Die Wahlverwandtschaften Research Articles

The late Goethe: New directions

The late Goethe: New directions

Wechselseitigkeit (Reciprocity)

Wechselseitigkeit (reciprocality, mutuality) refers to Goethe’s interactive understanding of human and non-human relations. In its attributive inflection wechselseitig, which can be variously rendered as reciprocal, mutual, alternate, interchangeable, or two-way, the concept mediates the inexorable polarities of life. As a vital “force of attraction” (Anziehungskraft) between contrasting phenomena, these Goethean oppositions operate within both nature and the human world, as when the narrator claims in Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities), “[j]ede Anziehung ist wechselseitig” (WA 1.20:282; Every attraction is reciprocal). As in this novel, wechselseitig in Goethe’s theoretical writings configures assemblages of shared feelings, actions, or close relationships between two or more entities. And whether they are inter-subjective or intercultural, these reciprocal interactions typically involve an order of exchange between opposing sides (Seiten) that give of themselves in mutual enhancement or decline. Grounded in change (Wechsel) and linked to such cognate compounds as Wechselspiel (alternate play, fluctuation), Wechselwirkung (reciprocal effect, mutual influence), and Wechselblick (reciprocal gaze), the ascription also at times highlights an ethics of interaction within heterological relations of parity for the purpose of producing intensified or enhanced (gesteigerte) outcomes. Ultimately, the lexeme configures mediations of overlapping and interdependent systems that operate within science, society, and aesthetics, while also illuminating post-Kantian subject-object relations.

Konsumrevolution und Verzeitlichung um 1800: Ein kommodes Feuerwerk bei Claudius und der neue Luxus der Flüchtigkeit in Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften

ABSTRACT This essay examines firework scenes in Matthias Claudius and Goethe, reading them in the context of a historical shift in the function of popular spectacles: from the representative role of fireworks in the ancien régime, to their broad availability as commodities in modernity. Claudius portrays that cultural change vividly and as the miniaturization of luxury. In Die Wahlverwandtschaften, meanwhile, the newly domesticated art of firework displays illuminates the link between the fashionable ‘little luxury’ and modern ephemerality. Thus, the following argues that literary representations of luxury around 1800, and of fireworks in particular, are examples of an ephemeral and increasing consumer culture at the time, and reflect contemporary accelerated temporalization. Moreover, the discussion of Goethe allows us to draw a line from Die Wahlverwandtschaften to his concept of the Veloziferisches, as well as making reference to other major works (‘An Schwager Kronos’; Faust).

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.

Increasing Motivation and Engagement in Advanced Literature Courses: Visions of Home: Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities)

Goethe’s complex novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, with its focus on enhancing the home and its landscape, an activity that ends in chaos and destruction, allows for a problematization of the Enlightenment credo of perfectibility of humanity and its environment. To increase student motivation, I prefer thematic courses instead of relying on survey courses. In particular, I favor topics that lend themselves to comparing and contrasting the students’ contemporary experience with the historical context. Creating a link between the past and the present, thus offering both familiarity and alterity, facilitates access to the respective theme. At the same time, employing typical pedagogies used in the beginning language courses (images, activities beyond questions, worksheets, games) also in the advanced language, literature, and culture courses like the one described here, fosters stronger engagement with the literary text. This fourth-year course, taught in German, meets our “Learning Goals”, emphasizes transferable skills, and contributes to project-based learning.

Zusammenhang (Nexus)

The lexeme Zusammenhang (nexus) was introduced into philosophy by the German rationalists, who conceived of the world as a multiplicity of independent substances coordinated in a system of pre-established harmony. In his critique of these metaphysicians, Kant insisted that things hang together in not one but two ways—as an aggregate of a posteriorisense data, or as a system of a priori concepts—and that these two nexus are separated by an epistemological chasm. This entry proposes that Goethe’s nexus concept recovers the middle term excluded by Kant’s binary distinction and that this middle term plays a key role in both his scientific and literary writings, including the Hefte zur Morphologie (1817-1824; Notebooks on Morphology), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), and Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities). By comparing Goethe’s theoretical use of the nexus concept with his literary use of the nexus motif, this entry articulates a relation of part to whole that displays more coherence than a mere aggregate, yet is more dynamic than an absolute system.

Kraft (Force)

The lexeme Kraft (force) is a foundational concept for Goethe that expresses the dynamism essential to his thought. Its tendency to move between operations of particularity and generality, polarity and intensification, differentiation and dedifferentiation, potentiality and actuality, norm and deviation, rationality and irrationality, and cognition and creativity together lend it a characteristic mobility, multiplicity, and diffusion. The discursive tensions and blendings of the concept during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—which extend between the obscure aesthetic construction of force in Karl Philipp Moritz and Johann Gottfried Herder and its scientific construction in Kant and Newton as the condition of possibility of knowledge—also manifest themselves in Goethe’s concept. As a grounding and ungrounding at one and the same time, Kraft thus serves as a material condition for the genesis of knowledge, on the one hand, and a metaphysical index of something absolutely unconditioned (das Unbedingte), on the other. When Goethe conceptualizes force as unconditioned, rather than as a condition of this or that individual being, he configures it in a number of ways. These include force as movement in processes of transformation and becoming, as potential, as a capacity for trans-discursive drift or blending, and as a non-discursive resistance to integration into normative, cognitive, and representational modes of thought. Certain scenes in Goethe's literary works—including most prominently, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; The Elective Affinities), Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821/29; Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years), Pandora (1807/08), and Faust(1808/32)—can be read as thought experiments that offer ontological conceptions of force in order to explore its informing oppositions of movement and metamorphosis, potentiality and actuality, as well as trans-discursivity and non-discursivity.

Arbeit und Müßiggang in der Romantik ed. by Claudia Lillge, Thorsten Unger, and Björn Weyand

Reviewed by: Arbeit und Müßiggang in der Romantik ed. by Claudia Lillge, Thorsten Unger, and Björn Weyand William H. Carter Claudia Lillge, Thorsten Unger, and Björn Weyand, eds. Arbeit und Müßiggang in der Romantik. Paderborn: Fink, 2017. 494 pp. Work has long served as the object of literary, philosophical, and artistic reflection. Its alternatives are also well represented, particularly in German Romanticism. Caspar David Friedrich's Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (1818) offers a celebrated example of the latter, and features prominently on the cover of Arbeit und Müßiggang in der Romantik. Above the fog and in view of the wanderer, we also see Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870–73) by the Russian realist Ilya Repin. Because explicit depictions of work are largely absent in German Romantic painting, this striking image of manual labor was selected to counter Friedrich's iconic image (11–12). The workers, in tattered clothes and wearing blank expressions, contrast sharply with the well-dressed observer transposed to witness the men (and boy) yoked to a heavy vessel. Barge Haulers on the Volga clearly depicts work, but to what extent does Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer represent idleness, leisure, or perhaps another form of work? The twenty-eight essays in this volume demonstrate that the questions surrounding work and its other depend on circumstance and perspective. The volume begins with a helpful introduction, which addresses work and idleness in Romantic painting, the contemporaneous understanding of key concepts, and a preview of the contributions. While the essays generally concentrate on works from the period, a few authors venture beyond the era but with due regard to the context. The collection is divided into five main sections. The first addresses various forms of Arbeit in Novalis (Franz-Jozef Deiters), Hölderlin (Sabine Doering), Chamisso (Christiane Weller), Heine (Dale Adams), and Büchner (Elke Brüns). The second shifts the focus to Muße and the related matters of Faulheit and Fleiß in Friedrich Schlegel's Idylle über den Müßiggang (Heide Volkening), Klingemann's Nachtwachen. Von Bonaventura (Mario Bosincu), Hölderlin's Hyperion (Leonhard Fuest), the Journal des Luxus und der Moden (Boris Roman Gibhardt), and Heine's Briefe aus Berlin and Lutezia (Robert Krause). The third section is dedicated to the arts and expands the scope of the volume; yet it remains heavily focused on literary texts with analyses of handcraft in Goethe and Heine (Michael Bies), the role of work and art in Klingemann's Nachtwachen (Tomasz Waszak), reflections on work and writing in Jean Paul (Monika Schmitz-Emans), and the work of poetry in Heinrich von Ofterdingen (James Hodkinson). The final essay here is the exception. It examines the work of art and the art of work in Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Claudia Hillebrandt and Tom Kindt). The fourth section approaches work, idleness, and leisure through the lens of time and space. Klaus Vieweg draws on Hegel and Nietzsche to argue that the workday is sublimated on Sunday. Claudia Lillge explores the Mittagsruhe in Wordsworth, Eichendorff, and the French realist Courbet, whose paintings capture daytime naps and a few at work. Eichendorff returns in Fred Lönker's examination of time in Ahnung und Gegenwart and Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts. [End Page 332] The final essays in this section address city spaces (Uwe Hentschel), different facets of work in the forest (Erhard Schütz), multidimensional space in Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (Martin Jörg Schäfer), and an exploration of Kahnfahrten in Fouqué, Brentano, and Heine (Simon Bunke). Bunke's reading mentions Goethe's Auf dem See but, surprisingly, not the deadly boating accident in Die Wahlverwandtschaften. The final section of the collection focuses on literary figures and their historical, social, and political contexts. Ursula Regener reads Eichendorff's work in light of his official duties and Adam Müller's politicaleconomic theory. Patricia Czezior examines work as obsession in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Das Fräulein von Scuderi, and Lydia Mühlbach analyzes the work of women in the Grimms' Schneewittchen and its adaptations. The final two essays provide close readings of Wilhelm Hauff's Das kalte Herz...

Kinship and Aesthetic Depth: The Tableau Vivant in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften

ABSTRACTJohann Wolfgang Goethe famously includes performances of tableaux vivants in Die Wahlverwandtschaften. The tableau vivant bridges social classes, kinship models, and aesthetic media (painting, sculpture, and drama). This essay argues that the representation of tableaux vivants in Goethe’s novel invites reflections on shifting social forms in the Goethezeit. In dialogue with G.W.F Hegel’s expressed frustration with Goethe’s inclusion of the tableau vivant in his novel, the essay contends that a hybrid aesthetic informs Die Wahlverwandtschaften, complicating assumptions about the centrality of interiority and aesthetic depth in the novel. A semiotics of the tableau vivant is intrinsic to Goethe’s work, inviting a critical reflection on developing kinship structures in the nineteenth century and on the concomitant development of the interior subject in the modern novel.

Goethe and (Um)Weltliteratur: Environment and Power in Goethe’s Literary Worlds

Goethe occupies a prominent but conflicted position within recent discussions of global inequalities embedded into the notion of “world literature.” Scholars have also debated Goethe’s environmental thought. Some critics describe him as a progressive environmental thinker, while others paint him as a staunch conservative resistant to changing views of nature. The present study claims that merging these two fields yields a better understanding of both political power and environmental change in Goethe’s writings. Drawing on theories of world literature, postcolonial studies, and environmental humanities, the present essay argues that Goethe’s texts display ambivalence with regards to both political power and environmental change. The argument is developed, in dialogue with past environmental interpretations of Goethe’s work, through an analysis of Die Wahlverwandtschaften. The essay proposes that Die Wahlverwandtschaften can serve as a key text for understanding the tensions in Goethe’s relations to environment, world literature, and political power.

Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830 by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, and: Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson

Reviewed by: Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830 by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge, and: Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson Heidi Schlipphacke Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830. By Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016. Pp. x + 202. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1571139597. Goethe’s Families of the Heart. By Susan E. Gustafson. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. vii + 199. Cloth $105.60. Paper $39.95. ISBN 978-1501315763. The topics of family and kinship have recently enjoyed a renaissance in German studies in light of new approaches to thinking about the relationship between the family model and the state. The shifting contours of modern familial and marriage paradigms, evident in recent legislation supporting marriage equality for same-sex couples, have surely informed reconsiderations of the nuclear family and its origins in the eighteenth century. In addition, the enhanced visibility of both nonbiological affective communities (adoptive, increasingly international, and even virtual) and purely biological relationships (for example, sperm donor families in which members have no connection beyond the biological) spurs us to rethink assumptions about the simple mapping of the nuclear family onto the (imagined) state in the German Enlightenment. For the past few years the German Studies Association has hosted a “Family and Kinship” network that has provided a highly productive forum for new reflections on the shifting connections between blood ties, economics, and politics in German-speaking countries. Sarah Eldridge’s and Susan Gustafson’s books respond to this call for nuance and reconsideration of the definition and function of “family” in the eighteenth century. Both Eldridge and Gustafson have chaired the “Family and Kinship” network, and each has written a book that intervenes in crucial ways with cutting-edge discussions about the intersection of family, economics, politics, and aesthetics. In Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830, Eldridge offers a nuanced study of the ways in which the form of the novel mirrors, responds to, and, in turn, helps shape conceptions about family and generation that emerged in the German states around 1800. Gustafson focuses explicitly on seminal works by Goethe: one play (Stella [1775]) and three important novels (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [1795], [End Page 158] Die Wahlverwandtschaften [1809], and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre [1821]), in order to elegantly show us how anathema these works are to any restrictive notion of love. On the contrary, Gustafson convincingly argues, Goethe’s works are not only nontraditional in their critical representation of nuclear families, they are likewise radically progressive (perhaps more so than our present age) in their consistently positive depiction of nontraditional affective bonds, including same-sex, polyamorous, and adoptive ones. In this sense, Gustafson’s monograph could be seen as a companion to Astrida Tantillo’s Goethe’s Modernisms (2010), in which Tantillo forcefully argues for the presciently modern nature of Goethe’s views on economics, education, and religion. Interestingly, although Eldridge’s work is not focused on Goethe per se, she concludes Novel Affinities with a beautifully astute interpretation of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, drawing out the ways in which it offers a subtle metareflection on the relationship between the genre of the novel and shifting notions of generation and testament—two concepts central to any understanding of the family. Eldridge shows convincingly in clear prose how we must think through the form of the novel together with that of the nuclear family, two “genres,” we might say, that are linked to emerging notions of subjectivity around 1800. Eldridge is particularly sensitive to the ways in which the novel—itself a malleable genre that becomes, as Eldridge argues, reflexive almost the minute it emerges as a dominant literary form—invites its readers to what she calls “imaginative engagement” with its material and form. The novel around 1800, she shows quite elegantly, is a literary genre that is not only concerned with the interior development of its protagonists but also with conceptions of generation and testament that are at the core of the bourgeois subject’s understanding of him/herself in the early nineteenth century. What is more, precisely by focusing on generation and testament, two concepts that link the...

BLINDHEIT UND TAKT IN GOETHES WAHLVERWANDTSCHAFTEN

ABSTRACTIn the eighteenth century, the German word ‘Takt’, in the first instance a synonym for the sense of touch and a musical term, adopts the figurative meaning of psychological and aesthetic sensitivity. Within a few decades, ‘tact’ then turns into a philosophical term for an intuitive form of empirical judgement that comes to bear in social intercourse as well as in the arts and sciences. In Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften tact is a property of the female characters Charlotte and Ottilie, in whose actions it manifests itself literally as a sense of touch and rhythm. Aesthetic sensitivity, however, is not sufficient to hinder the fatal course of events: in Die Wahlverwandtschaften, tact is inseparably tied to blindness.

The Metamorphoses of Ottilie: Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften and the Botany of the Eighteenth Century

ABSTRACTThis essay situates Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften “Elective Affinities” within the botanical discourse of the eighteenth century. According to Foucault, the botanical classification of plants is the paradigm of the old “Naturgeschichte,” whereas biology as a newly emerging science of the living relies on the description of animals. Yet it is the very notion of a sexuality of plants put forward by Carl von Linné that paves the way for new concepts of life as a (re-)productive force. By tracing the scene of a woman being transformed into a plant in texts from La Mettrie to Schlegel and Novalis, this essay suggests reading Ottilie as a figuration of Goethe’s own concept of the metamorphosis of plants. At stake here is not only a new line of scientific reference in Goethe’s encyclopedic novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften, but also a model of art transcending nature. Whereas Early Romantic poets—following Herder—envision aesthetic creativity as a “Fortpflanzungskraft,” a quasi-biological power of procreation, Goethe transforms not the living, but only the dead Ottilie into a work of art thereby stressing the gap between life and death, nature and art.

Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795–1830 by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge

Sarah VandegriftEldridge. Novel Affinities: Composing the Family in the German Novel, 1795-1830. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016. 202 pp.This sturdy book begins a graceful cover image by Daniel Chodowiecki entitled Cabinet d'un peintre. As the back cover indicates, it depicts the artist with his family in his study. Eldridge's monograph offers perspectives on the novel and its influence on evolving concepts of the family. Rather than foregrounding individual character development, Eldridge considers the ways in which eleven different novels represent family units, and in the process she reveals how Goethe and his contemporaries (as well as we ourselves) came to understand their roles and rights in and through the family. She examines the structures and conventions of the novel form and situates it vis-a-vis various biological, pedagogical, and legal texts from the period (8).Eldridge draws on a wealth of canonical as well as less familiar texts; she presents information about early nineteenth-century readership in general and argues that any sharp divide between canonical literature . . . and literature . . . is to a large extent the creation not of the eighteenth century but of more recent decades of literary scholarship (8-9). Among the so-called trivial examples she cites are books that were immensely popular in their day and that likely had a yet unexplored influence on contemporary attitudes.Goethe's novels frame the book, which begins references to Werther and ends extensive comments about Die Wahlverwandtschaften. The book is divided into two parts and includes helpful, often extensive notes. Beginning biological and pedagogical theories, Eldridge explains how ideas of the preformation of anatomy and character were replaced by conceptualizations of selfhood as the product of epigenesis, defined as the sum of influences or education experienced, differently, by each individual. Here she discusses debates between Haller and Wolffand between Blumenbach and Kant.Eldridge considers themes of misrecognition and distance in Caroline Wobeser's Elsa, oder das Weib wie es seyn sollte (1795), Caroline Auguste Fischer's Die Honigmonate (1801-2), and Johann Jakob Engel's Herr Lorenz Stark (1795). She discusses epistolary multiperspectivism (69) in Sara Reinert (1806), a novel written by two Dutch women but edited and translated by Johann Gottwerth Muller, as well as in Sophie Mereau's Amanda und Eduard (1803). She presents a section on Schlegel's famous essay Uber Goethes Meister (81-88) and discusses the role of pedagogical institutions (88) before concluding her consideration of epigenetic thought.The first segment in the second part of the book concerns the influence of the Allgemeines Landrecht fur die Preusischen Staaten (ALR) and questions of inheritance on novelistic production, showing the challenging effects that deliberations about the future have on these novels' protagonists. …

Affective Enclosures: The Topography and Topoi of Goethe's Autobiographical Childhood

Affective Enclosures:The Topography and Topoi of Goethe's Autobiographical Childhood Anthony Mahler Near the beginning of Goethe's autobiography Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, the narrator describes a series of enclosures that the child Goethe overlooks as he strolls along Frankfurt's city walls. Gärten, Höfe, Hintergebäude ziehen sich bis an den Zwinger heran; man sieht mehreren tausend Menschen in ihre häuslichen, kleinen, abgeschlossenen, verborgenen Zustände. Von dem Putz- und Schaugarten des Reichen zu den Obstgärten des für seinen Nutzen besorgten Bürgers, von da zu Fabriken, Bleichplätzen und ähnlichen Anstalten, ja bis zum Gottesacker selbst—denn eine kleine Welt lag innerhalb des Bezirks der Stadt—ging man an dem mannigfaltigsten, wunderlichsten, mit jedem Schritt sich verändernden Schauspiel vorbei, an dem unsre kindische Neugier sich nicht genug ergetzen konnte. Denn fürwahr der bekannte hinkende Teufel, als er für seinen Freund die Dächer von Madrid in der Nacht abhob, hat kaum mehr für diesen geleistet, als hier vor uns unter freiem Himmel, bei hellem Sonnenschein getan war.1 [Gardens, courtyards, and rear buildings extend right up to the zwinger; one sees several thousand people in their domestic, small, enclosed, hidden states. From the ornamental and display gardens of the rich to the fruit gardens of the bourgeois, concerned for his advantage, from there to the factories, bleacheries, and similar institutions, even up to the graveyard itself, one went past the most diverse, most wonderful spectacle, changing with every step, in which our childish curiosity could not take enough delight—for a small world lay within the precincts of the city. In truth, the well-known limping devil, when he lifted up the rooftops of Madrid for his friend at night, performed little more for him than was done here before us under clear skies in broad daylight.] In this panoramic view from atop the ramparts, the child's entire visual field is replete with enclosed spaces. Frankfurt becomes a walled-in "small world" of endless, confined small worlds. The view is created through the topological operation of enclosure, which separates an inside compartment from the outside environment. Enclosures shape and thereby create space. In this passage, they create spaces that consist in their subjective experience: they ignite a curiosity in the child by making him aware of a space hidden from his immediate perception. Enclosures show that they hide something and [End Page 43] thereby arouse a desire not just to unveil the concealed, but also to imagine its contents. "An empty drawer is unimaginable," as Gaston Bachelard writes in his phenomenology of the childhood home.2 Such enclosures abound in the first books of Goethe's autobiography, especially in the narration of his childhood in book 1, which will be the focus of this essay. The ubiquity of enclosures in the autobiography should not surprise since this motif holds a central position in Goethe's narrative prose. From the wandering casket of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre to the cabinets, cases, and chambers of Die Wahlverwandtschaften; from the magical chest in the fairy tale Melusine to the case of puppets and box-filled pantry in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; enclosures permeate Goethe's narrated worlds. Nonetheless, a systematic account of the motif has yet to be undertaken. This essay makes no pretense at such an ambitious task, but I will argue that the enclosures of the autobiography resonate with those of other works, and that the motif serves as a figure of thought across Goethe's works such that we should consider how a poetics of enclosure is at work within them.3 Furthermore, I hope to add methodologically to our understanding of enclosure in Goethe by seeking connected insights through different approaches. Section 1 thus traces how enclosures arouse a desire that defines the phenomenology of childhood, and it untangles the semiotic coding of these spaces. Section 2 attends to the narrative structure of the first book, whose story is not a chronological sequence of events, but a topographical sequence of spaces. But these two sections primarily serve as a preparatory basis for section 3, which demonstrates that the enclosures of the autobiography are also rhetorical topoi...

A Book of Living Paintings: Tableaux Vivants in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809)

DURING HIS 1787 VISIT to Caserta, a town near Naples, Goethe recounts a private performance of a new art form by the lively young Lady Emma Hamilton. He describes how with the help of just a few scarves and with her hair undone, she manages to transition swiftly between innumerable postures, gestures, and expressions, offering up a surprising spectacle, while the wealthy British ambassador and connoisseur Lord Hamilton holds out a light to illuminate her actions.1 Here Goethe describes his first (albeit fictional2) encounter with Attituden, a mimetic-plastic art in which a solo performer- usually a woman-imitates antique statues or general human affectations in rapid alternation.3 Goethe's introduction to these Attituden, precursors to the more elaborate form of tableaux vivants, or live reenactments of paintings, incited him to direct numerous living image performances in Weimar in the 1810s with painter and art connoisseur Heinrich Meyer and his l iterary assistant Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer. Around 1809, he included a performance of a series of three tableaux vivants and a nativity scene in one of his most ambitious novelistic projects, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities).These art forms, variously described as trivial and belonging to low culture,4 are means by which to ref lect on the mediated and composite nature of representation-and its inability to be pinned down by recourse to a single artistic or narrative mode.5In order to do this, Goethe has two women, Ottilie and Luciane, enact or perform the scenes-either while physically present or allegorically, as physically absent but metaphorically present. In both cases these women enact the oppositions inherent in this hybrid art form described by the narrator as a new form of representation (eine neue Art von Darstellung,427). In a letter from 1813 to Meyer, Goethe described these live reenactments of paintings performed privately for entertainment in aristocratic circles as Zwitterwesen zwischen der Mahlerey und dem Theater (McIsaac 156; hybrid beings between painting and theater). They belied categorization according to Lessing's division between the semiotics of the visual and the verbal arts in his 1766 Laokoon oder uber die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Laocoon and the Limits of Painting and Poetry), foundational for Enlightenment aesthetics. In their rapid, sequential alteration of the imitation of paintings, they did not remain within the bounds of the visual arts according to Lessing's system. Lessing assumed that paintings were spatial and in remaining static were indefinitely present for the beholder's gaze, whereas poetry, in being temporal, worked only in sequence, unable to represent its content at once. Furthermore, living enactments are not only sequential, but the function of representation is further complicated by their ekphrastic description from the point of view of an unknown, distant narrator. A further distancing from any kind of an iconic representation is presented in that two of the three tableaux performed are based not on original paintings viewed by either Goethe or any of the performers but on their printed copies, themselves interpretative. The fourth is a derivative from a biblical narrative. The sequence of performed paintings and the final staged biblical scene brings out tensions and parallels in several apparently oppositional modes of representation, which I will work out through an analysis of each performed tableau vivant: theatricality and antitheatricality, myth and image making, and the possibility of a performance or representation of unselfconsciousness.The show begins when the newly engaged Luciane, the daughter of the baroness Charlotte, is introduced to the elements of the Wahlverwandtschaften: Eduard, a melancholic baron and the owner of the estate that is the setting of the novel; Charlotte, his wife; an ex-military captain; and the orphan Ottilie, whom Charlotte takes in as an act of charity, having been a close friend of her mother. …

Goethe’s Allegories of Identity by Jane K. Brown

Reviewed by: Goethe’s Allegories of Identity by Jane K. Brown Simon Richter Jane K. Brown, Goethe’s Allegories of Identity. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 2014. 229 pp. Toward the conclusion of Jane Brown’s previous book, The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner (2007), she states that Goethe was “the last great allegorical dramatist of the European tradition. His synthesis of allegory and mimes, opera and Greek tragedy, did not survive his own death” (221). But the end of allegorical drama did not spell the end of allegory itself. In her new book, Goethe’s Allegories of Identity, Brown mounts a powerful argument that it is precisely Goethe’s use of allegory, especially in narrative and in Faust, that undergirds what we take for granted as the [End Page 285] terrain of modern subjectivity, the rhetorical landscape, so to speak, of our inner selves. In other words, even if allegory explicitly died on the stage, it persists implicitly and powerfully up to our own time in the way we have thought about and experienced the self. In the space between Rousseau, the author of the primacy of self and irrational feeling, and Freud, the representative analyst of the unconscious, we find Goethe. But it is only because of the literary record of Goethe’s lifelong preoccupation with Rousseau and the twofold problem that Rousseau posed—the inaccessibility to reason of the deepest self and the question of how to reconcile the claims of the self with society—that this space is so structured that analysis of the depths of the self can take place. What Goethe did, Brown argues, is to adapt dramatic allegory into a distinctly modern mode of narrative that succeeded in representing interior depths of the self that are not subject to the rule of reason and in so doing fashioned the realm that would become the domain of depth psychology. If Brown is right, we are all of us “Goethean,” whether we have read him or not. Although the chapters in Brown’s book, beginning with Goethe’s reception of Rousseau and culminating with those aspects of interiority that are taken up by Freud and depth psychology, may give the impression that her argument proceeds chronologically, it is important to recognize that it does not. For sure, there is a terrain of dates when major works were published. Rousseau’s works—Julie and Emile or the Confessions and Reveries, for instance—are given as a starting point. And one does get a sense that Goethe’s classical dramas (Egmont, Iphigenie, and Tasso) mark a significant moment in Goethe’s deployment of allegory in the service of plumbing the depths of the self. But the primary way in which Brown sees Goethe engaging with Rousseau is through persistent recurrence, coming back to him time and again in order to rewrite Rousseau’s plot of the interior self and to expose and limn greater and more complex depths. Thus, she begins with Werther, “the originary text of German depth-psychological narrative” (144), and Die Wahlverwandtschaften, “the paradigmatic German psychological novel” (34), and ends with them as well, just as she recurs to Faust in chapters 3, 5, and 7 and concludes with a new interpretation of Faust’s final words about “Vorgefühl” in act 5. In other words, the psychic terrain that comes into view through her recurrent interpretations of Goethe’s works is as stratified as her readings. What makes Brown’s contribution to the history of subjectivity distinctly literary is the fact that she continues to rely on aspects of literary form, chief among them, of course, allegory. The component parts of the secularized, modern allegory of the self consist of recurring plots, hybrid or mixed genres, patterns of naming and character constellations, and a symbolic landscape. All of these are involved in processes of constant rewriting, where the primary text being rewritten is Rousseau’s Julie. Brown has an uncanny knack for seeing through the surface narration and recognizing core similarities between disparate texts. Thus, for example, not only are Werther and Die Wahlverwandtschaften rewritings of Julie and the latter Goethe novel a rewriting of the former (18), but...

Goethe, der Merkantilismus und die Inflation: Zum ökonomischen Wissen und Handeln Goethes und seiner Figuren by Heike Knortz and Beate Laudenberg

Reviewed by: Goethe, der Merkantilismus und die Inflation: Zum ökonomischen Wissen und Handeln Goethes und seiner Figuren by Heike Knortz and Beate Laudenberg William H. Carter Heike Knortz and Beate Laudenberg, Goethe, der Merkantilismus und die Inflation: Zum ökonomischen Wissen und Handeln Goethes und seiner Figuren. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014. 199 pp. Nothing renews interest in Goethe and the economy quite like a global financial crisis, as Heike Knortz and Beate Laudenberg demonstrate in their introduction to Goethe, der Merkantilismus und die Inflation. The collaboration between Knortz, an economic historian, and Laudenberg, a Germanist, adds to the growing body of post-2007 Goethe scholarship revisiting the topic of Goethe and economic matters in light of recent meltdowns and crises. Their contribution offers a unique and refreshing approach to a topic that has occupied scholars in both literary and economic circles since Goethe’s time. By approaching Goethe and his works through the lens of recent Goethe scholarship, on the one hand, and the history of economic thought and economic history, on the other, this volume has much to offer both to Goethe scholars and to those curious about Goethe’s economic knowledge and his representation of various economic issues throughout his key works. The book unfolds more or less chronologically and gives a concise overview of economic matters in Goethe’s life and in his literary texts. The authors strike a nice balance between literary analyses of central figures and discussions of Goethe’s practical experience and knowledge of contemporaneous economic theories. Their well-researched study employs recent scholarship dealing with Goethe’s official duties as well as the history of political economy in Germany to revisit earlier approaches by Hans Christoph Binswanger and Bernd Mahl, for instance. Not surprisingly, the Faust drama serves as a backdrop against which to consider other key figures in Goethe’s work: Ferdinand (Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten), Hermann (Hermann und Dorothea), Eduard and Charlotte (Die Wahlverwandtschaften), Wilhelm and Werner (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre). Knortz and Laudenberg do not, however, limit their analysis to Faust II, as economic readings of Faust often do. Rather, following the introduction, the study begins with a section—the text is divided into sections rather than chapters—dedicated to “Margaretes ‘kleine Wirtschaft.’” Following are “Hermanns ‘große Wirtschaft,’” three sections (I–III) on “Goethes eigene Wirtschaft,” and “Die Wirtschaft des Herzogtums Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach [End Page 281] bei Goethes Ankunft.” The theme of Wirtschaft continues throughout the study, as the coauthors toggle between variations of kleine Wirtschaft and große Wirtschaft in both literary texts and Goethe’s life. This approach works well not only because Goethe incorporates micro- and macroeconomic elements throughout his works but also because Knortz and Laudenberg are concerned with how political-economic context (mercantilism) and economic history (inflation) contribute to a better understanding of Goethe’s oeuvre. With respect to contemporaneous economic theory, scholars have tended to read Goethe in terms of physiocracy, cameralism, and the work of Adam Smith. Goethe was indeed familiar with each of these as well as a number of other economic theories, texts, and their proponents. Knortz and Laudenberg argue that scholars have largely overlooked Goethe’s connection to mercantilism: “Durch seine Tätigkeit in Weimarer Staatsdienst nahm Goethe damit enge Tuchfühlung zu merkantilistischer Wirtschaftspolitik auf?” (149). His official encounter with “[m]erkantilistische[r] Gewerbe- und Industriepolitik, eine[r] dem theoretischen Anspruch des Handelsbilanzüberschusses verpflichtete[n] Zoll- und Handelspolitik,” was, however, ultimately a lesson in failure, as the duchy of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach lacked the infrastructure, resources, and the means to implement mercantile economic policy successfully (153–54). In the area of economic history, Knortz and Laudenberg demonstrate that Goethe was keenly aware of prices and inflation. “Preissteigerungen,” they write, “sind es dann auch, durch die sich Goethes kleine Wirtschaft mit der großen Welt zu verweben beginnt” (111). They note that Goethe witnessed Austrian inflation and its effects during his many visits to Bohemia over the decades and cite a diary entry from July 1806 in which Goethe writes: “Spatzieren, mit Fürst Reuß Politica. Über die östreichische Staatschuld. Bemerkung über die unglückliche Vermischung dreyer ganz separat zu haltender Capitel. 1. Staatsschuld. 2. Deficit...

Goethe’s Allegories of Identity by Jane Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Goethe’s Allegories of Identity by Jane Brown Anna-Lisa Baumeister (bio) Jane Brown. Goethe’s Allegories of Identity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 232 pages. Goethe’s Allegories of Identity contributes to our understanding of the history of the modern subject as it develops from Rousseau to twentieth-century depth psychology and psychoanalysis. In a compelling narrative of texts, concepts, and their transmission, Brown argues that Goethe played a crucial role in the emergence of notions of interiority and the subconscious in direct response to Rousseau and in anticipation of psychoanalysis—a role that literary scholars have thus far failed to acknowledge. Brown’s aim is not to provide a monolithic intellectual history, but rather to emphasize Goethe’s unique contribution—at times direct, at others indirect—to the semantic conditions that made possible the emergence of depth psychology. “If Rousseau was the first to think the thoughts later conceptualized by Freud,” Brown explains, “it was Goethe’s achievement to find a new language independent of the conscious and (as Freud taught) censoring self for representing and exploring the first traces of the unconscious identified by Rousseau in his Confessions and Reveries” (7). This “new language” refers not only to the specific terminology Goethe would introduce, but, more importantly, to the allegorical methodology Goethe would develop in response to Rousseau’s “mimetic imperative” (31–32). Brown’s striking thesis is that Goethe’s experiments with allegory, by figuring psychological processes non-representationally and in their concealment, paved the way for the modern discourse of interiority and the unconscious. A renowned scholar of Goethe’s oeuvre, Brown unfolds her argument in a series of astute analyses of Goethe’s texts, both well-known and obscure, spanning from Werther to the scientific writings of the 1790s to Faust II. Exhibiting these works against a Rousseauian backdrop, she makes a strong case for the [End Page 682] continuity of Goethe’s thought and method across the many genres and stages of his writing. The volume consists of three thematically organized parts of several chapters each, which move from an exposition of Goethe’s relation to Rousseau in part 1, to a comprehensive analysis of Goethe’s experiments with allegory in part 2, to a more provisional exploration of the connections between Goethe’s writings and psychoanalytic theory in part 3. The first part establishes the centrality of Rousseau to Goethe’s thought via an inventive juxtaposition of texts from both authors. Brown interprets Werther and Die Wahlverwandtschaften as responses to Rousseau’s Julie, while Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Faust are read as replies to Emile. These pairings reveal how, throughout his corpus, Goethe would return time and again to Rousseau, in admiration and in an attempt to reconcile certain paradoxical tensions Goethe saw in Rousseau’s conception of the self. Rousseau’s writings offered a stirring vision—of the individual torn between self-transparency and self-opacity, between interiorized intention and exteriorized action—that was blind to its own paradoxes. Brown shows how Goethe attempts to remedy Rousseau’s shortcomings by offering variations on and revisions of the Rousseauian source material. Goethe’s writing, Brown argues, must be understood as an attempt to advance beyond a problem with self-representation he had discovered in Rousseau. Part 2 delineates three stages in Goethe’s lifelong struggle to satisfactorily express unconscious processes: the initial theatrical stage of “projective allegory” in which the self is projected outward as a surface-effect (as seen in the dramatic works Iphigenia, Tasso, and Egmont); the intermediary scientific-epistemological stage of “experimental allegory” in which the self is grasped intuitively in experience (exemplified in the Farbenlehre, “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt”); and the final stage of “narrative allegory,” which unifies the two earlier stages, in which the self emerges in the (simultaneously conscious and unconscious) process of observational self-reference (seen best in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and brought to full completion in Faust II). On this reading, Goethe, not fully satisfied with his theatrical and scientific attempts to put the unrepresentable dimension of the self into actions and words, is compelled to return to the writing of Wilhelm Meister after a hiatus of...

Goethe, Kleist: Literatur, Politik und Wissenschaft um 1800 by Michael Mandelartz (review)

Michael Mandelartz, Goethe, Kleist: Literatur, Politik und Wissenschaft um 1800. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2011.465 pp.Whoever comes across a Goethe-Kleist juxtaposition in a book title might expect to find a sequel to the biographical conflicts and intertextual relations disentangled by Helmut Sembdner or Katharina Mommsen a few decades ago. Instead, the volume published by the Meiji University Germanist Michael Mandelartz places the two authors on a hermeneutic stage with the aim of pointing to the unity of their work and contrasting their respective concepts of subjectivity. Goethe's Auffassung des Subjekts als Produkt der Natur und der historischen Entwicklung, seen as a continuation of Enlightenment philosophy, is posited against Kleist's extreme Theorie des Subjekts, placed in the context of Kant's and Fichte's transcendental philosophy of the subject (9-11).Mandelartz illustrates his thesis with a collection of articles and book chapters that, with the exception of the Michael Kohlhaas and Penthesilea essays, have been previously published as stand-alone essays. His volume is organized in three sections, each devoted to one author, and each chapter is focused on a single work: Novalis's Klingsohrs Marchen-, Kleist's Uber das Marionettentheater, Der zerbrochne Krug, Michael Kohlhaas, Penthesilea, and Der Findling-, and Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, Zur Farbenlehre, Harzreise im Winter, Iphigenie auf Tauris, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Pandora, and Novelle. Despite the high scholarly quality of many of the individual essays, the heterogeneous origin of the parts results in a lack of conceptual coherence of the whole.Framed as a response to postmodern subject theory, the author intends to show a conceptual unity between Goethe's literary and scientific production. Such a unity is most clearly demonstrated in the author's juxtaposition of Goethe's geological fragments Granit I/II and his interpretation of Harzreise im Winter, Pandora, and Novelle, where, in contrast to Kant's theory of the sublime as a strengthening of the self, mountaintop experiences lead to either the dissolution, the symbolic surrender, or the Steigerung of the self into nature. While only marginally related to the central thesis of the volume, Mandelartz's chapter on the scientific methodology of Goethe's color theory and his essay on architecture as art in Die Wahlverwandtschaften stand out as original additions to the voluminous scholarship on these works.The Kleist essays trace how the reception of his works was influenced by Fichte's transcendental and moral philosophy as laid out in his Wissenschaftslehre, Grundlage des Naturrechts, Bestimmung des Menschen, and Grundzuge des gegenwartigen Zeitalters. …