Winterströme: Goethes erste Harzreise, and:Im Labyrinth der Täler: Goethes zweite Harzreise , and: Die Würde der Steine: Goethes dritte Harzreise (review)

Bernd Wolff, author of poetry and children’s books, grew up in Wernigerode in the Harz, and now lives in Blankenburg. He has published illustrated books on the Harz and was “fachlicher Berater” for television programs on Goethe’s Harz journeys. He clearly knows the Harz through which Goethe traveled in 1777, 1783, and 1784. Though he is not a professional Germanist, these novels are evidence of an enviable knowledge of Goethe’s oeuvre, the eighteenth-century Weimar milieu in which he lived and worked, and the human and geological history of the Harz and of Saxony.

Each novel focuses on one of Goethe’s three journeys. Featured players include the well and the less well known: Carl August, Anna Amalia, Georg Melchior Kraus, Goethe’s servant and factotum Christoph Sutor, Friedrich Victor Plessing, Charlotte von Stein, Fritz von Stein, Anna Maria Antonia Branconi, Carl Johann Matthaei, and the mining superintendent Friedrich Wilhelm von Trebra. Walk-on parts are occupied by the familiar and the more obscure: Luise von Göchhausen, a terribly insecure Duchess Luise Auguste, Josias von Stein (absorbed more in his horses than in his wife), Goethe’s cook Dorothee Wagenknecht (who disturbs his peace with her singing), Fritz Jacobi, Domherr von Berg in Halberstadt, the poet Gleim, Luise von Hartefeld (mistress of Carl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick), and Johann Joachim Eschenburg. The background is filled with figures one has heard of but whose position in Goethe’s life one might not be able to place: Emilie von Werthern, Adelaide von Waldner, and Sophie von Schardt, to name a few. We attend Duchess Luise’s birthday, a somber affair in view of the recent loss of a child (thus, a reading from Herder’s work in progress, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit). There are even intimate tête-à-têtes between Carl August and his mother concerning his marital duties as well as state policy. Mostly Anna Amalia sits around with court ladies gossiping while drinking tea from porcelain cups.

Such court happenings serve as a contrast to the Harz world Goethe explores. Thus, we are introduced to such man-made wonders as the Rehberger Graben, completed in the early seventeenth century to regulate the Oder, and to the legends behind the Roßtrappe and, of course, to the “Teufelskanzel” and the “Hexenaltar” on the Brocken. We make the perilous descent into mines with Goethe. Some are very deep, up to 520 meters, and some (e.g., Rammelsberg) were important sources of revenue in the Middle Ages already, forming self-sufficient communities in which, for instance, no agricultural work was allowed, the better to exploit their potential. Since Goethe was present, we are even privy to the ruminations of the powerful—the Duke of Brunswick and Carl von Hardenberg-Reventlow—at the secret negotiations in Brunswick in connection with plans for the Fürstenbund. Carl Wilhelm Ferdinand appears here in a moment of transition, after his brilliant military successes, while he was devoting himself to his “enlightened ruler” intentions, and before the period of defeat as portrayed in Campagne in Frankreich. We read of boar hunting, of clouds, of the accommodations at inns, of the Boten who led Goethe through the Harz, of Eierkuchen, of butterflies. I refrain from going on.

Wolff of course has a more serious purpose than trotting out details of natural and human history. The Harz journeys, though closely connected with Goethe’s mining and mineralogical duties and interests, offer a framework for exploring his first decade in Weimar. Thus, Wolff attempts to show the effect of the journeys on Goethe’s literary conceptions and also his developing interest in the natural sciences: not only “Harzreise im Winter” and Die Geheimnisse but also the granite essays, the osteological work, and ultimately the...