Why Goethe Needs German Studies and Why German Studies Needs Goethe

What does German Studies mean for the “earlier” time periods? As scholars of literature, we examine this question from complementary perspectives, taking “Goethe” as an exemplary rubric for literature written before 1900. Common to our essays is an understanding of German Studies as an inherently interdisciplinary approach that analyzes all texts—literary, historical, political, aesthetic, and philosophical—in their broader cultural and discursive contexts. For literary studies of the earlier time periods, German Studies has opened up important new lines of inquiry both within and beyond the traditional canon, paving the way for original work in fields like women’s writing, gender studies, and German Jewish studies, and fostering interdisciplinary research in diverse areas like fashion, the visual arts, and ecocriticism. Brent Peterson demonstrates how a German Studies approach is essential to the study of Goethe, while Martha Helfer examines disciplinary shifts within German Studies that affect the study of the earlier time periods, and considers the institutional framework within which Goethe is essential to German Studies as a discipline.

Why Goethe Needs German Studies

At a time when instruction is supposed to be efficient and college degrees should lead directly to a job, it is no longer enough to justify Goethe by repeating Matthew Arnold’s arguments about “the best, which has been thought and said.”¹ Another tactic might be to cite Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, confined to a wheelchair since 1990. In 2010, there was doubt about his physical ability to continue in office. Returning from extended hospitalization, Schäuble answered his critics by saying, “My Sitzfleisch is once again in a state where I can quote from Götz von Berlichingen when necessary.”² In other words, at least among the Bildungsbürgertum, Goethe still permeates German life in a manner both unimaginable in the know-nothing atmosphere of American politics and comparable to Shakespeare’s status in the English-speaking world. Thus, for the German Studies Association, where scholars increasingly confine their inquiries to artifacts produced since the advent of film, the question should not be whether but how Goethe and “Goethe” still matter.

I regularly teach “Reading Texts and Contexts,” a bridge course between intermediate and upper-level German. It starts with Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W., because it is the story of how canonical literature helps its hero understand and navigate his own life. We then turn to Werther, a work whose emotional landscape is even stranger to my students than the socialist notion of working for the good of the collective. Werther gives them their first opportunity for extended close reading, and the method I use to help my students engage with Goethe’s novel underscores my dependence on the many disciplines of German Studies.

I start from the presumption that there is no neat dividing line between a literary work and its context. A close reading therefore has to ferret out associations that would have been obvious to Goethe’s contemporaries; to miss such connections would be to overlook aspects of a text’s original meaning. In addition, just as other fields can help unpack literature, so too can literature provide access to the complex discursive universe in which discussions of contemporary issues took place, making it fruitful in a fashion that often exceeds what is available in the archival record alone. Werther, for example, resonated with readers in 1774 not only as the tale of a sensitive soul, but also as a complex indictment of values that might be coded as aristocratic, feudal, and French—that is not-bourgeois, not-modern, and not-German—even if that half of the opposition is frequently missing and therefore likely to be overlooked.

The reading I illustrate here is vaguely new historicist; but political science, economics, art history, and film studies, all represented in the German Studies Association, could be similarly employed with the appropriate texts. For Werther, three related passages make the point. First, in his opening letter, Werther writes of a garden that he characterizes as “simple” (einfach), and he emphasizes that no “scientific...