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