Ut Pictura Historia: Goethe's Historical Imagination and the Augenblick

NICHOLAS RENNIE Ut Pictura Historia: Goethe's Historical Imagination and the Augenblick Goethe is famously skeptical about the value of history writing. As Faust exclaims sardonically to his famulus Wagner, the times of the past are at best "ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln" (576), at worst a Kehrichtfaß or a chaotic Rumpelkammer (582). Wagner finds his own naive faith in progress confirmed by what he cans the "spirit of the ages"; Faust retorts: "Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heißt, / Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist, / In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln" (577-79)· Historians find in history only what they wish to find, projecting their own desires and assumptions upon a lifeless jumble of incoherent facts. Goethe's work, of course, demonstrates in its various genres a constant and vigorous interest in historical subjects. This is evident, for instance, in Götz von Berlichingen and Egmont, in Goethe's translation of and commentary on Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, in the Geschichte der Farbenlehre and the "Noten und Abhandlungen" of the Divan, and, of course, in Italienische Reise, Dichtung und Wahrheit and Campagne in Frankreich. A couplet from Goethe's later years asks: "Wer in der Weltgeschichte lebt, / Dem Augenblick sollt' er sich richten?" This possibility is dismissed with the aphoristic response: "Wer in die Zeiten schaut und strebt, / Nur der ist werth zu sprechen und zu dichten" (WA 1.3:230). A quatrain from the Divan raises the chaUenge: Wer nicht von dreitausend Jahren Sich weiß Rechenschaft zu geben, Bleib' im Dunkeln unerfahren, Mag von Tag zu Tage leben.1 It is not sufficient, nor even perhaps possible, simply to live ahistorically, within the present moment. Yet Goethe's disparaging comments about history belie a sense of helplessness . In an age when German ideaUsm is affirming the role of the human self (or the Ich) as autonomous historical subject, Goethe describes rather a temporal consciousness incapable of relating past to present, of situating itself in a coherent and stable temporal order. To his friend Chancellor von Müller Goethe says on December 17, 1824: "Und doch kann ei- Goethe Yearbook 121 gentlich niemand aus der Geschichte etwas lernen, denn sie enthält ja nur eine Masse von Torheiten und Schlechtigkeiten." The difficulty is not simply that history is unknowable, or that as a document of human wretchedness it reminds us "daß es zu allen Zeiten und in allen Ländern miserabel gewesen ist." The düemma is rather that history, in its incoherence, exerts a negative influence on the present. In a sketch we read: "Die Geschichte, selbst die beste, hat immer etwas Leichenhaftes, den Geruch der Todtengruft " (WA 1.28:358). If an awareness of time and history is necessary to humans, this same consciousness also becomes oppressive. History is antithetical to life, it lingers as a deathly smeU or—to borrow a related metaphor from the same passage—as a grim caput mortuum. This is the problem that Nietzsche describes as a particularly "modern" one in the second of his Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen: we yearn to live entirely in the moment , he writes, yet we discover at the same time our very inabiUty to forget . The modern subject drags along wherever he goes a "chain" that fetters him to the past: "Der AugenbUck, im Husch da, im Husch vorüber, vorher ein Nichts, nachher ein Nichts, kommt doch noch als Gespenst wieder und stört die Ruhe eines späteren Augenblicks."3 The modern consciousness has lost the abüity to integrate past and present in a fruitful way, and the past has become fundamentaUy irrelevant—except as a burden . I have referred at the outset to Faust because Goethe's drama perhaps most famously exemplifies the human desire to control the passage of time, as in the titular hero's final apostrophe to a schöner AugenbUck. In fact, the play contrasts two very different Goethean attitudes toward time. One is that of helplessness: humans seek ineffectuaUy to ground their existence in an incoherent succession of events. This is what Faust fears most—time as featureless chronos, represented, for instance, by the clanging beU that fills him with revulsion in Act V.4...