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Robert M. Browning 233 "reflex" in Götz von Berlichingen, which he takes occasion to quote. We are told just when the Ugner troupe performed in Strasbourg, and that their repertoire included a Faust drama "(zurückgehend auf Christopher Marlowes 'The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus,' 1589): vielleicht besucht Goethe eine Aufführung." Numerous other such conjectural events and possible influences lard the volume, all in accord with the bestknown topoi (Herder and Shakespeare being perhaps the most frequently mentioned in these years before 1775). They will make Steiger a gladly used handbook. Makeup facilitates easy reference. Goethe's works stand out from the page in caps, all proper names (including God and the angels), in italics. Detailed parenthetical annotation supplies biographical, topographical, historical, cultural, even meteorological data. There are abundant cross-references. The remark in Dichtung und Wahrheit, "ich hatte zwar sehr schöne Haare" (with respect to a visit to a Strasbourg barber), invites comparison with Marie Körner's (nee Stock) reminiscence on the Breitkopf house in Leipzig; this, in turn, with Goethe's recollection in a letter to Förster of how the Stock children had loved to play in his tresses. One can while away many an hour pursuing such a labyrinthine wealth of allusions. Even as Goethe was writing his letter to Förster, that handsome growth of hair was vanishing. Today, his entire existence is totally dependent on the living, and their ability to respond to the written word, on our powers of imagination. Works like Zischka and Steiger constitute magnificent enabling agents, the one facilitating our access to the original documentation, the other focusing the labors of many scholarly generations. University of Illinois, Urbana Harry G. Haile Schöne, Albrecht, Götterzeichen, Liebeszauber, Satanskult. Neue Einblicke in alte Goethetexte. München: Beck, 1982. 230 pp. It is probably safe to assume that by the time this review appears many members of the GSNA will have already perused the book, which has been hailed (by Franz Josef Görtz in the FAZ) as "der brillanteste und gewiß auch anregendste Beitrag zum Goethe-Jahr 1982." Three well known and frequently discussed texts are the subject of Schöne's reinvestigation: "Harzreise im Winter" (Des. 1777), "Alexis und Dora" (June 1796), and the "Walpurgisnacht" scene in Faust I (1808). Each is shown in a new and revealing light, a light derived not only from the texts themselves (though always trained on them) but also from Goethe's other works, letters, and sources that may have been or demonstrably were used by him, as well as sources paralleling these. Schöne's stance is fundamentally positivistic, but it is a profounder, a transformed, positivism that sees connections to which the older positivists were blind. Positivism plus immanent interpretation. Schöne's bête noire is Rezeptionsgeschichte, the "Aberwitz einer Rezeptionsästhetik" (p. 67), which would find "Sinn und Form des literarischen Werks in der geschichtlichen Entfaltung seines Verständnisses" (H. R. Jauß), an approach that never really caught on in Anglo-American criticism, but which perhaps still needs (or needed) castigation in Germany. In any event, I believe the Anglo-American reader will feel an instinctive 234 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA sympathy with Schöne's empiricism. His rejection of Rezeptionsgeschichte as a critical method does not of course mean that he takes no account of his predecessors; on the contrary, he goes into their views very thoroughly and, it would seem, fairly. Anyone who has attempted to take "Harzreise im Winter" at its word will agree with Schöne that it is one of Goethe's most difficult texts. A highly autobiographical document, it is by no means fully explicated by Goethe's own commentary of 1821 in Kampagne in Frankreich, which is itself more in the nature of a commentary on Kannegießer's explication of the year before. AU his poems, Goethe insisted, were written "im unmittelbaren Anschauen irgend eines Gegenstandes" and "Harzreise" was "hard to fathom (entwickeln) because it refers to the most particular circumstances" and is "mysterious in tone and meaning," like the whole undertaking that gave rise to it. This being the case, Schöne concludes that we can...

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