Building Bridges: Goethe’s Fairy-Tale Aesthetics

In my first course with Stuart Atkins, German Romanticism it was, the first text on the syllabus was Goethe’s “Das Märchen” (The Fairy Tale) and the last was his Novelle (Novella). This essay begins to address what I learned from those choices. It also addresses another experience I had with an equally eminent scholar who shall, however, remain nameless here. That person asked me what my favorite Goethe text was, apart from Faust. Floored, I finally said, “the Märchen.” “Wrong!” came the answer, “Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities).” What was I thinking? I was identifying what seemed to me the most paradigmatic, the most Goethean, of Goethe’s works, while my interlocutor was identifying the work that spoke most directly to the turn of the millennium. Today I want to see what might be learned from my answer and to show how Goethe’s fairy tale illuminates some of his less paradigmatic works. In fact, I want to claim that fairy tale is Goethe’s basic modus operandi, even though he wrote only three of them (“Das Märchen,” “Die neue Melusine,” and “Der neue Paris”). I made a comparable argument once for “Hexenküche” (Witch’s Kitchen) as the paradigm for Goethe’s new conception of Faust when he returned to the work in Italy.¹ I now think that this scene with its talking animals and witch comes from the realm of fairy tale; furthermore, I will argue shortly that the “Märchen,” like “Hexenküche,” also evokes Goethe’s Italian experiences. I will begin with a reading of it and then discuss another of Goethe’s fairy tales, “Die neue Melusine” from the Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years), to show not only the centrality of the genre for Goethe but also what it means that he took this arch-Romantic genre so seriously.

Goethe’s contemporaries were both baffled and delighted by the “Märchen,” published in 1795 as the end of Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Refugees). Two things seem fairly obvious to scholarly readers now: first, that it can be interpreted less in terms of its symbols than of its general structure and, second, that it responds to the French Revolution, the central political event for the Romantic generation and subject of the Unterhaltungen. Goethe describes how to purify monarchy rather than abolish it and how to control the mayhem of the Revolution.² The “Märchen,” which has been and can be read to be about many other things as well, initiated the vital tradition of Romantic “Kunstmärchen” (art-fairy-tale). It is paradigmatic for its decade in all these important ways.

Fig 1.

Layout of Goethe’s “Märchen” (J. K. Brown).

The “Märchen” is especially paradigmatic to Goethe for its connection to morphology. There has been a small tradition of reading it as being “about” biological morphology, but the better formulation is that the laws of morphology govern its literary form. Although most readers will be familiar with “Metamorphose der Pflanzen” (Metamorphosis of Plants) and the “Märchen,” the simple map shown in figure 1 may serve as a reminder of the essentials. The enchanted world of the “Märchen” is divided in two by a river, in flood at the moment. On the right side lives the beautiful Princess Lilie in a luxuriant park, all the product of her magically green thumb, but any living being (i.e., animal) she touches dies immediately. On the other, mountainous, side there is a buried temple, a green snake, and an old man and his wife. The old man’s magic lamp transforms stone into gold, wood into silver, and dead animals into gems. Flowers grow on this side.

In the story the overcoming of the enchantment—a shift from disorder and division to order and unity through the cooperation and even self-sacrifice of its characters—is organized in terms of Goethe’s laws of plant development. Two will-o’-the-wisps, pure light (which is also manifested in the gold...