Epic World Citizenship in Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea

Abstract

The title of Goethe's epic Hermann und Dorothea indicates that the story concerns two main characters or protagonists. The bulk of scholarship on Hermann und Dorothea has been concerned with determining the meanings of these two characters, what each stands as encodings of two socio-political alternatives and milieu. Though Hermann's name evokes the militant defender of Germania against the imperial oppressors, the Hermann *who defeated the Roman general Varus the battle of Teutoburger Forest 9 a.D. (the Prince of the Cherusker is represented as the protagonist of Kleist's Hermannsschlacht), he comes across Goethe's characterization as rather the immature, mild-mannered provincial bourgeois son. on the other hand, whose function within the character-system is quite complex, as we will see, displays a heroic temperament and worldliness linked to her experience as a refugee of the French Revolution, which undergo a process of domesticization over the course of the narrative. Goethe's epic tells the story of their marriage, and likewise suggests a commentary on two political options of the time and their potential resolution. In a letter to Herzogin Louise, Goethe describes his epic poem as the representation of the two main dispositions separating the contemporary world: Das Ganze schien mir zu fordern das die zwei Gesinnungen die sich jetzt beinahe die ganze Welt teilt neben einander und zwar auf die Weise wie es geschehen ist dargestellt wurden (13 June 1797). 1ThCSe two political attitudes, however, can be said to describe a fissure within late eighteenth-century bourgeois ideology, two character traits, if you will, of a conflicted enlightenment humanism. Goethe's text doesn't present a simple political situation which progressive enlightenment representative democracy confronts a reactionary provincial nationalism. Neither side is correct, for the truth lies the fact of their mutual struggle within political life.2 Stated differently, we might say that the fissure inhabits the space between the general claims to humanism of the world citizen (Weltburger) of the French Revolution and the particularity of the provincial German townsperson (Burger).3 The presentation of these two attitudes political life the immediate wake of the French Revolution is framed within the setting of an idyll and figured as a symbol Goethe's sense of the term.4 The idyllic framework provides perhaps the most central trope - namely, the - that helps figure the process of narrative characterization as both a political symbol and agent of narrative structure. In Canto VII, titled Dorothea, Hermann encounters Dorothea at a outside the village. He says to her, Freilich ist dies von besonderer Kraft und lieblich zu kosten. /Jener Kranken bringst du es wohl, die du treulich gerettet?, emphasizing Dorothea's beneficence (7:20-21). The two sit beside one another while Dorothea explains to him that she has come to fetch water from this well because the refugees have dirtied the water the village by selfishly letting their animals or themselves wash anywhere them, Denn ein jeglicher denkt nur, sich selbst und das nachste Bedurfnis/ Schnell zu berried' gen und rasch, und nicht des Folgenden denkt (73536). The interaction of Hermann and as it is figured through their mutual recognition of one another's reflection the as they fetch water for the other refugees, contrasts with the egocentric behavior of each of those individual refugees, in such a hurry to deal with his own needs: Also sprach sie und war die breiten Stufen hinunter Mit dem Begleiter gelangt; und auf das Mauerchen setzten Beide sich nieder des Quells. Sie beugte sich uber, zu schopfen; Und er faste den anderen Krug und beugte sich uber. Und sie sahen gespiegelt ihr Bild der Blaue des Himmels Schwanken und nickten sich zu und grusten sich freundlich im Spiegel. …