Goethe and Refugees, 2

This is the concluding part of the previous post on the subject of refugees and émigrés during the French Revolution in Goethe's works. As with Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, discussed in the earlier post, I am not dealing with the poetic character or literary values of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. (Another time perhaps!) As preparation for my participation on a panel at an 18th-century conference (see previous post), I am simply drawing attention here to what strikes me as interesting aspects of the subject of “refugees” in these works.

Goethe and Lili

One thing I did not mention in the previous post was that Goethe was personally familiar with an émigré of the type described in Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten. Her name was Lili Schönemann, and in an article I recently completed I have described her as the “last love” of Goethe’s youth. He and Lili met in January 1775, a meeting described in Dichtung und Wahrheit, in the Schönemann home in Frankfurt, where the 16-year-old Lili was playing the piano. The letters and poems Goethe wrote that year reveal that he was deeply in love with her. In his autobiography (published decades later) he writes that they did not marry because of “family differences.” Among the differences: Goethe’s family was Lutheran, Lili’s “Reformed.” Goethe does not draw attention to this, but the Reformed were in origin the French Calvinists whose conversion to Protestantism led to the French religious wars of the 17th century. The Huguenots, as they were called, fled France in the 17th century and took up residence in England, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, even the U.S.

Huguenot strongholds in France

 Lili Schönemann, like the figures described in the previous post, was also an émigré who left France in the wake of the revolutionary events. Her husband was a wealthy banker, baron von Türckheim, with whom she lived near Strassburg. In 1792, when things got out of hand with the French Revolution, he was deposed from his office as mayor. The family Türckheim also had a  farm near Strassburg, where they stayed for a while, but as the violence increased, her husband feared he would be among the Revolution’s victims. It was a tricky business, though perhaps not so hard for a single man to evade the frontier posts manned by revolutionary authorities. Lili, on her own, dressed as a farmer’s wife, along with her four children, also managed to escape and meet up with her husband in Mannheim. Goethe did not meet Lili at this time, but he was aware of her experience.

In 1795, as Schiller was getting ready to publish his journal Die Horen, he asked Goethe for a contribution. The result was the Unterhaltungen. You might say that the material was already there for Goethe to draw on. I would not say that the baroness in the Unterhaltungen is a stand-in for Lili; as in many of Goethe’s works, she may have simply provided the inspiration.

It’s worth noting that the wars that initially produced refugees in Europe were of a religious nature, in the 16th and 17th centuries; since the French Revolution, however, wars have been of a political nature. The kernel of the story of Hermann und Dorothea, however, which concerns “political” refugees, has a religious background, indeed a Huguenot one, and it is here that Lili may have played a role.

First, a short summary of the refugee situation in Hermann und Dorothea.

There are six characters in Hermann und Dorothea: the proprietor of the Golden Lion and his wife, their son Hermann, the village pastor, the apothecary, and Dorothea, who is among the refugees who have been driven through their small city by the French Revolution. Hermann’s mother sends him with food for their relief. Hermann encounters Dorothea, and “his heart at once goes out to her.” Indeed, it is love at first sight. On his return, he tells his mother that, if he is not permitted to marry Dorothea, he will never marry at all. His father had long tried in vain to persuade him to marry the wealthy neighbor’s daughter, and when the mother reports the son’s resolution, he at first indignantly refuses to accept a wife lacking a dowry. However, consultations among the father and the pastor and the apothecary lead to a happy ending.
 
Just when you think Goethe has invented something new, we find that there is a source! Here is that source as reported by the venerable Gutenberg organization. The Protestants referred to in the passage below are, of course, Huguenots, forced to leave Austria, but who then found welcome in Prussia, where foreign labor was welcome:

Salzburg Protestants on the way to Prussia

“The basis of [Hermann und Dorothea] is a historical incident. In the year 1731 the Archbishop of Salzburg drove out of his diocese a thousand Protestants, who took refuge in South Germany, and among whom was a girl who became the bride of the son of a rich burgher. The occasion of the girl's exile was changed by Goethe to more recent times, and in the poem she is represented as a German from the west bank of the Rhine fleeing from the turmoil caused by the French Revolution. The political element is not a mere background, but is woven into the plot with consummate skill, being used, at one point, for example, in the characterization of Dorothea, who before the time of her appearance in the poem has been deprived of her first betrothed by the guillotine; and, at another, in furnishing a telling contrast between the revolutionary uproar in France and the settled peace of the German village.”

The expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants was well known to Goethe. According to the site Salzburg Exiles: “The expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants created a sensation in the Protestant states of Europe. At least 300 different books and pamphlets were written about the migration in 1732–1733, celebrating the faith and perseverance of the Salzburgers.”

Image credits: Tales of Goethe; Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)