übergoethe

Übergoethe is the title of a newly created site by a blogger from Braunschweig. For additional reactions to and insights on Goethe, please visit this new enterprise and send some traffic his way! The most recent posting describes a visit to Goethehaus in Frankfurt.

Goethe was in Braunschweig as part of Carl August Fürstenbund diplomatic mission between August 16 and September 1, 1784. He found the court atmosphere unappealing. Bernd Wolff, a writer who grew up in the Harz region, wrote a Brocken trilogy, novels about Goethe's Harz journeys. The third, Die Würde der Steine, includes a description of the mission to Braunschweig. I wrote a review of the novels for the Goethe Yearbook (vol. 18, 2011). I notice that Wolff has recently published Klippenwandrer: Heines Harzreise, the journey of another Harz traveler.

"Goethe Country"

When I was writing my dissertation and also traveling more in Germany than I have in recent years, I would like to visit places associated with Goethe, for instance, Frankfurt (Goethe's birthplace), Sesenheim (site of Goethe's romance with Friedricke Brion; now in France, but in Goethe's time very much German in character), Wetzlar (home of Lotte Buff, who became the "Lotte" of The Sorrows of Young Werther, and where Goethe spent several months in a legal internship). And, of course, I have been to Weimar and spent time seeking the vanishing traces of Goethe's residence there. Virginia Woolf calls such pilgrimages "scientific," in that we visit the country where a great novelist lived in order to see to what extent he was influenced by his surroundings."

I came across Woolf's comments yesterday in an old issue (June 26, 2009) of the Times Literary Supplement, an excerpt of a review from 1905 of two books: The Thackeray Country and The Dickens Country. According to Woolf, one cannot really speak of "country" in connection with Thackeray or Dickens. Country, she writes, "calls up a vision of woods and fields, and you may read through a great number of these masters' works without finding any reason to believe that the whole world is not paved with cobble stones. Both Thackeray and Dickens were Londoners; the country itself comes very seldom into their books, and the country man or woman -- the characteristic product of the country -- hardly at all."

In contrast, Woolf claims that writers like Walter Scott or Thomas Hardy have "made the country theirs because they have so interpreted it as to have given it an ineffaceable shape in our minds, so that we know certain parts of Scotland, ... of Dorset as intimately as we know the men and women who have their dwelling there .. and so we may say not only that novelists own a country, but that all who dwell in it are their subjects."

Germany in the 18th century was a land of considerable local variation, and Goethe's early literary work in particular cherishes these differences. Partly this was an effect of the Storm and Stress aesthetics, a reaction against the universalizing tendencies of French neo-classicism. In the end, however, Goethe himself went neo-classicist, and one would be hard put to say (though many have tried) exactly where, for instance, Elective Affinities takes place. My Better Half points out that The Italian Journey, the account of Goethe's two years in Rome, contains references to the fruits of the south and to food eaten, but no mention of the specific qualities of Italian food. Likewise, the one longish encounter with a woman, in Naples (June 2, 1787), with the German-born Duchess of Giovane: we seem to witness the scene as if through a veil. All that is personal and particular has been leeched out. It was one of Goethe's "achievements" to transcend the specifically poetic character of places.

My Better Half also points out that Goethe made up for this lack of specificity in his scientific writings, in particular when writing of rocks. Goethe amassed collections of minerals and rocks from his travels, for all of which he penned exquisitely detailed labels. But Goethe's rocks are not the moors of, say, Brontë/Heathcliff country (pictured at top). Bernd Wolff, in his trilogy of novels on Goethe's geological explorations in the Harz mountains, sought to supply this missing "country."

Goethe's move away from the particulars of German history and culture to abstractness may have something to do with his rejection of nationalism. The rejection started with his animus toward the Romantic poets, especially their return to "German" themes in their writing. Especially after the Napoleonic wars, Goethe became a "cosmopolitan."

Picture credit: Live for the Outdoors; Bao and Eddie's blog

Goethe and Maria Antonia von Branconi

Kurt Eissler's psychoanalytic biography of Goethe has an illuminating chapter on the famous poem "Über allen Gipfeln," which he finds nothing short of a miracle. Here is the poem in German (an English translation can be found here):

Über allen Gipfeln

Ist Ruh,

In allen Wipfeln

Spürest du

Kaum einen Hauch;

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde

Ruhest du auch.

Eissler contends the poem could have been written by anyone who had mastered German and was strongly under the influence of nature. It represents, he writes, both the highest art (Kunst) and total artlessness. At the same time, such poems are seldom written. "The creation of the poem did not demand so much a poetic gift as the coincidence of both definite outer conditions and a specific mood." Eissler then sets out to identify these.

The quietness of the scene in the poem is one we have all experienced in a natural setting, at the end of a day, when the earth seems totally still. In the 18th century (and earlier) the experience must have been much more intense, though it was also likewise a daily happening. For us moderns -- I speak for myself in any case -- this quiescence of nature is very soothing, though we are likely to experience it with some background noise. Like many scholars, Eissler finds that the quiescence is about death. For myself, I think the mood could also suggest simply the quieting of the heart when it has been gripped by an intense feeling. The way that nature seems to rest, so naturally one might say, was once a reflection of the rhythms of human and natural life. Not for us moderns anymore. Now it is an aesthetic moment, yet still perhaps a moment of profound feeling.

For Eissler it is a specific kind of death, that of eros. He brings the poem into connection with Maria von Branconi, a German-Italian woman said to have been the most beautiful woman in Germany in her time. She and Goethe first met when he was in Zurich in 1779. He wrote to Charlotte von Stein about his impression. "In the evening I went to visit Madame Branconi. She is so beautiful and pleasant that I quietly asked myself several times in her presence whether it were true that she could be so beautiful. And such a spirit [Geist]! life [Leben]! openness! that one did not know what one was about."

(Interesting, one might think, that he confided in one woman about the beauty of another woman. Oh, well, back to the interpretation of "Über allen Gipfeln.")

Mme Branconi next visited Goethe in Weimar, on August 26 and 27, 1780. Within a week, on September 5, Goethe began an inspection tour of Thuringia with Carl August, spending the first two days by himself on the highest mountain of the area, the so-called Kickelhahn, lodging in the hunter's cabin. What we know about the genesis of the poem again derives from a letter to Charlotte von Stein, dated September 6. He mentions that the sky is clear and that he will go out to enjoy the sunset: "The view if great, but simple" (Die Aussicht ist gross aber einfach). After his return he continues the letter:

"The sun has set. It is the same area of which I once made a drawing for you, the one of shifting haze; now it is so pure and quiet, and as uninteresting as a great, beautiful soul when it feels itself most content. Were it not for some vapors here and there from the charcoal burners the entire scene would be unmoving." Such was the effect on Goethe at that moment.

It was very common for Goethe to start a letter, then continue it later. Thus, he begins anew, apparently after taking a nap: "After 8 p.m." While he was sleeping he received the "provisions" he expected from Ilmenau, which did not include a letter from Charlotte. But, he writes, "a letter from the beautiful woman arrived, to awaken me from my sleep."

Later on the night of September 6 he apparently wrote the famous poem on the wooden wall of the hunter's hut (pictured here is the "Goethehäuschen" on the Kickelhahn); the poem was still be seen there in the late 19th century).

According to Eissler the landscape Goethe described in the letter describes a woman's body, one that he associated with a "schöne Seele," a woman who -- like Charlotte von Stein -- while having a passionate nature, nevertheless subordinated it to higher ethical and social purposes. That is what Goethe saw while viewing the sunset. But, later, the letter from Madame Branconi provoked feelings of desire, which, if he was to be successful with his work in Weimar, he had to suppress, somewhat like "die schöne Seele."

Clearly Goethe was attracted to Madame Branconi. Eissler quotes from his letter of September 20, 1780, to Lavater, who had inquired about her visit in Weimar. Goethe referred to her as "die Schöne" and then continued:

"I behaved toward her as I would toward a princess or a saint. Even if this is an illusion, I would not like to besmear such an image with any transient desire. And God preserve me from a more serious liaison, in which she would unwind my soul from my limbs [mir die Seele aus den Gliedern winden würde]. The daily portion [of work] that has been assigned to me, which becomes both lighter and heavier, demands my presence waking and sleeping; this duty become daily more dear, and in this I wish to behave like the greatest of men, and greater in nothing else."

Thus, if Goethe were to function in Weimar, he had to kill great passion in himself and let himself be led instead by Charlotte. Eissler is of the opinion that the poem expresses "indirect hostility to her," whom he may love but cannot possess sexually. Considering that it was September in Germany, the above photo may accurately represent the "deadness" of the scene.

Goethe made two visits to Madame Branconi's estate in Langenstein in 1783 and 1784, during his famous Harz journeys. The 1783 visit in particular forms the centerpiece of Bernd Wolff's novel Im Labyrinth der Täler, about which I have already posted. (My review of those novels will appear in the next issue of Goethe Yearbook.) Wolff portrays Goethe as very attracted by Madame Branconi who, until 1777, had been the mistress of Crown Prince Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand of Brunswick, one of the most important German princes. Wolff makes much of her unhappiness. The daughter of a German father and Italian mother, she grew up in Naples. Married off at the age of 12 to the 20-years-old Signor Branconi, she was a widow at 20 and mother of a son and a daughter already. A month later she met the Brunswick crown prince and, after their separation, became mistress of several properties in Germany, including the estate at Langenstein.

Photo credit: Rudolf Henckel

Goethe and Geology

For a review I will be writing for Goethe Yearbook I am reading a trilogy by Bernd Wolff. The novels have as their central theme Goethe's three "Harz journeys," which took place in the years 1777 to 1784. The most well known product of these years, in terms of Goethe's oeuvre, is the poem "Harz Journey in Winter," which begins with a poetic invocation: may his song rise as effortlessly as a hawk, its pinions resting lightly on morning clouds, on the lookout for prey: "Dem Geier gleich/ Der auf schweren Morgenwolken/ Mit sanftem Fittich ruhend/ Nach Beute schaut,/ Schwebe mein Lied." Wolff's first novel, Winterströme, seeks to re-create the Harz journey of 1777 that gave impetus to this poem.

The major products of the second and third Harz journeys were two writings by Goethe on the subject of granite. Goethe, after becoming a member of Carl August's governing council, was appointed to the Ilmenau mine commission: the duchy of Weimar was short on cash, and it was hoped that the mine there, which had been shut down for several decades, would yield copper. Goethe took his duties seriously and began immersing himself in the study of mineralogy. The oldest university of mining and metallurgy in the world, established only a decade or so before, was located nearby, in Freiberg in Saxony. Among its famous students (at a later date) was Alexander von Humboldt.

Goethe took advantage of the expertise of J.C.W. Voigt (1752-1821), whom Carl August had sent to Freiberg to study, to carry out a mineralogical study of the duchy. This period was really the infancy of the science of geology or, in German, Erdenkunde. Voigt's mineralogical mapping was carried out with real hands-on labor. Today we are the beneficiaries of two centuries of technological development, as can be seen in this digital magnetized map of the so-called Kursk Magnetic Anomaly. We now can instantly see the mineralogical potential of the entire earth, thanks to the Commission for the Geological Map of the World. It is Goethe's enthusiasm for granite that Wolff portrays in the second and third novels: Im Labyrinth der Täler and Die Würde der Steine. It sounds very arcane, but Wolff's intention is to show the development of Goethe's scientific interests as a search for what might be called cosmic certainty. Another view of Goethe's interest in geology can be found here, in an article I wrote a few years back.

Wolff's novels suffer from the problem of most historical novels: the impossibility of recapturing the reality of the past. As I read, I constantly find myself objecting to conversations between characters but mostly to the mentality Wolff portrays. Nevertheless, for a Goethe scholar like myself it is fun to encounter all the people who were part of Goethe's milieu. There is hardly anyone Wolff leaves out: Goethe's cook and servants; Charlotte von Stein, but also her son Fritz; the painter Melchior Kraus (who accompanied Goethe on the third Harz journey and supplied the drawings of geological formations, including the one pictured here); Carl August's sad wife, Louisa August; the poet Gleim; Maria Antonia Branconi; Herder. They are all there and many more. So, if I can't take seriously Wolff's reconstruction of these figures, I have at least been led to reading more about them in historical accounts (which also suffer from the difficulty of recapturing past reality).

The painting at the top of today's post, The Weimar Court of the Muses, is by the artist Theobald von Oer. It shows Schiller (who died in 1805) reading his poems in the park of Schloß Tiefurt. (Goethe stands at the right, in a Napoleonic gesture.) It was painted in 1860, 55 years after Schiller's death, and is evidence of the late-19th-century fascination for "great" men. The court of the Muses at Weimar more likely resembled that to be seen in contemporary drawings by Melchior Kraus of "amateur theatricals" at the court in Vienna. Pictured here is a production of Der Postzug by the Austrian "officer and author" Cornelius Hermann von Ayrenhoff (1773-1819). Never heard of him? (And feminists are always decrying all the "disappeared" women writers!) According to his Wikipedia entry, his plays were modeled on the French writers Racine and Corneille; at the Burgtheater in Vienna, he was opposed to all the new-fangled theatrical innovations.

Picture credit: Free Republic

Goethe's Fondness for Disguise

I am reading the first of a series of three novels by the East German writer Bernd Wolff. Each has as its subject one of Goethe's three journeys into the Harz mountains. The first, Winterströme, is about the first Harz journey, the most famous one, between November 29 and December 14, 1777. Famous because of the poem "Harzreise im Winter," which re-creates Goethe's experience of the journey and the experiences recorded in the poem. Wolff's novel is historical fiction, and it suffers from the problem of the genre, namely, the difficulty of capturing the lived reality of historical persons. Wolff uses "innere Rede" to convey the thoughts and feelings of characters. Thus, Charlotte von Stein comes across as a "desperate housewife." To a great extent Wolff manages to solve the problem of portraying Goethe -- and of drawing us into the 18th-century world he otherwise creates quite successfully -- by presenting him in the disguise in which Goethe traveled, namely, as a landscape painter named "Weber."

I have just reached the middle of the novel, describing Goethe/Weber's meeting with the young man named Friedrich Plessing. Plessing is an instance of a now frequent phenomenon, namely, a person who sees in a famous person the embodiment of his own most intense feelings. Identifying with the central character of The Sorrows of Young Werther and imagining that its author is the only person on earth who can understand him, he began to pursue Goethe, besieging him with letters, asking for advice, wanting to be his friend. Goethe, uncomfortable with this importuning yet somehow intrigued by the morbid personality that comes across in the letters, thus makes a stop during the Harz journey in the town in which Plessing lives. Impersonating himself as Weber, he visits the young man, who, despite being in the best of health and having enjoyed a good education, lives in reclusion with his aged parents. (How very contemporary is that!) Weber/Goethe, imagining that the cure for Plessing's depression is some outdoor activity, convinces him to take a walk. The weather is beastly, however, Plessing's footwear is inadequate to the snow and the slush, and the walk only confirms for Plessing that nature holds no wonders for him.

I was thinking of this scene yesterday when friend Paula and I went to the Museum of Modern Art to see the exhibition of paintings by the Belgian avant-garde artist James Ensor (1860-1949). Ensor made a rather conventional 19th-century beginning as an artist, but there was one painting in the first room that pointed in the direction for which he would become known. This was the work, from 1883, called The Scandalized Masks. Like the other early paintings, it is rather dark, yet, at the same time, oddly "colorful," in that Ensor binds many colors together. I like the application of paint to the canvas in these early works; one is aware of the painting's texture as much as one is of the subject. Still, one can't call the works beautiful; they are simply too dark (for my taste, anyway). At a certain point, however, Ensor makes a transition to whites and brilliant colors. Light enters the paintings, never to disappear, as can be seen in the painting of masked figures at the top of this post. He returned to this subject of masks time and again (too often, in my opinion), and in these grotesqueries he seems a predecessor of the German Expressionists.

Goethe and his writings continue to have an effect on people. I was intrigued by the website of a California named Peter Chao, who credits Goethe with being one of his "spiritual mentors." You can find on his site a translation of the poem "Winter Journey in the Harz."