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  • Shakespeare And The Ethical Question: Leo Löwenthal In Memoriam
  • Geoffrey H. Hartman

The violent carriage of it Will clear or end the business: when the oracle (Thus by Apollo’s great divine seal’d up) Shall the contents discover, something rare Even then will rush to knowledge. Go: fresh horses! And gracious be the issue.

(The Winter’s Tale, 3.1.17–22) 1

A joining of East and West, which is the occasion of our meeting in Weimar, whether we understand it as a sacred union or simply a marriage of convenience, prompts me, at the beginning of this talk, to repeat a wishful declaration by Goethe in his West-Östlicher Divan: 2

So der Westen wie der Osten Geben Reines dir zu kosten.

[So the West like the East Give you pure things to taste.] 3

As is always the case, one can’t stop quoting Goethe. The next two lines run, just as deliciously:

Lass die Grillen, lass die Schale Setze dich zum grossen Mahle. [Leave aside suspicion and externals: Sit down to the festive meal.]

Goethe’s invitation can serve as motto for our intellectual feasting during the next few days.

But on these convivial occasions there is often a Banquo’s ghost, who [End Page 1] disturbs the well-ordered proceedings. “Do not stand upon the order of your going,” Lady Macbeth says, waving protocol primly or sardonically, as the Scottish nobles exit in disarray (3.5.118). Weimar, as lieu de mémoire, and this lecture-occasion itself, commemorating both Shakespeare and Goethe, must remind us that we are only a few miles from another memory-place, the Gedenkstätte Buchenwald. How tragic this proximity, how treacherous that a centre of barbarity existed at close quarters to a center of culture. A chasm opened up, no, was actively, by every device of cultural propaganda, dug deep, dividing neighbor from neighbor, driving into exile or death those who had shared, with likeminded enthusiasm, a love for Goethe and his concept of Bildung.

Can anything now remove the suspicion which has not dwindled in the years since Walter Benjamin articulated it: that every cultural monument might be unmasked as a document of barbarism? That even so high an ideal as “Weimar Culture” was impotent to stem barbarism? Or that, in the case of Germany, what went under the name of culture wasn’t that at all but rather a Scheinkultur? Goethe himself already suspected dilettantism and superficiality, but that was over two hundred years ago, near the beginning of Germany’s entry into “World Literature.” Goethe knew that Germany was, in cultural and political affairs, an apprentice: it still had to pass through the full historical appreciation of other peoples, whether Greek or French or English or Persian. He ransacked for his work all the points of the cultural compass; as late as 1827, on sending the Helena episode of Faust to the printer, he complains: “We Germans were born yesterday” (“Wir Deutschen sind von gestern”).

Leo Löwenthal, to whose memory I dedicate this talk, observed that Goethe’s consciousness of the exemplary achievements of the past, and his cosmopolitan willingness to make use of them, was missing in his time and remains unrealized to this day. He reinterprets “Die unbewältigte Vergangenheit” (“the unmastered past”) as symptomizing a basic fault which even Goethe’s life-long efforts failed to change. This fault, Löwenthal suggests, has been there all along as a formative trait of German bourgeois society. That society “did not master its prehistory but overwhelmed it” [“Sie hat ihre Vorgeschichte nicht bewältigt, sondern überwältigt”]. 4

Löwenthal’s analysis is also important for the conviction it upholds that history is intelligible: however dispiriting its course in Europe, the Enlightenment’s aude sapere is not extinguished, and our moral intelligence continues to take history as a text. Goethe can still speak to us, though always as critic, not as accomplice; so Goethe himself, addressing [End Page 2] Shakespeare as “my friend” in his youthful and effusive speech of 1771, adds that the English bard shamed as well as liberated him.

In what way is Shakespeare our friend today? Can we...

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