Goethe and Marriage

 

As usual, I am caught up in many things, including an article on Goethe's 1774 play Clavigo, which I am completing (the footnotes took ages) for publication. It is not a play that we in the U.S. hear much about, and at the time of its publication there were people in Germany who didn't believe it was by Goethe. It appeared in the same year as The Sorrows of Young Werther while Götz von Berlichingen had also drawn much attention to Goethe's talent the year before. Goethe got the idea for Clavigo from an account by the French writer Pierre Beaumarchais, who is well known today for the plays The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. Before he wrote those plays, however, before Rossini and Mozart turned them into world-famous operas, Beaumarchais had caught Goethe's attention and indeed that of many people in the year 1774 with an account entitled Mémoires contre Goezman. It concerned a trip Beaumarchais had made to Spain in 1764, during which he sought, on behalf of a French financier, to "obtain for him and thus for France the much coveted license to sell slaves to the Spanish empire, which at that time was open for purchase," in addition to seeking to establish a monopoly for a French company to trade for twenty years in Louisiana. Such was the age of the Enlightenment in France.

But there was a side purpose to his trip, namely, the attempt to rescue the honor of his younger sister Marie-Louise. This sister had been engaged to the Canary Islands native José Clavijo y Fajardo, who, having arrived with no previous reputation in Madrid, was befriended by Beaumarchais's sisters who lived there. Clavijo began publishing a weekly paper in the style of the English Spectator entitled El Pensador, and by 1763 came to be regarded as an "enlightened journalist of Madrid," and also to have succeeded in rising to the position of keeper of one of the archives of the king of Spain, which would allow him to marry the younger sister. According to Beaumarchais, "He was promised the first honourable employment at court which became vacant. He outmanoeuvred all other claimants to my sister’s hand.  . . . The wedding was held back only by the need to wait for the employment which had been promised to this author of pamphlets. At the end of a delay of six years on one side and many cares and kindnesses on the other side, the job appeared and the man vanished."

Goethe read the memoir after its publication and spent the spring of 1774 writing the play Clavigo. Clavigo in his play is not the outright scoundrel that Beaumarchais portrays in his memoir, and Goethe himself did not write a revenge tragedy. Instead, he wrote a play about an ambitious man who abandoned his promise to marry Marie because marriage stood in the way of his freedom to pursue his literary career and rise in the esteem of the world. I imagine Clavigo to have looked like the figure above in Goya's 1820 painting of Tiburcio Pérez Cuervo (1785–1841), a Spanish architect who (according to the wall label at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) was responsible for several of the institutional buildings in Madrid.

Goethe's Clavigo appears to possess charisma and good looks. He never appears in public, according to his friend Carlos, without on his arm "eine stattliche, herrliche, hochäugige Spanierin ... deren volle Brust, ihr glühenden Wangen, ihre heißen Augen die Welt ringsumher zu fragen schienen: bin ich nicht meines Begleiters wert?" The magazine Clavigo edits is well loved by women.  In the fourth act of the play Carlos tells him how astonished women in Madrid would be were he to marry Marie, who is a nobody.

This is a long way to getting around to the subject of this post: "Goethe and Marriage." It was a subject that was on Goethe's mind in 1774. He was twenty-five, had finished his legal studies in Strassburg, which was followed by an apprenticeship at the imperial court in Wetzlar (where he fell in love with Lotte Buff), and was living in the parental home in Frankfurt and taking part, if without enthusiasm, in legal work. In Book 15 of his autobiography, which concerns the year 1774, Goethe claims that his parents already had their eyes on a local girl for him to marry. The scholar H. J. Meessen has drawn attention to the number of marriages taking place around Goethe. In 1773, for instance, Lotte Buff finally became Lotte Kestner, his sister Cornelia had married. Maximiliane von la Roche was about to approach the altar. Marriage, however, must have been a vexing topic for ambitious, bourgeois men. Even Herder, after two years of writing what would be called love letters to Caroline Flachsland, took a long time wedding her, until he found a position to his liking.

 In 1775, Goethe fell in love with a young woman (she was sixteen) named Lili Schönemann. (Be careful of the Wikipedia entry: lots of errors.) The poems and letters Goethe wrote at the time reveal that his passion for her was very real, which led, according to Dichtung und Wahrheit, to their engagement. Marriage, however was ultimately doomed because of status incompatibilities between him and Lili: he was Lutheran, she Reformed. She was also from a wealthy mercantile family, with a patrician way of life, unlike inhabitants of the Goethe household. Back then, those differences did matter, and in part 4 of the autobiography, he claims it was those differences that ended the engagement. Book 4, however, also concerns his decision to accept the invitation of Duke Carl August to visit Weimar. In the article I just finished on the play Clavigo, I have drawn attention to the parallels Goethe created in his account of the relationship with Lili in the autobiography and the relationship between Clavigo and Marie Beaumarchais in Goethe's early play, in which Clavigo faces the dilemma between marriage and a courtly career. As always with Goethe's autobiography: poetry or truth?

By the way, I do not know if the above quote, attributed to Goethe, is the real thing. If anyone knows the source, please write.

 

Goethe and Refugees, 2

This is the concluding part of the previous post on the subject of refugees and émigrés during the French Revolution in Goethe's works. As with Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, discussed in the earlier post, I am not dealing with the poetic character or literary values of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. (Another time perhaps!) As preparation for my participation on a panel at an 18th-century conference (see previous post), I am simply drawing attention here to what strikes me as interesting aspects of the subject of “refugees” in these works.

Goethe and Lili

One thing I did not mention in the previous post was that Goethe was personally familiar with an émigré of the type described in Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten. Her name was Lili Schönemann, and in an article I recently completed I have described her as the “last love” of Goethe’s youth. He and Lili met in January 1775, a meeting described in Dichtung und Wahrheit, in the Schönemann home in Frankfurt, where the 16-year-old Lili was playing the piano. The letters and poems Goethe wrote that year reveal that he was deeply in love with her. In his autobiography (published decades later) he writes that they did not marry because of “family differences.” Among the differences: Goethe’s family was Lutheran, Lili’s “Reformed.” Goethe does not draw attention to this, but the Reformed were in origin the French Calvinists whose conversion to Protestantism led to the French religious wars of the 17th century. The Huguenots, as they were called, fled France in the 17th century and took up residence in England, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, even the U.S.

Huguenot strongholds in France

 Lili Schönemann, like the figures described in the previous post, was also an émigré who left France in the wake of the revolutionary events. Her husband was a wealthy banker, baron von Türckheim, with whom she lived near Strassburg. In 1792, when things got out of hand with the French Revolution, he was deposed from his office as mayor. The family Türckheim also had a  farm near Strassburg, where they stayed for a while, but as the violence increased, her husband feared he would be among the Revolution’s victims. It was a tricky business, though perhaps not so hard for a single man to evade the frontier posts manned by revolutionary authorities. Lili, on her own, dressed as a farmer’s wife, along with her four children, also managed to escape and meet up with her husband in Mannheim. Goethe did not meet Lili at this time, but he was aware of her experience.

In 1795, as Schiller was getting ready to publish his journal Die Horen, he asked Goethe for a contribution. The result was the Unterhaltungen. You might say that the material was already there for Goethe to draw on. I would not say that the baroness in the Unterhaltungen is a stand-in for Lili; as in many of Goethe’s works, she may have simply provided the inspiration.

It’s worth noting that the wars that initially produced refugees in Europe were of a religious nature, in the 16th and 17th centuries; since the French Revolution, however, wars have been of a political nature. The kernel of the story of Hermann und Dorothea, however, which concerns “political” refugees, has a religious background, indeed a Huguenot one, and it is here that Lili may have played a role.

First, a short summary of the refugee situation in Hermann und Dorothea.

There are six characters in Hermann und Dorothea: the proprietor of the Golden Lion and his wife, their son Hermann, the village pastor, the apothecary, and Dorothea, who is among the refugees who have been driven through their small city by the French Revolution. Hermann’s mother sends him with food for their relief. Hermann encounters Dorothea, and “his heart at once goes out to her.” Indeed, it is love at first sight. On his return, he tells his mother that, if he is not permitted to marry Dorothea, he will never marry at all. His father had long tried in vain to persuade him to marry the wealthy neighbor’s daughter, and when the mother reports the son’s resolution, he at first indignantly refuses to accept a wife lacking a dowry. However, consultations among the father and the pastor and the apothecary lead to a happy ending.
 
Just when you think Goethe has invented something new, we find that there is a source! Here is that source as reported by the venerable Gutenberg organization. The Protestants referred to in the passage below are, of course, Huguenots, forced to leave Austria, but who then found welcome in Prussia, where foreign labor was welcome:

Salzburg Protestants on the way to Prussia

“The basis of [Hermann und Dorothea] is a historical incident. In the year 1731 the Archbishop of Salzburg drove out of his diocese a thousand Protestants, who took refuge in South Germany, and among whom was a girl who became the bride of the son of a rich burgher. The occasion of the girl's exile was changed by Goethe to more recent times, and in the poem she is represented as a German from the west bank of the Rhine fleeing from the turmoil caused by the French Revolution. The political element is not a mere background, but is woven into the plot with consummate skill, being used, at one point, for example, in the characterization of Dorothea, who before the time of her appearance in the poem has been deprived of her first betrothed by the guillotine; and, at another, in furnishing a telling contrast between the revolutionary uproar in France and the settled peace of the German village.”

The expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants was well known to Goethe. According to the site Salzburg Exiles: “The expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants created a sensation in the Protestant states of Europe. At least 300 different books and pamphlets were written about the migration in 1732–1733, celebrating the faith and perseverance of the Salzburgers.”

Image credits: Tales of Goethe; Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)

Goethe and Refugees

Unterhaltungen dt. Ausgewanderten onstage in 2016

The East Coast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ECASECS) is holding its annual conference at the end of October, for which I will be traveling to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It’s an opportunity to hear what one’s colleagues in 18th-century studies are up to. Samuel Johnson always seems to hold a special place in the conferences, as there are a number of Johnson scholars in the society. German is usually underrepresented at these conferences, but I will be making a presentation on a panel on the theme of refugees and emigrés in the 18th century, specifically their representation in Goethe’s works. Goethe wrote two works that thematize the subject.

One is Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, from 1795; the other Hermann und Dorothea, from 1797. The two works present a contrast in terms of the people affected by the revolutionary events, but the refuges are all “culturally” German, individuals and families who have been living in what is now part of France (since WWI), but which when Goethe was writing was more mixed with French and Germans. The territory is now  Alsace-Lorraine, on the left bank of the Rhine. A major city is Alsace is Strassburg, where Goethe went to study in 1770. Most of the people at the university were Germans, although you have to recall that in 1770 Germany itself was not a united nation. In the wake of the French Revolution and, later, the violence of 1792 (Robespierre was executed that year), many of these people fled to the German side of the Rhine.

The characters in the Unterhaltungen are nobles, who are referred to as “émigrés,” the kind of people you might think would flee the Revolution, even when forced to abandon considerable possessions. The group that makes up the cast of the Unterhaltungen have settled on an inherited estate on the German side. There are six major characters, all more or less individualized. The situation is different in Hermann und Dorothea. If you have seen pictures on TV or in the newspapers of anonymous groups of people crossing the southern border of the U.S., you will have an idea of the stream of refugees that are passing through a German town, to a destination not quite specified. Clearly, their future is in doubt. And as always with Goethe, what he wrote has a present-day resonance.

And as always with Goethe, there are lots of threads to pull together. Thus, this post will focus on the Unterhaltungen, which will be followed soon (crossing my fingers) by a post on Hermann und Dorothea.

The title of the Unterhaltungen — “Conversations of German Emigrés” — points to what is at stake among the refugees: how to have a civilized conversation when the participants are of totally different political views. The leader of the the group of the small caravan is a baroness (“von C”), a widow in “middle years” known for her accomplishments, especially in the domestic sphere, and who would like to maintain “good spirits” among the group even in a moment of fear and need. And while the pleasant region in which they have settled is interrupted by the thunder of canons, depending on the direction of the winds, no one can stop talking about the events of the day. The result is dissension in the company, which is divided in its opinions. It should be mentioned that among those who fled the revolutionary wars, many were still in favor of the aims of the French Revolution. I found online a letter from 1792 by a man named Johann Alois Becker to a friend. Becker was in Mainz, which was occupied by supporters of the Revolution:

“Finally, our people began to reject their chains and gain human dignity. Soon we will be free. A few days before the French attacked our city, I already felt a great joy. Freedom and equality finally won in Mainz! The French finally arrived to remove our despots, and the first of them was our prince-bishop, who had fled a few days earlier. I confess that I am delighted at the sight of the immense despair that gripped our noble lords. They were panicked at the approach of the French and piled everything they could carry and fled the city.”

And so it is in the Unterhaltungen that two characters come into conflict over the Revolution’s goals.

One is the Privy Councilor (“Geheimrat”), whose wife was in earlier years a close friend of the baroness and who is of the party that is partial to the old system. The other is Karl, son of the baroness, who has been dazzled by the word “freedom” and has already disturbed the serenity of the group with with his passion for the Revolution. At first the discussions between the two are carried on with some balance, but when the blockade of Mainz turns into a siege and one fears for the residents of that city, their opinions are expressed with unfettered passion. One subject was the fate of the Jacobins who had remained in the city: punishment or release, depending on the seriousness of their actions. The Privy Councilor was of the first (“hang them all”), to which Karl took great exception.

The arguments between the two become extremely partisan and intense, and the Councilor hopes that the Jacobins will receive their punishment, which he believes will be judiciously (unparteiisch) rendered. Karl is outraged. He hates the word “unparteiisch” and evaluates the insurrectionists as people who have not had the advantages of the ruling classes and will see their hopes stolen. The Councilor jokes, but with some bitterness, about idealizing a situation, while Karl intones against those whose thinking is reactionary. His mother tries to calm him down, without success; likewise the Councilor's wife. But their attempts are thwarted by her husband who points out the inexperience of youth and about the tendency of kids to play with fire. Karl is so outraged that he declares his wish that revolutionaries be successful with their weapons and urges the Germans to join partners with them and put an end to slavery.  He is convinced that the French will look at the Germans as their own and not sacrifice them, but will treat them with honor and confidence. The Councilor says it’s ridiculous to think that the French, for even a moment, in the event of capitulation or whatever, would care for the Germans. His hope is that, in the event of an Allied victory (Prussians, Austrians), the Jacobins all be hanged.

Karl rejoins that he hopes for the return of the guillotine in Germany and that no guilty head would be spared. To which the Councilor speaks of finding himself for a second time exiled by one of his own “countrymen,” and realizes that there will be less mercy from his fellow Germans than from the New Franks. He thereupon announces that he and his wife are leaving the company.

Sound familiar?

Karl promises to behave better in the future, but the baroness is not convinced that people can contain themselves (“Entsagung”) in these matters.  She demands from here on out that people behave with more decorum in her house. Although she cannot change people’s opinions on world events that affect everyone, as everyone operates on his own sentiments, in “society” one must sacrifice one’s own idiosyncracies, not in the name of virtue, but simply for politeness, the way in which, from childhood on, we encounter a person on the street. If nothing else, the smoke by day and the flames at night should remind us, she says, that our homes and our possessions may be destroyed and should avoid bringing into discussion subjects that make others uncomfortable or upset them. Thus, she calls for an “amnesty,” banning the events of the day from their conversations. If politics drives out civil discourse, how can “einen guten Ton” be established? Pull your strengths together and become instructive, useful, and especially sociable! There are so many subjects that we can learn from and share with others: travel, history, poetry, philosophy, science.

Are there any lessons to be had from this?

To be continued.

Image credit: Thilo Beu

Goethe's Clavigo

Goethe's Clavigo

Clavigo and Marie meet after a long absence

Lots of things have been going on since my last blogpost that have kept me from posting regularly, even though what has kept me occupied has concerned Goethe. In fact I have been immersed in Goethe, trying to get my “Goethe book” off the ground. But I also had to bring to completion an article on Goethe’s early (1774) play Clavigo. (So many footnotes to deal with!) From my graduate studies onward, my work has focused on the “young Goethe.” In considering the pre-1775 work, however, one cannot ignore a late work, namely, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe’s autobiography of the years before he went to Weimar at the end of 1775, which he only began planning in the early 19th century. I am not the only scholar who is skeptical of much of what he writes  about his youth and the creation of his early poetic works. My article on books 5 and 6 of Dichtung und Wahrheit, which has just appeared in the Goethe Yearbook (vol. 31), addresses the “truth” versus the “poetry” of the Gretchen episode in those books. It is entitled “The End of the Affair: Goethe’s Gretchen ‘Roman.’” My contention is that the charming love “affair” with Gretchen, which the autobiography relates as occurring in 1763–1764, was a fictionalization of Goethe’s relationship with Käthgen Schönkopf from 1767 to 1768 when he was a student in Leipzig. By setting the Gretchen episode in his adolescence, Goethe underlined the immaturity of the poetry prompted by his acquaintance with Käthgen, namely, anacreontic poetry, a style he would abandon, especially the “Lüsternheit” (lasciviousness) represented by the poems in the “Annette” collection.

My article on Clavigo does something similar with the final books of DuW, in particular Goethe’s account of the origin of the play itself in 1774 as well as his portrait of his final youthful love affair with Lili Schönemann in1775. Goethe himself points in DuW to this issue of poetic re-creation, attributing to his friend Merck the following characterization of himself: “Dein Bestreben, … deine unablenkbare Richtung ist, dem Wirklichen eine poetische Gestalt zu geben.”

Also keeping me busy is another Goethe late work, Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Refugees).  The theme of the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in October is “Conflicts and Transitions in the Global Eighteenth Century.”  My friend and colleague Linda Merians has organized a panel for the conference —“Conflicts and Transitions:  Refugees and Refugeeism” — on which I will speak on Goethe’s tale of German-speaking exiles fleeing France after the French Revolution. Exiles: sounds like a timely topic. More later.

Image credit: Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Clavigo, by Goethe"

Jena anew: Novalis

The Blue Flower

My previous post was all over the place. As I wrote, the Jena circle and its influence is a complex story. The cast in the opening paragraph of the post includes people whose names are unfamiliar to most of us today, but whose works, as I wrote, had major influence on writers outside of Germany. Today, I want to draw attention to Novalis, whose real name, Friedrich von Hardenberg, shows his aristocratic background. Had he lived longer (he died at not even thirty years of age in 1801), he might have become a serious rival to Goethe in his influence. (Although he lived a longer life, the same might be said of Friedrich Hölderlin, who in 1806, at the age of thirty-six, succumbed to mental illness.) Among other things, Novalis is associated with the image of the "blue flower," and it is this image on which Penelope Fitzgerald drew in The Blue Flower, a novel about Novalis's life.

I won't go into the details here, but there is much about Novalis's work and life that would appeal to "young" people. The image below, for instance, apparently an album cover, is a perfect one for the inspiration felt by a German "romantic rock band" from Hamburg, who (according to Amazon) "specialized in taking romantic, atmospheric symphonic rock pieces and interspersing them with harder rocking material, dynamic keyboard flourishes, and harmonic guitar interplay."

But I have just come across a New York writer named Matthew Gasda who is inspired by another aspect of Novalis's legacy. I leave it to readers of this post to do their own research on Gadsa, but he seems to be well known among theater folks in New York. My interest here is his Substack, which goes by the title "Novalis." The contents of "Novalis" are what the Romantic writers called "fragments." The journal I mentioned in the earlier post, Atheneaum, published numerous fragments by Novalis who said, according to Andrea Wulf, that his "nature" consisted of "moments." It was (again per Wulf) Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel who elevated the fragment to a literary genre, and the Jena writers deployed them in order "to publish the greatest variety of ideas in a very few pages" -- and, moreover, in succinct and efficient form. Here is Novalis: "Friends, the soil is poor; we must scatter seed abundantly for even a modest harvest."

With that said, let me quote a few of Matthew Gasda's very pithy "fragments" from a recent entry on his Substack. In the second one, in particular, I hear echoes of Fichte:

Effectively, what people want out of supposedly transgressive downtown New York in 2024 is Disneyland for bored adults. Lights up early. Not much drinking or smoking, just stimulants. The vague possibility of sex and a lot of gossip and self-promotion.

The clout economy incentivizes laziness. You become an entrepreneur of the self rather than a committed artist, a craftsperson. The temptation is to produce one, maybe two things, get enough of a reputation (clout) and then produce memes and gossip and derivative products of the self associated with the original works.

Image credits: Das Goetheanum

Jena and the Invention of the Self

Jena 1779

The “story” — for it is a story that will be told — opens with a scene in the parlor of a house in the university town of Jena. The residents have gathered of an evening, after a day filled with poetic and other intellectual production, to discuss projects on which they have been working in seclusion in their rooms during the day. It is late in the year 1799, and on this evening tea, cheese, pickled herring, and potatoes are the fare, and Dante is on the agenda for discussion. Another evening might offer criticism of a long poem about Nature, or the progress on a translation of a play by Shakespeare. The participants include August Wilhelm Schlegel, his wife Caroline and his brother Friedrich, Friedrich’s lover Dorothea Veit (daughter of renowned philosopher Moses Mendelssohn), Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, and Friedrich Schelling. On other evenings Wilhelm von Humboldt and his brother Alexander von Humboldt might make an appearance, not to forget Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Significantly missing is Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who had been forced earlier in the year to resign his position at the university for a pamphlet he wrote that suggested he approved of atheism.

We are in Jena, as I said, a decade after the French Revolution, and the political events it unleashed had been prefaced by the works of philosophers, who celebrated the potential of individuals to conceptualize the world on their own. No more monarchs telling you what to think, nor husbands or fathers, no more marriage for that matter if you didn’t feel like it. Freedom of the individual and self-determination were now the plan going forward. In 1799, Napoleon was Consul, and all believed that the Revolution was over, and the ancient regime a thing of the past. “Time has been divided into a before and an after.” Those talking about Dante on that evening in Jena were living that new life.

The parlor scene described above opens a small book about which I wrote a short review back in 2022 for the TLS: Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits, by Peter Neumann. (It appeared in German as Jena 1800. Die Republik der freien Geister in 2018, and in English translation by Shelley Frisch in 2021.) It was hard to do the book complete justice in a short review, but the appearance in 2022 of another book that also focuses on the Jena set and its “free spirits” has led me to consider here both books in tandem. This is Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf. (Wulf is also the author of The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt's New World, concerning Humboldt's five-year journey to South America.). The publisher of Wulf's new bestseller (Penguin Random House) kindly sent me a copy to review on my Goethe blog.

Schiller and Goethe in Jena

After all, Goethe is also an important player in both books. He was living in Weimar at the time, with Christiane Vulpius, and he often mounted his horse and traveled to Jena, which was within the Saxe-Weimar principality. This was after getting to know Schiller better in 1794, when Goethe was at a low point in his literary production, and Schiller was also in a bit of slump. I am not sure whether Wulf was attempting to make the contrast, but the story of the friendship, lasting little more than a decade — Schiller died in 1804 — produced enduring works on the part of each and a profitable new direction in their lives. It was Schiller, whom Wulf calls “the unsung hero of the Jena set,” who brought the parlor residents together, first inviting August Wilhelm Schlegel to move to Jena and contribute to his literary journal Horen. Schlegel and Caroline took up lodging in Jena in 1796, and were soon followed by Friedrich, who, despite his vast literary knowledge and acumen, seems to have been unable to hold down a job.

While the authors of these two books cover the same period, from 1794 to 1806, their approaches are very different. Neumann is himself a poet and is “scenic” throughout: we learn, for instance, of bedbug infestations in the room that Fichte rents in Berlin after being forced to leave Jena. After such a chapter opening, Neumann then goes back and forth in time in the person's life before bringing us back to the present moment. Wulf proceeds chronologically, amassing an impressive amount of research. Both books end with the Battle of Jena in 1806 and the sight of a barefoot Hegel observing Napoleon’s march through the town: French troops have appropriated his shoes on their raids of Jena’s houses and cupboards. It is a very complicated story that Neumann and Wolf tell.

"Louche devotees of free love and free thinking"

Wulf says of the Jena set that it “changed our world.” Jena itself seems in some respects to have been a sleepy town: no public theater and opera performances there. And yet it was the “intellectual and cultural capital” of Germany in these years, because of the university: Schiller, August Schlegel, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel drew hundreds of students to their lectures, who, along with dueling and breaking the windows of the houses of professors they disapproved of, were reveling in the new age of freedom of thought. So, there are two stories here. One concerns a new philosophy, the beginnings of what has been called German Idealism, which had its roots in the university in Jena. (BTW, there were a couple of dozens universities at this time in Germany lands, and only two in England.) The other is about the luminaries in the Jena circle, the people who might be said to be living out, avant la lettre, the new philosophy. They were people who you might say knew God and the world. The caption on the above illustration of the luminaries comes from a New Yorker review of Wulf's book entitled “Ego Trip: The early Romantics and their troublesome legacy.”

“Flux” was the theme of my TLS review, a period in which all the old certainties were giving way. The immediate impulse for a radical change in thinking about those certainties was the French Revolution of 1789, but Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which appeared in 1781, had already prefaced the move away from traditional metaphysical explanations of God and the world. Two philosophers following in this “critical tradition” were Fichte and Schelling, both of whom are featured players in the two books. Fichte (“regarded as Immanuel Kant’s intellectual heir” per Neuman) came to the university in Jena in 1794. He was recommended for his academic position by none other than Goethe. Schelling didn’t arrive until 1798, but he was likewise Goethe’s beneficiary in receiving a position at the university.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Fichte is as impenetrable a thinker as is Kant, but what he formulated was an “idea” that would become a “reality.” According to Fichte, the “I” founds the external world. He thereby inaugurated the notion of self-consciousness, self-determination, and the self’s relationship to all the other selves in the surrounding world. Fichte was an “ideas” person, so he may not have been aware of what we now know, namely, that the growth of commerce and the rise of technology had begun already by the 19th century to free people from traditional paths of life. Men were the first not to have to follow in the footsteps of their fathers. Fichte himself, for instance, was the son of a village ribbon weaver, who through good fortune received an education that eventually led him to the university and his philosophical career. No longer bound by class identities, one's notion of one's “self” naturally changed. So it is that after two-plus centuries of material progress there are people today who envision liberation even from genetic restraints. We believe that we can be “self”-determined if we choose. It was the “starting point” from which the Jena set developed what became known as “Romanticism.”

Influenced by the new philosophy, the Schlegels and the Humboldts and others had a wide reach. August and Friedrich Schlegel published a journal, Athenaeum, which was outrightly provocative and disputatious, dedicated to freedom of thought and word. The political revolution in France may have failed, but now one had time to think about aesthetics and to practice self-determination. August Schlegel would go on to spend nearly a dozen years traveling with Madame de Stael, assisting her in the writing of her famous book Germany, which, in its English translation, disseminated the ideas of the Jena circle, in particular the concept of the “unity of humankind and nature, which was at the core of 'Romanticism.'” It would influence such writers as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle. After Napoleon’s exile in 1814 and the continent began again to be peaceful, the English began their travels to Germany. Not mentioned in either book is George Eliot, who “lived openly” (another Jena refinement) as soulmate with George Lewis. They traveled to Germany together in 1854, and Lewis later produced his Life of Goethe (1875).

Napoleon before Jena, 1806, by Ernest Messonier

While reading Wulf’s account in particular, I could not help thinking of the kind of excitement of the Boomer generation (my own), which believed it had discovered the truth about the world and was wildly and excitedly transmitting it. Speech was heavily censored in the 18th and 19th centuries, because of which Fichte lost his position as professor in Jena, but free speech, the center of his philosophy, lives on. Wulf writes that Fichte did not intend for his ideas to be “a narcissistic celebration of the self.” Like the philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment and, later of “true socialism” (see my blog post on this subject), he believed that free individuals would be moral individuals and make the world better for everyone. But nothing stays the same. Strikingly, the Jena figures didn’t like free speech when it concerned criticism by others of their own work. But they welcomed the devastation of Jena in 1806, as Wulf writes, because it meant the “end of History.” Hegel asserted that Napoleon’s victories culminated in the end of “feudal system” and the emergence of democracy and universal right to freedom. So many Napoleon's since then, and we are still waiting for that great emancipation.

BTW, re the image of Goethe and Schiller walking across the Jena town square: Wulf writes that Goethe was no longer the slender youth of the writer of The Sorrows of Young Werther at the time of his visits to Jena. Indeed, he was quite corpulent, enjoying the home cooking of Christiane Vulpius. For Goethe at home in Weimar in 1799, see my review of Charles Lewinsky's hilarious novel Rauch und Schall, which appeared in a recent issue of TLS.

Image credits: History Today; History Wall Charts; Javi Aznarez;

Goethe in Copenhagen in 1932

Goethe was never actually in Copenhagen, certainly not in 1932, but it shows the extent of his reach and influence and the general knowledge of his works that a parody on his play Faust was performed in the city in 1932, and by some very smart people at that. It was the 100th anniversary of his death; this is my third post on the commemorations in that year.

Like many of my posts on this blog, the inspiration for this one comes from others, in this case from a new friend, who, learning of my work on Goethe, recommended a book he had liked: Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, written by Gino Segrè. Now that I have read the book (struggled through it: the subject is the development of quantum physics in the early 20th century) and done a little research, I see that Faust in Copenhagen was well received on its publication in 2007. It turns out that Copenhagen, through the efforts of Niels Bohr, became a center of theoretical physics in those years, drawing many British and continental physicists. From 1929 until the beginning of World War II,  an annual conference was held there. Copenhagen, it turns out, is widely used in connection with a concept called "The Copenhagen Interpretation." Which means? you might ask. According to the Wikipedia link, the term was invented by Werner Heisenberg, one of the featured players in Faust in Copenhagen, to describe the various features of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century.

Bohr, Dirac, Heisenberg

Faust in Copenhagen is principally about seven leading players in the physics revolution of the early 20th century. Besides Bohr, they included Lise Meitner, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Delbrück, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Paul Ehrenfest, all of whom occupied the front row in the conference room in which the meetings were held. We learn of their backgrounds (several part-Jewish), their careers, their ideas, their after-careers. Meitner, the only female among these founding figures, was a major experimentalist ("one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission"). The 1932 conference ended with a "skit" that drew on Goethe's Faust with different physicists portraying characters from Goethe's play. Faust longed for knowledge of the workings of the universe, and made a pact with the devil, Mephistopho, to achieve it. Faust in Copenhagen portrays the search for understanding of the basic elements of matter and subtly brings out the dangers the discoveries have led to.

Already in 1932, of course, there were signs that Europe was traveling in a disturbing direction politically. The physicists at the 1932 Copenhagen conference seemed initially to have been gobsmacked less by the ominous rise of National Socialism than by an important transition in physics. In April 1932, before the  gathering, James Chadwick had published his discovery of the neutron ("the proton's neutral counterpart with the nucleus [of the atom]." The neutron, "loaded with mass" had applications that would move physics from theory to experiment, from coal and oil to the "birth of apocalyptic weapons." Thus, in hindsight, the relevance of the bargain Faust made to acquire knowledge of nature and its processes. As Segrè writes, with Chadwick's discovery "the pursuit of knowledge had uncovered a truth with implicit powers for both good and evil."

Okay, it took me three weeks of reading to be able to write the above. "Neutron" and "proton" I have heard of; I am aware that there is a "structure" to the atom. But how about neutrino ("tiny, subatomic particles, often called 'ghost particles,' because they barely react with anything else," but are at the same time "the most common particle in the universe")? That last little bit of the equation was the insight of Wolfgang Pauli.

Comments on Goethe and his play are threaded throughout this story of the work of theoretical physicists, and it is in the final chapters that Segrè devotes more attention to the skit drawn from Faust, in which the various physicists are apportioned roles. Pauli, a seemingly cantankerous character, should have been Mephisto, but he was traveling and was replaced by Leon Rosenfeld. Bohr was "the Lord." Ehrenfest performed the role of Faust. Ellen Tvede played Gretchen, representing Pauli's neutrion, and delivered the following lines to the tune of Schubert's "Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel":

My Mass is zero/ My Charge is the same.

You are my hero,/ Neutrino's my name.

I am your fate/ And I'm your key.

Closed is the gate/ For lack of me.

Beta-rays throng/ With me to pair.

The N-spin's wrong/ If I'm not there.

Not all of the great physicists of the day were on board with the Copenhagen Interpretation. E.g., Schrödinger. The cartoon above, portraying him (left) and Heisenberg (right), suggests the different views of "reality." Likewise, Einstein: "I cannot seriously believe in it because the theory is incompatible with the principle that physics is to represent reality in space and time, without spookish long-distance effects." But Einstein clearly had to be incorporated into the Faust parody, and his role was derived from the scene in Auerbach's Cellar in which Mephisto amuses the drinkers with a song about a king who has a giant flee that no one is allowed to touch and which leads to the court's suffering (Faust I, 1880–87). In the Copenhagen skit, Einstein is portrayed as the king, "since his new theories are compared to fleas that torture the king's court." Part of the song Mephisto sings in Copenhagen is as follows:

Half-naked, fleas come pouring/ From Berlin's joy and pride,

Named by the unadoring:/ "Field Theories -- Unified."

 

 It appears that the idea for skits at the conferences was originated in 1931 by Soviet physicist George Gamow ("his theory explained the radioactive alpha particle decay of atomic nuclei"). In 1932, however, he could not leave Russia and the skit was written by Max Delbrück. The manuscript only came to light many years later, when Gamow published an English edition. The line drawings here are my photos of illustrations that appear in Faust in Copenhagen. It is to Gamow's memory that Segrè dedicated his book.

According to Segrè, the participants in the play in 1932 gathered in the Copenhagen institute's first-floor lecture hall for the performance. Three astrophysicists sitting at a lecture table in the front of the hall stood in for the three archangels in the Prologue of Goethe's Faust who "lauded the Lord for the creation of the heavens." Mephisto then appeared, "sarcastically jibing the Lord for his seriousness: "My pathos soon thy laughter would awake/ Hadst thou the laughing mood not long forsworn" (Faust, Prologue, 35–36).

Many other names in physics in the early half of the 20th century turn up in this account, as the book concerns more than the so-called Copenhagen mecca. Besides Copenhagen, young scholars in the early decades made a Grand Tour of Göttingen, Berlin, Munich, Leipzig, Zurich and Cambridge to consult and work with others in the field of theoretical physics. Enrico Fermi makes an appearance, and also Robert Oppenheimer, whose work in Europe led him to establish two institutes of theoretical physics in California, which in the 1930s "spread the doctrine of quantum mechanics' Copenhagen interpretation." All this shared work and communication among scholars led to what Segrè calls "Big Science." By 1933 it was first realized by Leo Szilard that the potential of chain reaction ("the neutron entering the nucleus to enter it and release two neutrons) would lead to the building of nuclear weapons.

I am afraid I am still unable to provide a picture of what the theory of quantum physics is all about. Maybe the above cartoon helps? I can't help wondering what Goethe would have made of all this. Heisenberg, like most of the scholars portrayed in Faust in Copenhagen, was familiar with Goethe's writings. At a 1967 meeting of the Goethe Society in Weimar he spoke about Goethe's understanding of nature, which arose first with sensory impression and observation of phenomena. Faust's journey begins with his assertion that he is tired of learning. As in many other respects, Goethe was ahead of his time in foreseeing the downside of material progress. In the final scenes of Faust Mephisto murders an aged couple (Philomen and Baucis) living on land that he wishes to clear for improvement. And he does so.