Goethe Handbuch. Supplemente 2, Naturwissenschaften ed. by Manfred Wenzel (review)

This volume contains a trove of important information and resources for the scholar of Goethe’s scientific works. The first part of the Handbuch includes extensive background information on Goethe’s scientific works and is divided according to the main categories of his corpus: morphology, color theory, geology, meteorology, and his more general natural philosophy, together with some miscellaneous texts. Each section is further divided into smaller subsections with articles providing extensive and useful information on Goethe’s scientific writings, whether long or short, significant or insignificant. The first part also contains an overview of the Rezeptions- und Wirkungsgeschichte of his scientific publications. Each of the subsections in this overview concludes with a bibliography of secondary sources. The most substantial part of the volume (about four hundred pages) is dedicated to encyclopedic entries relating to all aspects of Goethe’s scientific works. The more important entries also include bibliographic sources. The critical apparatus at the end of the Handbuch contains lists of contemporary reviews of Goethe’s works, the tables of contents of the various scientific Hefte that he published between 1817 and 1824, the location of specific scientific works within each of the main editions of his collected works (a helpful list since not all editions print all of his scientific corpus), a comprehensive timeline, and a general bibliography relating to Goethe’s work as a scientist and to the history of science at the time. The volume also features beautiful, representative color illustrations from Goethe’s scientific works.

Given the extensive electronic and online resources available today, one may at first question the usefulness of this volume. After all, we can now easily search Goethe’s works electronically and also quickly find general background information through online queries. Once one delves into the volume, however, it becomes quite clear how useful it is, whether to a beginner or to a seasoned researcher. For the beginner, the background essays in each of the categories listed above provide the essential framework to understand the overall history of science at the time. This information often includes what was occurring in the scientific community as well as the context of Goethe’s literary endeavors and life circumstances. As a scholar of Goethe’s science, I would definitely turn to this volume for highly specialized information, from the location of hard-to-find original sources (the authors here give detailed information that will save time for those needing to find the original sources) to little-known interconnections (again in great detail that includes bibliographic and archival resources) between Goethe’s major and more esoteric scientific works and the research of his contemporaries.

As one would expect from a volume that involves numerous authors, some sections are stronger and more complete than others. My main critique of several sections is that the bibliographies can be a bit out of date and some report almost exclusively on the work of German scholars—even though much of the recent scholarship on Goethe’s scientific works is being done outside Germany. As a result, some issues in the background articles are treated as settled (such as Goethe’s status as a precursor to Darwin), although recent (and American) scholarship has argued quite differently, and other subjects are almost entirely neglected (such as Goethe’s influence on American and European chaos theorists). Another issue that I have with the volume is how the bibliographies are organized. Rather than providing a bibliography for each main article within the background sections, a very long bibliography is printed at the end of each main section. For example, although the morphology section is divided into clear subsections (botanical, anatomical, etc.), scholars have to wade through a long bibliography to try and pick out the references relevant to a particular topic.

Overall, the amount of work and scholarship contained within this Handbuch is very impressive, and no library or serious scholar of Goethe’s science should be without it. It is also a very beautiful book—all two kilograms of it...