Dagmar von Gersdorff, Goethes Mutter Eine Biographie. Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 2001.463pp. What did a woman's life look like in the eighteenth century? And when that woman was Goethe's mother? Where would you look to find out? Women's writing: literature, to the extent that women were allowed to write and publish; letters-fewer than one would think, since Goethe, in a preventative strike, burnt his mother's letters in 1792, with only three or four escaping by accident (letters after 1792 remain largely existent in the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv; Gersdorff designates them Dokumente von unvergleichlichem literarischem, kulturalem und menschlichem Wert [327]). Sociological studies from feminist, historical, and archival perspectives with more than a trace of theory and ideology. For women around Goethe, you might turn to the speculative biographies of Sigricl Damm, where you would find in the case of Goethe's sister, Cornelia Goethe Schlosser, an interior life accessed by a remarkable act of empathy, with hints of pathography; in the case of Goethe's erstwhile partner and eventual wife, Christiane Vulpius Goethe, where for my money Damm is less successful: Here, there is less access to an interior life and less empathy, Goethe's wife reduced to the role of yet another factotum, no more important than his servant-scribe Philip Seidel or an Eckermann, haunted by and in the shadow of Goethe. In a situation like this one, what would happen if you turned to a conventional biography in the old style, that meticulously researched documents and artifacts and refused to stray beyond their surface, to spy on any private life? If for no other reason, to escape Damm's relentless monomaniacal style of feminist biography. And what would happen if in that biography, an attempt was made to give Goethe's mother, Catherine Elisabeth Textor Goethe, a life in her own right? You might find it dry, you might find it unspectacular, you might not find it sexy-although Goethe's mother led a sexier life than the tradition would lead us to believe. You might find a woman who began her early life surrounded by men-father, husband, son-yet who spent most of her life on her own, a widow, perhaps even a happy one with houses and rooms of her own. In Dagmar Gersdorff's biography, for example, you will no doubt learn that Catherine Elisabeth Textor Goethe led a life of self-reliance that would surprise you.You will also learn, despite the distance he put between them, how dependent Goethe remained on his mother throughout his life, both financially and in terms of his own self-image. I will not argue that behind every successful man stands a willful and persistent mother, but I will argue that there are many ways to write biography and that the facts, mam, just the facts, as a methodology often get us further than we might have otherwise suspected. Dagmar von Gersdorff relies on account books, Catherine Elisabeth Textor Goethe's husband's Liber Domesticus, which she continued after his death-and her own Ausgaben-, Wirtschafls-, Spiel-, Wasch- und Cassabucher (30 handwritten volumes).That Goethe saved such archival materials, as opposed to letters, is a profound commentary on the differences between public and private spheres, between intimate and legal documents, in the eighteenth century. From these materials, Gersdorff reconstructs a life. She largely lets Catherine Elisabeth Textor Goethe speak from these materials (and others epistolary and biographical available to her) in her own voice as far as possible with few interventions and with virtually no attempts to interpolate, much less to psychoanalyze. It should be noted: Gersdorff reads account books as well as any scholar I know, W. Daniel Wilson included. Only once does she breathe the question: Kann man einem Haushaltsbuch Gefuhle lesen? (279)-her answer throughout remains ambivalent. Goethe's father married up and young: he was 38, Catherine Elisabeth Textor Goethe 17 upon the occasion of their arranged marriage in 1748. …
Read full abstract
Aug 31, 2010
Andrew Wilson 
Open Access