Galsan Tschinag

Back in graduate school, when I was working on my dissertation on Goethe, I began writing reviews for World Literature Today. I started with reviews of German novels but was occasionally sent American ones as well. Over the years, I have written reviews of Birgit Vanderbeke, Christine Brooke-Rose, Angela Krauß, Paul Theroux, Erich Loest, Joyce Carol Oates, Jens Sparschuh, Muriel Spark, Christoph Peters, Philip Roth, and many more. What a lineup! The short format -- 500 words -- taught me to be succinct while also telling what the novel was about. (Have you noticed how that information is missing from so many book reviews?)

It was a good exercise, plus I have been able to keep up with contemporary literature. I must admit that I have not always been excited about the German writers, but certainly one of my favorites has been Martin Mosebach (pictured at the right), whose Der Mond und das Mädchen I reviewed for WLT. Besides being a wonderful chronicler of Germany and of Frankfurt in particular, Mosebach is refreshingly politically incorrect. Listen here to a interview with him on Das Literatur-Café. A very intelligent and thoughtful man.

No doubt the most interesting book I reviewed for WLT was Tau und Gras by Galsan Tschinag (b. 1944), a Mongolian writer and shaman from the small nomadic tribe of the Tuva, who traditionally occupied yurt settlements in the pastures and valleys of southern Siberia and Mongolia. I was reminded of Galsan Tschinag the other day, when I came across the photos of the Mongolian yurt above. It was among a series of photos of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia on the Big Picture website.

Mongolia, a newly independent nation since 1990, was formerly a Soviet-based communist republic. The shamanist story traditions were already being eroded by Soviet collectivization when Galsan Tschinag was born. Like many promising young men and women from formerly socialist lands of the Third World, he was sent to Leipzig to study in 1962, where he made himself a master of the German language. Tau und Gras and his other stories and novels offer a glimpse of a people for whom, according to Herder anyway, poetry was once a spontaneous cultural product. Galsan lives today mostly in Ulan Bator, but travels widely in Europe giving readings of his works.

I was unable to pull off any pictures of Galsan from the Internet (but go to the Wikipedia entry), but Big Picture includes many from Mongolia, including this arresting color composite image (made using shortwave infrared and green wavelengths) of the Edrengiyn Nuruu, which forms a transition one between the Mongolian steppes to the north and the arid deserts of northern China to the south.

Goethe and Geology

For a review I will be writing for Goethe Yearbook I am reading a trilogy by Bernd Wolff. The novels have as their central theme Goethe's three "Harz journeys," which took place in the years 1777 to 1784. The most well known product of these years, in terms of Goethe's oeuvre, is the poem "Harz Journey in Winter," which begins with a poetic invocation: may his song rise as effortlessly as a hawk, its pinions resting lightly on morning clouds, on the lookout for prey: "Dem Geier gleich/ Der auf schweren Morgenwolken/ Mit sanftem Fittich ruhend/ Nach Beute schaut,/ Schwebe mein Lied." Wolff's first novel, Winterströme, seeks to re-create the Harz journey of 1777 that gave impetus to this poem.

The major products of the second and third Harz journeys were two writings by Goethe on the subject of granite. Goethe, after becoming a member of Carl August's governing council, was appointed to the Ilmenau mine commission: the duchy of Weimar was short on cash, and it was hoped that the mine there, which had been shut down for several decades, would yield copper. Goethe took his duties seriously and began immersing himself in the study of mineralogy. The oldest university of mining and metallurgy in the world, established only a decade or so before, was located nearby, in Freiberg in Saxony. Among its famous students (at a later date) was Alexander von Humboldt.

Goethe took advantage of the expertise of J.C.W. Voigt (1752-1821), whom Carl August had sent to Freiberg to study, to carry out a mineralogical study of the duchy. This period was really the infancy of the science of geology or, in German, Erdenkunde. Voigt's mineralogical mapping was carried out with real hands-on labor. Today we are the beneficiaries of two centuries of technological development, as can be seen in this digital magnetized map of the so-called Kursk Magnetic Anomaly. We now can instantly see the mineralogical potential of the entire earth, thanks to the Commission for the Geological Map of the World. It is Goethe's enthusiasm for granite that Wolff portrays in the second and third novels: Im Labyrinth der Täler and Die Würde der Steine. It sounds very arcane, but Wolff's intention is to show the development of Goethe's scientific interests as a search for what might be called cosmic certainty. Another view of Goethe's interest in geology can be found here, in an article I wrote a few years back.

Wolff's novels suffer from the problem of most historical novels: the impossibility of recapturing the reality of the past. As I read, I constantly find myself objecting to conversations between characters but mostly to the mentality Wolff portrays. Nevertheless, for a Goethe scholar like myself it is fun to encounter all the people who were part of Goethe's milieu. There is hardly anyone Wolff leaves out: Goethe's cook and servants; Charlotte von Stein, but also her son Fritz; the painter Melchior Kraus (who accompanied Goethe on the third Harz journey and supplied the drawings of geological formations, including the one pictured here); Carl August's sad wife, Louisa August; the poet Gleim; Maria Antonia Branconi; Herder. They are all there and many more. So, if I can't take seriously Wolff's reconstruction of these figures, I have at least been led to reading more about them in historical accounts (which also suffer from the difficulty of recapturing past reality).

The painting at the top of today's post, The Weimar Court of the Muses, is by the artist Theobald von Oer. It shows Schiller (who died in 1805) reading his poems in the park of Schloß Tiefurt. (Goethe stands at the right, in a Napoleonic gesture.) It was painted in 1860, 55 years after Schiller's death, and is evidence of the late-19th-century fascination for "great" men. The court of the Muses at Weimar more likely resembled that to be seen in contemporary drawings by Melchior Kraus of "amateur theatricals" at the court in Vienna. Pictured here is a production of Der Postzug by the Austrian "officer and author" Cornelius Hermann von Ayrenhoff (1773-1819). Never heard of him? (And feminists are always decrying all the "disappeared" women writers!) According to his Wikipedia entry, his plays were modeled on the French writers Racine and Corneille; at the Burgtheater in Vienna, he was opposed to all the new-fangled theatrical innovations.

Picture credit: Free Republic

September 1, 1939

World War II "officially" began on this day 70 years ago. The lead article today in the Times of London calls Poland "the great survivor" and commends the country for having emerged from rival totalitarianisms and become an integral part of a free Europe. Recently I have read Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes, a marvelous novel about Russian oppression under the tsars. It reveals that, under the Soviets, Russians only changed the names of their oppressors. As a warning to us today, it also shows the kind of fanaticism that grips people who live under tyrannies.

Neville Chamberlain is usually ridiculed for his "peace in our time" appeasement of Hitler, with the Munich Agreement of September 1938, but, as the Times remarks today, the "ailing and politically quiescent Prime Minister, who had been outmanoeuvered on the international stage, belatedly did the right thing nonetheless. For the next six years Britain's fate was integral to Poland's prospects."

A ceremony in Danzig today commemorating this date in history included the presence of the Polish president Lech Kaczynski, German chancelor Angela Merkel, and Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin (above). Putin looks like he would prefer to be elsewhere.

As a former student and now scholar of German literature and of Goethe, one is hard put to explain why totalitarianism developed in Germany. Herblock's cartoon expresses something of that puzzlement. Certainly German history in no way approaches the barbarism of Russian rule, whether under the tsars or the Soviets. It may be the very intellectual achievements and cultural heritage of Germany that makes the Nazi period stand out and continue to exert a rather perverse fascination. In contrast, when a tyranny like that of Stalin kills millions of its own citizens, we shrug our shoulders, as if such behavior is to be expected, thus not holding that regime to the standards of civilization. Such a reaction, however, is a disservice to the millions of people all over the world who would prefer to live in a free society. Let this date be a reminder of what our fathers and grandfathers fought for. And don't forget to read Conrad, on the dangers of quiescence.

Picture credit: Deutsches Historisches Museum

Happy Birthday, Goethe!

It was on the 28th of August 1749, at the stroke of twelve noon, that I came into the world in Frankfurt on the Main. The constellation was auspicious: the Sun was in Virgo and at its culmination for the day. Jupiter and Venus looked amicably upon it, and Mercury was not hostile. Saturn and Mars maintained indifference. Only the Moon, just then becoming full, was in a position to exert averse force, because its planetary hour had begun. It did, indeed, resist my birth, which did not take place until this hour had passed.

These good aspects, which astrologers in later years taught me to value very highly, were probably responsible for my survival, for the midwife was so unskilled that I was brought into the world as good as dead, and only with great difficulty could I be made to open my eyes and see the light.

Goethe begins his autobiography with the above description of his birth. He was being somewhat fanciful, for he rejected the "metaphysical assumptions" of astrology, namely, that one's path in life was determined by the position of the planets and other stars at the moment of one's birth.

Nevertheless, he saw fate (Schicksal), an element of what he referred to as necessity (Notwendigkeit), determining one's life in an "incomprehensible way" (auf unbegreifliche Weise). Moral freedom was achieved by the individual working within the limitations imposed by necessity and thereby crafting a meaningful life. Goethe's view would seem to have much in common with the Ancients, especially the Stoics, an aspect I have not investigated much in connection with Goethe. There is a great element of willfulness in his view of the world, especially as he grew older, perhaps influenced by a resistance to enthusiasm or mysticism, as if willing something to be the case would make it so.

I suspect that Goethe's description of his birth is playing on the account in Matthew 2: 1-12 of the Three Magi who followed the star from the East to the site of where Jesus lay in the manger. They are portrayed above in a late 6th-century mosaic at the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuova in Ravenna.

Even if Goethe himself rejected astrology, astrologers themselves have devoted themselves to plotting his natal chart. For a full "Astro-databank" on Goethe, go to this link, where you can find a larger image of the chart above; for Christiane here.

Poetry and Truth translation credit: Robert R. Heitner; natal chart: Astrotheme

Goethe as Gourmand

I wrote in an earlier post (November 30, 2008) that Goethe liked good food and wine. In his garden in Weimar (photo above by Adreas Trepte) he planted fruit trees and berries and raised potatoes and other vegetables, especially asparagus. Trellises on the south house wall were full of apricots. Even the cooking herbs came from this garden. In July 1793 Christiane wrote to Goethe (he was then in Marienborn; this was during the siege of Mainz) that she had eaten kohlrabi and artichokes from their garden.

The Weimar "court gardener" Friedrich Gottlieb Dietrich has also described the "experimental" portion of Goethe's garden, in which he analyzed the differences between local and foreign varieties of vegetables. According to Dietrich, Goethe liked to show visitors, such as Knebel Herder, Einsiedel, Gerning, "as well as women," around the garden, explaining the plants and giving small lectures. Providing an important contemporary illustration of the state of the garden is the charming colored etching below, by Eduard Lobe, showing Goethe and his grandsons in the garden ca. 1825.

Goethe's household accounts also show that he spent large sums on such items as chestnuts, grapes, fermented mustard, and honey. Chocolate was ordered from Vienna, and wines were imported from the Rhine region. Here are some of the other products guests enjoyed at Goethe's table: fois gras, truffles, mussels, salmon, Spanish raisins, and caviar. Weimar, a town of 6,000 people, could hardly have supplied Goethe with such delicacies, which we routinely enjoy today if we live near Zabar's or Fairway. Indeed, one of the first things that struck me when I first arrived in Manhattan so many years ago was the variety of food that could be enjoyed by ordinary folks. I grew up in the heartland, where cheese meant Velveeta.

Goethe's appreciation for such delicacies, as far as I can read the matter, takes place after the turn of the 19th century. From the moment his foot touched ground in Italy, in 1786, Goethe raved about the fruit, not surprising for an inhabitant of northern Europe. And though he mentions meals eaten in The Italian Journey -- published in 1816-17, though based on notes from the time of his stay in Italy in 1786-88 -- there is not a word in this account about Italian cuisine. It may be that in 1786 there was not what we today would call "cuisine" in Italy, though I doubt that is the case. One senses in the Italians' enjoyment of their food something atavistic; so, too, must Horace have enjoyed his food.

The appreciation for fine food among ordinary people and their ability to put it on their own table or in their own picnic baskets are phenomena of the kind of commerce that was starting to blossom in Goethe's time. It was this phenomenon that was one of the sources of Goethe's thinking on "world literature." As I have emphasized before, the free trade in goods was accompanied by the free trade in ideas. For Goethe the latter consisted of the work of writers, which he believed would bring the nations of the world into comity. To a great extent it is true that there is a "world republic of letters": those of us who care about these things are quickly made aware of the newest literary products from all over the world. We are also "tolerant" of many different ideas.

In our democratic age, however, more and more people are able to enjoy the products of free trade in material goods, especially in food. What is more, people have a great desire to move beyond what is local. An amusing story in the BBC news: although the Islamic Republic of Iran does not import any goods from Israel, in April authorities in Tehran discovered that Jaffa oranges were being imported in boxes marked as Chinese. Iranians love that seedly, sweet fruit, and someone in Tehran was willing to take the risk to supply them with it.

On a recent walk I discovered that a Whole Foods Market is to open tomorrow at Columbus Avenue and 100th Street. This is being announced as an "Upper West Side" store, but this only shows the extension of the concept of Upper West Side. The jump across 96th Street indicates a the changing demography. Lots of new apartment construction in that area, for people with trust funds or earning very big salaries, but there is also a large tract of public housing nearby. Never mind: people of all classes now appreciate choice and variety in their foods. Goethe Girl and her husband shop regularly at Fairway, another emporium for food choice.

The appearance on the shelves of stores of all these food offerings does not happen by accident. Like the Iranians who risk their lives to sell Jaffa oranges, people all over the world, in small ways and large, are working to satisfy our tastes in food and in other material goods. Working people like them are what makes our world go round. Think of all the different people behind those different varieties of bottled water at Fairway. I wish our politicians appreciated this aspect of our economy. The problem with most politicians is that none has actually worked in a real job. Like us folks in "the republic of letters," they are full of good ideas, most of which have no basis in real life.

The beautiful still life of melons and pears (in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) is by an 18th-century painter, Luis Meléndez (1716-1780). Goethe probably never saw a painting by Meléndez, though he certainly would have enjoyed fruits in Italy like those Meléndez painted. I recently became acquainted with Meléndez through a review by Maureen Mullarkey of a recent show of his paintings in Washington, D.C. Just a week ago I was in Washington to see the show myself. Another aspect of world literature, in the sense of intellectual exchange: I have probably seen more paintings in my life than Goethe ever did.

Jaffa picture credit: art2day4u

"Der abenteurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch"

Here is another German writer I have not thought about for a long time, maybe since graduate school: Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (1621-1676), author of the above-titled work. Simplicissimus has the thickness of a novel of the Baroque era, befitting an episodic account of the adventures of its roguish narrator from childhood to adulthood during the era of the Thirty Years War.

Naturally it has a Baroque-era subtitle: "d.h. die Beschreibung des Lebens eines seltsamen Vaganten, genannt Melchior Sternfels von Fuchsheim" (i.e., the description of the life of a strange vagabond, named Melchior Sternfels von Fuchsheim). It is regarded as the greatest non-Spanish picaresque novel, and, on this the 333 anniversary of Grimmelshausen's death, a modern German translation of the 17th-century work has just appeared. The translator is Reinhard Kaiser, an estimable writer himself, who has also tranlsated Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, Nancy Mitford, Sylvia Plath, and Neil Postman. What an eclectic lot.

For those who are interested, there is an English translation, from 1912, which can be had complete at Google Books. And for more information on the various literary currents in Germany in the 17th century, here is a wonderful Austrian site, with several neat graphs. So many long-forgotten names: Zincgref, Weckherlin, Angelus Silesius, Lohenstein, Gryphius, and, not to forget, my favorite of them all, Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau.

When I entered graduate school, before I had the brilliant idea of devoting myself to Goethe, I had thought I might concentrate on 17th-century German literature. Truth to tell, it is not the greatest age of German literature, but what a great age it is in Europe nevertheless, despite endless wars. It is amazing how many brilliant men (and, yes, mostly they were men) there were. I was reminded of this greatness this past spring when the Metropolitan Museum had a special exhibition of landscapes by Poussin.

In connection with the exhibition there was also a series of lectures, which were the most brilliant talks I had heard in a long time. Helen Langdon, of the British School in Rome, spoke on "A Wild Beauty: 17th-Century Sublime." From my own recent work on this aesthetic category, I had thought that the sublime came of age in the 18th century, but according to Professor Langdon Longinus's text on the sublime was well known in the 17th century and discussed in circles in which Nicholas Poussin participated.

"Seneca," she said, referring to a favorite poet of the 17th century, "was dazzled into melancholy by the immensity of the universe." No melancholy for the 18th-century Enlightenment!

There was a vogue in the 17th century, Langdon went on, for tales of the lives of hermits. Painters popularized these "anchorite" landscape scenes: precipices, trees splintered by lightning, and so on. There were many spiritual currents that fed into these contemplative landscapes, for instance, the works of Saint John of the Cross. At the end of the novel Simplicissimus, its anti-hero undergoes a spiritual redemption and becomes a hermit, retreating from a world of which he had reported so many terrible things. (Pictured here is Dürer's painting of Saint Jerome, during the period the saint, seized with a desire for penance, spent in the desert in Chalcis, near Antioch.)

I don't know if Goethe read Grimmelshausen's great novel. Simplicissimus is not listed among the contents of his own or his father's library. Baroque literature was regarded as too passé, too superannuated by the mid-18th century, though Goethe was interested in the picaresque novel. His own novels about Wilhelm Meister are episodic, describing the travels of Wilhelm and his encounters with many colorful individuals (indeed some much more colorful than he is) from whom he learns many lessons.

Goethe and Hölderlin

Goethe's views on world literature are "cutting edge," as seen in the connection he made between free trade in goods and in ideas. World literature was a preoccupation of the last decade of his life, the 1820s, when the different regions of the earth were being linked with one another through trade and colonization. He welcomed these links, especially as they brought people like himself into contact with like-minded individuals in other lands, but it was a turbulent time, and Goethe was aware of the disquieting effect that these material changes had on one's spiritual condition: "The world is in such a turbulent state that every individual is in danger of being sucked into its vortex." (See Manfred Osten's essay on "'Alles veloziferisch' oder Goethes Entdeckung der Langsamkeit.")

Earlier, however, in the 1790s, Goethe had been less "progressive" in his judgments, especially concerning literature and the arts. In my recent readings on Herder I came across a letter from Goethe to Meyer (20 June 1796) in which he criticizes an aspect of the "Humanitätsbriefe," namely, Herder's "unbelievable toleration for the mediocre, his rhetorical mixing together of the good with the insignificant, his admiration for the dead and decayed, an indifference to what is alive and aspiring" (eine unglaubliche Duldung gegen das Mittelmäßige, eine rednerische Vermischung des Guten und des Unbedeutenden, eine Verehrung des Abgestorbenen und Vermoderten, eine Gleichgültigkeit gegen das Lebendige und Strebende).

These words are somewhat ironic in light of Goethe's own reputation for seeming lack of critical judgment concerning certain contemporary writers, including Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). I was reminded of this on reading a review of the publication of volume 20 of the Frankfurt edition of Hölderlin's "Complete Works" and of English translations of the play The Death of Empedocles and of Hölderlin's odes and elegies. The review, by Charlie Louth, appears in the August 7 issue of the TLS.

Louth surveys the textual history of Hölderlin's works, an issue of concern perhaps only to specialists: Beissner and Beck of the Stuttgart edition, versus D.E. Sattler's Frankfurt edition. He makes a point that I found of interest. The Frankfurt edition reproduces Hölderlin's major manuscripts in color facsimiles "whose clarity of definition perhaps exceeds the originals and [which] show how much care Hölderlin bestowed on the fair copies of his poems: they are things of beauty, their balance and proportion intrinsic to their meaning."

As Christoph Jamme writers in Goethe-Handbuch (4/1, 489), "In contrast to the complicated, tragically overshadowed problematic of his relationship with Schiller, Goethe's relations with Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin are characterized by a great reserve." Goethe reported to Schiller of his meetings with Hölderlin in Frankfurt in July 1797, turning the younger poet's name into a diminutive: "Yesterday young Hölderlin visited me. I especially recommended that he write small poems and to choose for each an interesting human subject" (Gestern ist auch Hölterlein by mir gewesen. ... Ich habe ihm besonders gerathen kleine Gedichte zu machen und sich zu jedem einen menschlich interessanten Gegenstand zu wählen). In light of Hölderlin's subsequent great elegies and hymns, Jamme characterizes Goethe's words as "one of the greatest misunderstandings of German literary history."

Part of the difference between the two poets may have been what Ludwig Achim von Arnim characterized as their "totally contrary conceptions of "antiken Mythos." As von Arnim writes: Hölderlin does not lose himself in theorizing about antiquity ... Instead, the gods of the ancients surround him like approaching planets [nahende Sterne], with whose inhabitants he is able to converse." Very well put.

I notice that the German Hölderlin Society is offering a "Hyperion-Reise" in September. For those who prefer to read Hölderlin in English, this site offers a nice selection.

Credits: Hölderlin-Archiv der Württembergischen-Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart