„Ein Unendliches in Bewegung“. Künste und Wissenschaften im medialen Wechselspiel bei Goethe ed. by Barbara Naumann, Margrit Wyder (review)

While the preface arranges this collection under the rubric of intermediality, a more traditional Germanist would consider these essays to be discussions of Goethe’s creativity in arts other than poetry and prose. Their underlying coherence is brought out by Gabriele Busch-Salmen via a quotation from Wieland in which he explains that Goethe wanted to show himself a master in all the arts by representing all levels and types of culture in his own work. Goethe’s all-encompassing aspiration is confirmed throughout this wide-ranging collection. Nevertheless, the volume holds together well given that the fourteen essays fall into three categories: the first deals with the Classicist agenda Goethe enunciated in the Propyläen along with Schiller and Johann Heinrich Meyer; the second cluster examines the adaptation of Goethe’s writing as musical composition; while the third treats his work in the natural sciences, specifically as Goethe reflected upon the visualization of natural phenomena with regard to light and geology. Because the contributors hail from the French and German corners of Switzerland, the collection also provides us with a sense of a less systematic, more essayistic French approach to German literature. The footnotes often point to work composed beyond the famous universities along the Rhine, thereby extending the analysis beyond the learned circuit of (West) German Goethe scholarship.

Hans-Georg von Arburg provides a new interpretation of Goethe’s Kunstmärchen “Der neue Paris” that focuses on the architectural parallels between the story’s structures, particularly its exotic garden house with latticework, and Goethe’s description in Dichtung und Wahrheit of his earliest memories of his paternal house. Arburg quite correctly perceives Goethe’s architectonic writing as art of a larger self-hermeneutic project to depict and thereby construct his innermost thoughts. Concentrating on both architectural and morphological metaphors, Edith Anna Kunz shows convincingly that Goethe’s reflections on form in Propyläen anticipate a post-Classical aesthetic of fragmentation and sequences, even as the journal’s subject matter analyzes the organic unities of ancient art. In keeping with the volume’s coverage of an eclectic assemblage of diverse art forms, Kunz’s argument aligns Goethe’s activities as collector with his Morphologie as well as late poetic forms such as West-östlicher Divan and Faust II. Dominik Müller insists that the subtle interlacing of the epistolary form in “Der Sammler und die Seinigen” skirts around both systematic classifications of Meyer’s cultural history and Schiller’s programmatic culture politics.

The authors are all aware that they are cheering for an underdog when they evaluate Meyer’s continued standing as an art historian. Several of the essays reinterpret Meyer’s projects as having anticipated later more successful compositions (Margrit Wyder on Meyer’s awkward painting Oedipus löst das Rätsel der Sphinx) or as a deconstructive strategy to challenge the eternal validity of Classicism (Johannes Grave).

Carl Friedrich Zelter replaces Johann Heinrich Meyer as the aesthetic concerns shift in the second half of the volume where the essays concern Goethe’s work on music rather than visual images. Through a detailed interpretation of his staging of Properina, Gabriela Busch-Salman explains Goethe’s performance of synesthesia, which includes Meyer’s backdrop painting of the underworld, but which is more interesting for the singers’ rhetorical intertwining of music, declamation, singing, costume, and posture. Johannes Anderegg’s close reading of Faust’s lyricism is augmented by Fritz Egli’s ambitious theoretical integration of Goethe’s musical poetics into Kantian aesthetics. The essays on music are much more promising as a vein for further scholarly research. Historically, Goethe’s musical explorations were not as constrained by the lack of local talent that undermined his effort to import Classical painting and architecture. Barbara Naumann uses Goethe’s famous dictum that a string quartet sounds like four intelligent people holding a conversation with each other to explore...