Wilhelm Meisters Research Articles

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...

Grenzerfahrungen: Studien zur Goethes Ästhetik by Mattias Pirholt

 Reviews e final chapter is devoted to three short films—Nueva Argiróplis (), Pescado (), and Muta ()—and their connection to water. Martin makes a powerful case for understanding this in relation to ‘fluid ontologies and becoming, where the formlessness of water is suggestive of an opposition to established forms’ (p. ). e Cinema of Lucrecia Martel is a thoroughly researched and well-written study of one of the most innovative contemporary film-makers. Martin uses film theory, film criticism, interviews, and archival material to develop a detailed and insightful reading of Martel’s œuvre. Her conclusions are drawn from the evidence she presents through close readings of the cinematic texts, and they illuminate many aspects of Martel’s work as an intellectual and film-maker. S C V R Grenzerfahrungen: Studien zur Goethes Ästhetik. By M P. Heidelberg: Winter. .  pp. €. ISBN ––––. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s approach to aesthetics is generally discussed in terms of Autonomieästhetik, which assumes that an aesthetic experience remains isolated from different factors of society and culture, or from the events and undercurrents of an individual’s life. Mattias Pirholt challenges this dominant view in his study, which argues that Goethe’s description of aesthetic experience should be understood within the context of historicity and everyday life. In the introductory part of his study Pirholt goes against the mainstream discussion concerning the nature of Goethe’s aesthetics and lays the foundations for his subsequent argument by drawing upon the philosophical ideas of Hans Georg Gadamer , Hans Robert Jauß, and Reinhart Koselleck. As Pirholt reminds us, Gadamer’s concept of the ‘fusion of horizons’ proposes a different way of understanding the connections between natural sciences and humanities (H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, ), p. ). In contrast to the objective and scientific knowledge characteristic of the natural sciences, the Geisteswissenschaen contribute to change in the experiencing person. Jauß draws attention to the double bind in the aesthetic experience: although it is new, productive, and utopian, this experience draws upon the past of an experiencing subject. Pirholt draws attention to such change in terms of both its subject matter and its structure; in order to investigate the latter, he makes use of Koselleck’s categories of experience and expectation . ese concepts expose a movement of dialectics, which eventually shows the historicity of an individual and that of an era. Pirholt focuses on the era of Sattelzeit (c. –) in German cultural history in which the anticipation of the future and the individual’s space of experience became particularly relevant owing to rapid developments taking place in society. He regrets that such a dialectics of horizon and space—which is apparently well known in historical and social sciences—has thus far not reached the discussion about the structure of aesthetic experience: MLR, .,   Weder die analytische Philosophie, noch die Phänomenologie, noch der Pragmatismus bietet aber eine Erklärung der Historizität der Erfahrung, insbesondere der ästhetischen Erfahrung. Sie gehen ausnahmslos von einem modernen, quasi postromantischen Vorverstehen des Wesens der schönen Kunst und der Erfahrung davon aus. Deshalb übersehen sie die geschichtliche Kontextabhängigkeit ihres Gegenstandes, der offensichtlich von sozialen, erzieherischen, ökonomischen, wissenschalichen, technischen, medialen (und weiteren) Faktoren abhängt. (pp. –) Pirholt’s approach to aesthetic experience might appear merely polemical if his introduction were not followed by five insightful, thought-provoking essays about different aspects of aesthetic experience in Goethe’s works. e first chapter, entitled ‘Die Teilung des Raumes: Wandlungen der ästhetischen Erfahrung Goethes’, focuses on the origins of aesthetic experience in some of Goethe’s major works. Here Pirholt discusses the development of Goethe’s aesthetic experience in terms of the space which moves between the world of the arts and that of bourgeois existence. Pirholt considers the original aesthetic experience as a repetitive reflection point, a kind of ‘Urszene’ in the works of an author where it may appear as a path between two worlds. In Goethe’s unfinished Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (–) the path appears as a possibility for the protagonist to enter the art of theatre, but in his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (–) the path eventually turns out to be an illusion. Finally...

August Wilhelm Schlegel'Hamlet'-Manuskript: Kritische Ausgabe by Kaltërina Latifi

 Reviews A W S, ‘Hamlet’-Manuskript: Kritische Ausgabe. Ed. by K L. (Germanistische Texte und Studien, ) Hildesheim and New York: Olms. .  pp. €. ISBN ––––. Hamlet was not August Wilhelm Schlegel’s favourite Shakespeare play. at honour went to Romeo and Juliet, the play relegated to the last volume in Johnson–Steevens’s and Malone’s Shakespeare editions as well as in Eschenburg’s translation (and in a late volume in Wieland), but now reinstated as the first play in Shakespeare’s dramatische Werke in . A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which followed, assumed the primary position allotted it by Wieland and Eschenburg (and the English editions that they used) and picked up the challenge offered by their versions. ere was still no Hamlet, but Schlegel, having devoted volume  to Julius Caesar and Twelh Night, finally relented in  with the third volume, but in tandem with e Tempest. ere are two points of note here. e translation of Hamlet, a daunting prospect compared with the relatively compact Romeo and Juliet, could be seen not so much as a personal preference but as a reaction to the already massive reception of this play in Germany: with alone in the s Garve’s essay and notably Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the young Tieck’s sheaves of (unpublished) notes and Friedrich Schlegel’s significant mention of it in the so-called ‘Studiumsaufsatz ’. Goethe had already had it performed twice in Weimar in this decade and was to use Schlegel’s translation in , since when it has remained the standard version. ere were negotiations with Iffland, the great actor-manager in Berlin, whose interest in a properly rendered Hamlet would provide a breakthrough in the theatre for the otherwise so literature-oriented Romantics. But more precisely, it was Friedrich Schlegel who put pressure on his brother to complete the translation of this so central text, as part of a wider Romantic programme. August Wilhelm had used his opportunistically named Etwas über William Shakespeare bey Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters of , which has little of memorable value to say about either Wilhelm Meister or the Prince of Denmark, to set out his translation principles, the centrality and appropriateness of verse rendition, and the dignity and worth of translation itself in the dissemination of classical poetic texts. It did not, however, make him a friend of Hamlet, witness his very guarded remarks in his Vienna Lectures, nor indeed did he translate Macbeth, Othello, or Lear. Most—but not all—of these factors inform Kaltërina Latifi’s ‘Hamlet’-Manuskript and give it its raison d’être. ey raise issues of editorial scholarship, some specific to Schlegel’s Shakespeare, some less so. But first of all to the text itself. Since Michael Bernays’s ground-breaking study of , Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Schlegelschen Shakespeare, it has been known that the Dresden royal, later state, library (now SLUB) held the manuscripts of twelve of Schlegel’s Shakespeare translations, indeed all but five, in various stages of completion or redaction, mostly ‘work in progress’, with the sole exception of Romeo and Juliet, written out in a fair copy in Caroline’s hand. ey have been consulted by relatively few scholars, and only individual pages have been reproduced in studies on Shakespeare in Germany and MLR, .,   on Schlegel’s specific role in that process. Only one play, the earlier version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (), has been edited, by the late Frank Jolles in  and—it needs to be said—following principles different from the ones here under discussion. What is the status of the manuscript which is the subject of this edition? It is neither a first dra nor a final copy for the printer. It has what Rudolph Genée in , quoted here with approval, called a ‘Zwischenstellung’, affording us, as it were, a privileged insight into the translator’s desktop (Rudolph Genée, A. W. Schlegel und Shakespeare (Berlin: Reimer, ), p. ). is also may have involved Caroline, although there is very little sign of it here. What we do have is a diplomatic transcription of the main text of Hamlet in Schlegel’s hand, with the original manuscript reproduced en face. e original...

Herzog Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach: Das Tagebuch der Reise durch Nord-Amerika in den Jahren 1825 und 1826 ed. by Walter Hinderer and Alexander Rosenbaum

Reviewed by: Herzog Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach: Das Tagebuch der Reise durch Nord-Amerika in den Jahren 1825 und 1826 ed. by Walter Hinderer and Alexander Rosenbaum Waltraud Maierhofer Walter Hinderer and Alexander Rosenbaum, eds. Herzog Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach: Das Tagebuch der Reise durch Nord-Amerika in den Jahren 1825 und 1826. Stiftung für Romantikforschung LX. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2017. 912 pp. What was life in the United States like in the 1820s? A keen observer at the time compared the area around the Capitol in Washington DC with the vegetable fields surrounding Weimar and pondered: "Der Plan nach welchem Washington angelegt werden soll ist coloßal und wird nie ausgeführt werden; nach ihm könnte es eine Bevölkerung von einer Million Menschen faßen, während es jetzt gegen 13000 nur enthalten soll und schwerlich mehr bekommen wird." (300; November 2, 1825; Italics here and throughout are original.) We now have a splendid edition of one of the most detailed, visually minded and multiperspective accounts of North America in the early nineteenth century. Bernhard von Weimar (1792–1862), second son of Carl August Duke of Saxe-Weimar and officer in the Dutch army—who had fought in the Battle of Waterloo and, after the Congress of Vienna, became colonel of a regiment in the service of the Dutch king—had long wished to travel to the country of which Goethe famously wrote in Zahme Xenien, "Amerika, du hast es besser / Als unser Continent, das alte, / Hast keine verfallene Schlösser / Und keine Basalte." He does find "ein sonderbares Stück Basalt, einem Menschenprofil ähnlich" on one of his first days in Boston (117; July 31, 1825). He notes in his entry dated July 26, 1825 about approaching Boston, that his arrival in the United States—he abbreviates "V. St."—was one of the favorite memories of his life, and full of enthusiasm he calls the fight for independence "[die] heilsamste[] Revolution die je gewesen war" (121). He shares Goethe's sentiment when, about to depart, he names the United States "dieses glückliche Land" and Europe "veraltet[] und morsch[]" (628; June 16, 1826). He felt proud about covering "eine Distanz von 7135 Meilen" (630) and meeting his goal of careful reporting. On most days of his sojourn in the US from July 1825 to June 1826, Prince Bernhard must have spent several hours with pen and paper. He filled more than a thousand pages with his observations and reflections, with his own family and Goethe's circle in mind, and he also added many drawings and sketches. The original manuscript, bound in two volumes, and extant only at the Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar, has now been meticulously edited and combined with the concluding travelogue from Gent to Saxony, a list of drawings and other addenda, such as community constitutions and maps, and letters by Bernhard, Carl August, and Goethe. The edition is obviously the result of a multiyear labor of love by eminent Goethezeit scholar Walter Hinderer and art historian Alexander [End Page 301] Rosenbaum, an expert on scholarly editions with the Klassik Stiftung Weimar (since 2010, formerly Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar). The volume is enriched by two very readable and insightful articles on the genre of the travelogue and its history of publication (Rosenbaum, "Privates Journal und literarischer Reisebericht—Zur Geschichte der Veröffentlichung von Herzog Bernhards Amerika-Tagebuch") and on Bernhard's journey (Hinderer, "Die Amerikareise Herzog Bernhards von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach"). The new edition contains a useful chronology, bibliography, biographical outline, indices for names and geographical items, as well as many illustrations, including three portraits. Upon Goethe's commendation, the travelogue was heavily edited and first published by the historian Heinrich Luden as Reise sr. Hoheit des Herzogs Bernhard zu Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach durch Nord-Amerika (1828); it also appeared in an (anonymous) English translation in Philadelphia in the same year (Travels through North America, during the Years 1825 and 1826). Goethe made use of details of utopian settlements from the travelogue in the second version of his novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1829). The sheer volume and range of observations may be overwhelming. Prince Bernhard was interested in simply...

VERSIONES DE ROUSSEAU: DAS ERDBEBEN IN CHILI O EL “RETORNO A LA NATURALEZA” COMO PALIMPSESTO LITERARIO.

Las fuentes literarias del topico del “retorno a la naturaleza” —celebremente narrado por Heinrich v. Kleist en Das Erdbeben in Chili (1807)— no han sido hasta el momento suficientemente estudiadas. En el siguiente trabajo proponemos dos importantes precedentes filologicos: los B eytrage zur geheimen Geschichte des menschlichen Verstandes und Herzens (1770) de C.M. Wieland y la escena elaborada por Goethe en Capitulo Quinto, Libro IV, de la novela Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795). A partir de estas referencias, Kleist elaborara un abordaje singular de las problematicas intelectuales e ideologicas asociadas a las diferentes versiones del topico que le permitira a su vez llevar adelante una lectura singular de la obra de Rousseau en el contexto posterior a la Revolucion Francesa.

Goethe's Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson

Reviewed by: Goethe's Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson Julie Koser Susan E. Gustafson. Goethe's Families of the Heart. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. 208 pp. In this persuasive new study on family in Goethe's works, Susan Gustafson extends the focus of her award-winning scholarship on male same-sex desire to attend to the multiplicity of affinities and non-exclusive attractions constituting familial configurations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Expanding recent scholarship on gender and sexuality in Goethe's literary corpus, Gustafson foregrounds the varied iterations and diverse constellations of the family manifested in works spanning from 1776 to 1829. The aim of Gustafson's project is to illuminate how "Goethe's literary texts provide a counter discourse to the predominant aristocratic and emerging civil constructions of 'ideal families'" (2) by examining "the multiple ways in which his texts challenge common eighteenth-century notions of family and relationships between women and men, men and men, and women and women" (4). At stake in [End Page 300] Gustafson's critical readings is the claim that Goethe "clearly rejects the norms of his time in defining and accepting all love relationships, and in dismissing the notions of ideal civil or aristocratic families" (5). Through careful analyses, Gustafson's book participates in and successfully deepens Goethe scholarship by offering further insights into Goethe's attitudes and views about gender, sexuality, and kinship. Confining its analysis of Goethe's unconventional families to the novel Die Wahlverwandschaften, the play(s) Stella, and the novels Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, primarily, Goethe's Families of the Heart is organized into four chapters framed by a brief introduction and conclusion. In the introduction, readers are presented a concise summary of the historical, political, and legal definitions of family as they emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. Gustafson positions this important study on kinship within the existing scholarship on Goethe and establishes the theoretical framework for nuanced readings of the family with recourse to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I and Lisa M. Diamond's Sexual Fluidity. The first chapter, with its in-depth examination of the changeable and fluid nature of attraction in Die Wahlverwandschaften, functions as a fulcrum for detailed explorations of familial configurations in subsequent chapters. In this foundational chapter, Gustafson persuasively establishes the non-conformist, non-exclusive, and changeable nature of love that permeates the panoply of Goethe's literary families. In chapter two, same-sex relationships between women take center stage in Gustafson's compelling reading of the play Stella. Juxtaposing the two versions of the play's conclusion, the author notes that the drama "presents one of the most daring representations of same-sex desire between women in Goethe's works" (66). This chapter, as well others in which Gustafson exhibits a sustained engagement with elective affinities between women in Goethe's texts, offers perhaps the most innovative and impactful contribution to recent scholarly discussions. The majority of Goethe's Families of the Heart, chapters three and four, is dedicated to the novels Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre respectively, which offers numerous examples of the manifold and arguably unconventional forms of family conceptualized by Goethe. From incestuous attractions, same-sex and heterosexual partnerships, to non-biological, adoptive families, Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre provide Gustafson with the most compelling evidence for her claim that Goethe not only radically redefined notions of family and rejected conformist, conservative definitions of kinship promulgated by the dominant discourses of his time but that such elective affinities "are not only present, not only real, not just acceptable, but (as the Wanderjahre asserts) actually the highest and holiest of feelings that bring relationships and families together" (153). The study's arguments are synthesized succinctly in the book's conclusion which once more articulates the radical and controversial views of family instantiated by Goethe's works that took aim at conservative, restrictive notions of family in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century German-speaking society. Gustafson's concluding remarks affirm the transformative potential of Goethe's characters in their pursuit and consummation of elective affinities: "Goethe's stories confront us with not only the persistent...

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...

AN ATTEMPT TO ESTABLISH A BILDUNGSROMAN DEVELOPMENT HISTORY: NURTURING THE RISE OF A SUBGENRE FROM ANCIENT BEGINNINGS TO ROMANTICISM

In English literature, the Bildungsroman, or the novel of formation, emerged as one of the most popular literary types of fiction among Victorian realists and many of the most important works of realism are Bildungsromane. But the Bildungsroman did not emerge suddenly on literary scene in the Victorian Age. The present study relies on the assumption, supported by Bakhtin, that the Bildungsroman has its own history of development as a distinct category, form, type, or subgenre of the novelistic genre, which is in itself a long, complex, and interesting process of rise and consolidation of a literary pattern, tradition, and literary system. This process can be summarized as follows: from the ancient epic and novel to medieval romances to Renaissance picaresque fiction (continued in the seventeenth century) to (in English literature) the eighteenth-century rise of the English novel with its strong picaresque substratum and through romanticism and Goethe (accredited with having introduced in fiction the element of Bildung ) to the Victorian flourishing of the novel of formation following Carlyle’s moment of a threefold literary reception of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre . These are the main conventions which nurture the rise of the Bildungsroman as a subgenre from ancient beginnings to romanticism. Among the primary influences on the rise of the Bildungsroman, some belong, like romantic writings and Goethe’s canonical Bildungsroman, to the level of “allusion”. Others, like picaresque tradition and certain eighteenth-century English novels, belong to the level of “intertextuality”. The present article aims to disclose by its comparative and thematological perspectives of approach a number of experiences and aspects of literary practice whose diachronic unfolding should be considered in a study on the development history of the Bildungsroman.

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...

Figure And Ground In Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre

Figure And Ground In Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre Christopher S. Wood Many passages in J. W. Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, especially in its first two books, set forth little theories of art, representation, or mimesis. My topic here is a proposition about the right relation between a figure and a ground, formulated by the normally unreflective actress Philine. In book 2, chapter 4, Philine asserts that we are inclined to respond to a moving body directly, as an instance of movement as such, before grasping the body in its formal relation to non-movement—before seeing it as a figure against a ground, in other words. Philine is speaking about a dancer, but her doctrine also has implications for literary fiction and especially for the genre, still undertheorized at the time, which hosts her character: the novel. For her thesis can be translated into a thesis about the relation of a literary character to its narrative context. Philine, like her more mysterious colleague Mignon, also an adept dancer, enters the novel in book 2, chapter 4. Philine promises Wilhelm Meister and his new friend, the actor Laertes, an outing and a midday meal at a hunter's lodge in the forest. When the men arrive to fetch her at her quarters, they learn that she has already departed in a coach with two strangers. Wilhelm, although his acquaintance with Philine is only a day old, is not happy to have been stood up. In her unreliability Philine bursts like an arabesque upon a flat and fixed surface of pragmatism, matter-of-factness, probity, and expectations that effects will follow causes: the background assumptions of the novel's world. Reliability was the first principle of Wilhelm's parents' world, the youthful Goethe's world. Philine the actress-adventuress is recognizable as a figure against the homogeneous ground of bourgeois and mercantile society, as if such figures were only recognizable against a ground, defined negatively. Philine herself, with her theory of the figure, will protest against this imputation of negativity. Philine is one who punctuates her own ongoing performative life with songs and dances, performances within performances. Philine's capers and lyric outbursts, her garland-weaving and coquetries, are topoi copied from the unreal, pre-bourgeois textual worlds of pastoral [End Page 399] and romance. She functions within the novel as a figure—a signature or shorthand—of a textual archive located behind the novel. She is a readymade figure for the devices of surprise that once impelled the plots of romance. Philine recalls those devices by dancing, singing, flirting, and showing up late. For all the force of the character's enactment of animated arbitrariness, Philine is not arbitrary at all. Within the fiction, in Wilhelm's eyes, she is an original; seen from outside the fiction, by an experienced reader, she is conventional, a visitant from archaic textual spheres. The literary pedigree of the character Philine is in conflict with the forms of life that her character embodies inside the fiction: spontaneity, ludic inventiveness, discontinuity, but also authenticity, the condition of being non-derived and non-conventional.1 When the youths catch up with Philine, she is sitting at a stone table in a grove of ancient trees, near a spring. She greets them operatically, with a lustiges Liedchen, a "merry little song."2 Philine offers an amusing explanation and the antic atmosphere, not unlike that of certain sequences of François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962), is quickly restored. Philine with her turns and songbursts is profiled against the omniscient narrator's mostly nonfigural, rhetorically plain diegetic language. Figurality in the rhetorical sense is reduced in Goethe's novel. But if the figure as verbal pattern disappears, one might say that it reappears in Goethe's novel as an elusive, turning body, or more precisely as the textual picture of such a body. Philine's lithe image bursts onto the scene of writing. By displacing figurality from the diegetic plane of his text onto one of the characters summoned by that diegesis, Goethe recharges the metaphor of the rhetorical figure.3 If Philine enacts one theory of art, she expounds another: A young man from the...

The Theater of Anamnesis: The Spaces of Memory and the Exteriority of Time in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre

When Wilhelm suffers his first great loss in the Lehrjahre, that of Mariane, he recovers his spirits on his travels by re-immersing himself in the natural world. He is revived by the rejuvenating power of nature, but also by the animating power of memory:alle erduldeten Schmerzen waren aus seiner Seele weggewaschen, und mit volliger Heiterkeit sagte er sich Stellen aus verschiedenen Gedichten . . . an diesen einsamen Platzen scharenweis seinem Gedachtnisse zuflossen. Auch erinnerte er sich mancher Stellen aus seinen eigenen Liedern, er mit einer besondern Zufriedenheit rezitierte. Er belebte Welt, vor ihm lag, mit allen Gestalten der Vergangenheit, und jeder Schritt in Zukunftwar ihm voll Ahnung wichtiger Handlungen und merkwurdiger Begebenheiten.1[all the pains he had suffered had been washed away from his soul, and in complete cheerfulness he recited to himself passages from various poems . . . and these passages swam in shoals into his memory in these lonely places. He also remembered many passages from some songs of his own which he recited with especial satisfaction. He enlivened the world which lay before him with all sorts of figures from his past, and every step that he took into the future was full of presentiment of important actions and strange occurrences.]2This passage illustrates what Novalis, partly on the basis of this novel, identified as one of the central hallmarks of Romanticism: the mysterious play of memory and premonition: Nichts ist poetischer als Erinnerung und Ahndung oder Vorstellung der Zukunft3 (Nothing is more poetic than remembrance and premonition or imagination of the future).4 For Hardenberg, the sense of presence proper to the poet is not a punctual now ordered within a linear series of nows. The poet's geistige Gegenwart (spiritual present) is rather a present die beide [Erinnerung und Ahnung] durch Auflosung identifiziert- und diese Mischung ist das Element, Atmosphare des Dichters (Novalis 2: 468, n. 123; that dissolves [memory and premonition] into an identity- and this mixture is the element, the of the poet). In creating the atmosphere of Poesie, the pre-rational communication between past and present, present and future, becomes a distinctive feature of Romantic interiority.My argument in this essay, however, is that Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre not only evokes the Romantic temporal subject, but also radically undermines its elusive interiority. The novel's manifest aim in this regard is to communicate and publicize the temporal interior, thereby exposing the hidden exteriority of that interior. It reveals the soul's temporal depths to be an effect generated by the interplay of its manifold surfaces.In order to contextualize this reading, however, it is first of all necessary to situate the novel's memory-thematic within what is generally recognized to be its fundamental conflict-namely the conflict between self and other, or between the authentic, private self and the inauthentic, socialized self. Wilhelm's many reveries and reminiscences are the expressions of his ostensibly authentic self, and as such they signal Wilhelm's deep affinity with Mignon and the Harper. Through their common sensibility toward the deep past and distant future, these figures together form what Friedrich Schlegel appropriately designates die heilige Familie der Naturpoesie5 (Holy Family of natural poetry). The Tower then stands for the socialized self, or the self that has developed beyond the sphere of narcissistic self-reflection. The literature on the novel also tends to take sides along these lines. The classical line of Lehrjahre-interpretation established by Schiller and continued by Dilthey generally aligns itself with the Tower as the standard-bearer for social reality. Giuliano Baioni, for example, reads the novel against Mignon, as a representative of formless bourgeois interiority, and posits that the novel's goal lies in the education of the Sturmer und Dranger to reality. …

Ungleiche Gleichgesinnte: Die Beziehung zwischen Goethe und Schiller, 1794–98 by Gerrit Brüning

Reviewed by: Ungleiche Gleichgesinnte: Die Beziehung zwischen Goethe und Schiller, 1794–98 by Gerrit Brüning Jeffrey L. Sammons Gerrit Brüning. Ungleiche Gleichgesinnte: Die Beziehung zwischen Goethe und Schiller, 1794–98. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015. 360 pp., 3 illus. My earliest image of German literary culture was of the replica of the Goethe-Schiller monument from Weimar in the Poets' Garden in Cleveland, where I was taken as a schoolboy. As I studied my way into the field, the image remained stable for a time, as an axis that separated epochs and as a sign of an extraordinarily productive collaboration. However, when I noticed in Weimar that Goethe is a [End Page 285] little taller than Schiller, which I believe was not the case in life, I began to wonder if the image had been manipulated to manufacture a narrative, and the Goethe-Schiller correspondence began to make me uneasy. I thought I detected stresses, asymmetries, irritations, and partly subliminal impatience and annoyance. In a lexicon article, I ventured the observation that "although Schiller analyzed both himself and Goethe, Goethe analyzed Goethe but rarely Schiller." Lacking the deep learning and gumption of Dan Wilson, I felt unqualified to pursue a cow this sacred any further. But when Gerrit Brüning's study of the correspondence appeared, I was curious to see whether my impressions had any external support. Brüning, working with all the materials, including drafts and unpublished texts, applies a philological exactitude to the major issues in the correspondence that is not encountered everywhere today. He exposes a surprising amount of carelessness in the work of prestigious scholars. One of his tools is chronology: if A preceded B chronologically, B cannot have influenced or caused A—an old-fashioned idea, perhaps, but useful in this matter. On the whole, he finds that the differences between Goethe and Schiller have been exaggerated, and he rejects views that see Goethe as indifferent or Schiller as attempting to impose an unpoetic rationality on the superior genius. Brüning traces much of the misapprehension to Goethe's memoir of 1817, Glückliches Ereignis, which he finds almost completely misleading. As for Schiller's critical review of Egmont, Brüning believes that Goethe did not know Schiller had written it. Brüning does not even mention the embarrassing moment when Schiller belittled the Elpenor fragment, not knowing that Goethe was the author (Schiller to Goethe, June 25, 1798). Brüning judiciously reviews Schiller's careful wooing of the initially indifferent Goethe for his attention and respect, Schiller's marriage, which Goethe supported, and Goethe's willingness to be a contributor to Die Horen up to the breakthrough with the birthday letter. Brüning ascribes Schiller's attacks on Goethe in letters to Körner and Caroline von Beulwitz to resentment at Goethe's more comfortable economic situation. Of the conflicting accounts of the conversation of July 20, 1794, Brüning prefers Schiller's, recalled a couple of days later, and he does not believe that the two Episteln Goethe contributed to Die Horen were parodistically directed against Schiller or that Goethe's praise of the first nine letters of the Ästhetische Erziehung was ironic. Schiller did object to the beginning of the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten as too political for the politically abstinent Horen but he was overruled. Schiller's advice on Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is generally evaluated as helpful and appreciated; Brüning casts doubt on Eckermann's report that Goethe complained of having to hold his ground against Schiller's interference. Brüning finds that Goethe considered Schiller's suggestions and accepted many of them, especially for book 8. Still, most of these are matters of plot management, while Goethe continued to resist Schiller's persistent appeal for a philosophical summation. It was in this connection that Goethe spoke of his realistischer Tic (to Schiller, July 9, 1796); Brüning sees this as a confession of a deficiency on Goethe's part that Schiller's interventions helped in part to relieve. With constant attention to the secondary literature, Brüning recapitulates the discussion on epic and tragedy, noting that Goethe concentrated mainly on the epic. He points out that Goethe said...

Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity by Christine Lehleiter

Reviewed by: Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity by Christine Lehleiter Stefani Engelstein Christine Lehleiter. Romanticism, Origins, and the History of Heredity. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014. 323 pp. Christine Lehleiter's engaging first monograph delves lucidly into the complex currents of scientific and literary investigations into heredity in the period around 1800. Lehleiter's contribution to this growing field includes fascinating accounts of breeding experiments on plants and animals, medical literature on hermaphrodites, and early naturalist speculations on species transformation, culled from painstaking archival research. Her approach leads to provocative new readings of work by Goethe, Jean Paul, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, as well as to a [End Page 313] more robust understanding of the diversity of the theoretical landscape surrounding questions of individual identity, species identity, and transmission of traits. Lehleiter's interdisciplinary analyses also enable her to discover in the works of her chosen literary authors an implicit theory of the relationship between literature and science that has enjoyed significant and lasting influence and that establishes literature as a legitimate site for interrogating scientific methods, theories, and jurisdictions. Lehleiter opens with a readable and informative history of ideas about the inheritance of traits, culled from texts on medicine, natural history, and breeding. The quest to understand the transfer of traits, both physical and mental, merged with speculations about their metamorphosis and their retention, leading to debates about the possible transformation of species and to evaluations of the effects of inbreeding and hybridization. Here and throughout her volume, Lehleiter demonstrates that reflections on reproduction and heredity at the turn of the nineteenth century extended beyond the exclusionary rivalry between epigenesist and preformationist camps familiar from the growing literature in this field. She demonstrates that these discussions implicated humans not only in the context of incest and racial mixing but also in considerations of determinism, education, and identity formation. While an Enlightenment attitude had segregated the human from nature, she argues, thereby creating a space for spiritual or mental freedom, this dualism was threatened by the acknowledgment of human as animal. Lehleiter's subsequent three chapters interpret literary works within the context established in this first chapter. She begins each case study by situating the author within a debate and then turns to an analysis of the way each author comments on and contributes to the emerging definitions of the sciences and humanities. Lehleiter's reading of the Mignon episode in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre forces the reader to confront the neglected surface, namely, of Mignon's body, as indecipherable because truly hermaphroditic, what we would now call intersex. Hermaphrodism, infertility, and infirmity were among the reported risks of inbreeding in the literature on livestock. The offspring of sibling incest, Mignon thus demonstrates for Lehleiter Goethe's insistence on a firm reality of nature that the Tower Society anachronistically denies and screens. Goethe participates in a nuanced differentiation of value spheres both here and in the Mann von funfzig Jahren episode of the Wanderjahre, in order to enable the coexistence of a biological and a moral domain in which the latter is informed but not subsumed by the former. Lehleiter soon moves from animals to plants, where breeding experiments similarly interrogated inheritance and questioned the stability of species in the wake of speculations about evolution (or transformationism, as it was known at the time) that spread from Erasmus Darwin in England to Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus in Germany and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in France. Here Lehleiter uncovers intriguing connections between the discourses of transformation in biology and in alchemy. Less amenable to the idea of nature's influence on morality than Goethe, Jean Paul Richter would seem to subvert the logic of heredity in his novel Der Komet, where a kind of speculative self-generation or monstrous poetology substitutes for inheritance—whether of traits or of social position. And yet, this spiritual freedom arises against the fixity of a natural substratum that rejects evolutionary thinking and anchors physical drives in instinct. Richter thus returns to an earlier dualism that adheres to a divine order in nature and a human realm of freedom beyond it. [End Page 314] In her final chapter, Lehleiter turns to explicit considerations...

Educational Environments: Narration and Education in Campe, Goethe, and Kleist

In the extensive discussion of the emergence of a modern concept of childhood in the eighteenth century-and the controversy Philippe Aries caused by suggesting its absence before then1-relatively little attention has been given to changing conceptions of the (Umwelt) that is thought to surround a child and influence its upbringing. This is surprising, not only because today it is commonplace to assume that the environment in which a child grows up-be it social, cultural, familial, economical, or other-is of utmost significance for the child's development,2 but also because there were significant changes in meaning and importance of the concept of environment around 1800. A brief historical comparison can shed light on this point. Before the eighteenth century a child's surroundings were merely perceived as a potential danger to its existence as it was thought that a person's identity was predetermined by birth and god. Wolfram von Eschenbach, for example, wonders about the consequences of baby Parzival's removal from the court and then shows us a young adult who is woefully lacking in worldly manners and basic social and hermeneutic skills. Yet, Parzival becomes the hero he was destined to be due to his lineage. The unusual surroundings in which he grows up can delay, but not prevent his development and the fulfillment of his calling.3 Religious dogma long supported the assumption that a child's environment is of little consequence. While Martin Luther lamented the dangers of urbanization and materialism, which die kinder von der schulen zum dienst des Mammon zu keren (turned the children away from school toward the service of mammon),4 these factors are not viewed as formative of the person's identity, but rather are seen as dangers threatening to derail the true, that is, inherited, nature of a person. Compare this to the attention Jean-Jacques Rousseau pays to the environment in his representation of Emile's education. Rousseau believes that the environment affects the formation of a child's character in essential ways and plays a constitutive part in a child's cognitive and moral development. Emile's flight to the countryside is motivated by the desire to escape the decay that the narrator associates with civilization and urbanization, but also demonstrates that the educator's ability to control the learning environment is perceived to be of utmost significance. In Rousseau's Emile, the emergence of our modern concept of childhood goes hand-in-hand with the discovery of the environment as an object of conscious manipulation.In the following, I will examine how pedagogical discourses around 1800 construct their educational environments. What constitutes an environment for a child or learner in the first place? When do physical surroundings become a pedagogically relevant environment? How does a text envision the relationship between child and learner on the one hand and his or her environment on the other? What is the role of narrative in defining educational environments? How do narrative frames model and mirror relationships between learner and environment? And finally, how do the pedagogical and semi-pedagogical texts of the period themselves relate to the learner, that is, to those they address as their readers?With these questions in mind and building on Rousseau, I want to look at three exemplary texts, which develop three different notions of what constitutes an educational environment around 1800, namely Joachim Heinrich Campe's Sittenbuchlein fur Kinder aus gesitteten Standen from 1777, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795), and Heinrich von Kleist's short text Allerneuster Erziehungsplan from 1810. My aim is not to develop comprehensive readings of these classic texts, but to focus rather narrowly and schematically on the relationship they create between the student and what is presented as a learning environment, as well as to reflect on the texts' narrative structures and their pragmatic stance-on how they engage the reader pedagogically. …

Lyckans administration

This article engages in the new concept of individual happiness that spread in the 18th Century and in Goethe’s pivotal novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96). In this novel, the process of “Bildung” is designed to lead the protagonist to happiness, but happiness turns out to be possible only if the process can be governed from the outside, by powers alien to the subject. For this reason, the article argues that the notion of happiness orchestrated in the novel is not based on a revolutionary concept of happiness or a victorious Enlightenment critique, but on a concept derived from a more local field of knowledge, namely “Polizeywissenschaft”. Central to German state reform, and the practices of local administration in the late 18th Century, “Polizeywissenschaft” was developed in order to render happiness to both states and individuals, and it did so by means of surveillance and secret intervention in everyday life. On a theoretical level, the breakthrough of ”the police” during the century could be mapped as an outcome of the transition from a sovereign power regime to a biopolitical one, in Michel Foucault’s teminology. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, as in the biopolitics encoded in the “Polizeywissenschaft,” the experience of happiness is thus coupled with a new way of governing life as such.

Chronotopoi of the Good Life and Utopia: Bakhtin on Goethe’s Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister and the carnivalesque

This paper explores Bakhtin’s reception of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre with a view to assess how Bakhtin’s interest in this early chronotopical masterpiece can be understood in the wider context of his utopian thinking and his political eschatologies. Bakhtin reads Goethe’s novel as a critique of totalitarian forms of Socialist Realism as well as Dostoyevsky’s bourgeois realism. Like his contemporary Ernst Bloch, Bakhtin praises the complexity and richness of Goethe’s concept of realism. In the wake of Hermann Cohen, Georg Simmel and Friedrich Gundolf to whom Bakhtin alludes and whom he quotes, Goethe is regarded as a modern literary and anthropological role model, the epitome of Bildung. For Bakhtin, Goethe’s and Rabelais’ writings about the carnivalesque constitute complementary forms of reflection of and agents for social and cultural transformation in modernity.

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. …

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...

Ausbildung des Charakters

Blanckenburg’s Versuch über den Roman as well as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre develop a theory of the novel based on the connection between “Ausbildung”, the institution of theatre, and “character”. While Blanckenburg outlines an analogy of poiesis and social formation in the metaphor “kleine Züge”, Goethe’s novel alludes to these concepts not only by refusing its protagonist the Bildung he is striving for but also by a deformation of the novel.

Observing Neutrality, circa 1800

Heis mich nicht reden, heis mich schweigen-Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (MA 5:357)FOR HIS SEMINAR held at College de France during spring semester of 1978, Roland Barthes offered his students a series of fragments collected under title Figures of Neutral.1 What he wanted to provide was a dictionary, of definitions but of twinklings (scintillations) (Barthes 10). It was to be a loose collection, reflecting fact appears in a number of widely differing contexts and also embodies a particular kind of resistance with regard to choice or paradigmatic structures-a resistance could, he writes, also be understood as the refusal to dogmatize (Barthes 10). The twenty-three seminar sessions were devoted to topics whose connection to is at times relatively obvious (the androgyne, tact, etc.) and at times less so (the adjective, affirmation, etc.). Barthes's selection frees from any thematic rigidity and allows it to twinkle in unexpected places. By making neutrality an open and prolonged topic of discussion, he also opens door ironic play with one of neutrality's main taboos: production of speech itself. Such discussions might, at best, strive impartiality, but as we will see with regard to neutrality, once first word has been uttered, one can no longer hope to remain where is concerned.The discussion of neutrality in following pages will take its cues from Barthes, who has an approach to neutrality moves lightly between different disciplinary contexts-Barthes mentions in his lecture notes he takes word for a series of walks along a certain number of readings-and is committed to a certain structural definition of as that which outplays paradigm (Barthes 6). In present article, as well, there is an attempt to balance between discursive mobility and structural contour. Here, focus is narrower: both as regards historical parameters, lingering in decades around 1800, and in terms of choosing case studies where problem of is directly addressed in terms of human relations and in scientific contexts. On one hand, neutrality is used to indicate a certain mode of being around others, one defined by a kind of absence, as will be shown in more detail below. On other hand, concept of neutrality also plays an important role in developing science of chemistry, where term neutral salt was (and still is) used to describe a product emerges from certain combinations of acids and bases-a product that, however, has qualities of neither an acid nor a base. I will begin by considering theoretical positions associated with these two modes of neutrality, with reference to examples drawn from scientific, literary, and philosophical sources and with an eye unexpected affinities between them. In each case, we will see neutrality is accompanied by formal expectations; is, it carries with it certain transferrable structural features. Rather than resist this rigidity, as nimbleness of Barthes's approach might tempt us to do, I will instead attempt to navigate a middle (though certainly not neutral) position, such a close attention to particular features of each kind of neutrality-one based on human and other on chemical interactions-will, in fact, allow a kind of mutual illumination. With goal in mind, general discussion of neutrality in first part of article will, in second part, be complemented by three case studies where these two modes of neutrality appear in unexpected proximity to one another. We will see how they rely upon each other in surprising ways, and we will also witness their limits, as shown through emergence and decline of chemical neutrality as a metaphor and figure of thought beyond field of chemistry.Defining NeutralityThe word comes from Latin neutrum, which is itself a composite of ne + utrum, or either: essence of is to negate. …