English Goethe Society Research Articles

‘Incredible, that’s Literature!’ Attempts at Remoralizing Academic Disciplines, Politics, and the Professions with the Help of ‘Belles-Lettres’

ABSTRACT The Wilkinson-Willoughby-Lecture of the English Goethe Society for 2022 was given by Wolf Lepenies. The text of his talk is given below.

Civilized Competition: The Beginnings of the English Goethe Society and its Early Relations with the Goethe-Gesellschaft in Weimar

ABSTRACT The English Goethe Society (EGS) is the third oldest Goethe society in the world. Although it was founded solely as a literary society ‘to promote and extend Goethe’s work and thought’, the appointment of Friedrich Max Müller as the society’s first president suggested that the early founders of the EGS also saw it as playing an important diplomatic role in Anglo-German relations. This article demonstrates that from its founding in 1886 to the beginning of the First World War, the EGS experienced various crises, not least in its relations with other Goethe societies in Britain and with the Goethe-Gesellschaft in Weimar.

Naivety and Irony: Goethe’s Musical Needs

ABSTRACT The inaugural Wilkinson-Willoughby Lecture of the English Goethe Society was given in January 2021 by the distinguished pianist Alfred Brendel. The text of his talk is given below.

Willoughby, Blunck, and their Jewish Critics: The English Goethe Society and Anglo-German Relations in the Nazi Period

ABSTRACT H. G. Fiedler and L. A. Willoughby, the most important officers of the English Goethe Society during the years 1933 to 1945, pursued the goal of peace through stronger Anglo-German ties, which led Willoughby to gestures of support for the Nazi regime. His Jewish colleague William Rose criticized him for inviting poet and Nazi literary official Hans Friedrich Blunck to an EGS reading. Willoughby then channelled his appeasement efforts into his new periodical, German Life and Letters, before abandoning rapprochement in 1937–38. Though he gave a platform to Jewish émigré writers in PEGS before and after the war, and broke with the revanchist writer Hans Grimm, he supported Blunck’s denazification and positively reviewed Blunck’s untrustworthy memoirs.

Zivilisierte Konkurrenz: Die Entstehung der English Goethe Society und ihr Verhältnis zur Goethe-Gesellschaft Weimar

Abstract The English Goethe Society (EGS) is the third oldest Goethe society in the world. Although it was founded solely as a literary society “to promote and extend Goethe’s work and thought,” at certain points in the Society’s history, speakers such as Friedrich Max Müller and Thomas Mann emphasized its political dimensions. This article demonstrates that from its founding in 1886 to the beginning of the First World War, the EGS experienced various crises, not least in its relations with other Goethe societies in Britain and with the Goethe-Gesellschaft in Weimar.

Hans Siegbert Reiss (19 August 1922 – 2 April 2020)

Hans Reiss, the longest-standing member of the English Goethe Society (from 1948) and a member of Council (from 1978), died on 2 April 2020 at the age of ninety-seven. He was known primarily as a G...

Friedrich Max Müller and the Role of Philology in Victorian Thought, edited by John R. Davis and Angus Nicholls

Reviewed by: Friedrich Max Müller and the Role of Philology in Victorian Thought ed. by John R. Davis, Angus Nicholls Haruko Momma (bio) Friedrich Max Müller and the Role of Philology in Victorian Thought, edited by John R. Davis and Angus Nicholls; pp. xii + 167. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, £120.00, £36.99 paper, $140.00, $49.95 paper. John R. Davis and Angus Nicholls’s Friedrich Max Müller and the Role of Philology in Victorian Thought reevaluates the work and influence of the “most influential comparative philologist in Victorian Britain” (1). The contributors to this volume are affiliated with institutions in the U. K., Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Italy, and they specialize in subjects as diverse as English, German, comparative literature, applied linguistics, history, philosophy, and religious studies. The international and interdisciplinary nature of the contributors reflects the main focus of the volume: Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), a Sanskrit scholar who was born in Germany, studied in both Germany and France, held the prestigious Professorship in Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford, and exchanged opinions with all manner of scholars. All of the essays in this volume were originally published in 2016 as a special issue of Publications of the English Goethe Society, an organization of which Müller was the first president. The topics covered vary from language and thought to metaphor, myth, mythology, and religion. Of these, the last subject is given the greatest emphasis, for, even though Müller’s philological work intersected with many disciplines, it was in religious studies that he made—as Davis and Nicholls argue—“a significant and lasting contribution, though not always in ways that were intended” (30). Part 1 of the volume is called “Friedrich Max Müller on Language, Metaphor, Religion and Myth.” The general objectives of this cluster of essays are, first, to consider why Müller’s theoretical work in these areas was discarded by the end of the nineteenth century and, second, to demonstrate how it nevertheless “helped to define and establish new disciplinary and intellectual landscapes” (29). Exemplifying this double purpose is the chapter by Andreas Musolff on Müller’s idea of mythology as diseased language, along with the role that metaphor is said to have played in language’s alleged fall. Müller’s theory of metaphor may be “outdated” today, Musolff concludes, but “his questions on the intra- and intercultural transmission and understanding of metaphor still pose a challenge to philosophical and linguistic metaphor theories” (67). Marjorie Lorch and Paula Hellal take a similar approach in their discussion of Müller’s idea of “the interdependence of language and thought.” On the one hand, “Müller was relatively unique in successfully transmitting linguistic ideas to the medical and scientific research communities”; on the other, his claim drew increasing criticism as the empirical fields of study developed toward the end of the nineteenth century (44). The case of aphasia, for instance, demonstrated how patients maintained their intellectual capacity except for their ability to use words correctly. [End Page 686] Müller’s philology-based theorization of various subjects often defies clear systematization. This tendency comes in part from the diverse nature of his work, as he frequently gave public lectures, published articles in journals intended for a general (if educated) audience, and wrote numerous private letters expounding on his views. A strategy frequently taken in part 1 of the volume is therefore to locate Müller on the intellectual map of Victorian thought by examining his interactions with other scholars. Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn’s essay, for instance, evaluates Müller “as the founder of comparative mythology” by examining his correspondence with Angelo De Gubernatis, “his most zealous promotor in Italy” (78). In like manner, Robert A. Segal compares Müller with Edward Burnett Tylor and other contemporary scholars to point out that his attitude toward religion and myth, “pitting” the one against the other, was “atypical” even in his own day (68). In her chapter “‘Language is our Rubicon’: Max Müller’s Quarrel with Hensleigh Wedgwood,” Michela Piattelli considers Müller’s view on the origin of language through the intellectual debates he...

Friedrich Max Müller: The Career and Intellectual Trajectory of a German Philologist in Victorian Britain

The Oxford-based German comparative philologist, Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), ignored for much of the time since his death, attracted renewed scholarly interest in the last few decades of the twentieth century. This article summarizes some of the existing research on Müller, while also reintroducing him as the most influential comparative philologist in Victorian Britain. Subjects examined include Müller’s early life and education, his focus on Sanskrit studies, his career in Oxford, his role as the first President of the English Goethe Society, his debates with Darwin and others on the origin and nature of language, and his broader influence on anthropological and religious questions in Victorian intellectual life.

Die Weimarer Klassikerstätten: Vom Kriegsende bis zur Gründung der Nationalen Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar; Ereignisse und Gestalten: Eine Chronik, 1945–1949 ed. by Wilfried Lehrke

Reviewed by: Die Weimarer Klassikerstätten: Vom Kriegsende bis zur Gründung der Nationalen Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar; Ereignisse und Gestalten: Eine Chronik, 1945–1949 ed. by Wilfried Lehrke W. Daniel Wilson Wilfried Lehrke, ed., Die Weimarer Klassikerstätten: Vom Kriegsende bis zur Gründung der Nationalen Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar; Ereignisse und Gestalten: Eine Chronik, 1945–1949. Schriftenreihe des Freundeskreises Goethe-National-museum e.V., Band 7.1. Jena: Quartus, 2014. 216 pp. Hardly ever has there been such a spectacularly schizophrenic book, good and bad in equal measure. The title is not only convoluted but wrong. The NFG was founded in 1953, so it makes no appearance in the book. Only when one notices, on the back of the title page, that this is the first volume of two does it dawn that there will be a second volume covering 1950–53: the book contains no introduction or explanatory notes. Tiny font, typos, and many stray hard hyphens do not help either. The indices are a disaster: for example, in the “Sachregister,” under the letter G, almost none of the twenty-six entries are in the correct alphabetical order (it begins with “Goethehaus” and ends with “Gesellschaft zum Studium der Kultur der Sowjetunion”). Apparently, the odd document was taken out or added after the index was already completed, because the numbering is faulty. The book appeared only a few days before the controversial November 2014 conference “Hans Wahl im Kontext: Weimarer Kultureliten im Nationalsozialismus” (the proceedings were published in the October 2015 issue of Publications of the English Goethe Society), and one has the feeling that it was rushed into print for that occasion; the Freundeskreis that published it has been one of the leading defenders of Hans Wahl, director of the Goethe-Nationalmuseum from 1920 and the Goethe- und Schiller-Archive from 1928 until his death on February 18, 1949. But for the reader interested in the immediate postwar period in Weimar—and indeed in Germany—Lehrke provides 1,141 of the most fascinating documents. A large number are previously unpublished and come mainly from the Goethe and Schiller Archive or the Thuringian State Archives in Weimar and from hard-to-obtain newspaper articles. The events documented in the book begin with the American bombing raid on Weimar—which harbored armaments works—on February 9, 1945, and end not long after the politically contested celebrations of Goethe’s two-hundredth birthday in August 1949. It was a turbulent time. The American troops made a relatively good impression in Weimar, but soon the rumors were confirmed that they would be withdrawing so that Thüringen could be in the Soviet zone, according to the secret agreement made at the Conference of Yalta. Within days of Weimar’s surrender on April 10, Hans Wahl breaks the Goethe Society rules in order to bestow lifetime membership on the American commander Major William M. Brown, who in civilian life was a German professor at Columbia University. And Wahl uses this connection to go hunting for Goethe’s and Schiller’s coffins in Jena, where Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel sent them to keep them from falling into profane American hands (the order to destroy them to prevent that from happening was not carried out). The authorities and cultural institutions in Weimar faced a [End Page 288] daily struggle against shortages of food, building materials (particularly roofing), and labor, all of which were strictly rationed. After the Soviet troops occupy Weimar on July 3, it initially looks as if the transition will be reasonably smooth. Above all, the Soviets are keen to capitalize on the classical heritage, and they give permission for Goethe’s house—which had been hit by a bomb in February—to be reopened after the building is repaired and its contents are recovered from storage. The accompanying rhetoric, with its one-sided focus on the protosocialist humanism of German classicism, is ratcheted up, and soon the ideological strictures tighten. Hans Wahl manages to rationalize his NSDAP membership to the Soviets, with the help of allies who claim, among other astonishing things, that Wahl was “mit seinem ganzen Denken...

Goethe and Twentieth-Century Theory: An Introduction

Goethe and Twentieth-Century Theory: An Introduction Angus Nicholls The purpose of this special section—originally conceived as a series of panels sponsored by the Goethe Society of North America and held at the 2007 German Studies Association Meeting in San Diego—is necessarily more modest and less sweeping that its title may suggest. Its central research question is Goethe’s impact and influence upon twentieth-century “theory,” with that term being broadly understood to encompass not simply literary theory but also philosophy (at least in its continental, in this particular case German, manifestations). An explicit aim of the panels was deliberately to avoid readings of Goethe’s works according to various theoretical paradigms. An extensive examination of the twentieth-century German (not Anglophone) reception history of Goethe’s works, including some but not all of the theoretical dimensions of this reception, has already been undertaken by Karl Robert Mandelkow in the second volume of his Goethe in Deutschland: Rezeptionsgeschichte eines Klassikers.1 Unlike the approach of Mandelkow, these panels aimed to explore not how Goethe was interpreted by, but rather how he shaped twentieth-century theoretical discourses. It soon became clear, however, that the question of Goethe’s impact on theory cannot be separated from his reception through it, since these two questions constitute two sides of the same coin. Nonetheless, the predominant emphasis here is on impact and influence rather than on reception. Selected from the three panels that were convened—the first devoted to “The Life of Goethe and Its Relation to the Canon,” the second to “Goethe and Twentieth-Century Philosophy” and the third to “Debates in Twentieth-Century Theory”—the four papers in this special section can present only key instances of a subject which would require one or perhaps even several volumes to be treated exhaustively. What follows is thus a modest contribution to an important research question in Goethe studies. Since a good deal of the twentieth-century German theoretical reception of Goethe has been covered by Mandelkow’s study, in this introduction I shall confine myself to the question as to what the term “theory” actually meant in late twentieth-century Anglophone Goethe Studies. Or, to put this question another way, how did it resonate? One of the most direct late twentieth-century Anglophone engagements with the question of Goethe’s relation to theory can be found in the inaugural lecture delivered at Oxford University in 1989 by the current President of the English Goethe Society, T. J. Reed.2 [End Page 163] The title of this lecture—“Nobody’s Master”: Goethe and the Authority of the Writer, With a Reflection on Anti-Literary Theory—already functions as something like a statement of intent. The first part of its title is of course taken from one of Goethe’s best known contributions, if not to “literary theory” in our modern or post-modern senses of that term, then at least to the subject of literary composition: his “Ein Wort für junge Dichter,” which the editors of the Münchner Ausgabe describe as a “Resümee und Testament zugleich” (MA 18.2:988). As Reed’s title notes, the elderly Goethe (writing in 1832) insists in this short statement that, in terms of his own place within the then still nascent national literature of the German–speaking territories, he was a “Meister von Niemand.” A Meister, writes Goethe, ist derjenige unter dessen Anleitung wir uns in einer Kunst fortwährend üben, und welcher uns, wie wir nach und nach zur Fertigkeit gelangen, stufenweise die Grundsätze mitteilt, nach welchen handelnd, wir das ersehnte Ziel am sichersten erreichen. (MA 18.2:219) Such a definition of mastery would have suggested to Goethe the prescriptive aesthetics of Neo-Classicism against which the Sturm und Drang movement had rebelled. As Katrin Kohl also notes in her contribution to this section, Goethe insists that he was the Befreier of German literature rather than its Meister, since the junge Dichter of his age sind an mir gewahr geworden, daß, wie der Mensch von innen heraus leben, der Künstler von innen heraus wirken müsse; indem er, gebärde er sich wie er will, immer nur sein...

Goethe at 250: London Symposium/Goethe mit 250: Londoner Symposium by T. J. Reed, Martin Swales, Jeremy Adler

504 Reviews provided). We learn a great deal about the history ofthe teaching of mathematics, but though it tells us something about the language of mathematical books (for example, concerning oral features, the use of the imperative and the subjunctive), whether the study makes a really significant contribution to linguistics is not obvious. Institute of Germanic Studies, London John L. Flood Goethe at 230: London Symposium/Goethe mit 250: Londoner Symposium. Ed. by T. J. Reed, Martin Swales, and Jeremy Adler. (Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies, 75) Munich: Iudicium. 2000. 305 pp. ?38.50. ISBN 389129 -049-7 (pbk). This readable collection of talks from the symposium held by the English Goethe Society in April 1999 claims no special focus, other than to demonstrate 'the range and vitality, though not necessarily the limits, of present British interest in Goethe' (p. 7). A major anniversary is a good time for taking stock, and many of these essays do just that, in three differentways. The firstthree essays place Goethe at the most general level. In 'Goethe's Analysis of Modernity' Martin Swales contrasts the limitations of bourgeois modernity in the Wilhelm Meister novels with its expansiveness in Faust. Deftly combining survey, genre analysis, and apt details, he identifies the tension between action and reflection that characterizes Goethe's view of modernity. Next Katrin Kohl focuses on Goethe as 'national' poet to question the cliche that his 'Naturpoesie' represents a categorical break with all previous poetic language and to consider how Goethe himself promoted the accepted view. Hans Hahn's 'Kranke Marmorbilder und kinderlose Worte', fi? nally, surveys the semantic complex health/illness/statue in Goethe and the Romantic generation. The essays in the second group place Goethe more specifically in relation to a par? ticular text or movement. W. E. Yates describes Goethe's reception by the Austrian dramatists, while Paul Bishop discusses the importance of Goethe for Freud, espe? cially 'Die Natur', which Freud took to be Goethe's. Laura Martin considers possible feminist responses to Wilhelm Meister s Wanderjahre', after surveying how Goethe seems both pro- and anti-feminist, she concludes that the real issue forGoethe was to broach the problem rather than solve it. Henk de Berg uses communications theory to argue that Heine's apparently contradictory views of Goethe are really context determined . Duncan Large revisits the question of Goethe's 'plagiarisms' from Laurence Sterne in the Wanderjahre (concluding that Goethe did not have strong feelings about intellectual property). David Hill locates the coherence of 'Aus Goethes Brieftasche ' in Goethe's response to the poetics of Louis-Sebastien Mercier, to whose treatise on drama Goethe's own essay was originally appended. John R. Williams offersdetailed evidence that the Baccalaureus in the second act of Faust II may be as much satire on Schopenhauer as on the usual suspect, Fichte. Hilda Brown focuses on Die Wahlverwandtschaften in the context of landscape gardening and in relation to Goethe's own theory of dilettantism, while Leonard Olschner surveys Goethe's thinking about translation in 1828. The remaining essays deal with significantproblems or themes in Goethe. Matthew Bell demonstrates from samples of love verse over Goethe's entire career how love is always grounded in nature, even when it seems most metaphysical. Ouida Taaffe raises the (for Goethe studies) unusual question of hate, which she locates in the failure of the renunciation demanded by the collision of real and ideal; the discussion focuses on Werther,where Taaffe identifies Werther's narcissism as a form of hate. In a variant, Sarah Colvin discusses Charlotte von Stein's satire against Goethe, Neues MLR, 98.2, 2003 505 Freiheitssystem oder Die Verschwbrunggegen die Liebe. Riidiger Gorner sensitively surveys the morphology of repetition in Goethe, which takes the forms of repetition, memory, and parody at differentpoints in his development. K. F. Hilliard discusses the tension between discretion and speaking in the last of the Rbmische Elegien and moves from details of textual history and analogues in Goethe's earlier epigrams toward the larger question of the role of 'offenbares Geheimnis' and of fiction in resolving paradoxical oppositions. In similar fashion R. C. Ockenden's analysis of the backgrounds of 'Euphrosyne' begins with historical detail...

What is Classic? Responses from Contemporary Germany

(1997). What is Classic? Responses from Contemporary Germany. Publications of the English Goethe Society: Vol. 67, No. 1, pp. 55-68.

The Passionate Traveller: Goethe in Italy

(1997). The Passionate Traveller: Goethe in Italy. Publications of the English Goethe Society: Vol. 67, No. 1, pp. 17-32.

Thinking about Germany, 1750–1815: The Birth of a Nation?

(1996). Thinking about Germany, 1750–1815: The Birth of a Nation? Publications of the English Goethe Society: Vol. 66, No. 1, pp. 53-72.

Modelling the Renaissance: Intertextuality and the Politics of Goethe'sTasso

(1992). Modelling the Renaissance: Intertextuality and the Politics of Goethe's Tasso. Publications of the English Goethe Society: Vol. 63, No. 1, pp. 1-48.

‘Euphrosyne’ and the Theatres ofFaust Part Two

(1989). ‘Euphrosyne’ and the Theatres of Faust Part Two. Publications of the English Goethe Society: Vol. 59, No. 1, pp. 59-78.

Hofmannsthal's Elektra as a Goethean Drama

(1989). Hofmannsthal's Elektra as a Goethean Drama. Publications of the English Goethe Society: Vol. 59, No. 1, pp. 16-34.

Barthold Feind, Gottsched, andCato—Or Opera Reviled

(1985). Barthold Feind, Gottsched, and Cato—Or Opera Reviled. Publications of the English Goethe Society: Vol. 55, No. 1, pp. 107-123.

The Fortunes of Goethe's Nocturnal Traveller

(1983). The Fortunes of Goethe's Nocturnal Traveller. Publications of the English Goethe Society: Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 20-40.

Three Poems by Goethe

(1982). Three Poems by Goethe. Publications of the English Goethe Society: Vol. 52, No. 1, pp. 1-3.