The Youngest Goethe

Portrait of Goethe, ca. 1764

 It’s been too long since I have posted. In the meantime I have noticed that Goethe had more to say  in his autobiography about Gellert (see previous post), but my work on my book on Goethe (I am now writing a draft of the third chapter) has kept me too occupied. I have been prompted into action, however, by a posting by my friend Genese Grill who is writing a biography of Robert Musil. On her Substack site (“Attempts to Find Robert Musil”) she recently wrote a piece entitled “Stony and Silent or Effervescent and Fascinating?”which concerns what Musil was like in company.

So, this post is along similar lines. Since my present focus is the so-called young Goethe, the years before he went to Weimar at 26 in 1775, I have gone back for evidence of  those years to a magnificent archival work, by Ernst Grumach and Renate Grumach. It is part of a series entitled Goethe: Meetings and Conversations. Volume 1 covers the years 1749, the year of Goethe’s birth, to 1776, his first Weimar year. The volume is 500 pages long.

From 1752 until 1764, the entries are either from Bettina von Arnim’s “Correspondence with a Child” (arising from her conversations with Goethe’s mother; published in 1835), which describe Goethe at about the age of three or four, or from a letter of Goethe’s mother to him in 1795, in which she thanks him for sending her the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. This mention is important evidence of some events of Goethe’s childhood, as the novel assembled into fictional form many incidents of his childhood, including the famous puppet theater of 1754, when he was five or six. These entries are very small and short in comparison with the numerous excerpts from Goethe’s autobiography, which are Goethe’s own version of these years but which were written half a century after the events.

In 1764, we have the first documents in Goethe’s own handwriting in letters he wrote, as well as responses to these letters.

Goethe was then fifteen and was writing to gain admittance to a Frankfurt “poetic circle” called the Arcadian Society. The addressee was a certain Ludwig Ysenburg von Buri. Goethe’s letter begins with a paragraph in which he writes with effusive praise of von Buri that he has heard from the latter’s friends: “You are well aware that your merits captivate people even in places farther away than where I live.” He then continues: “You see from my preface that I presently seek only your acquaintance until you learn whether I am worthy to be your friend and enter your society.”

Goethe’s self-presentation is very striking. He goes so far as to say that the friends who have praised Buri have not given him, Goethe, the invaluable good fortune of making him and Buri acquainted, about which, he writes: “Perhaps a little bit of envy is at fault.” A person may deny his faults when seeking acquaintance with such an estimable person as Buri, but Goethe will not: “One of my main shortcomings is that I am somewhat impetuous (heftig). … Furthermore, I am used to giving orders, but where I have nothing to say, I can leave the matter alone.”

 This overbearing flattery from an unknown person causes von Buri to respond: “You attribute to me qualities that you could not personally have known and merits that you have not witnessed.” Referring to the friends Goethe had mentioned in his letter, von Buri adds: “My friends may mean well, but fundamentally they are doing harm to themselves and me.” Buri then gets himself out of responsibility for Goethe’s membership in the Society by recommending that he turn to another member, a certain Mr. Alexis, who is a supervisor of the Society, so that “I can get the appropriate information from him, in order not to expose myself to the cruel responsibility of the Society.”

Goethe seems not to have heard the underlying tone of Buri’s letter and wrote him again a month later: “You are too kind in giving me hope of entering your Society at a time when I thought this happiness was beyond my reach.”

There then followed another exchange between him and Buri in which Buri spoke with the same tone and postponed a decision regarding Goethe’s admittance. In the meantime, members of the Society carried out their own intelligence. One of the people to whom Buri wrote responded as follows, warning that Goethe was “given to excesses (Ausschweifung) and many other unpleasant faults. … Herr Goethe visited me last week for about 15 minutes. He is about 15 or 16 years old, but he is more in possession of  blabber (Plapperwerk)  than of depth (Gründlichkeit).” Therewith the matter appears to have ended, but not in Goethe’s favor. Buri writes to one of the members that “Herr Goethe” has not written again and that he hopes he will not do so. “But should he be so impertinent to do so, I have already decided not to deign to reply.”

Clearly, the time in which Goethe grew up had its rules, its decorum, its snobberies, but I can’t help thinking of the sororities and fraternities of my own youth in the 1960s and 1970s. The letters, however, give strong evidence in 1764 already, of Goethe’s almost overbearing self-assurance. 

Von Buri himself actually went on to write a work on the consequences of the French Revolution as well as a five-act play: Ludwig Capet, oder der Konigsmord: ein Burgerliches Trauerspiel, and a Lustspiel: Der Kohlenbrenner. But times change of course. The author of an article I came across concerning the letters to Buri mentions that he and Goethe met again in 1774, but that Buri continued on his own "lesser sunlit path" (wenig sonnenbeschienenen Weg), served in a modest position as an officer until 1806, and enjoyed only lukewarm success as a poet and dramatist. The author's conclusion: "How often must he have looked toward Weimar with envy, where there lived a great man (Mensch), an illustrious poet, and who moreover served in an official capacity at the court, whom he had so haughtily dismissed from his circle."

Image credit: Freies Deutsches Hochstift;

Goethe and his scribes

Francesco Clemente, "History of the Heart in 3 Rainbows," from Palimpsest

I have been wanting to post something on Albrecht Schöne’s new book, Der Briefschreiber Goethe. It deserves several posts, but a recent review in Book Forum gives me an opportunity at least to mention it (vorübergehend, let us say, since I will return to it later). The BF review (by Clive Thompson) concerns Palmipsest: A History of the Written Word by Matthew Battles, who is also the author of Library: An Unquiet History.

The reviewer notes that writing has often been associated, “in the West, anyway, with the rise of interiority and the individual … It is by sitting in solitude with our thoughts, pen in hand, that we develop our most profound ideas about society, ethics, and ourselves.” As Battles points out, however, none of the writers in the Western literary tradition sat down in solitude to write. Instead, they dictated, often to slaves (in Greece and Rome).

One of the major benefits of having taught “Great Books” to undergrads while I was in grad school was the chance to read works I might otherwise have bypassed. These included Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates opposes writing on the grounds that it promotes forgetting, in contrast to orality, which encourages memory. As with gossip, however, oral transmission encourages a distortion of the original message, to the point where the original is no longer recognizable. Similarly, the oral transmission of "literature," such as the epics of Homer or other “ancient” writers, produced varying versions. The production of a standard text has been the task of philologists from the time there have been philologists.

To return to writing itself, which is the subject of Palimpsest (how I love that word: I must bring it into my spoken vocabulary), writing originally served commerce and statecraft, of “tallying just what was in the coffers of the state and the grandiose one of expressing the might of rulers.” Scribes thus wrote “at the king’s bequest.” On the other hand, as I remember from grade school so many years ago, it was Phoenicians, early tradesmen par excellence, who originated the script that is the basis of our alphabet.

Writing for purposes that were purely literary, on the other hand, was “a victory.” Thompson quotes the Canadian poet and translator Robert Bringhurst: “Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.”



And Goethe? As we know, he preferred to dictate, not only his literary works, but also his correspondence. The letters discussed in Schöne’s volume (there are nine “case studies”) were subject to much thought, though interiority as we understand it was not at issue. Rather, it was process of coming up with the correct rhetorical strategy for the person being addressed. His earliest letter to the 16-year-old Ludwig Ysenburg von Buri, dated May 23, 1764, when Goethe was 14 years old,  displays “heitere Souveränität … über das rhetorische Instrumentarium.”

Moreover, as Schöne adds in a footnote, this early letter in which Goethe presents his case for entry into the "Gesellschaft derer Arcadier zu Phylandria,” was not, aside from the signature, in his own hand. The scribe was Johann David Clauer. Goethe's father was the guardian of this mentally ill man, who was in any case a “Dr. jur.” He resided in the Goethe family home for 30 years, during which time he took dictation and also executed written documents for Goethe’s father. In several essays on Goethe, I have stressed that rather than drawing on his own “experience,” he was calling on established literary forms when he drafted his literary works, just like all poets before the 18th century. Goethe's genius, I have always thought, lay in disguising his literary forefathers, but in dictating to an amanuensis (another great word I have to make more use of) he was following in a venerable tradition.

Picture credits: Schirn Kunsthalle; Jonnie Miles/Getty Images; Crystal Links