Goethe on Beggars

While reading the third volume of Goethe's On Art and Antiquity (Über Kunst und Altertum), from 1822, I came across some observations concerning various beggars whom Goethe encountered in his travels, including a comparison of Protestant beggars and their counterparts.

Of the former, Goethe writes that, on receiving alms, they say matter-of-factly, "May God reward you for your generosity," without offering to put in a good word for the giver with the Almighty, after which the two of you then go your separate ways. The Catholic, however, declares he will pray for you, will storm God and his saints with petitions, until they shower you with the holiest material blessings. Goethe finds a certain irony in these claims:

When one is in the right mood, it is really touching to see someone who, despite claiming a direct relationship with the highest being, is unable to entreat for himself a resonable improvement in his own condition, yet nevertheless believes himself able to be the patron of another, making an appearance before God, accompanied by his many clients, with supplications.

The essay in which this quotation appears concerns coincidences and the seemingly accidental nature of good fortune -- for example, the unexpected beneficence of a handful of coins from a toff like Goethe. For Goethe, the prayers of Catholics suggested superstition. Like many Germans raised in the Protestant tradition, he was both fascinated by Catholic practices and repelled by what he would have called mysticism. (Mother Angelica: "Angels could kill 260,00 peoples in one night. One angel went through Egypt and killed the firstborn humans, cows, sheeps, dogs, cats, locusts -- everything that was firstborn went. That angel was powerful.")

Goethe's anecdote hits on a distinguishing point that has been elucidated by Max Weber and that underlies the different direction in which Protestantism traveled with the onset of modernity. To men of the Enlightenment like Goethe, Catholicism seemed downright impractical in a worldly sense. And it continues (except among the "liberation theologian" types)  to reflect this unworldliness.

It is a truism that, in our modern worldliness, we often have little sense for the miraculous. I venture to say that our present worldliness affects our relationship with beggars. I was struck by this today, as I passed one of these forlorn humans on my way to the grocery store. One feels a decided skepticism about their condition. (For instance, how much of their condition is self-inflicted, because of, say, drugs or alcohol?) Moreover, how much money have Americans spent since Lyndon Johnson promised an end to poverty, and yet it still stares us in the face? In the face of our own affluence, beggars also seem something of a reproach to the good life that most of us manage to lead, even while often struggling to keep a roof over our head. Why do so many people remain failures despite all the money that has been poured into welfare, despite all the opportunities (free schooling, free breakfast and lunch programs for schoolchildren)?

Interestingly, it is the Protestants (in their contemporary liberal incarnation) who believe in miracles, expecting the welfare system to fix broken lives. Catholics seem more clear-sighted about the human condition.

Picture credits: the Louvre; Downside World News

Goethe in Bohemia

The cycle of poems entitled "Marienbader Elegie" (more properly, "Trilogie der Leidenschaft," or trilogy of passion), from 1824, is the most famous product of Goethe's frequent visits to the spas and healing springs of Bohemia. Other spas he favored were Franzensbad, Teplitz, and Karlsbad, of which he wrote, on a visit in 1785: "From granite and through the entire creation, to the women: everything conduced to make this stay pleasant and interesting."

From "granite and through the entire creation" refers to Goethe's lifelong interest in geology and geological formations. The drawing above (click on image to enlarge), made by Goethe in 1808, is of the so-called "Kammerberg" (chamber mountain), not far from Franzensbad, which we now know is an extinct volcano. Goethe visited and climbed it numerous times, and his geological writings contain an essay entitled Der Kammerberg bei Eger.

The 18th century challenged the time frame of the Biblical account of earth's creation, and rival theories arose to explain the formation of mountains. Thus arose the so-called Neptunist-Vulcanist controversy: Vulcanists (or Plutonists) declared that rocks and mountains had been formed by violent means, through volcanic action within the earth; for the Neptunists the process had been more gentle, with geological sedimentation (as in mountains) arising from the precipitation of water. This was an academic controversy, somewhat like that today over global warming. Goethe was a Neptunist. The fourth act of Faust II even has a scene between the two sides, with Mephistopholes taking sides with the Plutonists.

Goethe wrote the following about his observations at Kammerberg: "A long stay in Franzensbrunnen allows me to visit the problematic Kammmerberg at Eger often. I collect samples, observe it closely, describe and draw it. I find myself compelled to diverge from the opinion of Reuss, who declares it to be pseudo-volcanic, and to declare it instead to be volcanic. I will write an essay on it ... but the question will probably not be solved, and a return to Reuss's opinion might be advised" (Tag- und Jahreshefte 1807). Reuss refers to the first Czech balneologist, Frantisek Ambroz Reuss, founder of modern geological research of the Bohemian mineral waters. Goethe had consulted his works on the geology and hydrology of the Bohemian mineral springs.

It was not only at Kammerberg that Goethe collected rocks and minerals. He amassed a considerable collection all over Germany and Bohemia (and people constantly sent him samples from other regions of the world, though I don't know whether he had a sample of jasper, as in this piece in the Metropolitan Museum (2000.504). He frequently said he was not interested in gems. The jasper, with its lovely amethyst inclusions, was mined in mountains northwest of Prague and transformed into this vessel at the court of Charles IV in the late 1300s.

Goethe's "Novelle"

The lovely ivory plaque above (now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art; 2003.131.2) was made in Paris in about 1350. Originally the back panel of a casket, it shows a hunting party emerging from a castle on the left. On the right is a stag, already wounded by the hunter's sword, drinking from the waters of a fountain. (Click the image for a larger view.)

When I saw this image (it is reprinted in the November 2008 issue of The Burlington Magazine, p. 797), I immediately thought of the opening of Goethe's Novelle, which he began working on in 1797 but did not publish until 1828, four years before his death. Despite the title, it is not a novella in the conventional literary sense, derived from the Italian novella (lit. "a little, new thing"), a short tale in prose exemplified most famously by Boccaccio's Decameron.

Thomas Mann is one of the best-known practitioners of the form, as in Death in Venice or (one of my favorites) The Black Swan. (In German, the latter is called Die Betrogene, or "the deceived one," and was Mann's last tale.) Both are about impossible loves.

It is somewhat mysterious why Goethe chose Novelle for the title of his tale. (He also wrote Das Märchen, which is unlike any fairy tale you are likely to encounter.) It begins with a scene much like that pictured in the ivory, with the duke of a well-off town riding out from his castle with a group of nobles to hunt. He leaves his young wife behind at the castle, looking out the window (as in the ivory) at the departing riders. Nothing much happens in the story: the duchess and her husband's uncle and a young courtier named Honorio visit the ancient site of the family's castle in a nearby forest. While they are out, a fire breaks out in the town, and a tiger escapes from its cage into the forest. Of course, the tiger is not dangerous, since it was part of a menagerie and its killing by Honorio (who thinks he must protect the duchess) is unnecessary. A lion has also escaped, but the child of the menagerie owner is able to calm it with gentle music and song and lure it back to its cage. So, the story is about different ways of taming the passions.

I have always thought that Novelle would make a wonderful movie, something along the lines of Ever After: A Cinderella Story, a movie from 1998 starring (I kid you not) Drew Barrymore. It was a delightful re-creation of the fairy tale, with Cinderella, although put upon by the wicked stepmother (in another star turn, Angelica Houston), being the rescuer of the prince. Even in Goethe's time, Novelle must have had a similar otherworldly quality, and I imagine the story set in the years before the French Revolution. This is a movie script I would like to write.

Popular culture

It is interesting how facets of contemporary "culture" can simply pass you by. I am thinking now of Andy Warhol and of Interview magazine. When I came to New York, back in the early 1980s, the large-format Interview was always staring out at you from magazine stands, with the star or personality du jour on the cover, but I can't recall every picking up a copy and reading it. I was also aware of the club scene, with the likes of Bianca Jagger and Halston and so on, but I never went to a club and didn't really have much interest in going. There was the phenomenon then that I found amusing, the bouncers outside clubs who chose who got to go in and mingle with the "elect." Andy Warhol seems to have inaugurated all that, but for me there was simply no interest in being around celebrity. (I still feel the same way about movie stars and, now, the Obama celebrity.)

But when I got to Pittsburgh on Thursday, mid-afternoon, a few hours before the opening reception of the Goethe Society conference, I decided to go downtown to the Andy Warhol Museum. Warhol was such a quintessential New York personality that it is hard to believe that he actually came from Pittsburgh.

As I said, Andy Warhol was never of interest to me, though I have as my screen saver his silkscreen of Goethe (from the original painting by Tischbein). Still, the museum was lots of fun, again perhaps because of my recent interest in the phenomenon of "Spieltrieb." There seems to have been nothing serious about Warhol's artistic intentions. He was a central figure in what was known back in the ... when was it anyway? the 1970s? ... pop art movement. He even made Goethe into pop art and also Pittsburgh's benefactor, Andrew Carnegie.

Pittsburgh

At a certain point in a conference, it is necessary to have a break. That happened to me on day two. I gave my paper at 9 a.m. that morning. At 10:40 Robert Richards gave the keynote speech, in which he maintained that Goethe and Schelling had anticipated Darwin's theories, including those of species generation. Bob, by the way, has written a fascinating book, which I have used in my own research, called The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Some of us then went to lunch at the Carnegie Museum cafe, after which, at 1:30, facing the prospect of a talk entitled "Epistemology of Sensing and Feeling in Goethe's Faust I," I decided to take a break and go instead to see some paintings in the Carnegie Museum of Art.

What is it I like about museums? Probably being by myself for an hour. Solitary museum visits also replicate my first experience of museums, when I was 18 and visiting Europe for the first time. Europe: that means, museums, right? There was a lovely small museum in Paris, then called the Jeu de Paume, devoted solely to the Impressionists. For a person who had never been to a museum before, the Impressionists are immediately accessible. Thus I would spend hours there, taking notes in a small notebook I always carried and trying to decipher the French in the labels next to the paintings. I was particularly intrigued by the phrase "nature morte."

Despite the fact that Pittsburgh was once an important industrial city and that the Fricks and Mellons established their fortunes there, the art acquired by those men has gone for the most part elsewhere, to the Frick Museum here in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Wahington, D.C. (the Mellons). Thus, there is not the fullness of representation at the Carnegie Museum of Art, despite being the obvious recipient of the largesse of Andrew Carnegie (though many of the older public buildings in the city bear the Carnegie profile), that you find at, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The paintings in the first two galleries are in fact arranged in a very 19th-century style, as in the charming scene of schoolgirls drawing.

What I find interesting about the three paintings below, by Edvard Munch, Pierre Bonnard, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, is that they were painted within the same decade, from 1904 to 1914. The same for the painting at the top, "The Picnic" by Maurice Prendergast, a wonderfully cheery painting from 1914. (Check out this better image of the painting at the Carnegie website.) If you look at a painting by Raphael or any of his contemporaries, you usually assign it to a "period," in their case the Renaissance. The very different styles of the paintings by Munch and his contemporaries, however, are indicative of what we now called "Modernism" or even modernity itself: multiplicity of  styles, without any authoritative one, an era when art is about individual sensibility and is dependent for its reception on taste, but mostly on the marketplace.

It should be mentioned that the Carnegie is a very public- and family-friendly museum. Besides the schoolgirls who were drawing in the galleries (above), the large rooms invited antics from the two munchkins below.

Goethe Society of North America

I'm off this afternoon for Pittsburgh, where I will be giving my paper on Fritz Strich. Here is something to feast the eyes on, prepared by Rick, for our Haloween evening with friends. Am I a lucky wife, or what? (Click on picture for larger image.)

Procrastination

Since I work at home, with occasional forays to the library, procrastination is always an issue. Of course,  I am always working on something; often, however, the thing I am working on has nothing to do with the one thing that most needs to be done. I guess this is avoidance. There is a new book on the subject, which I will not read since I have so much to do, but I enjoyed the interview (heard as a podcast on my iPod) with the two German writers, Kathrin Passig and Sascha Lobo, who were promoting the book at the Frankfurt Book Fair, recently ended. Passig is an interesting person, not only a web designer but also a writer. She was winner of last year's Ingeborg Bachman Prize with her story "Sie befinden sich hier" and is also the author of the intriguingly named Lexikon des Unwissens. Check out Sasch Lobo's hair here.

The interview was courtesy of one of my favorite sites, Das Literatur-Cafe. Wolfgang Tischer is the impresario, reporting on the literary goings-on in Germany with much flair and intelligence. Passig and Lobo's book on procrastination is called Dinge geregelt kriegen: ohne einen Funken Selbstdisziplin (Rowohlt), or "How to get things done, without an ounce of self-discipline." They call it an anti-self-help book. Check out their website, where they tell you why they have written it.

The cartoon above (click on it for a larger version) is from another favorite site, Harold's Planet, from which I receive daily a lovely message.