Der Brocken 1945

I have been posting almost daily Tweets of Goethe's diary for December 1777, when Goethe was traveling in the Harz visiting various mining sites and also making his famous ascent of the Brocken. As I mentioned in my previous post, the journey made great physical demands. Snow, sleet, hail, fog, and then there were days when Goethe climbed down into the shafts of mines. On December 12, 1777, he descended into three pits of a silver mine in St. Andreasberg: Samson, Neufang, and Gottesgnade. The former, Grube Samson, even has a Wikipedia entry. It is 810 meters deep, and Goethe wrote afterward in his diary: "ward mir sehr sauer diesmal."

The larger towns on his route can be found on online maps of the Harz (Clausthal, Mühlhausen), but not the many mining villages: Duderstadt, Dammhaus, Silkeroda, and so on. But I keep looking, hoping to find such a map. Today, however, I came across quite unexpectedly the map at the top of this post, showing the path of the American troops who stormed the Brocken on April 20, 1945. According to the accompanying post, at the beginning of April 40.000 male prisoners from the concentration camp Mittelbau-Dora (and its "satellites" in Ellrich, Nüxei, Wieda, Mackenrode und Osterhagen) as well as from the concentration camp Brunshausen near Bad Gandersheim were death marched through the Harz. The goal of the death march was to reach towns that had a rail connection to Ravensbruck or Dachau. 10,000 died on the march. Click on the image to enlarge. For those who don't know German, "KZ" on the map represents "concentration camp."

It's sobering to consider that it was over the same paths that so many of those prisoners died.

"Harzreise im Winter"

As I mentioned in my previous post, it was at this time of year in 1777 that Goethe took off in a trip through the Harz. By then, he had been in Weimar for two almost years. Some of my recent posts have described his accommodation to life in Weimar. Although he had a residence in the town, he was also had new quarters for himself on the banks of the Ilm, something of a retreat, which he occupied with only a man servant. In the early part of 1777, when not busy with his court duties, he tended to repairs and reconstruction of this new home. Things seemed to be going well, but, as mentioned in an earlier post, a certain darkening of his mood began in the middle of 1777, occasioned in part by the death of his sister Cornelia. So, what was a young man to do -- Goethe was approaching thirty -- but to make a geographic escape? Nicholas Boyle in his Goethe biography, writes that, as in 1772 and 1775, Goethe sought through such a escape "clarity and relief from despair and doubt."

The Goethe-Handbuch, my go-to source for background on many of my posts, doesn't have an entry on the Harz journey itself, only on the poem and its reception. It is often the case that scholars seek for an interpretation of a poem by Goethe in his personal experience. After all, didn't Goethe himself once say that all his work represented "fragments of a great confession"? Much of the reception presented in the Goethe-Handbuch is recapitulated in Boyle, who refers to it as a "poem of self-assessment," reflecting a "division of Goethe's self" at this time and an attempt to discover whether his destiny is to be that of "Glück" or "Unglück." In this the poem, the journey to an undisclosed location, represents an attempt to seek a path out of "the danger of emotional self-destruction" in which an entire generation was stuck.

For Boyle and for much of the reception of the poem, Goethe's aim on this trip ("avowed at first only to himself") was to climb the Brocken, his reason being to be open to "a sign." Thus, the oracular language in parts of the poem "Harzreise im Winter."

My own scholarship on Goethe has been skeptical of considering his poetry strictly in this way. In my view, the "meaning" of the poem is determined by the form or genre in which Goethe chose to write. In this case, Goethe has written a hymn, which necessarily evokes religious associations. Hymns are expressive of exultation, and I can't help feeling that this arduous journey on horseback in the worst kind of weather speaks to the exaltation felt in his own strength and endurance. His letters to Charlotte von Stein, written as he took overnight refuge in inns, offers details. On December 4, he writes:

Ein ganz entsezlich Wetter hab ich heut ausgestanden wie die Stürme für Zeugs in diesen Gebürgen ausbrauen ist unsäglich, Sturm, Schnee, Schlossen, Regen, und zwey Meilen an einer Nordwand eines Waldgebürgs her, alles fast ist nass, und erhohlt haben sich meine Sinne kaum nach Essen, Trincken, drey Stunden Ruhe.

He refers to what he has experienced as an adventure (Abenteuer) that he has withstood. As he sits in the inn at the end of the day in the company of "ordinary people," his clothes are hanging on the stove drying. 

The letters to CvS cover many subjects, while his diary entries (see Tweets) give evidence of the rigors of the journey. As the days go by the tone remains that of exaltation. Traveling alone on horseback, it is obvious that he has a lot of time to think about himself and what he is going through. Goethe has always looked for signs, and it is not unusual that he would refer to type in such circumstances. On December 9, he writes that he wishes that the duke could share the experience (Mitgenuss so eines Lebens) with him. As he writes, however, the duke would experience the rigors in a different spirit:

 ... aber den rechten leckern Geschmack davon kan er noch nicht haben, er gefällt sich noch zu sehr das natürliche zu was abenteuerlichem zu machen, statt dass es einem erst wohl thut wenn das abenteuerliche natürlich wird.

A somewhat different interpretation of Goethe's motive for the journey is that of Wolf von Engelhardt (Goethe in Gespräch mit der Erde) who claims that the relevant reason was to get a picture of the "modern mining industry," such as it was in that region. Evidence, according to WvE, is Goethe's purchase of technical literature on mining in early November already, along with mentions of this in letters to Charlotte von Stein, and, above all, the well-planned travel route, which omitted not a single important mining site. Again, the diary (see the Tweets) record all those visits. They also inform us that Goethe actually descended into the depths of the mines. As far as the Brocken goes, the highest mountain in Middle Germany, von Engelhardt writes that Goethe would have been familiar with two volumes by Johann Heinrich Zuckert on the "Naturgeschichte" of the Harz and of its mines, but which also mentions that the Brocken was notorious as a site of witches and Satanic goings-on. It can be imagined that Goethe, having endured the effects of such terrible weather, might have taken it into his head to ascend the Brocken. Endurance does seem to be one of the themes here, which some individuals are unable to muster, while others, born in fortunate circumstances, do not have to exercise. This would include Plessing, whom Goethe met (according to his diary) on December 3.

Von Engelhardt sees expressed in the poem and in the journey itself a new and unsentimental view of nature -- not a Christian one in which rocks and mountains have a divine source. Goethe sought to convey such an unsentimental view of the world to Plessing, without success. The central part of the poem would seem to refer to Plessing's dissatisfaction with the world.

A wonderful recording of the poem, read by Christian Wewerka, is available on this site, along with an English translation.

Goethe's Harz Journey

 

On Nov. 28, 1777, Goethe wrote in his diary: "besorgt ich noch aller ley." What is being referred to are his preparations for a long trip, which began the next day, Nov. 29, and which would continue until December 15. He was traveling by horse, and stopped in such places as Greußen, Ilfeld, Elbingerode, Baumannshöhle, Wernigerode, Goslar, Clasthal, Altenau, and Eisenach. (Some of these are so small that they are not captured on images of the Harz mountains.) The high point of this journey would be his Brocken expedition, leading him, in the middle of winter, to ascend on Dec. 10 the high peak of the Brocken, of which it was said that no one climbed it in winter. On Dec. 12 he noted in his diary that he was working on the poem that would become known as "Harzreise im Winter."

Because the diary entry for November 29 is so long, I will not post it on the Goethe Twitter feed, but instead will break up here the contents of that day, which was quite a journey itself. First the setting off during a hailstorm (Schlossen), but feeling peaceful:

Früh gegen sieben ab übern Ettersberg in scharfen Schlossen 20 Min. auf 1 in Weissensee. stürmisch gebrochen Wetter, reine Ruh in der Seele, Sonnenblicke mit unter Abends nach 4 in Greusen.

In Greusen he decided to stop. The commentary to Goethe's diary makes it sound as if Goethe hears an anecdote from a teamster (Fuhrmann) he met there about a preacher (Seelsorger) who (apparently) sent a load to 3 blacksmiths who didn't wish to shoe it because it was too big. (This is a total guess: please correct me who knows what it is meant here. The diary commentary volume is not very revealing):

Musste schon Halt machen es brach die Nacht ein. NB. Wie der Furhmann erzählt von seinem Seelsorger wie der ein Maas zu 3 Schmieden schikt dies nicht beschlagen wollends so gros ist. Aber er wills so haben.

In any case, the anecdote ends with a Biblical reference (Deut. 25, 14: Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small):

Wenn wird der zehende aufhören und ein Epha -- ich weiss wohl was steht.

The diary for December 1 is even longer. It describes a very arduous journey:

Sonnt. früh nach sechsen von Greusen mit einem Boten ab. War scharf gefroren und die Sonne ging mit herrlichsten Farben an. Ich sah den Ettersberg, den Inselsberg, die Berge des Thüringer Waldes hinter mir. dann in Wald und im heraustreten, Sondershausen das sehr angenehm liegt. Die Spizze des Brockens einen Augenblick, hinter Sondershausen weg auf Sundhausen Schöne Aussicht die goldne Aue vom Kyffhauser bis Northhausen herauf.Mit einigen Invaliden die ihre Pension in Ilefeld hohlten. Fütterte in Sundhausen. Dann bey Northhausen weg. es hatte schon gegen Mittag zu regnen angefangen. Die Nacht kam leise und traruig. Auf Sachswerben, wo ich einen Boten mit einer Laterne nehmen musste, um durch die tiefe Finsterniss hierher Ilefeld zu kommen. Fand keine Stube leer. Sizze im Kämmergen neben der Wirthsstube. War den ganzen Tag in gleicher Reinheit.

I have posted this early portion of the diary and will continue with further stops on the route on the Twitter feed, after which I plan to post on the interpretation of Goethe's Harz poem and my own thoughts.

What Wilhelm Meister Might Have Seen on His Travels

Matsumura Goshun, Woodcutters (detail), ca. 1790

The two images here are details of paintings I saw at the Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day. The title of this post is thus misleading, as the details are from Japanese works. Yet, similarly laboring people would have been encountered by a wanderer in German lands in the 18th century: men carrying loads of straw or wood or a basketweaver. Both Anton Reiser and Jung-Stillings Lebensgeschichte describe encounters with such figures. (Click on images to enlarge.)

Matssumura Keibun, A Garden of Pictures (1814)

The Wanderjahre is of course less of a realistic work than those two novels, but such comparisons are helpful as they show the difference in Goethe's preoccupations. Goethe is always intent on describing the flowers and the foliage, and the Japanese illustrator also does that in the charming woodblock below, combining both the labor and the cherry blossoms.

Matssumura Keibun, A Garden of Pictures (1814)

 

Images: MMA 2015.300.2061; 2013.873

Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre

Julius von Leypold, Wanderer in the Storm

My earliest work on Goethe concern the poetic production of the young, pre-Weimar Goethe. My dissertation dealt with the subject of how Goethe, like most writers of his generation, steeped in the classics and in French literature, transformed the early literary influences, especially the traditional genre of the idyll, into something new. In other words, it was about "how Goethe became Goethe" or the Goethe we know today. In recent years, I investigated his concept of world literature and published an essay on the subject, focusing on Fritz Strich's groundbreaking writings on world literature. Now I am back to the early Goethe, in this case Goethe of the early Weimar years. I have been Tweeting his diary entries for 1777. In fact, just a little over a week ago, November 7, marked Goethe's second anniversary in Weimar.

The diary entry for yesterday's date, November 14, was very long, and I Tweeted only the part that mentioned his activities for the day: a meeting of the Council, lunch with the duke, Charlotte von Stein's new apartment. But there is in the diary a long appendix to that day, which is as follows. (Again, if necessary, cut and paste into Google Translate.)

Heiliges Schicksaal du hast mir mein Haus gebaut und ausstaffirt über mein Bitten, ich war vergnügt in meiner Armuth unter meinem halbfaulen Dache ich bat dich mirs zu lassen, aber du has mir Dach und Beschräncktheit vom Haupte gezogen wie eine Nachtmütze. Las mich nun auch frisch und zusammengenommen der Reinheit geniessen. Amen. Ja und Amen winkt der erste Sonnenblick d. 14 Nov.

Acht in der Haushaltung keinen Ritz zu eng, eine Maus geht durch.

One can hear Biblical echoes here; Goethe was well steeped in the Bible. I like the homeliness of the sentiments, especially the part about the night cap. Many of the diary entries of past months have concerned household tasks, and this seems to mark progress in settling in.  Domesticity meant a lot to Goethe, his comfort in any case, and that it was succeeding so well no doubt contributed to his satisfaction with his new life there, even if at times there was dissatisfaction, which is also often expressed in the diary entries, usually in connection with his relationship with Charlotte von Stein.

Yesterday I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and came across the painting that is pictured at the top of this post. Its title is Wanderer in the Storm. The painting is dated 1835, a few years after Goethe's death, and the painter was Julius von Leypold. I couldn't help thinking of Goethe in his early years in Weimar when I saw Leypold's painting. (Click on image to enlarge.)

Wandering forms the backdrop to a number of 18th-century German novels. This summer, in connection with my interest in exploring Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung, I have also read Anton Reiser by Karl Philipp Moritz, and Lebensgeschichte by Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling. The protagonists of these novels wandered all over the place! Anton Reiser wore the soles of his shoes out walking from Hanover to Erfurt. Jung-Stilling walked back and forth from his village to one village after another in search of employment. Goethe's protagonist, Wilhelm Meister, was not quite wandering or walking. He moved about on horseback, and wherever he went there was a meal waiting for him, usually at an inn, where he met with a true vagabonds, peripatetic actors.

After reading the Ur-Meister, I decided I had to re-read the Lehrjahre. The wandering part is not so extensive in this work, and Wilhelm spends most of his time in one place or another working on his theatrical practice. The Wanderjahre, which I never thought I would re-read in this lifetime -- but I am now doing so -- is truly about Wilhelm's wanderings, and he does so on foot for the most part. The book opens with a scene of Wilhelm and his son Felix climbing a mountain path. Indeed, because of his oath to the Tower Society, he can no longer stay in one place for more than three days, so he is always on the go. The restriction is done away with by the end of Book 2, as he seems to have settled on a profession, which will probably keep him in one place. (Only one more book to go!)

Because of the lack of realism in the Wanderjahre (the final version of which appeared in 1829), one does not have the sense of the difficulties and various trials of true wandering. Wilhelm covers a large area, including Germany, Italy, and the so-called Pedagogical Province, the last a pretty big place. The in-between stages are omitted, and Wilhelm, as if on a magic carpet, simply arrives. So, the painting above does not really give an indication of Wilhelm's wanderings, although it does suggest how much the theme resonated in Germany, especially for the Romantic poets.

Image credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art;

Museum visit

My friend Barb and I made a trip to the Metropolitan Museum today. She is photo researcher and a colorist of historical photos and an all-around expert at computer imaging. Herewith a cool photo manipulation of us in the Cypriot galleries of the museum.

Goethe is homesick

"Young Goethe"

According to Nicholas Boyle’s bio, the first phase of Goethe’s life in Weimar lasted until the middle of 1777. His diary entries (see my Tweets) mention work on his garden house in the spring of 1777, where he put in fruit and vegetable beds, occasionally sleeping on the veranda. By then, he was well acquainted with court life, and even before 1777, he had become responsible for court entertainments. In January he was planning a production for the birthday of the duchess, the new piece being the Singspiel Lila. In the middle of 1777, however, his sister Cornelia died. As I mentioned in a post on her death, we know of his reaction only from a diary entry and several letters. Her death was a big blow to him, however, and it is at this point that begins what Boyle calls the next phase, which will last until his return from his journey to Switzerland with the duke in early 1780.

By the autumn of 1777, we can already see Goethe’s mood changing and betraying a bit of boredom with it all. From the end of August until October 9, he was staying in Eisenach with the duke, while traveling from one village to the next with Carl August on official business. There was a lot of hunting as well and  carrying on ("nach Tische mit den Bauermaidels getanzt"), but several entries indicate that he had a whale of a toothache, of which he wrote to Charlotte von Stein (“24 Stunden Geschwullst und grose Schmerzen). But he also makes note of “Gefühl des Alleinseyns.” of his homesickness for his garden house, of the poverty of court life.

So much work and play and so little time for literary production. In these weeks on the road, he took up drawing, which is mentioned in many of the diary entries. The duke allowed him to stay at Wartburg castle, which appears to have been a highlight of these weeks, and of which he made several drawings. By the end, however, he was Lebensmüde,

Yesterday’s (October 8) Tweet was an exceptionally long one, with many official functions. Among those assembled à table at the Wartburg was Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, a native German (from Gotha) who lived in Paris, where he was friends with Diderot and d’Alembert, and where he published the literary newsletter Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, which concerned the goings-on in the Enlightenment capital. It was distributed to several  rulers of German lands, including Carl August, as well as Catherine the Great of Russia. Goethe appears to have declined to meet Grimm. As he wrote in his diary: Ich fühlte so inniglich dass … ich dem Manne nichts zu sagen hatte der von Petersburg nach Paris geht.

This long diary entry ends as follows: Und wills Gott in Ruhe vor den Menschen mit denen ich doch nichts zu theilen habe. Yes, very tired of life.

The next day he was on his way “home” to Weimar and wrote to CvS on October 10 from his garden, mentioning his estrangement from everyone: “Ich bin entfremdeter von viel Welt nur nicht von Ihnen."

Goethe Wisdom Anew

An email and a link appeared this morning in my inbox from Carl Muenzer, former president of the Goethe Society of North America. It turns out that the estimable cartoonist Brian Crane's comic strip Pickles, which features a long-married couple and their friends and neighbors, has drawn on Goethe's words of wisdom in these trying times. The cartoon below appeared recently in The Washington Post and shows the extent to which Goethe's "wisdom" travels. (Click to enlarge.)

According to The Washington Post, Pickles has topped comics polls across the nation again and again, and it appears in 900 newspapers around the world

This particular bit of Goethe wisdom is one that I have mentioned in a couple of posts, including recently, as occurring in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. I have also posted frequently on the appearance of Goethe in various non-Goethe contexts. shoes, lifestyle magazines, not to forget Duckenfaust.

Image credit: © 2020 The Washington Post

Goethe at Wartburg castle

In 1776 Goethe joined the “administration” in Weimar. By 1777, he was often accompanying the duke on trips in connection with that administration. According to Nicholas Boyle, the first two and a half years on the Council were “a natural, if time-consuming extension of his principal role as companion and mentor to Carl August.” Besides sessions in Weimar, they traveled to other places in the duchy. In 1777, for which I am also Tweeting from Goethe’s diary. they traveled to Martinroda, Manebach, Elgersburg, Stützerbach, all in the vicinity of Ilmenau. In Stützerbach he wrote to Charlotte von Stein of a wild night of dancing with the peasant girls (Bauernmädel) and drinking until 1 a.m. In those same days, however, he suffered an intense toothache. Yes, even the great one had toothaches. As he wrote to Charlotte from Eisenach on September 6, his swollen face compromised the good times with the “girls”: 

Alles ist wohl nur ich habe mir ein Monster von dicken Backen ganz wider allen Sinn meiner dürren Constitution geholt …  und muss nun inne sitzen und warme Kräutermilch im Mund haben, und kann nicht auff Misels ausgehen, es wird ein verfluchter Streich sein, wenn ich mit verzognem Gesicht soll die Maidels belügen.

Hans Lufft’s Bible printed 1536

He and the duke then traveled to Eisenach on September 12, where he would take part in the sessions of the Eisenach Estates, principally concerning tax matters. First, however, he was still suffering a "Geschwülst und grose Schmerzen" from the toothache, and had to remain in lodgings, while the others with whom he was traveling were out hunting. But the highlight of these days was certainly his stay at the Wartburg, the famous castle, where Martin Luther spent ten months, during which he translated the New Testament. Carl August made it possible for Goethe stay there, from September 13, and Goethe took the opportunity to sketch. On the 16th he wrote to CvS about the view from on high:

Heute früh war wider alles neu. Philip weckte mich und lies mich ans Fenster gehn! es lagen unten alle Thäler im gleichen Nebel, und es war völlig See, wo die vielen Gebürge, als Ufer, hervorsahen.

He liked Wartburg so much that he was back there at the end of September, when he wrote to his Wetzlar friend Kestner, saying that he was “living on Luther’s Patmos.” Indeed, Luther had referred to his stay in the castle as his personal “Patmos,” in reference to the exile to the isle of Patmos of the apostle John, who wrote the final book of the Bible there. A website I just came across, which appeared in 2017, “Reformation Year,” reports that Luther was very depressed during his stay in the castle and believed his end was near. Goethe, however, was in a far different mood. As he wrote to Kestner, he was “der glücklichste von allen die ich kenne.”

Somerset Mauham on Goethe's novels

Maugham looking Olympian

I have been gearing myself up this summer to write a scholarly article on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels. I foresee a year before me of combing through the scholarly literature on the subject, some of which I read side my side during my daily pensum of reading the novels. I have started off with books I have on my own shelves, including Eric Blackall, of course, whose footnotes offer guidance to older studies, and in which I find many underlinings from my first reading of it back in grad school. An essay by Stuart Atkins on Goethe's "classicism" also offers hints as to the choices Goethe made in writing the Apprenticeship.

It can't be said that reading these novels is an unmitigated pleasure, as is, for instance, sinking into many a 19th-century English novel. Goethe's literary production always owed a great debt to inherited literary models. Again, it is Atkins, whose essay on Wilhelm Meister, subtitled "Novel or Romance?," offers a clue to the abundance of long 18th-century prose narratives with which Goethe would have been familiar. These included, in the case of der Roman, as one calls the genre in German, "Reiseroman, Politischer Roman, Satirischer Roman, Schäferroman," and, most famously perhaps, the "picaresque." In the case of the WM novels, we are faced, as in these earlier types of novels, by a string of episodes in which a character is seen traveling and meeting lots of "types" of people, having many adventures, and so on, but not adding up to the kinds of resolutions with which we are familiar from "canonical" 19th-century novels. In other words, no plot (which, in any case, has been condemned by postmodernists). According to Atkins, Goethe himself did not generally refer to the WM novels as Romane; it was only Elective Affinities that he continually spoke of as a "Roman."

Since Somerset Maugham was himself a novelist, his essay on Goethe's novels is illuminating on Goethe's "failure" in respect of what moderns expect in the way of a novel, while at the same time knowledgeable concerning the 18th-century background of Goethe's writing. He speaks highly of the precursor to the WM novels, Theatralische Sendung, begun by Goethe in 1779, which Maugham associates with the Spanish picaresque novels that were in vogue in Europe: Gil Blas by Le Sage, Tom Jones by Fielding, and Humphrey Clicker by Smollett being three successful ones. Maugham found it "a pity" that Goethe was unable to finish along the lines he had begun. Instead, when Goethe again took up the novel, in 1794, he diverted from the original plan, which, according to Maugham, would have "reached the conventional end of a picaresque novel," with Wilhelm as manager of a theater and a happy marriage. Instead, "Goethe's theme was not, as it had been, the art of the theatre, but the art of life. ... Art is an effect of design; life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation." As readers of WM's Apprenticeship are aware, of course, "chance" plays a huge role in the novel. In other words, Goethe did not leave the influence of the 18th-century novels behind, all of which abound in far-fetched coincidences that redirect the action.

Of the Sendung, Maugham writes that, if finished, "it would [not] have been a great book, but it would have been a good one and have stood comparison, not unfavourably, with the best of the picaresque tales." At the same time, he gives credit to what Goethe did achieve: "If on the whole the novel which Goethe eventually sent to the press is a failure, it is of more consequence than many a novel which within its limits is completely successful."

Maugham makes a point about what happens when an author is "drawing a portrait of himself" in a novel, which he contends is the case in Werther, Clavigo, and Götz. (He doesn't mention Stella.) The male characters are "slaves of their emotions," traits, one suspects, "that were deeply rooted in Goethe himself." And so it is with Wilhelm: "Goethe had a weakness for delivering long disquisitions on any subject that happened at the time to interest him." Moreover, when the author is the hero of his novel, "the hero is acted upon, rather than acts, with the result that he remains shadowy in comparison with the other persons, objectively seen, of the story."

Image credits: Graham Sutherland; Barnes and Noble

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.

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

Goethe in July 1777

The "Goethe Room" at Schloss Kochberg

In July 1777 a month after receiving the news of Cornelia’s death, Goethe made a number of escapes from Weimar, some lasting only a day or two, including to Kochberg, estate of the von Stein family (who at the time were not in residence, but at a spa). As Nicholas Boyle writes, Goethe’s response that summer to his bereavement was “an almost manic wildness.” Sometimes he traveled alone, at times with members of the court.

On July 4, Goethe went to Dornburg with the Duke and Duchess Luise and Karl Theodor von Dalberg, where they sketched and, not having made overnight reservations, they ended up sleeping on straw palliates in unfurnished rooms of one of the small castles. Goethes diary entry: Nachts auf der Streue mit d. Herzog, Prinzen, Dalberg u 2 Einsiedels. The next morning they set off fireworks (Canonen gelöst), then returning to Weimar and arriving at midday. Goethe turned around and went to Kochberg (um 5 nach Kochberg geritten). He was back in Weimar on the 7th (In dunckler Unruhe früh). On the 8th he was in Tiefurt, joining the Duke and Prince Constantin where, as Boyle writes, they stayed up “half the night” and spent the following morning as well “talking, drinking, drawing silhouettes, and reading from his manuscript of Wilhelm Meister.” On the 11th he actually walked to Kochberg (Nachmitt. halb 5 zu Fus nach Kochberg kam halb 10 an). What oh what was going on in Goethe's head during those hours? The next day, July 12, was spent drawing.

Goethe seems to have been something like a member of the Stein family, spending a lot of time with Stein children, as on the visit he made on foot. He wrote to Charlotte concerning the July 12 visit (as always, go to Google Translate if necessary):

Mir ist's diese Woche in der Stadt wieder sehr wunderlich gegangen, ich habe mich gestern heraus geflüchtet, bin um half sechs zu Fuß von Weimar abmarschiert und war halbzehn hier, da alles schon verschlossen war und sich zum Bett gehn bereitete. Da ich rief, ward ich von der alten Dorothee zuerst erkannt und mit großem Geschrei von ihr und der Köchin bewillkommt. Kästner kam auch mit seinem Pfeifgen herab, und Karl, der den ganzen Tag behauptet hatte, ich würde kommen; Ernst, der schon im Hemde stand, zog sich wieder an, Fritz lag schon im Schlafe. Ich trank noch viel Selzerwasser, wir erzählten einander unsre Wochenfata, die Zeichnungen wurden produziert ...

The rest of his diary for July 1777 records frequent excursions to Kochberg, Tiefurt, and Ettersburg.

Boyle writes interestingly about the “ineluctable social facts” of Weimar at this time: “not much happened there, apart from the administration of the duchy.” The theater was one escape, a “transient” one into “aesthetic illusion, ... but Goethe was realist enough to know that inches behind the backcloth stood a blank wall.”

The lovely illustration at the top of this post is among a number of drawings of Kochberg by Editha Drawert (1887-1947) that can be found on the Goethezeitportal. According to the caption there, at the left is Charlotte's "old desk," which Goethe used when in Kochberg; the one of the right is the "new" one, a present to him from Charlotte.

Goethe in Fiction

I have posted occasionally on the results of my habit of looking for Goethe's name in the index of books I read, whatever the subject. He shows up everywhere. Just a couple of posts ago,  I introduced  the above subject, which I suspect is a promisingly large one.

There must be some kind of "law" to the effect that once you notice something, it will appear all over the place. Sure enough, this morning, while reading Willa Cather's The Professor's House, I came across a scene in which Goethe himself is the subject.

The protagonist of the novel, Godfrey St. Peter, a professor at a Midwestern collge, is in Chicago to give a lecture on his historical work. His son-in-law gives him and his wife tickets for a performance of Mignon at the city's opera house. St. Peter mentions that, when a student in Paris, he had a subscription to the Opéra Comique, where he occasionally saw Mignon. Cather is a wonderful writer, so allow me to introduce her description of the effect of the overture:

The music seemed extraordinarily fresh and genuine still. It might grow old-fashioned, he told himself, but never old, surely, while there was any youth left in men.

On the entrance of the hero, i.e., Wilhelm Meister, St. Peter's wife leans toward him and whispers:

"Am I over-credulous? He looks to me exactly like the pictures of Goethe in his youth."

To which her husband responds:

"So he does to me. He is certainly as tall as Goethe. I didn't know tenors were ever so tall. The Mignon seems young, too."

She was slender, at any rate, and very fragile beside the courtly Wilhelm.

What a lovely evocation of an era in America -- the novel appeared in 1925 -- when people actually had thoughts about what Goethe looked like.

Cornelia Goethe

On this date in 1777 Goethe received news of the death of his sister Cornelia the previous week, on June 8, four weeks after the death of her second child. His diary entry concerning the news is brief, with "zurück" referring to his return to Weimar from Kochberg, the von Stein estate:

früh zurück. Brief des Todts m. Schwester. Dunckler zerrissener Tag.

One assumes that he related the news to the duke, but the only document concerning his immediate reaction, a letter to Charlotte von Stein on the same day, is terse:

Um achte war ich in meinem Garten fand alles gut und wohl und ging mit mir selbst, mit unter lesend auf und ab. Um neune kriegt ich Brief dass meine Schwester todt sey. -- Ich kann nun weiter nichts sagen.

Every study I have seen of Goethe's sister stresses the close relationship between Cornelia and Wolfgang, who was one year older. (There had been another brother who survived early childhood, but only to the age of seven.) They were both educated at home, having many of the same lessons and teachers. His letters to her from Leipzig, where he enrolled as a student at the age of sixteen, reflect the bookish atmosphere in which they were raised. These letters display the pedagogical bent that was lifelong. As the elder sibling, he is always instructing her, especially on how to write a proper letter. This instruction itself reflects what he was learning at the time, as he attended the classes of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, who besides being one of the most popular German writers of the 18th century, penned a letter-writing style manual: Briefe, nebst einer praktischen Abhandlung von dem guten Geschmacke in Briefen (Letters, together with a practical treatise on good taste in letters, 1751). Letter-writing was an absorbing interest in the 18th century, as can be seen in the epistolary novels of Richardson and Rousseau. Germans learned from these writers, and carried on the tradition, with Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther being one of the most exemplary.

Goethe himself, however, rarely displayed such an outpouring of personal emotion in his letters. We know of the effect on him of grief, in the case of Cornelia's death, by what he did not put into words. A further diary entry, the next day, is very succinct: "Leiden und Träumen." That says it all, but he did write to his mother later in the month, in which he writes of the way that the good fortune he is currently enjoying in Weimar makes Cornelia's death more painful. And then a very interesting observation concerning the difference between recovery from physical pain and from grief:

Ich kan nur menschlich fühlen, und lasse mich der Natur die uns heftigen Schmerz nur kurze Zeit, trauer lang empfinden lässt.

A longer letter to his mother in November contains a beautiful, image-rich passage describing his relationship to his sister (and below it my paltry translation):

Mir ists als wenn in der Herbstzeit ein Baum gepflanzt würde, Gott gebe seinen Seegen dazu, dass wir dereinst drunter sizzen Schatten und Früchte haben mögen. Mit meiner Schwester ist mir so eine starcke Wurzel die mich an der Erde hielt abgehauen worden dass die Äste, von oben, die davon Nahrung hatten auch absterben mussen.

(It seems to me as if in autumn a tree had been planted, to which God gave his blessing so that we might one day sit in its shadows and have fruit from it. With my sister, it is as if a strong root that held me to the earth has been torn up, so that the branches above above that had their nourishment from it also had to die.)

Photo credit: Rain Forest Alliance

Goethe in Fiction

I have a feeling that there is a large topic on the subject of the title of this post. Suffice it for today simply to post here a passage in English translation from Ingrid Noll's 1993 novel Der Hahn ist tot (English: Hell Hath No Fury). The reason for the different typeface below is that I have copied the passage from a great blog called Clothes in Books. Please go to that link for observations on the passage by Moira Richmond, the host of Clothes in Books.

I had a bath, washed my hair and blow-dried it. Witold wouldn’t be coming in the morning, since he had to be in school. But as to whether he would arrive immediately after lunch or not until later, I could only guess. From two in the afternoon, I was waiting, in my silken pyjamas; I put away my tea-cup, fetched it out again, cleaned my teeth once more. By six I was extremely edgy....

At last, at eight, he arrived…

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘don’t hang around in the kitchen, lie down on the sofa. I’ll stay with you for a few minutes.’

In my silk nightwear, I tried to assume as decorative a pose as possible, a bit like Tischbein’s painting of Goethe in the Campagna.

‘I looked awful yesterday, you must have been disgusted by the sight of me,’ I murmured.

‘Don’t worry yourself, that’s how everybody looks when they’re in a bad way.’ Witold really did seem to pay precious little attention to my appearance.

Goethe and Trade: Correction

Global Trade Map

I posted on the above subject earlier, but must now make a correction to what I wrote in that post about Goethe and trade. Having finished reading Book 3 this morning (June 24) of the "Urmeister," i.e., Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung, I decided today to turn to the first Meister novel that Goethe published, the Lehrjahre (Apprentice Years). And there, in chapter 10 of Book 1, I find Werner's threnody concerning trade and commerce. Mea culpa. It would have been so great to have discovered something that no one else had noticed, but it was not to be.

In any case, here follows the earlier post with my error regarding the omission in the Apprentice novel. What still stands, of course, is what I wrote concerning Goethe's understanding of trade and commerce when he dictated the Urmeister.

FIRST ITERATION OF "GOETHE AND TRADE" (ON JUNE 9, 2020)

My summer reading includes Goethe's earliest version of the Wilhelm Meister saga, which I am beginning to think can be characterized as a roman fleuve, in the sense that Roger Shattuck discusses that term in connection with Proust's seven-volume novel. This early version, entitled by scholars Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung, was dictated by Goethe in the early 1780s, but the manuscript was not discovered until 1909, after which it appeared in published form. Whether Proust knew of this early version, he was familiar with Elective Affinities and the Wilhelm Meister novels. (The collection Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, translated by Sylvia Townsend Warner, contains an essay by Proust on Goethe.)

The topic of trade occurs in the 8th chapter of part 2 of the Theatralische Sendung, during a discussion between Wilhelm and his brother-in-law Werner. I think we are supposed to assume that Werner is a prosaic sort, attuned only to the family business, but, Wilhelm having suffered a nervous breakdown over the love affair portrayed in part 1, Werner has been attempting to build him up again. In the preceding chapters, he has spent many an hour listening to Wilhelm discoursing on the theater and on his writing efforts.

In a similar spirit of enthusiasm and in an attempt to draw Wilhelm's thoughts in a new direction, Werner portrays to him the charms of trade and commerce. It is astonishingly clear sighted concerning the effects of capitalism and imperialism. This discussion is not included in the eventual canonical Wilhelm Meister saga. For those interested but whose German may not be up to it, I recommend pasting the following into Google Translate.

Wirf einen Blick auf alle natürliche und künstliche Produkte aller Welteile, siehe wie sie wechselweise zur Notdurft geworden sind; welch eine angenehme geistreiche Sorgfalt ist es, was in dem Augenblick bald am meisten gesucht wird, bald felt, bald schwer zu haben ist, jedem der es verlangt, leicht und schnell zu schaffen, sich vorsichting in Vorrat zu setzen und den Vorteil jedes Augenblickes dieser großen Zirkulation zu genießen. ...

Es haben die Großen dieser Welt sich der Erde bemächtiget und leben in Herrlichkeit und Überfluß von ihren Früchten. Das kleinste Fleck ist schon erobert und eingenommen, alle Besitztümer befestiget, jeder Stand wird vor das, was ihm zu tun obliegt, kaum und zur Note bezahlt, daß er sein Leben hinbringen kann; wo gibt es nun noch einen rechtmäßigern Erwerb, eine billigere Eroberung als den Handel?

There is much more of Werner's comments in this chapter, but the above is a small taste.
 
I have often thought that Goethe's ideas on world literature, dating from the 1820s, were grounded in a recognition of the global spread of trade and commerce -- in fact, I have published an essay on this subject and also written about it on this blog, including this post and also here -- but I was thrilled to come across his early portrayal of the subject.



Image credit: Financial Channel

W.H. Auden (again) on Goethe

This post is an addendum to my last post, in which I mentioned two reviews Auden had written on Goethe subjects. (In the meantime, by the way, a reader of this blog has alerted me to several poems by Auden that directly address Goethe. See the Comments in the earlier post.) Back in 2017 I posted the question "Did Goethe have a pet?" I asked the question in connection with the book Celebrating Charlotte Brontë by Alice Spawls, which devoted much attention to the physical details of Charlotte Brontë's world, including the pets in the Brontë household. One wishes more of such details of Goethe's world.

Auden discusses the issue of animals in the review of Goethe: Conversations and Encounters. He mentions Goethe's "well-known dislike of dogs," which, Auden writes, is no great significance, except that it points to Goethe's lack of curiosity about the animal kingdom, despite his one anatomical discovery. Auden finds such lack of curiosity surprising in a man passionately interested in human beings, weather, stones, and vegetables. The reason for the lack of interest? Animals had no conversation, at least as reported by Riemer:

Animals only interested him as more or less close organizational approximations to man, provisional forerunners of the eventually manifest lord of creation. He did not despise them, indeed he even studied them, but chiefly he pitied them as masked and muffled creatures unable to express their feelings intelligibly and appropriately.

The image above is from Goethezeitportal, which offers other examples of Goethe Sprüche on the subject of animals.