Goethe the Manager

One of the books on Goethe that I am working my way through this summer is Goethe: Der Manager. The word “manager” is used advisedly by the author, Georg Schwedt, who seeks to portray Goethe’s practice, both literary and professional, within the context of modern management techniques. My own recent focus on Goethe concerns the early Weimar years. While this volume principally deals with the years after Goethe has become established in Weimar, it introduces a slew of people with whom he was associated from 1775 already, and with whom I am trying to gain a closer acquaintance

The aim of the book, as Schwedt mentions in the foreword, is to show how it was possible for Goethe so successfully to organize activities as diverse as administrative tasks and literary work (“so unterschiedliche und vielfältige Geschäfte wie das Verwalten (als Beamter) und Dichten (als freier Schriftsteller) erfolgreich zu organisieren”). Goethe, he asserts, can be taken as a model of our own managerial era. The first chapter, concerning Goethe before his arrival in Weimar, documents how his literary career (Sturm und Drang) and his legal work already established a “network.”

Here are the titles of the remaining chapters.

2. Der verbeamtete Manager
3. Der Zeitmanager
4. Der verbeamtete Entrepreneur: Veranstalter, Unternehmer, Agent und Förderer
5. Der Personal-Manager und Networker
6. Der private Geschäftsmann

There is a table of Goethe’s official activities and a short bibliography.

A lot of the material in this book has been treated in greater detail in various entries in the Goethe-Handbuch. For instance, Schwedt draws heavily on the entry of Siegfried Scheibe and Dorothea Kuhn on Goethe’s “Arbeitswese.” Nevertheless, it is great to have such scholarly articles condensed, as it were, plus there is lots of personal detail that gives a glimpse of Goethe or others in his environment. I mentioned in my last post the social emptiness of Weimar on Goethe’s arrival. In this connection, Nicholas Boyle in his Goethe bio goes on to write of Weimar in 1776: "There was no body of learned, or even systematically educated, men and women, no thinking and writing and artistically active milieu, such as a great city can provide, to support, stimulate, and give variety to their efforts." Schwedt shows us the contributions Goethe made to remedy the situation. In 1791,  for instance, he established the Freitagsgesellschaft (the Friday Society), which Schwedt calls a “think tank.”

At these monthly meetings, different individuals — scholars as well as members of the court and other intellectually interested people from Weimar and the neighboring towns — would present work on literary, historical, or scientific subjects. At the first meeting, according to Goethe’s minutes, Mining Director (Bergrat) Bucholz carried out a chemical experiment; Christian Gottlob Voigt read an essay concerning the newest discoveries on the west coast of North America; and Goethe read an introduction to his theory of light and color. The final contribution on that afternoon was from Major von Knebel: “Warum sich Minerva wohl eine Eule zugestellt habe?”

That last, by Knebel, is the one I would like to have heard.

By the way, Georg Schwedt is himself an analytical chemist by profession, with numerous scholarly publications to his credit, and apparently quite a time manager himself, to judge by the books on Goethe he has produced. Besides Goethe als Chemiker, these include a "Reiselexikon" of one hundred places associated with Goethe: Goethe: Museen, Orte, Reiserouten, a book that I have in my possession.  It was published in 1996 and thus, besides Germany, Switzerland, and France (Alsace), he was able to include places in the Czech Republic.

Picture credit: Das Lecturio Magazine