Bausteine zu einem neuen Goethe (review)

Goethe Yearbook 323 Lebens naively, without a heightened sense for its every metaphoric implication. Eckermann can never again be the neutral, ghostly medium of Goethe's profundity. If Dictations doesn't finally bear comparison with the best works in its genre — and I'm thinking here of works like Friedrich Kittler's recent Aufschreibesysteme I8OO-I9OO or Peter Henninger's Der Buchstabe und der Geist: Unbewusste Determinierung im Schreiben Robert Musils — it is still a noteworthy addition to the growing body of poststructuralist studies of German literature. Princeton University Michael W. Jennings Bausteine zu einem neuen Goethe, ed. Paolo Chiarini. Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum Verlag, 1987. Ten essays dealing primarily with texts from Goethe's middle and late years are gathered in this volume, a combination of essays first presented at a 1984 HerderGoethe Colloquium in Rome and other essays added by Paolo Chiarini, editor and director of the Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici. The essays are largely concerned with familiar texts approached in familiar ways, including the tragedies from Götz to Die natürliche Tochter (Wilhelm Emrich, Bernhard Böschenstein), "Alexis und Dora" (Dieter Borchmeyer), Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Paolo Chiarini), Italienische Reise (Heinz Schlaffer, Pierre Bertaux), Goethe's 1822 essay on Mantegna's "Triumph of Caesar" (Gert Mattenklott), the "Klassische Walpurgisnacht " (Luciano Zagari), and somewhat more generally, the use of comparative anatomy and analogy in Goethe's scientific studies (Valerio Verra) and the significance of his art criticism for an understanding of his general aesthetics (Gerhart Baumann). Thematically, a number of essays are linked by a concern with Goethe's response to modernity, variously understood. In the volume's opening piece Schlaffer sets the question broadly. Taking his cue from Albrecht Schöne and Hans Blumenberg and drawing illustratively on the opening pages of the Italienische Reise, he urges a reconsideration of Goethe's repeated attribution of cosmic meaning and purpose to both his own actions and to the events and processes of the world about him. Schlaffer emphasizes Goethe's discomfort within the new world of enlightened rationalism and his need for assurances of individual significance in a universe defined by Newtonian physics and a society by revolutionary politics. His response is a restless productivity in which numerous poetic constructions of the self are created to assure meaning, providing private myths in a demythologized world. The archaic and yet appealing sense of cosmic order and purpose that permeates his work is a poetic fiction, an achievement born of psychoiogical need, and it marks Goethe's primary response to modernity. Somewhat closer to Schlaffer than one might initially expect in their assessment of Goethe's discomfort with political modernity, but focusing on his dramatic statements of crisis rather than his construction of protective mythologies, both 324 Book Reviews Emrich and Böschenstein discuss Goethe's pessimistic responses to historical change, notably the French Revolution. From Götz to Die natürliche Tochter Emrich traces a growing despair about the continuing existence of divine spirit ("göttlicher Genius") in the modern world. Böschenstein reads Die natürliche Tochter as a dramatization of Goethe's lament about the loss of human efficacy before the inevitable course of history. Eugenie is an anachronism, individually powerless in the world of historical events, a kind of counter-Iphigenie. Like Emrich and Böschenstein, Chiarini is interested both in the persistence and transformation of earlier thematic problems in later texts. He argues that in Die Wahlverwandtschaften Goethe returns to an exploration of the precarious balance of eros and ethos that he left deliberately unresolved in the first version oÃ- Stella. Beneath the surface calm — of the lake, of the novel's opening, indeed of the novel'sstyle itself— are enigmatic and destructive depths. Charlotte's and Eduard's belated marriage, an attempt to recover against time a relationship as it might have been, is a project undertaken in unnatural isolation and characterized by everdeclining vitality. The balance of eros and ethos cannot be maintained and the belated attempt to realize a perfect aristocratic Enlightenment existence is doomed to failure. Two essays address Goethe's relationship to Herder. In a brief piece Bertaux suggests that the ltalienische Reise should be read as a response to...