Ungleiche Gleichgesinnte. Die Beziehung zwischen Goethe und Schiller 1794–1798 by Gerrit Brüning (review)

Which student or scholar of German literature has not heard of Goethe’s “first” discussion with Schiller after the July 1794 meeting of the Jena Scientific Society, culminating in his reaction to Goethe’s sketch of plant metamorphosis: “Das ist keine Erfahrung, das ist eine Idee”? Since Goethe inserted “Glückliches Ereignis” in the first issue of his morphological journal in 1817, the autobiographical anecdote has provided an undisputed point of reference to the relationship of the two Dioscuri. Regardless of the dubious historiographical status of a text aimed at defending Goethe’s scientific identity as an empirical thinker, the canonical fragment, with its core metaphor of “Geistesantipoden,” has fed an uninterrupted critical tradition casting Goethe and Schiller as intellectual opposites, one that has affected the assessment of their literary alliance.

As his title “Ungleiche Gleichgesinnte” indicates, rather than using “Glückliches Ereignis” as an interpretive model, Gerrit Brüning’s critical examination of the Goethe–Schiller correspondence shifts the focus of the relationship from one of essentialist opposition to one of aesthetic commonality between two unequal literary partners.

Informed by scholarship on the letter genre, Brüning’s approach to his epistolary subject matter combines several methodological strands: rhetorical textual analysis, source criticism, historical chronology, and literary history—as revealed in contemporary correspondence, publications, and reviews. He also weaves into his textual interpretations and extensive footnotes a careful refutation of scholarly treatment of the correspondence that has over-accentuated the Goethe–Schiller dichotomy. Brüning’s incisive critical analyses lend his conclusions a scholarly authority that should establish the significance of his study for future scholars and students of the Goethe– Schiller era.

As reconstructed by the author, the chronology of the post-Italian years leading to Schiller’s invitation to Goethe, on June 13, 1794, to collaborate in Die Horen underscores the asymmetry of their social and literary relationship but yields no clue for the kind of intentional avoidance of the Raüber author highlighted in “Glückliches Ereignis.” Instead, the meticulously narrated sequence of events provides abundant evidence of a relationship that was formal and asymmetrical, but unencumbered. Starting with the meeting in Rudolstadt on September 7, 1788, the first phase features Schiller’s review of Egmont, his administrative visit to Goethe on December 15, 1788, to discuss his appointment at the university of Jena, Schiller’s letters of February 1789, Goethe’s negotiation with Duke Carl August of a stable remuneration enabling Schiller to marry Charlotte von Lengefeld, Goethe’s Dresden visit to Schiller’s friend Christian Gottfried Körner, Friedrich and Charlotte Schiller’s invitation to Goethe in Jena, and their joint invitation to the Duke’s table in January 1791, to conclude with Goethe’s multiple stagings of Don Carlos prior to his departure to join the military campaign in France.

Brüning’s characterization of Schiller’s Horen-invitation letter accentuates the formal character of the request, and the informal nature of Goethe’s response that indicates his personal rather than political motivation in joining the literary project. In his discussion of Schiller’s famous “Geburtstagsbrief” of August 23, 1794, the author calls into question the hypostatization of Schiller’s opposition of speculative and intuitive mind into a fixed construct—parallel to the essentialist dichotomy of “Glückliches Ereignis.” Going back to the anthropological understanding of the terms as “artificial” vs. “naked” vision, he points out that Schiller’s aesthetic “ideas” can be congruent with empirical objectification while intuition designates an epistemological process based on sensory perception. Schiller’s rhetorical emphasis, Brüning observes, sketches a movement of the opposite terms toward a meeting point in poetic complementarity. In defending Goethe’s “Episteln” and the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten against the widespread contention that these texts convey a covert or overt critique of the Horen program and of Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education, Brüning probes textual genesis and publication chronology to note the neglected...