Goethe anew

For those of you wondering why Goethe Girl has not been posting, it is true that she came down with the dreaded virus. But that was not the reason there have been no postings since late March. In fact, even with the virus I was able to sit at my desk every morning and work on my current current project (though I admit that food did not appeal to me and that I suffered from fatigue for several weeks when I went outdoors).

The title of the post gives some indication of what I have been working on and that has taken up so much of my time. Goethe, in the preface to his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), explains his reason for writing. The first edition of his "complete works," in 12 volumes, had appeared in 1805, after which, he claims, a friend had written to him requesting that he offer some insight into those earliest works, that Goethe “rehearse those old productions and treat them anew” (“jenes Hervorgebrachte wieder als Stoff zu behandeln und zu einem Letzten zu bearbeiten”). At a distance of over half a century Goethe may not have had much recall of the specifics of those early efforts, especially before he went to Weimar in 1775. Goethe had the habit of burning letters, and excepting the letters he wrote to his sister Cornelia from Leipzig from 1765 to 1768, he had no access to the correspondence of this period when he undertook the writing of his autobiography. This period, what I called "before Goethe became Goethe," has always interested me; it was the subject of my dissertation.

The article I have been working on for almost a year concerns the way Goethe "rehearsed" his earliest literary works and reworked them anew in the autobiography. Although I don't deal with it in my own article, it has made me suspect that the visit to the shoemaker, recounted in Book 7 of DuW, and that I devoted a blog post to last September, is a total fabrication. Which is not to say that the episode as recounted is solely "Dichtung." Gustav von Loeper, back in 1874 already, wrote that “dichterische Erfindung [kann] nur ein anderer Name sein für Erinnerung” (“poetic invention can only be another name for memory”).

For my research I was very dependent on scholars like Loeper, the first generation of Goethe scholars, who did the legwork, going through archives and tracing all the references, mainly for the purpose of learning about all the influences that had turned Goethe into "Goethe." In the process, of course, they discovered a lot of discrepancies between what Goethe wrote in the autobiography and what "really" happened. I have benefited from such works during the last year, without having to go to the library. Yes, they are all online. Praise be to the Hathi Trust Digital Library.

Here are a few of the long-forgotten scholars whose work I was able to read and who provided "background" on where Goethe "came from," so to speak. They include Elizabeth Mentzel, who wrote about the "home schooling" of Goethe and his younger sister:  Wolfgang und Cornelias Lehrer: Ein Beitrag zu Goethes Entwicklungsgeschichte (Leipzig 1909). Heinrich Pallmann published a book on Goethe's childhood friend Johann Adam Horn: Johann Adam Horn: Goethes Jugendfreund (Leipzig, 1908), from which you can glean the kind of poetry Goethe himself wrote before he went to Leipzig at the age of sixteen. And all that can be discovered about Kätchen Schönkopf is to be found in Kätchen Schönkopf : eine Frauengestalt aus Goethes Jugendzeit Leipzig, 1920) by Julius Vogel. The image at the top is from Vogel's book on Goethe's Leipzig poetry, from the hand-copied production of Goethe's collection "Annette" by Ernst Wolfgang Behrisch in August 1767.

And of course I went through all the volumes of Der Junge Goethe, edited by Hannah Fischer-Lemberg. There is still wonderful stuff to be gleaned about Goethe.