552 Reviews This handsomely produced volume concludes with a series of excellent plates, all appropriately annotated, illustrating medieval manuscripts and other items of rele? vance to Lessing's medieval interests. It is to be regretted that such enhancements, and the genuine contributions to Lessing scholarship in the second part of the book, are marred by the errors, repetitions, and digressions which fillso many of its pages. Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge H. B. Nisbet Fausts Kolonie: Goethes kritischePhdnomenologie der Moderne. By Michael Jaeger. Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann. 2004. 668 pp. ?49.80. ISBN 3-82602716 -7. It may seem paradoxical that someone who asserted the interdependence of good and evil and even made the 'Lord' in 'Heaven' express serene disregard forwayward be? haviour should have remained firmlyopposed to demands forchanges to the political status quo. Goethe's abhorrence ofrevolution and derision of Saint-Simonism are well documented. Yet, as a key representative of European Enlightenment, he frequently portrayed the feebleness ofmonarchs, the self-glorification ofpettyaristocrats, and the unproductive consequences of inherited privilege. Given his insight into the corrupt governmental structures of his time, why did he work himself into a frenzy over the deposition of Charles X in 1830? Could the author whose tolerant Humanitdt comes across in Iphigenie auf Tauris and whose Mephistopheles derides favouritism in his 'Song of the Flea' even think of supporting a regime that was headed by an extreme clericalist reactionary and that reintroduced censorship, rode roughshod over its own council of ministers, and eventually annulled democratic elections? Michael Jaeger is not the firstto grapple with this paradox. Goethe's politics were scrutinized by Wolfgang Rothe in Der politische Goethe: Dichter und Staatsdiener im deutschen Spatabsolutismus (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), and se? veral recent studies of the poet's ideology attribute his reactionary stance to fears of 'das Veloziferische', an apparently diabolical amalgam of speed and perdition. Peter Stein's Hanover production of 2000 gave Ernst Osterkamp the opportunity to re? flect on the violence done to the environment by a determinedly 'progressive' Faust (in Peter Stein inszeniert Goethe, ed. by Roswitha Schieb and Anna Haas (Cologne: DuMont, 2000), pp. 297-302). What Jaeger now attempts is to relate the politics of Goethe the man, as revealed in personal letters, conversations, and literature, to the work he struggled to complete in 1830-31. The result is a 640-page compilation which would have been rejected as wilfully un-Goethean by scholars of the adulatory schools that once dominated scholarship. Jaeger presents Faust as a charlatan in the mould of Cagliostro, a failed colonizer of new land whose self-satisfied hedonism cannot be read in anything other than terms of parody. Goethe's experience of modernity is one of perpetual crisis. Daily newspapers were anathema to him, so was rapid transportation, so was egalitarianism. Faust was, from the time of the pact, beset by a misdirected desire forspeed, 'Baume, die sich taglich neu begriinen' being the most farcically obvious expression of wrong-headedness. The gospel of personal desire ('Allein ich will!') is there wherever you look, and the supposed 'hero' emerges as an emblem of 'zukunftshungrige Ungeduld'. The present study seeks to confirm Goethe's holism by relating Faust II to the autobiographical works Campagne in Frankreich, Die Belagerung von Mainz, and Italienische Reise, all of which record events that occurred some thirtyyears prior to their composition. Goethe feltobliged to write them up belatedly, if only to consolidate his personal model of an opposition between chaos and idyll, as represented by the antitheses of France and Italy. A similar dichotomy runs through Faust II, where MLR, 100.2, 2005 553 the static tableau scenes in the Aegean, in Arcadia, and in the Mountain Ravines con? trast with periods of 'Faustian' striving at court, on the battlefield, and in his futile land-reclamation project. Jaeger goes beyond an examination of Faust when he reviews many of Goethe's daily preoccupations, such as his curiously ambivalent attitude to journalism. Yet the result is less readable than Heinz Schlaffer or Manfred Osten; as a recycled Habilitationsschrift ,the monograph is aimed at the specialist rather than the general or undergraduate reader. It is well documented, amply illustrated, and closely argued, but ultimately...