Goethe in the Campagna

I have posted on this subject before, indeed a decade ago, but one of my domestic tasks in the present lockdown has been to go through my filing cabinet and create some order. Obviously I have a huge Goethe file, and I have selected some items out for this blog. I would like to add one detail on the charming sketch above by Tischbein (as always, click to enlarge) that I overlooked in my earlier post (2009!).

The 2009 post concerned the drawing's acquisition by the Freies Deutsches Hochstift and the information it added to the gestation of Tischbein's iconic portrait of Goethe in the Campagna. Judging by the gesture of the left hand and by the attentive position of the other figures, Goethe is apparently imparting some story, while his hat and his coat suggest the motif of Der Wanderer. It was this hat that caught my attention this morning. I might be mistaken -- and if so I hope someone will correct me -- but I can't recall any other representation of Goethe with a hat on. Certainly he wore a hat; people -- men and women -- wore hats in those days.

In the Tischbein portrait Goethe wears a hat, but it is not the hat of a "wanderer." It resembles more closely the hat worn by Nicholaes Berchem (1620-1683), a painter of pastoral landscapes. I mention Berchem only because he is referenced in the Bersani article I quoted in the earlier post as a source of the pastoral imagery in the portrait. The above image of Berchem is by Jan Stolker (d. 1785), a near contemporary of Tischbein. Maybe Tischbein was referring to the Dutch Golden Age? I'm not an art historian and welcome any enlightening on this particular sartorial style, especially in the portrait of Goethe.

Goethe in Ettersberg

Karl Eibl, in his Goethe Handbuch entry on Goethe's poetry in the first Weimar decade, addresses the "ambivalent world feeling" (Weltgefühl) to which Goethe would give expression when mentioning his early years in Weimar and to which most Goethe scholars have assented. Evidence is a letter Goethe wrote to Charlotte von Stein on July 16, 1777, which expresses what Eibl writes could be regarded as a "deep-seated ambivalence." Goethe was on his way home after a bird shooting with the duke in Apoldo. We must imagine Goethe on horseback (as always cut and paste into Google translate):

Der Etterberg! Die unbedeutenden Hügel! Und mir fuhrs durch die Seele -- Wenn du nun auch das einmal verlassen mußt! das Land wo du so viel gefunden hast, alle Glückseligkeit gefunden hast, die ein Sterblicher träumen darf, wo du zwischen Behagen und Mißbehagen, in ewig klingender Existenz schwebst ...!

Eibl, however, doubts that Goethe really felt existentially ambivalent, instead contending that the mixed feelings (Behagen und Mißbehagen) were primarily an expression of the restrictions on him that gave him little time for poetic production.

The above-mentioned Ettersberg -- called here "unbedeutend" (insignificant) -- is interesting because this range is associated with one of Goethe's best-known poems from the Weimar years, "Wandrers Nachtlied," written "Am Hang des Ettersberg d. 12. Feb. 76."

In my last post I mentioned Wolfgang Vulpius's volume on Goethe in Thuringia, the focus of which is less the poetry and more the natural world that Goethe was introduced to in the duchy of Weimar. The opening sentence of Vulpius's chapter on the Ettersberg mentions the abundant fossils of the shell limestone era in this mountain range. Ultimately Ettersberg was not insignificant at all. The entire area, including the Harz, was important for his mineralogical forays. Vulpius quotes from notes of Goethe, made in 1780 for J.C. Voigt in the context of the geological survey of the duchy:

Auf einer mineralogischen Reise durch das Herzogtum Weimar wäre der Ettersberg zuerst zu besteigen und alsdenn herunterwärts nach Zimmern und Hopfgarten zu, als auch herüber bis an die Ilm, was von Lage zu entdecken sein möchte, zu untersuchen, in was für Ordnung sie aufeinander folgen und in welcher Höhe gewisse Arten von Versteinerungen besonders der Bufonites stehen. Die Erfurter Bemühungen nach Steinkohen bei Hopfgarten sind zu untersuchen und nach den ... auf dem Ettersberg geschehenen Bemühungen sich zu erkunden.

It was the Harz journey of 1777 that inaugurated Goethe's enthusiasm for and learning on the subject of mineralogy, which increased with each journey (mostly on horseback) through this region. Vulpius mentions other Ettersberg landmarks associated with Goethe (e.g., the meteorological station established in 1817 in Schöndorf, on the back side of the Ettersberg), and also from Eckermann's report of September 26, 1827, including this well-known appreciation:

Ich war sehr oft an dieser Stelle und dachte in späteren Zeiten sehr oft, es würde das letztemal sein, daß ich von hier aus die Reiche der Welt und ihre Herrlichkeiten überblickte.

Pertinent to the importance of the area for what Goethe learned about the natural world is this passage from the same report :

Immer der alte Meeresboden! Wenn man von dieser Höhe auf Weimar hinabblickt und auf die mancherlei Dörfer umher, so kommt es einem vor wie ein Wunder, wenn man sich sagt, daß es eine Zeit gegeben, wo in dem weiten Tale dort unten die Walfische ihr Spiel getrieben. Und doch ist es so, wenigstens höchst wahrscheinlich.

"The Road to Hell"

I cannot finish up this post on the Ettersberg without mentioning, as does Vulpius, that the Nazis cleared one of the Ettersberg forests and built a concentration camp there. The two maps in this post (click to enlarge) come from the blog of the British historian, Ian Friel. In a blogpost back in 2014, Friel writes of buying in a bookshop in Germany the 1935 publication of Conti-Atlas für Kraftfahrer (‘Conti-Atlas for  the Motorist’). The map directly above shows the renaming of street names in Weimar by that date. After World War II, Adolf Hitler Strasse was renamed by the DDR government  Ernst-Thälmann Strasse. I am a terrible map reader and cannot tell from the book I mentioned in the previous post (Weimars Stadtbild ...) what the street's name was in Goethe's day.

Goethe's Garden House

Setting of Goethe's Garden House (click to enlarge)

The diary entries of winter and spring 1777 concerning the garden house, the mention of workmen and further work on the roof, got me interested in exploring it. According to Nicholas Boyle, Goethe took possession of the two-storied cottage in April 1776. More or less a ruin, it required several months of repair before it was habitable. Boyle writes that the duke employed up to 26 workmen at a time, repairing roof and floors, painting walls, clearing the garden, while court carpenter Johann Martin Mieding constructed furniture: a 3-part pine dining table and two beds, one for Goethe, the other for Seidel. Boyle speaks of the hut as allowing Goethe to live out “Werther’s fantasy of the simple life at a symbolic, but not inconvenient, distance from the town,” where he spent half his time and also had an emergency apartment for his use. Goethe’s diaries of early 1777

Wolfgang Vulpius (1897–1978) has a take on Goethe's early years in Weimar that throws a different light on the garden house. Vulpius, a  literary scholar and writer, was a descendent of Christian August Vulpius, brother of Christiana. Wolfgang published in 1955 — thus, when Weimar was still in the DDR — Goethe in Thüringen: Stätten seines Lebens und Wirkens, which I have in my possession. He touches on practically every place in Thuringia that Goethe visited or in which he left some trace of himself, not only the big names (Erfurt, Gotha, Ilmenau), but also places unfamiliar to me (Paulinzella, Pößneck, Kötschau).

According to Goethe In Thüringen, biographies of Goethe dwell on the court life and the literary pursuits but shortchange the effect of the “new world” that Weimar revealed to him, “eine grenzenlos weite, unerschöplich reiche: die Natur.” According to Vulpius, before Weimar Goethe’s acquaintance with the world of “natural produce” (Naturerzeugnisse) consisted of table fruit (Tafelobst) and ornamental gardens. Vulpius drew my attention to “Die Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums” of 1817 in Goethe’s morphological writings, which opens as follows:

Sogleich bei meinem Eintritt in den edlen weimarischen Lebenskreis ward mir der unschätzbare Gewinn zuteil, Stuben- und Stadtluft mit Land-, Wald- und Gartenatmosphäre zu vertauschen.

Goethe continues in the opening paragraph to mention that in his first winter in Weimar, while partaking in the pleasures of the chase and hunt, activities that most of us are familiar with, he had many conversations with foresters about “Holzkultur.” In the rest of the text he gives credit to the many individuals who imparted botanical instruction: Dr. Buchholz (“Inhaber der Stadtapotheke am Markt”), Johann Friedrich August Göttling, Johann Georg Karl Batsch, Friedrich Gottlieb Dietrich. The basis of botanical knowledge was Linnaean, and it was the young Friedrich Gottlieb who explained the Linnaean classification to him, while Linnaeus’ Philosophy of Botany became his daily study. It is here that Goethe writes that the greatest influence on him, after Spinoza and Shakespeare, was Linnaeus.

Already in 1776, according to Boyle, Goethe planted lime trees, and in 1777 oaks and beeches, spruce and Juniper. Jasmine, honeysuckle, and climbing roses soon decorated the place, and before long he was sending fresh vegetable from his garden to Frau von Stein. It strikes me that Goethe was not simply living Werther’s fantasy of the simple life, but was making a home for himself in a very un-Werther kind of way.

The very cool images here (click to enlarge) come from Weimars Stadtbild 1784-1828-1900 (Mit den Strassennamen und einen Stadtplan zur Zeit von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) by Guido Schnaubert.

Winter in Weimar 1777

I was reviewing some of my recent Goethe Tweets and noticed something interesting.

Goethe was supervising the work on his Gartenhaus on this day in 1777. The roof seemed to have some problems, and, as he wrote in his diary for this day, he was "den ganzen Tag unter den Arbeitern." What might the weather have been in Weimar at the end of March of that year? Maybe not too bad -- just as it is pretty warm this day of 2020 in New York City, with cherry blossoms and forsythia already in bloom in Central Park and people wearing shorts and on bikes -- but if I return to an earlier Tweet, that of January 3, I see that Goethe, besides dictating the first act of Lila, spent the entire day "Im Garten." Did he have a nice warm winter coat?

Entrance to Central Park, March 27

The person to whom he dictated Lila was presumably Philipp Seidel, who had accompanied Goethe from Frankfurt and who, until Christiana moved into the Gartenhaus in 1788, organized most of Goethe's private activities. The relationship between him and Goethe was so close that Philipp was the only person who knew in advance of Goethe's plan to travel to Italy.

Goethe utilized the talents of various scribes, and there have been illustrations of Goethe dictating in later years. In fact, I did a post on Goethe and his scribes back in 2015, and the image I used showed Goethe and the scribe in full-length coats. The picture of Goethe's work space in the garden house at the top of the post suggests a cozy little room, but it must have been pretty cold there at the beginning of January 1777.

Image credit: Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Goethe and Yeats

Phillinen Crowning Wilhelm With a Wreath

This post follows up on the previous one, concerning poetic reinvention, which few poets manage to do, Goethe being an exception and perhaps Yeats. The article I referred to in that post had a footnote to an article on the subject of the title of this post by the wonderful poetry critic and scholar Marjorie Perloff. Her article dates back to 1971, which shows that good scholarship does not go out of date.

Perloff begins by mentioning the writers that led Yeats to Goethe, even as Yeats read no German, namely, Walter Pater and Edward Dowden, the latter an Irish professor of English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, while also president of the English Goethe Society from 1886 to 1908. Dowden translated the West-East Divan. An instructive comment regarding the subject of re-invention occurs in the introduction to the translation (edited by Dowden's wife on its posthumous publication in 1914): "The Divan is the product of Goethe's Indian Summer of art-life, the rejuvenescence that came when he was sixty-five." In this connection, Perloff mentions Yeats' Crazy Jane lyrics and "the rhapsodizing of the joys of sexual life in [Yeats' letters]" in 1930, when he was sixty-five.

When Perloff wrote her article, Yeats' library had not yet been catalogued (has it since then?), so that it was difficult to know which works of Goethe Yeats had read. Despite his deficiency in the German language, however, it appears that he "obviously" knew Werther, Faust, and "the major lyrics," and may well have known Egmont, Tasso, and Iphigenia. The most influential works, however, were Wilhelm Meister, the John Oxenford translation of the conversations with Eckermann, and the Oxenford translation of Goethe's autobiography, which appeared in 1848 (not 1948).

I am not a Yeats' scholar, so I will not go into the particulars of what Yeats absorbed from reading Goethe, especially on the nature of "the Doctrine of the Mask" or the concept of "self-unity." (For those interested, the article is available on JSTOR.) Apparently, Yeats took from Wilhelm Meister less the plot or the characters than its themes, which he seemed to have used as a "book of wisdom." In this connection and in light of what I learned about Yeats' enthusiasm for Eckermann's conversations,  I cannot help thinking of my recent posts on Eckermann pastiches as well as on the appropriation of Goethe's words for all manner of commerce, prophecy, and self-help.

So, in this connection, Perloff quotes William Butler Yeats paraphrasing Goethe in "Anima Hominis" (1917):

"I think that all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours in the events of life, and that, as somebody says in Wilhelm Meister, accident is destiny."

As I did in the earlier posts mentioned above, let us see what Google Translate makes of this:

"Ich denke, dass alle religiösen Männer geglaubt haben, dass es in den Ereignissen des Lebens eine Hand gibt, die nicht unsere ist, und dass, wie jemand in Wilhelm Meister sagt, Zufall Schicksal ist."

To my ears, this sounds too prosaic for Goethe, granted that his thinking ran along these lines.

Image credit: Look and Learn History Picture Archive

Goethe's poetic reinvention

I came across an interesting comment about Goethe in an essay by the literary critic Graham Hough on the subject of "The Modernist Lyric." In the section in which Goethe is mentioned, Hough writes that long-form poetry became out of fashion in the 19th century: "The epic poem expresses a settled ethical choice; the lyric can be the expression of a transitory mood or a momentary illumination." This illumination or mood need not be consistent from lyric to lyric by the same poet, so "poetry becomes habituated to startling changes of mood and style."

The result, in the course of a poetic career, is that poets may find themselves "blocked" psychically. I mean, how much material can you dredge out of your subconscious or unconscious? Hough asserts that there are only three ways out of this psychic impasse:"alienation in the clinical sense"; reintegration on a lower level of insight and experience; and the successful individuation of disparate elements, leading to a more comprehensive experience on a higher level of insight." Literary history is littered with a number of "truncated literary careers," indicating that the last way out is the least common. And now the money quote:

"There are no Goethes in modern literature, and few poets whose lives show a long-sustained development, a perpetual re-creation of the self continued into late maturity of old age."

The one outstanding exception is Yeats. The reason, according to Hough, offers a similarity to Goethe's poetic trajectory, In the case of Yeats, Hough attributes his success in part to "a gift of fortune -- the fortune that cast his lot in with that of a small country, comprehensible by individual intelligence and will, rather than with the vast inhospitable movements of the wider world."

Without doubt, the move to Weimar led to a break in the poetic production that characterized Goethe's Sturm und Drang work, after which it took years for the "new Goethe" to appear. The break has intrigued me since I wrote my dissertation, which was precisely on the subject of the pre-Weimar Goethe. Goethe was scarcely cut off from the wider world in Weimar, but it was a "small" and "comprehensible" place in which he had the freedom to nourish his genius and constantly to transform himself.

Goethe in Weimar 1777

There is nothing like a Singspiel to take your mind off of unpleasant subjects and situations. I am referring to Lila, which, as mentioned in my previous post, Goethe was preparing for the duchess's birthday in January of 1777. This diversionary aspect must account for the popularity of this genre of entertainment. And consider this: who imagined that the courtly world would be coming to an end by the end of the century? Such questions are on my mind in connection with the corona virus. There is nothing like immersing oneself in Goethe to keep social distance from the obsession that people (myself included) are beginning to feel. No conversation escapes from discussing it. So, I turn anew to Goethe.

I apologize in advance for the TBC at the end of this post. I am trying to bring together various elements of Goethe's life in Weimar in 1777, of which Singspiel is part (and which Goethe's Tweets to some extent document). The present post is one of these elements.

While I mentioned in my last post that Goethe was becoming fully immersed in the court culture at Weimar, I referenced a letter to Lavater. In fact, there are several letters to Lavater at this time, in connection with the Physiognomische Fragmente, and also to Philip Reich, the Leipzig publisher of the project. As can be seen in the several letters from the early part of 1777, Goethe was apparently handling the transaction with Reich. The Goethe-Handbuch has two excellent contributions by Karl Pestalozzi, one on the Fragmente and Goethe's participation in the project, and the other on Lavater himself, detailing the relationship of Goethe with Lavater, both the early acquaintance and the later estrangement. The letter to Lavater I quoted in the preceding post ends with the following, which seems to indicate that the terms of the relationship are becoming hardened:

Dein Durst nach Christ. hat mich gejammert. Du bist übler daran als wir Heiden und erscheinen doch in der Noth unsre Götter.

TO BE CONTINUED