Kotzebue!!! Ermordung

Kotzebue is assassinated

On this date in 1819 Goethe recorded the following in his diary: "Kanzler von Müller die Nachricht von Kotzebue!!!! Ermordung." It is interesting how slow news traveled in those days: Kotzebue was murdered three days before in Mannheim. Three days for news to travel 216 miles (346 km).

August von Kotzebue was a very popular writer and dramatist in his day. In an article on world literature and literary history from 1930, Fritz Strich writes that the concept of world literature "posits criteria of supranational appreciation and dissemination," but goes on to note that, if this criterion is observed, then Kotzebue is "more of a world literary author than Goethe, ... [Edgar] Wallace with his detective stories more than Cervantes with his Don Quixote. In such a case it might offer a way out if one says: Kotzebue and Wallace do not belong to world literature because they do not belong to literature to being with."

Kotzebue was a conservative and his death was a political assassination by a nationalist student. The authorities used the event to crack down on the universities and the press.

An interesting fact: Jane Austen saw a play by Kotzebue, The Birthday, at Bath in 1799. The theatrical in her novel Mansfield Park is based on an adaption of the play by Elizabeth Inchbald. Since it includes sex outside of marriage, kissing, and illegitimacy, it was no wonder that Sir Thomas Bertram was very upset when he unexpectedly returned home and discovered the young people making preparations to perform it.

Grillparzer on Goethe

Grillparzer, ca. 1827, by Moritz Michael Dafflinger

I love this epigram by Franz Seraphicus Grillparzer about Goethe:

Er war nicht kalt, wie ihr wohl meint,
Nur hielt er die Wärme zu wenig vereint
Und da er sie teilte zuletzt ins All,
Kam wenig auf jeden einzelnen Fall.

Grillparzer is a German-language writer whom I have barely studied (likewise, Jean Paul), but Fritz Strich wrote his dissertation on the Austrian writer: Franz Grillparzers Ästhetik (1905, under Franz Muncker; reprinted Hildesheim, 1977). In it, the "inductive aesthetician" Grillparzer was portrayed developing his anti-Romantic theories on the writings of Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, Kant, the German Romantic theorists (toward whom he felt a special animus), Hegel and his followers, and Friedrich Bouterweck.

According to my friend Paula Fichtner, author of Historical Dictionary of Austria (Scarecrow Press, 2nd ed., 2009), Grillparzer's career as author and dramatist "developed even as he toiled somewhat resentfully as a bureaucrat." At his death in 1856 he was director of the imperial treasury archives. There were literary successes in his life, but also failures. According to Fichtner, the negative public reaction to his play Weh dem der Lügt (Woe unto the Liar, 1838) caused the "hypersensitive dramatist to stop writing for the state altogether." He also had unpleasant experiences with government censorship.

Source: Franz Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1 (Munich, 1960–1965), p. 476.

The end is near

Last entry in Goethe's diary on this day, 1832: "Den ganzen Tag wegen Unwohlseyn im Bette zugebracht."

Picture credit: Deutsche Welle

Eichendorff's Birthday

Ich schlaf am liebsten unterm Himmelsbette,

leicht mit dem Sternenmantel zugedeckt.

100th death commemoration

Joseph von Eichendorff was born 226 years ago, in 1788. A lot of interesting figures in German letters were born in that decade: Carl von Clausewitz (1780), Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Achim von Arnim (1781), Sulpiz Boissereé (1783), Jacob Grimm, Bettina von Arnim, Harmann von Pückler-Muskau  (1785), Ludwig Börne, Ludwig I, and Carl Maria von Weber (1786), Ludwig Uhland (1787), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788), and Georg Simon Ohm (1789).

Of course, I didn't know all of these dates by heart. I frequently look at geboren.am. One of my professors in graduate school used to say: "Die Daten, meine Damen und Herren, sind sehr wichtig."

As an undergraduate I loved Eichendorff's stories. In fact, the literature of the Romantic period was my real introduction to the study of literature, in contrast to simply reading and enjoying it.

Postcard picture credit: Goethezeitportal

Goethe illustrations

The above image was posted on arthistoricum.net, via which I have now come across a rich source of Goethe illustrations: the digital catalogue of the Frankfurt Goethe-Haus. The drawing, a "study for Werther, is by the German Impressionist painter Franz Skarbina.

Searching through digital museum site, I also found this contemporary "Idealportrait Werthers in Medaillon, darunter Szene mit Werthers Abschied von Albert und Lotte." It is by "D. Chodowiecki del.," and appeared in the first volume of Goethe's writings in the 1779 "Gesamtausgabe." The difference in sensibility between the two images is quite striking. Did Goethe's contemporary readers visualize Lotte as the finely dressed lady to whom Werther is bidding farewell? Everything Goethe writes about her in The Sorrows of Young Werther suggests domesticity, not finery.

Lessing revisted

Lessing, by Cornelius Rinne

On my desk is Jonathan Rée's review (in the London Review of Books, 2/6/14) of a new biography of Lessing by Hugh Nisbet. Reading Lessing's plays in graduate school, I was charmed by the language, which made me think Lessing was, like Goethe, someone I would like to know more about. Rée finds, however, that Lessing is a figure hard to bring into focus. Coleridge, for instance, impressed by Lessing's philosophical essays, found that a Life of Lessing was too much. According to Rée, Coleridge was not to blame:

"Lessing never gave any indication of the kind of unified personality whose growth and vicissitudes might make a good subject for biography. He was one of those writers who play perpetual hide-and-seek with their readers: you may admire him but -- as Kierkegaard once put it -- your admiration 'will not let you enter into a direct relation with him, since what is admirable in him is precisely that he prevents such a thing.'"

True or false? The quote from Kierkegaard comes from "Something about Lessing," which Rée considers "one of the loveliest tributes ever paid by one writer to another." ( Another thing to add my reading list.) In it Kierkegaard confesses that he wasn't keen on the "universally admired" aspects of Lessing.

I've recently come across Lessing in connection with my work on the role of commerce in Goethe's idea of world literature. It concerns a  trial in which Voltaire was involved in 1751 in Berlin and for which Lessing translated some of Voltaire's court documents. In a marvelous book by Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought, I discovered that Voltaire was a big proponent of the free market. His support is usually seen in connection with his attempt to break down the power of established religion: the London stock exchange, for instance, was a site of "tolerance" among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traders. In the Philosophical Letters, according to Muller, the market was pictured "as the basis of peaceful coexistence." Contrary to many in the 18th century, particularly the church and other moralists, Voltaire defended the pursuit of luxury. "Abundance," he wrote in The Wordling, is "the mother of the arts."

Voltaire held that self-interest was good for the social order, and he took care of his own self-interest. It seems that he was quite avaricious, and he became wealthy by lending large sums of money to members of the royalty in return for lifelong annual payments. For instance, he "donated 150,000 livres to Prince Charles-Eugene of Württemberg, in return for a lifelong annuity of 15,570 francs; in case of his death, 7,500 a year would be paid to his niece and mistress, Mme. Denis." Muller says that Voltaire's famed hypochondria may be attributed in part to these economic pursuits. Although he lived to be eighty-four, Voltaire constantly spoke in the last decades of his life of illness and "his imminent demise." In this way he hoodwinked debtors who were only liable to repay their debt as long as he lived.

Lessing and Lavater at Mendelsohn's home, by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1856

In 1750 he moved to Potsdam, at the invitation of Frederick II, and became involved in a financial adventure that led him to a trial that involved illegal financial speculation with the "court Jew" Abraham Hirschel. (A record of the trial is available at Hathi Trust.) Lessing, who had already translated fifteen of Voltaire's historical essays, was employed to translate into German certain pleading in Voltaire's lawsuit against Hirschel. Neither Voltaire nor Hirschel emerged from the lawsuit unscathed. As Adolph Stahr wrote in his biography of Lessing: "Voltaire hatte Anfangs auf die königliche Gunst getrost; aber er mußte bald erfahren, daß der große König in Sachen der Gerechtigkeit keinen Spaß verstand." When Voltaire told Frederick that he had won his lawsuit, the monarch wrote in sarcasm:

Weil Ihr den Prozess gewonnen habt, so wünsche ich Euch Glück dazu. Es ist mir sehr lieb, daß diese häßliche Geschichte einmal ein Ende ist. Ich hoffe, daß Ihr keine Händel weiter haben werdet, weder mit dem neuen Testamente ...

Frederick went on to write a play Tantale en procès, a satirical comedy in which he made fun of the avaricious Voltaire. As Stahr writes: "So kam Voltaire aus diesem schmutzigen Handel noch mit einem blauen Auge davon." Lessing, who had before the trial been a great admirer of Voltaire and had occasionally dined with him in Berlin, expressed his opinion of the poet after the trial in an epigram entitled "Der geizige Dichter." Here are a few lines from a later epigram about the affair:

Und kurz und gut, den Grund zu fassen,
Warum die List
Dem Juden nicht gelungen ist,
So fallt die Antwort ungefähr,
Herr V*** war ein größrer Schelm als er.

According to Muller, Voltaire was time and again accused by friends and associates of the traditional negative attributes associated in the Christian tradition with mercantile activity. Voltaire's reaction was continually to denounce the Jews, a classic case, writes Muller, of projection.

The "mind" of capitalism

The illumination of the philosophes

I continue to work on my essay on Fritz Strich and find myself somewhat bogged down in the subject of "Geistesgeschichte." Strich in his writings constantly refers to "Geist," either to German or French "Geist" and so on, or to the "Geist" of history and so on. This can first be seen in a very important essay he published in 1916 entitled "Der lyrische Stil des 17. Jahrhunderts." It is acknowledged that the essay inaugurated the discipline of Baroque literature. An indication of the low regard in which 17th-century literature was held can be seen in a comment by Wilhelm Scherer in his history of German literature (1883): "Aber nie hat ein unbedeutender Dichter mit so geringem Recht eine bedeutende Stellung in der Literaturgeschichte errungen, wie Opitz."

The connection of Geistegeschichte and the inauguration of Baroque literary scholarship has itself become a subject of recent academic interest in recent decades. Hans-Harald Müller in his Barockforschung: Ideologie und Methode, ein Kapitel deutscher Wissenschaftsgeschichte 1870-1930) of 1973 associates the two with proto-fascist tendencies. Klaus Garber in 1976 (Martin Opitz, Der Vater der deutschen Dichtung": eine kritische Studie zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik) finds in Geistegeschichte support of monopoly capitalism in the German empire at the end of the 19th century. Both of these studies are very well researched and documents, but they reflect a tendency of Western intellectual life since the 18th century, namely, to reject the inheritance of the past. In the case of Geistesgeschichte, it is probably the failure of this very optimistic "doctrine" of universal progress that has consigned it to the dust heap of history.

In this article Strich discussed the "naturalization" in German poetry of the baroque (lower case) style. In a much later article (1938) he would discuss the Spanish and Italian roots of "baroque," but in 1916 he was simply making the point that the accentuation of German poetry, its "Betonung," and the contraries contained in the alexandrine style, made it a "natural" for the German language to express the new "spirit of the time." This spirit was a realization of "den jähen Wechsel aller Dinge, ... : daß alles auf Erden eitel ist, ein Schatten, ein Wind, ein Rauch, ein verklingnder Ton, eine Welle. Man ist ein Ball, den das Verhängnis schlägt, ein Kahn auf dem empörten Meer, ein Rohr, das jeder Wind bewegt."

The Thirty Years' War plays a big role in the interpretation of this mood of the time. Henning Boetius, in his edition of Daniel Morhof's Unterricht von der Teutschen Sprache und Poesie (1682), has written of the 17th century: "Der mittelalterliches Ordogedanke, der bis den Humanismus hinreichte, Denken wie soziales Leben auf ein Göttliches hin hierarchisiered, ist im 30jährigen Krieg zerbrochen." Yet even while wars were leading the nations to bankruptcy, grandiose architectural projects and intellectual developments continued.

Descartes published his Discourse on Method in 1637, and Galileo was writing the founding texts of modern physics. Men born in the 17th century were the first generation to come of age outside the world of Aristotle, outside a sense of order of the universe. The telescope showed that limits could no longer be placed on the world. Poets may not be the legislators of the world, but they are often the first to respond to such changes in the world. Thus, they responded, in Germany and elsewhere, especially to the heretofore-unperceived immensities of the universe, to the displacement of Europe included, stand still with the planets revolving around it.

What inaugurated all these changes, what fractured the previously stable world view, including the confessional differences that ostensibly sparked the Europe-wide warring, was the opening of the world to commerce. That scientific knowledge began to accumulate, without any standard of truth, indicates that rapid turnover in "goods." It in only ironic that European exploration began with an Italian; the major Italian thinkers of the Renaissance period seemed blissfully unaware of change in perspective. In the Baroque essay, Strich characterizes the Renaissance poetic style as "measured": "der ganz auf Mass und Messbarkeit angelegt ist," expressed of eternal things. The Baroque, in contrast, gives expression to "dem werdenden, sich wandelnden, momentanen Erlebnis."

What is this experience but that of capitalism, The spirit of history, the "mind" of the title of this post, is that of capitalism.