On 13 April 1813, Goethe received a small booklet in the mail titled “Einige neue Versuche und Beobachtungen über Spiegelung und Brechung des Lichtes” (A few new experiments and observations on the reflection and refraction of light). It was an offprint of an article that had appeared in theJournal für Chemie und Physikwritten by Goethe’s friend Thomas Seebeck, who was now residing in Nuremberg. It concerned the question of the polarity of light, which was observable through the combined effects of double refraction and multiple reflection and which had been treated two years earlier in a prize-winning article...

Jane Brown’sThe Persistence of Allegory(2007) brilliantly rethinks the history of the neoclassical aesthetic in literature and the visual arts over the past three hundred years. The study’s interpretive frame, which Brown describes as “morphological in Goethe’s sense of the word,”¹ allows her to revisit the fluid relationship between the mimetic interests of an array of neoclassicisms from Shakespeare to Wagner and the disruptive allegorical interests of a variety of nonillusionist stage-practices. The following comments on Goethe’s architectural idea are indebted to Brown’s analysis of how the allegorical impulse “persisted” by adaptively reinscribing itself within the practices of neoclassical...

Commentators have been practically unanimous about the general atmosphere of Goethe’s little poem “Über allen Gipfeln.” Release of tension, imminent repose, harmony, and so on, make up the general view. My own sense of the poem—at least of its final version, as it appeared in print from 1815 on—is different. I find in it mainly nothing but dissonances, incongruities, and contradictions. And in the end, I think, the recognition of these qualities produces a distinctly better overall reading of the text than most others.

1. The first jarring element is the title: “Ein gleiches” (Of the same sort)....

In 1807 Goethe formed a small chamber choir in Weimar, which he referred to on occasion as his “Singschule” (singing school),¹ “Singechor” (singing choir),² or “Singstunden” (singing class);³ in his diary he would often simply write that he spent time with “die Sänger” (the singers).⁴ Thanking Bettine Brentano for a packet of music she had sent him, he called the choir “meine kleine Hauscapelle” (my little chamber group) in a 24 February 1808 letter to her,⁵ and with irony he called the choir “meine kompendiose Hauskapelle” (my compendious chamber group) in a 22 April 1814 letter to his friend and...

At the very beginning of the drama, a desperate and daring Faust conjures up the Earth Spirit, but he recoils under the impact of his haunting vision: “Schreckliches Gesicht! [. . .] Weh! ich ertrag dich nicht” (Appalling vision! Woe, I cannot bear your sight).¹ Ironized as an “Übermensch” (superman) and derided as “Ein furchtsam weggekrümmter Wurm” (A fear-filled cringing worm), Faust is dismissed by the vanishing spirit with the verdict: “Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst, /Nicht mir!” (490, 498, 512–13; You resemble the spirit that you comprehend /Not me). As Faust realizes, subjective yearnings and visions,...

As many of his enemies have repeatedly emphasized, laughter is the devil. A long line of humorlessness, and especially a demonization of laughter, runs through the history of Christianity. Above all, it was the ancient Christian monkhood and the Church Fathers who accused laughter of being incompatible with human dignity.¹ This tradition of an conservative hatred of laughter reaches from the seventeenth century’s Jesuit and Jansenist critique of the comedy of the seventeenth century to Charles Baudelaire’s essayDe L’Essence du rire(1855), in which he reveals laughter to be the signature of fallen humanity, the trait of the satanic...

Hans Blumenberg’s early historical examination of the metaphorology of the shipwreck,Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer(Shipwreck with spectator), lays out the existential import this image held for Western thought from antiquity through to philosophical modernism.¹ For Blumenberg, the metaphor of the ocean voyage assumes a place alongside that of air flight and the Promethean theft of fire as one of the staple concretizations of human arrogance in its attempts to challenge and tame the laws of nature (14–15). The sea voyage in particular encapsulates, according to Blumenberg, a paradigmatic moment of human blasphemy, codified in the attempt to transgress those...

“Goethe”—the mythic complex of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s life and works—has long been used to construct, consolidate, and repeatedly rehabilitate German national identity.Faustin particular has been enlisted in efforts to shore up the German nation. These often wrong-headed attempts to appropriate Goethe for the sake of the nation have obscured the fact that the nation is indeed a central topic inFaust. From the seemingly cheerful bustling nation of theVolkin “Vor dem Tor” (Before the gate) to the decaying nation of the Holy Roman Empire inFaust II, which Faust unsuccessfully attempts, with the...

Throughout her distinguished career, Jane Brown has evolved a theory of allegory derived in no small part from the persistent prominence of Goethe’s literary works in her critical imagination. From her consideration of allegory as an essentially pictorial trope to her extended analysis of the imperative to rethink the place of allegory, in a relationship of productive tension with mimesis, Brown identifies allegory as a dominant mode in the European tradition of cultural representation, which encompasses the general argument of her 1992 study,The Persistence of Allegory.¹ In contrast to the emergence of theoretical models of allegory derived from early...

In his ABC and Reader of 1807, the German pedagogue Joachim Heinrich Campe warned against teaching children to read before the age of six, arguing that it was better to allow them first to exercise their senses with direct perceptions of nature than to start by conveying knowledge about nature through printed or written signs. Campe worried especially that reading too early could harm a child’s ability to perceive things directly: “The learning of signs, and the continualconceiving of signs, weaken and cripple in the young soul the impulse to the clear and livelyconceiving of things; are at...

A reader of Hegel’s letter to Goethe of 24 April 1825 encounters this (to my mind, deeply moving) expression of indebtedness: “When I survey my intellectual development, I find you everywhere interwoven therein and might well call myself one of your sons; from you my inner life acquired nourishment and the strength to resist abstraction and found its just course by keeping your constructs [Gebilden] in sight as if they were beacons.”¹ Needless to say, the passage has not gone unnoticed and the relationship between Goethe and Hegel has often been treated in the scholarship, most recently in the important...

“History” is a paradigm that emerges from what the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck calls theSattelzeit, the period between 1750 and 1850; in other words, the concept of history itself has a history. For although history “als Kunde, Erzählung und Wissenschaft” (in the form of tidings, storytelling and scientific inquiry), as he explains, has been “ein alter Befund europäischer Kultur” (a part of European culture since antiquity), and although “das Geschichten-Erzählen zur Geselligkeit des Menschen [gehört]” (the telling of stories is inseparably bound up with human sociability), the notion that “es in der Geschichte um ‘Geschichte selber’ geht und nicht...

On 16 March 1807 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe received from the publisher his long-awaited copy of Alexander von Humboldt’s groundbreaking work on comparative plant geography,Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen nebst einem Naturgemälde der Tropenländer(Essay about the geography of plants accompanied by a table depicting the tropical regions), which he reportedly finished reading eagerly. Unfortunately and by accident, the copy sent to Goethe did not include the plate with the table visualizing the geography of tropical plants announced in the title of the book. In a later letter, Goethe recalls how he read the work with great interest...

What does it mean to think “I,” to say “I,” to write “I”? These foundational questions of subjectivity inform Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s literary production to such an extent that one might arguably define her oeuvre in terms of the early German Romantic notion ofautopoiesis, the self-reflexive, self-critical self-creation of the subject,das Ich(the I), in and through poesy. Yet in contradistinction to the unitary structure of early Romantic subjectivity, for Droste the self frequently is presented as an object, an object often watched by—and at times watching—the subject, an object that is irreconcilable with the subject....

“Goethe über alles!” This phrase, with its thinly veiled allusion to the German national anthem, means that Goethe was more important than Germany. The emphatic slogan is to be found in Gottfried Benn’s letter to Friedrich Wilhelm Oelze from 8 November 1950.¹ The correspondence between the two men had already been going on for eighteen years by this time. It began in 1932, the Year of Goethe, in connection with which Benn contributed an essay, “Goethe und die Naturwissenschaften” (Goethe and the natural sciences). It was first published in a special edition ofDie neue Rundschauon the occasion of...