Das Ist Research Articles

Turkish Culture in German Society Today

For many decades Germany has had a sizeable Turkish minority that lives in an uneasy co-existence with the Germans around them and as such has attracted considerable interest abroadwhere it tends to be seen as a measure of German tolerance. However, little is known about theactual situation of the Turks. This volume provides valuable information, presented in a most original manner in that it combines literary and cultural studies with social and political analysis. It focuses on the Turkish-born writer Emine Sevgi A-zdamar, who writes in German and whosework, especially her highly acclaimed novel Das ist eine Karawanserei, is examined criticallyand situated in the context of German migrant literature.

Ut Pictura Historia: Goethe's Historical Imagination and the Augenblick

NICHOLAS RENNIE Ut Pictura Historia: Goethe's Historical Imagination and the Augenblick Goethe is famously skeptical about the value of history writing. As Faust exclaims sardonically to his famulus Wagner, the times of the past are at best "ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln" (576), at worst a Kehrichtfaß or a chaotic Rumpelkammer (582). Wagner finds his own naive faith in progress confirmed by what he cans the "spirit of the ages"; Faust retorts: "Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heißt, / Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist, / In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln" (577-79)· Historians find in history only what they wish to find, projecting their own desires and assumptions upon a lifeless jumble of incoherent facts. Goethe's work, of course, demonstrates in its various genres a constant and vigorous interest in historical subjects. This is evident, for instance, in Götz von Berlichingen and Egmont, in Goethe's translation of and commentary on Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, in the Geschichte der Farbenlehre and the "Noten und Abhandlungen" of the Divan, and, of course, in Italienische Reise, Dichtung und Wahrheit and Campagne in Frankreich. A couplet from Goethe's later years asks: "Wer in der Weltgeschichte lebt, / Dem Augenblick sollt' er sich richten?" This possibility is dismissed with the aphoristic response: "Wer in die Zeiten schaut und strebt, / Nur der ist werth zu sprechen und zu dichten" (WA 1.3:230). A quatrain from the Divan raises the chaUenge: Wer nicht von dreitausend Jahren Sich weiß Rechenschaft zu geben, Bleib' im Dunkeln unerfahren, Mag von Tag zu Tage leben.1 It is not sufficient, nor even perhaps possible, simply to live ahistorically, within the present moment. Yet Goethe's disparaging comments about history belie a sense of helplessness . In an age when German ideaUsm is affirming the role of the human self (or the Ich) as autonomous historical subject, Goethe describes rather a temporal consciousness incapable of relating past to present, of situating itself in a coherent and stable temporal order. To his friend Chancellor von Müller Goethe says on December 17, 1824: "Und doch kann ei- Goethe Yearbook 121 gentlich niemand aus der Geschichte etwas lernen, denn sie enthält ja nur eine Masse von Torheiten und Schlechtigkeiten." The difficulty is not simply that history is unknowable, or that as a document of human wretchedness it reminds us "daß es zu allen Zeiten und in allen Ländern miserabel gewesen ist." The düemma is rather that history, in its incoherence, exerts a negative influence on the present. In a sketch we read: "Die Geschichte, selbst die beste, hat immer etwas Leichenhaftes, den Geruch der Todtengruft " (WA 1.28:358). If an awareness of time and history is necessary to humans, this same consciousness also becomes oppressive. History is antithetical to life, it lingers as a deathly smeU or—to borrow a related metaphor from the same passage—as a grim caput mortuum. This is the problem that Nietzsche describes as a particularly "modern" one in the second of his Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: we yearn to live entirely in the moment , he writes, yet we discover at the same time our very inabiUty to forget . The modern subject drags along wherever he goes a "chain" that fetters him to the past: "Der AugenbUck, im Husch da, im Husch vorüber, vorher ein Nichts, nachher ein Nichts, kommt doch noch als Gespenst wieder und stört die Ruhe eines späteren Augenblicks."3 The modern consciousness has lost the abüity to integrate past and present in a fruitful way, and the past has become fundamentaUy irrelevant—except as a burden . I have referred at the outset to Faust because Goethe's drama perhaps most famously exemplifies the human desire to control the passage of time, as in the titular hero's final apostrophe to a schöner AugenbUck. In fact, the play contrasts two very different Goethean attitudes toward time. One is that of helplessness: humans seek ineffectuaUy to ground their existence in an incoherent succession of events. This is what Faust fears most—time as featureless chronos, represented, for instance, by the clanging beU that fills him with revulsion in Act V.4...

Handke's Grammatology: Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Reading and Writing in Die Wiederholung

Handke's 1986 novel, Die Wiederholung, is not an easily accessible work – the prose is dense, and the narrator's ruminations outnumber passages with action or dialogue. One frustrated reviewer even suggested that the work represents an authorial brush with insanity (von Matt). The approach offered here is an analysis of the aesthetic of the work which examines seemingly disparate elements – cultural anthropology (especially myth, religion, and language), and the topics of writing and reading, both as components of the action, and as works of (graphic) art. Anthropology, writing, and reading are key topics of both French structuralism and poststructuralism, and the names Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes have often been invoked by Handke scholars. Indeed, in 1971, Gunther Schiwy called Handke Strukturalisten unter den deutschsprachigen jungeren Autoren (121). Handke has acknowledged the importance of structuralism for his early works: Asked in 1981 about the importance of Barthes, Handke replied: ist fur mich schon wichtig gewesen, vor funfzehn Jahren, um die Strukturen. Es hat mir geholfen, auch Strukturen zu sehen, und das ist ein Vergnugen, es macht einen heiter; [...] Aber das ist alles lang vergessen und trotzdem bin ich dankbar. Das poetische Schreiben mus weit daruber hinausgehen (Schlueter 166). Despite this disclaimer, scholars have continued to link Handke to structuralism. In 1983, Theo Elm referred to LeviStrauss in order to describe Handke's mythisches Denken in processing the images of reality in Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied (Elm 76). According to Ingeborg Hoesterey's 1988 study of literature and art in Modernism/Postmodernism, Handke has by no means abandoned the discussions surrounding French theory. In her chapter on Handke's Lehre der Sainte Victoire, she ascribes Levi-Straussian concepts to Handke, specific terminology,

Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution: Goethe and the Spectre of Illuminati Conspiracy

W. DANIEL WILSON Weimar Politics in the Age of the French Revolution: Goethe and the Spectre of Illuminati Conspiracy Adam Weishaupt is really the father of Bolshevism — not Karl Marx. [...] Thejacobins of the French Revolution were controlled by the Bavarian Illuminati. [...] The "Conspiracy" today controls communism.1 These wild notions were pronounced in an American right-wing journal in 1965. Equally bizarre are the claims by Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, that the German Illuminati of the eighteenth century were ultimately responsible for "everything in the way of 'security' legislation, from the first Workmen's Compensation Acts under Bismarck to the latest Medicare monstrosity under Lyndon Johnson," as well as centralized banking, a graduated personal income tax, both World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the expansion of Communism, the breakup of colonial empires, and the formation of the United Nations.2 The seeds of this theory were sown in the period of the French Revolution itself; in the words of one of its most rabid adherents, in 1793: Nicht die Franzosen sind [...] die eigentlichen Erfinder dieses großen Projects, die Welt umzukehren; diese Ehre kommt den Deutschen zu. [...] [D]en Franzosen gehört nur die Ehre daß sie mit der Ausführung den Anfang gemacht haben. [...] Aus dem in Deutschland entstandenen, und noch ganz und gar nicht erloschenen, sondern nur Verborgenen und um desto gefährlicher sein Wesen treibenden Illuminatismus sind also die Comités politiques entstanden, die dem Jacobinerclubb sein Daseyn gegeben haben.3 The Germans have been accused of many things, often with good reason, but the idea that they instigated the French Revolution evokes only ridicule in most of us today. But this idea stands out from the host of modern conspiracy theories because of its ideological impact: it played a major role in 164 W. Daniel Wilson nineteenth-century politics, and the Nazis were guided by it in their persecution of Freemasons.4 In fact, it can even be found haunting the pages of reputable modern scholarship, two hundred years after the beginning of the Revolution.5 More important for our purposes, it was one of the most important conservative discourses of the revolutionary period itself. My topic is the extent to which this theory infected and frightened the literary elite, some of whom had themselves been Illuminati, and what this phenomenon means for our understanding of subjectivity, especially in times of repression. Adam Weishaupt and his followers were the subject of intense debate in Germany in the late 1780s and the 1790s. He founded the secret society of Llluminaten at Ingolstadt in 1776; within a fewyears it had grown to over two thousand members, not only in Bavaria but in Northern Germany and the Rhineland. While generally the goals of the Illuminati were of a broadly Enlightened and moral-pedagogic nature, some of their writings pointed the way to an eradication of the state: "[...] Fürsten und Nationen werden ohne Gewaltthätigkeit von der Erde verschwinden," Weishaupt wrote in a speech meant only for the highest ranks of the order. Such statements were less radical than they seemed to outsiders, since Illuminati tactics involved a very long-term process of moral improvement — their goals were not revolutionary , but rather an expression of the illusionary ideal of enlightened absolutism: moral influence on an absolutist ruler, resulting in reform ('revolution from above').7 Still, the Illuminati operated by infiltrating the government, clandestinely recruiting (often through Masonic lodges) the highest civil servants and even rulers, and this process seemed very conspiratory. When the Illuminati were suppressed by the Bavarian and other governments in 1784-1785, and when some confiscated documents were published in 1786 and 1787, most Germans were stunned at what they felt was a plot against the political and social order; some even predicted a revolution led by Illuminati.8 When the French Revolution did break out in 1789, conservatives and even moderates almost automatically associated the Illuminati with it.9 Two of the German conspiracy theorists later claimed that when they heard the news of the storming of the Bastille, they looked at each other and said in unison : "Das ist das Werk der 44 [= der llluminaten],"10 and such conclusions hardly...

Teaching the Relative Clause through Asyndeta: A Structural/Historical Approach

We usually teach the relative clause in German by first introducing the concept in English1 and setting down structural rules: find and drop the noun phrase that corresponds to the antecedent, select the appropriate relative pronoun and place it first in the clause. Thus, the English sentences That is the man/We visited him in Biberach are reduced to a main clause and relative clause by dropping him and introducing the clause with the relative pronoun appropriate to the antecedent (human or nonhuman) and to the syntax of the relative clause in case: That is the man whom we visited in Biberach. We then apply similar rules to German. The sentences Das ist der Mann/Wir haben ihn in Biberach besucht are reduced to a main clause and relative clause by dropping ihn, supplying the corresponding relative pronoun with the gender and the number from the antecedent and the case from the syntax of the relative clause, placing the relative pronoun first in the clause, and placing the verb last: Das ist der Mann, den wir in Biberach besucht haben. This approach to teaching the relative clause can be found in popular textbooks from the structurally oriented German: A Structural Approach2 to the more conversationally oriented Alles Gute.3 While this is a direct presentation, it is complicated, for it requires the students to learn an intricate pattern of replacement and transformation in order to arrive at a grammatical structure that they may not fully understand. The problem, then, is to devise a simpler method of introducing the relative clause that will also give the students an understanding for just what it means.

Wissen or kennen? A Grammatical Explanation

All teachers of German know the rule for differentiating wissen from kennen: wissen is to know a fact and kennen is to be acquainted with something. All teachers of German also know how difficult it can sometimes be to apply the rule: Er kennt die Regel or Ich wei3, wer das ist are examples in which students often interpret either sentence to imply factual knowledge or acquaintance with the information presented. The truth of the matter is that the problem doesn't lie with the students: judging by definition is not the most accurate way to choose between wissen and kennen.

The problem of terminology in one of Marx's works

The text we will be analysing is: A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction (the first two pages), written between the end of 1843 and January 1844. It was published in March of the same year in The French-German Annals. When Marx talks about 'man', it is generally Feuerbach that he has in mind. The same can be said with reference to the sentences: "Man makes religion" and "criticism or religion", which are upheld by the young followers of Hegel, from Strauss to Moshe Hess, and from Feuerbach to Bruno Bauer. However, in these two pages Marx deals also with his immediate past and at the same time with the theories of these young scholars. These accounts are therefore rendered simultaneously; the same applies to the statement: "Aber der Mensch das ist kein abstraktes, ausser der Welt hockendes Wesen. Der Mench, das ist die Welt des Menschen, Staat, Soziet/it" [But man is not an abstract being, hidden outside the world (who dwells hidden, squatting and kneeling outside the world). Man is Man's world, State and Society]. This is a criticism directed at Feuerbach's concept that Man is an abstract being, a concept which was used by Marx in the years immediately preceding this and which, in a discontinuous form, bring us to these first pages. The final part of paragraph 7 has a similar meaning directed this time at Bruno Bauer: "The criticism of sky thus becomes the criticism of the earth, and the criticism of religion becomes the criticism of right, the criticism of theology becomes the criticism of politics". This is the philosophical itinerary which Marx had already followed and which leaves Bruno Bauer and the young followers of Hegel behind, although it is also the beginning of the way which will allow Marx to stop being a young follower of Hegel and become a Materialist. This is the moment (from the spring of 1843 to the summer of 1844) in which Marx and Engels, who were in contact with one another, developed their ideas from idealism to materialism and evolved them individually, from positions of radical democracy to Communism. This evolution meant an 'overcoming' in the Hegelian sense of the word. From the philosophical point of view it can be expressed by omitting some of the terms from the vocabulary of the young followers of Hegel and by preserving others, or by giving a new sense to the old terms. Zvi Rosen has published an important work 1 concerning the influence of Bruno Bauer on Marx's terminology on religion. In the second chapter of the second part of his essay entitled: 'Bauer's Themes on the Marxian Conception of Religion', he convincingly shows the origin of the following words or sentences which appear in these first two pages of the Introduction: (1) Die Aufhebung der Religion als des illusorischen image]. (2) ist die Religion das Selbstbewusstsein und das Selbstgefiihl des Menschen [religion is Man's selfconsciousness and selfsensibility]. (3) die Religion, ein verkertes Weltbewusstsein [religion, an inverted consciousness of the world]. (4) eine verkerte Welt [an inverted world]. (5) die Religion ist die allgemeine Theorie dieser Welt [religion is the general theory of this world]. (6) ihre moralische Sanktion [its moral sanction]. (7) die imagin~ren Blumen an der Kette [the imaginary flowers of the chain]. The above are the seven themes of Bauer which Marx underlined, because they were in general the most distant from the radical atheism of Bauer himself. Concerning the other similarities which Rosen found, the following points must be clarified: (1) Die Auflaebung der Religion als des illusorischen Glficks des Volkes [The overcoming of religion as an illusory happiness of the people], where only the second part of the comparison is authentically Bauerian. We must point out an important terminological difference here. Rosen translates 'Aufhebung' with 'cancelled' (suppress, eliminate, abolish); but in German this term means both "to abolish' and 'to preserve' (maintain). The English translation corresponds to an 'overcoming' in the Hegelian sense of the word. (2) Sie ist das Opium des Volks [It is the opium of the

Trends in Literary Theory: The Female Aesthetic and German Women's Writing

The title of my paper draws upon a well-known essay by Silvia Bovenschen, Ober die Frage: Gibt es eine weibliche Asthetik?' and indicates an important development within recent German feminism. From about the middle of the 1970's, German feminists recognized that beyond patriarchal stereotyping and the demand for equal rights, women were different from men, though not necessarily in the ways men had maintained, and that the task of feminism was to assert and explore, not eradicate, that difference. The literary response to this perception of radical difference was an outpouring of feminist creativity as, from a consciously feminist standpoint, women writers tried to speak about the female specificity of their own experiences. At issue was a new feminist form as well as content; for, it was argued, if women's subjectivity has stood in a different relationship to the objective world than men's, then different literary techniques will be required to express the different shapes of women's lives. Asserting women's subjectivity as an epistemological model opposed to dominant male structures of thought, women's writing became a form of feminist resistance and struggle, as Johanna Wordemann reported in Alternative: Ein Ziel der Frauenbewegung: die 'Entdeckung' des Spezifischen der Frau, Erkenntnis und Erforschung des Spezifischen. . . . Als Spezifikum weiblichen Denkens-Schreibens wurde .. . immer wieder die 'radikale Subjektivitat' genannt, Subjektivitat, wie sie in den Selbsterfahrungsberichten gefordert wird. Diese Subjektivitat wird in Opposition zum mannlichen, 'objektivierenden,' von sich absehenden Denken begriffen. Frauen wollen nicht langer 'von sich absehen'; das ist ihr Widerstand, das ist ihr Kampf.2 In their endeavor to explore the alternative possibilities of female subjectivity, German feminist writers were supported by a direction of feminist analysis beginning to seep into German feminism from France.3 Drawing on the work of Derrida and Lacan, French feminists like Luce Irigaray, H6lne Cixous, and Monique Wittig argue that male domination is established and maintained by the society's symbolic order or structures of thought. These structures are logocentric; they conceptualize the world as a system of polarities involving a central term or logos

Frank Wedekind: A German Dramatist of the Absurd?

Frank Wedekind: A German Dramatist of the Absurd? Robert A. Jones While it is almost common nowadays to find Frank Wedekind numbered among the predecessors of the Theater of the Absurd, it is equally common to have the matter summarily dismissed with a few lines to the effect that Wedekind “ has always been acclaimed” as a principal forerunner to the modern avant-garde (Absurd) theater, and that that theater’s “debt” to him cannot be denied. For example, the “sell” to the prospective buyer on the back cover of a recent Fawcett paperback, The Lulu Plays, concludes with the impressive statement that it is difficult “ to overestimate Wedekind’s role in con­ temporary drama, as a vital force in modem expressionism and as a direct forebear of our Theater of the Absurd.” 1 Now in the first place it is debatable whether Wedekind’s importance for the modem theater has ever been “ acclaimed” or “overestimated.” For the most part, references to him rarely move beyond simplifications of the kind cited above. Wedekind’s admirers have concentrated principally— and quite legitimately— on his role as a forerunner to much that took place in the theater during the Expressionist movement, and subse­ quently in the theater of Bertolt Brecht. But with the greater attention paid to his successors, Wedekind’s position has become almost entirely an historical one, and in that quarter his significance has become very generalized. Secondly, such claims all but imply that Wedekind exerted a genuine “influence” on the much later Absurdists, although the evidence now available would not justify our assuming that they paid Wedekind’s works any significant attention; at least none have acknowledged even the slightest debt to him. In short, these rather stock phrases and assertions are rapidly becoming clichés. O f course the suggestion of a tenable similarity between the post-war Absurdists and the much earlier German play­ wright is a very intriguing thesis; but it is one that is sorely in need of examination and clarification. If all the catch phrases are valid, then one ought to be able to demonstrate that at the turn of the cen­ tury Wedekind was indeed experimenting and making innovations in the theater, as well as using techniques and devices, similar to those 283 284 Comparative Drama of the Absurdists who followed him by several decades. If the as­ sertions break down under scrutiny, then they should be forgotten or, at the least, amended. Possibly the most strategic factor in a comparison of Wedekind and the dramatists of the Absurd, and likely the root of many of the original claims, is their common desire to make the theater more the­ atrical and the innovative way in which they sought to put this into practice. In Wedekind’s case the majority of his innovations stemmed from a reaction against the naturalistic theater of his day, a theater that, in his opinion, was too intellectual, too wordy, and too super­ ficial because it overlooked the real governing forces of life. He ob­ jected to the emphasis on purely social aspects, and the naturalist’s attitude of reform which paid virtually no attention to the bourgeois values. Instead of being genuine works of art, he felt, the products of the naturalist playwrights were nothing other than Tendenzstücke aimed at arousing sympathy for a passive hero. He publicly voiced his rebuke in Büchse der Pandora, when Aiwa Schön, justifying his association with Lulu, condemns the contemporary “curse” of intellectualism and literariness: Das ist der Fluch, der auf unserer jungen Literatur lastet, dass wir viel zu literarisch sind. Wir kennen keine anderen Fragen und Probleme als solche, die unter Schriftstellern und Gelehrten auftauchen. Unser Gesichtskreis reicht über die Grenzen unserer Zunftinteressen nicht hinaus. Um wieder auf die Fährte einer grossen gewaltigen Kunst zu gelangen, müssten wir uns möglichst viel unter Menschen bewegen, die nie in ihrem Leben ein Buch gelesen haben, denen die einfachsten animalischen Instinkte bei ihren Handlungen massgebend sind.2 Applied to the Naturalist stage, Wedekind’s lament was aimed at the absence of theater for its own sake, and the almost total lack of any appeal to the senses. Early in...

Unrecorded maps in Danish Collections

The only two known copies of the 1614 edition of Miinster's Cosmographey which contain a second title-page dated 1615 are to be found respectively in the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen, Denmark, and in the Universitats-Bibliothek in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany. This title-page is signed, as engraver, by Wilhelm D i.e. Willem de Haen (Guilielmus Hanius), a Dutch (?) engraver active between 1609 and 1625, probably in the Netherlands and Rhineland.1 The title-page which he engraved for the Latin edition of Opmeer and Beyerlinck: Opus Chronographicum ... (Antwerp, 1611), bears both the name of De Jode, the designer, and that of Haen, the engraver. The 1615 title-page of the 1614 Cosmographey, less elaborate than the one in Opmeer, bears only the name of Haen. The printed text on the 1615 title-page is as follows: COSMOGRAPHIA 2 / Das ist / Aussfiihrliche und eigentli-/che beschreibung aller Ltndern, Herzschaff-/ten, und fiirnembsten Stdtten der gantzen Welt, sampt / derselben Abrissen, Gelegenheiten, Eygenschafften, Religionen, Gebrduchen, Geschichten und Handthierungen, usw. / Erstlich durch / SEBASTIANUM MUNSTERUM / mit grosser arbeit zusammen getragen, und mit allerley / denckwiirdigen sachen, auch Geburtslinien und vielen Contrafacturen gezieret: / Jetzund aber durch / IOAN IACOBUM GRASSERUM / in acht Bucher abgetheilt, mit ausserlesnen nutzlichen / Materien und Figuren trefflich gemehrt / und verbessert. / M. DC. XV. The text is printed in the center of the plate between two columns with Ionic capitals. Across the top are five figures, of which the center one is a seated, bearded king, crowned, holding a sword in his left hand and a terrestrial globe in his right. On each side of the king are two kneeling feminine figures, apparently symbolizing the four continents, Asia, Africa, Europe and the New World. Underneath the text are two engraved portraits: to the left, Munster, with dividers and globe; to the right, Grasser, as a preacher standing before an open Bible on a lectern. Following this special title-page is the usual title-page for the 1614 edition, similar to that of the previous edition of 1598 with the Tobias Stimmer woodcut of but bearing the date M.DC.XIV. The Copenhagen copy contains both title-pages and the Petri colophon dated 1614. rhe Freiburg-im-Breisgau copy contains the 1615 title-page but lacks the 1614 title-page and colophon. This missing colophon has been replaced by a contemporary handwritten colophon dated 1615, obviously based on the 1615 titlepage. However, examination of the Register and of the contents reveals the edition to be otherwise identical with the 1614 edition.3 The 1615 title-page caused Viktor Hantzsch, in his Sebastian MUnster, in Abhandlungen der philologischhistorischen Classe der Konigl. Sdchsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vol. 18, no. 3 (Leipzig, 1898), p. 154, to list the Freiburg-im-Breisgau copy as a separate edition. Dr. Werner Horn, in his Sebastian MUnster's Map of Prussia, in Imago Mundi, VII (1950), p. 70, notes, evidently examined this copy and thus denied the existance of a separate 1615 edition. We must assume Dr. Horn's examination of this copy, as he did not explain his denial. nor has he ever fulfilled his promise that he would shortly publish a bibliographical work on MUnster. Not only do the bibliographers of engraving fail to cite this 1615 title-page of Haen, but the bibliographers of Grasser fail also to mention his 1614 revision of the Cosmographey of 1598. We have arrived at the following conjecture concerning both the 1614 and its 1615 second title-page. Johann Jacob Grasser (1579-1627), a Swiss Protestant theologian and historian, revised the 1598 edition of the Cosmographey for the 1614 edition, as indicated by the 1615 title-page. We have compared the first chapter of

Books that made ophthalmological history.

A collection of original creative endeavors of time-honored authors, who led way in study of eyes and their diseases, should stimulate interest in history of This paper is an effort to present a few of these early works, with reproduction of their title pages, a brief discussion of contents, and an estimation of importance of these authors for progress of It is felt that these publications are representative of some of highlights in advance of In Dresden, in year 1583, an epoch-making work, Ophthalmodouleia, das ist Augendienst (Fig. 1) by George Bartisch 1 did much to elevate subject above musty prejudices of times and gave tremendous impetus to progress of ophthalmic surgery. 2 It is not without cause that Bartisch has been designated the father of modern ophthalmology. His book with its

Goethe's Scientific Works

A SPECIAL issue of the Berlin journal, Forschungen und Fortschritte, dated March 1932, includes thirty-nine pages devoted to a series of articles by more than thirty authorities dealing chiefly with Goethe's influence as a man of science. The subjects covered include mathematics, the theory of colours and optics, chemistry, geology, meteorology, botany, zoology, and anatomy, together with an appreciation of the Goethe Museum at Frankfurt. In the restricted space at the disposal of each author, it has only been possible to deal very briefly with what are often abstruse and involved matters of history, but, nevertheless, these articles should prove a very useful guide to those who propose to take up the study of Goethe's scientific works. The modern critic of Goethe's central idea of the unity of plan has little to add to Schiller's acute observation of 1794, quoted by Prof. O. Abel—“Das ist keine Erfahrung, das ist eine Idee”, and Goethe's response—“Das kann mir sehr lieb sein, dass ich Ideen habe, ohne es zu wissen, und sie sogar mit eigenen Augen sehe”, is an admirable epitome of his own attitude towards the central idea.

Aeroplanes and Atmospheric Gustiness

IN reply to Prof. Alexander McAdie's request (NATURE, April 12) for a means of recording gustiness, I venture to throw out the suggestion that this might be done by observing what in German is called “wimmern”. “Hoert Ihrs wimmern hoch vom Thurn? Das ist Sturm”. This variation in the sounds heard from church bells during gusty weather is due to the irregular velocities in the atmosphere. That part of a whirl of air which moves in the same direction as the sound will increase the pitch of the note heard, and vice versâ. If an instrument could be devised for recording rapid but slight changes of pitch of musical notes, a fairly accurate estimate of the irregularities of atmospheric velocities could be obtained.