Pietist Grief, Empfindsamkeit, and Werther

JILL ANNE KOWALIK Pietist Grief, Empfindsamkeit, and Werther Leidest du um dein selbst -willen / welcher Weyse es sey / das Leiden thut dir -wehe / und ist dir schwer zu tragen: Leidest du aber um GOtt allein / das Leiden thut dir nicht wehe / und ist dir auch nicht schwer; denn GOtt trägt die Last. Johann Arndt, Vier Bücher vom Wahren Christenthum, III,'23 Die sogenannte Seele.—Die Summe der Bewegungen, welche dem Menschen leicht fallen und die er infolgedessen gerne und mit Anmut tut, nennt man seine Seele;—er gilt als seelenlos, wenn er Mühe und Härte bei inneren Bewegungen merken läßt. Nietzsche, Morgenröte, §311 TXlE LEIDEN DES JUNGEN WERTHERSHAS been described, more JLSoÃ-ten than any of us care to know, as an emotion-filled, secularized blossom of the pietist culture of "Innerlichkeit." Goethe was apparently "pietistisch gestimmt" when he wrote this work, which owes so much to the confessional discourse of pietism.1 Werther (not Goethe), in the pithy formulation of no less a reader of the German Romantic tradition than Thomas Mann, is "ein Meister unbarmherziger Introspektion, Selbstbeobachtung, Selbstzergliederung —das überfeinerte Endprodukt christlich-pietistischer Seelenkultur."2 Only two scholars, however, have taken the trouble to investigate with any specificity what others simply assert, namely, how Werther may be "influenced by" the culture of pietism. Stuart Atkins, in a philological tour de force published in 1948, meticulously analyzes Goethe's masterpiece in order to demonstrate the relationship between Werther's character and Lavater's sermon on "Ãœbele Laune," with which Goethe was engaged -while he was -writing the novel.3 Richard Brinkmann, in an elegant and unjustly overlooked essay written in 1976, shows how Goethe's reading of Gottfried Arnold's Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie found its way into 78 Jill Anne Kowalik the core issues of the work that made Goethe famous and which in turn became a founding document of modernity.4 Both of these seminal contributions suggest to me that Goethe's relationship to pietism is probably more complicated than is generally assumed.'While it is tempting to explore this problem in greater detail, it is not my purpose in this study to speculate on the biographical links between Goethe and Werther, nor do I wish to comment on Goethe's relationship to pietism per se. Rather, I start with the working hypothesis, established by my reading of a number of pietist works, that Werther contains—must contain—a devastating critique of pietist psychology, by which I mean a model of the mind and a theory of experience that would later inform the psychology of Empfindsamkeit.6 For Werther, who is usually described as "ein Empfindsamer" (for better or worse), also has a thoroughly pietist imagination. To anticipate my argument below, his fantasy of the resurrection of his actual earthly body, which he hopes will be united with Lotte's actual earthly body, is a pietist—not orthodox—conception of the afterlife. In his exhaustive and still definitive study Empfindsamkeit, Gerhard Sauder suggests that the common view of German sentimentalism as secularized pietism is untenable. Pietism is itself too heterogeneous to be unambiguously classified, he argues (citing a wealth of twentieth-century historical studies), even though scholars continue to view it as the source of German emotionalism in the mid-eighteenth century and beyond. August Langen's now standard work Der Wortschatz des deutschen Pietismus contains similar reservations in his preface to the second edition of 1968 and in his final chapter titled "Die Nachwirkung der pietistischen Sprache im 18. Jahrhundert." Nevertheless, as Langen himself makes clear, the literature of Empfindsamkeit is unthinkable ("nicht zu denken") without the achievements of pietist linguistic expressiveness.7 My essay proceeds from the assumption that there is indeed a profound link bet-ween pietism and Empfindsamkeit insofar as we can identify a common psychodynamic in the writings of both of these cultural formations. This dynamic, which I shall term ambivalence toward affect (defined below),is subjected to a rigorous critical analysis in Werther. So understood, the novel is neither a representation cum glorification of an affectively laden protagonist (a possibility that caused of course great anxiety among certain of Goethe's contemporaries), nor is it a...