Abstract
In a famous essay, Baudelaire defined one half of art as ‘the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent’, while the other half was ‘the eternal and the immutable’. The focus of much work in Germanistik might be said to fall into a similar set of categories, in which case this edition of the Goethe Yearbook is definitely an exemplar of the latter. Arising largely from a GSNA conference on ‘Goethe and the Post-Classical’ held in Pittsburgh in 2008 and a workshop on ‘Goethe and Idealism’ hosted by DePaul University in 2009, the 2011 Yearbook’s major theme is the relation of Goethe to German Idealism. As such, it tackles such topics as Goethe’s cultural, institutional and philosophical function in Weimar and Jena; the relationship of Goethe to the early German Romantics; Goethe’s reception of Spinoza; Goethe’s interest in Kant in general (and the notion of teleological judgement in particular); the contrast between the conceptual, systematic approach of Hegel and Goethe’s approach; the concepts of intuition and anschauende Urteilskraft; his concept of morphology; his understanding of nature as a living organism; and the relation of nature to art, and science to poetics and religion.
Nothing could be more ‘eternal’ and ‘immutable’ than the concept of God advanced by Spinoza, and Horst Lange offers a careful, even sceptical account of the vexed (and highly problematic) question of Goethe’s reception of this ‘God-intoxicated’ thinker. Goethe’s reading of Spinoza forms the basis of Frederick Amrine’s essay that seeks to refute a widely held view of Goethe as philosophically naïve and unschooled, and argues in favour of a Spinozist ground for key concepts in his scientific method. The central notion of an intuitive power of judgement is in turn explored (and clarified) by Gunnar Hindrichs. Although Goethe and Novalis are often regarded, in terms of literature and science alike, as antipodes, Dalia Nassar notes − while not collapsing their distinctive projects − the numerous affinities between them. Again like the early German Romantics, Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt sought to move beyond ‘graphs and charts’ (as the author of the ‘Oldest Systematic Programme of German Idealism’ puts it, already anticipating the rise of statistics and Powerpoint presentations), and Elizabeth Millán argues that both thinkers reveal the important benefits that accrue to science when it relates itself to aesthetics. Three papers examine the question of Goethe’s relation to Hegel, with particular reference to Hegel’s appropriation of Faust (Jeffrey Champlin); the relation of art to science and knowledge (Luke Fischer, who draws on Rudolf Steiner’s lecture, ‘Goethe as the Father of a new aesthetics’, 1888); and the affinities between Goethean morphology and Hegelian phenomenology (Brady Bowman, who argues that ‘insight into the ways that Goethe’s methodology of the intuitive understanding shaped Hegel’s philosophical procedures … make[s] the German Idealist tradition productive in unexpected ways for interrogating the nature of philosophical evidence’ (p. 177)). Around the question that Gretchen famously posed to Faust, John H. Smith brings this section to a close with a lively discussion of philosophies of religion (with reference to Kant, Reinhold, Fichte and, in particular, Schelling) around 1800.
Several of the issues discussed in these papers find a resonance in the four remaining essays in the Yearbook. Adrian Del Caro proposes a new reading of the figure of Margarete in Faust, drawing on recent investigations of Goethe’s sources for this work in antiquity and its metaphors of mystical rebirth and baptism to argue that she is an Ariadne/Medea figure: ‘Faust’s love with and for Margarete and Helena are designed to bring him closer to the source of all creativity, mystically portrayed as the Mothers, by means of a shattering experience’, he argues (p. 239). Martin Walser’s recent novel about Goethe and Ulrike von Levetzow, Ein liebender Mann (2008), is insightfully analysed by Jens Kruse in the context of earlier treatments in ‘Ulrike novels’ of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era and the post-war period. Stefani Engelstein examines sisterly love (an option apparently absent from the discourse of fraternity embraced by the EU in its choice of Beethoven’s setting of ‘Ode to Joy’ as its anthem) in Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina, while Gail Hart uses the paradox of freedom and didactic intention, captured in Schiller’s remark that ‘the highest freedom is only possible through the highest determination’ (see p. 245), as a starting-point to discuss the problem of external influence and the appearance of autonomy with reference to Der Geisterseher. Finally, the fleeting and the ephemeral − or, even here, possibly not − finds due recognition in the Yearbook’s reviews section, which devotes around 40 pages to a consideration of some two dozen new publications in the field of German eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies. This section opens with a knowledgeable and balanced review essay considering the scholarship dubbed New Economic Criticism, and it closes with a report on a recent study of the anthroposophical Mysteriendrama. As well as demonstrating the perennial relevance of the tradition of German Idealism, this absorbing Yearbook confirms the utility of a philosophical or historico-intellectual approach to Goethe, especially one alert to the particular contribution of aesthetics.