Aspects of reception: reading Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris with Adorno, Fassbinder, and Jauss

Abstract

Abstract In staging his Iphigenie auf Tauris, Johann Wolfgang Goethe stages reception itself. The story about a Mycenaean maiden who, exiled from her home in the South, was welcomed and sheltered by the barbarian people of the North, readily represents how the corpus of ancient Greek culture, detached from its native historical context, came to be received and curated by German artists, poets, and scholars, including, of course, by Goethe himself. If Goethe’s text is indeed understood as an allegory of reception, then subsequent readings of his Iphigenie should exhibit any number of ways in which reception itself has been formulated and assessed. The investigations here all turn on the issue of verbal aspect. By turning to key German interpretations of Goethe’s drama by Theodor Adorno, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Hans Robert Jauss, which emerged during the socially and politically tumultuous period of 1967–73, the present study aims to give a critical account of receptive paradigms — an account based on an investigation into the varied aspects that distinguish different historical receptions of reception.