Weislingen: Goethe's Politics of the Ego

Abstract

HORST LANGE Weisungen: Goethe's Politics of the Ego Most interpretations of Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen, particularly those published before 1980, fall into one of two groups. One group sees the play as being concerned with the depiction and interpretation of certain historical events—in other words, reads it as a Geschichtsdrama— while the other locates the purpose of the play in the presentation of Götz's larger-than-life personality, thereby assigning it to the genre of the Charakterdrama . As opposite as both kinds of reading are, they nevertheless share the same convictions when it comes to identifying Goethe's agenda. The historical approach argues that Goethe wanted to highlight the shortcomings of contemporary German culture, particularly its inferiority complex in relation to the French Enlightenment, by contrasting it with an age in which German culture still had its own unadulterated individuality and authenticity. And the character-oriented reading claims that Götz's blunt and rowdy, yet honest and straightforward behavior was meant as a masculine antidote to the overly mannered and feminized conduct of Goethe's contemporaries. Both readings, then, ultimately dovetail in the timehonored , but questionable assumption that the play was Goethe's artistic declaration of war against his age. During the last two decades, however, both approaches have undergone substantial transformations. The more historical readings paid attention to the wealth of detail and reflection on political and historical matters, the more it has become apparent that the play is best described as an essay on constitutional history which tries to understand the transition from a medieval paradigm of politics to that of political modernity.1 And the more it has been understood that the play, as Goethe put it, considered the ramifications of such a "Wendepunkt der Staatengeschichte" (MA 16:815), the more the assumption that the play was championing a medieval over a modern way of life became questionable. On the other hand, interpretations that proceed from the centrality of character have discovered that it is really the character of Weisungen around which the other characters, Götz included, pivot.2 Consequently, the claim that the play successfully presents Götz's personality as an exemplary alternative to the modern self has faded away. Goethe Yearbook XI (2002) 178 Horst Lange If in this manner the latest incarnations of either approach to Götz have done away with a number of long-standing orthodoxies, scholarship has still not come closer to reconciling the apparent contradiction that both approaches, despite their fundamental differences, appear equally valid. The historical reading cannot explain why, insofar as we can speak about a plot in the play at all, Weisungen is its engine, and therefore why it could be argued that Götz succumbs not so much to the ascent of political modernity, but rather to the machinations of a tormented soul. And the character-oriented approach has to be puzzled by the fact that in a play supposedly concerned with character dynamics at least half of the text is not about character and psychology, but instead is packed with a wide array of often obscure historical minutiae; after all, entire scenes solely devoted to legal phenomena of sixteenth-century Germany, such as the competition between Roman and common law, the corruption of the Reichskammergericht, or the Westfälische Feme, could be cut without real damage to the plot. In the following I will present a reading designed to offer a way out of this impasse. Taking its cue from the recent realization that Weisungen should be seen as a hidden center of the text, its success will depend on two interconnected arguments: on the one hand I will contend that Weislingen 's self is, unlike Götz's, composed of three distinct parts; and on the other hand I will argue that this triadic structure is ultimately political in meaning, insofar as it is presented as a precondition for the functioning of the modem state. I The most important interpretation of Götz has been Rainer Nägele's, if only because he was most successful in challenging much of the received wisdom of scholarship on Götz, Goethe, and even the Sturm und Drang...