The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe (review)

Patrick Leigh Fermor felt it. Staying in Vienna on his way by foot from the Netherlands to Istanbul, the British traveler almost detoured south:

It is a famous hazard. All dwellers in the Teutonic north, looking out at the winter sky, are subject to spasms of a nearly irresistible pull, when the entire Italian peninsula from Trieste to Agrigento begins to function like a lodestone. The magnetism is backed by an unseen choir, there are roulades of mandoline strings in the air; ghostly whiffs of lemon blossom beckon the victims south and across the Alpine passes. It is Goethe's Law and is as ineluctable as Newton's or Boyle's.

(Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts [New York: Harper & Row, 1977] 199)

It is unfortunate that Richard Block seems not to know Leigh Fermor's work, for the above quotation would have fit in nicely with Block's own definition of Goethe's Law, one predicated less on the earthly delights of Italy and more upon the inexorable influence that Goethe (and Winckelmann) have exerted on those who journeyed south after them. The main thesis of this complex, densely-argued book is that German journeys to Italy have always been built upon an absent ideal, whose absence, however, Goethe and Winckelmann did much to conceal.

Block's first full chapter is devoted to Winckelmann. It is here that he develops his argument that Italian journeys by German writers are based upon substitution. In the case of Winckelmann, Block elucidates the all-important role that copies play in the former's admiration for the Greeks. In addition, Italy, not Greece, is the place where Winckelmann develops his theories about Greek art, an example of another substitution. Furthermore, Winckelmann's own ekphrastic descriptions further distance the reader from the originals, both temporally and spatially. In addition to substitution, Italy is the "locus of cutting off," a jettisoning of that which came before (6). Block shows how Winckelmann's fascination with castrati as well as with Laokoon initiates this tradition.

The two chapters in The Spell of Italy dealing almost exclusively with Goethe expand upon the argument. Goethe comes to precede his own father, whose Italian journey is supplanted by the son's. As Block writes of Johann Caspar, "His presence is only by virtue of the law that his son's journey executes" (49). Johann Wolfgang goes beyond the father, in that he journeys to Sicily and there discovers the Urpflanze. Just as important in Goethe's rebirth in Italy, however, is not what he brings back, but what he leaves behind. "Goethe must distance himself from himself; something of himself must be left for dead in Italy" (67). That something is the multiple aliases Goethe used to surreptitiously travel to and within Italy as well as his desire to be a painter, not a writer. Faustina, the beloved of the Römische Elegien, is also left behind and her questionable existence serves as another example of the ideal built upon absence. Block's analysis is wide-ranging, taking in not only the Italienische Reise and the Römische Elegien, but also the Venezianische Epigramme and various shorter texts, as well.

Goethe returns to Weimar from Italy and inaugurates German Classicism. In contrast, Heine travels to Italy and goes into Parisian exile afterwards. Heine's father, unlike Goethe's, is not yet dead at the time of his Italian travels. This, coupled with an awareness of the political situation in Italy missing in Goethe, leads, Block argues, to Heine's inability to return home to Germany again. Heine is the "one who cannot help but report what others sought to erase" (141). He cannot leave part of himself beyond as Winckelmann and Goethe do. Freud, too, returns from Italy to go into exile. Unlike the other travelers Block portrays, Freud actually travels beyond Italy to the actual site of the absent ideal: Greece. "He thereby redraws and extends the boundaries of the...