Goethe: Journeys of the Mind by Gabrielle Bersier, Nancy Boerner, and Peter Boerner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Goethe: Journeys of the Mind by Gabrielle Bersier, Nancy Boerner, and Peter Boerner Forrest Finch Gabrielle Bersier, Nancy Boerner, and Peter Boerner. Goethe: Journeys of the Mind. London: Haus, 2019. 220 pp. During his lifetime, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was not a frequent traveler, aside from his famous Italian journeys, but he engaged frequently with reports of faraway places in letters, scientific treatises, statistics, and other media. Especially later in life, Goethe read a variety of accounts of foreign countries from home in order to form his own impressions of these places and people. In Goethe: Journeys of the Mind, Gabrielle Bersier and Nancy Boerner continue the work of the late Peter Boerner (1926–2015), as they cogently interpret Goethe's correspondence and literary work in conversation with a network of travelers', explorers', and scientists' correspondence and writings to contour the limits of his knowledge. This study is divided into eight chapters, which examine the possibilities of documenting when and under what conditions Goethe engaged with travel literature. Although he never traveled to England, this study emphasizes the fact that England was the non-German speaking country with which Goethe was most familiar, due to his lifelong exposure to English culture through a variety of media that many educated Germans had at their disposal in the late eighteenth century. Through cross-referencing Dichtung und Wahrheit with epistolary correspondence and library records, the authors explore the broad horizons of Goethe's knowledge of England, which extended from drama to political theory. [End Page 346] The authors remark that Goethe admired England in a way similar to his contemporary, Johann Caspar Lavater, who, like Goethe, never traveled to England, but espoused the idea in his 1775 Physiognomische Fragmente that one could make judgments about the English character based on superficial physical attributes. Thus, the authors approximate Goethe's attitude toward English culture as extending to preconceptions of individual personality traits. The authors astutely address England first in the study's sequence in order to articulate the pedagogical impact Goethe saw in learning through armchair travel, not only as a means to rear cosmopolitan subjects, but also for readers to learn about themselves. In the second chapter, the authors discuss Goethe's West-östlicher Divan and its intimate intertextual engagement with medieval Sufi poetry by Hafez as another example of vicarious travel. Bearing a bilingual title page and chapter headings, Goethe's poetry collection imagines a particular intercultural openness that contrasted with contemporaneous views on Eastern culture. Using Edward Said's concept of Orientalism, this study successfully shows that rather than maintaining an asymmetrical colonial relationship between East and West as a "clash of civilization," his text articulates mental versatility through an unbiased oscillation between Eastern and Western attitudes. While this chapter and the seventh chapter address Goethe's openness to global attitudes that contrasted with prevailing colonialist attitudes, the following chapters address the limitations of Goethe's knowledge within colonial discourse. The third chapter shifts to the topic of Goethe's relationship with Alexander von Humboldt following his expedition to Brazil. Considering that Goethe's Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen inspired Humboldt's botanical depictions of plant morphology, the authors demonstrate an intellectual exchange between Humboldt and Goethe that resulted in discursive innovations in the form of graphic, annotated, comparative visualizations of European and Andean flora and their respective elevations. While Humboldt is often credited for emphasizing the primacy of visual media in the popularization of new scientific discourses around 1800, the authors compellingly demonstrate that Goethe participated in the knowledge exchange that contributed to this generic advancement. Although Goethe and Humboldt agreed when it came to botany, their opinions diverged regarding geology, insofar as Goethe was convinced of neptunism, i.e., the theory that a primal ocean formed earth's rocks, whereas Humboldt advocated vulcanism, i.e., the theory that earth was formed by volcanic activity. Goethe's position runs as a red thread through the subsequent two chapters. The fourth chapter documents Goethe's correspondence with naturalists who explored Brazil, while the fifth chapter examines Goethe's vicarious travels in North America through correspondence with Duke Bernhard of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach. Through a close reading of Goethe...