From Frankfurt to
Regensburg:
Looking for Goethe
keith harmon snow
(Published January 1999, by Wingspan magazine,
Tokyo, Japan.)
Mozart had
been buried for 30 years. Old Goethe,
having warmed up
twelve-year-old Felix Mendelssohn with his most cherished Bach fugues, next
challenged the child prodigy with an original Mozart score. “Now we will see
whether you can play something you do not know.”
The boy’s eyes beamed as he
recognized the clear but small notes of Mozart’s hand. Young Felix played it
like a boyhood friend. “That’s nothing,” Goethe teased, “anyone could do it.”
Then Goethe laid before Mendelssohn a roll of parchment sloppily splashed and
lined and blotted with ink. Laughing at the apparent joke, the prodigy went
silent as Goethe pressed him to play.
“Why, Beethoven wrote that,”
declared Goethe’s friend Zelter, leaning over the shoulder of his awestruck
pupil. “He always writes with a broomstick and passes his sleeve over the notes
before they are dry.”
Felix explored Beethoven’s
labyrinth once through. “That is true Beethoven,” he passionately exclaimed,
sticking on notes which lurked in the chaos and surprise of the composer’s
genius, “I recognize him in it at once.” And then Felix played it.
It was November, 1821.
Thinkers the world over were seeking Goethe’s audience in person. Himself
captivated by a romanticized America, Goethe read Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans
four times. He favored the ideas of Thoreau, but it was Emerson who read Goethe
in German in preparation for a visit. Arriving in Weimar in May, 1832, Emerson
was four weeks too late. The great Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had died.
In life Goethe pondered the
cosmos. His was a world of primordial archetypes: plants, bones, souls. In his
concepts of “intensification” and “polarity” he saw a universe of cyclic
rebirth and transformation, of energy in balance and in opposition. Expansion
and contraction. Light and dark. Poetry and science. Spirit and matter. Faust
was Goethe’s pilgrimage, his epic design to educate humanity about itself.
Mephistopheles was his devil; nature his temple.
“Words are as valuable as
money,” Goethe once wrote. Yet mere words fail to convey his expansiveness.
Coming from an American culture rich in arrogance and poor in education, I am
stunned by the spectrum of Goethe’s energies. Poet, painter, architect,
historian. Student of both Bible and Koran. Self-described as the “last of the
great pagans.” There is a certain essence to Goethe which holds little currency
at present. This is the Goethe I seek. Rebel. Iconoclast. Independent. Heretic.
“I, pagan?” quipped Goethe
— who persecuted his heroines in reflection of moral and religious
hypocrisy. “Well, after all, I let Gretchen be executed [in Faust] and Ottilie
starve to death [in Elective Affinities]; don’t people find that Christian
enough? What do they want that would be more Christian?” Another day he wrote,
“I believe in God, nature, and the victory of good over evil.”
Frankfurt
Am Main
I stroll the night along
Frankfurt’s Main river, which the young Goethe loved. The city is big. The
black hulk of a barge emerges midstream, drones under the bridge, fades into
the foggy river. Herr Goethe is here: Commissioner of Highways and Canals. By
day the financial district hums and I am reminded of Goethe’s reflections on
returning to his childhood city: “People live in a perpetual whirl of making
money and spending it, and that which we call ‘mood’ can neither be produced
nor communicated. All amusements, even the theatre, are meant only as
diversions.”
At the Frankfurt house of
Goethe’s 1749 birth, scholar George Dewitz describes young Johann’s little
puppet theatre. “This is the most important original artifact in Goethe’s
house. It signifies the origins of Goethe’s theatrical work. Goethe, the most important
theatrical dramatist in Germany.” George distills humor out of his 15 years as
a quadrilingual guide at Goethehaus. “Who is Goethe?” a young man from America
once asked. “He is like Shakespeare,” George replied. The youth was even more
puzzled. “Who is Shakespeare?”
For three years Goethe
studied law in Leipzig on his father’s wish, but illness and discontent brought
him back home. As a law student in Strasbourg, he met the great thinker Herder
(1744-1803) and through Herder came Homer and Shakespeare. “What noble
philosophers have said about the world applies to Shakespeare too,” Goethe
wrote, in a 1771 tribute. The theme is echoed in Faust: “What we call evil is
only the other side of good; evil is necessary for good to exist and is part of
the whole. I cry: Nature! Nature! Nothing is so like nature as Shakespeare’s
characters.”
In the Strasbourg Cathedral,
Goethe found the Gothicism which he hailed as “uniquely German.” His
discoveries united him with the Sturm und Drang, a literary rebellion against
the suffocating morality of the day. The poet G.E. Lessing set the stage with
Laocoon in 1766. The storm and stress raged after Goethe’s Sorrows of Young
Werther compelled forlorn lovers to copy the protagonist: Scores of young men
committed suicide, copies of Werther in their pockets. It was 1774. Suddenly,
all Europe was reading the 25-year-old Goethe.
The Court
at Saxe-Weimar
In 1775, Goethe was invited
to Weimar by the Duchess Anna Amalia, mother of the 18-year-old Duke Karl
August. Arriving in Weimar under grey Thuringian skies, I find Goethe
everywhere expropriated by entrepreneur and institution. The Goethe Museum is
full of white space, empty of exhibits, in metamorphosis. It is a fitting
reminder: In 1809 Goethe headed the reorganization of all museums and
departments at the University of Jena. He was forever enriching and enlarging
collections.
In the hustle of plans for
“GoetheJahr 1999” and “Weimar 1999: Cultural Capital of Europe,” I find
Goethehaus — and the house of soulmate Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)
— shrouded in the scaffolds and plastic of repair. Inside are Goethe’s
copious possessions, the “minerals, busts, engravings, statuettes and large
drawings” noted by Felix Mendelssohn in a letter to his family. Standing at the
piano, I imagine the spectacle of Felix Mendelssohn sight-reading Beethoven to
the whim of Goethe. But the piano is silent. The floorboards creak under the
feet of pious tourists and whispers die off like flies in the corners of
stately rooms bereft of cobwebs.
The Weimar Hilton overlooks
the Ilm river valley, and each morning I cross the original stone bridge and
walk briskly to the palace in the footsteps of Goethe — through a park
that he helped landscape, according to Norbert Lessing, the charming and hospitable
manager at the Hilton.
“Not that Lessing,” Norbert Lessing had been quick to say.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) shared Goethe’s capacity for poetry and
art. Both wrote essays on the Grecian statue Laocoon; both praised Shakespeare.
Lessing had begun his own Faust, in 1759, but the work went unfinished. Goethe
often staged his plays along with those of Schiller and Shakespeare, and
Goethe’s own.
I see Goethe’s influence in
the Duchess Anna Amalia Library: His direction from 1797 to 1832 secured its
prosperity. To a bibliomaniac like me, the place is awesome. Even the
floorboards, circa 1563 and spanning 30 inches, are impressive. House
technician Klaus Hildebrandt pulls the velvet curtains to reveal countless
first editions by Weimar greats. From the shelves he pulls Goetz von
Berlichingen. I envy Klaus his position: Fifteen years with the world’s rarest
texts — some 900,000 items including hand-bills from the Reformation,
prints from the French Revolution era, and 13,000 volumes on Faust.
Herder followed Goethe to
Weimar as Court Preacher in 1776. On the bronze statue hat fronts the 15th-century
Herder Church, I read his motto: “Light. Love. Life.” Inside I can imagine
Herder, a spiritual force in Goethe’s life, at the pulpit railing against the
state, corruption and conquest: “Can you name a land where Europeans have
entered without defiling themselves forever before defenseless, trusting
mankind, by the unjust word, greedy deceit, crushing oppression, diseases,
fatal gifts they have brought?”
Goethe struggled with duty
and obligation as his Duke forged and shattered alliances in the expedience of
success or defeat. As Director of the War Commission, he stood and ran with the
Duke’s regiments in France in 1792, after Prussia meddled in the French
Revolution, and again at the Siege of Mainz in 1793. As Councillor of State, he
doled out justice and tried to moderate the Duke’s passions for hunting and
war, both financed by taxes levied on peasants.
Beethoven found Goethe too
servile to aristocracy. Astounded by the other’s talent, Beethoven had set
Goethe’s Egmont to score in 1811. Meeting the following year in Bohemia, where
the rich bathed in the healing mineral waters of Karlsbad and Marienbad, the
two titans clashed. Goethe pitied Beethoven his increasing deafness, but found
him “an utterly untamed personality, not altogether in the wrong in holding the
world to be detestable, but who surely does not make it any more pleasant by
his attitude.”
Goethe met Napoleon in 1808,
which he described as “one of the most gratifying experiences of my life.”
Napoleon liked the poet and his poetry. Others attacked Goethe for his
aloofness to war. “National hatred is a peculiar thing,” he wrote in 1830. “How
could I write songs of hate without hatred?” Still, his link to the Duke, his
Court functions — his “interests” — blinded him and so many after
him to the evils forewarned by his old friend Herder.
Travels in
Bohemia
I am standing at the edge of
a Bohemian meadow when a small deer leaps out of the grass and bounds to a
distant thicket: It invokes an image of the Ducal hunt. Then I see Goethe,
traveling with footman and carriage, no longer the “incarnate Wild Huntsman” of
his youth, but the indefatigable scientist. Between visits to nearby Marienbad
or Karlsbad spas, this land was Goethe’s laboratory. Year after year he came,
investigating the secrets of nature (see “Goethe the Scientist”)..
Two deer, white tails
flagging, cross my path as I walk a farm surrendered under the Potsdam Agreement
by the family of Anna Woebking. Anna points to holes riddled in cement by
strafing Allied planes in 1945. Eight years later, her husband, Wilhelm, stayed
a year on my grandfather’s farm. “Willy” graduated from high school, with my
mother, in Massachusetts. Four hours from Weimar by German Rail, we explore
Goethe’s old haunts.
Goethe stayed in Plana,
where Gothic frescoes date from circa 800 A.D. Alena Mrovcova from Galerie
Plana walks us to the 13th-century postcoacher’s house where Goethe
stabled his horse and took modest meals. “You should recognize that Goethe did
much of his scientific work in this area,” says Galerie partner Tilo Ettl. “His
house in Marienbad was ten kilometers from here.”
War between Austria and
France forbade Goethe’s annual sojourn here in 1809. But this land has always
been in dispute. Some 80,000 Prussians commanded by Frederick the Great
conquered all land to Prague in 1744. Anna and Willy talk about the Thirty
Years War (1618-48) against the doctrines of Martin Luther: Towns were sacked
and burned, Bohemian peasants slaughtered by the thousands.
The castle ruins of Count
Krasikov Svamberk (1287) rise on rock over the Bohemian plain.
We explore the playground of
Anna’s youth as a chill wind drives ominous clouds over plains and castle,
invoking Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen. “I am rescuing the memory of a
valiant man,” Goethe wrote of his martyr of truth and liberty. In fact, Goetz
was a robber baron more akin to a character from Goethe’s 1794 translation of
the low-German epic Reineke Fuchs: The unprincipled, cowardly, duplicitous and
greedy “Reynard the Fox.”
Pilgrimage
to Rome
In a quiet hamlet on the
plain, four kilometers by crow, Anna locates the exit of the castle tunnel.
Nearby, two girls herd a sow and nine piglets into a furrowed field. A family
gathers apples in a courtyard orchard. They are shy, but Anna’s introduction
jogs their memories: They are friends of Anna’s family.
In 1786, Goethe spent an
entire summer here conducting a series of experiments that showed how fruiting
could be prevented by too much nourishment or accelerated by deprivation. The
same year, he abruptly left Bohemia for Italy, in a secret plan known only to
his servant and chronicled in Italian Journey: “I leapt into a mail coach, all
alone, with only a portmanteau and satchel for luggage.”
In Regensburg I walk the
Steinerne Brucke, Germany’s oldest stone bridge, which Goethe crossed on his
way south. The rains have swelled the Danube and the sky remains grey, but
medieval Regensberg, with its narrow alleys and Gothic architecture, is
fascinating. Here, too, is Goethe: His study of 12th-century Gothic
architecture prompted posthumous efforts to spire cathedrals at Cologne and
Regensberg.
Goethe spent two years in
Italy, disguised as undistinguished painter Filippo Miller. During this time he
realized his artistic talents and resolved to spend the rest of his life
writing. On his return to Germany, however, Goethe suffered for his
enlightenment: “I received no sympathy, no one understood my language.”
Many of his friends were
offended by his living with a young mistress, Christiane Vulpius, who bore him
a son in 1789 (see “Goethe the Lover”). “My friends,” he wrote, instead of
comforting me and drawing me back to them, drove me to despair. My delight in
things almost unknown to them, my sorrow and grief over what I had lost, seemed
to offend them. I could not adjust myself to this distressing situation, so
great was the loss to which my exterior senses must become reconciled. But
gradually my spirit returned and sought to preserve itself intact.”
Seeing ignorance, pride and
stupidity everywhere, Goethe kept his genius to himself. He was indignant at
censorship. He became more guarded. Still he experimented. He recorded. He
created. Some works were kept secret. His Faust was a labor of 60 years and for
that Goethe gets the last word. His Faust, he said in 1828, “represents a
permanent record of the development of a mind, tormented by everything which
tortures all human beings, stirred by the same things that trouble us all,
engulfed by what we all abhor, and delighting in the things we all desire.” He
published selectively, but profusely, to the end.
~end.
sidebar one:
“I have found, not gold or
silver,” Goethe wrote to his friend Herder the preacher, “but something that
makes me much happier: The intermaxillary bone in man.”
His 1786 discovery was
heretic. Humans were then held to be separately and uniquely ordained by God;
Goethe’s study of animal forms — from hawks to pachyderms to turtles to
rodents to sloths — verified the continuity of nature. Goethe put humans
in their proper place.
He pioneered the disciplines
of morphology and comparative anatomy. His evolutionary theory eclipses
Darwin’s. His profound treatise on the Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) followed
years of detailed studies, but was rejected by his publisher, and its
importance remains unrespected to this day. Like his Theory of Colors (1808)
and treatise On The Intermaxillary Bone In Man, his holistic, spiritual
perspective was met with cold hostility. He was a poet, not a scientist,
everyone said.
His science fills museums in
Weimar, Stutzerbach, Marienbad and Jena. A ginkgo planted by Goethe towers over
the Jena Botanical Gardens. Like the Observatory, their genesis was in Goethe.
Chemistry. Weather. Optics. His ideas spread in letters, debates, journals
— and in his poetry. Rejection followed. “It is tormenting not to be
understood when one feels sure himself, after a great stress and strain, that
one understands both one’s self and one’s subject.”
He was a fervent advocate of
tolerance and the coexistence of ideas. He blistered at the exclusion of his
views, at the “insufferable arrogance” and “distortion of truth” shown by the
followers of Isaac Newton. “Newton explained,” wrote Ernst Lehrs about Goethe,
“or at least was supposed to explain, why an apple fell; he never thought of
explaining the exact correlative but infinitely more difficult question of how
the apple got up there.”
Goethe foretold the abuse of
mathematics, of abstraction and reductionism in the study of nature. He
postulated a spiritual essence in plants. In his old age, he compared the earth
to a living being — “she” in gender — perpetually inhaling and
exhaling. Centuries ahead of his time, his poetry speaks his truth:
Who would study and describe the living, starts
By driving the spirit out of the parts;
In the palm of his hand he holds all the sections,
Lacks nothing, except the spirit’s connections.
Sidebar two:
“It was no love affair,”
wrote Goethe’s last flame. At Marienbad in 1823, Ulricke von Levetzow wrote
this “to refute all the fantastic things which were printed.” She was 18.
Goethe — old fool that he knew himself to be — asked for her hand
anyway.
The Marienbader Elegies grew
from this affair. Dejected and sad, Goethe wrote: “Now I must see how I can get
through a dull and monotonous winter, which, to some extent, I look forward to
with horror. However, we must endeavor, with good humor and courage, to make
the black days useful to ourselves and to our friends.”
Dark and light. Good and
evil. Polarity in love as in all Goethe’s things. His teenage love for Gretchen
of Frankfurt emerges in Faust. He was a heartbreaker, and the parson’s daughter
Friederike Brion was his second victim. The Sorrows of Young Werther spoke of
his unrequited love for Charlotte Buff.
“Do you know me in this
style, Behrisch?” Goethe wrote. The older Behrisch — Goethe’s living
Mephistopheles — had Goethe drinking and chasing women at 18. “The true
lady-killer style,” said Goethe. “But to make no bones about it, I’d already be
fit to...how the devil do I put it? ...a girl.” Goethe’s conquests continued in
the Duke’s company.
Torquatto Tasso was for
secret lover Charlotte von Stein, a court lady seven years his senior married
to the Duke’s Master of the Horse. Goethe fell for Maddalena Riggi in Italy. He
was captivated by Corona Schroter. Roman Elegies was for the young Christiane
Vulpius, whom he married in 1806. West-East Divan was for Marianne von
Willemer, also married, who roused Goethe’s passion in 1819.
Sin and salvation. Fantasy
and reality. Renunciation and desire. Confined by a stifling and religious
patriarchy, war was waged in Goethe’s soul: Duty, morality, salvation and fear
pitted against desire, sexuality, love and freedom. His poetry was his grand
expression of this human conflict.
~sidebars end.