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

Focusing on the “Goethe effect” (111) in a series of intriguing psycho-biographies, Block offers a fascinating study of Italy’s attraction as evidenced in travelers from Winckelmann to Bachmann. Tracking the mysterious space Italy occupies in the minds of German and Austrian authors, he breaks the spell by spelling out how they have been drawn ever onward by Italy’s canonized magic, while emphasizing that in the illusive tradition of inscribing the land’s lure, this Italy might need an actual place to spell it for a while. By examining Winckelmann and Goethe’s legacies in the works of Heine, Nietzsche, Freud, and Mann, Block shows how belated writers are hindered by spellbinding phantasmagorias when trying to approach Italy in their own right: “To be on Goethe’s trails is [. . .] to pursue an origin that exists only as illusion” (10).

Winckelmann and Goethe are gloomy portents responsible for the castration of epigones, as well as for the development of fascist ideology. While compelling arguments about authorship, censorship, repression, exile, and “the logic of substitution” (4) smoothly guide the reader through the book, one also encounters bolder claims such as this: “the ideal Italy that Goethe substituted for the real one [. . .] generates a history [. . .] not unrelated to the political alliance between Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany” (15). In addition to occasionally leaping to rash conclusions, Block’s method of inquiry consists of a curious admixture of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Even though he is committed to Goethe the author (particularly to his nocturnal departure for Italy), rather than Goethe the text—there is a lot hors du texte, whereas close readings are more scarce—the book shows Goethe’s repressive influence, while dismantling structures to preserve their elements for recycling, exactly as Bachmann does, who is deployed as a mothering heroine to bracket Block’s elaborations on his “primary concern [. . .] men” (3).

Bachmann’s death in Rome, as well as her poem “Das erstgeborene Land”—Block simply identifies author with persona here (1)—appear only in the “Introduction” and the “Epilogue: Birthing Italy,” which is not surprising if one recalls Block’s principal interest in his male writers’ “dialogue with absence” (4), and in “Italy as a locus of cutting off” (6)—Italy’s geographic contour is read as phallic on this occasion. I cannot deny my uneasiness with Block’s stylization of Bachmann’s actual death into a “critical interruption of the tradition that Goethe established” (1), nor with his use of her death as a counterpart to Goethe’s “rebirth” in Italy. This reading of his is grounded in a dubious concoction of literal death with metaphorical birth, reminiscent of the problematic of Illness as Metaphor. Block’s reasoning culminates in the question of whether Bachmann’s death “might [. . .] not be [. . .] an auto-da-fé, the punishment exacted from one who seeks to awaken from the spell of Goethe’s Italy?” (3) By contrast, Bernhard in his Stimmenimitator states that Bachmann’s compatriots prevented her return to Austria and are responsible for her death.

“Opened Wounds: Winckelmann and the Discovery of the Art of the Ancients” offers a strong analysis of the art historian’s predilection for copies over originals: “copies keep desire focused on what is missing” (22). Block not only approaches the interconnections of Winckelmann’s life, work, homoeroticism, and death, but also sets the tone for subsequent chapters, where decisions whether or not to travel to Greece (Freud “goes too far” [14], while Winckelmann “bracket[s] out the real Greece” [34]), identity changes, and the ever fortified establishment of Italy as “space for vacationing, in which any form of resistance to desire is removed” (21) continue to play a significant role in completing a subtle argument about the paradox of the ideal as “present precisely where it is absent” (22).

In chapters 2 and 3, “Fathers and Sons in Italy: The Ghosts of Goethe’s Past,” and “Taking the Words out...