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!