Werther's Goethe and the Game of Literary Creativity (review)

Abstract

Goethe Yearbook 247 der "Klassik und Romantik" schon versuchte. (Sie wurde bedauerlicherweise auf diesem Symposion nicht einmal erwähnt!) Doch führen uns derlei Überlegungen in das weite Feld der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung, die in diesem Band ausgeklammert wurde. Auch wenn man dieser jüngsten Tendenz zur Normativität, Kanonisierung und Idealität kritisch gegenübersteht, so läßt sich nicht leugnen, daß dieses Symposion den Horizont der Klassikdiskussion erweiterte, zu neuen Fragen anregt und Widerspruch provoziert, gerade weil es gar manches bewußt ausklammert . Wie die Klassik-Legende könnte dieser Band ein Markstein der Klassik-Forschung werden, da beide der reinste Ausdruck des Zeitgeistes sind. University of Wisconsin, Madison Kl. Berghahn Vincent, Deirdre, Werther's Goethe and the Game of Literary Creativity. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Readers of the Goethe Yearbook will bear with me if I preface my review of this fascinating and stimulating book with some remarks on the subject of texts. The scholarly editor's point of view can be stated very simply: every interpretation has its proper textual object. There is no particular mystery about the text(s) of Werther and there should therefore be no particular confusion among Goethe scholars about understanding what is being discussed and analyzed. The tangled history of Werther interpretation is therefore a continual and continuing affront to philological reason. I take for my example a paper on Werther submitted within recent memory for consideration by the Goethe Yearbook. The paper argued—as do so many others—that such and such in the novel was representative of young Goethe, or typical of the Sturm und Drang group of writers, or a credible portrayal of society in 1770s Germany. It had other problems that militated against accepting it for publication. But a closer look at the philological aspects of the piece revealed the following: the author had apparently read/used a Klaus Wagenbach Verlag Werther-Tepnnt from the early 1980s. I am not familiar with the Wagenbach edition, which may or may not reproduce the text of the first edition of Werther. But the author had not cited the Wagenbach edition, which was only listed, according to the MLA formula which is not used by the Goethe Yearbook, under "Works Consulted." Instead the author, while using the tide Die Leiden des jungen Werthers throughout the paper, had substituted references to WA I, 19- WA I, 19 happens to contain the text of Die Leiden des jungen Werther in the "Ausgabe letzter Hand," which is based on the second version of Werther as published in the Göschen collected works of 1787-1790. The author was referencing a text that did not match the context of the paper, and one of my comments in rejecting the paper was that any article purporting to deal with young Goethe and his place in the literary-social-cultural milieu of the 1770s should clearly be based on the text published by young Goethe. 248 Book Reviews That would seem to me to be elementary, yet I have been confronted with such elementary text confusion countless times, both as editor of the Goethe Yearbook and as reader of papers for other journals (such confusion is of course not confined to Werther). If we don't know about the history of the text we are reading and/or quoting, then we are liable to misunderstand it in some way or another. I blame contemporary confusion with regard to the text of Werther primarily on the existence of the Hamburger Ausgabe, which prints only the second version of the novel. The first version has been available all the time, of course, but in editions that many of us (and particularly our students) have not been correctly taught to use or consult (most usefully in the Morris and Fischer-Lamberg editions of Der junge Goethe ). As far as many non-specialists are concerned, whatever work by Goethe isn't contained in the Hamburger Ausgabe simply doesn't exist. If I could be God for a day, I would be sorely tempted to recreate the universe without the Hamburger Ausgabe. That would remove all copies of all printings of those fourteen volumes from all private and university...