German passage (please copy and paste to Google translate, if necessary):

"Eine der unbestreitbaren Erfahrungen intensiver Goethe-Lektüre ist, daß dieser Autor immer für eine Überraschung gut ist, daß er viel schwieriger auf einen Nenner zu bringen ist als andere .— auch bedeutende — Autoren, daß man zwar vertrauter werden kann mit seinem Werk, aber eigentlich nicht zu einem konsistenten ‘Bild’ kommen kann: dazu ist das ‘bunte Gemisch der Phänomene’ einfach zu groß, das Werk, Person und Lebensvollzug bieten."

Yes, one does feel overwhelmed. At times, I would like to revert to and remain with my earliest area of Goethe research, namely, the pre-Weimar works. In my dissertation and early essays, I traced his literary coming of age in the Anacreontic and pastoral/idyll idioms. The “young Goethe” is very likable, especially in his enthusiasms, and this trait began to be effaced in the years following his establishment in Weimar. Maybe it had something to do with encountering a young noble, a duke, who shared his enthusiasms, but on whose decisions would rest the future of the duchy, that made Goethe serious about the effect of his writing and behavior on others. (And which may, later, have turned him against his early tendencies among the Romantic generation.) The turn — and it was not immediate — must have been the result not only of considerable soul searching and evaluation of the new circumstances of life at a court but also of the conviction that his early life represented a false path. He appears to have begun to remold himself, at the age of twenty-six, at considerable personal cost, made himself into a person that was not foreseeable while still in Frankfurt. I wonder if the physical distance he kept between himself and his mother after he went to Weimar indicated his awareness that he had become a different person. The "Schattenriss" at the top of the post seems to speak to an indeterminate Goethe.

I have begun to read his diaries, especially of his first years in Weimar, for some insight into this change. Some research on my part is required before I can say anything about my reading, but I am in possession of the J.B. Metzler edition of the “historical-critical” edition of the diaries and the companion volume of Commentary edited by Wolfgang Albrecht and Andreas Döhler. In the meantime, I have started re-tweeting about Goethe, with entries from these early diaries. For those interested, go here for my Goethe Twitter feed. I am following him day by day beginning in 1776.

Eckermann pastiche

It is typical: when I do research on a given Goethe subject, I also come across something else of interest, and often far removed from actual Goethe scholarship. Case in question, a "story" in The New Yorker magazine, back on October 20, 1980, by Donald Barthelme. Taking up one full page of the magazine, the content mirrors the entries in Eckermann's Conversations, with all the pedantry and adulation that Eckermann brings to the job, while lathering it with Barthelme's irreverence. It begins with the date of an actual Eckermann's entry, November 13, 1823. Eckermann had recounted meeting a valet of Goethe's, who related an anecdote about Goethe, lying abed at night, having a premonition of an earthquake in the year 1783. No one at court believed him. "Höre! Goethe schwärmt!" said one of the court ladies. A few weeks later, however, they all learned that an earthquake had occurred in Messina on that date. Here is Barthelme's entry for the same date:

I was walking home from the theater with Goethe this evening when we saw a small boy in a plum-colored waistcoat. Youth, Goethe said, is the silky apple butter on the good brown bread of possibility.

Barthelme, who died in 1989 and did not have the wealth of Goethe "quotes" to be found on the internet today (see above picture), was obviously working avant la lettre in this genre of wisdom attribution to Goethe. Here is another good one from The New Yorker piece:

Art, Goethe said, is the 4 percent interest on the municipal bond of life.

Continentalization

Theoretical Model of Cosmopolitanism

I have just returned to New York City after an absence of two and a half months. In that time, spent on a small island in British Columbia, it was a period of working on my novel, and I had very little Goethe material on hand, aside from Eckermann's Conversations and a book on Goethe's use of the superlative, the subject of a small volume by Mathias Mayer that I have just finished writing a review of. The return home has prompted me to undertake some housecleaning, which means thinning out files. Since the publication in the spring of my essay on Fritz Strich and world literature, it is high time to attack my copious files on that subject. This morning an article by Paul Michael Lützeler fell out of an overstuffed folder, to which was attached my handwritten notes. The title was "Europäischer Kosmopolitismus und Weltlteratur -- Goethe und Euorpa -- Europa and Goethe." It appeared in a volume called Kontinentalisierung. Das Europa der Schriftsteller, published in 2007 by De Gruyter. "Cosmopolitanism" is one of those terms that gets on my nerves, so here goes.

The first of my handwritten notes was a question: Did Edward Said really believe, as he is quoted by Lützeler,  that Goethe's "underlying and perhaps unrealizable rationale [for world literature] was [a] vast synthesis of the world's literary production transcending borders and languages, but not in any way effacing the individuality and historical concreteness of its constituent parts"? (My italics.) Whatever one thinks about the "vast synthesis" part of that statement, it is evident that non-European national languages have little viability in the literary marketplace today. Whether it is true, as John Noyes has written that “the mother tongue preprograms an individual’s thought with an entire cultural history of interpreting the world,” most people in the world today, even when they are literate, do not speak or write in a language that has a well-developed written tradition that reflects the history contained in such a tradition. Thus, despite the establishment of “official” languages in former colonial lands, when non-Europeans enter the public sphere today, they tend to write in a “universal” language, if not English, then French, Spanish, Chinese, or Arabic, all reflecting earlier colonial or imperial domination. That sounds to me like the effacement of "the individuality and historical concreteness" of the constituent parts of which Said was speaking.

Lützeler does not seem aware of this irony in his praise of cosmopolitanism and in anointing Goethe its spiritual father. Writers of the various countries of Europe, after all, enjoy large "native" publics and, no matter the extent of their "Europeanness" or their cosmopolitanism, continue to write in their own languages. For them, there has been no effacement of individuality, and indeed, one only has to consider the major writers of the Enlightenment -- proponents of universal values -- all of whom wrote in their mother tongue. "Europe" only began in the early 19th century, and it arose through through trade and commerce, which also included literary and cultural products.

Science is a different matter, While David Damrosch contends that a work of world literature “has an exceptional ability to transcend the boundaries of the culture that produces it," in truth it is that other European idiom, the language of science, that has transcended the boundaries of the culture that produced it. This idiom, to use Friedrich Schlegel’s formulation, is universal and progressive. All peoples of the earth today, whatever their national origin, can learn to speak it or apply its precepts without knowledge of the history of science. (This claim is not to deny the historical contributions of non-Europeans to this product, but it was in Europe, precisely because of the sharing of discoveries among the various European nations, in their own vernaculars, that the scientific and industrial revolutions took off.) Interestingly, while the universality of science can be seen in the status of English today as its quasi-universal language, French and German, which in the nineteenth century were competitive with English in the production of scientific texts, are today becoming marginal (the same goes more so for Hungarian, Danish, Polish, and so on). The earlier contributions of French and German scientists, written in their respective languages, are of interest primarily to historians of science.

Damrosch's claim, that certain literary works are so “culture-bound that they can only be meaningful to a home-grown audience or to specialists in the area," points up the problem with "the European canon." For those who don't grow up reading works of European literature, the cultural history contained in those works is to a great extent inaccessible. Thus, the postcolonial criticism of Eurocentrism and of the role of the humanities in perpetuating it. Is cosmopolitanism, which Lützeler privileges, simply a happy term for wiping out real difference? For making us all alike? And European "continentalization" the first step in that process?

Image credit: ResearchGate

Goethe, the armchair traveler

Arecoideae

In my last post I discussed the "society" with which Goethe surrounded himself in the last decades of his life, as portrayed in Eckermann's Conversations. The immediate society was a rather tight one of Weimar inhabitants who seem to have been regulars at the house on Frauenplan on many an evening. A book that I recently reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement (July 16, 2019), presenting Goethe as an "armchair traveler," throws further light on why he did not have to venture from home for company.

The book, Goethe: Journeys of the Mind, by Gabrielle Bersier, Nancy Boerner, and Peter Boerner, concerns Goethe's immersion in foreign lands without the necessity of leaving the premises of his home. Some of this armchair traveling was in the interest of his poetic production, e.g., West-östlicher Diwan and Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten. For research, he had access to the Weimar library as well as to scholars of "the Orient." For me, the most interesting chapters of Journeys of the Mind concern his reading and correspondence with scholars and scientists, especially those working in the field of botany and natural science. With Alexander von Humboldt he was on close terms, and they met and corresponded often, both before Humboldt's journeys to the Americas and afterward.

As I mention in my review, by the early 19th century Goethe was Germany's most famous product, and it was not surprising that many scholars traveled to Weimar to share their findings. One of these was Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, a professor from Erlangen, who traveled to Brazil in 1817 as part of a scientific expedition of Bavarian and Austrian scientists that accompanied the bridal ship bearing the daughter of the Hapsburg emperor to marry the Portuguese crown prince. The Leopoldina edition of Goethe's scientific writings is named for the archduchess.

Martius's treatise on the natural history and morphology of palm trees complemented Goethe's ideas of plant morphology. Nevertheless, the enigmatic entry in Ottilie's diary entry -- "Es wandelt niemand ungestraft unter Palmen"  -- could not have been suggested by Goethe's acquaintance with Martius, as Elective Affinities was published already in 1809. The relationship between Goethe and Martius was obviously of great importance to both men, as can be seen in Goethe und Martius, which includes the correspondence between the two men.

My TLS review was accompanied by a lovely illustration from Mauritius's study of Brazilian vegetation, Historia naturalis palmarum. I include another illustration at the top of this post from a book review of an English translation of Book of Palms that appeared in The Gardening Register.

Goethe at home

Friedrich August Wolf

I have written before, most recently concerning Proust and Goethe, that one gets very few details of politics or government or even the surrounding world in Goethe’s novels, which in a certain respect — Goethe was after all a government minister with quite a large portfolio, so to speak — is surprising.

But lately, as I read Eckermann’s conversations (which, admittedly, may or may not represent Goethe’s own utterances), it strikes me that the limitation in that respect in the novel Elective Affinities actually mirrors Goethe’s own domestic environment. Evening after evening, Eckermann is received at Goethe’s house, and sometimes other visitors appear: Riemer, Coudray, Kanzler von Müller. Goethe pours wine for the others; he drinks mineral water from Marienbad. Usually the subject is literature, although one evening (December 9, 1824) the discussion concerns the water crisis (“Wassernot”) in Petersburg. Oberbaudirektor Coudray makes drawings showing the effects of the Neva on the city and surrounding localities.

It is a thoroughly educational affair, although it is hard to know whether Goethe, as in E’s portrayal of Goethe, is such a pedant, always pontificating, teaching, which is fine with Eckermann. I will have to at some point look into works by Weimar contemporaries, accounts of his sayings or his appearance and so on, to see if this portrayal is corroborated by others.

There is one evening described (Jan. 18, 1825) at which one would like to have been present. Goethe was working on his autobiography and had had Eckermann makes notes of his drafts. On that evening he read aloud portions from 1795 to Eckermann and Riemer. Likewise, on an earlier occasion (April 19, 1824), Goethe gave a “Diner” for the classics scholar Friedrich August Wolf, who had stopped off in Weimar on his way back from southern France. The guests were all men: Röhr, Kanzler von Müller, Coudray, Riemer, Councilor Rehbein, and Eckermann. Unfortunately the “geistreichen Schertze, die über Tisch flogen,” were too quick for Eckermann to be able to recall them. In any case, Goethe seems to have played the devil’s advocate in the presence of Wolf: “Ich kann mit Wolf nicht anders auskommen, all daß ich immer als Mephistopheles gegen ihn agiere.”

Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer

Before Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer became one of Goethe’s right-hand men, he had attempted an academic career, on Wolf’s encouragement, but had to abandon it because of the need to earn a living. He then accompanied Wilhelm von Humboldt to Italy, when the latter occupied a diplomatic post there. According to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie: “Goethe persönlich war er ‘als gewandter Kenner der alten Sprachen höchlich willkommen’ (Annalen 1803), und er wurde Goethe’s antiquarischer Beirath als Nachfolger des 1804 nach Dresden abgehenden Böttiger. Goethe’s bisherige Secretäre waren mehr oder weniger bloße Schreiber gewesen; mit R. trat ein Gelehrter in seinen Dienst und zwar als wissenschaftlicher Helfer und Mitarbeiter.”

These occasions confirm that Goethe liked his domestic circle and didn’t feel it necessary to move beyond it. He had everything he needed within arm's reach. More on that in the next post, particularly on Goethe as an "armchair traveler."

Birch trees anew

Alder trees on Malcolm Island

I went out hiking this morning. One of my companions was Yolanna, who grew up literally in the backwoods of British Columbia. She can tell the difference between a thrush and a robin by their song. With Goethe's comments about birch trees on my mind, I imagined we were walking past a forest of such trees and took a picture, only for Yo to tell me that they were not birch trees, but alders. I post my own photo here, along with a lovely shot of the real thing by the photographer Randy Nyhof. (Click both to enlarge.)

Randy Nyhof, Birch Trees

Over the years I must have seen many such shots like Randy's, which made me imagine that the straight, spare trunks before me this morning were birch. According to Yo, birch doesn't grow in a wet climate, which is what we have out here in the Pacific Northwest. Birch grows where it is dry.

There is a great charm about birch trees, and it will bear looking into in connection with Goethe. Allow me to post another portrait of birches, by the Russian painter Ivan Shishkin (1883), entitled In the Birch Tree Forest. The forest itself reminds me of the one I hiked through this morning. My inability to distinguish alder from birch is due to the fact that I am a totally urban person, without much expertise in the works of nature, unlike Goethe.

Picture credit: Visual Elsewhere; Randy Nyhof

Goethe on Ruisdael's birch trees

Jacob van Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery

On May 2, 1824, Goethe and Eckermann took an evening walk through "Upper Weimar" on a path that led to a view of the park from an elevated position. Eckermann is quite good at descriptions (see, e.g., his description of his visit to Goethe's garden house on March 22): "Die Bäume blühten, die Birken waren schon belaubt und die Wiesen durchaus ein grüner Teppich, über welche die sinkende Sonne herstreifte. Wir suchten malerische Gruppen ..."

Of these picturesque groups of trees full of white blossoms, it was agreed that they were not suitable for painting (nicht zu malen). Similarly, leafy birches in for the foreground of a picture, because the delicate leaf does not sufficiently contrast with the white trunk. Ruisdael, claims Goethe, never introduces birch with its foliage in the foreground, but only birch trees that are broken off at the top and without leaves: "Such a trunk is very effective in the foreground; its shape has such natural prominence.” The issue seems to be that white birch trunks are not large enough to offer striking effects of light and shade.

I speculated in my last post that Goethe might have seen the painting of a goat and sheep by the animal painter Philipp Peter Roos that is now in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, as it was once in the possession of the Brentano family whom Goethe had visited in 1814. The Ruysdael painting at the top of this post, The Jewish Cemetery, from 1655-60, is in the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden. (Click to enlarge.) Is it possible that Goethe saw this painting already when he visited Dresden, perhaps when he was 18 years old and a student in Leipzig? The website of the museum does not give any information about when The Jewish Cemetery entered the museum, although there is a Goethe quote, in English: "I entered this shrine, and my amazement exceeded any preconceived idea!"

Picture credit: Web Gallery of Art

Goethe educates Eckermann in the matter of taste

P. P. Roos, Sheep and Goat in a Rocky Landscape

I wrote previously concerning what might be considered "authentic" about the Conversations, namely, the way Eckermann portrays Goethe as a pedagogue. I am not familiar with the scholarship on the Conversations, but something similar can be seen in his Leipzig letters to his young sister Cornelia. Here is an example from February 26, 1824. They have been examining drawings and engravings in Goethe's possession. Eckermann writes as follows:

Goethe verfährt hiebei in Bezug auf mich sehr sorgfältig, und ich fühle, daß es seine Absicht ist, mich in der Kunstbetrachtung auf eine höhere Stufe der Einsicht zu bringen. Nur das in seiner Art durchaus Vollendete zeigt er mir und macht mir des Künstlers Intention und Verdienst deutlich, damit ich erreich möge, die Gedanken der Besten nachzudenken und den Besten gleich zu empfinden. ... "Ich zeige Ihnen daher nur das Beste; und wenn Sie sich darin befestigen, so haben Sie einen Maßstab für das übrige, das Sie nicht überschätzen, aber doch schätzen werden.”

Here is Margaret Fuller's translation of the passage, which leaves some things out, but for those interested I recommend Google Translate. Simply copy the German passage here, and the translation comes out very quickly, provided I have made no typing errors!

“Goethe takes great interest in forming my taste; he shows me only what is complete and endeavors to make me apprehend the intention of the artist; he would have me think and feel only with the thoughts and feelings of the noblest beings. ... 'I show you the best and when you have thoroughly apprehended these, you will  have a standard, and will know how to value inferior performances without overrating them.'”

It strikes me that Goethe might have said something along those lines. How about the comments attributed to him about the drawings of sheep by the German painter Philipp Peter Roos (1655-1706)? This occurs shortly after the above passage:

"Mir wird immer bange," sagte Goethe, "wenn ich diese Tiere ansehe. Das Beschränkte, Dumpfe, Träumende, Gähnende ihres Zustandes zieht mich in das Mitgefühl desselben hinein, man fürchtet, zum Tier zu werden, und möchte fast glauben, der Künstler sei selber eins gewesen."

This does seem to be a sentiment of Goethe's, even if it was not expressed in the exact words that Eckermann quotes. As I don't have an edition of the Conversations with commentary (I am spending the summer again on an island in British Columbia, far away from any research facility), I do not know for certain that Goethe is referring here to Philipp Peter Roos; he is quoted only as saying "Roos," and there were several painters of that name. Nevertheless, the painting at the top of this post is in the Städel in Frankfurt and was acquired by the museum in 1895 as a gift of Josephine and Anton Brentano. I wonder if Goethe might have seen the original. As I wrote in a post two years ago, he visited the estate of Franz and Antonia Brentano in September of 1814. Perhaps they owned the painting at that time?

In both of the above passages the sentiments do seem to be those of Goethe. Whether he expressed himself in that rather magisterial way is something else. More thoughts on that matter in the future. Familiarity with Goethe's method of composing letters at this time -- dictation to a secretary followed by editing or revisions -- leads one to suspect that Eckermann may likewise had formalized Goethe's speech.

Eckermann's Goethe

"Mit Goethe spazieren gefahren"

I first posted on the Conversations back in December of 2018, planning a series on the topic, and it has taken me this long  to return to it. I brought with me to British Columbia this book and one other on Goethe that I am due to review. My reading of the Conversations has now taken me through 1823 and into 1824, and a few things suggest themselves to me as worth mentioning. At the same time, I confess that I am not familiar with the scholarship on the Conversations, although I do know that they were not composed as such on the dates attributed to them. To what extent the "Goethe" before us, often quoted at length, is factual is thus uncertain.

Most entries open with time and date of encounter with Goethe (e.g., "Um ein Uhr mit Goethe spazieren gefahren"), which suggest that Eckermann kept a diary in which he recorded that information at the end of the day, which might also have been accompanied by notations concerning subjects discussed and also Goethe's personal appearance and state of health. The latter was of concern to the inhabitants of Weimar. Eckermann visited Goethe on November 16, 1823, and described an illness for which "Pflaster" was applied to his chest on the side of the heart. The next day's entry, November 17, notes as follow: "Als ich diesen Abend ins Theater kam, drängten viele Personen mir entgegen und erkundigten sich sehr ängstlich nach Goethes Befinden."

One other aspect that seems authentic to me is a decided pedagogical impulse on Goethe's part vis à vis Eckermann. This aspect is on view in Goethe's letters to his sister Cornelia when he was a student in Leipzig. His letters to her are full of recommendations for improvement of her mind. As we know, the Leipzig letters were written by Goethe himself, not dictated to a secretary, and, one suspects, were sent off to Frankfurt without being edited.

In my next post on the Conversations I will discuss some of the life lessons dished up by Goethe for Eckermann.

Goethe scribblings

Notgeld Weimar 1921

I came across an old notebook and going through it came across all matter of notes on Goethe and many other subjects. Let me note some of what I wrote concerning Goethe's finances, often only a few lines from a scholarly article. (I have written on Goethe and money a couple of times: in 2008; and in 2015).

For instance, of an article by Dieter Hein on Goethe's "Haushaltsführung," I noted that Goethe was in the 8.2 percent of Weimar taxpayers who had a yearly income of ca. 4000 talers in 1820. By then, he was drawing considerable honoraria from publishing. From a book entitled Goethe und das Geld: Der Dichter und die moderne Wissenschaft (an edited volume by Vera Hierholzer and Sandra Richter), I noted Goethe's ambivalent relationship with Bertuch, whose activities employed between 100 and 150 persons, supporting 10 percent of Weimar's population (including families of employees).

Jochen Klauß, in Goethe und Geld: Goethes Finanzen, mentioned that Goethe's negotiations, from 1827, with publishers, especially Cotta re his Ausgabe letzter Hand, reveal a hard-headed bargainer and an understanding of his commercial worth. According to Klauß, Goethe received in 1816 a yearly honorarium of 3000 talers, corresponding to 20 years of his annual salary of 3,100 talers, what today would be worth 2.5 milion Euro: "etwa das Doppelte von dem, was für den Literatur-Nobelpreis vergeben wird."

Fritz Strich on world literature

My essay on the above subject has just appeared in vol. 26 of Goethe Yearbook and is probably available at JStor for those who are interested. I have worked for a long time on this subject. Among the issues that interested me were the omission of Fritz Strich from the scholarship concerning world literature and the prevalence of an interpretation of world literature that has little to do with what Goethe had in mind when he began speaking on the subject in the 1820s. That said, it must be admitted that Goethe was breaking new ground. Strich also was breaking new ground when he began to write on world literature in the 1920s, and it may surprise Germanists in particular that Goethe und die Weltliteratur (1946) was the first comprehensive treatment of world literature to be written. Within a decade of that publication, the world literature "industry" began, although even the 1965 edition of Pyritz's Goethe bibliography still had no separate section on world literature.

It can't be said, of course, that Strich faithfully reproduces what Goethe may or may not have had in mind. Strick began his writing on world literature in the 1920s, when Germany was at a low point internationally, to put it mildly, and his writings were an attempt, I believe, to write Germany back into the historical continuity of European nations that was also to be seen in two almost contemporaneous studies: Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature and Ernst Robert Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. In Strich's treatment, world literature was a process leading to tolerance, amity among the nations, a felt humanity, and so on, and was grounded on the verifiable cross-fertilization of the European literary vernaculars since the Renaissance, with the various "national" literary idioms borrowing or passing on the distinctive features of their literary production. Thus, sonnets, for instance, originated in one country, but were passed on to others, with each becoming nationally inflected: compare the difference between those of Petrarch and Shakespeare, not to forget the vast production in the Baroque period in Germany.

It was the peaceful nature of this cultural contact, unlike the often warlike, cross-borders political relations, that suggested to Strich a "universal" spirit (Geist) absorbing all the individual national spirits and uniting the nations into a shared universal destiny. No doubt, it is this "spiritual" approach -- that of Geistesgeschichte -- that was already out of date when Goethe und die Weltliteratur appeared and that has led to undervaluation of Strich's role in scholarship. The orthodox view today of world literature seems to be "literature of the world," a marketplace..

While Strich was certainly correct about the literary cross-fertilization, there were other processes, of a material nature, that also began in the period of the Renaissance and that have indeed produced a common European -- or, better put, Western -- "spirit." I am speaking of trade and commerce, which, within a decade of the discovery of the New World, jump-started the material transformation of the various European countries. Locally produced inventions and technology crossed borders as well, spreading the findings, despite existing historical animosities, despite the attempts of governments to control the flow and making knowledge "proprietary." The result has been the spread of common institutions and a shared ethos concerning civil liberties, which, for those who share them, are universal values.

Picture credit: University of Bern

Proust on Goethe

Swann in Love

Recently I have been reading "Swann in Love," a novella-like episode within Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. "Classic" authors, such as Proust, always serve as something of a foil for considerations of Goethe, and the major difference that struck me was the lack of "society" in Goethe's novels. One does discern some idea of German social relations circa 1770s in The Sorrows of Young Werther, and the obsession that drives Swann in regard to Odette is similar to that of both Werther and Eduard, but where in the heck are we, anyway? There are no recognizable landmarks, no Faubourg Saint-Germain, no Bois de Boulogne, only generic places and settings. I have actually written on this subject before, in connection with Trollope and Jane Austen. In that earlier post, I pointed out that Goethe knew a lot about government, first hand, in contrast to Anthony Trollope, who only worked in a post office. It was Trollope, however, who wrote about the workings of government and politics.

At home I have a volume entitled Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, which besides Proust's well-known "Contre Saint-Beuve," also contains the section "Proust the Reader," the first essay of which is on Goethe. Editors date it to the period of Jean Santeuil, Proust's first novel, between 1899 and 1904 . Here are a few nuggets:

The habits we constantly recur to in our books show what has fired our imagination ... In Goethe sites are extremely important. We often come upon a place where there is a wide and varied prospect. Valleys extend before us, with villages and a fine river on which the light of morning dazzles, and we look down on all of this from a little mountain. Various private collections, too, are dwelt on with pleasure, collections of pictures, natural history collections. One feels that these things were not merely put in to please, but that they had an extremely serious bearing on his intellectual life; that the concern of his intellect and its essential aim was to analyze the pleasure he drew from them ... and to ascertain their effect on his mind.

Characters, likewise, show us "the habitual preoccupations of Goethe's mind." Proust also draws attention to an aspect that is sometimes mentioned in connection with his own work, i.e., allegory, and to the seeming importance to Goethe of symbolizing "what is seen and unseen in our lives by ceremonies."

Proust's reading of Goethe appears to have been fairly wide. He mentions the Wilhelm Meister novels (of which the quote above might refer to the opening of the second novel) and Elective Affinities (commenting on the Count and the Baroness and on the laying out of gardens), as well as to what the translation calls "the Reflections," which I assume means the Maximen und Reflexionen. I can't help thinking back to my post a few weeks back in which I discussed what I considered the deficits of J.M. Coetzee's piece on Goethe in the New York Review of Books. Proust's take on Goethe, in contrast, shows the mind of a great writer thinking deeply about another great writer.

Goethe calligraphed

I stopped by the Grolier Club today to see "Alphabet Magic," an exhibit of the work of calligraphers and type designers Hermann and Gudrun Zapf. Typefaces with which book lovers are familiar were created by Hermann Zapf, including Optima and Aldus. Unfortunately, I did not have my camera with me and could not get images of poems by Goethe in Hermann's calligraphy. Here are a couple of nice examples from the internet. The Buch Suleika was on exhibit, a gorgeous volume. (Click on images to enlarge.)

"Faust" conference in Boston

Having discussed Peter Schwartz's translation of André Jolles's Einfache Formen yesterday, let me mention another undertaking of his at Boston University, where he is a member of the Department of World Languages and Literatures. This is a symposium this coming Saturday, April 13, on the theme of "selling one's soul," sponsored by the WLL Department. The keynote address, by Jane K. Brown, illustrious Goethe scholar and former president of the GSNA, is entitled " Irrlichtelieren: Knowledge in Faust and in Goethe’s Theory of Color." If only I had a magic carpet and could travel there.

Is it my imagination, or does the person of Faust in the above image not look like Edgar Allan Poe?

"Simple Forms" by André Jolles in English

No tales told here

 This is a long overdue post, no two ways about it.

A few years ago I came across in the PMLA (vol. 128:3) a contribution by my Goethe Society colleague Peter Schwartz, which included an excerpt from Simple Forms, his translation of the book Einfache Formen by André Jolles, which first appeared in 1930. (See my earlier post on other work by Peter.) It so happened that I had read the book back when I was in graduate school. This was before Goethe and I got together, when I was in my German philology phase. In those days I was steeped in the study of Old High German, Middle High German, Gothic, Dutch, Norwegian, as well as the story of the Indo-European family of languages. I could talk volubly about “Lautverschiebung” and Werner’s Law. Einfache Formen, with its wealth of material about medieval lore and its references to early scholars in the field (Wilhelm Scherer, Walter Porzig, Andreas Heusler, not to forget the real forefathers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and Herder and Hermann), were like honey to the bears. It was one of the first instances of a methodology that I sought to wrap my mind around, and in my case, as a non-native speaker of German, I was proud of my ability to follow Jolles in his formidable erudition.

Over the following decades I only once or twice encountered anyone who had heard of the book (a much annotated copy of which is still in my possession). As I have now learned, from reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Critical Inquiry as well as from the introduction to Peter’s translation by Frederick Jameson, Jolles was among a number of scholars investigating earlier “folk forms” (Vladimir Propp was another) for the light such forms throw on the way that humans conceptualize the world. Later this would come under the aegis of “structuralism” and be applied to all human thinking and cultural production, not simply that of our pre-literate ancestors. According to Robert Scholes, who discussed Einfache Formen (working from a French translation!),  “The perception of order or structure where only undifferentiated phenomena had seemed to exist before is the distinguishing characteristic of structuralist thought.” I hope I can be forgiven for suggesting that the notion also suggests Noam Chomsky’s concept of “deep structure,” where the underlying forms of linguistic composition are generated.

As Scholes writes, the simple forms are “intimately connected with the human process of organizing the world linguistically.” Scholes combines here two aspects of Jolles’ treatment. Regarding the first, Jolles speaks of Geistebeschäftigung to describe the mind’s attempt to categorize the world. Peter and others use the term “mental disposition” to translate this term, which, to my ears, suggests something settled and does not convey the active sense with which the mind assembles the facts on the ground. That, however, reflects an insuperable difference between German and English. In the case of legend, in its simple form it encapsulates the human disposition to endow certain individuals with exemplary attributes. The saints that appear in legends that have been written down have little authentic historicity and stand before us in their exemplary state, achieving feats that ordinary humans are hardly capable of enduring (early Christian martyrology provides plenty of examples). It speaks to a human desire to emulate virtuous actions, even as we fall short. Today, we have only “sports legends,” but you get the idea. As for the “linguistic” part, Jolles speaks of Sprachgebärden, or verbal gestures. Under the pressure, so to speak, of the mental disposition, over time various attributes accrue to the imitation-worthy individual of legend.

While literary scholarship has traditionally had as its subject a finished work — a Gebilde is Jolles’s term —Jolles interest is not in genres as we know them, but the “elementary narrative structures” that seem to exist in the mind before they are actualized in language  (Jolles use the term “Veranschaulichung”), without the work of the poet. These nine forms, “underling all literary production” (in Peter’s words), are  legend, sage, myth, riddle, proverb, case, memorabile, folk or fairy tale, and joke.

The folk tales that the Grimms collected are a good way to consider what Jolles was getting at: a collective working out of the problem of justice or, better, injustice. They typically present a situation that conflicts with our feeling concerning what is unjust or unfair in the real world. In the real world, the poorly dressed Cinderella does not generally get the prince. In the fairytale, she does after overcoming obstacles. The obstacles sound like life, but the reward is not always there.

Jolles works backward from the “Kunstformen” with which we are familiar in either literature or in popular genres—legend, joke, riddle, saga, and so on—in order to isolate the mental disposition and that then produces the "verbal gestures" that express the “solution” to the problem. Another way of thinking about this is to consider that, once upon a time, before radio, before TV, people actually sat around talking and in the process, using the resources of their everyday life, gave expression to perennial human issues that led to genres then gave an “answer” to a “question.” For instance, myth (writes Jameson) gives an answer to the question: "Where did the world come from?

The very sad photo at the top of this post (click to enlarge) encapsulates what we have lost in the modern world. The group of Indian soccer players, instead of talking, all sit (except for one whose iPhone battery was probably low) staring at devices. It is not only athletes who no longer talk. I was recently at a birthday party for a young woman who is a graduate of Columbia University. Her friends of the same age were likewise graduates of Ivy League schools. They talked a lot, they were very verbal, loquacious, but what do you suppose they talked about? Movies and TV shows. Such is the devolution of contemporary collective wisdom. It is not surprising that the rise of journalism began at the same time as traditional forms of life underwent a process of erosion. But what is the wisdom in contemporary journalism? Today’s “answer” is rejected for another one tomorrow, which likewise gives little comfort to the imagination or to the soul.

For those who cannot read German, Peter Schwartz has achieved an estimable, indeed awesome, feat both in bringing Jolles's work into English and in making this fascinating book new to us.

Picture credit: Twitter Moments; Business 2 Community

Goethe reviewed

Coetzee wears a safety helmet

J.M. Coetzee is an author whose novels I have never read, but at a local library branch the other day I pulled off the shelf of new non-fiction the volume Late Essays: 2006-2017. Among all the illustrious writers listed on the front cover were Goethe, along with Hölderlin, Kleist, and Robert Walser. I quickly checked it out and looked at the essays right away. I spent more time with the Goethe "essay" (why I put this in quotes will be revealed) than the others, but I intend to read them all more closely.  Coetzee shows himself to be very knowledgeable about German literature.

The Goethe piece appeared in The New York Review of Books (April 26, 2012), ostensibly in connection with Stanley Corngold's translation of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. I say ostensibly because, although Coetzee is very knowledgeable about Goethe and the publication history of Werther, he does not discuss the merits of Corngold's translation. It is a fault of many reviewers to devote the lesser part of a review to the book under consideration. Anyone who has picked up an issue of the NYTBR or the London Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement discovers that a reviewer often spends a lot of time on the "back story" of the book, which, especially in the case of non-fiction, is necessary. I mean, a new book on dinosaurs will bring the reader up to date on the field of dinosaur studies, or it might deal with cultural impressions of the vanished species over the past several centuries, before, finally, the book being reviewed is discussed. So, nothing new here.

 Coetzee's subject, however, is nothing less than a synopsis of the novel, the relationship of Goethe to his subject, the relationship of Goethe with the Kestners, the composition history, the relation of the fictional character to Goethe's own personality ("the passionate side of himself that he sacrificed to his own cost"?), Goethe's reaction to the endless interrogation about Werther in succeeding decades. There is a good passage in which the lack of a guiding authorial voice is addressed, as well as what Coetzee calls the "long run" of the story of Goethe and Charlotte Buff, as set down in Thomas Mann's 1939 novel Lotte in Weimar. Moreover, Coetzee gives the background to the Ossian letters, Goethe's translation of same, the reading of the poems preceding Werther's parting from Charlotte, and the success of Macpherson's forgery in creating a desire for "a new poetic speech." And while Goethe claimed to have written Werther in a "somnambulistic trance in four weeks," the novel absorbs pre-existing material like Ossian, not to forget his own diaries and letters. Strangely enough, Coetzee does not mention the episode that would seem to have been the inspiration behind the novel, namely, the suicide of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem.

Toward the end of the review he introduces the Sturm und Drang movement, again very swiftly blending in the advent of Romanticism, Herder, and Rousseau. One thing I never paid much attention to in connection with Werther is the influence of Laurence Sterne. Coetzee: "The first pages of Werther bear all the signs of Sterne's mercurial narrative style." From Sterne, Coetzee writes, Goethe "absorbed the technique of illuminating the interior by bringing up fragments of involuntary memory."

In the final paragraphs Coetzee does mention that Werther has attracted many distinguished translators (but without mentioning whether he considers Corngold to be one). Instead, it is the first translation of Werther that interests him, by Daniel Malthus, father of Thomas, which appeared in 1779. Malthus, translating from a French translation, omitted passages that might have been felt to offend the public. Coetzee is intrigued by Malthus's translation of the word "Leidenschaft" in the first Werther letter, when Werther remarks on the "passion" forming in poor Leonore's heart. Malthus writes "tenderness," undoubtedly under the influence of the French "tendresse." This choice, writes Coetzee, must be deliberate: a performance of an act of cultural translation, one informed by his "embeddedness in the cultural norms of his society, including its norms of feeling." We moderns, in the face of the "tender passions," "see passion predominating," whereas Malthus's 18th-century readers would see "tenderness."

Coetzee channeling Jesus

It is an excellent piece, in fact the kind of piece that a student might be tempted to copy or plagiarize in place of doing the research on the novel. On reading a bit on Coetzee's background, I discovered that he has a Ph.D. in English literature (dissertation on Samuel Beckett), so clearly he understands research. What the piece is not is a literary essay. It is literary journalism -- of a superior nature, it should be noted, outfitted with footnotes and page references. The difference can be seen within the pages of this very book. At random, let me quote a passage from Hermann Melville, writing about The Scarlett Letter, that appears in Coetzee's piece on Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel:

"For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne's soul, the other side -- like the dark half of the physical sphere -- is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black ... Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effect he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom -- this I cannot altogether tell."

That is a great writer writing about the mystery of another great writer. Or take this passage in Henry James's biography of Hawthorne, also quoted by Coetzee:

"It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, warmer, richer European spectacle -- it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist."

This last is something that Coetzee must know something about, having published quite a few novels, but his literary "essay" on Goethe, in any case, suggests nothing so profound. I just looked online of a review of Late Essays that appeared in The Spectator. The headline says it all: "J.M. Coetzee's Essays Are Filtered Through Boundless Reserves of Knowledge, Wisdom, and Reading." I can't imagine, however, that the piece I have described would make anyone long to read The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Image credits: Books Live; Wesley Merritt for the Telegraph

Poets ranked

I come across references to the 18th century and to Goethe and the Goethe era in unexpected places.  Case in point, the most recent issue of the New Left Review has a translation of an article by the German scholar Carlos Spoerhase that appeared in Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft in 2014. The article is entitled "Das Maß der Potsdamer Garde," the measurement referring to the standard by which the Prussian military chose its soldiers (apparently 6'2" minimum). The NLR title is "Rankings: A Prehistory." The article begins by noting the many rankings by which the world around us is evaluated in the 21st century -- best sellers, restaurants, impact factors -- and also by noting that such evaluations likewise existed in antiquity: the so-called canons of Hellenistic philologists. The latter, however, did involve "critical-aesthetic" judgments, which is not the case, for instance, for best seller lists.

Between 1700 and 1800, the classical comparatio, contrasting comparisons of "persons, positions, or objects, was established, beginning with the "Scale of Painters" drawn up by the art connoisseur and collector Roger de Piles in 1708. Listing alphabetically fifty-seven "best-known painters" and judging them on a variety of attributes, he set up a "numerically based aesthetic ranking." While up to 20 points could be given in the various categories (color, expression, etc.), De Piles did not aggregate the scores. For those interested in the background, I recommend the German version or the NLR translation. It wasn't long before a similar scale was established for poets. The first was that of the Scottish poet and physician Mark Akenside, which was published in 1746 as "Balance of the Poets" and included poets of all times. Oliver Goldsmith drew up a scale for English and Irish poets. (Note again the image of weight.)

By degrees, the Germans got around to weighing poets, which shows the interplay among the various European "literati," and also how much in the 18th century started in France. Christoph Martin Wieland published in 1757 "Balance der großen Poeten," but it included no Germans. As Spoerhase writes, the Germans apparently had, in Wieland's estimation, achieved nothing exemplary. There was a certain grade inflation in Wieland's rankings, with James Thompson coming out on top. (In Spoerhase's estimation, Thompson is remembered today only for the lyrics of "Rule, Britannia." But, he was oh so loved by German writers of the 18th century!)

C.F.D. Schubart brought the Germans on board in his "Kritische Skala der vorzüglichsten deutschen Dichter" in 1792, but, by then, "mathematically inclined rationalism" employed in ranking the "Moderns" came under pressure with the rise of Romanticism. In a scale of numerical evaluations, how to deal with "Genius"? For Schubart, "the poet was beyond the reach of numerical aesthetic evaluation," there being no measure in feet and inches for the mind, as there is for the body." Still, Schubart found a rationale for his "scala": low-scoring poets would see the gulf that separated them from the great ones. Or, per the caption at the bottom of the chart: "The dwarf sees more clearly that he is a dwarf when he stretches himself up against the measure of a Potsdam guard."

In the image of Schubart's chart here (click to enlarge), earlier poets (Bodmer, Hagedorn, etc.) scored fewer points than contemporaries. I have not added up all the listings, but it looks to me as if Wieland (at 165 points) came out ahead of Klopstock (154) and Goethe (152). I was interested to see that all of the poets that Schubart listed (excluding "Denis") were still very much with us when I was in graduate school in German.

A few years later Herder rejected “the project of the aesthetic scale altogether,” a position that went on to win the day. Spoerhase: “The project of arithmetizing the aesthetic or, in the terminology of de Mairan, a ‘geometrization of taste’, was abandoned. A century after the publication of de Piles’s ‘Balance des Peintres’, Jean-François Sobry (1743–1820) summarized the new viewpoint in his Poétique des arts: ‘Let us love what is beautiful when we see it, without bothering about weighing it. Let us repay the enthusiasm of talent with the enthusiasm of esteem; and leave the scales to the merchants.’”

What we know of Goethe allows us to say that he would draw a similar conclusion.

Image credit: Berkeley Haas