Goethe Proceedings (review)

226 GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA Tendenzen der Literatur einer bestimmten Zeit zwischen zwei geschlosseneren literarischen Epochen vermittelt er sehr wohl, und eine Reihe von Artikeln bereichern die Forschung um fundierte neue Interpretationen. University of Alberta Gerwin Marahrens Goethe Proceedings. Essays Commemorating the Goethe Sesquicentennial at the University of California, Davis. Ed. by Clifford A. Bernd, Timothy J. Lulofs, H. Günther Nerjes, et al. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1984. While the eight essays assembled here do not neatly focus on a common topic in Goethe studies they can without too much strain be read in groups of two. The introductory essay by Stuart Atkins ("On Goethe's Classicism," pp. 1-21) establishes the broadest frame of reference. Atkins succinctly outlines "the opposition's self-contradictory case" (p. 6) against him, stressing current negative American reactions (Rexroth, Lowell), and then comments on Goethe's "classical temperament" (p. 1) as it manifests itself in his attitudes to and thoughts about science, art and the political realm: his "concern for objectivity" (p. 6), his awareness of a specific audience for specific works, his notion of Gestaltung and of the "congruence of import and form" (p. 10), his ceaseless experimentation with (classical) forms, and his mixed reactions to the French Revolution and later political developments in Germany. While Atkins gives us a fair measure of both Goethe's youthfulness and his historical distance, Victor Lange concludes the volume with a concise, exemplary exposition of "Goethe's View of History" (pp. 107-19) which seems equidistant from his contemporaries' belief in progress and our current, unalleviated bewilderment. Lange briefly places Goethe in context (Lessing, Herder, Kant, Schiller), and especially succeeds in contrasting and somewhat reconciling Goethe's "relentless assertions of the disjointedness of history" in which it differs fundamentally from nature, with his compellingly felt need "to find categories of meaning and cohesion" (p. 113). They specifically surface in the "concretely realized accomplishments of tradition in an individual" (p. 114), and, transcending the erratic forces of time and history, in works of art that provide a "perspective of the eternal" (p. 115). From these historical dimensions that appropriately frame the collection we can move to two essays in the middle of the book that pursue distinctly current concerns. Keeping alive a historical perspective Katharina Mommsen (pp. 51-65) presents a convincing case for "Goethe as a Precursor of Women's Emancipation." Mommsen concentrates on the type of strong, courageous, talented, and intellectually independent woman in Goethe's work, a life model of which she portrays in Susanne von Klettenberg. Mommsen finds traces of her in Margarete von Parma, Klärchen, and above all in Iphigenie. Emphasizing the positive features of character in the schöne Seele Mommsen draws out the parallels between the Bekenntnisse and the drama about the Greek priestess, cautiously suggesting von Klettenberg rather than Frau von Stein as a possible model. Goethe's continued advocacy of women's equality gains special weight when compared to Humboldt's ("Über Erdmann Waniek 227 den Geschlechtsunterschied") or Schiller's ("Würde der Frauen") estimate of women, and finds its most decided statement in the collection Die guten Weiber where men's selfeducation is explicitly made dependent on women's equal rights. In a completely different vein Andrew Jaszi circles around "The Inexhaustible Object: Trying to Understand Die Wahlverwandtschaften" (pp. 67-76). Playfully serious, he disclaims any "intention to practice deconstruction" (p. 68) and embarks on an impassioned meditation about Naturwirklichkeit and Kunstwahrheit, about the questions of object, reification, time, and beauty. Sometimes evocatively moving, occasionally selfindulgent , Jaszi above all is conscious of and constantly reflecting back on and involving the reading self. In any case Jaszi himself suggests a summary of his efforts, the correctness of which will have to be judged by each individual reader. Jaszi sees in Die Wahlverwandtschaften "the tragedy of Goethe's classical world-view and of the aesthetic self-referentiality to which it gave rise" (p. 74). An older mode of approach rules in Oskar Seidlin's "Goethe's Vision of a New World" (pp. 23-34). Fitst printed in 1962, Seidlin's urbane, laudatory excursion takes us from Goethe's veneration for the eye, to Faust's...