"Originality"

The first thing that caught my eye in Goethe Yearbook 15 was the section devoted to "Goethe and 20th-Century Theory," edited with Angus Nicholls. An essay in that section by Katrin Kohl is entitled "No Escape? Goethe's Strategies of Self-Projection and Their Role in German Literary Historiography." The question in the title refers to the dominant role played by the personality and work of Goethe in giving shape to German literary history. After all, whether we speak of "Weimar Classicism," "Goethe period," "Romanticism," "Storm and Stress," and so on, Goethe turns out to be not only "central to the history," as Kohl writes, but also throws all who follow him into the shade.

Such was his intention, according to Kohl, who quotes from an unpublished text from 1832 -- "Noch ein Wort für junge Dichter" -- in which Goethe speaks of himself as a liberator ("Befreyer"), insofar as young poets became aware, through his example, that "Der Künstler von innen heraus wirken müsse; indem er, gebärde er sich wie er will, immer nur sein Individuum zu Tage fördern wird," to which he adds, "nur auf diese Art ist es möglich Original zu seyn." In terms of German literary history, this view of himself as originator (expanded in his autobiography) has become a founding myth of German literary history. Before Goethe, all was darkness, when poets were unaware of the need for what Kohl calls an "individual creative impulse"; afterward, Goethe emerged "as the unique and enduring embodiment of German culture," meeting the requirements, as Kohl suggests, "of a nascent German nation that needed to construct a coherent cultural identity."

The appearance of the word "Original" in a late text surprised me, for it seemed to show, as late as the year of his death, of the persistence of a concept that I had thought was restricted to the "Genius" period, when that movement in German literature known as "Sturm und Drang" rejected the authority of poetic predecessors and instead invoked the creative power of individual subjectivity. And indeed Kohl begins her essay with a look at that period, for a look at the "origin" of Goethe's views on art, nature, and creativity.

In 1774, in a well-known letter to Fritz Jacobi, Goethe employed the metaphor of "reproduction" to describe writing:  "Sieh lieber, was doch alles schreibens anfang und Ende ist die Reproduckion der Welt um mich, durch die innre Welt die alles packet, verbindent, neuschafft, knetet und in eigner Form, Manier, wieder hinstellt ..."

The metaphor of reproduction, according to Kohl, indicates that Goethe was responding to the debate about poetic imitation in the 18th century and moving away from the neoclassical position of poetry as imitation of the best models. Instead, it is the "inner world" from which the poet "is capable of originating, fashioning, and controlling a work of art equivalent to the external world created by God and unique to the poet." In this connection, Kohl refers to a biblical passage, Job speaking to Yahweh ("Oh, remember that you fashioned me from clay!/ Will you then bring me down to dust again?"), which she juxtaposes with the fashioning by Prometheus of man from earth and water. Goethe's "Prometheus" ode, from 1773/74, in which the mythological figure emancipates himself from Jove and fashions a man in his own image, "could be understood," writes Kohl, "as a confident assertion of independence by the modern artist."

A couple of points. First, what kind of "world," really, is inside a person, be he poet or otherwise? A poet, like everyone else, has feelings, imagination, fantasy, rationality, sensibility, memory, experience, and so on, but how are these materialized into form except by words that the poet has inherited from people who spoke these words before him?

Second, the poet may have a world within that he would like to express, but creating art from himself cannot be compared to divine creation. God (in the "orthodox" view) did not create man from himself, but stood outside of his Creation. Thus, the painting by Michelangelo (who did not consider himself an "original") conveys the sense that God created a being that is separate from its creator, with an independent existence. Originals, however, drawing only on their own inner world, would only be able to "re-create" themselves. This suggests narcissism.

My point here is not to take issue with Kohl, whose analysis I find excellent. Her essay has merely allowed me to engage with the issue of "originality," a bête noire of mine.

Let me return to the "orthodox" view of Creation, according to which God created both man and woman. From them descended generations of humans and with them the products of human hand and intelligence, including art. The cultural inheritance traditionally had something biological about it, replicating the characteristics of previous generations in its transmission. For this reason, we can recognize works of art, for instance, distinguish painters by schools and trace their antecedents. I read many German writers of the "Anacreontic" persuasion when I was writing a chapter on Goethe's early poetry for my dissertation. The poems of Friedrich von Hagedorn (Des Herrn Friedrich von Hagedorns sämmtliche poetische Werke, 1775) actually include footnotes citing the poem that he is imitating in a particular instance. In other words, poets felt "legitimacy" as poets in being able to identify their poetic progenitors.

I use these biological metaphors advisedly, to draw attention to the rhetorical strategy of the 18th century "originals," a word radically at odds with its etymology. Originals, "re-producing" their inner world, have no origin, are self-created. While the literary originals assert their artistic independence and their lack of reverence for literary progenitors, this gesture mirrors a transformation going on in the social order in the 18th century, when men  (and it was men in this instance) began to be emancipated from the ties that bind.

As I have written earlier (Goethe Yearbook 10), in connection with Goethe's poem "Der Wanderer," originality or self-creation encapsulates the 21st-century terminus of a long process, during which the legitimacy of truly originating attachments -- family, the work, required to care for future generations, and so on -- has been gradually eroded. That this process was still in its infancy in the 18th century can be seen in Goethe's poem. The role of the nursing woman in that poem, in reproduction, creation, and indeed the process by which cultural products are passed on generationally, is in competition with the man, the "Wanderer," who is able to go out and create an independent existence for himself. Note the majestic gesture of independence in the painting by Caspar David Friedrich, from the year 1818. The creation of the modern world required independent souls, and artists were the first to give voice to this need.

Kohl opens her article with a quote from Harold Bloom who contends, in The Western Canon (1994), that "every Goethe text, however, divergent from the others, bears the mark of his unique and overwhelming personality, which cannot be evaded or deconstructed." Bloom also had something to say about Goethe that is relevant to the issue of originality: "Goethe, like Milton, absorbed precursors with gusto, evidently excluding anxiety." I would contend that the opposite is the case, that Goethe had "issues" with his literary forebears, and even the construction of his works often reflects his attempt to suppress or destroy them. Indeed, Arnd Bohm in his recent study of the European epic makes this point. In addressing Goethe's failure to write an epic, Bohm responds by saying that "Goethe did compose an epic poem, which has been hidden in plain view" (my italics), namely, Faust. (I love Bohm's subtitle, also relevant here: "Forgetting the Future.") Thus, the importance for Goethe of the concept of "Original," an instance of what Kohl calls Goethe's "self-projection throughout his career ... predicated on an internal, natural creative force that is independent of teachers and examples." By now, originality has become "naturalized," but it does have a history. Can its historiography be far behind?

Goethe Yearbook 15

The newest volume of the Goethe Yearbook, published by the Goethe Society of North America, arrived in the mail on Saturday. (Note the handsome logo of the Society on the cover of the Yearbook.) There are some familiar names among the contributors -- Judith Ryan on the aphorisms in Die Wahlverwandtschaften and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and Ellis Dye on the concept of "Sorge" in Heidegger and in Faust -- but also many new contributors. I am even represented with three book reviews.

In the next week or so I plan to comment on articles of interest to me, starting (tomorrow) with the one by Katrin Kohl on "Goethe's strategies of self-projection." Stay tuned.

Sesenheim

"We never would have gone to Sesenheim at all, if it had not been for Rhodora."

Who could resist a story that opens like one by Ford Madox Ford, recalling the visit of proper English and American gentlefolks at "Nauheim" in The Good Soldier? This opening, however, is from "Sesenheim," by an American named Bliss Perry, which appeared in the May 1889 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I came across it the other day while looking up something on Goethe. Perry (1860-1954) was an American scholar who edited, among others, the works of Edmund Burke, Sir Walter Scott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He also wrote a study of the works of Thomas Carlyle. He taught at Harvard and was also Harvard lecturer at the University of Paris, in 1909-1910.

"Sesenheim" as it appears in The Atlantic Monthly, is told by a first-person narrator who calls himself "the Scribe." He has been accompanying his friend John who "was inspecting the chemical laboratories of Germany universities." Rhodora, John's wife, is an American woman familiar from much fiction, with decided opinions. According to the Scribe she is a "delicate, sensitive, highly organized American woman." (Indeed, the name Rhodora sounds like "Leonora" in The Good Soldier, which, however, was not published until 1915.)

 

While the three of them are sightseeing in Strassburg, Rhodora notices the name of the owner on a bricabrac shop: "Brion": "'Brion,' she repeated. 'Brion? It must be a French name. ... Why, of course!' exclaimed Rhodora. 'Friederike Brion, Goethe's Friederike! John, Sesenheim must be near by, and I've always wanted to go here. It's so hot and dirty here; let's go to spend the Sunday at Sesenheim.'" And that, says the Scribe, is the reason the three happened to make a pilgrimage to the quiet Alsatian village, "whose sole claim to notice is that it was once the scene of a love episode more idyllic and more tenderly told than perhaps any other that ever won its gentle way into the world's literature."

The Scribe is dispatched -- it is Saturday afternoon -- "in search of a cheap edition of Dichtung und Wahrheit," which Rhodora claims to have read in her school days. Moreover, he also finds a tiny book on Friederike by "Pastor Lucius of Sesenheim." On the train the Scribe, with Dichtung und Wahrheit in one hand and the pastor's book in the other, is "deputed to read the important passages from the pastor's loving chronicle."

There follows a long passage rendering the events of the "Sesenheim idyll" (as recounted in books 9-11 of Goethe's autobiography): the ride of the brilliant, lovable 21-year-old student to Sesenheim in the autumn of 1770; the slender, light-haired daughter of the village pastor; the bright, tender, and infinitely winning letters; the verses with all the lyric passion of the "young Goethe"; the restiveness of genius; the departure without explanation; the final letter to her and her gentle answer, which "tore his heart." And then, years later, while journeying southward with the Duke of Weimar, Goethe stops at the parsonage, "to find all its inmates unchanged toward him, and Friederike calm and affectionate as of old, so that the next morning, at sunrise, he rode away from Sesenheim 'in peace,' as he wrote Frau von Stein." In sum, Goethe rose "steadily upon his splendid and solitary path, and Friedericke Brion, spinster, growing old and dying in 1813 at her brother's house in the tiny village of Meissenheim, having lived a life of such unselfish ministration and such sweetness that an old woman who has survived into our own day tells us that when as a child she heard about angels, she 'always thought of Aunty Brion in a white dress' and that 'the sick, and children, and old people' loved her." Sounds like the shade of Otillie in Elective Affinities.

Of interest in Bliss Perry's story are descriptions of a century ago -- 1899 -- which are much closer to the Sesenheim of Goethe's day than our own, which are so much obscured by features of modern life. 

For instance, this is the scene the Scribe sees from the window of the train: "To the left were the Vosges, in a retreating blue distance, while as we rolled northward, all along on the right, beyond the Rhine, were the wooded summits of of the Black Forest, misty yet and shadow-barred in the morning sunlight. It was Trinity Sunday, and the peasant in holiday costume thronged the station platform, intent upon excursions to neighboring villages." And then, indicating a misunderstanding of the German, the Scribe writes: "After an hour, we passed Drusenheim. It was the place where Goethe changed horses, and the next village was Sesenheim." True, Goethe did change horses at the inn in Drusenheim, but, more important, he was able to exchange clothes with the son of the innkeeper, in order to rid himself of his earlier "Verkleidung."

I made a trip to Sesenheim back in 1999. It is a well-preserved town in the best European welfare state fashion, but still retaining many of the sights described the Scribe. There were the reddish-gray roof tiles and the eight-sided tower of Pastor Brion's church, although I did not see the girl "busily at work draping a white cloth about a temporary roadside shrine of the Virgin, in honor of the feast day."

  

Like the travelers from 1899 I also went to an inn near the church. The present incarnation of the Gasthaus zum Anker they visited is "Au Boeuf," where I enjoyed one of the best meals of my own trip through the Vosges region.

They too had an Alsatian country dinner, during which Rhodora and John got in a heated argument about Goethe's abandonment of Friedericke. John didn't believe "any man of genius [had] the right to break the heart of a girl like Friederike."

After lunch they went to the church at which a funeral service was being conducted, for an old woman, "born in the very year that Friederike Brion died." In the aisle was a tombstone, with the inscription half effaced, bearing the date of 1557, "over which the young Goethe's feet one stepped so lightly; and there was the pastor's pew, in which, by the side of Friederike, he found her father's sermon 'none too long.'" The seats were filled with peasant women, "in dark, immobile rows." Their dress consisted of a black alpaca gown edged with velvet ribbon and a brocaded silk cloth, and they wore on their heads, "a queer little quilted black cap, with wide stiff bows of ribbon that stood out from the head like the wings of a butterfly."

 

I didn't see anything like that in 1999, but perhaps they resembled the headdress in this charming illustration from a book on Alsace-Lorraine from 1918.

Emerging from the church they encountered a dozen boys ranged along the wall of the churchyard. "Just as if it were a New England country meeting house!" exclaimed John. They proceeded to visit "the historic barn," and John reached his long arm over the fence and plucked a blossom "from the famous jasmine bush." They encountered the new "rosy-cheeked" pastor who explained why the old parsonage had been torn down. Here is Goethe's description of the parsonage, which suggests the fairytale state in which the Sesenheim idyll hovered: "Haus und Scheune und Stall befanden sich in dem Zustande des Verfalls gerade auf dem Punkte, wo man unschlüssig, zwischen Erhalten und Neuaufrichten zweifelhaft, das eine unterläßt, ohne zu dem andern gelangen zu können."

The parson tells them he had to read Dichtung und Wahrheit in order to answer all the questions of visitors, then invites them to his library to see one of Friederike's letters, the sight of which -- "a yellowed old letter" framed and hung -- makes them conscious that antiquarianism and curiosity had breathed a spirit of prose upon their hitherto unspoiled Sesenheim idyll.

 

Nowadays there is a charming museum at "Au Boeuf," where one can wander free of charge and inspect Sesenheim memorabilia and even some authentic documents.

Toward the end of the afternoon they find the hillock "where Friederike passed many an hour in that favorite arbor of which Goethe himself had much to say." Some Goethe lovers had bought the hillock and erected a new arbor with the inscription "Friederiken Ruh. 1770-1880." Arriving at this "reinlicher Platz mit Bänken, von deren jeder man eine hübsche Aussicht in die Gegend gewann," Goethe wrote that it did not occur to him that he had come to disturb its peace: "denn eine aufkeimende Leidenschaft hat das Schöne, daß, wie sie sich ihres Ursprungs unbewußt ist, sie auch keinen Gedanken eines Endes haben kann, und wie sie sich froh und heiter fühlt, nicht ahnden kann, daß sie wohl auch Unheil stifen dürfte."

It was perhaps with something of this disturbance in mind that the Scribe and his companions retired to an adjacent meadow, where they lay under a great ash and watched the clouds drift across the heaven and "pile themselves into a huge glistening mass above the Black Forest." Their talk drifted constantly back to Goethe. At sundown they turned their steps toward the train station, and Rhodora could be seen bending in the dusk above one of the bushes near the arbor, then returning with some white primroses in her hand. The primroses of course remind us of the Primrose family in The Vicar of Wakefield, by Oliver Goldsmith, on which Goethe consciously modeled his narration of the Sesenheim idyll. Rhodora gives each of the men one and sticks a third through the buttonhole of her jacket. John takes the final one and fastens it to the lattice of Friederike's arbor. "'Why, of course, John!' said Rhodora, softly. 'The poor girl!'"

The photos of contemporary Sesenheim are by the German photographer Ivo Schweikhart, who includes many more of interest on his website, along with quotations from Dichtung und Wahrheit.

Rooms with a View

This is an often-reproduced picture of Goethe, made by Tischbein in 1787, in the quarters Goethe shared with the artist on the Corso in Rome. Nicholas Boyle, in his biography of Goethe, writes that it was one of the few streets in the city that was regularly swept. A mile long, carriages passed regularly on its raised pavements. The scene in Tischbein's drawing seems a daytime one. It was a simple room that Goethe occupied, "small and bare," according to Boyle, "with plain wood-block floors, wooden shutters on the big windows, a bed, a table for the oil lamp and some hard chairs." From his posture, Goethe would seem to be a young man, but he was already 38. It is an intimate scene, with the viewer having the impression of having caught Goethe unawares.

There are some paintings, by other German painters in the 19th century, that likewise offer similarly intimate domestic settings, usually occupied by women. Here are a couple of my favorites. The one on the left, Caroline at the Window (1822), is by Caspar David Friedrich. Though separated from it by only 20 years, the one on the right, by Adolph von Menzel, is very modern in its feeling compared to Friedrich's painting: The Balcony Room (1845). The woman seems to be here by implication. One I really like, however, is below these two, Before the Mirror, by Georg Friedrich Kersting. It was painted in 1827, which means it probably reflects domestic arrangements in the last decade of Goethe's life. Kersting was from northern Germany and, like Friedrich, he also studied painting in Denmark.

And speaking of Denmark, the longevity of this window motif can be seen in the work of a later artist, from Copenhagen, Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916).

While Goethe is alone, he does not seem as solitary as the women in the later paintings. Still, he is separate from the life on the street, which he seems to be observing, rather than participating in. This separation from the life of contemporary Rome actually characterized Goethe's behavior. He spent most of his time while in Rome with other Germans, for instance. His major literary efforts while there concerned the completion of works he had begun before coming to Rome. As Boyle writes, Rome was "no rebirth for his poetry," as he produced no lyrical poetry of note, "or indeed any substantial new literary work at all." Nevertheless, Goethe underwent a significant personal change in Rome. The distant posture in the Tischbein drawing perhaps presages the later distant, "Olympian" Goethe.

New Biography of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

The Times Literary Supplement reviews in its current issue (1/23/09) Hugh Nisbet's biography of Lessing (unfortunately not yet published in English). For a person of his stature in German letters, it is hard to get a picture of Lessing the person. As Ritchie Robertson mentions in the TLS review, it would have been fascinating to have "Boswellian records of Lessing's conversations with friends in coffee-houses in Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg and Brunswick." Unfortunately, Lessing's day-to-day life has passed "into oblivion," which leads a biographer to concentrate on his writings. Fortunately, those writings give a picture of a very attractive human being. You see the mind working, and you tend to like what you see, whether or not you agree with what is being said. This respect for Lessing the person seems to have moderated Goethe's response to Lessing the writer.

Lessing (1729-1781) was only in his forties, thus at the height of his game, when the so-called Storm and Stress (Sturm und Drang) generation erupted in the realm of German literature. Lessing's first play (Der junge Gelehrte, or The Young Scholar) had appeared in 1748, the year before Goethe's birth; the drama Miß Sara Sampson in 1755; and Laokoon, his treatise on the differences between painting and poetry, in 1766. While the Storm and Stress writers rebelled against standards of French taste that had been imported into German literature, Lessing had already been there, in his drama criticism, known as Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767-69).

Goethe had what today would be called "issues" with his poetic precursors, with writers who influenced his own work. (The famous statue of Laocoon suggests something of his struggle.) There is a charming instance of this in The Sorrows of Young Werther, as Werther and Lotte, enraptured, watch a thunderstorm. Lotte, in a flood of emotion, suddenly utters the word "Klopstock!" which causes them both to explode in a flood of tears. (The heightened emotionality portrayed here is characteristic of the temper of the Storm and Stress movement.) Lotte was referring to the famous ode by that poet, "Frühlingsfeier" (Celebration of Spring). Werther's response: "Divine Klopstock! If only you could have seen your apotheosis in those eyes. And your name, so often profaned, may I never hear it uttered again!"

There are instances in Goethe's writing that likewise suggest thinly veiled jealousy toward Lessing. These can be found in the letters Goethe wrote in Leipzig to his friend Behrisch, in which he portrayed his emotions concerning his relationship with Käthchen Schönkopf. In the most famous of these letters, dated October (but really written November) 10, 1767, he describes his jealousy at seeing Käthchen in the theater with a man whom he imagines to be his rival. As he stands in the balcony and watches with feverish agitation, Goethe unobtrusively drops the name of the play being performed: Lessing's Miß Sara Sampson. He claims to notice nothing of the play because of the distraction caused by the other scene, Käthchen being courted by another man. Lessing the writer was also a poetic rival, however, as is clear in the continuation of the letter to Behrisch: "Es schlägt neune, nun wird sie aus seyn, die verdammte Comoedie. Fluch auf sie." It's 9 p.m., that's clear, but when he says "sie" will soon be out, he does not mean "she" (i.e., Käthchen), but the play (with the feminine pronoun for "Comoedie"). Then: Curses on it. The next installment of the letter continues in this febrile vein: "Ich habe eine schröckliche Nacht gehabt. Es träumte mir von der Sara" (I had a terrible night. I dreamed of the Sara).

And, of course, much has been written about the volume of Lessing's Emilia Galotti found in Werther's room after his suicide.

Aside from his scientific pursuits, Goethe's ouevre has the same range as Lessing's, and includes reflections on many of the same subjects, from the aesthetic to the political and religious. Both were men of the Enlightenment, in different ways, with Goethe more inclined to sensuous appreciation. Both men are also characterized by important friendships, Goethe with Schiller and Lessing with Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786). 

Robertson reports that Mendelssohn wrote, after Lessing's death, that Lessing was the only person who in thirty years had never made him unwanted as a Jew. In the portrait by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Lessing stand in the center between Mendelssohn and Johann Kaspar Lavater, a Swiss theologian who attempted to convert Mendelssohn to Christianity.

Indeed, Lessing's third play was Die Juden (1749), about a Jew who looks like a gentile and who saves a baron from two highwaymen who are gentiles disguised as Jews! His most famous play in this regard is Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), a portrait of enlightened religious tolerance among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It even takes place in the Middle East, though I have a feeling one will not find it performed there today, outside of Israel.

Among the statements that Goethe made about Lessing, two stand out as expressing important aspects of the character of both men. In conversation with Eckermann on October 15, 1825, he said: "A man like Lessing is what we need now. For why was he so great but through his character, through his tenacity! There are plenty of clever, educated men, but where is a man of such character?" In a later conversation (on April 11, 1827) he addressed differences between himself and Lessing: "Because of his polemical nature, Lessing prefers to inhabit the region of contradiction and doubt; his strength is in making distinctions, for which a his great intellect [Verstand] came to his aid. You will find that I am completely different. I have never involved myself in  contradictions. I always tried to reconcile doubts inwardly and only expressed the results of that process."

Goethe and Religion

I am always looking for contemporary angles with which to talk about Goethe, mostly to make clear to myself who he was. It is very difficult to get a handle on people from the past. Sometimes it is easier to discuss what they were like by looking at what they were NOT like. Goethe was certainly not religious in a conventional sense. When Gretchen asked, "How do you stand with religion?" (Nun sag, wie hast du's mit der Religion?), Faust prevaricated. Still, Goethe took religion very seriously, as can be seen, at a minimum, in his autobiography. He has been called a "non-Christian humanitarian." What does that mean exactly?

I got some insight this past Sunday, on learning that January 25 is now the feast of the conversion of Saint Paul. A jubilee year, from 28 June 2008 to 29 June 2009, on the occasion of the bi-millennium of Paul's birth (placed by historians between 7 and 10 A.D.), has also been declared by Pope Benedict XVI. (The stained glass image is from the parish church of Melton Mowbray, in Leicestershire. It was taken by a wonderful photographer, whom I know only as Lawrence OP and who has a site dedicated to the year of Saint Paul.)

As far as I know Goethe made no pronouncements concerning Saint Paul and didn't even see while in Rome the famous painting by Caravaggio (in Santa Maria del Popolo) portraying Paul's conversion. Conversion itself is not something I have come across in Goethe's writings. It strikes me that conversion -- a radical turnaround in one's life and the emergence of a new self -- would have been alien to Goethe's notion of "Bildung," which was not a transformative event but a life-long process. Not for Goethe what Tolstoy described, when writing of his own religious conversion: "Everything that was on the right hand of the journey is now on the left."

We do know, however, Goethe's views on original sin. He didn't think much of it. Coincidentally, on Sunday evening I came across a book review of a new book by Alan Jacobs, entitled Original Sin: A Cultural History. The book of Genesis sets the scene for the disobedience of Adam and Eve (as portrayed in this 1909 painting by Suzanne Valadon), but it was only in Christianity -- not in Judaism -- that there developed the doctrine of original sin.

And it was Paul who first enunciated the doctrine: "Wherefore as by one man sin entered this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned" (Romans 5, 12). In his book Jacobs is not so much interested in the development of the doctrine in Christian history (e.g., in Augustine) as he is (per the subtitle) in its role in our identity as humans. Jacobs is a professor of literature, and the examples he cites range from high literature (Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, and so on, but also from Confucius and Rousseau) to popular culture (movies like Animal House!)

It is not surprising that Goethe, as a man of the Enlightenment, would not agree with words spoken by the pope during a December address at the Vatican: "The existence of the power of evil in the human heart and in human history is an undeniable fact." On the contrary. In 1822, responding to a review of the "Pedagogical Province" of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Goethe wrote, "Il y a une fibre adorative dans le coeur humain." Of course, Goethe was aware that bad things happen in the world, and he does not condone them. From early on, however, he was on the side of those who might be called law-breakers: Prometheus, Mahomet, Faust.

The notion of original sin is radically democratic: all humans come into the world stained with it. Goethe was a democratic person; he thought highly of "brotherly love." But he was also a spiritual elitist. Like many in the Enlightenment, Goethe would have believed that humans had the moral ability not to do evil, though this ability was something that had to be nourished and cultivated, perhaps supplementing that innate "fibre adorative." Thus the importance of education.

The supreme quality of Goethe's faith was "reverence" (Ehrfurcht). There were many strands in his thinking here. An important one was Spinoza; another was his scientific studies. Both gave him a view of humans and nature that was radically different from the Christian view of a world created for man and over which he was to have dominion. Goethe, however, departed from the strict instrumentalist view of the Enlightenment, namely, that humans could manipulate nature for their own advantage. Goethe thought nature mysterious; thus, his reverence for it.

As is well known, he parted ways with Newton. It was Newton's discoveries that had opened men's eyes to the power of intellect and reason: "Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night/ God said, 'Let Newton be' and all was light" (Alexander Pope). Many Enlightenment thinkers thus imagined that humans, through their rational capacities, could ensure that bad things would no longer happen to good people. Goethe was not so sanguine. While activity was important, the potential destructiveness of "do good-ism" can be seen in the fateful consequences of Faust's schemes for worldly improvement. Goethe had a sense of man's limits, but it was in the act of striving and of doing that man (and woman, too, though he was not so "enlightened" as we!) would redeem himself.

Poems on Paintings (Bildgedichte)

My previous posting drew attention to Rilke's poem on the archaic sculpture of Apollo. Like John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the poem is an example of the Greek rhetorical device known as ekphrasis, by which one medium of art seeks to describe a work in another medium. One of the most famous examples in literature is Homer's description in the Iliad (book 18) of the making of the shield of Achilles by Hephaestus. Pictures at an Exhibition is another well-known example, a suite of piano pieces by Mussorgsky.

Margot Scharpenberg, the most important exponent in contemporary German poetry of the Bildgedicht, thus stands in a long poetic tradition. Margot is an American of German background (from Cologne), and I have known her for many years in connection with German writing. Last night I got to hear her read from her most recent volume Verwandeln (her twenty-seventh!) at Deutsches Haus at New York University. Peter Beicken, of the German department at the University of Maryland, offered an informative introduction to the special qualities of Margot's work. Though I am a great reader of literary works, I seldom like to hear authors read from their works. Such readings are usually occasions for celebrity-watching, and I much prefer to hear "professional readers" of poetry and prose on my iPod. Then, I can listen again and again. In a live reading so much flies right past me, especially poetry and especially poetry in a foreign language.

Margot, however, is an excellent reader of her own work. She began with a poem called "Verwandeln" (change or transform), which I won't even try to translate. It is based on a painting by the Cologne artist Elke Imhof, which is also reproduced on the title page of the volume. There were also poems on paintings from Dutch collections, including Rembrandt's Nightwatch and Vermeer's Milkmaid and Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Margot refers to these poems as "Bildgespräche" (conversations with poems). My favorite concerned Van Gogh's Sower (in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; click on above image to enlarge). After a description of the piety of the sower at his task (there are references to the Lord's Prayer), it compares the poet's work with that of the sower, casting his seeds into an unknown future while praying for a good harvest. Here is Margot's poem:

Der alte Anfang ist schon da

Es werde Licht

als gelbe Scheibe steht

die Sonne auf der Erde

groß hinter einem Kopf

der alte Bitte

wird schon nachgeholfen

Gib

uns unser täglich Brot

ein Säamann geht

mit ruhigem Schritt

und scheinbar blindlings

wird die Saat geworfen

Er hat das Maß

im Weitwurf seiner Hand

die Richtung heißt

in gleichem Rhythmus weiter

den Säman treibt

das Pendel seines Arms

zur Zukunft hin

er wirft die Körner aus

daß sie im Dunklen

für sich selber fechten

was wird zur Ernte reif

wer Körner sät

der meint als Nahurung Sprache

ein weites Feld

so weit man sieht

ich sehe letzten Endes

noch kein Ende

Very simple but, again, a translation can hardly transmit the lyrical and visual qualities. I particularly like the image of the "pendulum of the arm" that drove the sower forward.

As seen in this picture by Hannelore Roston, the poet enjoyed some refreshments after the reading with friends and admirers. As so often happens on these occasions, the publishers of Margot's book (Gilles & Francke) failed to get copies of it to the reading for purchase and signing. Peter Beicken, however, had brought along copies of a small anthology of poems drawn from Margot's many collections that had been prepared for a celebration at the Goethe Institute in New York for her 80th birthday in 2005.