Goethe ascends the Brocken

Goethe, Brocken im Mondlicht

At the end of November 1777 Goethe undertook his 500 km Harz journey, traveling on foot and on horseback. He had been in Weimar two years by then, and was uncertain whether he should stay or leave. What was his life supposed to be about, anyway? He was in his superstitious phase and was looking for “a sign.” Even though it was winter, and even though everyone advised against attempting to climb the mountain, he believed that a successful ascent of the Brocken would be such a sign.

So it transpired that on this day in 1777 Goethe became the first person to climb the Brocken in winter. As he wrote in his diary: “d. 10. früh nach dem Torfhause in tiefem Schnee. 1 viertel nach 10 aufgebrochen von da auf den Brocken. Schnee eine Elle tief, der aber trug.” In his travel diary for Charlotte von Stein he wrote (in N. Boyle’s translation): “The goal of my longing has been reached, it hangs by many threads and many hang from it; you know how symbolical my existence is.” He interpreted his success as confirmation of his new existence in Weimar.

As Boyle writes, “the biblical tone and language that permeate G’s account of this day in his diary, and in his letters to Charlotte von Stein, show the religious significance that the ascent had acquired for him and had indeed always been intended to have.”

Hexenexperiment auf dem Brocken, 1932

The black and white photo depicts an experiment atop the Brocken on Goethe’s birthday in 1932, conducted by a British ghost hunter named Harry Price. The goal was to transform a goat into a young man, to be accomplished by the invocation of maiden. Unsuccessful, Price claimed that he was only seeking to prove “the fallacy of transcendental magic.”

Georg Melchior Kraus, Hexenaltar

The winter ascent of the Brocken occurred on what is called the first Harz journey, during which Goethe also visited several mines, indeed even descending into one. See an earlier post on this subject. Goethe climbed the mountain again, twice, first, with Heinrich von Trebra and Fritz von Stein in September 1783, then with Georg Melchior Kraus in September 1784. Both journeys were devoted to "geology."  As Goethe wrote to Herder at the time: “Krause ist also mit mir alleine, und wir sind den ganzen Tag unter freiem Himmel, hämmern und zeichnen.” The trip inspired his essay “Über den Granit."

The Goethezeitportal offers an account of all three of Goethe's Brocken ascents, with illustrations.

Sylvia Townsend Warner -- and Goethe!

When the house has cleaned itself at last

Of its diurnal human,

When the black man and the blind woman

Both have groped their way into the dark

And the dwindling watchman has gone by,

I have heard him waken, and sigh.

I have heard the bedstead twang and creak,

And the bed-curtains swaying,

And he sprawled down on his knees, praying:

O Jesu pie, salvum me fac!

Whether that same Jesu heard him or no,

My ears attended to his woe.

The above poem, "Dr. Johnson's Cat," is by Sylvia Townsend Warner (b. 1893), a writer who has long intrigued me. It is not untypical of Warner to write from the point of view of an animal or even a witch, as in her first novel, Lolly Willowes, when, Lolly, to escape the importuning of a well-meaning relative, turns herself into one. The opportunity to post something about Warner arrived with the current issue (January 2, 2009) of the Times Literary Supplement, in which Ali Smith, an English novelist and short story writer, reviews new editions of poems by STW. (Come to think of it, Ali Smith also writes from unexpected points of view, for instance, that of a dead person in Hotel World.)

There is often a hint of maliciousness in Warner's short stories, which can be delicious or off-putting. Suffice it to say that she is not predictable. One of my favorite stories is "A Widow's Quilt," in which a married woman begins making one while her husband is very much alive. On the other hand, I find Warner's stories about "fairy life," Kingdoms of Elfin, too whimsical for this Enlightenment scholar. Penelope Fitzgerald (who wrote a wonderful novel about Novalis, The Blue Flower) spoke of Warner's "affinity with whatever it is that defies control." Fitzgerald went on to say that she did not mean sin or magic, "for she [STW] regarded both of these as perfectly amenable, but what she liked to call 'the undesigned.'" Warner belongs in Thomas Hardy country, which I suppose has quite disappeared in England. As a young woman she worked as a musicologist, part of a committee that was searching and editing Tudor music, and she traveled alone throughout England collecting this manuscript material.

After reading Ali Smith's review, I went back to the letters between STW and the novelist William Maxwell, who had been her editor at the New Yorker, the magazine that published many of her short stories. Here is a short example of Warner's writing that is so appealing, from a report on a visit to the Villa d'Este:

We got there so early in the morning that we had it all to ourselves, painted rooms, and cypresses and fountains, and gardeners snipping at box-hedges. I realised that such fountains come out of the same vein of Italian genius as the immense crystal chandeliers that fly like swans in the roofs of baroque churches and hang in a ladder all the way up the transepts of St Peter's. The water that falls in a fringed curtain from the goblet fountain is not so much water-works as water-sculpture.

I never fail to check indexes for Goethe in whatever book I am reading, and, lo and behold, there were several entries. Here is what she writes, in November 1973:

What I love about Wilhelm Meister is what I loved about Werther and Elective Affinities -- that what seems like historical reconstruction is really just ordinary social detail to Goethe. Scenes, pictures, costumes, that remind me of paintings were to him simply the way things were. The beginning drags -- perhaps because I am reading it in the evening before bedtime, and I am not fond of Goethe's sermonizing [!], but I do like the people. I am at the place where he finds (Oh most unlikely device!) in the scarf that he tore from Marianne's neck the note from her elderly protector -- in short not very far along. Faust and the novels are the only works I haven't read in German, way back in my youth. Dichtung und Wahrheit was what I loved, though I also liked the plays. The eighteenth century love of generalities I find rather tedious unless they are Gibbon's generalities, in which case I have to lie down on the floor so I can laugh more comfortably. But I wouldn't dream of not finding out what happens to Wilhelm.

By the way, "the black man" in the poem about Dr. Johnson was Francis Barber, a Jamaican boy adopted by Samuel Johnson in the 1750s and to whom he, indeed, felt like a father. A novelistic account of their relationship can be found in Caryl Phillips Foreigners, which does a pretty good job of re-creating the 18th century.