How Goethe Became Goethe

Some of my readers may have been wondering about my long silence. I am sure I mentioned sometime back that I was starting to work on my own book on Goethe, which I have been doing for the past two years, but it was September 2025, the last date of a post, that I sat down in earnest to work. I have read and read and read and taken thousands of notes. I have reached the point where I am beginning to go through all those notes and categorize them and soon begin with the actual writing of the book, the subtitle of which is "How Goethe Became Goethe."

I am keeping the main title a secret for the moment, but it concerns an aspect of Goethe's early life that has contributed to Goethe "becoming" Goethe, if you get what I mean. Part of my book concerns the radical rethinking of what literature constituted in the 18th century, and the chapters of my book concern his writing from his earliest poetic attempts ca. 1764 until he left for Weimar in 1775. These years were what I characterize as his literary apprenticeship, which established the manner in which he would work going forward, all the way to the last works of his life, including the Faust drama. I will try to post more going forward, especially as I so often come across comparisons in art across the early modern period, before the 18th century, which seem to offer parallels to what was going on in literature.

Recently I got to thinking about this subject after viewing a wonderful small exhibit of Caravaggio’s 1595 painting Boy with a Basket of Fruit at the Morgan Library. 

The painting is on loan from the Galleria Borghese in Rome. (See image at bottom of post.) I can’t help thinking that many, many years ago, back in my youth, I visited that museum when I was an au pair with a German family living in Rome. Since I don’t recall the painting from those years, it was great to be acquainted with the work last week. A small booklet was available in the exhibition room, and a few days ago, with beautiful spring weather in the Sixties, I wandered out to Riverside Park, sat on a bench and read it. According to the booklet, Caravaggio devised an approach to painting that produced “a radical rethinking of what art might be.” The boy in the painting, for instance, was not a typical representation of figures in Italian art, whether religious or of noble people. The boy is not a god or a saint, and the peaches and pairs even have brown spots on them, while the figs disgorge their seeds. Another painting by Caravaggio (not on view at the Morgan), Boy Bitten by a Lizard, is even more “naturalistic,” drawing on figures from the “real” world.

 Here are a few pictures of Goethe in the "real world," a place we don't usually see him in his works. They were drawn when he was in Rome.
 

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I like the drawing of young Goethe staring out the window (actually he was 36 when he finally made it to Rome, but he still carries his youthfulness with him), as well as the one showing him making up his bed against the background of his own drawings. 

 From what I can tell, concepts like “naturalism” were not used in the 18th century when discussing changes going on in literature in Europe, but the life of real people was certainly on the minds of literati, especially in France. The philosophes wanted to “give power to the people,” so to speak, allow them to make their own decisions on matters of importance, instead of depending on the dictates of the Church or the Monarchy. The material changes taking place, including in the world in which Goethe grew up, were offering alternatives to ordinary people that would separate them from the world of their parents. Goethe’s father was a lawyer, but his grandfather had been a tailor who, in a second marriage, wed the wealthy widow of the owner of a successful wine establishment and  was thereby able to send Goethe’s father to law school. Literature, in turn, as in 16th and 17th century Italian paintings, was starting to incorporate “ordinary people.” Consider Tom Jones in Fielding’s novel. Who wanted to read the Odyssey or the Iliad, when you could read a story in which you could to an extent imagine yourself? Lessing dramatized the real-world conflicts that women faced in this new age when it came to marriage.

 

So, too, Goethe dramatized the conflict of individuals with the demands of the greater society. Goethe created in the character of Werther a person who readers identified with, who was felt to be “real.” Such was fiction, with Goethe as a predecessor of a writer like Jane Austen, whose fictional characters “live on” today in movies and TV series. Again, who wants to read Homer anymore? We live in a totally different world, the opportunities of which allow Goethe to become Goethe. 

Details anew

It's been a while, as I have been working away at my Goethe book. Lately, I am rereading Goethe's autobiography (Poetry and Truth  in English), which plays a big role in the book I am writing. I mentioned in the previous post the lack of detail in Goethe’s works, even in letters to friends, where he is actually writing about himself, but without offering many details of the environment. But I came across something  in Book 2 of Part 2 of the autobiography, which has some suggestive detail. Book 2 covers the period ca. 1755, when his family is living in the home of his paternal grandmother. In that year, she died and Goethe’s father undertook the rebuilding of the house, from the bottom up. Because of all the work going on in the house, young Goethe (maybe 6 years old) attended a “public school.”

Goethe describes himself at this time as a boy who did not lie, nor did he like to pretend, and was anything but frivolous. This statement is somewhat odd because immediately before writing of his time in public school, he inserted a fairy tale ("Der Neue Paris"), which he claims he told to his friends and other children. It is solely a story of pretense, about a young boy who enters an enchanted kingdom. In any case, because of the dignity with which he had been raised  and also the dignity of his close friends, they often found themselves the subjects of taunts by boys not so well raised who mischievously or roughly attacked them. Fairy tales were fun, they could lead you into enchanted worlds, but he was also learning that, instead of  yielding to the pleasures of fantasy, it would be necessary to harden himself against the real world.

At this point he adds that he began to train himself  in “a youthful Stoicism,” which amounted to bearing up to physical pain. The teachers of course were already administers of pain, against which there was no recourse. Schoolboys  had to inure themselves to the pain of being struck by their teachers, in an “unfriendly” awkward manner as they dolled out punishments. They hardened themselves because insubordination and counteraction were proscribed. And so it was that roughness even became a source of achievement and competition among them, was mirrored in the roughneck behavior on the school yard, with boys trading blows, even receiving blows as forfeits in certain games.

Thus, Goethe’s youthful stoicism, which amounted to flaunting his own defiance of pain. This led other kids to indulge in cruelty toward him. As he puts it, the classroom was divided between those who disliked him and those who wished him well (die Mißwollenden and die Wohlwollenden),  One day at school, the teacher did not arrive on time, and gradually the classroom emptied, and he sat alone with three boy who were among those who did not wish him well. They began to torment him, but after leaving the room for a moment they returned with switches torn from a broom. He saw their intention, but since it was almost the end of the hour he decided not to defend himself, but sat firmly awaiting the remaining minutes. The boys began, he writes, to beat him mercilessly, in the cruelest way, on the legs and calves. He didn’t stir, but he began to notice that pain simply prolonged the minutes.

With his patience, his rage grew, and when the hour struck he took the boys on, one after the other, applying a stranglehold on one boy, banging another’s head to the floor. Even so, they kept kicking and biting, which fueled him with more rage. At a certain point they screamed so appallingly that they were soon surrounded by all the school’s inhabitants. Lucky for Goethe, after pulling off his long socks, the switches and the scratches on his legs showed him to be in the right and he was allowed to go, although he vowed if something similar happened again he would claw out their eyes, tear their ears off, or even strangle them. The end result is that school was over for him, and soon therefore he returned home for his lessons and was taught by private teachers with his sister. 

 It wasn’t the last nasty business of this sort that he experienced in his childhood. Goethe is always drawing moral lessons, and in this case he considered that the disgusting behavior he experienced in school was not personal, but was a human thing. In other words, don’t think because you were bullied that it was personally directed at you. At the same time, kids who are raised in conditions of manners or civilized behavior (like him and his few friends) learn early on from parents and teachers to act in a civilized way (mäßig, verständig, vernünftig), and not to harm one another out of wantonness. Instead, they learn to regulate hateful (gehässig) drives. If they don't, and have to put up for too long with ruffians, they too can become violent, even treacherous or deceitful.        

So much for repaying pain with pain. Goethe goes on to say that force can usefully be repelled by force, and that he was generally able to counter the physical attacks of his “playfellows.” He was, however,  no match for those who begrudged the benefits and possibly the renown he and his family enjoyed: Goethe’s maternal grandfather, after all, was chief magistrate of the city, which aroused resentment and scurrilous remarks among  the “Mißwollenden.” They attacked his family and his position in society with “jibes and disparaging remarks.”

At those attacks he remained quite equable, even when one of the boys made inuendos that the father of the magistrate was not a man of rank. Goethe doesn’t draw attention to it here, but he begins to write about his paternal grandfather, who it turned out did not have a lofty background. It was in the house of this grandfather's wife that Goethe had been living until her death, which was why he was at the moment attending a public school with all the ruffians.

Goethe's home in Frankfurt

Goethe’s father’s father had been a wandering tailor of peasant stock. It was customary for craftsmen to travel, and he had worked, among other places, in Paris, before finally settling in Frankfurt, where he made a great success in Frankfurt as a tailor which led to him marrying the widow of a wealthy innkeeper. His financial success meant that Goethe’s father enjoyed an education, went to law school, married the chief magistrate’s daughter, and inherited the house he rebuilt and filled it with books and paintings, not to forget the vast store of wines from the window’s inn.

 Is that enough detail for today? Interestingly enough, those details of the paternal grandfather do not come from Goethe himself, but from Nicholas Boyle's biography. Is it the case that these were details he didn't want to include in his biography?

 Image credit: Jeni Kirby History; Art UK

Goethe in Detail

Even in his letters from I call his “apprentice years,” from 1768 to 1775, there are few moments in which Goethe informs us (or his addressee) of what is going on is his surroundings or of what is happening around him at a given moment. To give a sense of where I am heading, consider an exception, a letter to his friend J. Ch. Kestner dated Christmas Day of 1772. “It is still night, dear Kestner. I have risen in order to write again by the morning light, which recalls to me pleasant remembrances of past days. I have had some coffee made to honor the festival, and will write to you until it is day. The watchman has already sounded his tune; it woke me up. Praised be thou, Jesus Christ. I very much like this time of year, the songs one sings; and the cold which has set in makes me quite happy.” It suggests that he had gone to bed but has got up again while it is still dark, awakened by the clock outside striking the hours.

Frankfurt Christmas market

The news and thoughts on various matters in the succeeding paragraphs continue to be interspersed with observations about the temporal progress of the day. At one point he mentions that “the watchman has turned himself to me again, the north wind brings his melody to me as if he were blowing before my window.” A long paragraph concerning the events of the day before, including the Christmas market place in Frankfurt, is also interrupted with a mention of the arrival of the gate keepers, rattling their keys. Later we learn that the first gray of day comes to him over the house of the next-door neighbor, and “the bells call together a Christian congregation.” We then learn that he is sitting in the upper story of the family house, “much edified up here in my room, which for along time I have not liked as much as I do now.”

Raphael Heads

The succeeding reflection concerns what hangs on the wall, the “happiest pictures, which wish me a friendly good morning. Seven heads after Raphael, inspired by the living spirit, one of which I have copied, and with which I am satisfied, although not over-pleased.” After news of his sister, he writes: “The day is coming on in strength. … I must write one more page; I will act as if I did not see the daylight.” A final paragraph follows and the letter closes: “Now, adieu, it is broad daylight; God be with you as I am with you. The day has begun festively.”
 

Johann Christian Kestner

The letter resembles a scene in a novel. Not only can we picture the young man sitting at his desk in the middle of the night writing a long letter to his friend, but we see him carrying out the activity in time. We can also situate him in a city, one in which the town’s gates are closed at night and opened in the morning by men whose job it is is to open those gates. It is full of churches where one regularly hears bells at regular intervals of the day. Of course, Goethe had not yet written a novel in 1772, but it is obvious here that he can probably write one. What we have to consider is that the the idea of a novel was already incubating on this Christmas night. Kestner had written him in October informing him of the suicide of Jerusalem, which would be the germ of the novel he wrote in a matter of months two years later, in 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther. By 1772, Goethe was already familiar with the epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson. Goethe kept reading and his literary works kept replaying inspiration he received from his reading. The things to emphasize with Goethe is that he didn’t stick with one thing.

Going back for a moment to Die Laune des Verliebten, Goethe’s early pastoral play, and to his letters at the time of his love for Käthchen Schönkopf. Yes, plenty of feeling, but, aside from scowling, again without specific detail. Did he importune her for kisses in the darkened hallway of the household, after the town crier had announced the closing of the city’s walls?  Did they hold hands? Did they ever engage in passionate kisses? Did he give her presents? The supposition, or the one I am inclined to accept, is that the only thing that happened is that he, a very smart and well-off eighteen-year-old boy, sought to be very proper but made a fool of himself in his attentions to a young woman whose job was to serve him meals. Evidence of anything lubricious or lascivious we do not have.

 I dwell on the lack of detail in these early letters, because it shows the difficulty of writing a close study of a writer who talks about himself so much, but neglects much about what is around him.

The translation of the letter to Kestner appears in Goethe's World, as Seen in Letters and Memoirs, edited by Berthold Biermann, the title of which suggests the desire to provide details of that worl.d

How Goethe Became Goethe

The title above is the subject of the book I am writing on Goethe, and the work itself explains my long blog silence. I am definitely progressing, am in the midst of drafting chapter 4, which concerns the 1774 epistolary novel The Sufferings of Young Werther, which made Goethe famous among German readers, but also from Paris to Saint Petersburg. But in 1774 he was not yet the "literary Olympian" that he began to be regarded in the 19th century, had not yet been consecrated as such, as in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: ‘I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Nearwicked, I always think in a wordworth’s of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper …’

Tischbein, "Goethe am Fenster"

My book concerns what I call Goethe’s literary apprenticeship, the period in which he began to hone the gifts that would lead to the figure known as “Goethe.” The period begins in 1765, when he was 16 and went to Leipzig to study law, and ends in 1775, when he was 26 and traveled to Weimar, where he ended up spending the rest of his life, dying in 1832.

If his father had had anything to do with it, young Goethe would have followed in his footsteps, study law at the university, become a lawyer, marry, raise a family and be part of the bourgeois city of Frankfurt. Goethe did go to the university, at the age of 16, to Leipzig. Instead of pursuing his legal studies, the two and a half years in Leipzig were spent attending classes on literature and writing poetry and plays. He also began to draw and to learn etching. Two years later he traveled to Strassburg and this time actually matriculated and received a law degree, after which, in 1772, he spent a summer in the town of Wetzlar, where he underwent a legal apprenticeship at the Imperial Court, and where the story of “Werther” has its origins. Back in Frankfurt, he spent the next three years working on legal cases under his father’s direction, but spent most of his time traveling and consorting with literary companions and publishing reviews and dramas. At the end of 1774, The Sufferings of Young Werther was published, which brought him heaps of attention, including from Carl August, duke-in-training in Weimar. Goethe met him when Carl August was in a town near Frankfurt to finalize his marriage, and he was invited to visit Weimar. Like his earlier jaunts, on foot or horseback, he intended to spent only a few weeks. The rest is history.

In some ways, these early years of Goethe's youth sound very modern. How many of us also spent a lot of time figuring out what we wanted to do when we grew up? Goethe came of age of in a time of transition, when, for the first time in history, ordinary young men (principally) had that choice before putting down roots and conforming to social expectations.

Tischbein, "Goethe in Rome"

Rather than going into specific details here of Goethe's literary apprenticeship, I'd like instead to offer a comparison with a 19th-century painter whose work is now on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Singer Sargent. Although Sargent was born over a century after Goethe (in 1856), the trajectory of his career shows similarities with Goethe's, insofar as it reveals how artists and writers once upon a time still learned their craft by imitating their artistic and literary predecessors. In the process, they learned the "strokes," so to speak, and if they possessed any "originality" they began to modify what they had learned from the works they imitated. And then one day, as the Metropolitan exhibit suggests about Sargent, he "became Sargent."

Sargent's parents were American, but he was born in Florence and spent most of his life in Europe, and like the youthful Goethe he traveled all over, including down to northern African. It was already a more "advanced" material age than when Goethe was making his travels: Sargent traveled by train, and he also probably had a manservant who carried his materials, for instance, wood squares on which he could quickly imprint an oil work. One thing I gleaned from the Met exhibit is that he never stopped drawing or sketching, which mirrors Goethe as well.

For instance, Goethe describes in his autobiography his jaunts on foot of 20 miles from Frankfurt to visit friends in Darmstadt. Several poems that were composed at this time -- 1772 -- were on the theme of "the Wanderer," and one can imagine Goethe belting out the verses of his poems as he walked. There were, after all, no shops along the way catering to the tastes of urban breakfast consumers: no bagels or raisin bread, cafe latte, cappucino, or decaf. He was able to direct his thoughts to what was really on his mind, his poetry. He tried out poems as he walked, sang them. The result was work in a variety of literary genres, imitating, with remodeling, certain literary predecessors. (You will have to read my book to get these details.)

So it was with Sargent. He too had a father with plans for him, in this case sending him in 1874 to Paris, a magnet for art students. He learned to study the works of Franz Hals, Rembrandt, Diego Velasquez. His early works, according to the labels at the Met, indicate that his "sun-drenched canvases" of the late 1870s bespeak the influence of Claude Monet." But the works in the first galleries at the Met show that he was working in a number of styles. Herewith two paintings.

"Dancing Faun," 1873-74

 

 

"Portrait of Ralph Curtis," 1880

And then suddenly he "became Sargent." He was living in Paris and was the most famous portrait painter of the period. The first painting below is one of my favorites, followed by a detail of the young girl's face.

"Edouard and Marie-Louise Pailleron," 1880

She looks as if rather annoyed at the painter, and according to the Met exhibit it took a long, long time to paint his portraits. Below is one that is very famous and reveals the breadth of Sargent's social associations in Paris. Next to it another famous Sargent portrait.

"Madame X," 1883-84

 

"Dr. Pozzi," 1881

As the Met catalogue suggests, Sargent created a work of "remarkable sensuality that blurs the boundaries between public and private personae." In any case, the painting of Madame X produced a lot of criticism and Sargent soon moved to England, where he spent the rest of his life.

I have devoted this attention to Sargent to consider how he "became Sargent," which the exhibition shows as having been attained in the 1880s with these many portraits, all made in Paris and exhibited there. At the same time, they differ from Goethe's "becoming." Sargent seemed in the Paris years to have reached a certain perfection of style and stayed there, while Goethe never remained with one style. His literary production, from his earliest Leipzig efforts to the conclusion of Faust shortly before his death in the late 1820s, shows that he continued to appropriate new models and transform them. Interestingly, after Sargent left Paris and moved to England, he seems to have varied things a bit, going back to the Claude Monet style, which I find more charming than his portraits. According to the Met's wall label of the work below, from 1889, it was painted in the English countryside at Fladbury, Worcestershire." Moreover, Sargent adapted "the plein-air lessons he had learned while painting alongside Claude Monet at Giverny." I wish, like Goethe, he had felt free to continue the explorations found in his early apprentice years. And I hope that the post offers some insight into Goethe's "becoming."

"Out of Doors Study," 1889

 

 

The Youngest Goethe

Portrait of Goethe, ca. 1764

 It’s been too long since I have posted. In the meantime I have noticed that Goethe had more to say  in his autobiography about Gellert (see previous post), but my work on my book on Goethe (I am now writing a draft of the third chapter) has kept me too occupied. I have been prompted into action, however, by a posting by my friend Genese Grill who is writing a biography of Robert Musil. On her Substack site (“Attempts to Find Robert Musil”) she recently wrote a piece entitled “Stony and Silent or Effervescent and Fascinating?”which concerns what Musil was like in company.

So, this post is along similar lines. Since my present focus is the so-called young Goethe, the years before he went to Weimar at 26 in 1775, I have gone back for evidence of  those years to a magnificent archival work, by Ernst Grumach and Renate Grumach. It is part of a series entitled Goethe: Meetings and Conversations. Volume 1 covers the years 1749, the year of Goethe’s birth, to 1776, his first Weimar year. The volume is 500 pages long.

From 1752 until 1764, the entries are either from Bettina von Arnim’s “Correspondence with a Child” (arising from her conversations with Goethe’s mother; published in 1835), which describe Goethe at about the age of three or four, or from a letter of Goethe’s mother to him in 1795, in which she thanks him for sending her the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. This mention is important evidence of some events of Goethe’s childhood, as the novel assembled into fictional form many incidents of his childhood, including the famous puppet theater of 1754, when he was five or six. These entries are very small and short in comparison with the numerous excerpts from Goethe’s autobiography, which are Goethe’s own version of these years but which were written half a century after the events.

In 1764, we have the first documents in Goethe’s own handwriting in letters he wrote, as well as responses to these letters.

Goethe was then fifteen and was writing to gain admittance to a Frankfurt “poetic circle” called the Arcadian Society. The addressee was a certain Ludwig Ysenburg von Buri. Goethe’s letter begins with a paragraph in which he writes with effusive praise of von Buri that he has heard from the latter’s friends: “You are well aware that your merits captivate people even in places farther away than where I live.” He then continues: “You see from my preface that I presently seek only your acquaintance until you learn whether I am worthy to be your friend and enter your society.”

Goethe’s self-presentation is very striking. He goes so far as to say that the friends who have praised Buri have not given him, Goethe, the invaluable good fortune of making him and Buri acquainted, about which, he writes: “Perhaps a little bit of envy is at fault.” A person may deny his faults when seeking acquaintance with such an estimable person as Buri, but Goethe will not: “One of my main shortcomings is that I am somewhat impetuous (heftig). … Furthermore, I am used to giving orders, but where I have nothing to say, I can leave the matter alone.”

 This overbearing flattery from an unknown person causes von Buri to respond: “You attribute to me qualities that you could not personally have known and merits that you have not witnessed.” Referring to the friends Goethe had mentioned in his letter, von Buri adds: “My friends may mean well, but fundamentally they are doing harm to themselves and me.” Buri then gets himself out of responsibility for Goethe’s membership in the Society by recommending that he turn to another member, a certain Mr. Alexis, who is a supervisor of the Society, so that “I can get the appropriate information from him, in order not to expose myself to the cruel responsibility of the Society.”

Goethe seems not to have heard the underlying tone of Buri’s letter and wrote him again a month later: “You are too kind in giving me hope of entering your Society at a time when I thought this happiness was beyond my reach.”

There then followed another exchange between him and Buri in which Buri spoke with the same tone and postponed a decision regarding Goethe’s admittance. In the meantime, members of the Society carried out their own intelligence. One of the people to whom Buri wrote responded as follows, warning that Goethe was “given to excesses (Ausschweifung) and many other unpleasant faults. … Herr Goethe visited me last week for about 15 minutes. He is about 15 or 16 years old, but he is more in possession of  blabber (Plapperwerk)  than of depth (Gründlichkeit).” Therewith the matter appears to have ended, but not in Goethe’s favor. Buri writes to one of the members that “Herr Goethe” has not written again and that he hopes he will not do so. “But should he be so impertinent to do so, I have already decided not to deign to reply.”

Clearly, the time in which Goethe grew up had its rules, its decorum, its snobberies, but I can’t help thinking of the sororities and fraternities of my own youth in the 1960s and 1970s. The letters, however, give strong evidence in 1764 already, of Goethe’s almost overbearing self-assurance. 

Von Buri himself actually went on to write a work on the consequences of the French Revolution as well as a five-act play: Ludwig Capet, oder der Konigsmord: ein Burgerliches Trauerspiel, and a Lustspiel: Der Kohlenbrenner. But times change of course. The author of an article I came across concerning the letters to Buri mentions that he and Goethe met again in 1774, but that Buri continued on his own "lesser sunlit path" (wenig sonnenbeschienenen Weg), served in a modest position as an officer until 1806, and enjoyed only lukewarm success as a poet and dramatist. The author's conclusion: "How often must he have looked toward Weimar with envy, where there lived a great man (Mensch), an illustrious poet, and who moreover served in an official capacity at the court, whom he had so haughtily dismissed from his circle."

Image credit: Freies Deutsches Hochstift;

Christian Fürchtegott Gellert

This post is going to be all over the place.

In my work on the "young" Goethe, i.e., his oeuvre before he went to Weimar at the age of twenty-six in 1775, I would come across the name and work of Gellert, a professor in Leipzig, whose classes on literature and essay writing Goethe attended while a student there. Gellert was one of the major writers in the generation at mid-18th century. Among other things, he was the author of plays and a short novel, The Life of the Swedish Countess G____, one of the first German novels to imitate Richardson's epistolary style. His Fables were one of the most popular works of that century. There was, however, no copyright protection for authors (Goethe would later be instrumental in securing that right for authors in Germany), and Gellert himself profited little financially from this popularity. Ten years after his death, the German publisher Wendler brought out an edition of the Fables and made a fortune of 10,000 Thalers.

I have mentioned many times that my research on Goethe, especially now that I am writing a book on him, leads me in many directions and down many alleyways, and thus this post on Gellert. My curiosity about a work by the writer Berthold Auerbach on Goethe's "Erzählungskunst" led me to Auerbach's own collection of "folktales (Volkserzählungen), in which appears "Gellert's Last Christmas" (1857). Reading this tale I seemed to encounter something new about the world in which Goethe came of age, in this case, the matter of religion in the age of Enlightenment.

According to the Wikipedia article on Auerbach (1812–1882), he was the founder of the German "tendency novel," one that uses fiction to influence readers on social and moral matters. Moral, in the case of the tale of Gellert's last Christmas (his death occurred in 1769), is not of the kind we now associate with public matters (immigration, abortion, etc.), but is really about individual conscience and the scruples that can plague humans in the rounds of everyday life. In fact, I found the tale really difficult to read at times. The two main characters are Geller, professor of moral philosophy, and a a poor farmer, both of whom are plagued by inner demons to such an extent that the moment they feel positive about something, they are quickly besieged by negative thoughts. Sound familiar?

Gellert reads his letters

The farmer enjoys a warm beer on arriving in Leipzig

The farmer and Gellert meet

The farmer's wife prepares dinner

The tale begins with Gellert returning home from the university. We soon learn that he suffers from depression, though not so called in the tale. (The term in  German is Schwermut.) His servants greet him at the door, they clearly care for him, and he settles at his desk with his pipe and reads letters that have arrived today, some from friends, others from people asking for advice or for his help. One of the letters, from a friend, causes such joy that he stands up and cries, "How fortunate I am to have such a friend." He is an affable man, for whom being in the presence of good men and contemplating the good is true bliss. But quickly dark spirits intervene. As a professor of moral philosophy, he has his scoffers, and when he is alone like this they enter his room, peer over his shoulder when he is writing, and laugh at what they see. Ideas that he hopes will elevate the behavior of others are perverted by them into folly and madness. The acclamation of friends makes him joyful, while the antagonism of his opponents engulfs him in sadness. Not to forget,he is also very poor, despite the popularity of his writing.

Similarly, the poor farmer constantly compares himself with others who have more, including his own brother. He too is dissatisfied with himself, tortured by "dark thoughts." His story opens as Gellert goes to bed and he rises from his bed, goes out in the dark night to feed his livestock. The  story revolves around his decision after abruptly coming across a poem by Gellert that is in a book on a table and open to that particular page. It lifts his spirits so much that he decides to make Gellert the gift of a wagon load of wood on Christmas eve. The farmer is very poor, so the gift is a true sacrifice, but in doing so he meets Gellert at his quarters in Leipzig and learns that carrying out one's daily duties with integrity, rejoicing with his wife and children -- what more is needed for a good life?

There is some nice imagery in the tale. As the farmer makes his way from his farm to the city with his load of wood, he thinks of times past when a man like himself might have been transporting the wood for the stake on which people of other religions would be tied before being burned to death. And this in turn makes him think of the dark monsters sitting on the necks of those whose beliefs tortured them and led to their deaths. Indeed, Auerbach's portrayal of the mental struggles of the two figures in the tale are somewhat hard to read. What is interesting is that the monsters against whom they struggle are not the "traditional" ones of the Catholic faith -- heaven, hell, the devil, the better angels --  but seem a secularized version of Protestantism: being "good" in everyday life is presented as an ongoing internal struggle against demons that constantly urge us to do the opposite of what is good for our souls (although the word is seldom used here) and betray our "better" self.

Oeser's monument to Gellert

Goethe mentions Gellert in a few places in his autobiography, never slightingly, although noting in particular the red ink with which the professor drew attention to Goethe’s poetic extravagances (too many mythological figures). The one professor with whom Goethe was on close terms when he was a student was Adam Friedrich Oeser (1771–1799), who was an important mediator between Goethe and Winckelmann's conception of antiquity. Goethe was, as Nicholas Boyle writes, an assiduous student in Oeser’s drawing academy. The classes took place in the “old castle,” which was also “an important meeting place,” where young Goethe, a “rich, talented, and well-connected young amateur” became personal friends of the family. Oeser was responsible for many artistic projects at this time, including ceiling paintings. When Goethe was in Weimar, Oeser had important commissions from Anna Amalia for the Wittums Palace there, and he also illustrated Wieland’s works. He was also known for monuments he created, which included one for his close friend Gellert after the latter's death.This monument was the subject of a poem by Goethe, written in 1776, presumably at the time Oeser was commissioned to produce the monument.

Als Gellert, der geliebte, schied,
Manch gutes Herz im Stillen weinte,
Auch manches matte, schiefe Lied
Sich mit dem reinen Schmerz vereinte;
Und jeder Stümper bei dem Grab
Ein Blümchen an die Ehrenkrone,
Ein Scherflein zu des Edlen Lohne,
Mit vielzufriedner Miene gab:
Stand Oeser seitwärts von den Leuten
Und fühlte den Geschiednen, sann
Ein bleibend Bild, ein lieblich Deuten
Auf den verschwundnen werthen Mann;
Und sammelte mit Geistesflug
Im Marmor alles Lobes Stammeln,
Wie wir in einen engen Krug
Die Asche des Geliebten sammeln.

Gellert image credit: Harvard Museums

Goethe and the Elegiac Tradition

I subscribe to the TLS, which does pretty good coverage of German literature and history, including Goethe. (I have even written a few reviews in the TLS on Goethe, which you can check out online.) But I also read literary coverage generally. Often reviews of other literary traditions lead me to consider Goethe, which was the case with a recent review: The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of Memory, Mourning and Consolation, edited by Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan. The reviewer, Alan Jenkins, gave a very tough review, tough in the sense of focusing on the shortcomings of the volume (a Penguin Classics), in particular its omissions.

The origin of the genre was an ancient Greek one: a song of mourning or lament and, in addition, composed in a specific meter, “the elegiac couplet or distich.” Jenkins made it clear that in the transmission of the genre over the centuries covers a wide territory of subject matter. For instance, the Anglo-Saxon “The Seafarer” does not lament the death of an individual but instead reflects “gravely on serious matters of life and death”; likewise Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which Jenkins considers the best example of this type:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
         The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
         And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

At first glance, one cannot say of Goethe’s Roman Elegies, written between 1788 and 1790, that they are laments. Composed in elegiac distichs, they portray Goethe’s experience of sensual love in the Eternal City. At the same time, that background, Rome with its ancient monuments, is no more. Goethe’s “love affair” with the literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans was a life-long one, so it might be said that even the Roman Elegies are saturated with sadness at the passing of that world.

"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Jim Stovall

But Goethe also penned an elegy back in 1767, when he was sixteen years old, which is indeed a poem about loss and is more in line with the elegies discussed in the TLS review. Indeed, I wonder if Goethe was aware of Thomas Gray's elegy, which was published in 1751, as his is entitled “Elegy on the Death of the Brother of My Friend" (Elegie auf den Tod des Bruders meines Freundes) and which was set in a churchyard. Herewith a link to the original; unfortunately I could find no English translation, which is an indication of the low esteem in which the poem is held in Goethe scholarship. The poem was never published, and was not discovered until 1895, decades after Goethe’s death, in a handwritten manuscript of nineteen poems, the so-called Buch Annette, prepared by the friend in the title of the poem, namely, Ernst Wolfgang Behrisch, Goethe’s confidant and mentor while he was a student in Leipzig. (You can find many posts on this blog in which Behrisch is discussed.) Apparently, Behrisch had a very nice handwriting, which can be seen in the image at the top, which is one of the poems in the collection of poems, most of which concern Goethe’s love interest while he was a student in Leipzig.

To do some research for this blog post, I went back and looked into the work of scholars I had not consulted since writing my dissertation on the “young Goethe,” in this case Heinz Kindermann and Eugen Wolff. The former’s work concerns the “Rococo Goethe,” the latter the “historical” development of Goethe’s poetry. Both scholars regard the poem as a “new direction” in Goethe’s poetic production, a move away from the subject of romantic dalliance that featured shepherds and shepherdesses toward a more sober tone.

The story the poem tells concerns a marriage abandoned, not as in Clavigo (see previous post), but because the prince whom Behrisch’s brother served required it of him. It is not specified what the demand was, but the bridegroom was honor-bound to observe it. There is a slight suggestion that he committed suicide, thus prefacing a theme found, as Kindermann and Wolff write, in The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Goethe does a nice job of telling the story, moving step by step, in the first verse setting the scene in a darkened courtyard featuring an an oak tree that has been felled by a storm. It is here that the brother’s body lies buried. A few verses on we read that his betrothed also lies buried, or as Goethe writes, her “heart” lies buried here: “Never did a heart suffer so.”

"O Gott, bestrafest du die Liebe
Du Wesen voller Lieb und Huld?
Denn nichts als eine heil’ge Liebe
War dieser Unglückseel’gen Schuld”

Her hope was to go with her beloved to the altar; instead the prince, in the fashion of tyrants, tore him from her side. Goethe doesn’t dwell on what the prince demanded, only that the lover’s heart was pierced. So that it did not appear that he abandoned his promise to marry her, his death serves as a sign of his fidelity.

“Leb’ wohl, es wein bey meinem Grabe
Jed’ zärtlich Herz gerührt von meiner Treue,
Dann eil’ die stolze Tyrannei,
Der ich schon längst vergeben habe,
Daß sie des Grabes Ursach sei,
Unwillig fühlend, schnell vorbey”

For my part, I don’t think one can attribute much in the way of personal experience on Goethe’s part: he never met Behrisch’s brother. Since the brother had a burial in a cemetery, he obviously was not a suicide. Moreover, research shows that the bride actually died a year before. The elegy seems to have been a “finger exercise” on Goethe’s part, and the “new direction” that scholars perceive in it is an indication of Goethe trying out every literary form he came across. It did not lead to further ventures in this genre until after his return from Italy in 1788, after which began an intensive immersion in the works of Greek and Latin poets and also in the metrical forms of the ancient literature. (Here is a great piece in the Goethe-Lexicon site.) Thus, the Römische Elegien and such works as Hermann und Dorothea (about which see my earlier post). The elegiac tradition, in the sense of lament and mourning, found a place in English literature. According to the TLS review, however, at least two German poets are featured in translation in the book under review: Rilke’s 9th “Duino Elegy” and Paul Celan’s “chilling ‘Deathfugue.’” Clearly there is more to say about the German tradition.

Image credits: Jim Stovall