Year Four in Weimar Begins

Goethe and Carl August in conversation

Wilhelm Bode, in his book Goethes Leben im Garten am Stern, notes at the beginning of the chapter entitled "Das vierte Jahr: November 1778 to November 1779" a change in the circumstances of Goethe's status in Weimar. He begins by writing that three years earlier the consensus in Weimar would have held that Goethe was not qualified to occupy the office of privy councilor. By the end of 1778, however, his friends might have asked whether he wasn't too great and too good (zu groß und zu gut) for the job. His tasks, as he writes, were to deal always with petty men with petty goals. And indeed, in the month of December 1778, Goethe gives voice in his diary to his feelings about the office. The entries are so long that I gave up Tweeting  them and have decided to summarize here some of his thoughts in the final days of 1778. They show him coming to terms with the new situation. He is coming down to Earth after having been regarded as a "Genie" and realizing what he has got himself into.

On December 14, for example, after reporting about a fire at the school, he mentions a conversation with Carl August about "politics and laws" (Pol. und Gesezze) and notes that they had different notions about the matters. He continues that he may not speak his own opinions. They would be easy to misunderstand and might then be dangerous. There then follows a passage in which he reflects on the difficulty of bettering incorrigible human evils and circumstances. (Paste in Google translate, if necessary.)

[man] verliert die Zeit und verdirbt noch mehr statt dass man diese Mängel annehmen sollte gleichsam als Grundstoff und nachher suchen diese zu kontrebalanciren. Das schönste Gefühl des Ideals wäre wenn man immer rein fühlte warum man's nicht erreichen kann.

On December 15 he writes that he is spending time in architectural drawing in order to distance himself. Then there follows an interesting comment. It seems that while speaking with his friend Knebel about society's disorders (Schiefheiten). the conversation came to a discussion of how his own situation looked from outside. "From outside," he emphasizes, then goes on:

Wenn man mit einem lebt soll man mit allen eben, einen hört, soll man alle hören. Vor sich allein ist man wohl rein, ein andrer verrückt uns die Vorstellung durch seine, hört man den dritten so kommt man durch die Parallaxe wieder aufs erste wahre zurück.

With only the evidence of the diary, it is hard for me to say (although maybe a reader will have a different take on this) whether he is indicating what Knebel has said, or whether this last is Goethe speaking his own opinion. What follows, however suggests that Knebel is giving him some insights into the situation of the privy council itself, as von Fritsch, who was not happy when Goethe was elevated to the council, is mentioned.

The entries for 1778 conclude with this lapidary sentence: "New grievances grow daily and never more so than when you think one has been taken care of" (Es wächsen täglich neue Beschwerden, und niemals mehr als wenn man Eine glaubt gehoben zu haben).

Image credit: Goethe Was Here

Goethe as Thinker? Goethe as Scientist?

To what extent do the above terms apply to Goethe? Consider the first. It can’t be denied that Goethe was a thinker in the sense of a person who did a lot of thinking. The proof is in his writings, as well as in reports of conversations with contemporaries. But if we consider some of the thinkers of his age and the influence they had during their lifetime — e.g., Kant, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot — Goethe cannot be said to have belonged in such company.  Kant and Hume were both philosophers and created philosophical systems, while the influence of the three Frenchmen was in the realm of ideas in the service of contemporary social and political life. In his lifetime Goethe came to occupy an important cultural and literary position, but he wasn’t a “thinker” in that class. It was only after his death in 1832 that he was portrayed as oracular, when he began to be regarded as an important thinker, but the content of the oracles has been changeable. “Goethe, for instance, can’t be pinned down the way one can “Kafkaesqe” or “Orwellian.”

Goethe’s scientific interests were in the field of natural science, which encompassed fields we today identify as botany, geology, paleontology, zoology, and so on. In monasteries in the Middle Ages there was already extensive collections of plants, and this continued in the Renaissance with scholars documenting animal, insects, plant life and all manner of earth forms. Some important natural scientists in Goethe's lifetime were the Count de Buffon, Charles Bonnet, and Albrecht Haller. One of the greatest natural scientists of Goethe’s era was his friend Alexander von Humboldt. As Wikipedia puts it, natural science is less experimental than it is observational.

Goethe had use of laboratories for his scientific researches, including that of the well-established one at the court in Gotha, where he was a favored visitor. But for Goethe, the eyes were important, the perception of what was before our eyes, not the “unseen” elements that make up the building blocks of modern-day science. “Gegenständliches Denken” was his own term for describing his intellection. Thus, the difference between natural science and what have become the modern scientific disciplines of chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, and their continuing branchings and flowerings into the present. Goethe was adamantly opposed to what is called such “system building,” and thus immediate predecessors in respect of science were not Euler, Lavoisier, Herschel, or Priestly. Instead, Goethe is part of a long and venerable transmission that includes such observers as Aristotle and extending to Charles Darwin and beyond. 

There are dozens of articles on the internet regarding Goethe as a scientist, so the above is as minimal as I can make things.

The questions in the title of this post are prompted by two recently published articles by Michael Saman, one in the Goethe Yearbook (vol. 27 [2020]), the second in German Quarterly (vol. 94, 4 [2021]). Saman quotes Tzvetan Todorov to the effect that while “Goethe himself had expected his scientific writings to have their most lasting impact on the study of nature, they instead ‘have fallen into oblivion’ in that area, and, ‘since the 1920s, [...] have found an ever-increasing echo among literary scholars, psychologists, and anthropologists, such that one could say that out of all of Goethe’s intellectual legacy, it is precisely his writings on nature that have most strongly influenced the specialists in culture!” Thus, Goethe as thinker.

Saman investigates this influence on the discipline of “social science,” in particular in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp. Lévi-Strauss is best known for his studies in anthropology, and Propp for his work on folklore. And while both these men assembled amazing collections of empirical data, just as do practitioners of natural science, it is not from the tangible bones of the earth and the flowers of field. It is human behavioral practices that constitute the “data.”

While Saman stresses that Lévi-Strauss, like Goethe, had no interest in being a philosophical thinker, the “science of the concrete” that unites them still uses the word science if science means ultimate the representation of something abstract, say, types. Propp, who knew Goethe’s scientific writings well, also spoke of “laws” that were equally valid for the realms of nature and human creativity and “that can be investigated with similar methods.” In Lévi-Strauss we are dealing with what has become known as “structuralism,” whereas Propp’s method is “formalism.” Both present, not “a mere descriptive catalogue of so-called facts” (Saman quotes sociologist Sverre Holm here who calls Goethe a model for social science) but also “types,” “structures” and the like, which are not visible to the naked eye.  Goethe, after all, in his botanical research, sought to discern “the relations that unify” the facts on the ground.

Saman’s articles are well written (distinguishing them from much scholarly writing) and I liked reading his attempt to distinguish structuralism and formalism and the account of the scholarly feud between Lévi-Strauss and Propp. For my part, I have always found structuralism off-putting — I find it ultimately abstract — whereas Propp’s system strikes me as a literary scholar as intuitively of interest. I feel the same way of a similar proponent of formalism, André Jolles, to whom I earlier devoted a blogpost. Reading traditional tales with Propp or Jolles in mind, I find that the reading is enriched.

As I mentioned in my review in the Times Literary Supplement of a book by Stephen Bollmann, there is much interest of late in the “Green Goethe,” I think it is more apt to place Goethe here in the domain of natural science. So, in that respect there can be no doubt that Goethe qualifies as both thinker and scientist.

Image: Semantics Scholar
 

Goethe Is Everywhere

The Goethe Global project is something I should have posted on long ago, but things have piled up so much that I haven't posted at all for over a month. Several months ago I was contacted by "The Goethe Global Team," which announced the creation of a new website in order to raise Goethe’s popularity among English speakers worldwide. Further, "On the website, we provide Goethe quotes in English, often newly translated, with the German original and the exact source. In addition, we link to free versions of some of Goethe’s works in English and to online resources about Goethe in English."

After some back and forth I agreed to list the website on my blogroll, but (again, lack of time) did not include a blogpost about it. I think the best way to inform readers of this blog about the site is to provide a link to the blog of Cynthia Haven's website The Book Haven, which tells more about the activities of Tino Markworth and The Goethe Global Team. Cynthia mentions Markworth's other passion: he organized the first international conference on Bob Dylan in 1998 at Stanford, which attracted more than 400 people. If you are looking for Goethe wisdom in English, the categories of translation range from action, advice, aging to world of delusion, writing, and youth.

I've mentioned elsewhere that Goethe turns up in the darndest places, which is why, when I open a scholarly book, I immediately turn to the index. One is often sure to find him there. Here is a link to something found on the internet: the Goethe Project 2021. The intention is to read Goethe's works in English in 2021. It is late in the year, but here is a link to the reading schedule. The site was founded by two grad students in Classics at NYU. Bravo.

The last item for today concerns a piece by Edward Luttwak that appeared in the London Review of Books of June 3, 2021, entitled "Goethe in China." Luttwak is of the opinion that the founder of the project to translate "all" of Goethe's works into Chinese must be recruiting "every qualified Chinese Germanist" there is. (How many can there be in China, anyway?) This founder is Wei Mao-ping, dean of the School of Germanic Studies at Shanghai International Studies University. (See link to project here.) Such a project requires lots of financing, and Luttwak writes that a major "paying customer" must be  Xi Junping, "the only world leader who knows Faust by heart." At least, so he boasted to Angela Merkel on meeting her.

This reading experience took place when Xi was being "re-educated" at the age of 15 in rural China, when another teenager in exile lent him a copy of Faust.  The translator was Guo Moruo (1892-1978), "a consciously Faustian character himself, though his own, widely accepted claim was that he was China's Goethe." His exceptional prominence as a poet and scholar and early supporter of Mao might not have saved him during the Cultural Revolution, but, when the Guards came after him, he had a self-critical text ready that declared the counter-revolutionary nature of his earlier writings. He even remained silent when the Red Guards persecuted two of his sons, who later committed suicide in order to avoid further torture.

Luttwak describes the fall from grace of Xi's own father (leading to abuse and imprisonment for 16 years), which apparently did nothing to cause the present Chinese leader to turn against the regime. Something to keep in mind.

Goethe and Anton Reiser

I am finally getting around to the continuation of the previous post, in which I mentioned what I saw as a connection between Goethe's account of the shoemaker in Leipzig and the account in Anton Reiser of AR's apprenticeship experience. In Goethe's account of his visit to Leipzig, the shoemaker is good hearted and philosophic, a joy to be around. In AR's account, the milliner in his cruelty is Dickensian avant la lettre.

Goethe and the Philosophical Shoemaker

It was not simply that particular contrast that made me think that Goethe had the character of Anton Reiser in mind when he wrote about the shoemaker in Book 8 of Dichtung und Wahrheit. That book, along with the last part of Book 6 and the entire Book 7, concerns Goethe's residence in Leipzig, and in particular his mentors, including the wife of Professor Böhme, Oeser, Behrisch, and even an officer who had fought in the Seven Years' War and to whom young Goethe confided his confusion concerning the nature of "Erfahrung." Each of these individuals was important in some way for Goethe's development. In Anton Reiser, in contrast, Anton also has several mentors who endeavor to assist him to rise from the narrow, impecunious circumstances in which he was raised. In every case, however, good fortune is followed by bad fortune.

What made me bring these two cases into connection was the opening paragraph of Book 9. Goethe is back home Frankfurt, after a less than stellar legal studies in Leipzig. It begins with a quote from a review by the classical philologist Heyne, which seems to sum up the real experience of Leipzig for Goethe. Here is part of the quote:

[W[ir haben eine Einbildiungskraft, der wir, wofern sie sich nicht der ersten besten Vorsellungen selbst bemächtigen soll, die schicklichsen und schönsten Bilder vorlegen und dadurch das Gemüt gewöhnen und üben müssen, das Schöne überall und in der Natur selbst, unter seinen bestimmten, wahren und auch in den feineren Zügen zu erkennen und zu lieben. Wir haben eine Menge Begriffe und allgemeine Kenntinisse nötig, sowohl für die Wissenschaften als für das täglich Leben, die sich in keinem Kompendio erlernen lassen. Unsere Empfindungen, Neigungen, Leidenschaften sollten mit Vorteil entwickelt und gereinigt werden.

Anton Reiser, of course, is never in control of is his imagination, which is always painting pictures of success, whether it be as an actor or a poet. It takes him so far afield that, whenever an opportunity comes his way for betterment, he is so far carried away by the glorioius prospect that his feet seem not to be on the ground. The result is that he ends up being cast down by what he perceives as his failure. The novel is a daunting story of what we might call today manic-depression. What Bodmer wrote of poetic enthusiasm (in his 1727 treatise Von dem Einfluss und Gebrauche der Einbildungskraft) applies to Anton Reiser:

[Sie] jagt die Einbildungs-Krafft in eine ausserordentliche Hitze, und führet den Dichter gleichsam ausser sich selbst, daß er die Einbildungen von den Empfindungen nicht unterscheiden kan, die gerichts von dem Gegenstand, dem wir wircklich, vor dem Gesicht haben, abkommen; sondern meinet er sehe und fühle die Dinge gegenwärtig.

For Goethe, of course, imagination was extremely important, but he had a different personality (to use another modern term) from Reiser. We know that he was occasionally petulant when criticized, but he seems to have been fortunate in being more grounded, so to speak, and was able to take his time, to allow himself to be led by those wiser than himself. As I read on in Der junge Goethe and in the autobiography, this is very apparent in his encounters with men like Herder and Merck.

Anyway, take it as you like. As I wrote in the previous post, one cannot know what was on Goethe's mind when he wrote this account of his early "apprenticeship," but his acquaintance in Rome with Karl Philipp Moritz, author of Anton Reiser, is suggestive of the many influences that affected his writing.

Image credit: AKG images

Goethe in Dresden

Adriaen van Ostad, The Painter in His Studio

When I have an idea for a blog post, I always imagine it can be accomplished quickly. And, yet, every post on Goethe takes me far afield, because there are so many trails that lead from him or to him. I have a feeling that this will be a two-parter.

Take the case of Goethe’s visit to Dresden in 1768, when he was a student in Leipzig. My original idea for this post came from my recent re-reading of books 7 and 8 of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit and, in particular the episode of the shoemaker, a relative of a fellow student of Goethe’s in Leipzig. Of all the bad luck, the two pages dealing with that visit are missing in the electronic file of Loeper that I have been reading in conjunction with the autobiography. Trunz, however, in his commentary, asserts that the shoemaker was real, if not the details that Goethe describes concerning his visit and lodgings with the shoemaker. On meeting the man, Goethe engaged with him in a lighthearted conversation that showed the shoemaker to be something of a wit. Goethe felt right at home in this humble dwelling. On his return to the lodgings for lunch after his morning outing to the Dresden gallery, he writes that he could hardly believe his eyes: a scene from a painting by the 17th-century Dutch painter Adriaen Ostade, a scene so perfect that one could imagine it hanging in the gallery itself.

Stellung der Gegenstände, Licht, Schatten, bräunlicher Teint des Ganzen, magische Haltung, alles, was man in jenen Bildern bewundert, sah ich hier in der Wirklichkeit.

 (If necessary, cut and past German quote in Google Translate.)

It’s not known which painting of Ostade Goethe actually saw. Dresden today has lots of paintings by the artist, but I liked the one above, which seems to reflect what might have appealed to Goethe, as per Wikipedia: Ostade “is distinguished from his rivals by a more general use of light and shade, especially a greater concentration of light on a small surface in contrast with a broad expanse of gloom.”

That evening, on returning home near midnight, making his way to his quarters, Goethe again describes the setting in reference to another Netherlandic painter, Godfried Schalken:

Die Türen fand ich unverschlossen, alles war zu Bette, und eine Lampe erleuchtete den enghäuslichen Zustand, wo denn mein immer mehr geübtes Auge sogleich das schönste Bild von Schalcken erblickte, von dem ich mich nicht losmachen konnte, so daß es mir allen Schlaf vertrieb.

Godfried Schalken, Girl Reading a Letter

Again, Wikipedia offers information on the painter that resonates with Goethe's description: "a Dutch genre and portrait painter. He was noted for his mastery in reproducing the effect of candlelight," Further, Schalcken specialized in scenes by candlelight."

In a certain way, this coincidence of Goethe’s visit to the magnificent galleries in Dresden with his meeting with a humble craftsman reminds me of certain experiences I had in my youth when I traveled in Europe and later in Asia. Being a student, I did not have a lot of money and did not stay in grand hotels. At the time of those travels, however, the exchange rate was favorable to Americans. It really was the era when you carried in your backpack a copy of Paris on $5 a day or Asia on a Shoestring. Those days of course are long over, but I often stayed in lodgings like that of the shoemaker and had experiences similar to that of Goethe in Dresden.

It has taken me a while to arrive finally at the idea that initiated this blogpost, namely, that I could not help being struck by the difference between Goethe’s view of a craftsman’s life and circumstances from the experience of Anton Reiser, who spent a couple of years of a really awful apprenticeship with another craftsman, a milliner (Hutmacher) in Braunschweig named Lobenstein. Goethe of course knew Karl Philipp Moritz’s novel, having read portions of it in Rome when he first met Moritz. The description of Reiser’s apprenticeship is contained in the first part of the novel. It is impossible to trace every influence on an artist or a writer, for instance, whether Anton Reiser’s experience inspired the creation of the shoemaker in Dresden. It is not, however, the shoemaker episode itself that makes me suspect a relationship between Goethe’s account here and the "person" of Anton Reiser. As I wrote above, this will be a two-parter, and I will attempt in the next post to strengthen the connection between the episode in Goethe's autobiography and Anton Reiser.

Image credits: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister

Happy Birthday, Goethe

Drawing of Gerbermühle by Boisserée

 The Canadian embargo on American visitors was lifted on August 9, and on August 12 Goethe Girl flew to the small island in British Columbia where she has spent almost a decade of summers. She got through the lockdown in New York without major or even minor incidents, but the loss of her visit to B.C. last summer was keenly felt. Since she is staying here only a month, she is restricting herself to one Goethe project, which includes reading some very early scholarship on Goethe’s pre-Weimar years, most of which is online (thus, no need to carry books while traveling). One of these books, a short volume entitled Goethe und Frankfurt am Main: Die Beziehungen des Dichters zu seiner Vaterstadt (published 1876), is by Wilhelm Friedrich Karl Stricker.

Since today, August 28, is Goethe’s birthday, let us quote details from Stricker concerning the festivities for on his sixty-sixth birthday in 1815, which took place at the Gerbermühle, country get-away of the banker Johann Jacob von Willemer and his wife Marianne. There is a prehistory to this visit and Goethe’s acquaintance with Marianne, in whom Goethe, according to Bielschowsky in his biography, discovered his “love nucleus” for the Divan.

In 1814, Goethe had traveled to the Rhine and Main region of his youth. Peace had been restored and he wished to take a cure in Wiesbaden. He had begun work on his Divan. The first word in his travel journal was “Hafiz,” and indeed the journal shows him rejuvenated. It was in September that he went to Frankfurt, his first visit since his mother’s death in 1808. It was there that he met Willemer, a patron of the theater in Frankfurt and with whom he was already acquainted, and Marianne. On October 18 he visited the Willemers at the Gerbermühle. As Stricker writes of the effect of this 1814 visit:  

So flüchtig diese Begegnung war, so nachhaltig waren ihre Folgen; haben wir doch in ihr vielleicht das bestimmende Motiv für die zweite Rheinreise zu suchen.

Johann Jacob Willemer

According to the Wikipedia article on him, Willemer afterward wrote to Goethe and offered him a retreat (something like I enjoy here in British Columbia): “Erholen sie sich doch bald von den Beschwerden des Winters zu Weimar an den Ufern des Mains. Sie könnten ja die Vor-Kur zu Oberrad einleiten und bei uns auf der Mühle wohnen.”

And so in 1815 Goethe traveled for the second time to the Rhein and Main region, staying in the Gerbermühle from the end of May until past the middle of July. He undertook other travels while in this region, for instance, revisiting the Roman antiquities in Mainz, which he had seen before leaving to study in Strassburg decades earlier, and he also was in contact with Sulpiz Boisserée, with whom he had spent time the previous year studying his collection of medieval art. It was with Boisserée that he returned in August 1815 to the Gerbermühle. The evening of August 27 began a grand birthday celebration, arranged by Boisserée, Here is Boisserée’s account (I, 271), quoted by Stricker:

Die Familie Willemer, Herr Scharf und seine Frau, Fritz Schlosser, der Kastenschreiber Riese, und Seebeck sind schon mit dem alten Herrn beim Frühstück versammelt.  Das große Gartenhaus war ganz mit Schilf ausgeziert, wie Palmenbäume zwischen den Fenstern gebunden, oben überhängend. An der hinteren Wand, wo der Alte saß, war ein großer Spitzschild von Laubkränzen angebracht, darinnen ein runder Kranz von Blumen, nach der Farbentheorie geordnet.

The ladies of the house, who included Marianne and the daughter of her husband, presented Goethe with baskets, one containing beautiful fruits, the other gorgeous flowers, mostly foreign. On the basket was a turban of the finest Indian muslin, garlanded with a laurel wreath: “alles in Anspielung auf seine jetzige Liebhaberei für die orientalische Poesie, besonders weil auch unter seinen Gedichten ein großes Lob des Turbans vorkommt.”

Willemer toasted Goethe’s health with a 1748 Rhine wine. There is much more in the account, with birthday greetings and visitors pouring in from all sides. It is somewhat sad to see Goethe referred to as “der Alte.” I wonder what he made of such veneration. He was probably used to it by this time. The mill in any case turned out to be a good place to work on the Divan, which he continue to do mornings until September 15, while spending evenings with Marianne exchanging verse.

Among the above-mentioned personalities at the birthday party, two might be noted: Johann Jacob Riese, Goethe’s childhood friend and one of the few from his early years with whom he maintained a lifelong connection; and Johann Thomas Seebeck, a physicist who worked with Goethe on his color theory.

Speaking of the Rhine/Main region, I would like to add that Goethe, during his travels there in 1814, also visited Winkel, the country seat of Peter and Antonie Brentano, spending eight days visiting the Rheingau. It turns out that Goethe Girl herself was in Winkel 213 years later. See my post “Goethe in Rheingau,” which has some details of Goethe’s comments on his visit there. The photo of Goethe Girl with the bottle of “Goethe Wine” was taken at the nearby Schloß Vollrads.

Image of Willemer from 1793 by Joseph Nicolaus Peroux

Goethe and the literary inheritance

Francis Daniel Pastorius

This post is an expansion of the previous one.

There is current among literary scholars to interpret earlier writers in terms of what their writings telegraph, so to speak, about current preoccupations. This current of scholarship “reads forward.” If we go back to the 18th century, we will of course discover that some writers shared certain modern preoccupations, for instance, concerning colonialism, racism, imperialism, feminism, and so on. But even when we find that an earlier writer was an outspoken opponent of slavery, it usually turns out that the writer came to the subject from a different perspective. For instance, the majority of abolitionists were deeply religious people and did not necessarily share such modern values as equality, a value that has been legally institutionalized in the West. The idea of such civil rights were in nuce back in the 18th century, and codifying them has simply “naturalized” them. That is fine, but in the process we tend to imagine that we are smarter than our forefathers and foremothers.

For myself, I do look for ways in which Goethe telegraphs “modernity,” but whenever I look at portraits (such as those in those in the previous post) of men from the Republic of Letters (and they were for the most part men), from law, religion, philosophy, natural science, and literature, I cannot but feel the difference of the world in which Goethe came of age and wrote his most important works. Still, the late 18th century was an age of transition, from traditional ways of living and organizing life, handed down over generations, to what Goethe himself characterized (in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre) as the “veloziferic” era.

My desire is to ferret out what Goethe knew from living in the world in which he lived. All the annotations that Strack notes of Goethe’s indebtedness to precursors is simply the way that earlier poets acknowledged their legitimacy within an evolving tradition.  It strikes me that Goethe’s “Ephemerides,” discussed in the previous post, is an early attempt at a commonplace book, in which he would compile matters of intellectual and literary interest.

Commonplace books are the subject of a chapter in a new book (recently reviewed in the London Review of Books) by Anthony Grafton entitled Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe. It is a series of portraits of scholars from the 16th to the 18th century who sought to compile and transmit the centuries of knowledge written down in medieval manuscripts. This knowledge of the past, as the reviewer writes, “was gained only through hard graft and expertise.” One learns that these scholars created special equipment for the backbreaking, hand-wrenching work: rotating bookwheels for unwieldy large medieval volumes, along with spinning chairs and hooks on which to hang thousands of piece of paper on which they wrote notes.

All this knowledge, excerpted on slips of paper, was organized into categories and written down in commonplace books. One of Grafton’s portraits of these “treasure seekers” was Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651–1720), whose commonplace books contained “not only excerpts from ancient texts but also jokes, stories, reflections, recipes …” It strikes me that Goethe’s “Ephemerides” is an early attempt at a commonplace book, in which he would compile matters of intellectual and literary interest. In fact, there are some jokes in the Ephemerides, including this one: Altum petit ut crepitus in balneo redditus. According to the commentary in Der junge Goethe, this was “ein derber, im 16. Jh. verbreiteter Witz.” Google Translate offers little enlightenment on the punchline. As Grafton writes of such witticisms: “You had to be there.”

However much Goethe criticized old-fashioned scholars — there are entries in the Ephemerides on this subject — reading itself remained for him what Grafton writes of Pastorius, “a deeply serious enterprise.” All of what he read became part of the identity he crafted for himself, which was founded in his polyglot reading and writing. In the Ephemerides he appears simply to be hunting and gathering, so to speak, which would eventually add up to a larger body of work. I am going out on a limb here, because the Maximen and Reflexonen, for instance, is not my area of expertise, but it strikes me that Goethe must have been storing up these apercus for years. He would later have the assistance of a number of secretaries in categorizing them. Someone reading this blog might fill me in on this aspect, which I will then pass on here.

Mephisto and Student by Julius Oldach

Pastorius was of course the founder of Germantown in Pennsylvania. As Wikipedia puts it: “ein deutscher Jurist. Er begründete die Deutsche Überseewanderung und war der einzige deutsche Schriftsteller des Barock in Amerika.” He came from a learned family. According to Grafton, his father, the jurist Melchior Adam Pastorius, was "a compiler on the grand scale and a versifier almost as obsessive as his son. In 1657 he issued a massive study of the election and coronation of the Holy Roman emperors.” His son, who had begun his studies in Altorf, wrote of the tedium of the traditional forms of learning at the university, criticizing the professors who pursued erudition for its own sake, which echoes Goethe’s own complaints about his studies in Leipzig: “Many professors waste their time on useless questions and clever trifling tricks, and while they detail the minds of the learners on empty questions they prevent them from aspiring to more solid matters.” Though learned himself, Pastorius wished to use “the records of the past to challenge what he saw as a sterile orthodoxy in his own day.” And to put it to practical effect, as, for instance, in his opposition to slavery, which existed even among the Quakers in Pennsylvania.  He compared Christian slavers to the Turks who enslaved Christians. With several other Germantown founders, he drafted in 1688 the first protest against slavery in America. Of note about Pastorius, is the lack of that head attire that distinguished the learned in the early 18th century. Unfortunately there seem to be no contemporary paintings of him, but we can take it from the drawing at the top of this post that he became a frontiersman.

I could go on — and will later do so — as I seek to uncover the influences that made Goethe into "Goethe."

Picture credits: Main Post; Science Photo; Kunstkopie