Geheimräte gegen Geheimbünde: Ein unbekanntes Kapitel der klassisch-romantischen Geschichte Weimars (review)

256 Book Reviews erotics to all of Goethe's writing. The Roman Elegies make clear that the erotic experience brings classical art and literature to life and allows one "to see with feeling eye, and feel with seeing hand." This merging of the touchoriented sensory realm and the sight-oriented intellectual realm enables the poet to write, tapping out hexameters on the slumbering lover's back. In the Venetian Epigrams, the poet answers repeated questions about the presence of low-class girls in his works with the response that, in contrast to Midas, what he touches becomes, in his hands, lively poetry. In "Das Tagebuch," the erotic encounter causes physical impotence, then memories of past passion, and then the power to write. Again and again, Goethe's texts assert the importance of erotics for literature. The true merit of this collection is that it urges the reader to consider whether Goethe's erotic poetry is not in fact simply another name for Goethe's collected works. Whitman College Robert Tobin Wilson, W. Daniel, Geheimräte gegen Geheimbünde: Ein unbekanntes Kapitel der klassisch-romantischen Geschichte Weimars. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991. 391 pp. In his painstaking archival investigations of the seamier side of Weimar cultural politics during the 1780s and 1790s, W. Daniel Wilson has uncovered aspects of Goethe's and Carl August's dealings with the literary and professorial intelligentsia of the duchy that do not conform to traditional monumentalizing depictions of classical Weimar as a center of liberal tolerance . No doubt it will come as a surprise to many readers to learn not only that the Duke and his most trusted privy councilor joined the local chapter of the Illuminati—a particularly secretive German outgrowth of the Freemasons —in the early 1780s, but that their main intent seems to have been to keep an eye on suspicious activities. What otherwise might have remained a rather arcane incident in German intellectual history—the Illuminati were disbanded officially in 1785-86 due to internal quarrels and outside pressure from the Bavarian government, which accused them of irreligious and insurrectionist aims—took on disquieting tones in the 1790s when conservative and reactionary German publicists launched accusations that the Illuminati were in fact still in operation and had been responsible for inciting the French Revolution. As a result of Wilson's findings, it becomes clear that in addition to covering up all traces of their illuminist past, Carl August, Goethe, and other chief officials in Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach also took care to demonstrate that Weimar was not a hotbed of revolutionary propaganda by monitoring and suppressing anything even remotely resembling support for events in France following the outbreak of war; indeed, some of the strictest instructions regarding surveillance of French "sympathizers" such as Herder came from Carl August while he 'was away serving as a Prussian general in the summer and fall of 1792. Goethe Yearbook 257 Already the first sentence of Wilson's preface serves as a clue that the revelations to come are meant at least in part as a further demolition of the already tottering "Klassik-Legende": "Für Außenstehende ist die an Besessenheit grenzende Beschäftigung mit Goethe ein faszinierendes Phänomen, denn in anderen westlichen Kulturen findet man kaum eine ähnliche Belastung der nationalen Identität durch eine übermächtige literarische Persönlichkeit " (9). Wilson, however, is not so much interested in levelling personal accusations against Goethe or his princely patron as in investigating the institutional mechanisms that enabled the channeling and control of oppositional thought and behavior by the state at the very time and place when the notion of artistic and individual autonomy was being developed. The activities of Carl August and his ministers, in other words, are seen not as atypical, but rather as all too typical of power constellations in late eighteenth -century German principalities. This eminently Foucauldian mode of thought is also evident in Wilson's discussion of the internal organization of the Illuminati, which bore an uncanny resemblance to the absolutist society they were attempting to supplant : although the ultimate aim of the society was the elimination of states and princes—as formulated in founder Adam Weishaupt's "Anrede an die neu...