Goethe's Clavigo

Goethe's Clavigo

Clavigo and Marie meet after a long absence

Lots of things have been going on since my last blogpost that have kept me from posting regularly, even though what has kept me occupied has concerned Goethe. In fact I have been immersed in Goethe, trying to get my “Goethe book” off the ground. But I also had to bring to completion an article on Goethe’s early (1774) play Clavigo. (So many footnotes to deal with!) From my graduate studies onward, my work has focused on the “young Goethe.” In considering the pre-1775 work, however, one cannot ignore a late work, namely, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe’s autobiography of the years before he went to Weimar at the end of 1775, which he only began planning in the early 19th century. I am not the only scholar who is skeptical of much of what he writes  about his youth and the creation of his early poetic works. My article on books 5 and 6 of Dichtung und Wahrheit, which has just appeared in the Goethe Yearbook (vol. 31), addresses the “truth” versus the “poetry” of the Gretchen episode in those books. It is entitled “The End of the Affair: Goethe’s Gretchen ‘Roman.’” My contention is that the charming love “affair” with Gretchen, which the autobiography relates as occurring in 1763–1764, was a fictionalization of Goethe’s relationship with Käthgen Schönkopf from 1767 to 1768 when he was a student in Leipzig. By setting the Gretchen episode in his adolescence, Goethe underlined the immaturity of the poetry prompted by his acquaintance with Käthgen, namely, anacreontic poetry, a style he would abandon, especially the “Lüsternheit” (lasciviousness) represented by the poems in the “Annette” collection.

My article on Clavigo does something similar with the final books of DuW, in particular Goethe’s account of the origin of the play itself in 1774 as well as his portrait of his final youthful love affair with Lili Schönemann in1775. Goethe himself points in DuW to this issue of poetic re-creation, attributing to his friend Merck the following characterization of himself: “Dein Bestreben, … deine unablenkbare Richtung ist, dem Wirklichen eine poetische Gestalt zu geben.”

Also keeping me busy is another Goethe late work, Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Refugees).  The theme of the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in October is “Conflicts and Transitions in the Global Eighteenth Century.”  My friend and colleague Linda Merians has organized a panel for the conference —“Conflicts and Transitions:  Refugees and Refugeeism” — on which I will speak on Goethe’s tale of German-speaking exiles fleeing France after the French Revolution. Exiles: sounds like a timely topic. More later.

Image credit: Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Clavigo, by Goethe"