"An diesem Brunnen hast auch du gespielt": Notes on Klinger and his Relationship to Goethe

DAVID HILL "An diesem Brunnen hast auch du gespielt"1: Notes on Klinger and his Relationship to Goethe ι The main facts about Klinger's life and about his relationship to Goethe were established by the beginning of the present century, notably in Max Rieger's monumental biography.2 If it seems worthwhile today to turn again to such matters it is not so much because of the new facts that have emerged—although there are several. It is more because the predominant interest in Goethe has obscured the continuity of Klinger's own development and the meaning of his relationship to Goethe within it. Above all, however, it is a question of biographical method. The positivists' painstaking and deferential accumulation of facts produced biographical portraits which now seem straightforward and even simplistic by comparison with the complexities we have learned to find in the literary texts themselves. Christoph Hering, in a study which properly represents the basis of our present-day understanding of Klinger's literary production, shows well the "distance" that existed between the wild emotionality of the "Sturm und Drang" heroes and the author himself, but in the attempt to show that, unlike his heroes, Klinger was "keineswegs pathologisch" he overstresses "den im Grunde gesunden Kern des jungen Dichters" and "den eigentlich doch harmlosen und natürlichen Übermut Klingers."3 It is important to have recognized that Klinger was himself neither a Guelfo nor a Wild, but the question of Klinger's personality and underlying attitudes is more con- 2. GOETHE SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA fused than resolved by pronouncing him healthy, and is reminiscent of older interpretations of the "Sturm und Drang" as the eruption of Nature. Ansgar Hillach introduced the idea of an altogether more complex model when he argued that the exaggerated emotional gestures of Klinger's early heroes in fact correspond to the author's tendency to hide, or repress, his own real emotions,4 but this suggestion does not appear to have found any resonance in the subsequent literature. A similar but apparently unrelated attempt to point to psychological complexities in the young Klinger is to be found in an essay by Henry J. Schmidt dealing with the play Sturm und Drang? But although his analysis of manic depressiveness, inferiority complex and narcissism is often illuminating and confirms the value of not starting from assumptions about Klinger's normality, the use of Freud and Foucault, while offering categorial complexity, tends to produce generalizations about Klinger's experience which neglect the specificity of his position. The problem of using Freud's framework of analysis is only in part the enduring contentiousness of his procedures: even if we accept that he at the very least provided a language for describing how people give meanings to experience it is likely that we shall have simply too little relevant information to attempt a thorough psychogram in the Freudian style. Our knowledge of Klinger's private life is extremely limited, and our knowledge of even the main facts of his childhood and adolescence no more than sketchy. We are unable to point to those experiences which, perhaps trivial to the outsider, can acquire great significance in the mind of a child and contribute importantly to the adult personality which grows out of it. Nonetheless, even if our analysis cannot attempt that level of precision, we are not thereby excused from recognizing that the human mind is full of secrets and contradictions and may be driven by a logic that is not necessarily the same as that which a person uses in explaining to himself his own behavior and attitudes. Where Freud was undoubtedly right was in recognizing that the reassessment of the relationship of one person to another necessarily involves a reconsideration of the bundle of attitudes and behavioral patterns which constitute a personality. To look at what Goethe meant to Klinger is to look again at the way that Klinger gave meaning to the world. This is all the more necessary for the fact that Klinger's attitude to Goethe was not just one of many such attitudes to contemporaries who are of greater or lesser interest to us today, but was, as I shall argue, the...