Goethe and "evening's empire"

Copernicus Observing the Night Sky, by Jan Mateiko

While Goethe Girl was following various trails that led from Grumach, subject of the previous post, there were along the way some interesting byways that led her to pause and take a look. A book that came to my attention was Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe by Craig Koslofsky. As Professor Koslofsky writes on the first page, “The night imposed fundamental limits on daily life” for people of early modern Europe, while also “serving as a many-faceted and evocative natural symbol.” The subject of his study is the gradual “nocturalization” in the 17th and 18th centuries in European countries, a process that had a significant effect on social life. By 1700, for instance, all European cities had coffeehouses, which as we know from Habermas were sites of lively sociability. But even discussions of the scientific discoveries of the early modern period took place in the candlelight-illuminated indoors, as seen in the painting below.

I won’t go into the story of the discovery by Georg Rhätius in 1540 that night was an effect of the earth’s rotation. Previously, as Koslofsky writes, the space between the Earth and the circle of fixed stars was conceived as being illuminated by solar and divine light. The new astronomy would reveal an infinite universe of endless light. Imagine the effect on your thinking at such a discovery, although it probably didn’t really settle into men’s minds for a long, long time. with the night kept at bay.

Wright of Derby, The Orrery (1766)

You knew I would be getting around to Goethe at some point. Again, I am focusing on the “young” Goethe, before 1775, the date at which he went to Weimar and began, in my estimation, “to become Goethe.” There are three stages here: Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Strassburg.

In Book 5 of his autobiography, chronicling the period 1765–65, he writes of spending evenings away from his parental home in Frankfurt at a house where gathered a group of young folks his own age — in the telling he is fourteen going on fifteen — during which he first displayed his poetic talents. By then, Frankfurt was a major city of the Reich — it was the site in the year 1765 of the coronation of the emperor, a story also told in Book 5 — and would have had street lighting, which, as Koslofsky tells us, consisted of candles or oil lamps in glass-pained lanterns. So, we can imagine that Goethe had no trouble finding his way to the party and back home at a late hour without stumbling around in the dark. Before the inauguration of street lighting, anyone out after dark was required to carry a torch or a lantern: not to see so much as to be seen.

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night

In 1765 he went to study law in Leipzig, which according to Richard Benz’s short bio of Goethe in vol. 14 of the Hamburg edition of Goethe’s works, was the most modern “Großstadt” of the time. The initiative for street lighting there had come from the Elector of Saxony, Augustus II (again, this and all info on street lighting is gleaned from Koslofsky), Leipzig being part of his fief. It was in particular the merchants’ guild that advocated street lighting because of nocturnal crime, and it was duly established in 1701. Leipzig’s prosperity, after all, depended on attracting merchants. (And of course Augustus taxed the residents for this amenity.) We know from the letters Goethe wrote home from Leipzig that he often went to the theater. Again, like coffeehouses, theater productions contributed to a lively street life with the advent of street lighting. Thus, we can see young Goethe — he is first sixteen, going on seventeen — heading out in the evening to the theater or to Auerbach’s Keller.

Finally, he arrived in Strassburg in 1770. Interestingly, as Koslofky writes, Strassburg was the “last word” in street lighting, where it was finally installed — and over the protests of citizens at that — in 1779, long after Goethe’s student days there. Goethe makes no mention in the autobiography of theater attendance in Strassburg, so we can imagine his nocturnal activities taking place indoors, spending many an evening, for instance, reading with Herder, who was undergoing eye surgery there. At the same time, he describes his horse rides in the Elsass as well as to Sesenheim to visit Friederike, and I wonder if those rides took place at night. It might have been pretty dangerous.

Francisco de Goya, Witches Sabbath (ca. 1823)

I am not sure whether night as subject in Goethe’s poetry and of his work in general has been investigated in detail, but, along with various night scenes in Faust, he wrote one very impressive poem in which night expresses the “Invisible World” of nocturnal ghosts and witches, as Koslovsky writes, before “the imprint of nocturnalization on the early Enlightenment helped reconfigure European views of human difference and the place of humankind in the universe.” That was “Der Erlkönig,” the effect of night in that poem being well evoked by Schubert. One of my favorite early Goethe poems concerning night, however, evokes both the “Schauer” (frisson) of night combined with the sweet experience of spending it with the beloved:

Gern verlaß ich diese Hütte,
Meiner Schönen Aufenthalt,
Und durchstreich mit leisem Tritte
Diesen ausgestorbnen Wald.
Luna bricht die Nacht der Eichen,
Zephirs melden ihren Lauf,
Und die Birken streun mit Neigen
Ihr den süßten Weihrauch auf.

Schauer, der das Herze fühlen,
Der die Seele schmelzen macht,
Wandelt im Gebüsch im Kühlen.
Welche schöne, süße Nacht!
Freude! Wollust! Kaum zu fassen!
Und doch wollt ich, Himmel, dir
Tausend deiner Nächte lassen,
Gäb mein Mädchen Eine mir.