Goethes Dramatik: Theater der Erinnerung (review)

Goethe Yearbook 233 profession was dominated by male native speakers of German. The "Ausgrenzung des Weiblichen" that Becker-Cantarino locates in 1795 appears to be alive and well in 1986. University of California, Los Angeles Jill Anne Kowalik Schanze, Helmut, Goethes Dramatik: Theater der Erinnerung. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1989 (Theatron: Studien zur Geschichte und Theorie der dramatischen Künste, Vol. 4). Helmut Schanze's Goethes Dramatik contains conscientious commentary on Goethe's dramatic practice and theory as well as information on the genesis of individual plays, considered to a greater or lesser extent in the light of the thesis that Goethe's dramatic art is a "Theater der Erinnerung." The central idea is that early conceptions were preserved, made rational, and deliberately retrieved, as from a place of gestation, and worked into their public form — to be brought to sensuous life in the theater. This book is most interesting, however, when the author neglects his theory of conception, recollection (Goethe's memory aided by favorite mnemonic devices — schemata, increasingly, after 1800), and conscious production — that is, when he studies Goethe's workmanship in a way not strictly in the service of his thesis. The best chapters simply observe the dramatist in his workshop. Due attention is given to the early plays and to the minor ones written after 1800. Iphigenie gets short shrift, while the treatment of Tasso takes up nineteen pages, much of it bearing only tangentially on Schanze's main argument. The "Schematische Methode" generating the "Repräsentationsst ücke" (e.g. Paläophron und Neoterpe, Pandora, and Des Epimenides Erwachen), rather than the works themselves, is at the center of focus, although Die natürliche Tochter is dealt with in its generic as well as its genetic aspects ("Der Titel könnte in der Tat auch nur 'Trauerspiel' lauten," 142). In general, interpretation is, as the author says, "knapp gehalten." Goethes Dramatik reflects usefuffy on "Goethes poetische Rhetorik und ihr Verhältnis zur Tradition" and on his theory of poetic production. It is also instructive as to his compositional practice and his way of responding to both commissions and flashes of inspiration. Schanze's accounting of the "Publikationsbedingungen " of Götz von Berlicbingen and of the arcane topoi informing Tasso, however, has little to do with a "Theater der Erinnerung," while, on the other hand, the designation oi Faust and Iphigenie as "besondere Form[en] in der Erinnerungsenzyklopädie" (77) seems gratuitous. The rubric "Theater der Erinnerung" is questionable for at least three reasons. First, too much in Goethe's work does not fit neatly under it. Second, though learned and thorough, Schanze is too much the traditional Germanist and too little the psychologist or epistemologist to have settled the questions any investigation of the role of memory in creativity raises. Finally, the concept "Theater der Erinnerung," as Schanze seems unintentionally to confess through special pleading in its behalf (see, for example, the "Bestätigung" offered on p. 149 for the "Memorialcharakter" of Die natürliche Tochter), is almost empty. This is not to suggest that Goethe's creativity was ungoverned 234 Book Reviews by inherited categories, deliberate purposes or an evolving methodology. In principle, the attempt to discern the structures informing his plans, the genesis of his plays, his rhetorical aims and methods, and his changing conception of his mission is worthwhile and may yield instructive studies in the future. I see little evidence that Schanze reads Goethe "gegen den Strich," as he claims to do. The view of theater as "erinnernde Vergegenwärtigung" (5) seems to take a representational conception of art for granted. The view of a dramatic text as a repository of memories ("gebuchte Imaginationen," 41) to be revived through performance does not indicate a subtle underetanding either of intertextuality or the relationship between art and experience. Goethe understood that not only the "schwankende Gestalten" of Faust — "die paradigmatische Konzeption für Goethes Theater der Erinnerung" (6) — but also the Urfaust and, indeed, every invocation of any tradition by any author whatsoever involves a re-presentation of memories, among other things, as Schanze acknowledges when he quotes Goethe's note on Plato in his youthfuf "Ephemerides": "es sey alles Erinnerung was wir...