Goethe as a "True" Socialist

A “true” socialist, I have learned, is a humanist. And a humanist, per 19th-century German socialist writer Karl Grün, was Goethe. Or so he tried to make Goethe out to be in a biography that appeared in 1846 entitled Über Goethe vom menschlichen Standpunkte (On Goethe from the Human Standpoint). Friedrich Engels took umbrage at this portrait and critiqued it in five installments in the Deutsche Brüsseler Zeitung in 1847. (It turns out that a lot of German communists were holing up in Brussels in that year.)

As I have mentioned in several posts, Goethe appears in the most varied contexts, and so it was that I came across just last week something of interest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which, besides the mammoth Manet/Degas exhibition, is also hosting a smaller exhibition entitled “Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s.” Among the exhibits was a display of copies of the journal New Masses, including the September 1932 issue, with “Engels on Goethe” featured on the cover. Engels was no longer around in 1932, but 1932 being the year of celebration of Goethe’s centenary (“in Russia as well as in Germany, and by the working class as well as by intellectuals”), New Masses offered excerpts from the 1847 critique.

I managed to download the New Masses piece, but as with many subjects that catch my interest and seem appropriate for a blog post, I found it necessary to plunge into research. In order not to make this piece longer than necessary, let me introduce the authorities that I have made use of. These include, besides the excerpt from Engels in New Masses, two scholarly articles, both of which appeared in a journal entitled Science and Society. The first, by Auguste Cornu on German utopianism, of which “true” socialism was a part, appeared in 1948 (vol. 12, no. 1); the second is by Renate Bridenthal, which appeared in 1971 (vol. 35, no. 1), and has Grün as its subject. Had I not read the two scholarly articles, I would have been in the dark about the subject of “true” socialism, which seems to have been the name by which the movement went. Truth is an ideal category, after all, which reflects the idealistic character of the movement. It reflects the world of human thought.

True socialism was a phenomenon in Germany among Hegel-influenced intellectuals, at a time when the communist movement had not yet become revolutionary in the sense of being proletariat-based, in favor of abolishing private property and substituting common ownership, and acknowledging that only a violent, democratic revolution was the means of accomplishing these goals. True socialists like Grün were not revolutionaries in that sense. Although Grün used the word revolution freely, he meant a revolution in thought. For him, the goal of history was “the achievement of human self-consciousness,” and the real battleground was the mind. Thus, the need for education, which “could bring out the true nature of man and fulfill its potential.” As Bridenthal writes: “The idea that political, economic, and social institutions could be forcibly overthrown and a free society established before humanity as a whole had achieved consciousness was flatly contradictory to his metaphysical conception of history.”

What bothered Engels in particular about Grün’s biography was its attempt to champion Goethe as the first humanist in the “true” socialist sense. Since I don't have Grün’s book, I am relying on Bridenthal for his claim that Goethe “had recognized recognized 'true' human nature, socialist man, and had portrayed man’s historic struggle to achieve existence in his writings. Goethe's notorious lack of interest in the politics of his day resulted from his having seen beyond what these politics hoped to accomplish and his impatience with their limited goals. He had fought out the conflicts of humanity within himself and had achieved inner peace.” Further, “Grün saw in Goethe's works the chronicles of his inner battle and of human history in its striving for self-consciousness. He had been a hundred years ahead of his time.”

Engels was having none of this and ridiculed Grün: 

“Herr Grün lifts him onto his untiring shoulders and carries him through the mud; in fact, he charges all the mud to the account of true socialism, just to keep Goethe's boots clean.”

Here is Engels’ judgment on Goethe in the New Masses: 

“It is not only single sides of German life that Goethe accepts, as opposed to others that are repugnant to him. More commonly it is the various moods in which he find himself; it is the persistent struggle in himself between the poet of genius, disgusted by the wretchedness of his surroundings, and the Frankfurt alderman’s cautious child, the privy-counselor of Weimar, who sees himself forced to make a truce with it and to get used to it. Thus Goethe is now colossal, now petty; now a defiant, ironical, world-scorching genius, now a calculating, complacent, narrow philistine. Even Goethe was unable to overcome the wretchedness of German life; on the contrary, it overcame him, and this victory over the greatest German is the best proof that it cannot be conquered by the individual.”

As the New Masses editor writes, Engels’ chief point was that “even so great a genius as Goethe could not overcome the weakness of his class, and that the artist, as artist, was affected by his compromise with bourgeois society.”

Bridenthal cites the full critique by Engels in her bibliography, although anyone interested in interpretations of Goethe’s political thought might also want to look at the shorter version in New Masses.

Since I have worked on utopian themes myself, I found Cornu’s article very illuminating. For instance, “Feuerbach's critique of idealism and Hess' critique of alienation as the basic phenomenon of society were the starting point of Engels' and Marx's evolution from idealism to historical and dialectical materialism, and from liberalism to communism.” Marx and Engels were liberated, so to speak, from idealism by their stays in “the most advanced capitalist countries,” where they “attained a new conception of historical development and communism.” Hess and Feuerbach were still expressing the social and economic situation of “backward Germany.” Interestingly, according to Cornu, it was the revolt of the Silesian weavers in 1844 that occasioned the "true" socialism movement and also led to a vast bourgeois philanthropic current — which Marx and Engels would call “liberalism.” While Grün is practically unknown today, Bridenthal remarks that the section on “true” socialism in the Communist Manifesto was aimed primarily at him (according to Engels’ notes of 1890 to that document), while the bulk of Part 3 of The German Ideology also contains of a critical analysis of Grün’s book Soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien, written in 1846.

 

Briedenthal also has a interesting take on Grün going forward. As she writes, the ethos of his brand of socialism “may have a familiar ring to us today.” She introduces three popular figures of the 1960s and 1970s, whose whole way of thinking was like Grün’s: “he felt the pain of capital accumulation, not its historical mission; he saw misery, but not class formation and class struggle."

The first figure is Paul Goodman, whose vision for a “modernized anarchism” was purely aesthetic, one of life style. The second is Herbert Marcuse, who, like Goodman, found “the highest form of human expression to be aesthetic: the play impulse could replace the impulse to dominate in shaping the world. Under liberated conditions, work itself becomes invested with eroticism and provides instinctual gratification.”

The last is Charles Reich, working in “the optimistic, success-oriented American tradition” in his best- seller The Greening of America. Appropriately, she calls his vision “the Grüning of America”: “Once again we hear that personal institutions hold us spellbound, that there are no classes, only generations, in opposition to one another, that a consumer revolution is all that is necessary, that an emotionally and intellectually satisfying life is only a thought or two away.” You have to love it.

Image credits: All Riot

Goethe is everywhere

I am currently involved in de-cluttering my apartment. Many of you know the feeling: too many books! A book dealer came over and took fifty off of my hands, but I am putting many out on my stoop to allow neighbors to pick through. Many of these belonged to my late husband, who taught physics and whose books are on scientific subjects. Before consigning them to the garbage, I check the index to see if Goethe is mentioned. Actually, this is something I always do when I look at unfamiliar books, whether they be on history, science, philosophy, art.  It's amazing the places Goethe turns up. Anyway, today, it was the case with a book entitled Man on His Nature by Charles Sherrington, a British neurophysiologist who won the Novel Prize in 1932. If I have this right, for the most brilliant minds, Goethe was a known known.

Two of the references in Sherrington concern Goethe's interest in "natural philosophy," a world view that was not mechanistic (as in Descartes), but a dynamic, organic one. Sherrington writes of those in Goethe's time who imaged "certain ideal types toward which vast groups of individuals were, it was argued, striving, unconsciously on their part, as an aim of Nature. There was, so to say, a 'Universal' toward which the individual was an endeavour, an attempt. There was an imagined archetypal flowering plant. There was an archetypal vertebrate. The view intrigued Goethe and he contributed to it."

The second passage is similar. In it Sherrington discusses Aristotle who "possessed for his era an encyclopedic acquaintance with animal form, and drew from it profound and far-reaching inferences regarding nature." Aristotle divided form from its material manifestation. There are concrete, material things -- clothes, clouds, stones -- which are perennial, but underlying each manifestation was a prototype. This notion of prototype underlay, as Sherrington writes, "so-called Nature-philosophy which included, among its naturalists, Goethe."

Naturphilosophie is a subject I have shied away from in connection with Goethe. Make that a known unknown for me.

Goethe and the oral tradition of literature

Brad Pitt as Achilles

In the previous post, concerning the pastoral genre, I sought to convey how much Goethe drew on traditional poetic genres in his poetry and dramas, but which he "modified" in such a way as to create something new poetically. I have recently come across an illuminating account of the epic poetic transmission that throws light on Goethe's innovations. For instance, he wrote Hermann und Dorothea at the start of the French Revolutionary Wars, which, like the tales of the Trojan war in the Iliad, were a pretty brutal period in history. No one in the 1790s in Europe, however, wrote epic poems in the style of the Iliad about Napoleon's conquests. Novels, yes (War and Peace?), but the epic was passé as a genre. Hermann und Dorothea has been called an "epic poem," but there are no heroes in it, although Dorothea, among the refugees, can be called courageous. Hermann und Dorothea is more properly an idyll, in nine cantos of hexameters. So, Goethe has taken a traditional genre, epic, and a traditional theme, war, and come up with something new.

The account I mentioned is entitled The Mortal Hero, an introduction to Homer's Iliad by Seth Schein, who was a professor of mine in a comp lit class in graduate school. The "overwhelming fact for the heroes of the Iliad" is their mortality, unlike the immortal gods, as Seth Schein remarks in chapter 1. We have learned from studies of history that the ancient world was a battle-filled one, and tales of heroes and of mortality were evidently a "popular" subject of oral literature. The Iliad itself is the "end product of a poetic tradition that may have been as much as a thousand years old by the time the epic was composed," ca. the 8th century B.C. Lesser and greater singers gave expression to the Trojan War, representative of wars of the Late Bronze Age. And the memory of the events of the heroic age was kept alive by these singers, re-imagining the events, re-telling them over and over, and, as an aid to memory, using formulas of scenes, episodes, words, phrases, and so on. Homer's epics were the end products, so to speak, of this tradition, but also "equally the first in Greek literature," i.e. in writing.

Do these guys look like heroes?

When Goethe came of age there was also a strict classification of literary genres, inherited from the Greeks and Romans, each of which had its own subject matter and its own linguistic formulas. In an essay I published in 1996 in the Goethe Yearbook, I wrote about Goethe's five-act play Clavigo. Shakespeare, whose plays young Goethe was enthusiastic about, worked with a five-act structure in his tragedies. And a tragedy, according to Aristotle in the Poetics, is a genre about a noble hero who goes from good to bad fortune. Goethe imitated this pattern in Clavigo: ein Trauerspiel, but the problem is that Clavigo himself was not a heroic individual. He was a courtier who, in order to rise at court at the king of Spain, reneged on a promise to marry the sister of Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. It's a very bourgeois situation. As I wrote in my an essay, however, the play received a certain "existential weight" by this generic contamination:  the introduction into a classicist play of a non-heroic (i.e., bourgeois) character literally altered the character’s self-conception.

Picture credits: Warner Bros.; New York Public Digital Library

Goethe in Love

I am back in New York City after three months on a small island adjacent to Port McNeill on northern Vancouver Island. As I wrote in earlier posts, my intention was to read as much of "young Goethe" as possible this summer, and I managed it. Today's brief post is simply to note a few things that were on my mind as I flew high in the sky from Vancouver to New York.

Goethe grew up in a time when it was understood that poets imitated other poets, especially earlier ones. Whether writing about love or despair or whatever the emotion, poets employed the conventions of existing poetic forms and genres. Besides love and grief and so on, poets also wrote about events in the world, but these too were clothed in certain poetic conventions. An example from painters might make this clearer. Take Spanish painters of the golden age. Some are esteemed as "better" or "greater," but all of them painted the same subjects: e.g., the Crucifixion, the Nativity, shepherds, kings and queens, battles. Did Murillo, Zurbaran, Velasquez keep diaries? It's difficult to know what the painters' feelings were concerning the subjects of their work. So, too, the poets and dramatists in the period right before Goethe came of age. When they wrote about shepherds in love, did they also feel in love? Probably not. Did they even know any shepherds?

Goethe's earliest poetry collection has shepherds. In other words, he drew on this long-standing poetic genre. But he also used conventional forms to write of something personal. Goethe did not keep a diary in the way of famous personalities, but, unlike the private lives of earlier writers, we know a lot about his life, and he mediated his experience of jealousy in Die Laune des Verliebten, from 1767–68. It is a pastoral play, one of the most conventional genres of the mid-18th century, in which two shepherd couples learn some lessons in love. He wrote many letters at this time of writing this play, some of which are preserved, and several of which portray his youthful ardor for a young woman, an innkeeper's daughter, with whom a young man of his standing would not likely marry. The play details the curing of a jealous shepherd. The letters he wrote at the time document the bitter jealousy to which he was reduced in regard to this girl, to whom his earliest collection of poetry was addressed: Annette. The manuscript image at the top of this post is the poem "Die Liebhaber" (The Lovers) from that collection.

Photo credit: Charlotte Zilm

"Stories of Love and Eros"

No, Goethe fans, this post will not be about Goethe's love life, although there is much to be said in that connection. As mentioned in an earlier post I have been reading this summer, among other writings, Goethe's Roman Elegies, and at some date I will do a post on the subject. In a few days I will be leaving this island on which I have spent the summer. This will be the last post before I am back in New York in early September. For this post, something new.

 Many of you know that I have published fiction in the past, including in my relative youth, two mystery novels. Over the years I have written a number of short stories on the above-titled theme, for which I am hoping to find an agent and publisher. Two of the stories have recently appeared as an eBook. For those interested in purchasing it, here is the Amazon link.

And now a description of the two stories:

Love and eros know no bounds, especially for Ching-mei and Laura, two women living in very different times and places.

“The Treasure of the Poet” tells of eroticism and creativity on the eve of the Mongol invasion of China in the 13th century. Ching-mei, who aspires to be a great calligrapher, has had the misfortune of dying too early in a previous life. Is her fortune about to change on meeting the poet Li, whose own dream is to travel to the City of Flowers, one dedicated to the highest ideals of art and poetry and music?

“The Perfect Lover” takes place on Axel Isle, a planet known for its beautiful women, especially the Companions, who are created for men according to their own specifications. So, too, Laura, who appears one day in the life of William Babilot. William discovers in Laura the perfect lover, but the poetry she writes presents complications on one of the best functioning planets in the universe.

Happy Birthday, Goethe!

Yes, August 29 has rolled around again. And, again, another mention on this blog of Goethe's birthday. This year, however, it struck me that Goethe was a Virgo. And yesterday was the annual Virgo Party on this small island. Above some of the Virgos present, including myself, along with a few friends. The party, held at the end of August or beginning of September, marks the end of my stay out here, as I will be heading back to New York within the next couple of weeks. Above a photo of yesterday's party-goers, taken at Bere Point. As always, click to enlarge.

Goethe and plants

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I planned this summer to concentrate on Goethe’s pre-Weimar writings, having brought with me Karl Eibl’s two-volume edition of Der junge Goethe. (The five-volume Fischer-Lamberg edition was too much to carry.) But as often happens when following up one thing on Goethe, I become diverted. In any case, I never thought I would be making my way this summer through Goethe’s writings on the metamorphosis of plants. It was in particular the poem “Metamorphose der Pflanzen” from 1779 (nice translation here) that interested me initially because of the use of the diptych poetic form. And that was only because of a review I was writing of a translation by John Greening of several poems by Goethe that includes stanzas from the Roman Elegies. (See previous post.) So I led myself through a tutorial, so to speak, on the diptych, “the segmented structure of two lines and caesuras” (this is from Karen Schuler’s article on the form in the Goethe-Lexikon of Philosophical Concepts). Which led me to look at the MM poem, likewise written in that meter. Well, it was not as easy a read as the Roman Elegies, not by a long shot.

Lamb's quarters

Anyway, during this my annual summer visit to an island in the Northwest Pacific, with the beach right before my windows, I like to walk on the rocky shore when the tide is out. In connection with Goethe’s writings on plants, I turned my attention to studying the seaweed, which flourishes in what is called the intertidal zone. Goethe of course does not consider seaweed in his study of the development of plants, although he does mention underwater plants (“water buttercups”) in paragraph 24 of his metamorphosis essay. My Goethe Society colleague Heather Sullivan has written an article on this essay by Goethe, which appeared in the Goethe Yearbook in 2019. I was intrigued by her use of the term "Pflanzen-Ozean" (plant ocean) in connection with Goethe's vision of the earth as a vast landscape of green life.

Rockweed

Fortunately, the small museum in this small town offers for sale a pamphlet entitled A Field Guide to Seaweeds of the Pacific Northwest by Dr. Bridgette Clarkson, which inaugurated my enlightenment concerning seaweed. Unlike the plants that Goethe describes, seaweed has no roots, flowers, or seeds. It does have a form of rootedness, which in the language of seaweed is called “holdfast.”

Sea lettuce

There are also three varieties: green, brown, red. Being a totally urban person, I will not risk trying to sound like I know anything more. The identifications on the images here were supplied by a friend who grew up in this part of the world. Annie has generously sent me the descriptions, which appear at the end of this post. As she mentions, there have been many changes in the nomenclature (the scientific names) that have likely occurred since she worked in the field. In contrast, as she says of the common names here, they are "a little more flexible and forgiving." Thanks, Annie! As always, click on the photos for a larger view.

Surfgrass

Lamb’s quarters is a terrestrial plant you would have found in the upper tidal zone, generally just above the high tide line

Rockweed,  sometimes called bladder wrack. There are different varieties of rockweed — some with shorter and rounder bulbs and some more like this one, with sharper, longer bulbs. These bulbs are filled with carbon dioxide, which keeps the plant floating and closer to the sun — helps with photosynthesis!

Surfgrass (as opposed to eelgrass) is a terrestrial plant with roots — transitional, as it is found in a marine environment. It has a narrower blade than eelgrass and is likely attached to a rock and not embedded in sand. (Won't venture to identify the red seaweed that is around the surfgrass. Might be Cryptosiphonia or Prionitis, but I can't really tell)

Sea lettuce is  often found in the mid tidal zone. It is quite edible when cleaned and dried.

The two bottom ones are of bull kelp, likely washed up in the big northwesterly blows we've had these past few days. The top photo of the two shows the stipe and fronds, while the bottom one, as best I can tell from the photo, shows a closeup of the fronds. The off-color areas in the middle of the fronds contain reproductive spores that will disperse in the water and float around as phytoplankton before settling to the bottom and growing into new plants in the spring.

Translating Goethe's poetry

Consider the following a book review of a very small volume (47 pp.) of translations of poems by Goethe entitled Nightwalker’s Song. I saw an ad for the book in the London Review of Books and wrote the publisher, Arc Publications, expressing my interest in writing about it for the blog. Arc kindly sent me a copy. The translator is John Greening, and the selection of poems, with German and English texts, is from Goethe’s early and middle years, from one of Goethe's most famous poems, “Wandrers Nachtlied” (Über allen Gipfeln; 1780) to the sonnet “Natur und Kunst” (1800; publ. 1809). In between are poems that have been a favorites of poets (among others, Christopher Middleton, David Luke, and David Constantine) who have tried their hand at reproducing Goethe’s rhythms, structures, and vocabulary : “Willkommen und Abschied,” “Prometheus,” “Harzreise im Winter,” “Römische Elegien” (I, V, XIV, XX), “Nähe des Geliebten,” “Der Zauberlehrling,” and “Faust im Studierzimmer.” Each poem is prefaced with a few lines of background.

John Greening himself is a considerable poet and writer about poetry. His poetry, from what I have gleaned online, can be recondite, at least for this American reader.  (A collection of his poetry for “American readers” has been published  by Baylor U Press.) Take a poem entitled “Heath XXIX,” from a collection “about an airport and its surrounding area.” The collection, a joint project with the poet Penelope Shuttle, “merges voices on the impact of Heathrow Airport on Hounslow Heath, and the things we’ve lost as a result of it.” It turns out the heath on which the airport is located has a long history in the west and southwest of Britain. The venerable Bede is among the ghosts of this history, along with the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. Herewith the opening lines:

Richard Wilson, Hounslow Heath (ca. 1770)

Twenty-four thousand times in any year, lightning strikes
and kills. On the Heath, the timber shells, like bony Flemish spires,
point heavenwards in warning. The stags take note and bow their heads
at the sky’s first challenge, or hurl a bellowing peal back in defiance.

Besides his many books of poetry, Greening has published essays on poetry. One subject of interest is the poets of World War I. He is not a scholar of German literature, but he did spent time as a student in Mannheim, and even spent a summer in residence month living in the Heinrich Böll cottage in Dugort, Achill Island. In one of his essays, Greening addresses the issue of being a “European,” in which he takes on an “indigestible” essay by T.S. Eliot and considers his own bona fides on the issue. In this connection, he has translated Georg Heym, Georg Trakl, Ernst Stadler and August Stramm, “poets who wrote about (or anticipated, in Heym’s case) the First World War.”

I am guilty of not having given much thought to the subject of translation, although, like many of us, any learning I posses is a result of having read works in translation, both in the Christian and the Western classical tradition — and in recent decades literature from non-Western parts of the world. Goethe himself was of course a beneficiary of all that inheritance, even as he was more fluent in Greek and Latin, not to forget French and Italian, than I ever was — not to forget being bibelfest. Whether it be the evidence of the Roman Elegies or the West-East Divan, Goethe certainly knew the value of this inheritance. In turn, Goethe’s language had an immense influence on the German language going forward, similar, as it is said, to the King James version of the Bible.
 
German is an intransigent language to translate, even in prose. For those who do know German, I suspect their interest in translations of Goethe’s poetry will be attuned to issues of structure, rhythm, rhymes and meter, vocabulary, and the like, all of which render an inimitable musicality. That said, there is simply no way that English can match Goethe’s German, especially his musicality. For those who don’t know German, there remain some who might be interested in what the poetry has “to say.” For those potential readers, I suspect it is the content of his poetry, the “spirit,” that would be of interest. This has been called a “culture to culture” translation.

While aware of the semantic differences between German words and their English equivalents, Greening has sought to reproduce Goethe’s original meters. From my recent experience working on a translation of a German novella, rendering the different emotional expression that words convey is exceptionally frustrating. And German has these strange word formations, especially Goethe’s German.

Of course, a translator must render that content in a readable idiom. Here are a few lines from a stanza of “Willkommen und Abschied,” followed by Greening’s translation. The lines present a simple picture, easy to understand. We’re not talking Klopstock here. Someone with a couple years of German could recognize the different semantic values of the German vocabulary as well as the rhyme.

Der Mond von einem Wolkenhügel
Sah kläglich aus dem Duft hervor,
Die Winde schwangen leise Flügel,
Umsausten schauerlich mein Ohr.
Die Nacht schuf tausend Ungeheur,
Doch frisch und fröhlich war mein Mut:
In meinen Adern welches Feuer!
In meinem Herzen welche Glut!

The moon looked sadly through a veil
of cloud, the winds began to beat
soft whirring wings about me, till
my ears could no more bear, the night
revealed its thousand horror masks.
And yet my fiery spirits cheered,
hotly defying such grotesques,
from heart and veins the lava poured.

Greening has abandoned Goethe’s rhyme, and also the definitiveness of Goethe's couplets. In the process, however, the enjambment of the first five lines of his version intimates the flow of loving feeling between the speaker and his beloved. But, then, in the final three lines of the stanza, Greening abandons enjambment and follows Goethe: three stand-alone lines echo Goethe’s defiant response to the effect of the dark night and its accompanying grotesques.

Ernst Barlach, Harzreise im Winter (1924)

 This is only one small example of the many choices Greening has made, which he discusses in his introduction. I particularly liked his recommendations of G.H. Lewes’ biography of Goethe as conveying “the full scope of Goethe’s genius” (and as also the most entertaining book about Goethe) for English readers. Many non-specialists may feel inspired by the tale of his own path to Goethe, while Greening's translations also remind us scholars about what real poets appreciate about Goethe. Greening, for instance, wishes more attention were paid to the free-verse “Harzreise im Winter”: “It would be good to encounter this poem as often as one finds modern versions of, say, Rilke’s ‘First Duino Elegy.’” My favorites among his translations are “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “Faust in His Study,” and “Nature and Art.”

Images: The Tate; Art Net

Goethe and Time, updated

François Boucher, Pastor tocant per a una pastora

There is at least one important exception to what I wrote in the previous post, namely, the absence of Goethe's references to times of day in his early letters. In several letters to his Leipzig literary mentor, Ernst Wolfgang Behrisch, Goethe poured out his jealousy concerning Katherine Schönkopf. The letter dated  November 10–14, 1767, is composed of six installments, each headed with a specific time and/or a time of the day or night: Abends um 7 Uhr; um 8 Uhr; Mitwochs früh; Abends um 8; Freytags um 11. Nachts; Sonnabends.

I have recently finished an article that discusses this letter, but it is also the subject of excellent essays by Stuart Atkins and Albrecht Schöne. The letter is something like a first-person novelette detailing the depths of jealousy with its attendant sicknesses and fevers at the outset, to be followed at the end by the sweet pleasures of consolation and healing. As Schöne pointed out, in the next-to-final installment (Friday around 11 at night) Goethe remarks that he has reread what he has written and is astonished to discover its literary potential. It was in this same period that Goethe wrote the play Die Laune des Verliebten, in which the excessive jealousy of the shepherd Eridon threatens the harmony of the pastoral order. As with the play, both Atkins and Schöne discern in this and other letters of this period the development of Goethe’s apprenticeship in narrative prose, which will find its great expression in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers.

That novel includes specific dates on each letters written to Werther's friend Wilhelm, beginning with May 4, 1771, but there is only one letter — Werther’s final letter to Lotte — that details the time of day. It is headed “nach eilfe,” after which he records his last thoughts before putting the pistol to his head. And then: “es schlägt zwölfe! So sey’s denn — Lotte! leb wohl! Leb wohl!”

Any thoughts of this specificity?

Goethe and Time

 

I picked up at the post office yesterday a copy of the July 14 issue of the TLS,  in which my review of a new biography of the poet Phillis Wheatley appeared. (Yes, I occasionally venture into other parts of the 18th century.) Since I am not at home in NYC this summer, the book review editor kindly mailed the issue to me, and I was able to peruse it this morning with my cup of hot tea. Nothing in the issue itself about Goethe or German literature, but a couple of the reviews brought up subjects that prompted me to think about Goethe. One was a review of a book about “time and medieval life. The reviewer (Pablo Scheffer) opens with quotes from Chaucer that reminded me of how entrenched was once the tradition of writing about nature. In the Prologue, Chaucer writes of “tendre croppes” bathing the breath of the West Wind and of little birds impelled to “maken melodye” when fields are filled with flowers. And here is young Goethe, in 1765, in a poem sent to his friend Riese. (All quotes following reflect Goethe’s own spelling at the time of writing.)

So wie ein Vogel der auf einem Ast
Im schönsten Wald, sich Freiheit ahtmend, wiegt,
Der ungestört die sanfte Lust genießt,
Mit seinem Fitigen von Baum zu Baum,
Von Busch auf Busch sich singend hinzuschwingen

Since the book under review is about time, we learn about how people kept time when “there was the problem of keeping it,” before the invention of the mechanical clock in 1300. The clergy, tracking the seven mechanical hours, relied on sundials, water clocks, candles, sand glasses, and astrolabes, while everyone else relied on the clergy. In this way, as the authors of the book point out, “the sound of liturgical bells at the canonical hours became part of the medieval soundscape, governing all sorts of secular activities from the opening and closing of city gates to the business hours of shops and taverns.”

Allegory of Good Government by Lorenzetti Ambrogio

In reading through the two volumes of Karl Eibl’s edition of Der junge Goethe, I am now struck by how specific notations of time are absent in Goethe’s letters. There is one letter, however, to Kester, dated Christmas 1772, in which Goethe marks the times of the day almost as if he were a medieval person. In the first sentence, he writes “Christag früh. Es ist noch Nacht lieber Kestner, ich bin früh aufgestanden um bey Lichte Morgens wieder zu schreiben,” and continues: “ich habe mir Coffee machen lasen den Festag zu ehren und will euch schreiben biss es Tag ist.” And, then, what I have just learned about medieval times: “Der Türmer hat sein Lied schon geblasen ich wachte drüber auf.”

Some lines follow (which include the mention of Lotte’s portrait on the wall near his bed), after which we hear again of the town watchman “Der Türmer hat sich wieder zu mir gekehrt, der Nordwind bringt mir seine Melodie, als blies er vor meinem Fenster.” This is then followed by a description of his activities of the previous evening and his impressions of the natural world on his return home as well as the sights at the market place (“viele Lichter und Spielsachen”). And, then, returning to the present, he notes the passage of time: “Das erste Grau des Tags kommt mir über des Nachbaars Haus und die Glocken läuten eine Christliche Gemeinde zusammen. Wohl ich binn erbaut hier oben auf meiner Stube, die ich lang nicht so liebe hatte als ietzt.” I can really see Goethe in his room here, especially with that cup of coffee beside him!

After some more words about Lotte and his “lieben Mädgen,” it is finally morning: “Der Tag kömmt mit Macht …”

Clearly Goethe came to reflect on time and became to some extent clock bound. The above image, "Comparative Table of German and Italian Time," appears in The Works of J. W. von Goethe (vol. 12, p. 131). It is the only image I could find on Google on the subject of "Goethe and time" and comes, I suspect, from his Italian journey. (I don't have the English edition with me, but if anyone has it and would liket to let me know about the image, I would appreciate it.) There is more that I could write about the issue of “temporal progress,” as it is certainly a subject in which Goethe devoted some thought. More anon.

Image credits: Physics World

 

Goethe's "Belsazar" Fragment

 

As mentioned in my last post, I am on a small island in British Columbia, concentrating as usual on “der junge Goethe.” All the documentation of that era is to be found in the five-volume edition of that title by Hanna Fischer-Lamberg, which I own, but which I did not bring with me this summer. Instead, for my review of this early period, I carted along Karl Eibl’s two-volume set Der junge Goethe in seiner Zeit, which is hefty enough at 700-plus pages per volume. Unlike Fischer-Lamberg, which is chronological, vol. 1 of Eibl’s edition contains the plays, diaries and legal writings; vol. 2 the poetry, prose, and bibliography. I started with the poetry and have worked my way up to the “Iris” poems of 1774, but have decided to take a break and turn to the plays. The first two items in Eibl are fragments. One concerns the drama "Belsazar," the action of which seems to have been on Goethe’s mind already before he went to study in Leipzig in 1765. The second is a monologue entitled “Die königliche Einsiedlerin.” From there, Eibl continues with “Der Lügner,” “Tugendspiegel,” and then, coming to more familiar territory, Die Laune des Verliebten. These three were also Leipzig products.

Willilam Blake, Nebuchedensar loses his mind

Among my reading on this subject has been the Old Testament Book of Daniel, which begins with the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. It is the era of what is called the Babylonian Captivity, which included the deportation from Judah to Babylon of the smartest Jews, who become court favorites. Daniel was one of Nebuchadnazzar’s favorite soothsayers and was called to interpret  a dream that presaged his loss of royal authority. As the Book of Daniel has it: “You will be driven away from people and will live with the wild animals. You will eat grass like the ox” (Dan. IV, 31–32). This episode (recounted in Dan. V, 21) was the subject of the above painting by William Blake. Belsazar seems to have been more favored as a subject by later artists, and the OT account describes several episodes, including Daniel’s reading of the inscription on the Wall that so terrified Belzasar, the casting of Daniel’s friends into the blazing furnace, and Daniel’s sojourn in the lions’ den.

Rembrandt, Belzasar sees the writing on the wall

Goethe was what Germans call “bibelfest,” and the language of his oeuvre shows the influence of that acquaintance. As Roger Paulin writes in a very good article on the influence of Klopstock on Goethe, it was via Klopstock that the persons of the Old and New Testaments had achieved “ein zartes und gefühlvolles Wesen,” one that spoke to the young Goethe and many of his contemporaries. Thus Klopstock’s epic poem Der Messias (1748–1773). There were also other German-speaking writers who wrote such epics, e.g., Bodmer. (See my earlier post on Bodmer.) So it was that Goethe, as Paulin writes, for a time planned several works on Biblical themes. Besides the Belazar drama, there was to be an epic poem about Joseph and a tragedy on the successor of the Pharoah, the subject of which was the killing of the first born. Those drafts as well as of Ruth and Jezabel were destroyed in one of Goethe's auto da fés, excepting the two fragments mentioned here.

The two fragments of “Belsazar” are pretty strong stuff, even if they are written in the Baroque-favored alexandrine meter at which Goethe was so adept. In the first Pherat, a confident of the Persian king Cyrus, describes how the tyrant Belsazar will be killed. The death will be brutal, and blood will flow. Pherat views Belsazar as a tyrant, and the coup will free the city from its hard yoke and allow Cyrus to conquer Babylon (ca. 7th century B.C.). It is the feast day of “Sesach, the Babylonian god of wine,” when “rauchend Blut” will replace the wine that flows in Belsazar’s body and when “our sword will enter the darkness and spear him and transport him to death.”

Der König, und den Hof, mag erst der Wein erfüllen,
Dann wollen wir den Durst in seinem Blute stillen

Swords out for Belsazar

The second fragment is from Belsazar’s point of view and take place after the feast and his tired spirit is being lulled to sleep with sweet dreams. It begins with his feeling of contentment. Feeling himself equal to the gods (den Göttern gleich), he wishes only that “ungetrübtes Glück” continues to be his lot. But, like all these pagan rulers, he has a vision. A cloud approaches, and it is not a good omen. Belsazar foresees the end of his plan to enlarge his kingdom, of marching through the world “mit hohem Siegerschritt.” He seems suddenly to perceive the existence of a more destructive power. It is unclear to me whether Cyrus is meant here or the higher God that is the message of the Book of Daniel.

Im wetter eigehüllt, tritt er mit Macht hervor,
Der Donner bring sein wort in men betäubtes ohr.

Since Goethe worked pretty assiduously on the drama in Leipzig, I couldn’t help thinking that the two fragments also show his reading of Shakespeare during his early student days. In a letter to Cornelia, dated May 11, 1767, he reported that he finished the five-act Belsazar drama, with the fifth act composed in iambic meter, the standard meter of “Der Britte,” meaning Shakespeare. To my ears the content of the two fragments also seems to draw on plays concerning conspiracies to overthrow a tyrannical ruler (e.g., Julius Caesar, Macbeth).

Goethe and Physiognamy

Sointula evening sky

Goethe Girl is again this summer on a small island in British Columbia. This marks a decade, after her first visit in 2013 to give a talk at a conference on “Utopian Thought in the 18th Century.” It is wonderfully quiet here, not to forget the beautiful skies, and I am able to concentrate on my various literary projects, which this summer includes rereading almost all the writings of Goethe up through 1775. Ergo, “the young Goethe,” which has always been my subject of interest.

Right now I am investigating Goethe’s contributions to the so-called Physiognomische Fragmente: zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (PF) of Lavater, published in 1777, which proceeded from the assumption that facial features and body shapes were a key to an individual’s moral character. As I am learning from my research, Lavater brought back to life in the 18th century a physiognomic tradition stretching back centuries. Indeed, Aristotle had written on the physiognomy of animal skulls, a portion of which Goethe translated for the PF. According to Windows of the Soul: The Art of Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780, by Martin Porter, physiognomy had during the Middle Ages formed a part of sermons based on passages of Scripture, and early books were dedicated to the discussion of the meaning of physiognomical passages in the Bible. According to Porter the astrologer and natural philosopher Hagecius ab Hajek, who served at the court of Rudolf II in the late 16th century, wrote that lines on the forehead were “vestiges of the impression of God.” Sir Thomas Browne likewise spoke of the “characters” to be found in the human face, hands, and forehead: “The finger of God hath left an Inscription upon all his works, not graphicall or composed of Letters, but of their severall formes.”

In the last quarter of the 15th century, Italian humanists Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola began translating Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, and Pythagoras, texts known as the Corpus hermeticum, and by the 17th century writers were attempting, according to Porter, “to reconcile and synthesize a dominant Christianity with Egyptian and pagan Neoplatonic philosophy.” Since this hermetic tradition was already known to Goethe before he encountered Lavater, it is perhaps not surprising that he joined forces with Lavater, assisting in PF’s publication as well as writing many of the “character assessments.”

The PF were controversial in their own day, and even some of Lavater’s acquaintances refused to be portrayed therein. Albrecht von Haller, for instance, the Swiss anatomist, wrote to Charles Bonnet, describing Lavater as a poet and placing no confidence in a man entirely so governed by imagination. Haller was of course a deeply devout man, but also a man of science, and it is interesting to consider that the rise of physiognomy in the Renaissance, its attempt to see a resemblance between “signifiers and things signified,” also coincided with investigations that sought to penetrate into the workings of nature. But, as Martin Porter notes, this resemblance was “far from the new geometry that Galileo had claimed was the language in which the ‘book of nature’ was written.’”

Whatever the case, what Goethe wrote in the PF bears looking at for what it tells us about Goethe. First off, all of his descriptions of the character of various subjects (Scipio, Titus, Tiberius, Brutus, Caesar) were drawn from his consultation of drawings, or, in the case of contemporaries, from silhouettes (Schattenrisse). In other words, not from direct encounter. While using the physiognomical vocabulary or grammar, Goethe was basically describing his perception of characteristics that, in turn, were the perception of an artist. Thus, his characterization of Titus : “Höchst edel und trefflich die Nase” (The nose is extremely noble and excellent). Of Caesar, he draws attention to “das verzogene, abgeschlappte Augenlid! der schwankende abziehende Mund! Im Ganzen eine eherne, übertyrannische Selbstigkeit” (the warped, worn-out eyelid! the faltering deducting mouth! All in all, an iron, overly tyrannical ego).

There are a few instance where he writes of less elevated individuals, for instance, of a “sehr kränkelnder, schwindsüchtiger, cholerischmelancholischer, einfältiger Schuster, …völlig ermangelnd an Leben und Quellgeist” (a very ailing, consumptive, choleric, melancholic, simple-minded shoemaker, utterly lacking in life and internal spirit). Pretty strong stuff.

At the same time, Goethe did recognize the subjective nature of his observations. In “Von den oft nur scheinbaren Fehlschlüßen des Physiognomisten,” he writes as follows: “Wie die Sachen eine Physiognomie haben, so haben auch die Urtheile die ihrige, und eben daß die Urtheile verschieden sind, beweist noch nicht, daß ein Ding bald so, bald so ist.” (Just as things have a physiognomy, so too with our judgments, and the very fact that judgments differ does not prove that a thing is sometimes this way, sometimes like that). He introduces the example of a book that portrays the joys and miseries of love in all its lively and manifold colors, a book that young people rave about, but that older people dismiss. Who is correct? No one! It is the role of the physiognomist to step in and remind opponents that words like excellent and terrible lead to “confrontation.” Everything is relative (verhältnismaßig) in the world. Only God know the relationship between things.

Sterbender Schmertz

It strikes me here that Goethe is expressing, avant la lettre, exactly what Kant wrote (in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View) about the subjectivity of “taste.” Herewith this quote from Porter: “Physiognomy is the art of judging what lies within a man, whether in terms of his way of sensing or of his way of thinking, from his visible form and so from his exterior.” Our reaction, however, is a matter of subjective judgment, by which we rationalize our pleasure or displeasure with men, and such a judgment “cannot serve as a guiding principle to Wisdom, which has the existence of man with certain natural qualities objectively as its end (which, is for us, quite incomprehensible) …” Kant does agree with the subtitle of Lavater's book, namely, that physiognomy had the potential for improving human relationships.

The drawing above (click to enlarge), “after Fusseli,” portraying the pain of a dying man (sterbender Schmerz),  again underlines the connection between Goethe, Lavater, and Fuseli, about which I have posted in recent months.

Goethe, Fuseli, and von Humboldt

 

Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt with Schiller and Goethe in Jena

After having finished the previous two posts, I have been brooding on certain commonalities of the three. All were “geniuses,” in the 18th-19th century sense of that term, and all of German-speaking background. From youth onward, their path forward in life would have been to follow in the path of their father. Fuseli would become a pastor, Goethe a lawyer, and Humboldt a high-ranking bureaucrat in the Prussian civil service. Nothing of the sort happened. All three might be said to have followed their own star.

As I mentioned in the post on Fuseli, that his life took such an unanticipated turn, that he became a great and original painter in England, rather than in Switzerland or Germany, was the result of a youthful imprudence, engaged in with Lavater, who did return to Switzerland and did become a pastor. As I mentioned in that post, the amount of scholarship on Fuseli is very sparse, but the alacrity with which he accepted the offer to travel to London in 1764 with the British ambassador to the Prussian court is perhaps an indication of a desire to mark out a new path.

About Goethe and von Humboldt, however, we know from their own writings how adverse they were, from a young age, to following in the well-trod path of their own fathers.

Goethe’s father, Caspar, had studied law as a young man in Leipzig and Strassburg, and followed up his studies with a grand tour that included Italy. He had inherited quite a fortune from his father, and it seems to have been the time of his life. Professionally, however, he made a wrong step on his return to Frankfurt in 1742, which left him without a position in the city’s administration.  He married into a prominent and old Frankfurt family, which raised his status considerably, but with a lot of time on his hands, he appears to have devoted it to the education of young Goethe and his sister Cornelia. Cornelia of course married, while his son was supposed to follow in his footsteps. So it was that young Goethe studied in both Leipzig and Frankfurt and was supposed to go to Italy before becoming a lawyer.

Johann Caspar Goethe

Well, Goethe did study law in Leipzig and Strassburg, and he even studied (as had Caspar) at the imperial court in Wetzlar, but between Leipzig and Wetzlar other things intervened, The Sorrows of Young Werther of course being the most notable. Already in 1768, however, when Goethe was still only nineteen, he wrote to a friend of his “efforts to become, and his fairly well founded hopes of becoming, a good writer.” (Mein feuriger Kopf, mein Witz, meine Bemühung und ziemlich gegründete Hoffnung, mit der Zeit ein guter Autor zu werden.) Nicholas Boyle in his biography of Goethe writes that Goethe “was no Rimbaud” (Goethe’s earliest surviving poetry gives evidence of that), but Rimbaud (b. 1854) came of age in a far different literary milieu. The French language was a well-formed literary language by the time of his birth, whereas Germany in 1749, the year of Goethe’s birth, was not even a united nation, while its writers were in the process of forging a common literary language. So, too, Goethe’s earliest efforts were a pastiche, a hodgepodge, a babel, a collage: imitation on a wide scale. It took him several years to get his feet on the ground, so to speak, and craft his own inimitable idiom.

Alexander von Humboldt’s father died when Alexander was still a child, but his mother undertook his education with the aim of outfitting him to occupy a role in the Prussian civil service. He did follow her orders for a while, went as far as becoming an inspector of mines, a very important position. Unlike with Goethe we have more evidence of his youthful unhappiness and of his many forays into different pursuits. For instance, he associated with members of the important Berlin salons. As Maren Meinhardt writes of Humboldt’s integration into this “new and mysterious world,” it offered him “the prospect of transformation, of being not quite who he was. The unknown, shimmering and colorful always seemed enticing to him.”

Guests at Henriette Herz's Literary Salon, ca. 1800

In the end, he didn’t even know what he would discover when he took off for South America in 1799: “no colonial power had sent him, nor did he represent any political or mercantile interest. Nor, for that matter, was anyone funding him. Instead, Humboldt put his own inheritance in the service of a scientific expedition for himself and his collaborator Aimé Bonpland, a journey that would last five years, the foremost purpose of which would be to satisfy his scientific curiosity.”

What Meinhardt writes of Humboldt could also be applied to Goethe’s early path in life: “his motivations were complex and the goal of his journey was to a very high degree unspecified.” Along with Fuseli, they were travelers, and their achievements came from uprooting themselves from familiar soil.

The influence of Goethe and Humboldt has been enormous, while the effect of Fuseli both during his life and afterward is still up in the air. While he occupied an important position in London literary and artistic life, his non-English background may have shortened his “outreach.”

 Image Credits: London Remembers; Schule.Judentum

Alexander von Humboldt (and a little Goethe)

 

Humboldt's Naturgemälde

Alexander von Humboldt has attracted some interest in recent years. (In what follows, I am assuming  that readers have heard of Humboldt’s famous five-year South American expedition, but, if not, I recommend the Britannica link.) First, in 2006, there was Daniel Kehlmann’s delightful novel Measuring the World (Die Vermessung der Welt), in which Humboldt shared the stage with the mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss. It was followed in 2015 by The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf, an in-depth biography that offers a  “global view” of Humboldt and his scientific achievements. As Wulf writes early on, the individual disciplines we recognize today as “science” — chemistry, physics, astronomy, and so on — were taking on distinct form by the end of the 18th century, breaking away from natural philosophy, which subsumed natural phenomena within a metaphysical framework. Humboldt was an experimentalist par excellence (as Wulf writes, “a man who discarded a life of privilege to learn how the world works”), but was not content to examine natural phenomena in isolation (think of Linneus’s neat classification of plants), but sought to study them within larger relationships in which they were embedded. Humboldt’s conception is graphically on view in his famous Naturgemälde der Anden, a depiction of the volcanoes Chimborazo and Cotopaxi in cross section, with detailed information about plant geography. (Click on the image above to enlarge.) The illustration was published in The Geography of Plants, 1807, in a large format. Wulf also trace Humboldt’s influence on later generations, especially writers and others who are concerned with the effects of human habitation of the Earth  (e.g., Thoreau and Ernst Haeckel), including subjects like deforestation and climate change.

A third book on Humboldt, by Maren Meinhardt, appeared in 2018 -- A Longing for Wide and Unknown Things -- which I discussed briefly in a post several years ago. Meinhardt was probably in the process of writing her own book on Humboldt in 2015, as can be seen by a long article she published in the magazine Guernica that year. (Very readable, much to be recommended.) She must have felt blind sided by the appearance of Wolf’s book, but she has produced a very different kind of study. It is a “life,” and not, as in Wulf, “a global Humboldt.” One learns more about the man close up. Meinhardt’s notes, for instance, which include the bibliographic references, are only thirty pages (in contrast to Wulf’s walloping 120 pages), and are drawn for the most part from contemporary documents, including correspondence.

Humboldt and Bonpland at Mt. Chimborazo, Ecuador

In places this biography is uncomfortable reading. Humboldt’s obsessive quests for knowledge of the natural world seemed reflected in several relationships, apparently non-sexual, with various men. Meinhardt treats these, quoting from effusive letters, which may suggest homosexuality, but, interestingly, there was one man whom he would seem to have known closest, Aimé Bonpland, and with whom he inhabited the closest quarters during their American travels, but with whom apparently no sexual relationship occurred. Meinhardt, and Wulf to some extent, deals with the Humboldt mother-son relationship, which seems to have had little room for close emotional contact. In Meinhardt, however, one learns that Humboldt’s desire to understand natural phenomena in terms of relationships also extended to his views of those between humans.

Which brings me to Goethe, who plays a major role in both books. In fact, already the second chapter of Wulf’s book is entitled “Imagination and Nature: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Humboldt.” It is a very thorough discussion of Goethe’s scientific pursuits, which the relationship with Humboldt revivified on their first meeting in Jena in 1794. Wulf’s wealth of bibliographic sources allows her a closer look at their get togethers. (For instance, it was freezing cold in Jena in December of that year: “The frozen Rhine became a thoroughfare for French troops on their warpath through Europe.”) It was a period when Goethe’s scientific ideas found little resonance among contemporaries, including Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) or his essays on optics (Beiträge zur Optik, 1791), a preface to his theory of colors. Meeting Humboldt, a “sparring partner,” caused him to start working on his scientific studies more intensely. We also learn that the young Goethe who had stormed Europe with his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was now corpulent, “with a double chin and a stomach cruelly described by one acquaintance as ‘that of a woman in the last stages of pregnancy.’ His looks had gone — his beautiful eyes had disappeared into the ‘fat of his cheeks’ and many remarked that he was no longer a dashing ‘Apollo.’”

Chemical attractions in Elective Affinities

So be it. It is only in chapter 9 that Goethe gets his own chapter in Meinhardt, the title of which is “Chemical Attractions.” While discussing the coming together of Humboldt and Goethe and its electrifying effect on Goethe’s enthusiasm for scientific matters (Humboldt had by 1794, writes Meinhardt, “developed an almost obsessive interest in the idea of animal electricity, generally referred to as ‘galvanism’”), she focuses on the literary effect, namely, Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, in which the relationships between natural phenomena offer a model for those chemical and human relationships portrayed in the novel. As Meinhardt writes: “Goethe puts his characters in the positions of chemical substances in the course of an experiment.” Further, “the novel is strongly preoccupied with the equilibrium that needs to be maintained,” but that, in the case of the relationship between Eduard and Charlotte, is disturbed by new elements. “Chemistry, following its inevitable course, quickly goes beyond the experimental setting and draws the characters into a destructive maelstrom.” Wulf mentions the novel in her study, but only in passing. Similarly, Meinhardt’s focus on the milieu of the first meeting of Humboldt and Goethe brought out something I had not known, namely, the role Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander’s brother, played in “engineering” the course of events that led to the fabled encounter between Schiller and Goethe, which was followed by dinner at the home of Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt in Jena in July of 1794. The rest is literary history.

Another chapter in which Goethe plays a role takes place after Humboldt’s famous American tour, when he and a group of friends, despite the warlike conditions in Europe, plan a trip to Italy in 1797. It is entitled “Goethe’s Caravan,” and at some point, according to Meinhardt, Goethe actually considered joining the group. The group venture “went south,” so to speak, not to Italy, but by now, Humboldt’s renown as a scientist “smoothed his path wherever he went.” His brother Wilhelm and Caroline did go to Italy, however, where they were neighbors with the German-Danish writer Friederike Brun, about whom I wrote a blog post back in 2012 in connection with “Goethe in Venice” and have also written an essay on Brun that appeared in this volume.

Like Fuseli (see previous post), Humboldt doesn’t inhabit a single world, escapes easy classification. He was “one of the most captivating and inspiring men of his time” (writes Wulf) and the most famous scientist of his day. The 100th anniversary of his birth, September 1869, was celebrated all over the world. Imagine that the streets of downtown New York City were lined with flags, and posters with his picture appeared on building fronts. Today, of course, as Wulf writes, very few outside of academia have heard of him, although that is probably only true in North America and the European world. Humboldt's name is everywhere in Latin America and in several African countires. According to the Alexander Humboldt Foundation, mountain peaks, bodies of waters, and entire regions bear his name, including the Humboldt Current.

Image credit:  Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten / Hermann Buresch; Sofatutor