West-östliche Divan and the “Abduction/Seduction of Europe”: World Literature and the Circulation of Culture

For Reza in Göttingen

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World literature does not require that its readers travel; instead, the texts are brought to us, so that we do not need to go out into the world to find them.¹ By the nineteenth century, several generations of academics had already compiled and translated narratives acquired through global exploration. Enlightenment scholars gave precedence to travelogues and memoirs when formulating their own anthropological theories about distant societies.² To be sure, armchair anthropologists were always subject to criticisms from world travelers, yet at the start of the nineteenth century Europeans interested in learning Mandarin, Persian, or Sanskrit were more likely to visit the royal libraries than they were to cross the Indian Ocean.³ A parallel emerged between Europeans’ consumption of Asian luxury products and their reading of foreign literature. Already at the start of the eighteenth century, the consumption of fine goods such as tea, porcelain, spices, and perfumes set an aesthetic precedent for the intellectual engagement with foreign literature. Paris and London were the most important nodal points in the European network that amassed books, goods, and art together in large collections. These concentrations allowed consumers to see a material world culture before their eyes—yet from the start Goethe and his contemporaries juxtaposed the benefits of such large agglomerations against the injustice perpetrated in their acquisition. In the West-östliche Divan (West-Eastern Divan, 1819) Goethe raises the question of how to treat foreign treasures, literary and material, as he formulates an aesthetic that intertwines the public presentation of poetry with luxury consumption. Even as he eschews the strict separation of art from commerce typical of Weimar classicism and finds inspiration in Hafez’s ghazals, he continues to rely on Greek epics and myths as representations of the violence and robbery that precede the idyll.

In proclaiming the era of world literature, Goethe stresses that the end of the Napoleonic Wars has renewed communication and exchange between European nations and the world at large.⁴ Many types of exchange are assumed in such a generalization. One of the complexities within Goethe’s idea concerns the exact relationship between the circulation of culture and the demarcation of political territories. World literature, as Goethe states quite clearly, becomes conceivable only after the lifting of strict enforcement of territorial boundaries, in this case the British assertion of its control over the flow of goods to the European continent. Translations attempt to cross linguistic and political boundaries through philological negotiation, a model of international relations that Étienne Balibar presents as an instrument, as well as a regulative ideal, of multiculturalism.⁵

Running parallel to the media flow of communication are commercial trade networks. The lifting of England’s blockade after Napoleon’s fall allowed continental Europe to import commodities from abroad again—not just newspapers and books but also consumer goods and raw materials. However, the movement of world literature cannot be reduced to international commodity exchange. As Napoleon’s amassing of art in Paris demonstrated to his contemporaries, the circulation of cultural artifacts does not always include only legally sanctioned, open-market purchases but may also, of course, encompass the spoils of robbery, administrative transfer, expulsion, exile, and so forth. The ancient definition of “translation” as the transfer of sacred relics from one church to another included furtive stealing and political threats. The stealing of Saint Mark’s bones in 828 from Alexandria by Venetian merchants and Barbarossa’s gift of Milan’s relics of the Three Kings to the Cologne cathedral are just the most famous examples of forced translation. Napoleon’s military acquisition of art from across Europe and its eventual repatriation after his defeat were widely discussed as Goethe was writing the West-östliche Divan.⁶ He wrote a report on the subject to the governor of Prussia’s newly acquired Rhineland territories and dedicated the first volume of Über Kunst und Altertum (On Art and Antiquity, 1816) to the dispersal of artworks along the Rhineland.⁷ The horrors of war, the plunder of art, and Goethe’s poetic...