Corona Schröter and Goethe

Corona Schröter drawing a bust of Goethe

I continue to plunge through Safranski's biography of Goethe, or Kunstwerk des Lebens. The new environment of Weimar certainly stirred Goethe's imagination and gave him, initially anyway, "ein freies Feld" for his exuberant tendencies. Even for those who "know" their Goethe, this section is a pleasant (in the best sense of the term) read. Goethe is close to power, even if it is a small power. It is hard to dredge up a contemporary example of the situation of the duchy. Even the small Muslim principalities of India in the 15th and 16th centuries had more splendor than Weimar. Power relies to a great extent on symbolism.

Besides Charlotte von Stein, Goethe was very drawn to the actress Corona Schroter, whom the duke and Goethe urged to settle in Weimar. She was, however, according to Safranski, very concerned for her reputation and was always accompanied by a kind of "Kammerzofe." The duke wooed her, with great effort, but with no success.

Goethe likewise was attracted. He wrote in his diary on January 2, 1777, after a visit with her: Nicht geschlafen. Herzklopfen und fliegende Hitze. In May, when Charlotte von Stein was away, she spent an entire day with Goethe in his garden house. A few days later, Charlotte, having heard of this visit, made a rare visit to the garden house.

Goerg Melchior Kraus: Goethe als Orest und Corona Schröter als Iphigenie

Goethe became an impresario in the first years in Weimar, especially of cultural activities. The "Uraufführung" of Iphigenie took place in April 1779 in the Redoutentheater. According to Safranski, he created the character of Iphigenie on Corona, viewing her as beautiful and passionate, yet also pure and "sittsam." This first production featured Corona as Iphigenie and Goethe as Orest. Writes Safranski: "Coronas junonische Formen und ihr sorgfältig drapiertes seidenes Kostüm paßten zm antikisierenden Geschmack bei Hofe, und Goethe selbst kam so gut zur Geltung, daß der Arzt Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland noch im hohen Alter in Erinnerungen schwelgte: 'man glaubte eine Apollo zu sehen.'" Goethe's own diary entry of April 6 records the following: "Iph[igenie] gespielt. gar gute Würkung davon besonders auf reine Menschen." His friend Knebel played Thoas, and Prince Constantin appeared in the role of Pylades. The above painting by Kraus was executed in the same year. The painting of Corona drawing the bust of Goethe, also by Kraus, is from 1794-97.

Picture credits:  Kunst-fuer-alle.de

Utopia and Reform

I want to add a few more comments to my earlier posting ("Intellectuals and Power") on Franco Venturi's book, and in particular Goethe's reason for staying in Weimar. Goethe's interest in working for political reform shows the penetration of ideas within Europe by the 1760s, in which Paris and the circle around the Encyclopedists played a major role. There was, writes Venturi, a "great convergence of those who were ahead of the times, and those who were behind, of those who had shown the way, and those who had tried to follow." A determination to change things was spreading, "however diverse the problems in various parts of Europe were." And it was believed, among these forward thinkers, that they should be the ones to guide society. Thus, I return to quote that led me to look at Venturi in the first place: "Power and philosophy seek each other." By the 1780s, the philosophes in France had "advanced" beyond reform and were instead "preparing for revolution." Not so in Weimar, by which time Goethe had abandoned government service and the revolutionary effects on German lands were still a couple of decades in the future.

Venturi's goal in his book was "to put the problem of the impact of republican tradition on the development of the Enlightenment." The importance of the ancient Roman republic in the symbolism of the French revolutionaries can be seen, for instance, in the paintings of Jacques-Louis David, but there were contemporary republics in Europe that produced lots of ink. One of these was Geneva, and it was this city that formed the centerpiece of Rousseau's ideas in the Social Contract. And here we find a nice link with Bodmer, who was a great fan of Rousseau's ideas and whose dramas of the late 1760s reflect the virtuous republic that Rousseau espoused.

According to Venturi, in turning to Geneva Rousseau envisioned a kind of utopia. To survive as a republic, Geneva would have to go back to the period of its origins, even before the Protestant reformation, because it was there that Geneva "would discover that just division of political power which had been lost in the 16th century under the rule of a few noble families. ... [T]he image of a city in which virtue was rooted in a long tradition never left him."

Bodmer was a professor of Swiss history for nearly 50 years, and during this period he inspired a number of young Swiss for republicanism and against the undemocratic politics of contemporary Zurich. Notable among Bodmer's disciples were Lavater and Henry Fuseli, who went into temporary exile in Germany in 1761 because of their exposure of an unjust magistrate whose family was set on revenge. Moreover, Bodmer's dramas, published in 1768-69, exemplify the corruptions of republics and the choices of virtuous citizens desirous of maintaining ancient privileges of liberty. No doubt because of censorship, they are set in ancient times and bear such titles as Thrasea Pätus, Marcus Brutus, Tarquinus Superbus, and Die Tegeaten. As Jesko Reiling points out in his recent study, these dramas were much maligned in their own time, as being too full of ideas and too empty of aesthetic attraction. Bodmer shares with Rousseau a certain humorlessness, and he even went so far as to defend his dramas by saying that the theater as it was developing in the late 18th century, especially its emotionalism, served the goals of absolutism by making citizens unpolitical. Do I hear intimations of Bert Brecht?

Even before David painted his Oath of the Horatii (1784), Fuseli had already drawn on Swiss republican tradition, that of the ancient Swiss Confederacy, in his 1780 painting. (See my earlier post on this.) Bodmer is now receiving much scholarly re-assessment, and his connection with the republican tradition is waiting to be drawn. (Interestingly, Venturi mentions him in the introduction to his Utopia and Reform, along with other neglected German-language thinkers.) The influence of his republicanism can be seen in another work by Bodmer's disciple Fuseli, a defense of Rousseau at the time of the latter's quarrel with Hume.

Intellectuals and Power

A scholar from whom I much profited while writing the introduction to my volume on the history of freedom of speech was J.G.A. Pocock, especially articles on the problematic nature of the concepts of "Europe" and "the West" generally. As Pocock wrote in the article "Some Europes and Their History," Europe is a word used to denote "a great many things that are important in human experience." It was in another work, Pocock's multivolume study of Edward Gibbon, however, that I came across an interesting quote: "Power and philosophy seek each other." It comes from the book Utopia and Reform by the Italian historian Franco Venturi. Recently I got Venturi's volume out of the library and read it in several sittings, finally finding the quote in the last chapter. I will say more about this work in succeeding postings, but I wanted to mention something today because it sheds some light on why Goethe chose to stay in Weimar.

Venturi's starting point, as the title indicates, was the perceived need, beginning in the early 18th century, for a solution to a felt political crisis. The absolutist states, with their desire for expansion and power, were placing intolerable burdens on the population and on the functions of government, while the still existing independent republics had insurmountable problems of their own. As Venturi writes, ideas of reform and utopia were linked by the attempt to modify aspects of society inherited from the past and to bring about practical change. The absolutist governments of Prussia, the Hapsburgs, and Russia were in this sense top-down reformist. Catherine the Great, for instance, ordered the translation of Western works in the 1760s. There was, as Venturi writes, a "determination to change things," which derived from a common language and center in France, in particular the writings of the Encyclopedie circle.

In this reform of existing institutions, the philosophes, according to Venturi, were asking to be allowed to act as guides: "Everywhere in Europe, one finds this pretension, this determination to lead and guide society." I will try not to get ahead of myself -- by the 1770s, especially in France, reform of existing institutions had been abandoned in favor of a total transformation -- and now turn to Goethe.

Goethe went to Weimar in 1775, as the Duke's guest, and initially played a role that fit in with the cultural policies of Anna Amalia. Weimar was becoming a literary center, one of the most important signs of which was the Teutscher Merkur, established by Wieland. Still, Weimar was remote and backward, even in comparison with Goethe's native Frankfurt. Moreover, as is well known, the first decade in Weimar was a backwards step in Goethe's literary production, something Goethe himself acknowledged by fleeing to Rome in 1786.

His reasons for remaining in Weimar touch on the very issues that Venturi mentions. In "enlightened Europe" of the 1760s and 1770s, the new intelligensia became conscious of its own strength in "speaking truth to power." Indeed, Goethe's Sturm und Drang works might be said to voice these challenges to traditional authority -- church, state, or otherwise. Within Goethe's first year in Weimar, Carl August had appointed him as one of his privy councilors. Did it seem to Goethe that he might be able to help transform a small, impoverished duchy through "enlightened" reforms?

Nicholas Boyle, the most recent biographer of Goethe, thinks so. As he writes: "Weimar offered him an entrée to the court life that he had hitherto seen only briefly and from outside, and like any other autocracy, untrammeled by constitutions and traditions, it offered to young, ambitious, and gifted men the prospect of far more rapid advancement in the exercise of administrative power than could be hoped for in the cautious city-states, where promotion came essentially only with age ... Goethe saw in Weimar's offer the possibility of doing something -- perhaps even useful to his fellow men ... certainly of fulfilling the ambitions that his father had had perforce to renounce when the door closed on his own political career."

In the end, the experiment failed, and in 1785 Goethe withdrew from his governing duties and ended his political career. His one success at "reform" seems to have been in helping the Duke to subdue, according to Boyle, "both the martinet and the playboy within" and making of him "a benevolent despot." In this respect, Goethe was more successful than Voltaire had been with Frederick the Great. (See Lytton Strachey's entertaining account of that relationship.) Power and philosophy sought each other, to paraphrase Venturi, and the result was disillusion on both sides.

Picture credits: Felix Petruska; Helmut Roewer; Roger Payne