Goethe at 28

Goethe's drawing of Kochberg, 1779

Goethe was often on the road, traveling by horse, on official duties. On August 27, 1777, he set out from Weimar and overnighted at Kochberg, the von Stein estate. His diary reports: "Langsam ritt ich nach Kbg. fand sie froh und ruhig und mir wars so frey und wohl noch den Abend." This was in the early Weimar years, when Goethe was seeking to conquer the affections of Charlotte von Stein, and Kochberg exerted a strong attraction. According to Wolfgang Vulpius (Goethe in Thüringen), whenever Goethe could free himself from official duties, he hurried to Kochberg. Letters reveal that he was a favorite with her children and even her servants. For the most part, his diary does not reveal "ungetrübtes Glück an der Seite der Herrin von Kochberg," while his letters to her often reveal instead that he left Kochberg deeply disappointed and unhappy. In fact, he wrote the following note to her on August 27: "Meine Verständnisse sind dunckel, nur ist mir ziemlich klar dass ich Sie liebe."

Still, things must have gone well between him and Charlotte. The next day was his twenty-eighth birthday, and it was a good day. As he wrote in his diary: "wachte an m. Geburtstag mit der schönen sonne so heiter auf dass ich alles was vor mir liegt leichter ansah." In his note to her that morning, he wrote: "Morgen d. 28 meinen Geburtstag dencken Sie an mich! Noch einmal Adieu. Es ist doch in der Welt immer Abschiednehmen. ... Ich bin oft bey Ihnen." And then he was on his way to meet the duke in Ilmenau.

The last time Goethe was at Kochberg was on September 5, 1788, after his return from Italy. He was accompanied by Karoline Herder, Sophie von Schardt, and Charlotte's sixteen-year-old son, Fritz.  Herder's wife reported a chilly reception. No doubt Charlotte was disappointed in Goethe for bringing others with him. As Vulpius writes: company made impossible a face-to-face private conversation. In any case, the relationship was not to be restored. Charlotte had accused him with bitterness of unfaithfulness, a reproach he felt unfounded. And so, according to Vulpius, "Die Saite, der Goethe so zauberhafte Töne entlockt hatte, war zerrissen und verstummt." (The string from which Goethe had elicited such magical tones was torn and became silent.)

Adventures in Goethe Blogging

Like all bloggers, I occasionally check on the response to the blog, i.e., the number of visitors. I noticed a couple of days ago that the "all time number of page views" had exceeded 500,000. That only took eleven years!

Almost three years ago I gave a presentation at a meeting of the Goethe Society of North America entitled “Blogging Goethe.” As far as I knew then, my Goethe blog was the only such blog. Since then I have encountered another one (über goethe) in Germany, but that blogger posts even more irregularly than I do. It takes work to blog.

It was back in 2008, when everybody seemed to be setting up a website, that I thought of creating one as a site for posting my own work on Goethe, but I didn’t know how to go about it. Then one night at dinner my step-daughter said, why don’t you just do a blog?, and she, being very computer savvy, went to the “Blogspot” site and created this one. I wanted to call it Goethe.blogspot.com, but someone already had that one, so my husband suggested Goethetc.

Mackerel sky over Central Park

For a long time it was really Goethe Etcetera, since I wasn’t sure what to do with a blog, and I would often simply write about my life in New York. I don’t do any other social media, so the blog became sort of a Facebook substitute.  But eventually I did start blogging about Goethe. For instance, an early post showed the clouds in  the sky over Central Park in Manhattan, entitled "Mackerel Sky," which drew on Goethe’s admiration for Luke Howard’s categorization of clouds. And more and more I began to post about whatever I was reading, as in this post on Goethe and beggars. Clearly, I spend a lot of time looking for images.

Like many people I found myself coming across Goethe in unexpected contexts and would post on them, for instance, a post on Stephen Spender writing about Goethe.

Over time, I have posted on lots of subjects, and Google very nicely makes available the numbers of "hits" on specific posts. At the GSNA talk, I circulated a handout that showed, in descending order, the number of page views for specific subjects. Some very arcane subjects even had some respectable numbers: Branconi, Stolberg, Arnim. At the time of my talk, the one post exceeding all the others in page views (6,161) was “Goethe and Schiller and the French Revolution.” The second highest number of hits was “Goethe and Grief” (5,330),  on which I posted at the end of 2011, shortly after my husband's death. This number is interesting, especially since, as I wrote in a recent post (on the death of his sister), Goethe wrote very little in his life on the subject of his own grief.  There are some subjects I have covered often (46 on Goethe and world literature, for instance), but I only wrote once on Goethe and grief. And yet it continues to draw visitors to the site. My entry on Goethe and geology had by 2017 a quite respectable number of viewers, 1,023. In the meantime, the most visited post is now "Goethe and Romanticism" (7,813 visits, thus surpassing "Goethe and the French Revolution.)

Blue: the color of peace, consensus

At the beginning of 2017, the site became compromised in respect of the number of visitors. In that month I did four posts on  a book I was reviewing for a national magazine by the French medievalist Michel Pastoureau, who has written four large beautiful volumes on colors and their social representation. Pastoureau mentioned Goethe frequently, so it was a no brainer that I would post about this connection. The fourth Pastoureau post was entitled "Red versus Blue." Red, according to Pastoureau, was the primordial color of all civilizations, but in the 12th century in the West it began to be competitive with blue. By the 18th century, Goethe, according to Pastoureau, contributed to this ascendence of the social preference for blue. The title of the post had nothing to do with the inauguration of Donald Trump, but the subject of "blue" and "red" America apparently still resonated. As of today, over 5,000 visitors have looked at that post! The spike in views changed my status in the Google algorithm and led subsequently to Google sending more visitors to my blog, whatever the subject.

Red: the color of danger

Already in the summer of 2016 I had noticed that I was getting a lot of hits on the site from Russia. At first, I thought, how interesting: all these people in Russia reading my blog about Goethe. At some point, however, I got in touch with Google  and asked why there were so many hits from Russia, the Ukraine, and even the UAE. Google seems to have disabled them from registering, although every now and then I notice the appearance of several hundred visitors from unexpected places on the planet.

So, Goethe Etcetera will go on. Let's hope we reach a million visitors before another decade passes!

Walks in Weimar with George Eliot

Lately I have been going through books long laid aside in connection with Goethe, among them a book of essays by George Eliot in which one finds "Three Months in Weimar." After reading the essay, I decided to discuss it on the blog and, in preparation, I started looking for images. I typed "George Eliot in Weimar," hoping for some interesting images of Weimar in the year 1854, when Eliot accompanied George Lewes there. Lewes was collecting material for the biography of Goethe on which he had been working. Much to my surprise, I came across a site so titled: George Eliot in Weimar. It appears to be a one-off sort of blog, posted on successive days in January 2019, commemorating Eliot's 200th birthday. There are ten "episodes," with each post excerpting highlights of the visit to Weimar, either a portion from the essay or from Eliot's journal or letters: Arrival at Weimar, Hotel zum Erbprinzen, Kaufstraße, The Goethe Haus, The Schiller Haus,Theatre with Goethe-Schiller-Denkmal, The Stadtschloß, The Altenburg, The Ilm Park with Goethe’s Garden House, The Garden House – Guest Book, The Belvedere Schloß, The Ettersburg, The Tiefurt Schloß, Bad Berka, The Kickelhahn Hut, Leaving Weimar. The blog includes audio recordings of readings from the writings.

Since Eliot was traveling with a man who was not her husband, the essay itself is not very forthcoming about who she is with or why she is even there. It seemed like a piece of travel journalism, and, except for a few places (the visit to Schiller's house), not very fascinating. The blogger at the "George Eliot in Weimar" website, however, has made things more interesting, beginning with asserting that the journey to Weimar represented a kind of honeymoon for the two Georges. Thus, entries from her "recollections" mention George Lewes by name ("George"). The following is a nice passage not included in the essay.

"Another delightful place to which we often walked was Bercka (sic), a little village, with baths and a Kur-Haus seated in a lovely valley about six miles from Weimar. The first time G. went I was obliged to stay at home and work, and when he came back he merely said that the place and the walk to it were pretty, and brought me a bunch of berries from the mountain ash as a proof that he had thought of me by the way. He wished to ménager (prepare) a surprize for me by the moderation of his praise and he succeeded, for I was enchanted with the first sight of this little paradise and half inclined to be angry with G. for having been able to restrain the expression of his admiration."

From that passage, we see that George Eliot was working during this trip. What might she have been working on? The Goethe-Handbuch has a single reference to Eliot, in connection with Hans-Richard Brittmacher's entry "Wirkungsgeschichte in der Weltliteratur," specifically English and American literature. Carlyle in his enthusiasm for Wilhelm Meister, which inspired his own Sartor Resartus (1838), seems to have inspired the genre of "apprenticeship novels," which included Contarini Fleming by Benjamin Disraeli and several by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. And, then, Brittmacher writes: "Den Bildungsweg einer weiblichen Heldin stellte George Eliot in Middlemarch (1871-72) dar."

Eliot's essay concentrates solely on externals. We do not learn in it, for instance, that she and Lewes got to know Franz Liszt, who was then living in Weimar. Moreover, in view of their own relationship, Lizst was living with a married woman, a princess at that, Caroline Sayn-Wittgenstein. Through Lizst they met writers, musicians, poets. They even attended performances in Weimar of Wagner's operas, but were worn out by the second act of Lohengrin.

The externals of Weimar, as she writes of them, are those one might expect of an English person, very attuned to gardens, town vs. country, and the beauty of the natural environment. Her first impression of Weimar, as she set out exploring the town, was: "How could Goethe live here in this dull, lifeless village? ... [I]t was inconceivable that the stately Jupiter, in a frock coat, so familiar to us all through Rauch's statuettee, could have habitually walked along these rude streets and among these slouching mortals. Not a picturesque bit of building was to be seen; there was no quaintness, nothing to remind one of historical associations, nothing but the most arid prosaism."

It must be said that, in the course of things, she gives the town and townspeople their just due. For instance, of the market, next to Herder Platz, she writes that it is a cheerful square "made smart by a new Rath-haus. Twice a week it is crowded with stalls and country people; and it is the very pretty custom for the band to play in the balcony of the Rath-haus about twenty minutes every market day to delight the ears of the peasantry." She goes on to describe the head dress worn by local women at the market.

For the most part, however, the outings she describes in the essay concern the more splendid environs of the town. The park on the Ilm, the Belvedere, the Schloss, Oberweimar, Not to forget Goethe's Garden House, which she describes as "a homely sort of cottage such as many an English nobleman's gardener lives in." I couldn't help thinking of To the Manor Born. I was very impressed that she knew of the "torchlight performance of Goethe's Die Fischerin in Tiefurt, on the bank of the Ilm, where the river is seen to best advantage. It turns out that the one place associated with Goethe that she most liked was Ilmenau. The essay ends with a laborious walk to the Kickelhahn, where one can see the lines written by Goethe's own hand.

At the start of the essay, when Eliot speaks of her surprise at the homeliness and rusticity of Weimar, I could not help thinking that Goethe, having had a hand in many projects that enhanced the ducal quarters of Weimar, never turned his talents to "town planning." In this era, the "face" of a town was the last thing on the mind of its rulers and administrators. For those who did conscientiously seek to improve the "infrastructure," it was more homely projects, for instance, roads and water supply, that were at the top of the list. So, Weimar became Goethe's "hometown," where he lived for almost fifty years, during which time he occupied important bureaucratic roles. It would be expecting too much for a bourgeois person, which he was, to have concerned himself with the externals of Weimar.

Goethe wisdom

I have posted several times on the appropriation of Goethe's words in advertising, self-help manuals, political slogans, and the like. I wonder if there is any living personality whom we would invoke today to give substance to whatever agenda is being promoted. In a recent post, I quoted from a New York Times piece by Martin Walser, in which Walser vented about this mobilization of Goethe's words, generally without context. There are dozens of quotes on Google Images, including the one at the top of this post.

Usually I run these quotes through Google Translate to see if they sound like Goethe. In a post entitled "Goethe Wisdom," I mentioned one that I felt sounded too corny to come from Goethe. Here it is: "Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words. Here is how Google Translate rendered it: "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."

This summer I have been working my way through Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels. I began with the Theatralische Sendung and am now in the middle of Book 5 of the Lehrjarhre. And what did I come across this morning but the following:

"Man sollte," sagte er, "alle Tage wenigstens in kleines Lied hören, ein gutes Gedicht lesen, ein treffliches Gemälde sehen und, wenn es möglich zu machen wäre, einige vernünftige Worte sprechen."

These are the veritable written words of Goethe, much better than Google's German translation of the English, but they were not spoken by Goethe himself. The speaker is the theater director Serlo, with whom Wilhelm Meister is having a discussion about theatrical matters. The narrator's attitude toward Serlo is ambivalent, although the value of what he recommends here cannot be denied. In a certain respect, he voices opinions of the theater public that one imagines Goethe was himself in agreement with.

I do not know if the quote in the image above is by Goethe, but I love the sound of it. Maybe I will come across it one of these days in my reading of Goethe. If anyone knows, however, please write.

 

Goethe and Girolamo Cardano

This entry is speculative. First of all, there is no scholarship on the subject of Goethe and the Renaissance polymath Girolamo Cardano (1501–76), aside from the mention in the Goethe-Handbuch, that Goethe attended to both Cardano's autobiography and that of Cellini in connection with Dichtung und Wahrheit.  Goethe's diary of July 27, 1777, documents that he was reading Cardano's De propria vita. Three days later, it is Cardano's Synesiorum somniorum omnis generis insomnia explicantes libri IV (Four books in which all kind of dreams in Synesius’s “On dreams” are explained; 1562). Dream interpretation has apparently a long tradition, The Neoplatonist Synesius of Cyrene (370–413) himself being one. As I said, no scholarship on why Goethe might have been reading, as he wrote in his diary, Cardan Synes Somn.

But I was intrigued and went looking and found an article that had no reference to Goethe, but was suggestive of what might have interested Goethe in Cardano's dream book. The article is by Jacomien Prins, and it concerns a seminar held between 1936 and 1941 conducted by the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, during which he discussed twelve of Cardano's dreams, which apparently appeared in the Latin-titled work that Goethe read. I will be paraphrasing from this article, which appeared in I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance (vol. 20, no. 2, 2017).

Cardano is most well known for his work in mathematics, but we can assume that his math was not Goethe's interest, but, instead, the more arcane aspects of the Renaissance thinker. Cardano was, for instance, an astrologer. According to Prins, Cardano was also “one of the most important Renaissance pioneers to revive the ancient dream interpretation.” Here is a sentence from the first paragraph of the article that one can imagine might have had some resonance for Goethe: “Central to Cardano’s dream theory is the idea that the cosmos is a dynamic network of occult harmonic correspondences, knowledge of which can be revealed in dreams.”

Cardano kept a night diary in which he recorded his dreams. He believed that dreams, being about the dreamer's present situation, should be consulted for inferences they contain for the future. According to Prins, the great trauma of Cardano's life was the death of one of his sons, who was executed for murdering his wife. Cardano kept asking himself whether, had he paid more attention to warning signals in his dreams, he could prevented this tragic course of events. Cardano wrote, for instance: “I had a warning, also, in 1547, in the summer at Pavia while my younger son was sick, lying, as it were, at the point of death, that I should be bereft of the object of my affection.”

In this connection, I can't help considering that Goethe might have been seeking some solace after the family tragedy of the month before, the death of his sister Cornelia. The few comments that Goethe made about his sister suggest a certain guilt concerning her unhappy situation after her marriage.