Der Duckenfaust

Goethes Entenhausener Klassik

Interesting program on BR Fernsehen recently: “Was Goethe über Big Data wusste.” It was premised on Goethe having sent Faust on “eine rastlose Jagd nach der Zukunft.” When Goethe created the pact with Mephisto, he was aware that “Verweile doch, du bist so schön” was a thing of the past. Some of the topics investigated on the program were artificial intelligence, the financial world, big data,” interspersed with scenes from a production of the play. Some familiar faces among the interviewees: Manfred Osten, Michael Jaeger, Peter Sloterdyck, and Carsten Rohde, along with new (to me) folks: Jürgen Schmidhuber, whose goal (according to the program) is to make the entire universe more intelligent; and Katharina Zweig.

Carsten Rohde, who works at the Klassik-Stiftung in Weimar, is shown in the very impressive and modern “stacks” of the K-S, pulling out various editions of Goethe’s works, the most fascinating of which, for me anyway, was a comic book concerning the adventures of “Doctor Duchtus.” Disney and Goethe: quite a conjunction. The image at the top of this post (with link) is from a site that offers copies of Hier bin ich Ente, hier darf ich's sein.

Rohde has a nice post on the K-S blog concerning the penetration of Goethe’s language into modern German discourse, even among people who have never read Goethe’s works, for instance, in the advertising slogan of a Lübeck bakery: Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt und morgens ohne Brötchen lebt.

Goethe and Hölderlin

Goethe's views on world literature are "cutting edge," as seen in the connection he made between free trade in goods and in ideas. World literature was a preoccupation of the last decade of his life, the 1820s, when the different regions of the earth were being linked with one another through trade and colonization. He welcomed these links, especially as they brought people like himself into contact with like-minded individuals in other lands, but it was a turbulent time, and Goethe was aware of the disquieting effect that these material changes had on one's spiritual condition: "The world is in such a turbulent state that every individual is in danger of being sucked into its vortex." (See Manfred Osten's essay on "'Alles veloziferisch' oder Goethes Entdeckung der Langsamkeit.")

Earlier, however, in the 1790s, Goethe had been less "progressive" in his judgments, especially concerning literature and the arts. In my recent readings on Herder I came across a letter from Goethe to Meyer (20 June 1796) in which he criticizes an aspect of the "Humanitätsbriefe," namely, Herder's "unbelievable toleration for the mediocre, his rhetorical mixing together of the good with the insignificant, his admiration for the dead and decayed, an indifference to what is alive and aspiring" (eine unglaubliche Duldung gegen das Mittelmäßige, eine rednerische Vermischung des Guten und des Unbedeutenden, eine Verehrung des Abgestorbenen und Vermoderten, eine Gleichgültigkeit gegen das Lebendige und Strebende).

These words are somewhat ironic in light of Goethe's own reputation for seeming lack of critical judgment concerning certain contemporary writers, including Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). I was reminded of this on reading a review of the publication of volume 20 of the Frankfurt edition of Hölderlin's "Complete Works" and of English translations of the play The Death of Empedocles and of Hölderlin's odes and elegies. The review, by Charlie Louth, appears in the August 7 issue of the TLS.

Louth surveys the textual history of Hölderlin's works, an issue of concern perhaps only to specialists: Beissner and Beck of the Stuttgart edition, versus D.E. Sattler's Frankfurt edition. He makes a point that I found of interest. The Frankfurt edition reproduces Hölderlin's major manuscripts in color facsimiles "whose clarity of definition perhaps exceeds the originals and [which] show how much care Hölderlin bestowed on the fair copies of his poems: they are things of beauty, their balance and proportion intrinsic to their meaning."

As Christoph Jamme writers in Goethe-Handbuch (4/1, 489), "In contrast to the complicated, tragically overshadowed problematic of his relationship with Schiller, Goethe's relations with Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin are characterized by a great reserve." Goethe reported to Schiller of his meetings with Hölderlin in Frankfurt in July 1797, turning the younger poet's name into a diminutive: "Yesterday young Hölderlin visited me. I especially recommended that he write small poems and to choose for each an interesting human subject" (Gestern ist auch Hölterlein by mir gewesen. ... Ich habe ihm besonders gerathen kleine Gedichte zu machen und sich zu jedem einen menschlich interessanten Gegenstand zu wählen). In light of Hölderlin's subsequent great elegies and hymns, Jamme characterizes Goethe's words as "one of the greatest misunderstandings of German literary history."

Part of the difference between the two poets may have been what Ludwig Achim von Arnim characterized as their "totally contrary conceptions of "antiken Mythos." As von Arnim writes: Hölderlin does not lose himself in theorizing about antiquity ... Instead, the gods of the ancients surround him like approaching planets [nahende Sterne], with whose inhabitants he is able to converse." Very well put.

I notice that the German Hölderlin Society is offering a "Hyperion-Reise" in September. For those who prefer to read Hölderlin in English, this site offers a nice selection.

Credits: Hölderlin-Archiv der Württembergischen-Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart