Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit by Stefan Hajduk

Abstract

Reviewed by: Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit by Stefan Hajduk Daniel Purdy Stefan Hajduk, Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. 513 pp. The notion of Stimmung is in the air, it is all around us. After having been pushed aside in the late twentieth century, Stimmung has returned as a priority for architecture, city planning, environmentalism, and literary criticism. The term has become the progressive angle from which diverse movements have sought to reverse the functionality of modernism without falling into retrograde traditionalism. The eighteenth-century affinity for nurturing Stimmung, first articulated in landscape gardening and sentimental prose, has been mobilized into a more active climate awareness, both local and global. Stefan Hajduk's massive Poetologie der Stimmung covers much more than the literature of the early Goethezeit, as it addresses the 250-year history of scholars who have sought to characterize the illusive quality. He engages earnestly with Leo Spitzer's articles on Stimmung's relation to ancient ideas of cosmological harmony while proposing Heidegger's Befindlichkeit as conceptually superior to nineteenth-century aesthetic articulations. He is also fully conversant with Gernot Böhme's more recent appeal to foster Atmosphäre in architecture. Most importantly for Goethe scholars, Hajduk builds his argument on David Wellbery's definitive essay on the subject in Aesthetische Grundbegriffe, providing interpretations and examples that augment Wellbery's reconstruction of the term's semantic field. For all his thoroughness, Wellbery's succinct review of Goethe's remarks on Stimmung leaves room for many more investigations into the term's poetic use around Strasbourg and Weimar. Hajduk's book takes up the challenge by finding diverse forms of Stimmung in the early Goethezeit, not just those that proffer a lyrical perception of nature. The core of Hajduk's book is organized around lengthy close interpretations of three texts: Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Karl Philipp Moritz's Andreas Hartknopf novels, and Ludwig Tieck's short drama, "Der Abschied." [End Page 362] Hajduk agrees with Wellbery's opening claim that the difficulty in translating Stimmung into other European languages reflects the manner in which the German term integrates both subjective and objective references. Stimmung appears both within the perceiving individual as well as in the surrounding environment. "Mood" and "atmosphere" capture different portions but by no means the full range of aesthetic connotations in Stimmung. Because the term is often invoked in such a manner as to take advantage of its rich metaphorical allusions, no single other word comes close to its fullness. Agreeing with Wellbery's Begriffsgeschichte, Hajduk reviews the many connotations of Stimmung, landing at the conclusion that "mood," "milieu," "ambience," "atmosphere," or "attunement" do not adequately correspond to the word's musical-cosmological resonance nor its indeterminate sense of an emotional landscape. Demonstrating the inadequacy of many translation choices makes clear how many diverse and complex connotations are carried by the word. Indirectly, both Wellbery and Hajduk underscore the distinctiveness of the German word. For both scholars, contextual usage remains vital to understanding the particular meanings invoked at any given instance. Wellbery refrains from offering a conceptual definition but turns instead to a history of its metaphorical application. In this regard, both critics agree with Spitzer that Stimmung's lexical career takes off in the eighteenth century. In building off his predecessors, Hajduk points out that Wellbery's focus on aesthetic theory serves an entirely different purpose than Spitzer's reconstruction of cosmology. Hajduk goes further than Spitzer and Wellbery in highlighting the inadequacy of all translations and conceptualizations of Stimmung to argue that philosophical definitions around 1800 were ultimately incomplete and poetic articulations increasingly subjective, thereby losing the term's spatial and natural dimensions. For Wellbery, the indeterminacy is a source of fruitful variation, whereas Hajduk sees a problem that ultimately requires Heidegger to provide an adequate answer. Contrary to Wellbery's conceptual history, Hajduk argues that from Kant to Humboldt, Stimmung loses its position within the aesthetic space of nature as something external to the subject, such as a musical tone or atmosphere—decisive connotations for Goethe, Moritz, and Tieck. The poetic texts Hajduk cites...