Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: origins and relevance of Weltliteratur

Abstract

Contrary to popular perception, Germany’s most celebrated writer, JohannWolfgang Goethe, was not the first intellectual to employ the term “world literature” (Weltliteratur) (Berczik 1967: 7 n. 9; Weitz 1987). Nevertheless, it is Goethe to whom credit must be given for creating the paradigm that became a significant, widely debated element in critical and pedagogical literary discourse, particularly in the last two decades, when scholars seeking to gain a purchase on the emergence of imaginative literature as shaped by the forces of globalization and transnationalism have frequently drawn on Goethe and his term. What did Weltliteratur signify for Goethe? The major difficulty in answering thisquestion stems from the circumstance that he never attempted to define it in any cohesive manner. Instead, the term makes a number of random appearances in letters written toward the end of his life, diary entries, aphorisms, references in his journal Uber Kunst und Altertum, and in a number of conversations with his secretary, Johann Peter Eckermann, who edited and published these colloquies under the title Gesprache mit Goethe (Conversations with Goethe) in 1836, almost ten years after Goethe first used the expression in 1827 and four years after his death. This chronological gap between utterance, publication, and concomitant public discourse is significant, because in 1827 the suppression of nationalist sentiments in the German states resulting from the decrees of the 1815 Congress of Vienna was still quite effective, while by 1836 such sentiments were flaming anew and efforts to stamp them out were becoming increasingly futile. The political atmosphere created by repressive ancien regime policies in 1820s Germany and in Europe as a whole enabled the cosmopolitan milieu in which a transnational concept such as world literature could emerge. It is important to keep this circumstance in mind in order to understand both the most significant principles Goethe intended to convey with his term, and its seminal importance for present-day debates on literary globalization, the two primary aims of what follows in the present essay. There are a number of scholars who believe GoetheanWeltliteratur emerged in an age of virulent nationalism, and that it is conceptually tinged by such nationalist ideology (for example, Wegner 2003: 281). This perspective conflatesGoethe’s articulation of world literature in the late 1820s and early 1830s with its initial reception in the late 1830s, which, given the upsurge in nationalism at that time, was frequently negative.