In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

EUZABETH POWERS From "Empfindungsleben" to "Erfahrungsbereich": The Creation of Experience in Goethe's Die Laune des Verliebten Freylich wenn mehrere das Gefühl dieser innern Form hätten, die alle Formen in sich begreift, würden wir weniger verschobne Geburten des Geists aneklen. Man würde sich nicht einfallen lassen, jede tragische Begebenheit zum Drama zu strecken, nicht jeden Roman zum Schauspiel zerstücklen! Ich wollte, daß ein guter Kopf dies doppelte Unwesen parodirte , und etwa die aesopische Fabel vom Wolf und Lamme zum Trauerspiel in fünf Akten umarbeitete. ("Aus Goethes Brieftasche") IT has been recognized and well documented that Goethe's early work in particular is heavily dependent on earlier literary models,1 but for generations of scholars Goethe was the poet who abandoned the age-old practice of imitation and initiated the poetry of experience ("Erlebnisdichtung "), a view abetted by his own Rousseau-tinged evaluation that all his work represented "fragments of a great confession." A representative view of the older scholarship supporting such an approach to Goethe can be seen in Der Rokoko-Goethe by Heinz Kindermann . Appearing in 1932, it traced the change from Goethe's early Anacreontic -style lyrics to the Sesenheim Lieder and into the Sturm und Drang period. According to Kindermann, Goethe underwent a personal breakthrough that led him away from Rococo artificiality to poetry that came from "dem innersten Empfindungsleben." Similarly, Hermann Baumgart, writing in 1931, perceived in "Das Buch Annette" "einen tiefen Einblick in die leidenschaftlichen Stürme, von denen die Brust des werdenden Dichters erschüttert wurde, und [wir] werden zu Zeugen gemacht, wie unzerst örbare Kräfte seines Innern frei werden, um ihn aus der Unnatur einer konventionell erheuchelten Gefühlswelt [i.e., Rococo poetry] zu der frischen Luft der Wahrheit und Natur die Wege finden zu lassen."2 However outmoded these views of an earlier era may seem, they are so powerful that they still inform contemporary evaluations, according to which life itself provides the impulse for the work. For instance, Deirdre 2 Elizabeth Powers Vincent's recent study of Die Leiden des jungen Werther, though resolutely textual and thus formal, seeks the reason for changes in the second version of the novel in biography (i.e., Goethe's letters to Frau von Stein). Goethe's most recent biographer, Nicholas Boyle, also portrays Goethe's artistic development in terms of private impulses. While citing Goethe's attempts to write works of literature that transcended accidents of life and fortune (100), Boyle writes, in regard to the year 1773, "Never again in his writing life was there so exact a coincidence of personal and general concern " (168).3 One reason that the biographical model has been so tenacious, particularly in interpreting the changes in Goethe's work between Leipzig and Strasbourg, is the fact that very little work has actually been done in recent years on the period Goethe spent as a student in Leipzig during which he wrote two poem collections ("Das Buch Annette" and Neue Lieder) and a pastoral play (Die Laune des Verliebten). The most recent study of the complete "Das Buch Annette," by Werner von Nordheim, appeared in 1967. Nordheim rightly attempts to rescue the collection from the criticism of derivativeness lodged by earlier scholars. He points out the training ground these poems represented, in which Goethe emulated and, in strongly competitive fashion, tried to better his poetic models. Nordheim documents the contrasting positions of earlier critics concerning this collection —(1) that it contains no Erlebnis character, but is only an imitation of Rococo models; or (2) that even these first imitative efforts reveal traces of the "real" Goethe (as in Kindermann's and Baumgart's judgments)—and makes important points concerning Goethe's partiality for the conventional .5 Despite painstaking analysis of this collection, Nordheim likewise lapses into the practice of measuring this early poetry by the amount of "personally experienced" that it contains. Thus, these Rococo works serve "der Selbstbestätigung des Jünglings . . . , und sie zielen .. . auf Weltbewältigung ab. Beides fällt zusammen in dem Streben nach fortschreitender Selbstverwirklichung" (91-92). Recent scholarship challenging or offering new strategies in place of the biographical tendency is subject to an interesting reversal...

pdf

Share