Goethe und Lessing: Eine schwierige Konstellation (review)

296 Book Reviews Wilfried Barner, Goethe und Lessing: Eine schwierige Konstellation. Göttingen : WaUstein Verlag, 2001. 56 pp. In Goethe und Lessing: Eine schwierige Konstellation, Wilfried Barner focuses on the "curious" distance that manifested itsetf between Goethe and Lessing Ui spite of theft (or because of their) epoch-making status for eighteenthcentury German letters. Barner provides a meticulous distillation of their comments about each other, theft reactions to one another, comments about them by contemporaries, and the major trends of the era Ui order to demonstrate the "Zeitverhältnisse" which inevitably worked to distance Lessing and Goethe from one another. Barner concentrates, above aU, on the emerging rift between the Enlightenment and Storm and Stress authors and specificaUy on the rise of conflicts between generations of Uterary figures Ui this era. He also illustrates how these larger social and cultural influences combined with personal tensions between Lessing and Goethe—both private and Uterary. Barner stresses the close appearances of Goethe's Götz and Lessing's Emilia Galotti—two dramas with radicaUy different dramatic purposes and impUcations. He notes theft competing interests Ui writing Faust tragedies and emphasizes the inevitable distancing effect of the rapidly metamorphosing character of aesthetics and Uterary production during the 1770s and 1780s. FinaUy, Barner traces precisely Lessing's and Goethe's mutual dismissal and/or disapproval of each other's dramatic, Uterary, and aesthetic successes. Barner also reminds us of Goethe's increasingly negative assessments of Lessing's work throughout his lifetime—and how rapidly his criticisms became canonized and have persisted within scholarship ever since. Barner's analysis of the distance between Goethe and Lessing provides a good summary for students and non-speciaUsts interested in a short and precise geography of the social and personal tensions that obstructed any closer interactions and exchanges between these two Uterary giants. University of Rochester Susan E. Gustafson Eugene L. Stelzig, The Romantic Subject in Autobiography: Rousseau and Goethe. CharlottesvUle and London: UP of Virginia, 2000. χ + 279 pp. Most of this book is much better than its maladroit title would indicate. Of course one's critical reservations are awakened by the use of a term such as "Romantic subject," and aU the more so when it is supposed to include both Rousseau and Goethe. If Uterary generations or cohorts are to have any meaning at aU, then Rousseau's dates (1712-78) make it difficult to include him with much legitimacy among the Romantics, despite the exigencies of undergraduate survey courses. At best, he might be included among those precursors to Romanticism , the much-debated pre-Romantics. Goethe, on the other hand, Uved to see the dominance of the Romantics, but never made more than a grudging peace with some of them. It is a persistent quirk of Anglo-American reception of Goethe to lump him in with his Romantic contemporaries. WhUe that simplifies procedures, it loses sight of the fact that Goethe was born in 1749 and remained loyal to the ideals of the EnUghtenment in which he grew up. Stelzig admits that his original plan had been to treat Wordsworth as weU, but the only undisputed Romantic had to be excised for reasons of space. Further, one is not surprised that Stelzig is unable to get a firm grasp on the süppery "Romantic autobiography." His ingenuous declaration rather begs the question: "I use the term Romantic autobiography, then, to denote a type of Ufe- ...