Did Goethe have a pet?

A dog, perhaps? A cat? I ask, because the presence or absence is one of those biographical details that would seem to offer insight into the person, if not into the work. Maybe the Goethe household had cats around to keep away other critters, but a dog would seem a very English custom. The Brontë family, for instance, had pets, and the pets even had names. This I learned from a long essay in a recent issue of the London Review of Books by Alice Spawls assessing a number of new books on the Brontë females, the first of which concerns Charlotte, whose 200th birthday was commemorated in 2016. Emily and Anne and even brother Branwell will get their due in the coming years.

Spawls herself is very ambivalent about literary biographies, because of the confabulation that enters into them. She quotes Virginia Woolf to the effect that the worthies of the world are reduced to little figures that we expect to begin to see moving and speaking and whom we arrange "in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant." In this connection are the concocted images featuring famous writers. An example would be the image above of Goethe and Carl August in an imagined meeting on "state" business.

One of the books Spawls examines is Celebrating Charlotte Brontë, which looks at physical objects, including, e.g., styles of clothing, women's hair, the making of lace cuffs, dressing cases, writing desks ("really a sort of wooden tray you put on your lap"), decorative china. Spawls goes on to mention the richness of the material world of Charlotte's novels, which I found very interesting in connection with Goethe's novels. Objects are important in his novels, but they serve a symbolic purpose rather than creating realism. Long ago I read an essay by David Wellbery on Elective Affinities (the title escapes me now, but maybe someone can remind me), which concerned a bunch of objects in that novel the initial letter of which was "K." They included Kahn, Koffer, Kästchen. But, again, not easy to visualize as individually. Not very illuminating for biographical purposes, right?

Reviews of English translation of Safranski's Goethe biography

My review of the above bio appeared in volume 23 (2016) of the Goethe Yearbook. While reading Safranski's volume, I also devoted several posts on this blog to it, e.g., on Goethe's relations with Corona Schröter, on Goethe and war, Goethe and Friedrich Jacobi. I also did a post on the first review I came across, this past June, of the English translation of Safranski's work -- Goethe: Life as a Work of Art -- in the Literary Review. Since then, two more reviews have appeared, and they could not be more different in their assessment. The New York Times review by Michael Hofmann, with whose translations from German many of us are familiar, was exceedingly negative. That by Daniel Johnson in the New Criterion was full of praise.

Hofmann begins by characterizing the biographies of literary figures by Anglo-American biographers, in particular praising Nicholas Boyle. He was on board with Boyle when he learned that the cost of pineapples in Goethe's time was about the price of a horse, or and the time it took to send a letter from London to Edinburgh was a week. Safranski in contrast, Hofmann complains, "doesn't feel the need to locate Goethe for a non-German readership. ... Dozens of obscure names scoot past the reader's eye with nary a word of introduction or presentation." Hofmann is of the opinion that the book is aimed "squared at a German readership of Bildungsbürger ..." As I wrote in my review, however, the book is really for Goethe aficionados. Do educated Germans today have any idea who Bertuch is, not to mention Goertz, Rochlitz, Kanzler Müller, Falk, Riemer, men introduced by their last name by Safranski and in most cases not even specifically identified?

Basically, Hofmann faults Safranski for what he does not do, complaining, for instance, that Life as a Work of Art does not bring out Goethe's English connections. I also mentioned such absences in my review, indeed, the absence of the larger European context. But Safranski's focus was the inner life, especially the difficulty Goethe had in conforming his innate character to the demands of life, love, work. It was a lifelong task; thus, Kunstwerk des Lebens. For me, what was striking and illuminating about Safranski's biography is his portrayal of Goethe's emotional volatility and grandiosity. In literary terms, these were channeled in the works of the Sturm und Drang epoch. And as Goethe aged out of Sturm und Drang, he went on to channel these emotional tendencies into an immense variety of projects.

Daniel Johnson begins by corralling Goethe into the company of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and so on and relates his importance to Carlyle, Arnold, Eliot, Mann. Johnson apparently attended a German Gymnasium in 1974, when Goethe "was still at the heart of the curriculum." No more, not even one assumes for the children of so-called Bildungsbürger. As Johnson points out, today most Germans today have only a vague idea of who Goethe was and when he lived. While he contends that a "highly cultivated bourgeoisie" still exists, it never fully recovered from the destruction of German Jews. This brings us back to Goethe's importance to Western civ, addressed at the beginning of the review. Goethe may not have been a philosemite, bu "the history of Goethe scholarship was largely a Jewish affair until the 1930s," with an emphasis on Goethe's universality and cosmopolitanism. Recent European history, especially the migrant crisis, illustrates the problematic status of these. Perhaps, Johnson writes, this is "a good moment ... to rediscover Goethe."

Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus (National Gallery, London)

Johnson gives a nice round-up of the English biographer's interest in Goethe and Goethezeit: John Williams and T.J. Reed recently, "not to mention studies by the doyen of classical Weimar, W.H. Buford." He does not ignore Boyle's achievement (we learn that two more volumes are projected). All of these, however, are in debt to Goethe's first biographer in English, George Henry Lewes. (It is odd that  Hofmann does not mention Lewes in his opening paragraph, nor anywhere else in his review.) Lewes did not overlook Goethe's faults ("At times the clamorous agitation of rebellious passions misled him, for he was very human, often erring," he wrote), but through "naked vigour of resolution, ... produced a self-mastery of the highest kind." Boyle, too, emphasizes this theme of "renunciation," and Safranski, too, writes that Goethe "is the great example of how far you can go when you accept the lifelong task of becoming who you are." Safranski's method, however, is very different. Although his  biography includes secondary sources, he dispenses with scholarly footnotes and paraphernalia. It is based solely on primary sources: "Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher, Gespräche, Aufzeichnungen von Zeitgenossen."

As I wrote in my own review of the German edition, Safranski's approach yields insights concerning the transition from Goethe's youth, when his grandiosity, depressiveness, and his charisma were on view. Take this comment by a friend from his Strassburg days: "Dieser Goethe, von dem und von dem allein ich ... stammeln und singen und dithyrambisieren möchte. .... Noch nie hätt ich das Gefühl der Jünger von Emmaus im Evangelio so gut ... mitempfinden können ... Machen wir ihn immer zu unserm Herrn Christus, und lassen Sie mich den letzten seiner Jünger sein!" It was after an initial raucous initial period in Weimar that his outer affect became more serious and that the stiffness noted by friends like Merck and Wieland began to emerge.

Photo credit: Peter Michaelis

Goethe biographies

I posted already on Andrew Piper's short biography of Goethe, but here are a few additional take-aways from my reading.

Waterloo imagined

1) Goethe, as Piper writes at the start, was conversant in many fields representing the accumulated heritage of a thousand years, but he also was a man of his time, with his life coinciding with "some of the more decisive transformations of European society." Some of the events he lived through: the Seven Years' War, the French Revolution, the end of the Holy Roman Empire, the Congress of Vienna, Waterloo, and the July Revolution of 1830 in France. The fall of the HRE coincided with the rise of the nation state.

2) Speaking of Cornelia, Piper writes that she was "Goethe's first and probably truest love." After her death, "Goethe would spend the rest of his life searching for and falling in love with sister figures." True or false?

3) Of Kätchen Schönkopf, "Goethe's great love" of the Leipzig period, Piper writes that marriage was out of the question "for class reasons." But Goethe was only 17: did marriage ever really come seriously into question? I doubt it.

4) I was glad to be reminded of Herder's belief that language shaped nations and that "poets were the ones who shaped language." Fritz Strich, in his many essays on world literature, always stresses that a language expresses the spirit of a people.

Pfarrhaus Sesenheim (1770), drawing by Goethe

5) Piper calls the relationship with Friedericke Brion "a love affair." They spent "a great deal of time together, much of it alone." Later (p.29), when writing of Lili Schonemann, Piper asserts that, "unlike this traumatic separation from Friedericke, ... Goethe was careful to leave his affair with Lili unconsummated and thus leave Lili's social status untainted." Whoa!

From what we know, through plenty of later documentation, Goethe tended to fall hard for a woman, then withdraw, although not in a sexual sense. In my essay on the Sesenheim idyll, I explored the literary formation of the episode. Recently I have been struck by the similarities with Marianne von Willemer and the composition of West-East Divan.

6) Granted that Goethe's practice of law in Frankfurt after his return to Sesenheim was "a lacklustre performance," can one really say the same of "all of his subsequent administrative duties"? I have the sense that Goethe's performance in Weimar was anything but lacklustre. See (9) below.

7) Re Wetzlar: Goethe immersed himself in a domestic scene "that he was not wholly a part of." Good observation.

Lotte as "secularized" Madonna

8) Interesting is Piper's observation that Lotte re-creates "Christianity's virgin mother in a secular domestic chord (nicely amplified in the Eucharistic gesture of breaking bread with the children)."

9) In re (6) above, Piper's own description of Goethe's duties on the Privy Council in Weimar belies any sense of a lacklustre performance on Goethe's part. As Piper points out, Goethe "led an initiative to reopen a silver mine near Ilmenau." Although this venture was unsuccessful, Goethe spent years trying to make it work. This activity also contributed to his interest in geology and to his many mineralogical speculations.

10) Weimar as a site of "intellectual networking."

11) Finally, Charlotte von Stein. Piper writes that she was an "important medium of temperance" and helped him navigate the ways of the court, in the process weaning him away from his Sturm und Drang inclinations. Piper believes the "love affair" was in this case consummated. I have always doubted this, because it seems that everyone knew everyone in Weimar and such an indiscretion would hardly have escaped notice. On the other hand, after a few years in Weimar Goethe certainly became buttoned up, so to speak, as friends like Merck noted, so perhaps the buttoning up was a way of assuring that he did not reveal a sexual liaison. But then, again, the poetry he wrote under CvS's influence is so idealized, unlike the sensuousness of the Divan lyrics or the Roman elegies.

That's all for today. Guests tomorrow, so I am cooking up a storm this evening.

Goethe biographies

Goethe Girl with cowboy poets

I am enjoying an extended (eight days) absence from Manhattan, visiting friends in northern Arizona. One item on our itinerary is a trip to Monument Valley. I continue to be interested in the different geological formations of Europe and of the American West.

On the flight out I started reading Andrew Piper's biography of Goethe (2010), which appears in the Brief Lives series of Hesperus Press, offering, as per the back jacket, "short, authoritative biographies of the world's best-known literary figures." Such is Goethe, as Piper reminds us throughout this very readable biography. Early on, I had the feeling that Piper worked with a chronology Goethe's life at his side, assuring that all the high points were treated, but he is seldom abstract or vague. For instance, after Goethe returned to Weimar from Italy he was made director of the theater, expending a decade of energy and time. This is followed by a nice detail that gives an impression of Goethe's ambitions as well as the limitations he endured: "The theater was of modest size (fourteen rows of benches in a fifty-foot-long room with a twenty-foot-wide stage), although its initial repertory was not: it consisted of eleven operettas and thirty-five plays in the summer season alone."

Works for sale at Phippen Museum Western art show in Prescott

Piper has the enviable ability to summarize, with pertinent detail, large historical moments, as, for instance, the opening gestures of the French Revolution in a single short paragraph and its initial effects on Germany (none, aside from the interest of intellectuals). He is also good at sketching, in a few strokes, the kernel of Goethe's works, although occasionally producing a clunker, e.g., re Werther: "It is the story of a young man with too much emotion. He falls in love with another man's fiancée, is an incessant reader, and imagines that he can see the entire universe in a blade of grass. By the end of the novel, he will shoot himself in the head as a copy of Lessing's play Emilia Galotti lies open on his desk."

Generally the insights are better, and Piper is good at relating Goethe's poetic production to his life or experience. On Tasso: "In it we can see how difficult courtly life had become for Goethe and how retreat and solitude had emerged as fundamental ingredients of his own creativity. ... Torquato Tasso was one of the most eloquent laments about the artist's awkward position in the world."

Arizona watercolors by Margarethe Brummermann

Schiller is introduced as an "itinerant playwright who had been unable to find permanent employment at one of the handful of large repertory theaters in the German states. His first play, The Robbers, had been a tremendous sensation ..., but he had never been capable of churning out standard bourgeois fare like Kotzebue or Iffland." On the success of Schiller's inaugural lecture in Jena: "No one cold move a crowd quite like Schiller."

Each "stage" of Goethe's life channels different priorities. For instance, the felt immediacy of the early poetry ("Mailied") gives way go "an artistry of reflection ("Auf dem See"),

It is a good overview, a very intelligent one, and it also places Goethe in a larger European context, with references to Keats, Carlyle, world literature, and so on. Lately I find myself interested in more partial studies of Goethe, which include two that I am currently reading, Albrecht Schöne's study of Goethe as a "Briefsteller" and Sigrid Damm's Goethes Freunde in Gotha and Weimar. More news on those two books to come.

Goethe biographies

From The Book Haven

I have a new book review project: Rüdiger Safranski's Goethe: Kunstwerk des Lebens. I suppose it is not surprising that the titles of Goethe biographies resemble one another: Ludwig Geiger, Goethe: Sein Leben und sein Schaffen (1913); Albert Bielschowky, Goethe: Sein Leben und seine Werke (1895, followed by numerous editions); Friedrich Gundolf, simply Goethe (1916). It can't be helped. The same thing goes for biographies of Napoleon, Dante, Churchill, and lesser lights. Nevertheless, this issue of titles has me thinking about the book I am now completing, the title of which I will reveal in due course. Obviously, a book has to have a title that forces book buyers to want to look.

Safranski's method is to make use only of primary sources: the oeuvre, letters, diaries, conversations, reports of contemporaries. Whether this method is ultimately satisfying remains to be seen:  I have only reached chapter 7, which concerns the events after Goethe's return from Strassburg. In his preface, Safranski writes of a reason for our continuing interest in Goethe: "Er war nicht nur ein großer Schriftsteller, sondern auch ein Meister des Lebens." And the reason for a new biography? "Jede Generation hat die Chance, im Spiegel Goethes auch sich selbst und die eigene Zeit besser zu verstehen." In this respect, of Götz von Berlichingen he writes that what fascinated Goethe on this historical figure is the same as our fascination with American Westerns, i.e.: "der romantische Blick in eine vergangene Welt, in der der Einzelne noch zählt, der kraftvolle Kerl, der sich selbst seiner Haut wehren kann und der seine Souveränität noch nicht an Institutionen abgetreten hat, wodurch man zwar an Sicherheit gewinnt, aber eben auch verzwergt wird." That is definitely a Goethe for our time.

I was interested to see that Nicholas Boyle, author of Goethe: The Poet and the Age, of which two volumes have so far appeared, also published in 2012 a book entitled: 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis. This is a case of the kind of caution one must use in choosing a title. According to a headline of a 2012 review of the book in the English Daily Mail, "World could be plunged into crisis in 2014: Cambridge expert predicts 'a great event' will determine course of the century." Retuers (UK) headline: "Historian warns of looming political crisis." Well, 2014 is past, and what was that great event? An interdisciplinary journal, Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy, opines: "A tempting thesis, leavened with erudite references, to Hegel, Bentham, Johnson and Jefferson, and sound on the confused waffle that surrounds 'human rights.'"

Cover image of book, 1949

The Amazon "reviewers" of books, ordinary readers, are always interesting. There were only three of 2014, two of which gave it five stars. Here is the one-star review, with the headline The Blurb Says It All, thus beginning with a quote from the book's jacket copy: "If human civilization is to survive the 21st century, that ideology [American exceptionalism] will have to give way to a more realistic acceptance of supranational authorities, and especially of an enhanced IMF and WTO." The reviewer then continues: "In other words, saving humanity requires giving the parasites of the world increased power to plunder America. Meanwhile we're going broke as it is. LOL."

As much as I admire Professor Boyle, I am always skeptical of people wandering outside of their discipline to opine on the state of the world, especially the future. Although Reuters identifies Boyle as a historian, he is really a scholar of literature. Moreover, despite having spent many years trying to enter into the world of the 18th century, I am reticent to draw lessons for the present from events and the actions of individuals of that time. One only lives when one lives. Thus, history or the writing of history is of interest for the "errors" of the past, but I am not really sure what lessons one can draw for current issues. Yet, of course, that is the aim of even Safranski's biography of Goethe: "im Spiegel Goethes [Generation] auch sich selbst und die eigene Zeit besser zu verstehen."

Photo credits: Cynthia Haven; Only Artists; Dictus