Erotische Gedichte: Gedichte, Skizzen und Fragmente (review)

Abstract

254 Book Reviews ger and Lawrence Ryan—and to argue convincingly that Torquato Tasso ends with its protagonist at a Wilhelm Meister-like "Scheideweg" recognizing "in seiner Lebenskrise auch das Heilbringende seines Talents" (138f.). What might be objected to as insufficiently clear textual expression of an expectation that Tasso is destined for still greater poetic stature than he has already enjoyed as (a mere) court poet is explained by Ammerlahn not as a consequence of the Weimar courtier Goethe's private discretion, but—with adduction of new parallels from the Lehrjahre, Das Märchen, and the first act of Faust II—as properly consistent with his characterization of a still developing young writer whose Mephistophelean prod is Antonio Montecatino . In any event, Ammerlahn seems to me to confirm Susanne Langer's acute observation in Feeling and Form that a drama lacking "absolute close" cannot be a tragedy, can like much so-called French classical tragedy be only heroic comedy—an observation that reconciles non-tragic interpretations of Goethe's play with his categorization of it in 1823 as a "tragédie selon les regles." No brief review can do justice to Ammerlahn's nice analyses and the conclusions he carefully draws from them. His extraordinary sensitivity to parallels in other texts and to echoes within Torquato Tasso contributes as much to his authority as a critic as do his judicious arguments with other critics and supplemental evidence in footnotes often as interesting as his main text. University of California, Santa Barbara Stuart Atkins Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Erotische Gedichte: Gedichte, Skizzen und Fragmente, ed. Andreas Ammer. Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1991 (Insel Taschenbuch 1225). 246 pp. In Erotische Gedichte, Andreas Ammer has collected Goethe's poetic and dramatic speculations, fantasies, anxieties, and jokes about male and female genitalia and their use in various sexual practices. In the priapic elegy beginning "Hinten im Winkel des Gartens," one penis is both (realistically) incredibly large and (in comparison to the expectations of the local women) ridiculously small. While the possessor of that penis claims overwhelming potency, the speaker in "Das Tagebuch" experiences an embarrassing bout of impotence. Masturbation and pederasty, scatological humor and fear of venereal disease, all make their appearance. If much of Goethe's erotics centers on the phallus, the Venetian epigrams contain a more vaginal emphasis : at first the poet wishes the city had vaginas the way it has streets, but then he fears that Bettine, the young pornographic contortionist he observes , will perform cunnilingus on herself, losing interest in men entirely! Bettine's possible loss of interest in men shows that not all of this material is heterosexual in nature. Pederasty and sodomy have a role to play, too, usually as the butt of a joke. At the beginning of the Erotica Romana, the poet asks Priapus to sodomize all those who read the poems with Goethe Yearbook 255 hypocritical and voyeuristic piety. In his Latin meditations on the Carmina Priapeia, he speculates that the pederast's member is called "smerdaleos" ("horrible"), because it is covered with the "merda" ("excrement") of a youth. Young Werther, discovering the beauties of the naked human body, begins by bathing with his male friend Ferdinand and then looks for a woman to observe. Strangely, the homoerotic passages of the final scene of Faust, in which Mephistopheles develops a crush on the angels, and the passages in the West-östlicher Divan in which, according to Chamisso, Goethe flirted with "Knabenliebe," are missing from the collection. Erotische Gedichte presents its readers with these and other delicacies in: (I) Hanswursts Hochzeit oder Der Lauf der Welt, a fragment begun around 1775 in a Faustian style; (II) a reconstruction of the Erotica Romana, an uncensored version of the Römische Elegien (1789/90), including four poems suppressed in Goethe's lifetime; (III) two Latin texts, one on the Carmina Priapeia and the other on Augustine's De Civitate Dei (1790); (IV) a very valuable reconstruction of the Venezianische Epigramme (1790); (V) an excerpt concerning a prostitute from Briefe aus der Schweiz: Erste Abteilung , a collection of letters ostensibly written by Werther (1796); (VI) a reconstruction of the Walpurgisnacht scene based on fragments composed throughout the writing of Faust; and...