How much poetry, how much truth?

Clärchen in Egmont (W. von Kaulbach, detail)

Goethe frequently mentions in Dichtung und Wahrheit the divertissements poetiques with which he regaled friends in his youth. He also writes that spontaneity characterized his literary production in these pre-Weimar years. Ideas or scenes would form fully in his head, and he would sometimes jump out of bed in the middle of the night to record them. In Book 19 he mentions how he came upon the figure of Egmont: after writing Götz he became interested in a similar turning point in the affairs of state, which led him to the uprising in the Netherlands against the Spanish. He and his father had lively discussions about he might handle the topic. In turn his father ardently wished to see in print what his son had already worked out in his  head (“dieses in meinem Kopf schon fertige Stück auf dem Papiere, es gedruckt, es bewundert zu sehen”). And so began, he writes, in the days during which he waited for the coach that would take him to Weimar, the composition of Egmont, not like with Götz, in logical order (“in Reih und Folge”); instead, after an introduction, he devoted himself to the main scenes without paying much attention to the connections between them.

There are many things about Goethe’s life that one would like to know more. Unfortunately, he destroyed almost all of his pre-Leipzig correspondence, which might have given us a picture of those get-togethers with Frankfurt friends of his youth, during which he entertained (as per DuW) them with spontaneous poetic effusions. One also misses, of course, the absence of a comparable autobiography of the early Weimar years. Of course, since Dichtung und Wahrheit was written half a century and more after the events it describes, one always has to be careful at taking Goethe at his word about his youth.

Still, it strikes me that surviving correspondence as well as other documents of the early Weimar years offer evidence of the truth of the above-mentioned autobiographical account.
 

Parts 3 and 4 of DuW portray what Goethe calls the “Zerstreuungen” (distractions) of his life in Frankfurt following on his entrance into the literary world, beginning with his contributions to the Frankfurter Gelehrten Anzeigen and with Götz and Werther. Everyone wanted to meet him, wanted something from him, wanted to instruct him, plus there was the “distraction” of his relationship with Lili Schönemann. Such was also his life in Weimar from the get go. Nicholas Boyle writes that 1778 was the year of “Goethe’s involvement with the amateur theater” in Weimar. Goethe became the organizer of theatrical entertainment for the court, writing some of the plays himself and even acting in them. While Goethe did not abandon his “earlier pyrotechnic productivity,” as Boyle puts it, “in the circumstances it is remarkable that Goethe wrote as much as he did, unsupported either by the immediate Weimar environment or by the wider world of German literary culture.” By the way, on this date in 1778, Goethe mentions that "Egmont war mir wieder in Sinn gekommen."

 The diary entries of 1778 document that Goethe saw a lot of theater and opera as well as productions on which he played a major role. Interesting for me to see, especially because of my interest in the "Ur-Meister" is that Goethe records four meetings with the actor Conrad Ekhof in January of 1778, which is when he began writing the novel.

Images: Das Goethezeitportal

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

Goethe in Venice

I mentioned earlier that friends had vacationed in Venice before New Year's and sent me the reminder in the photo at the left (click to enlarge and see the sign indicating "viale Goethe") that Goethe had left his mark on the city. Today I will write a bit about the city's mark on him, which is one of the lesser fields of Goethe scholarship.

Travel accounts of the past two centuries are often records of desire, particularly the attempts of travelers to discern the past in the milieu of the present. Thus, 17th- and 18th-century travelers to Italy sought to resurrect the vanished classical past from the ancient ruins. For northern European travelers, especially Germans, Rome in particular occupied an outsized role in the imagination.

Goethe had longed since his youth to visit Italy, which he finally did in 1786, spending two years there. As Nicholas Boyle writes in his biography of Goethe, however, the real Italy itself was merely confirmation that "the object of his desires had a place and habitation on this earth." Those two years in Italy were not really spent on the ground, but "in Arcadia, in a creation of his mind and heart." Goethe devoted little attention to the actual Italy (unless it was geological or plant in nature), exploring few of the customs of the land, the very thing that most of us look forward to experiencing in foreign countries. The difference can be seen by comparing Goethe's Italian Journey with the diaries and memoirs of Friederike Brun, who spent considerable time in Rome and southern Italy exploring both the past and documenting the present. Her writings of these years were published before Goethe's Italian Journey, and I suspect he studied them closely. (My account of Frederike Brun as a traveler can be found in this publication.)

Goethe had passed through Venice on his first Italian journey, but it was in 1790 that he returned, on a quasi-official Weimar mission: the Duke's mother had been in Rome for the past two years, and Goethe was to accompany her on this stage of her return trip to Weimar. Her delay in leaving Rome, however, meant that Goethe stayed longer than expected. By now, Goethe had settled in Weimar with Christiane and had a small son, a domestic situation that was clearly satisfactory. Thus, the epigrams record disappointment at what is not in Venice: the snowy mountains of the north and the German Faustina left behind in Weimar. The erotic vein of the Roman Elegies is abandoned. In contrast, Italy on this second journey was more clearly observed than on the first, "imaginative," visit. It was now, writes Boyle, "a place of dusty roads and dishonest hotel keepers."The literary product that emerged is the Venezianische Epigramme, a "cycle" of 100 or so short poems that drew their formal inspiration from such ancient precedents as Martial.

This collection occupies a secondary place in Goethe scholarship, probably because of the seemingly unmediated character of the reflections in the poems. Boyle writes of this being a "distempered time" for Goethe. What is unprecedented about this work is that they are "full of Goethe's opinions. ... Never before in his writing have views been expressed in so undramatized a form, so unattached to any persona other than of Goethe at a particular time and in a particular place." Boyle also adds that "the image of the traveler, of the man who is not at home, is fundamental to the collection." Thus, Goethe would seem to exemplify the flâneur (see also here), before being a flâneur became a literary and artistic subject.

Though the subjects are wide-ranging and, unlike in the Roman Elegies, contain quick sketches of Venetian daily life, Boyle identifies three thematic areas: political, cultural, and sexual. The effects of the French Revolution was in its early stages, and Goethe's references to street-corner revolutionaries contain some interesting observations, including, I was interested to see, the following two lines on the nature of freedom of speech. (The epigram itself, however, went unpublished in his lifetime.)

Leider läßt sich noch kaum was rechtes denken und sagen
Das nicht grimmig den Staat, Götter and Sitten verlezt.

(Unfortunately it is hardly possible to think or say anything right that is not savagely wounding to the state, the gods, and morals.)

Sex seemed to preoccupy Goethe at this time. For instance, he devotes some lines to Venetian prostitutes, whom he had seen in his wanderings in the labyrinth of Venice streets. Of these epigrams Boyle writes that their character was so explicit -- nudity, erections, masturbation, sodomy, venereal disease -- that they were not published for over a century.

The third theme shows Goethe, as Boyle writes, at his most "explicitly and violently" anti-Christian. "Christianity is presented as a series of illusions," while the epigrams consistently focus instead on "Epicurean materialism," which offers "the unadulterated truth" about God, man, and the world.

According to the Goethe-Handbuch, Goethe failed to mention ("with a single word") the grand palaces on the Canal (seen above in the gorgeous photo above by Todd Landry), and the Byzantine and Gothic influences on the architecture simply passed him by. He had the following to say about St. Mark's: "The architectural style is commensurate with every manner of nonsense that was taught or perpetrated there." Goethe did not, however, neglect the paintings to be found in Venice, and he and his companions, Friedrich Bury and Johann Heinrich Meyer, made a systematic tour of practically every church and public collection in the lagoon city and, in this way was Goethe's understanding of the history of Venetian painting enriched.

This post is becoming very long. Thus, I hope to devote the following post to a continuation of Goethe in Venice, in particular to his impressions of the paintings he saw there, reflected in an essay from 1825, Ältere Gemälde. Venedig 1790.

Picture credit: Visual Culture; Todd Landry (as above)