Exhibiting Ottilie: Collecting as a Disciplinary Regime in Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften

Abstract

The public museum is an institution we take for granted today, but it is an institution with a long history. The dynamics of nineteenth-century European society shaped the modern museum and subsequently brought about a total realignment of art, culture and the politics of representation. The French Revolution and Napoleon removed not only paintings and sculpture from the royal palaces, churches, and homes across Europe, but also moved entire church facades and cornerstones of buildings to new locations (Duncan and Wallach 451-56). New orderings of these objects placed them into contexts never before encountered, and contexts no longer limited to royal consumption alone (Nochlin 9-11). The opening of the collections of the Louvre marked but the first major attempt at public museum-making, part of a process that continued in myriad ways throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The nineteenth century saw the German-speaking countries emulate, and perhaps even surpass, the French with their intense interest in creating museums that were to serve as bastions of culture with national importance. Across Europe, museums came to serve as a highly popular educational apparatus intended to transform masses of people into citizens who shared a common, particular experience and knowledge of their culture and history (Hooper-Greenhill 172-85; Bennett 23-25). In the German-speaking countries this project is perhaps best understood in association with the concept of Bildung, so central to the age of the museum's development. Although the museum as cultural institution has been an object of intense study