Goethe is homesick

"Young Goethe"

According to Nicholas Boyle’s bio, the first phase of Goethe’s life in Weimar lasted until the middle of 1777. His diary entries (see my Tweets) mention work on his garden house in the spring of 1777, where he put in fruit and vegetable beds, occasionally sleeping on the veranda. By then, he was well acquainted with court life, and even before 1777, he had become responsible for court entertainments. In January he was planning a production for the birthday of the duchess, the new piece being the Singspiel Lila. In the middle of 1777, however, his sister Cornelia died. As I mentioned in a post on her death, we know of his reaction only from a diary entry and several letters. Her death was a big blow to him, however, and it is at this point that begins what Boyle calls the next phase, which will last until his return from his journey to Switzerland with the duke in early 1780.

By the autumn of 1777, we can already see Goethe’s mood changing and betraying a bit of boredom with it all. From the end of August until October 9, he was staying in Eisenach with the duke, while traveling from one village to the next with Carl August on official business. There was a lot of hunting as well and  carrying on ("nach Tische mit den Bauermaidels getanzt"), but several entries indicate that he had a whale of a toothache, of which he wrote to Charlotte von Stein (“24 Stunden Geschwullst und grose Schmerzen). But he also makes note of “Gefühl des Alleinseyns.” of his homesickness for his garden house, of the poverty of court life.

So much work and play and so little time for literary production. In these weeks on the road, he took up drawing, which is mentioned in many of the diary entries. The duke allowed him to stay at Wartburg castle, which appears to have been a highlight of these weeks, and of which he made several drawings. By the end, however, he was Lebensmüde,

Yesterday’s (October 8) Tweet was an exceptionally long one, with many official functions. Among those assembled à table at the Wartburg was Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, a native German (from Gotha) who lived in Paris, where he was friends with Diderot and d’Alembert, and where he published the literary newsletter Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, which concerned the goings-on in the Enlightenment capital. It was distributed to several  rulers of German lands, including Carl August, as well as Catherine the Great of Russia. Goethe appears to have declined to meet Grimm. As he wrote in his diary: Ich fühlte so inniglich dass … ich dem Manne nichts zu sagen hatte der von Petersburg nach Paris geht.

This long diary entry ends as follows: Und wills Gott in Ruhe vor den Menschen mit denen ich doch nichts zu theilen habe. Yes, very tired of life.

The next day he was on his way “home” to Weimar and wrote to CvS on October 10 from his garden, mentioning his estrangement from everyone: “Ich bin entfremdeter von viel Welt nur nicht von Ihnen."

Goethe Wisdom Anew

An email and a link appeared this morning in my inbox from Carl Muenzer, former president of the Goethe Society of North America. It turns out that the estimable cartoonist Brian Crane's comic strip Pickles, which features a long-married couple and their friends and neighbors, has drawn on Goethe's words of wisdom in these trying times. The cartoon below appeared recently in The Washington Post and shows the extent to which Goethe's "wisdom" travels. (Click to enlarge.)

According to The Washington Post, Pickles has topped comics polls across the nation again and again, and it appears in 900 newspapers around the world

This particular bit of Goethe wisdom is one that I have mentioned in a couple of posts, including recently, as occurring in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. I have also posted frequently on the appearance of Goethe in various non-Goethe contexts. shoes, lifestyle magazines, not to forget Duckenfaust.

Image credit: © 2020 The Washington Post

Goethe at Wartburg castle

In 1776 Goethe joined the “administration” in Weimar. By 1777, he was often accompanying the duke on trips in connection with that administration. According to Nicholas Boyle, the first two and a half years on the Council were “a natural, if time-consuming extension of his principal role as companion and mentor to Carl August.” Besides sessions in Weimar, they traveled to other places in the duchy. In 1777, for which I am also Tweeting from Goethe’s diary. they traveled to Martinroda, Manebach, Elgersburg, Stützerbach, all in the vicinity of Ilmenau. In Stützerbach he wrote to Charlotte von Stein of a wild night of dancing with the peasant girls (Bauernmädel) and drinking until 1 a.m. In those same days, however, he suffered an intense toothache. Yes, even the great one had toothaches. As he wrote to Charlotte from Eisenach on September 6, his swollen face compromised the good times with the “girls”: 

Alles ist wohl nur ich habe mir ein Monster von dicken Backen ganz wider allen Sinn meiner dürren Constitution geholt …  und muss nun inne sitzen und warme Kräutermilch im Mund haben, und kann nicht auff Misels ausgehen, es wird ein verfluchter Streich sein, wenn ich mit verzognem Gesicht soll die Maidels belügen.

Hans Lufft’s Bible printed 1536

He and the duke then traveled to Eisenach on September 12, where he would take part in the sessions of the Eisenach Estates, principally concerning tax matters. First, however, he was still suffering a "Geschwülst und grose Schmerzen" from the toothache, and had to remain in lodgings, while the others with whom he was traveling were out hunting. But the highlight of these days was certainly his stay at the Wartburg, the famous castle, where Martin Luther spent ten months, during which he translated the New Testament. Carl August made it possible for Goethe stay there, from September 13, and Goethe took the opportunity to sketch. On the 16th he wrote to CvS about the view from on high:

Heute früh war wider alles neu. Philip weckte mich und lies mich ans Fenster gehn! es lagen unten alle Thäler im gleichen Nebel, und es war völlig See, wo die vielen Gebürge, als Ufer, hervorsahen.

He liked Wartburg so much that he was back there at the end of September, when he wrote to his Wetzlar friend Kestner, saying that he was “living on Luther’s Patmos.” Indeed, Luther had referred to his stay in the castle as his personal “Patmos,” in reference to the exile to the isle of Patmos of the apostle John, who wrote the final book of the Bible there. A website I just came across, which appeared in 2017, “Reformation Year,” reports that Luther was very depressed during his stay in the castle and believed his end was near. Goethe, however, was in a far different mood. As he wrote to Kestner, he was “der glücklichste von allen die ich kenne.”

Somerset Mauham on Goethe's novels

Maugham looking Olympian

I have been gearing myself up this summer to write a scholarly article on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels. I foresee a year before me of combing through the scholarly literature on the subject, some of which I read side my side during my daily pensum of reading the novels. I have started off with books I have on my own shelves, including Eric Blackall, of course, whose footnotes offer guidance to older studies, and in which I find many underlinings from my first reading of it back in grad school. An essay by Stuart Atkins on Goethe's "classicism" also offers hints as to the choices Goethe made in writing the Apprenticeship.

It can't be said that reading these novels is an unmitigated pleasure, as is, for instance, sinking into many a 19th-century English novel. Goethe's literary production always owed a great debt to inherited literary models. Again, it is Atkins, whose essay on Wilhelm Meister, subtitled "Novel or Romance?," offers a clue to the abundance of long 18th-century prose narratives with which Goethe would have been familiar. These included, in the case of der Roman, as one calls the genre in German, "Reiseroman, Politischer Roman, Satirischer Roman, Schäferroman," and, most famously perhaps, the "picaresque." In the case of the WM novels, we are faced, as in these earlier types of novels, by a string of episodes in which a character is seen traveling and meeting lots of "types" of people, having many adventures, and so on, but not adding up to the kinds of resolutions with which we are familiar from "canonical" 19th-century novels. In other words, no plot (which, in any case, has been condemned by postmodernists). According to Atkins, Goethe himself did not generally refer to the WM novels as Romane; it was only Elective Affinities that he continually spoke of as a "Roman."

Since Somerset Maugham was himself a novelist, his essay on Goethe's novels is illuminating on Goethe's "failure" in respect of what moderns expect in the way of a novel, while at the same time knowledgeable concerning the 18th-century background of Goethe's writing. He speaks highly of the precursor to the WM novels, Theatralische Sendung, begun by Goethe in 1779, which Maugham associates with the Spanish picaresque novels that were in vogue in Europe: Gil Blas by Le Sage, Tom Jones by Fielding, and Humphrey Clicker by Smollett being three successful ones. Maugham found it "a pity" that Goethe was unable to finish along the lines he had begun. Instead, when Goethe again took up the novel, in 1794, he diverted from the original plan, which, according to Maugham, would have "reached the conventional end of a picaresque novel," with Wilhelm as manager of a theater and a happy marriage. Instead, "Goethe's theme was not, as it had been, the art of the theatre, but the art of life. ... Art is an effect of design; life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation." As readers of WM's Apprenticeship are aware, of course, "chance" plays a huge role in the novel. In other words, Goethe did not leave the influence of the 18th-century novels behind, all of which abound in far-fetched coincidences that redirect the action.

Of the Sendung, Maugham writes that, if finished, "it would [not] have been a great book, but it would have been a good one and have stood comparison, not unfavourably, with the best of the picaresque tales." At the same time, he gives credit to what Goethe did achieve: "If on the whole the novel which Goethe eventually sent to the press is a failure, it is of more consequence than many a novel which within its limits is completely successful."

Maugham makes a point about what happens when an author is "drawing a portrait of himself" in a novel, which he contends is the case in Werther, Clavigo, and Götz. (He doesn't mention Stella.) The male characters are "slaves of their emotions," traits, one suspects, "that were deeply rooted in Goethe himself." And so it is with Wilhelm: "Goethe had a weakness for delivering long disquisitions on any subject that happened at the time to interest him." Moreover, when the author is the hero of his novel, "the hero is acted upon, rather than acts, with the result that he remains shadowy in comparison with the other persons, objectively seen, of the story."

Image credits: Graham Sutherland; Barnes and Noble

Goethe at 28

Goethe's drawing of Kochberg, 1779

Goethe was often on the road, traveling by horse, on official duties. On August 27, 1777, he set out from Weimar and overnighted at Kochberg, the von Stein estate. His diary reports: "Langsam ritt ich nach Kbg. fand sie froh und ruhig und mir wars so frey und wohl noch den Abend." This was in the early Weimar years, when Goethe was seeking to conquer the affections of Charlotte von Stein, and Kochberg exerted a strong attraction. According to Wolfgang Vulpius (Goethe in Thüringen), whenever Goethe could free himself from official duties, he hurried to Kochberg. Letters reveal that he was a favorite with her children and even her servants. For the most part, his diary does not reveal "ungetrübtes Glück an der Seite der Herrin von Kochberg," while his letters to her often reveal instead that he left Kochberg deeply disappointed and unhappy. In fact, he wrote the following note to her on August 27: "Meine Verständnisse sind dunckel, nur ist mir ziemlich klar dass ich Sie liebe."

Still, things must have gone well between him and Charlotte. The next day was his twenty-eighth birthday, and it was a good day. As he wrote in his diary: "wachte an m. Geburtstag mit der schönen sonne so heiter auf dass ich alles was vor mir liegt leichter ansah." In his note to her that morning, he wrote: "Morgen d. 28 meinen Geburtstag dencken Sie an mich! Noch einmal Adieu. Es ist doch in der Welt immer Abschiednehmen. ... Ich bin oft bey Ihnen." And then he was on his way to meet the duke in Ilmenau.

The last time Goethe was at Kochberg was on September 5, 1788, after his return from Italy. He was accompanied by Karoline Herder, Sophie von Schardt, and Charlotte's sixteen-year-old son, Fritz.  Herder's wife reported a chilly reception. No doubt Charlotte was disappointed in Goethe for bringing others with him. As Vulpius writes: company made impossible a face-to-face private conversation. In any case, the relationship was not to be restored. Charlotte had accused him with bitterness of unfaithfulness, a reproach he felt unfounded. And so, according to Vulpius, "Die Saite, der Goethe so zauberhafte Töne entlockt hatte, war zerrissen und verstummt." (The string from which Goethe had elicited such magical tones was torn and became silent.)

Adventures in Goethe Blogging

Like all bloggers, I occasionally check on the response to the blog, i.e., the number of visitors. I noticed a couple of days ago that the "all time number of page views" had exceeded 500,000. That only took eleven years!

Almost three years ago I gave a presentation at a meeting of the Goethe Society of North America entitled “Blogging Goethe.” As far as I knew then, my Goethe blog was the only such blog. Since then I have encountered another one (über goethe) in Germany, but that blogger posts even more irregularly than I do. It takes work to blog.

It was back in 2008, when everybody seemed to be setting up a website, that I thought of creating one as a site for posting my own work on Goethe, but I didn’t know how to go about it. Then one night at dinner my step-daughter said, why don’t you just do a blog?, and she, being very computer savvy, went to the “Blogspot” site and created this one. I wanted to call it Goethe.blogspot.com, but someone already had that one, so my husband suggested Goethetc.

Mackerel sky over Central Park

For a long time it was really Goethe Etcetera, since I wasn’t sure what to do with a blog, and I would often simply write about my life in New York. I don’t do any other social media, so the blog became sort of a Facebook substitute.  But eventually I did start blogging about Goethe. For instance, an early post showed the clouds in  the sky over Central Park in Manhattan, entitled "Mackerel Sky," which drew on Goethe’s admiration for Luke Howard’s categorization of clouds. And more and more I began to post about whatever I was reading, as in this post on Goethe and beggars. Clearly, I spend a lot of time looking for images.

Like many people I found myself coming across Goethe in unexpected contexts and would post on them, for instance, a post on Stephen Spender writing about Goethe.

Over time, I have posted on lots of subjects, and Google very nicely makes available the numbers of "hits" on specific posts. At the GSNA talk, I circulated a handout that showed, in descending order, the number of page views for specific subjects. Some very arcane subjects even had some respectable numbers: Branconi, Stolberg, Arnim. At the time of my talk, the one post exceeding all the others in page views (6,161) was “Goethe and Schiller and the French Revolution.” The second highest number of hits was “Goethe and Grief” (5,330),  on which I posted at the end of 2011, shortly after my husband's death. This number is interesting, especially since, as I wrote in a recent post (on the death of his sister), Goethe wrote very little in his life on the subject of his own grief.  There are some subjects I have covered often (46 on Goethe and world literature, for instance), but I only wrote once on Goethe and grief. And yet it continues to draw visitors to the site. My entry on Goethe and geology had by 2017 a quite respectable number of viewers, 1,023. In the meantime, the most visited post is now "Goethe and Romanticism" (7,813 visits, thus surpassing "Goethe and the French Revolution.)

Blue: the color of peace, consensus

At the beginning of 2017, the site became compromised in respect of the number of visitors. In that month I did four posts on  a book I was reviewing for a national magazine by the French medievalist Michel Pastoureau, who has written four large beautiful volumes on colors and their social representation. Pastoureau mentioned Goethe frequently, so it was a no brainer that I would post about this connection. The fourth Pastoureau post was entitled "Red versus Blue." Red, according to Pastoureau, was the primordial color of all civilizations, but in the 12th century in the West it began to be competitive with blue. By the 18th century, Goethe, according to Pastoureau, contributed to this ascendence of the social preference for blue. The title of the post had nothing to do with the inauguration of Donald Trump, but the subject of "blue" and "red" America apparently still resonated. As of today, over 5,000 visitors have looked at that post! The spike in views changed my status in the Google algorithm and led subsequently to Google sending more visitors to my blog, whatever the subject.

Red: the color of danger

Already in the summer of 2016 I had noticed that I was getting a lot of hits on the site from Russia. At first, I thought, how interesting: all these people in Russia reading my blog about Goethe. At some point, however, I got in touch with Google  and asked why there were so many hits from Russia, the Ukraine, and even the UAE. Google seems to have disabled them from registering, although every now and then I notice the appearance of several hundred visitors from unexpected places on the planet.

So, Goethe Etcetera will go on. Let's hope we reach a million visitors before another decade passes!

Walks in Weimar with George Eliot

Lately I have been going through books long laid aside in connection with Goethe, among them a book of essays by George Eliot in which one finds "Three Months in Weimar." After reading the essay, I decided to discuss it on the blog and, in preparation, I started looking for images. I typed "George Eliot in Weimar," hoping for some interesting images of Weimar in the year 1854, when Eliot accompanied George Lewes there. Lewes was collecting material for the biography of Goethe on which he had been working. Much to my surprise, I came across a site so titled: George Eliot in Weimar. It appears to be a one-off sort of blog, posted on successive days in January 2019, commemorating Eliot's 200th birthday. There are ten "episodes," with each post excerpting highlights of the visit to Weimar, either a portion from the essay or from Eliot's journal or letters: Arrival at Weimar, Hotel zum Erbprinzen, Kaufstraße, The Goethe Haus, The Schiller Haus,Theatre with Goethe-Schiller-Denkmal, The Stadtschloß, The Altenburg, The Ilm Park with Goethe’s Garden House, The Garden House – Guest Book, The Belvedere Schloß, The Ettersburg, The Tiefurt Schloß, Bad Berka, The Kickelhahn Hut, Leaving Weimar. The blog includes audio recordings of readings from the writings.

Since Eliot was traveling with a man who was not her husband, the essay itself is not very forthcoming about who she is with or why she is even there. It seemed like a piece of travel journalism, and, except for a few places (the visit to Schiller's house), not very fascinating. The blogger at the "George Eliot in Weimar" website, however, has made things more interesting, beginning with asserting that the journey to Weimar represented a kind of honeymoon for the two Georges. Thus, entries from her "recollections" mention George Lewes by name ("George"). The following is a nice passage not included in the essay.

"Another delightful place to which we often walked was Bercka (sic), a little village, with baths and a Kur-Haus seated in a lovely valley about six miles from Weimar. The first time G. went I was obliged to stay at home and work, and when he came back he merely said that the place and the walk to it were pretty, and brought me a bunch of berries from the mountain ash as a proof that he had thought of me by the way. He wished to ménager (prepare) a surprize for me by the moderation of his praise and he succeeded, for I was enchanted with the first sight of this little paradise and half inclined to be angry with G. for having been able to restrain the expression of his admiration."

From that passage, we see that George Eliot was working during this trip. What might she have been working on? The Goethe-Handbuch has a single reference to Eliot, in connection with Hans-Richard Brittmacher's entry "Wirkungsgeschichte in der Weltliteratur," specifically English and American literature. Carlyle in his enthusiasm for Wilhelm Meister, which inspired his own Sartor Resartus (1838), seems to have inspired the genre of "apprenticeship novels," which included Contarini Fleming by Benjamin Disraeli and several by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. And, then, Brittmacher writes: "Den Bildungsweg einer weiblichen Heldin stellte George Eliot in Middlemarch (1871-72) dar."

Eliot's essay concentrates solely on externals. We do not learn in it, for instance, that she and Lewes got to know Franz Liszt, who was then living in Weimar. Moreover, in view of their own relationship, Lizst was living with a married woman, a princess at that, Caroline Sayn-Wittgenstein. Through Lizst they met writers, musicians, poets. They even attended performances in Weimar of Wagner's operas, but were worn out by the second act of Lohengrin.

The externals of Weimar, as she writes of them, are those one might expect of an English person, very attuned to gardens, town vs. country, and the beauty of the natural environment. Her first impression of Weimar, as she set out exploring the town, was: "How could Goethe live here in this dull, lifeless village? ... [I]t was inconceivable that the stately Jupiter, in a frock coat, so familiar to us all through Rauch's statuettee, could have habitually walked along these rude streets and among these slouching mortals. Not a picturesque bit of building was to be seen; there was no quaintness, nothing to remind one of historical associations, nothing but the most arid prosaism."

It must be said that, in the course of things, she gives the town and townspeople their just due. For instance, of the market, next to Herder Platz, she writes that it is a cheerful square "made smart by a new Rath-haus. Twice a week it is crowded with stalls and country people; and it is the very pretty custom for the band to play in the balcony of the Rath-haus about twenty minutes every market day to delight the ears of the peasantry." She goes on to describe the head dress worn by local women at the market.

For the most part, however, the outings she describes in the essay concern the more splendid environs of the town. The park on the Ilm, the Belvedere, the Schloss, Oberweimar, Not to forget Goethe's Garden House, which she describes as "a homely sort of cottage such as many an English nobleman's gardener lives in." I couldn't help thinking of To the Manor Born. I was very impressed that she knew of the "torchlight performance of Goethe's Die Fischerin in Tiefurt, on the bank of the Ilm, where the river is seen to best advantage. It turns out that the one place associated with Goethe that she most liked was Ilmenau. The essay ends with a laborious walk to the Kickelhahn, where one can see the lines written by Goethe's own hand.

At the start of the essay, when Eliot speaks of her surprise at the homeliness and rusticity of Weimar, I could not help thinking that Goethe, having had a hand in many projects that enhanced the ducal quarters of Weimar, never turned his talents to "town planning." In this era, the "face" of a town was the last thing on the mind of its rulers and administrators. For those who did conscientiously seek to improve the "infrastructure," it was more homely projects, for instance, roads and water supply, that were at the top of the list. So, Weimar became Goethe's "hometown," where he lived for almost fifty years, during which time he occupied important bureaucratic roles. It would be expecting too much for a bourgeois person, which he was, to have concerned himself with the externals of Weimar.