Details anew

It's been a while, as I have been working away at my Goethe book. Lately, I am rereading Goethe's autobiography (Poetry and Truth  in English), which plays a big role in the book I am writing. I mentioned in the previous post the lack of detail in Goethe’s works, even in letters to friends, where he is actually writing about himself, but without offering many details of the environment. But I came across something  in Book 2 of Part 2 of the autobiography, which has some suggestive detail. Book 2 covers the period ca. 1755, when his family is living in the home of his paternal grandmother. In that year, she died and Goethe’s father undertook the rebuilding of the house, from the bottom up. Because of all the work going on in the house, young Goethe (maybe 6 years old) attended a “public school.”

Goethe describes himself at this time as a boy who did not lie, nor did he like to pretend, and was anything but frivolous. This statement is somewhat odd because immediately before writing of his time in public school, he inserted a fairy tale ("Der Neue Paris"), which he claims he told to his friends and other children. It is solely a story of pretense, about a young boy who enters an enchanted kingdom. In any case, because of the dignity with which he had been raised  and also the dignity of his close friends, they often found themselves the subjects of taunts by boys not so well raised who mischievously or roughly attacked them. Fairy tales were fun, they could lead you into enchanted worlds, but he was also learning that, instead of  yielding to the pleasures of fantasy, it would be necessary to harden himself against the real world.

At this point he adds that he began to train himself  in “a youthful Stoicism,” which amounted to bearing up to physical pain. The teachers of course were already administers of pain, against which there was no recourse. Schoolboys  had to inure themselves to the pain of being struck by their teachers, in an “unfriendly” awkward manner as they dolled out punishments. They hardened themselves because insubordination and counteraction were proscribed. And so it was that roughness even became a source of achievement and competition among them, was mirrored in the roughneck behavior on the school yard, with boys trading blows, even receiving blows as forfeits in certain games.

Thus, Goethe’s youthful stoicism, which amounted to flaunting his own defiance of pain. This led other kids to indulge in cruelty toward him. As he puts it, the classroom was divided between those who disliked him and those who wished him well (die Mißwollenden and die Wohlwollenden),  One day at school, the teacher did not arrive on time, and gradually the classroom emptied, and he sat alone with three boy who were among those who did not wish him well. They began to torment him, but after leaving the room for a moment they returned with switches torn from a broom. He saw their intention, but since it was almost the end of the hour he decided not to defend himself, but sat firmly awaiting the remaining minutes. The boys began, he writes, to beat him mercilessly, in the cruelest way, on the legs and calves. He didn’t stir, but he began to notice that pain simply prolonged the minutes.

With his patience, his rage grew, and when the hour struck he took the boys on, one after the other, applying a stranglehold on one boy, banging another’s head to the floor. Even so, they kept kicking and biting, which fueled him with more rage. At a certain point they screamed so appallingly that they were soon surrounded by all the school’s inhabitants. Lucky for Goethe, after pulling off his long socks, the switches and the scratches on his legs showed him to be in the right and he was allowed to go, although he vowed if something similar happened again he would claw out their eyes, tear their ears off, or even strangle them. The end result is that school was over for him, and soon therefore he returned home for his lessons and was taught by private teachers with his sister. 

 It wasn’t the last nasty business of this sort that he experienced in his childhood. Goethe is always drawing moral lessons, and in this case he considered that the disgusting behavior he experienced in school was not personal, but was a human thing. In other words, don’t think because you were bullied that it was personally directed at you. At the same time, kids who are raised in conditions of manners or civilized behavior (like him and his few friends) learn early on from parents and teachers to act in a civilized way (mäßig, verständig, vernünftig), and not to harm one another out of wantonness. Instead, they learn to regulate hateful (gehässig) drives. If they don't, and have to put up for too long with ruffians, they too can become violent, even treacherous or deceitful.        

So much for repaying pain with pain. Goethe goes on to say that force can usefully be repelled by force, and that he was generally able to counter the physical attacks of his “playfellows.” He was, however,  no match for those who begrudged the benefits and possibly the renown he and his family enjoyed: Goethe’s maternal grandfather, after all, was chief magistrate of the city, which aroused resentment and scurrilous remarks among  the “Mißwollenden.” They attacked his family and his position in society with “jibes and disparaging remarks.”

At those attacks he remained quite equable, even when one of the boys made inuendos that the father of the magistrate was not a man of rank. Goethe doesn’t draw attention to it here, but he begins to write about his paternal grandfather, who it turned out did not have a lofty background. It was in the house of this grandfather's wife that Goethe had been living until her death, which was why he was at the moment attending a public school with all the ruffians.

Goethe's home in Frankfurt

Goethe’s father’s father had been a wandering tailor of peasant stock. It was customary for craftsmen to travel, and he had worked, among other places, in Paris, before finally settling in Frankfurt, where he made a great success in Frankfurt as a tailor which led to him marrying the widow of a wealthy innkeeper. His financial success meant that Goethe’s father enjoyed an education, went to law school, married the chief magistrate’s daughter, and inherited the house he rebuilt and filled it with books and paintings, not to forget the vast store of wines from the window’s inn.

 Is that enough detail for today? Interestingly enough, those details of the paternal grandfather do not come from Goethe himself, but from Nicholas Boyle's biography. Is it the case that these were details he didn't want to include in his biography?

 Image credit: Jeni Kirby History; Art UK