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  • After Jena: Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the End of the Old Regime
  • Adrian Daub
Peter J. Schwartz, After Jena: Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the End of the Old Regime. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010. 358 pp.

A title like After Jena may seem puzzling at first: which “Jena” and what “after” is the author interested in here? We might think of Jena as a metonymy for a constellation of thinkers, or a metaphor for their thought. But what Peter J. Schwartz is after in his book of that title is something altogether different: he means by “Jena” a particular date, namely the battle of Jena and Auerstedt. And while the roar of Jena’s cannons famously pounded its echoes into Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, we tend not to think of Goethe’s Elective Affinities as a text so indebted to a particular date, or expressive of a certain historical moment. We tend to think of it as “timeless,” and we are in good company, as Schwartz makes clear, though that doesn’t mean that we’re also right.

Schwartz undertakes to put the novel’s timelessness into interplay with its rather circumscribed historical moment, to show how broader questions raised themselves in a particular way and with particular vigor at a particular point in time. That point in time is the one identified in Schwartz’s subtitle: the period of Elective Affinities straddles the battle of Jena and Auerstedt on October 14, 1806, and thus the demise of the old feudal order in Germany. It is this demise that animates Goethe’s novel, Schwartz argues, and that accounts for its numerous and well-documented perplexities. According to Schwartz, Elective Affinities is an attempt to “represent, and thus understand, a radically new state of affairs in the world” (20), which emerges from a set of events understood by those who lived through them to be unprecedented, a caesura in the normal course of history. And while it attempts to comprehend a profoundly unsettled moment in history, Schwartz argues, the novel tarries with that unsettledness rather than attempting to resolve it (as did the cannons’ other listener, G. W. F. Hegel).

Schwartz proposes that the novel’s economic transactions, rather than standing in for shifts of erotic and personal power between the book’s protagonists, should be taken seriously in their own right. The sale of a shed, the building of a summer house, debates about expenditure and architecture are all grounded in a moment at which the legitimacy of the old regime was irreversibly shaken, when aristocratic behavioral norms were undergoing a breakdown and a Promethean new figure had arrived in the guise of Napoleon Bonaparte. The formal disturbances of Elective Affinities (which have the power to disturb in turn) simply register a wider disturbance in Goethe’s world. The novel is thus a story of change and the stories we tell about change. For instance, Schwartz understands the novel’s implicit rejection of romanticism and Rousseauism as the rejection of “attempts to establish order by replacing the crumbling myths of the ancien régime with positive conceptions” grounded in either a “new mythology” or a social utopia (168).

Schwartz suggests that this complex interrelation between Tagesbezug and more “timeless” themes, combined with the novel’s refusal to allow them to harmonize, accounts for the more than two hundred years of puzzlement engendered by Elective Affinities. Indeed, building on Astrida Tantillo’s work, Schwartz’s book is also about the reception of Goethe’s text, from immediate reactions (such as that of the aging Christoph Martin Wieland) to twentieth-century readers from Friedrich Gundolf and Jakob Wasserman to Walter Benjamin. Given its extreme level of detail and its wealth of scholarly references, After Jena is almost shockingly lucid and well written. Schwartz thrusts the reader into his argument right away, eschewing an introduction in favor of a simple chapter one; the remainder [End Page 308] of the book justifies its beginning in medias res, since the general thesis emerges quickly enough and since little is presupposed from chapter to chapter. The reader comes away both with a thorough background in varying interpretations of Elective Affinities from...

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