Goethe Year 1932 in Argentina

As I wrote in my previous post, 1932 marked the 100th anniversary of Goethe’s death, with commemorations organized worldwide. Another such commemoration has been documented by my Goethe Society colleague, Robert Kelz, in an article in volume 29 of the Goethe Yearbook. Professor Kelz has also documented the 1949 festivities in Buenos Aires in volume 28. Both occasions were darkened, of course, by National Socialism and by the German losses in two world wars. Besides being full of details unfamiliar to most of us in the English-speaking world, the articles also show the intercultural connections between South America and Europe, as well as the cultural reach of Goethe and his works.

I was of course aware that many German Nazis had fled to South American countries after the World War II. Who could forget the capture of Adolf Eichmann by Mossad in 1960? But before that, since the 19th century, Germans had a history of settlement in Argentina.

As I have learned from a book mentioned by Professor Kelz in his bibliography, German Buenos Aires, 1900–1933: Social Change and Cultural Crisis, by Ronald C. Newton, there was a flow of Western European immigrants to Argentina in the 19th century, primarily Italians, but French, English, and Germans also left the Old World behind and started new lives. This was also the case of immigration to the U.S. But not quite. A major difference was that the U.S. was a land that swallowed up the ethnic and national identities of emigres and then turned them into “Americans.” Not so, it turns out, Argentina.

Argentina in the 19th century was tied to overseas trade, with Buenos Aires funneling “the bulk of the Pampa’s foodstuffs and fibers in one direction, and of Europe’s manufactures, capital, technology, and surplus labor power in the other” (Newton). Those emigrés who stood atop the social hierarchy in Buenos Aires, the money people (bankers, traders, manufacturers), formed communal associations familiar from their homelands. There were German schools and hospitals and aid societies, and German scientists seems to have played a big role in academic life in Argentina. (I also learned that Chile benefited from German military training.) The Germans were more or less part of a cosmopolitan culture that existed in Buenos Aires, in particular, among other Western European emigrés, but they still felt themselves “German.”

Esteban Echeverría

Professor Kelz writes that “the organized study of German literature” had begun already in 1847, five years after Goethe’s death with the establishment of the Salon Literaria in Buenos Aires. A leading figure in the salon was the author Esteban Echeverría, who wrote a novel inspired by The Sorrows of Young Werther. Echeverría was a Romantic poet in a true sense, and since the salon’s meetings included discussion of democratic politics, it was banned in short order by the government. By the 1920s, German literature was established as an academic subject at the University of Buenos Aires, but Goethe always figured as a major figure among literati and intellectuals. Some of the writers mentioned by Kelz include the Mexican writer and philosopher Alfonso Reyes, who served as diplomat in Argentina from 1927 to 1930 and again in 1936–37 and who later wrote a book on Goethe entitled Path to Goethe. A book by Ardoino Martini, The Personality of Goethe, appearing in 1933, “asserted that Goethe proved the existence of a universal culture counter to dogmatic ideology in art, religion, and politics.” In the background of this interwar period was clearly the wish for avoiding the threats that were soon to disturb the world.

What follows highlights some of the activities described in Professor Kelz’s article on the 1932 Goethe Year, entitled “Fleeting Hopes in Foreboding Times.” The commemorations included such festivities as a series of talks by the leading German Romantic scholar Karl Vossler, sponsored by the German Foreign Office, in which Vossler  spoke of “Goethe’s spiritual and intellectual connection to the Latin world.” There was an exhibit of editions and translations of Goethe’s works, of which, by that year, over 150 translations existed in Spanish. Magazines and newspapers featured articles by eminent German scholars on Goethe, for instance, Julius Petersen. The celebrations were rounded off by a gala sponsored by the Argentine-German Cultural Institute, whose honorary chairman was the authoritarian, antidemocratic Argentine president Augustín Justo.

As in all the activities during this year of celebration, there were “disparate political agendas” on view. At the gala, the president of the AGCI gave what Kelz calls a “blatantly nationalistic, fascist speech,” saying that “Goethe’s fame was Germany’s glory”; now a universal figure he had nevertheless emerged from “a specific nationality.” Vossler’s own speech was a rebuttal, in which he asserted that Goethe was defined by “an absence of strong patriotic feeling” (Ausbleiben starker patriotischer Empfindungen). This “inclusive, intercultural event,” as Kelz calls it, was  thus “a volatile mixing zone for disparate political agendas,” which presaged the coming conflicts “in Europe and South America alike.”

By the 1949 Goethe Year, lots of Nazis had fled to South America, including Adolf Eichmann, who arrived in Argentina in 1950. 

Image credits: Martin Kramer;