Poetic Transformations and Nineteenth-Century Scholarship: The "Friederikenliteratur"

HELGA STIPA MADLAND Poetic Transformations and Nineteenth-Century Scholarship: The "Friederikenliteratur" Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. In 1840, Karl Bahrs published a novella titled Das Geheimnis in which a character named Eduard criticizes Goethe's behavior toward Friederike Brion and is immediately challenged by his listeners. Goethe 's love affair in Sesenheim, immortalized in the collection of lyrics known as the "Sesenheimer Lieder," had become a controversial issue in mid-nineteenth century literary circles and scholarship because it involved significant questions of guilt and responsibility. Interest in the love story between the young Goethe studying in Strasbourg and the young Friederike Brion living quietly in a country parsonage in Sesenheim had been sparked by the publication of an essay earlier in 1840 by the Bonn philologist August Friedrich Näke (1788-1838) titled "Wallfahrt nach Sesenheim ."2 In this essay, written after his visit to Sesenheim in 1822 but not published until eighteen years later, Näke relates the story of Friederike Brion's "fall" after being abandoned by Goethe, and he presents a much different picture than that familiar from Dichtung und Wahrheit? Näke's essay led to a veritable flood of biographical studies and essays on Friederike Brion, Goethe and Brion, and Lenz and Brion. Most were written by scholars of literature, but some were the work of individuals who had an interest in the matter for other reasons: Philipp Ferdinand Lucius, for example , whose Friederike Brion von Sessenheim was published in 1878 in a second edition, was a pastor in Sesenheim.4 Some of the material was intentionally fictionalized, for example Albert Griin's play Friederike, published in 1859.5 The scholarly and literary material is permeated with admiration for the Sesenheim idyll, but also with questions and discussions of the purity of Brion's love for Goethe and of his responsibility toward an inexperienced young woman upon whose life he apparently had a major impact. The Goethe Yearbook 29 genuineness of Lenz's love for Friederike Brion and her meaning in his life are also a concern. ' Alongside these ethical considerations, however, today 's reader is impressed by another problem the material unintentionally reveals, and that is the enigmatic relationship between literature and life, the exchange of fact and fiction. The apparent confusion between the two, a slippage to which both readers and writers succumbed, may be partially explained by the theory of aesthetics dominant in the second half of the nineteenth century. Fundamental to the theory of 'psychological aesthetics' is a notion of spontaneity that equates work with personality, an explanation of the nature of art which allows scholars to posit and study the psychic activity from which a work arises in the belief that this will reveal its meaning.7 The peculiar literary phenomenon referred to by many scholars as the "Friederikenliteratur"8—an obsession with Goethe and to some degree with Lenz concerning their personal relationships with Friederike Brion, and the desire to transform the fictional woman into a factual one, appears from the distance of more than one hundred years to be scholarly, aesthetic, and literary folly. It can only be understood within an historical context involving both the tenets of late nineteenthcentury aesthetics and the competition among increasing numbers of literary scholars to dominate the discourse. In 1822 Ludwig Tieck, who had read Dichtung und Wahrheit but apparently did not pay close attention to the title, was the first of many "pilgrims" to Sesenheim, but most likely not the last to be disappointed by what he found.9 "Glauben Sie wohl, daß es mich gewissermaßen gereut, daß ich Sesenheim besucht habe?" he writes in his novella Der Monds üchtige: Zwar nicht gereut, der Ausdruck paßt nicht. Aber eine unpoetische Wehmut erfüllt mich, daß alles dort so anders, so ganz anders war, als meine Phantasie es mir, nach der unvergleichlichen Schilderung unsere Dichters, vorgemalt hatte. Denn diese Schilderungen in seinem Buche von diesem Teile seines Lebens, die Darstellung dieser Gegend und jener liebenswürdigen Familie, das süße Licht, das alles magisch umspielt, diese liebevollen Töne, die so ungesucht sich dem Erzähler bieten, und die...