Der faustische Pakt. Goethe und die Goethe-Gesellschaft im Dritten Reich by W. Daniel Wilson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Der faustische Pakt. Goethe und die Goethe-Gesellschaft im Dritten Reich by W. Daniel Wilson Katherine Arens W. Daniel Wilson. Der faustische Pakt. Goethe und die Goethe-Gesellschaft im Dritten Reich. Munich: dtv, 2018. 368 pp. Daniel Wilson, now a professor emeritus in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the Royal Holloway College at the University of London, has again opened up the Goethe industry to new insights, after his earlier works that have taken the author out of the cotton wool in which the notion of "Weimar classicism" had wrapped him. Der faustische Pakt turns our attention to the Goethe-Gesellschaft (Goethe Society), founded in 1885, to show how its claimed affinities to the humanism disguised a long-standing commitment to conservative nationalist views and an alignment with the Nazi regime—to creating a Goethe who would ultimately become commensurate with Nazi ideology and cultural imperatives. Wilson adduces facts drawn from many archives to produce a well-researched and superbly written story of cultural opportunism that illuminates the many shades of grey in the cultural politics of the Nazi era, and how their legacies remain at play today. Most critically, he has filled in precise details about the post-May-1933 organization of the society, which have been vague since 1945 when its organizational files disappeared. Wilson found instead the correspondence of the leadership to tell an increasingly disturbing story of scholarly humanism. The alignment of the Goethe Society with the Nazi cultural projects started slow. From its early years on, the Goethe Society had been an important cultural reference point for the Bildungsbürgertum, the educated population of Germany. Gustav Roethe, the society's president until 1926, worked toward establishing Goethe as an internationalist and moved to consolidate individual local author societies under the national organization. Receiving no state support, the society boasted a considerable membership as well as patronage by the ruling aristocracy. As the Weimar Republic's financial crises led to declining memberships, reimaging Goethe as an antisemite made him a potential asset for Nazi cultural politics. The Nazi government had begun to intervene in organizations after 1933 in its move toward a kind of cultural Gleichschaltung; the Goethe Society was vulnerable initially to charges of liberalism because 8 percent of its members were Jewish and 20 percent international, with the result that after 1933 the society did not admit any new Jewish members (keeping many that they had for financial reasons until a 1938 general exclusion). "Jewish" themes like Goethe's interest in Spinoza were kept out of the society's journal; Roethe's cosmopolitan and tolerant Goethe was refigured as an antisemite, with skirmishes at both local and national levels of the organization. By the 1936 Olympics, new funding became possible as part of Germany's image building—and the society found its lifeline in ways effaced or denied after the war. In the volume's first chapter, "Goethes Janusgesicht," Wilson draws out how these two possible readings of the author were crafted out of a body of work large enough to find support for both readings. The subsequent six chapters are [End Page 390] organized chronologically to chart this course in detail; they are solidly documented, based on the private correspondence of important members of the society's leadership and internal records of the society's business and meetings. What emerges is the society's sense of dedication to its cultural mission under a pronounced sense of threat, leading to decision-making that prioritized the society's survival at all costs. The prime mover in this preemptive decision-making was Hans Wahl, the vice president of the society and director of the National Goethe Museum, who became a party member in 1938 and an early member of the "Kampfbundes für deutsche Kultur," which put the organization under the patronage (but not direct control) of Joseph Goebbels and his Reichsschrifttumskammer and helped it to evade the total government takeovers that were becoming increasingly common and that often required wholesale surrender of archives and museum holdings. Instead, the Goethe Society preserved itself as it fell into a kind of codetermination and collaboration with government institutions. These decisions, however, created a...