Safranski ad infinitum

I have posted twice now (on October 27 and on June 7) on the response to Goethe: Life as a Work of Art, David Dollenmayer's translation of Safranski's Goethe bio. The most recent person to weigh in is Ferdinand Mount, in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books. Certainly Michael Hoffmann and Daniel Johnson are familiar with German literature (whereas Adam Kirsch's New Yorker review of The Essential Goethe was hardly more than a potted summary of Goethe's life and work), but Mount shows more than a superficial reading of Goethe's work. I would expect nothing less of a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

Mount has read earlier biographies, including the two volumes so far by Nicholas Boyle. A comparison with Boyle is always a good place to start, which I also did in my Goethe Yearbook review of the original German edition. In Mount's estimation, Safranski does not "measure up to the depth and subtlety of Boyle’s analysis." In compensation, Safranksi "says certain things plainly that Boyle tends to blur or omits altogether—like the story of Herr Glaser." This is an episode of Goethe's life with which I was unfamiliar and about which Safranski reported. Herr Glaser of Stützerbach was a corpulent merchant who proudly showed off a life-size portrait of himself to the young Carl August and his new privy councilor. When he was out of the room, Goethe cut out Glaser's face from the canvas and stuck his own head in the hole. In the meantime, the duke's other hangers-on were raiding the merchant's wine cellar and rolling the barrels down the hill. Here is the quote in English in Mount's review: “Teased Glaser shamefully. Fantastic fun till 1 am. Slept well.”

Here is Goethe's own diary account of the events of August 31 and September 1, 1777: "nach Tisch ritt mit Lichtenb. auf Stützerbach. war äusserst lustig den Abend. d. 1. den Morgen bis Nachm 3 auf der Jagd. Hesler zu uns nach Tische mit den Bauermaidels getanzt, Glasern sündlich geschunden, ausgelassen toll bis gegen 1 Nachts. Gut geschlafen."

Glaser House in Stützerbach. Note cellar and hill.

The commentary volume of Goethe's diary identifies Lichtenberg as "Husaren-Rittmeister in Weimar, Adjutant des Herzogs." Hesler (i.e., Häseler) was the "Oberforstmeister in Stützerbach."

Perhaps because of those Bauermaidels, Mount is inclined not to take seriously Goethe's sexual innocence before his journey to Rome. Boyle seems to accept the view that Rome was his initiation, while Safranski is silent on the subject. Mount finds the youthful Goethe too "boundless, energetic, uninhibited" to have been buttoned up. He quotes Goethe's boast to his friend Kestner ("Between you and me I know something about girls”), as well as an early letter from Weimar to Frankfurt (“I’m leading a pretty wild life here”).

Mount finds the essential Goethe in the "young Goethe," in the Sturm und Drang Goethe, and is not too enamored of the notion, purveyed by Safranski and others, that Goethe continually "reinvented" himself. Goethe, in his view, was fully formed as a young man, and his later turn to classicism, "toward the erotic," was no more than "pirouettes on the ice." As evidence, he notes that Goethe's late-life infatuations were all with young women, what Mount calls "the throbbings of noontide," which were the reviving of an old self, not the invention of a new one. Thus, Goethe's remarkable poetic facility, from youth to old age, with its "extraordinary combination of movement and musicality, the best of Byron with the best of Tennyson. He is the easiest of poets to remember."

Very interesting observations. I am not sure I agree with Mount, however, when he writes that Goethe's basic outlook was "sunny." This does not comport with Mount's conclusion, which introduces Nietzsche's reverence before Goethe in Twilight of the Idols. (Thus, the image at the top of this post from the New York Review page by the Dutch illustrator Siegfried Woldhek.) For Mount, what Nietzsche is describing is the Superman, one who "acknowledges no external limits on his will, whose actions are self-validating, who is beyond scruples." I don't see the path from the young Goethe to this image of a Goethe, for whom nothing is forbidden but "weakness." Mount seems to have made a giant leap. Although Safranski does not foreground it as such, his biography shows how the "sunniness," the  exuberance of Goethe's youth, was killed by life in Weimar. Goethe had to change, if he were to stay there. The result was resignation, renunciation (Entsagung), not a unscrupulous Superman.

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 and money

Every now and then while reading Safranski's biography of Goethe, I have to laugh out loud. Such was my reaction today when I learned that Goethe made a 100 Thaler bet in the Hamburg Lottery in May 1797; the main prize was an estate (Landgut) in Silesia. The numbers he chose included, among other calculations, his own and Schiller's birth dates. As Safranski writes, "er zog eine Niete." The next year Goethe purchased a property in Oberroßla, 10 km northeast of Weimar. Five years later, he was glad to be get rid of it at a loss.

I have posted on the subject of Goethe and money before, long ago, in fact, in 2008. Back then my focus was on what the possession of money allowed Goethe to do and enjoy. He was the recipient of a considerable inheritance, accumulated by his grandfather. While his father did not deplete the fortune, he lived off the income from that legacy, somewhat like the landed gentry portrayed in Jane Austen's novels. Goethe's expenditures in Weimar, as he sank roots there, became considerable. Like his father, he kept an accurate record of his financial outlays. In his last decades, one can see that he enjoyed good food and good wines.

I came across a post today on a site called Brain Pickings, which aims to tell readers "What Goethe can teach us about cultivating a healthy relationship with our finances." The blogger draws on a book How to Worry Less About Money, by John Armstrong, "philosopher-in-residence" at Melbourne's Business School. Armstrong earlier wrote a book (Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet, 2006) that I reviewed, negatively, in volume 15 of Goethe Yearbook. It is a bit tiring to return to Goethe on the subject of life lessons, but here I go again.

Life lessons from Goethe

The Brain Pickings' blogger, Maria Popova, has many musings on how to have a "healthy relationship" with finances, focusing on our emotional problems with money. For most people, I would hazard that their worries about money are very existential: they don't have enough to pay their bills, in contrast to Goethe, who never feared the loss of a roof over his head. Thus, her advice is for people who have enough. She quotes from Armstrong's new book to demonstrate Goethe correct relationship:

"From his many writings about his own experiences, we know that he was determined to get well paid for his work. He came from a well-off background but sought independence. He switched careers, from law to government adviser so as to be able to earn more (which made sense then; today the trajectory might be in the opposite direction). He coped with serious setbacks. His first novel was extremely popular but he made no money from it because of inadequate copyright laws. Later, he negotiated better contracts. He was very competent in financial matters and kept meticulous records of his income and expenditure. He liked what money could buy — including … a stylish house-coat (his study had no heating). But for all this, money and money worries did not dominate his inner life. He wrote with astonishing sensitivity about love and beauty. He was completely realistic and pragmatic when it came to money but this did not lead him to neglect the worth of exploring bigger, more important concepts in life."

Well, yes and no. It is true that money worries did not dominate Goethe's inner life, which may have contributed to his ability to write "with astonishing sensitivity about love and beauty." Friedrich Schiller, as Safranski points out, was burdened by this difference between himself and Goethe. Goethe's serenity, such as it was, however, was hard won, although having money perhaps gave him opportunity to work on his serenity.

What I find interesting about Goethe on the subject of money is his failure to increase his paternal inheritance. Aside from a few bad financial ventures (the property in Oberroßla), he remained very conservative. Some of his contemporaries were making a killing in the market in the 18th century, e.g., Voltaire. (See my earlier post in this connection.) This conservatism is somewhat strange, since, as financial minister of the duchy and because of his attempts to increase the duchy’s tax revenues, Goethe was up to date on the Europe-wide discussion of modern economic issues. He was acquainted with the writings of Adam Smith via Georg Friedrich Sartorius, economist and historian at the University of Göttingen, who was the first mediator of Smith’s writings in Germany. The Jena Allgemeine Zeitung kept abreast: in 1804 Sartorius reviewed Henry Thornton’s An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper-Credit of Great Britain; in 1808 JAZ reviewed F.H. Hegewisch’s German translation of Malthus’s essay Principles of Population; and, in 1817, Georg Graf von Buquoy’s Die Theorie der Nationalwirtschaft. In recent years there has of course been increasing interest in Goethe’s understanding of finance and economics, beginning with Bernd Mahl, Goethes ökonomisches Wissen (1982).

Goethe's legacy, well expressed

Yet, the fact remains that Goethe did nothing to increase the wealth he inherited, wealth that his ancestors had labored to provide. On the other hand, of course, Goethe enriched the Western cultural inheritance, of which we are all in his debt.

Picture credits: Navona Numismatics; Carpe Diem Moments