Space and Place in Goethe’s “Alexis und Dora”

Abstract

In a letter to Schiller of August 16,1797, Goethe describes how theRaum meines grosvaterlichen Hauses, Hofes und Gartens, der aus dem beschranktesten, patriarchalischen Zustande, in welchem ein alter Schultheis von Frankfurt lebte, durch klug unternehmende Menschen zum nutzlichen Waarenund Marktplatz verandert wurde. Die Anstalt ging durch sonderbare Zufalle bey dem Bombardement zu Grunde und ist jetzt, grostentheils Schutthaufen, noch immer das doppelte dessen werth was vor 11 Jahren von den gegenwartigen Besitzern an die Meinigen bezahlt worden.1[space of my grandfather's house, yard, and garden was changed by clever, enterprising people from most limited, patriarchal condition in which an old mayor of Frankfurt lived into a useful commodityand marketplace. The establishment was destroyed by strange coincidences during bombardment [of July 1796] and is now-for most part as a pile of rubble-still twice worth of what present owners paid to my family 11 years ago.2]Goethe traces how, in a relatively brief period of time, nature and value of a place was transformed. Despite its demolition, his grandfather's house managed to double in economic value. And its change in value was not only financial, for transformation of this place also reflects a transformation in social and value systems. Before it was sold, it represented patriarchy and authority, a limited (beschranktesten) or retrograde way of life, yet after its sale, individual authority in a restricted realm gave way to authority of commodity exchange on a larger financial market. A personal connection to place-memory of grandfather-gave way to a perception of space as impersonal and economically determined. The home of Goethe's grandfather became not only a site of exchange (Waarenund Marktplatz) but also an object of exchange itself (he refers to its resale value after bombardment of late July 1796).The changed perception of a personal place into an impersonal space intimates larger changes within society such as transformation from a feudalistic to a capitalistic order. It indicates that with changes in social structures, conceptions of place and space were changing as well. Goethe's texts reflect changing conceptions of place and space around 1800. They reflect an important transitional moment in shift from place to space, in which distinction between two concepts becomes fluid.Place and Space circa 1800The end of eighteenth century witnessed transformation of concepts of place and space, where place is a unity of human experience and locale and space is a more abstract, impersonal conception, such as Cartesian space. In gradual move toward modernism, relation to locale in terms of place gave way to a focus on space, a move that later nineteenth century would attempt unsuccessfully to reverse. Connection with and immediate experience of locale yielded to displacement and abstraction.The move toward space at this time is evident in German Romanticism. For example, Bruno Hillebrand describes idealistic tendencies of Romanticism als Hohepunkt aller Realitatsferne und damit auch RaumEntfremdung (as culmination of all distance from reality and thus of alienation from space as well).3 In a more recent study, Andrew Cusack argues that from the metaphysical idea of a world in flux and insecure and frequently nomadic nature of their lives grew tendency of romantics to conceive of themselves as wanderers.4 In Romanticism, motif of wandering binds metaphysical insecurity to a tenuous relationship to place. Romanticism reflects a distancing from or defamiliarization of actual places in favor of ideal or abstract spaces.Kate Rigby links romantic experience of place to dislocation, largely in connection with modernization of agriculture and beginnings of industrialization at home.5 Clearly, new developments in material and conceptual worlds were transforming concept of place around 1800. …