Goethe in Ettersberg

Karl Eibl, in his Goethe Handbuch entry on Goethe's poetry in the first Weimar decade, addresses the "ambivalent world feeling" (Weltgefühl) to which Goethe would give expression when mentioning his early years in Weimar and to which most Goethe scholars have assented. Evidence is a letter Goethe wrote to Charlotte von Stein on July 16, 1777, which expresses what Eibl writes could be regarded as a "deep-seated ambivalence." Goethe was on his way home after a bird shooting with the duke in Apoldo. We must imagine Goethe on horseback (as always cut and paste into Google translate):

Der Etterberg! Die unbedeutenden Hügel! Und mir fuhrs durch die Seele -- Wenn du nun auch das einmal verlassen mußt! das Land wo du so viel gefunden hast, alle Glückseligkeit gefunden hast, die ein Sterblicher träumen darf, wo du zwischen Behagen und Mißbehagen, in ewig klingender Existenz schwebst ...!

Eibl, however, doubts that Goethe really felt existentially ambivalent, instead contending that the mixed feelings (Behagen und Mißbehagen) were primarily an expression of the restrictions on him that gave him little time for poetic production.

The above-mentioned Ettersberg -- called here "unbedeutend" (insignificant) -- is interesting because this range is associated with one of Goethe's best-known poems from the Weimar years, "Wandrers Nachtlied," written "Am Hang des Ettersberg d. 12. Feb. 76."

In my last post I mentioned Wolfgang Vulpius's volume on Goethe in Thuringia, the focus of which is less the poetry and more the natural world that Goethe was introduced to in the duchy of Weimar. The opening sentence of Vulpius's chapter on the Ettersberg mentions the abundant fossils of the shell limestone era in this mountain range. Ultimately Ettersberg was not insignificant at all. The entire area, including the Harz, was important for his mineralogical forays. Vulpius quotes from notes of Goethe, made in 1780 for J.C. Voigt in the context of the geological survey of the duchy:

Auf einer mineralogischen Reise durch das Herzogtum Weimar wäre der Ettersberg zuerst zu besteigen und alsdenn herunterwärts nach Zimmern und Hopfgarten zu, als auch herüber bis an die Ilm, was von Lage zu entdecken sein möchte, zu untersuchen, in was für Ordnung sie aufeinander folgen und in welcher Höhe gewisse Arten von Versteinerungen besonders der Bufonites stehen. Die Erfurter Bemühungen nach Steinkohen bei Hopfgarten sind zu untersuchen und nach den ... auf dem Ettersberg geschehenen Bemühungen sich zu erkunden.

It was the Harz journey of 1777 that inaugurated Goethe's enthusiasm for and learning on the subject of mineralogy, which increased with each journey (mostly on horseback) through this region. Vulpius mentions other Ettersberg landmarks associated with Goethe (e.g., the meteorological station established in 1817 in Schöndorf, on the back side of the Ettersberg), and also from Eckermann's report of September 26, 1827, including this well-known appreciation:

Ich war sehr oft an dieser Stelle und dachte in späteren Zeiten sehr oft, es würde das letztemal sein, daß ich von hier aus die Reiche der Welt und ihre Herrlichkeiten überblickte.

Pertinent to the importance of the area for what Goethe learned about the natural world is this passage from the same report :

Immer der alte Meeresboden! Wenn man von dieser Höhe auf Weimar hinabblickt und auf die mancherlei Dörfer umher, so kommt es einem vor wie ein Wunder, wenn man sich sagt, daß es eine Zeit gegeben, wo in dem weiten Tale dort unten die Walfische ihr Spiel getrieben. Und doch ist es so, wenigstens höchst wahrscheinlich.

"The Road to Hell"

I cannot finish up this post on the Ettersberg without mentioning, as does Vulpius, that the Nazis cleared one of the Ettersberg forests and built a concentration camp there. The two maps in this post (click to enlarge) come from the blog of the British historian, Ian Friel. In a blogpost back in 2014, Friel writes of buying in a bookshop in Germany the 1935 publication of Conti-Atlas für Kraftfahrer (‘Conti-Atlas for  the Motorist’). The map directly above shows the renaming of street names in Weimar by that date. After World War II, Adolf Hitler Strasse was renamed by the DDR government  Ernst-Thälmann Strasse. I am a terrible map reader and cannot tell from the book I mentioned in the previous post (Weimars Stadtbild ...) what the street's name was in Goethe's day.