Die Leiden Des Jungen Werthers Research Articles

Symptomatic Readers and the Sentimental Novel

ABSTRACT Fears around the consequences of reading went hand in hand with the development of the novel in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and these concerns crystallized around the reception of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). An examination of prescriptive approaches to reading and an analysis of how moral fears around aesthetic attachment were transferred from theatrical experience to reading prepare the ground for looking at fictional accounts of reading practices in Wertheriaden — the innumerable texts that reused characters and topoi from Goethe’s novel. Where Leopold Alois Hoffmann’s play Das Wertherfieber (1785) offers a broad condemnation of the fashion for Werther, Ernst August Anton von Göchhausen’s identically titled satirical novel, Das Werther-Fieber (1776) ostensibly condemns the moral arguments for suicide in Werther, but its comic portrayal of a variety of social reading practices points to a more nuanced phenomenology of reading — and how reading cannot be contained.

Kulturelles Erbe und Arbeit im Exil: Die deutschsprachige Literatur und der internationale Film (1933–1945)

Considering the devastating impact of Fascism and National Socialism on exiles and their literary heritage through the lens of adaptation history, this essay focuses on German-language literature in international cinema from 1933–45 and, by implication, on the role of refugees in major film industries abroad. When Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, most notable authors and filmmakers were forced to leave their homes in Germany and soon Austria. Many of them went to Paris and quite a few eventually made it to Hollywood. Several exile filmmakers sought to claim German-language literature for that ‘other Germany’ in foreign language films, but — especially after Hitler’s troops had invaded Poland — the literary canon of Germany and Austria was considered a liability by most international film producers. In desperate need of income, many exile authors actively pursued adaptations of their own works, but only rarely did their plans materialize, even for bestselling writers; Remarque, Seghers, and Werfel were among the lucky few. Max Ophuls’ effort to preserve at least a fragment of the German literary canon and ensure the survival of German culture abroad, by filming Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), was an exception. For the most part neither international film studios nor audiences were interested in German literary culture during the Hitler era unless an exile writers’ works provided useful and entertaining insights into current challenges and/or had established a wide-ranging readership.

ROOM AT THE INN? WERTHER IN WAHLHEIM

ABSTRACTThis article examines the widespread assumption that the protagonist of Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers chooses to live in ‘Wahlheim’. It is argued that this assumption cannot be reconciled with a close reading of the textual evidence. At no stage can Wahlheim be shown to be Werther's sole or main residence. Indeed, it is doubtful whether he ever resides there at all.

Lotte's Bird, Female Desire, and the Language of "Sexuality" in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers

In the 1787 edition of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, the revised second edition of the text, Goethe added a brief episode that shows Lotte having a bird (a canary) kiss her on the mouth—something she has trained it to do with breadcrumbs. Werther is deeply affected by what he sees, and one can read the couch scene, Werther's assault on Lotte that causes the final breakup between the two of them, as linked to this scene. The canary episode touches on one of the central problems in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers: the fact that Werther and Lotte are driven by desires and urges that we nowadays would call "sexual" (they are physical in nature, closely linked to their sense of self, and experienced as absolutely imperative), but for which they have no vocabulary—the term "sexuality" would not be invented until the second half of the nineteenth century. Read in the context of the history of sexuality, the significance of Goethe's novel consists in its production of a series of images (metaphors) as means of communication to help us understand this (sexual) dynamic as it develops between Lotte and Werther—in particular, the depiction of female desire in the text. Interpreted from this perspective, the image of the bird kissing Lotte (and also Werther) turns out to be remarkably complex but may help us understand where on the fault line between biology and culture "sexuality," in Goethe's view, is to be situated.

Editors' Preface

Editors' Preface Patricia Anne Simpson and Birgit Tautz For this editorial team, volume 30 represents our valedictory effort. Over the past year, some of us were able to transition from the Zoom squares to in-person conferences; we tentatively removed our masks, applauded with real hands, and continued debates in the corridors outside conference rooms. Nevertheless, we have come to value even more the continued opportunity to share work in this venue, and we as editors have particularly enjoyed bringing current debates, controversies, and new directions of ongoing, exciting research to these pages. Hans Hahn's "Wielands Singspiel Alceste, ein Stein des Anstoßes für Goethe?" opens this issue with an exploration of the role Wieland's libretto, in particular, played in a literary dispute with Goethe. A certain synergy emerged in a cluster of contributions around issues of gender, influence, and female marginalization among Carl Niekerk's "Lotte's Bird, Female Desire, and the Language of 'Sexuality' in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers," Maryann Piel's "La Roche and Goethe: Gender, Genre, and Authorship," and an editorial by Margaretmary Daley in which she challenges us to confront gender bias. While Niekerk dwells on the scene of the canary's kiss as a moment in the history of sexuality at the edge of its biological and cultural construction, Piel latently picks up on Daley's challenge, restoring La Roche's constitutive role in Goethe's oeuvre (rather than the other way round, as much scholarship has it). Departing from scholarly analyses to the genre of editorial, Daley seeks to challenge women writers' continued relegation to the margins of an eighteenth-century literary canon that she sees revolving around Goethe and/or other "great men"; in picking bias as a Schlagwort, Daley also begins to reflect on the state of the humanities more broadly, oscillating between the seemingly privileged position of choosing one's own research topics and the festering of structural inflexibilities that are contributing to the crisis of the humanities. The next essay in the line-up, "Things of Art and Amor: Mediation in Goethe's Römische Elegien," by Sebastian Meixner and Carolin Rocks, offers an innovative and compelling reading of the figure of Amor as poetic guide, matchmaker, rogue, servant, and mediator to Goethe's own Roman past. By coauthoring the essay, Meixner and Rocks present a model of scholarly research and writing that remains relatively rare in the humanities and that we wish we could have featured more often over the past five years. In "Reading Performatively: Disruptive Gestures in Heinrich von Kleist," [End Page xi] Katherine Pollock brings Kleist's gestures into the framework of contemporary performance theory to implicate the body of the reader in the cognitive production of meaning. We move to a section that resonates with responses to the persistence of bias; it is devoted to new work on "(White) Enlightenment Legacies." In four parts, the section showcases a direction in scholarship we believe is urgent: an inquiry into the role that German Enlightenment thought and the culture of the Goethezeit play in the persistence of anti-Black racism. These brief interventions recapitulate a series of conversations that have emerged from ongoing research and conference presentations. Introduced by Birgit Tautz and Patricia Anne Simpson—"Reexamining (White) Enlightenment Legacies Through a German Lens"—the section builds on novel attention to literature, race, and the Global South in two exemplary ASECS sessions that Tautz attended ("New Horizons"), as well as Simpson's reflection on "Black Actors: Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Decolonial Fantasies." Sarah Eldridge's "Interior Whiteness: Race and the 'Rise of the Novel'" previews the incoming coeditor's book in progress. The section closes with a Tagungsbericht by our colleagues Sigrid Köhler and Claudia Nitzschke, "Racial Classification, Slavery, and Human Rights: The Impacts of the Transatlantic Order in Eighteenth-Century Germany." While the interlude hashes out ongoing debates and the faultlines that chart the present and, hopefully, the future of German eighteenth-century studies, our final forum section glimpses into this future. It arose from a series of MLA panels devoted to the topic of "Unexpected Bodies in the Eighteenth Century." The contributors take a range of innovative and generative...

Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer (eds.), Contested Selves: Life Writing and German Culture

In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), a piece of life writing constitutes one of the founding documents of modern German literature. The tragic story of the young bohemian Werther and his beloved Charlotte is partly based on the life and suicide of Goethe's friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, but is also infused with passages from Goethe's own letters and inspired by his unrequited love for Charlotte Buff. Validating Paul De Man's assertion that autobiography is not necessarily a genre or a type of writing, but rather a way of approaching and interpreting literature, Goethe's Werther can equally be read as biography, autobiography or as a work of fiction. Despite the fact that the novel sets the scene for the intricate interplay of life and literature that became a distinguishing mark of European Romanticism, the particular significance of life writing for German literature and thought is obvious if one considers the role of biography for German Historism in the tradition of Leopold Ranke and Gustav Droysen, of autobiographical writing from Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811-1833) to Ruth Klüger's Weiter leben (1992), or of auto/biographical tropes in fictional genres like the Bildungsroman. This makes it all the more surprising that no comprehensive study has yet been devoted to the role of life writing within the German context. Even the term ‘life writing,’ bridging the gap between different genres and media, has only recently and somewhat reluctantly been adopted in German-language scholarship. A recent collection of essays, edited by Katja Herges and Elisabeth Krimmer, entitled Contested Selves: Life Writing and German Culture has set itself to remedy this shortcoming.

Maß (Moderation, Measure)

This entry on Maß (moderation, measure) explores a concept that has not received much attention in Goethe scholarship and makes a case for its usefulness and versatility in tracking how Goethe addresses a philosophical issue with a history stretching at least back to Aristotle’s conception of “the golden mean.” It shows how Goethe’s writings respond to numerous issues connected with the concept of moderation, ranging from the problem of self-moderation, when an individual’s own internal calibration comes in conflict with societal norms, to the more theoretical question of how to define the correct standard of measure (Maßstab). The discussion of moderation in Goethe’s work is, to be sure, coupled with its opposite, namely the potentially deadly threat of immoderation and excess, such as one finds in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), and Torquato Tasso (1790). Such potential conflicts, which also raise questions of where to position the standard of measure (Maßstab) of behavior, lead naturally into contexts of scientific experimentation, as in Goethe’s essay “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt” (1792; The Experiment as Mediator of Object and Subject), where such standards take on a different valence from their role in mathematically based natural sciences. In addition, Goethe’s novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities), provides a poetic model where conflicts between individually and socially calibrated notions of measure and moderation play out with major ethical consequences. The entry concludes with a reflection on different kinds of aesthetic experience, each with its particular understanding of Maß: the individual’s appreciation of the sublime, the theatrical performance, and the embodiment of the self through poetic meter. Throughout these examples, the entry will underscore the role of narrative constraints: regardless of whether the medium is prose or poetry, one finds that questions of Maß as moderation in Goethe’s writings are often accompanied by questions of narrative control and excess. The following overview and analysis of Maß in Goethe’s writing will show that this term is a nodal point of ethical, epistemological, and aesthetic concerns.

“Chizhiki tak i mrut”

My article will investigate the ways in which metaphors for birds, especially birds of song, in the correspondence between the protagonists of Dostoevsky's novel “Poor Folk” (Бедные люди, 1846) — Makar Devushkin and Varen'ka Dobroselova — refer back to Goethe's scandalously popular epistolary novel “The Sufferings of Young Werther” (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774). I propose that Dostoevsky involves a metaphoric net as an oblique subtext of references to recent popular European literature to convey the idea of Romantic death (bearing in mind the extent to which “Werther”, though written in the late eighteenth century, retained its cultural relevance for Russian readers in Dostoevsky's time). As I am investigating the larger picture of Dostoevsky's treatment of death and suicide in his shorter fiction as well as his dialogue with Goethe on this subject, I also argue that in “Poor Folk” the parody and stylization of Romantic discourse in Rataziaev's texts (and elsewhere) reveals thematic parallels between the Russian and the German narratives, and demonstrates Dostoevsky's viewpoint on death, Romanticism and Realism. For the methodological basis of my study, I will apply Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas on parody and stylization from his seminal “Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics” (especially from the chapter “Dostoevsky's Discourse”.

Keywords, Structures of Feeling, and the Novel

Keywords, Structures of Feeling, and the Novel

Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit by Stefan Hajduk

Reviewed by: Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit by Stefan Hajduk Daniel Purdy Stefan Hajduk, Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. 513 pp. The notion of Stimmung is in the air, it is all around us. After having been pushed aside in the late twentieth century, Stimmung has returned as a priority for architecture, city planning, environmentalism, and literary criticism. The term has become the progressive angle from which diverse movements have sought to reverse the functionality of modernism without falling into retrograde traditionalism. The eighteenth-century affinity for nurturing Stimmung, first articulated in landscape gardening and sentimental prose, has been mobilized into a more active climate awareness, both local and global. Stefan Hajduk's massive Poetologie der Stimmung covers much more than the literature of the early Goethezeit, as it addresses the 250-year history of scholars who have sought to characterize the illusive quality. He engages earnestly with Leo Spitzer's articles on Stimmung's relation to ancient ideas of cosmological harmony while proposing Heidegger's Befindlichkeit as conceptually superior to nineteenth-century aesthetic articulations. He is also fully conversant with Gernot Böhme's more recent appeal to foster Atmosphäre in architecture. Most importantly for Goethe scholars, Hajduk builds his argument on David Wellbery's definitive essay on the subject in Aesthetische Grundbegriffe, providing interpretations and examples that augment Wellbery's reconstruction of the term's semantic field. For all his thoroughness, Wellbery's succinct review of Goethe's remarks on Stimmung leaves room for many more investigations into the term's poetic use around Strasbourg and Weimar. Hajduk's book takes up the challenge by finding diverse forms of Stimmung in the early Goethezeit, not just those that proffer a lyrical perception of nature. The core of Hajduk's book is organized around lengthy close interpretations of three texts: Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Karl Philipp Moritz's Andreas Hartknopf novels, and Ludwig Tieck's short drama, "Der Abschied." [End Page 362] Hajduk agrees with Wellbery's opening claim that the difficulty in translating Stimmung into other European languages reflects the manner in which the German term integrates both subjective and objective references. Stimmung appears both within the perceiving individual as well as in the surrounding environment. "Mood" and "atmosphere" capture different portions but by no means the full range of aesthetic connotations in Stimmung. Because the term is often invoked in such a manner as to take advantage of its rich metaphorical allusions, no single other word comes close to its fullness. Agreeing with Wellbery's Begriffsgeschichte, Hajduk reviews the many connotations of Stimmung, landing at the conclusion that "mood," "milieu," "ambience," "atmosphere," or "attunement" do not adequately correspond to the word's musical-cosmological resonance nor its indeterminate sense of an emotional landscape. Demonstrating the inadequacy of many translation choices makes clear how many diverse and complex connotations are carried by the word. Indirectly, both Wellbery and Hajduk underscore the distinctiveness of the German word. For both scholars, contextual usage remains vital to understanding the particular meanings invoked at any given instance. Wellbery refrains from offering a conceptual definition but turns instead to a history of its metaphorical application. In this regard, both critics agree with Spitzer that Stimmung's lexical career takes off in the eighteenth century. In building off his predecessors, Hajduk points out that Wellbery's focus on aesthetic theory serves an entirely different purpose than Spitzer's reconstruction of cosmology. Hajduk goes further than Spitzer and Wellbery in highlighting the inadequacy of all translations and conceptualizations of Stimmung to argue that philosophical definitions around 1800 were ultimately incomplete and poetic articulations increasingly subjective, thereby losing the term's spatial and natural dimensions. For Wellbery, the indeterminacy is a source of fruitful variation, whereas Hajduk sees a problem that ultimately requires Heidegger to provide an adequate answer. Contrary to Wellbery's conceptual history, Hajduk argues that from Kant to Humboldt, Stimmung loses its position within the aesthetic space of nature as something external to the subject, such as a musical tone or atmosphere—decisive connotations for Goethe, Moritz, and Tieck. The poetic texts Hajduk cites...

Klassik als Kulturelle Praxis. Funktional, Intermedial, Transkulturell ed. by Paula Wojcik et al.

Reviewed by: Klassik als Kulturelle Praxis. Funktional, Intermedial, Transkulturell ed. by Paula Wojcik et al. Marissa Schoedel Paula Wojcik, Stefan Matuschek, Sophie Picard, and Monika Wolting, eds. Klassik als Kulturelle Praxis. Funktional, Intermedial, Transkulturell. Spectrum Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 62. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. 577 pp. What a classic! What is the first thing you associate with the word classic? The classic in question could be a book, film, or even a play or design aesthetic. Classic can refer to so many things and, without context, one is left guessing as to what, precisely, the classic referent is. This edited volume strives to create several working definitions of the elusive term "classic." The term is especially tricky in the German-speaking context, where the term can be used to refer to a specific literary period: Weimarer Klassik. In both English and German, the classics can also refer to classical studies (i.e., the study of classical antiquity) and the ancient world in general. The volume does not focus on any literary period in particular but rather emphasizes the need to make the terms classic and classical contemporary rather than treating them as a fixed point in time. Classics are a ubiquitous aspect of everyday life, which Wojcik et al. note has lead to the semantic overloading (Überfrachtung) of the concept Klassik. Semantic ambiguity is primarily what hinders the creation of a single working definition. As the subtitle would suggest, the ultimate goal is a multitude of functional, medial, and transcultural definitions rather than one vague, imprecise one. The volume's six subsections are a testament to its interdisciplinary and comparative focus. Section 1 considers the current state of the term "classic" and its [End Page 391] contemporary uses. The transition of classic works to new forms of mass media such as radio and television are examined in section 2. The theme of section 3 is cultural icons as a form of classic. Section 4 focuses on intermediality as a means of mediation. The final two sections deal with cultural appropriation in both intermedial (section 5) and intertextual terms (section 6). Canonical German authors most certainly make a good showing in the volume, but the forms in which internationally canonical texts such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers appear in are what make it a necessary addition to the Spectrum Literaturwissenschaft series. The explorations of how classics have evolved as they are adapted to radio, film, comic strips, graphic novels, and reimagined novels proves that classics do not inherently need to be boring or tired. On the example of Goethe's oeuvre alone, everything from mashup novels to rapped recitations of Erlkönig are cited as evidence of classical works having clearly moved beyond their static texts of origin to become a body of works centered around the aforementioned canonical point of origin. Transnational interpretations and adaptations of classics is another focal point, which demonstrates the wide reaching, indeed global, impact of canonical classics and their expansion to different media. The currently popular forms of comics and graphic novels have proved a fruitful venue for modern interpretations of well-known classics. Comic adaptations discussed include Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Conscience's Löwe von Flandern, the profane comic anthology Chopin New Romantic, and a manga of Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liasons Dangereuses. The increased representation of authors with multiple cultural identities (e.g., Turkish German, Iranian German) has also broadened transnational and transcultural perspectives within the German context. In the case of Ilse Nagelschmidt's essay "Vom Klassiker zum Kultbuch. Goethes Werther und Feridun Zaimoglus Liebesmale, scharlachrot," intertextuality and transnationalism are simultaneously at play. Adaptations studies further show how transcultural and multilingual adaptations of classics bring these texts to broader audiences beyond the confines of the original's language of origin. Such works are not mere translations as can be seen in the examples of the comics mentioned in the previous paragraph. Parodies of classics are another form that transcends national and cultural boundaries. Because of its comparative bent and interrogation of the specific brand of "classic literature" championed in school and university curricula, this volume will be of interest to literary scholars and students alike...

Comparison of Pessimistic Character of Spasse’s Jon Zaveri and Goethe’s Werther

This paper aims to compare the pessimistic character of Spasse’s Jon Zaveri and Goethe's Werther. Although the novels were written in different periods, “Why?!” (Albanian: Pse?!) by the Albanian author Sterjo Spasse, in the thirties of the twentieth century, and “The Sorrows of Young Werther” (German: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), by the German author Johan Wolfgang Goethe, in the seventies of the seventeenth century, they have their similarities and contradictions, which is natural given the fact of the social and economic circumstances of both the Western European and European Balkan areas. Goethe's Werther, although much earlier in time than Spasse’s Jon, lived in an environment that bears no resemblance to the environment in which Jon was born, raised, and formed. Werther, was traditionally rich, educated, and wandered around different places. His social circle was of an intellectual and artistic level. There is talk of ballrooms, pianos, music, novels, drawing, travel, and great writers...while, in Jon's social circle, especially where we deal with family and social conventionalism, it is completely different even though we are almost in the second half of the twentieth century. Jon is the only villager who leaves the village and goes to the city to get educated, while all the villagers are not only in mentality, but also in their clothes they wear still traditional. This is also beautifully portrayed at the time of John's wedding, when his family arrange a marriage getting him married to his wife Aferdita! She is a bride in traditional village style clothes, as described by Jon, just like all the wedding guests, with the exception of Jon, who had changed his dressing style, getting dressed as a citizen. The most obvious commonality in the characters of the novels “Why?!” and “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, is the pessimism of both and the suicide of both. John commits suicide in the lake by disagreeing with the marriage and fails to understand love, while Werther is madly in love, a love that leads him to suicide. So, Jon commits suicide by not finding the WHY of life and young love, which he never managed to understand or experience, while Werther fails to find the WHY of not making true the dream of his love, love which blinds him and takes him to the peak of pessimism, to suicide! Goethe's Werther is influenced as a personality by the world of art, while Spasse’s Jon is influenced by the world of philosophers.

The Virginal Mother in German Culture: From Sophie von La Roche and Goethe to Metropolis by Lauren Nossett

Reviewed by: The Virginal Mother in German Culture: From Sophie von La Roche and Goethe to Metropolis by Lauren Nossett Beth Ann Muellner Lauren Nossett. The Virginal Mother in German Culture: From Sophie von La Roche and Goethe to Metropolis. Northwestern UP, 2019. 232 pp. Cloth, $99.95; Paper, $34.95; E-book, $34.95. Lauren Nossett’s well-researched study presents moments of upheaval in German history that become stable in the presence of the fictional virginal mother, offering new emphasis on a ubiquitous figure not yet highlighted in the scholarship of fictional mothers. The idealized virginal mother inhabits the contradictory space between “social expectation and reality” (3), where she glorifies motherhood, fetishizes virginity, and views sex and pregnancy as taboo topics. The fictional virginal mother emerges as changing eighteenth-century discourses of science, religion, and philosophy failed to fully explain human female behavior. Beyond Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential position on women’s maternal instincts, an attempt to strengthen male control over the female body eluded the scientific community. The virginal mother emerges in the cultural imagination as a solution to her absence in reality. Sophie von La Roche and her epistolary novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771; The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim, 1991)— an example of the private, informal, supposedly female genre— provides the first example (22). The novel’s emphasis on the patriarchal order of gender and class is disrupted via the narrator Sophie’s dispersal of pedagogical advice to women. As in each insightful chapter, Nossett begins with brief historical context and author biography, followed with close readings that trace two virginal mother motifs: first, the caregiving and self-sacrificial figure who replaces “bad” mothers (24); and second, the virginal heroine who overcomes “the seduction plot” (27). In chapter 2 the focus is Goethe’s ideal of the nonbiological virginal mother. In Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779), Lotte’s chaste, maternal care for her siblings differs from the “dangerous maternal body” (53), a theme repeated in unrealistic female characters in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1824) who bolster the virginal mother as feminine ideal. Where the biological female body appears in the figure of Gretchen in Faust I (1808), she proves murderous. Nossett’s excellent reading notwithstanding, Marianne Ehrmann’s (1755–95) infanticide fiction— the only female contemporary of Goethe’s to have written on the topic, as discussed [End Page 125] by Helga Madland in a 1992 Monatshefte article— would be better matched for the female authorship the book otherwise pursues. Chapter 3 considers the virginal mother as a “heroine of pulp fiction” in E. Marlitt’s Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell (1867; The Old Maid’s Secret, 1871) and Die zweite Frau (1874; The Second Wife, 1887) (75). Amid political upheavals, Marlitt’s virginal mother provides social stability within middle-class domesticity, reinforcing Rousseau. At the same time, her heroines offer slight variations on eighteenth-century romance-driven models: women in Marlitt’s world suffer from vanity rather than adulterous behavior. In chapter 4, evidence of actual caregiving and motherhood in autobiographical texts of Hedwig Dohm, Adelheid Popp, and Ottilie Baader, shift s away from idealized motherhood elsewhere (99). Rare are glimpses of satisfying or idealized maternal labor in Dohm’s middle-class view or Popp’s and Baader’s working-class life stories, where economic, social, and political realities challenge maternal images found in aristocratic or bourgeois fictional worlds. In chapter 5, Thea von Harbou’s screenplay for Metropolis (1927) allows maternal images to overcome destructive patriarchal forces, where biological mothers are portrayed in a positive light (Joh Fredersen’s mother and his wife, Hel, appear in the novel). However, Maria as virginal mother does not exist in a domestic sphere, leaving no opportunity for critique either. Ideal femininity here is redemptive and extends to women as well as feminized men. In conclusion, in her propensity to act chastely and to offer free labor, the idealized, selfless German female caregiver differs from US and British examples. The end of the idealized virginal mother in Germany comes with the Nazi push for utilitarian, biological motherhood. Nossett’s examinations are well...

Koselleck's Timely Goethe?

Uses and Abuses of Goethe THROUGHOUT MUCH OF the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, it was common to use Goethe to diagnose the contemporary historical moment, to view him either as an emblem of his time or a representative of a bygone or coming age. This reception by cultural elites across the ideological spectrum certainly began during his lifetime, first with Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers ( The Sufferings of Young Werther ) and then his reception by the Romantics, and again in the 1820s and 1830s, with writers of the Vormarz accusing him of being politically and culturally out of touch. In each instance, the engagement with Goethe served to articulate a vision of the present moment, of modernity, and of historical time more broadly; in each instance, Goethe is positively or negatively invoked in the name of history. The young Nietzsche brings this approach to Goethe to a polemical head in his Unzeitgemase Betrachtungen ( Untimely Meditations ), opening his assault on the modern conception of history with a quote from Goethe's correspondence with Schiller, where Goethe describes his ambivalent reaction to Kant: “Ubrigens ist mir alles verhast, was mich blos belehrt, ohne meine Thatigkeit zu vermehren, oder unmittelbar zu beleben” (In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly enlivening my activity). For Nietzsche, untimeliness is an inherently historical category, for it positions past, present, and future in relation to one another (it is the attempt to act “gegen die Zeit und dadurch auf die Zeit und hoffentlich zugunsten einer kommenden Zeit” (counter to our time and thereby [to act] on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come), though it is a likewise category aimed at the heart of historicism and the method of academic history, which, as Nietzsche argues, via Goethe, has lost any connection to the vital activity of “life.” In a 1993 lecture on “Goethes Unzeitgemase Geschichte” (“Goethe's Untimely History”), Reinhart Koselleck explores a similar conception of untimeliness, namely as a historical category that is directed against the modern concept of history and that catalyzes multidirectional relationships between past, present, and future.

Impossible Ideals: Reconciling Virginity and Maternity in Goethe’s Werther

IN THE SEPTEMBER 10,1771, letter of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Lotte recalls the death of her mother and the heavy responsibility she is assigned in her absence:Sey ihre Mutter! Ich gab ihr die Hand drauf! Du versprichst viel, meine Tochter, sagte sie, das Herz einer Mutter und das Aug' einer Mutter. Ich habe oft an deinen dankbaren Thranen gesehen, das du fuhlst, was das sey. Habe es fur deine Geschwister, und fur deinen Vater: die Treue und den Gehorsam einer Frau. Du wirst ihn trosten.1[Be a mother to them.-I gave her my hand.-Dear daughter, she said, you are promising is a great deal. It is the heart of a mother and the eye of a I could often tell from your grateful tears that you felt what that means. Show a mother's care to your brothers and sisters, and be as faithful and obedient to your father as a wife. You will be a comfort to him.2]With these deathbed words, Lotte's mother simultaneously secures her replacement in the family and complicates the familial bonds that must be renegotiated in her absence. Lotte, in adopting her mother's caregiving role, ref lects a contradictory and complex social ideal of woman as both a maternal and a being, a figure whom I call the virginal mother. A young, chaste woman who provides unpaid care for children not her own and simultaneously practices her maternal skills before consummating marriage, the mother marks a departure from the sexualized woman of the seventeenth century and negotiates the eighteenth-century fetishization of virginity with contemporary discourses of domestic motherhood.3 Rousseau, in particular, was influential in emphasizing the role of maternal nurture in the child's moral development, and it was assumed that a woman's natural body predisposed her to this role. In the eighteenth century, this maternal nature is located in the mother, who is charitable and self-sacrificial. She represents an impossible ideal, but one recurring throughout German culture, from Sophie Sternheim in Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim (The History of Lady Sternheim) in 1771 to Maria in Thea von Harbou's novel and Fritz Lang's film Metropolis in 1927.4Although examples of motherhood are more prevalent in the works of female authors,5 Lotte is not Goethe's only mother figure. Both Therese and Natalie in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1795-96) willingly serve as surrogate mothers, and even Gretchen in Faust I (1808) selflessly devotes herself to her young sister before her encounter with Mephistopheles and Faust. In the works of Sophie von La Roche and later female authors, the mother functions to negotiate prescribed gender roles along with the pursuit of education. Her devotion to reading does not inspire sexual passions, as was feared with the reading of novels,6 but rather benefits the children in her care. As a positive example for young girls, the mother thus serves as an appropriate character for women writers to enter the male-dominated publishing world.7 Goethe, however, did not write under the same social constraints as his female contemporaries. And although he maintained relationships with many educated women (including La Roche), he did not argue for advancements in female education like Christoph Martin Wieland or Johann Christoph Gottsched. Why then does the mother represent the ideal feminine in Goethe's work? And how is the love of the mother- represented as ennobling and a precursor for domestic happiness in other texts-linked to Werther's suicide?Much has already been written about Lotte. Where Goethe's contemporaries heralded her as ein Kind der Natur (a child of nature), modern scholars debate her role in Werther's suicide.8 But little attention has been paid to her unique position as mother in relation to her siblings and father and as the love object of Werther. …

Christian Gottlob Proft og de utilladelige skrifter. Bogforbud i årene efter trykkefrihedsperioden

In 1770 Christian VII’s personal physician Johann Friedrich Struensee exploited the king’s feeble condition to seize power in Denmark and one of his first acts was to introduce unrestricted freedom of the press. Two years later in January 1772, Struensee was himself toppled from power and subsequently executed in April of the same year. It was soon clear that the new regime aimed to reintroduce a form of control over book publication and the present article how these new restrictions were viewed from the perspective of the Copenhagen bookseller Christian Gottlob Proft (1736–1793).In the years 1773–76 Proft twice found himself the object of the authorities’ suspicions, as he had distributed printed matter which the authorities regarded as impermissible.In 1773, Proft was convicted of having provided the itinerant bookseller Hermann Ludolph Bardewyck with forbidden writings which the new rulers regarded as dangerous as they espoused Struensee’s cause and potentially could undermine the legitimacy of the new rulers. Three years later, Proft announced that he intended to publish Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers in a Danish translation, but its publication was blocked for religious and moral reasons.These two court cases brought against Proft show that, even though the abolished censorship was not reintroduced, actual practice had changed very little. The abolished law of censorship was still applied in legal judgements, just as the government made no bones about banning the translation of a work it did not wish to see circulated among the common people. Further, they resorted to the well-tried method of inflicting severe sentences on representatives of the book trade rather than carrying out comprehensive control of the authors.

Nature and the “Dark Pastoral” in Goethe’s Werther

Introduction: The Dark Pastoral in Relation to Dark Ecology and the AnthropoceneCELEBRATING THE NATURAL HARMONY of the stream, grasses, and the beautiful wellspring where the peasant girls come to fetch water in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Goethe's epony- mous hero embraces pastoral nature with a passion. He partakes in a traditional pastoral setting of rustic, idyllic landscapes rife with simple peasant folk, happy children, and agricultural pursuits far from the complexities of urban or courtly life-at least in the first part of the novel. This idealized pastoral framework with its peaceful green hills and valleys appears isolated from-or, more precisely, abstracted from-the urban sites where the authors of such poems and tales inevitably write and where, apparently, corrupted wealthy sophisticates rage political and economic battles. Yet according to ecocriticTerry Gifford, the pastoral trope is actually not so one-sided and simplistic; this literary form encompasses complex, often ironic tensions, including the primary oppositions between the (gritty) urban and the (garden-like) rural, between the always already lost Golden Age and a messier present time, between myth and history, and between an overtly artificial and concrete realism, as well as the intentional acknowledgment that the green vision is hyperbolic yet precisely therefore able to provide a social critique through artifice.1 Even the pastoral's common insistence on avoiding all mention of politics can function as a form of critique, with its utopian, conflict-free zone inevitably suggesting the opposite, much in the way that a utopia can describe a no-place that critiques what actually is. The pastoral tensions in these polarities resonate all the more powerfully because they cannot be bridged; their mythic nostalgia can reveal stark contrasts in social, political, chronological, and, most significantly for ecocriticism, ecological terms.However, the pastoral's capaciousness may not be broad enough to encompass the rupture documented in Goethe's novel through Werther's radical shift from a foundation of agrarian harmony to the unstable grounds of destructive storms and flooding. This shift parallels the text's move out of Werther's solipsistic letters and into a multiplicity of voices describing his downfall. One might thus abandon the pastoral's inherently dualistic artifice altogether and seek to define some kind of postpastoral taking place in the novel; instead, I propose here the pastoral. The dark pastoral builds on Timothy Morton's idea of which shatters traditional notions of nature as an aesthetic and isolated green site to visit or ignore and replaces this outdated vision of nature with a more ecological and postmodern understanding that engages us in every location, regardless of its color or number of trees, with a physical, bodily inevitability as part of the mesh of the world that includes us. Morton writes:I explore the possibility of a new ecological aesthetics: dark ecology. Dark ecology puts hesitation, uncertainty, irony, and thoughtfulness back into ecological thinking. . . . There is no metaposition from which we can make ecological pronouncements. Ironically, this applies in particular to the sunny, affirmative rhetoric of environmental ideology. A more honest ecological art would lin- ger in the shadowy world of irony and difference. With dark ecology, we can explore all kinds of art forms as ecological: not just ones that are about lions and mountains, not just journal writing and sublimity. The ecological thought includes negativity and irony, ugliness and horror.2Dark ecology thus opens up nature to include the full spectrum of the bodily materiality in which every living being exists, and it encompasses also the human discursive and cultural elements as well. There is no outside of this realm; it includes the biosphere, but Morton sees it as also expanding out into the cosmos and, from a more earthly perspective, as embracing cyborg or even robotic, mechanistic beings; he uses Ridley Scott's androids in Blade Runner as exemplary for the other-than-human. …

‘Arise, O magnificent effulgence of Ossian's soul!’: Werther the Translator in English Translation

As first published in 1774, over seven per cent of Goethe's novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, consists of translation from extended passages from James Macpherson's Ossian. What should the anglophone translator do with these? The essay begins by considering the merits of J. M. Coetzee's criticism of Stanley Corngold's translation for simply inserting what he and Coetzee take to be Macpherson's English original, instead of back-translating from the German. Questions about the editions used, both of Macpherson and Goethe, are raised. The function of the Ossianic translations within the economy of the novel is discussed and the ways in which the source text is adapted in order to serve this. In consequence it is argued that back-translation represents the only legitimate option.

Die Leiden des jungen Werthers à luz da história do conceito de subjetividade

O artigo analisa os paralelos entre o retrato do 'sujeito moderno em crise' visto no romance Die Leiden des jungen Werthers de Goethe e, por outro lado, o perfil psicossocial do 'homem do sentimento' do século XVIII, fruto da cultura da Empfindsamkeit. Defendo a perspectiva de que, no romance, Goethe não apenas se utiliza do formato literário mais tradicional da Empfindsamkeit (o do romance epistolar), como também se apropria de topói e técnicas discursivas que lhe são próprias em registro radicalmente heterodoxo. A argumentação nos ligará a uma dedução da visão do conceito de subjetividade moderna com que Goethe trabalha em sua fase final do Sturm und Drang, e que o situa como importante nome do discurso filosófico da modernidade.

Werther’s Love. Representations of Suicide, Heroism, Masochism, and Voluntary Self-Divestiture

This article examines discourses on suicide in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers in the context of representations of heroism, masochism, and strategies of ‘un-becoming’ such as Leo Bersani’s concept of self-shattering desires and voluntary self-divestiture. It outlines the two imaginary families created in the novel. The first is based on matrilinearity incorporating God, Lotte’s deceased mother, and Werther. The second family derives from the male bonding which occurs when the Amtmann and his sons rush to Werther’s deathbed. Both families keep the pure potentiality of literature alive, thus undermining Goethe’s intention to write a cautionary tale.