Goethe in East Germany, 1949-1989: Toward a History of Goethe Reception in the GDR (review)

208 Book Reviews the curator at that time, Carl Schreiber, who was a vigorous participant in the Aspen convocation and made recordings of its proceedings. The book is a testimony to contemporary German-American cultural relations; five of the contributors have been Max Kade professors at the University of Kansas. It is weU produced with a vanishingly smaU number of misprints; an index would have been helpful. Some American readers may find it pleasant that the German-language essays are printed Ui the orthography we learned Ui school. New Haven, Connecticut Jeffrey L. Sammons Daniel J. FarreUy Goethe in East Germany, 1949-1989: Toward a History of Goethe Reception in the GDR. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1998.168 pp. With the focus throughout on the historical roots and forty-year evolution of East German Goethe scholarship and its reflection of SED cultural poUcy and the tight concentration on the interpretation of Goethe's worldview as Spinozan ("God equal to nature"), Daniel J. Farrelly's book is characterized better by the subtitle, "Toward a History of Goethe Reception Ui the GDR" than by the primary title "Goethe in East Germany, 1949-1989" After a brief introduction to the East German transition from fascism to socialism, the accompanying repossession of Goethe from the Nazis and preemptive claim on Goethe versus the capitalist West in chapter 2 "Official Cultural Policy (Kulturpolitik)," FarreUy limits "the aim of this work" (14) to: 1) Marxist Literaturwissenschaft; 2) important Influences on the tradition; and 3) the GDL and therein spectficaUy Werther (the abbreviation GDL appears frequently early on, but isn't defined as Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart untU page 34). Once the actual topic of the book, an examination of the scholarly (and to a much lesser extent artistic) marriage of Marx and Engels with pre-socialist ideas in Classical Weimar, here exclusively those of Goethe, has been estabUshed, FarreUy delivers an impressively direct tour of the pre-history and history, from Hegel, Marx, and Engels, Lenin, Lukács, and Korff to the four decades of GDR scholars who inherited them.The book comprises a concise 31-page orientation on influences and trends Ui GDR scholarship , followed by another 143 pages of dense analysis of the most durable interpretations and influences, mostly as distilled into the GDL. Most of the first chapter addresses the history of GDR scholarship, based primarUy on the testimony of East German scholars, with less specific interest in Goethe and his works than Ui the critical-political developments in East Germany and those that prefigure them (Hegel, Marx, Lukács, Korff).The portrayal of the competing personalities, generations, and agendas provides a broad representative summary of GDR scholarship, and an encyclopedic introduction and useful orientation to the most important influences in GDR scholarship from the political foundations to the actual producers of GDR scholarship. In an ironic tribute to the potential for paranoia of state ideology, FarreUy describes the task of the Marxist Uterature critic in "Part 4. Religion versus Society: Transcendence versus Immanence," somewhat uncritically suggesting inherent "difficult problems" in reconciling Goethe's frequent metaphorical invocations of "Gott" and "das Götüiche" (33-35) with East German atheism. Goethe Yearbook 209 Though FarreUy comes to a satisfying traditional conclusion here, comparing Goethe's view with Spinoza's "deus sive natura," this simple resolution of the "difficult problems" hindering validation of SED ideology reveals how relatively small the problems were to begin with. This is, of course, not Farrelly's problem , but was East Germany's. Nonetheless, the enormous energy spent battling this spectre in the GDR and the relative space allotted to it in Farrelly's book beg for some response. Writing the word "God" or portraying God does not necessarily reveal anything about an author's belief system or an author's intent in a particular text. It is just as valid to conclude based on Faust that Goethe was a closet Devil-worshipper or an atheist as it is to fear Pietist influence, and this aU should hardly have presented a problem for Marxist scholarship's view of Goethe as a Spinozist, since the only conclusion we can reasonably offer about...