Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present by Kirk Wetters (review)

Disciples of the demonic will know that Kirk Wetters's book is not the only recent study of this notoriously slippery topic: Angus Nicholls's monograph Goethe's Concept of the Demonic: After the Ancients (Camden House, 2006) investigated its ancient roots in Platonic philosophy and traced its development in the poetics of the Sturm und Drang and Romanticism. The title of Wetters's new book, Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present, could give the impression that he has written a study that commences where Nicholls left off. This could not be further from the truth, for as Wetters convincingly argues, das Dämonische is not a concept, and it does not, strictly speaking, have a history that predates Goethe. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg's Arbeit am Mythos, Wetters describes it as a "stand-in for variable unknowns and … for the unknown" (8). The demonic is a "meta-metaphor" whose history can be aligned with modernity alone. While Wetters dispenses with the significance of Socratic daemons for Goethe's demonic, the virtue of his reading, ironically enough, is its Socratic stance: he refuses to claim a unified theory for a principle that amounts to something of a conceptual black hole, yet in the course of discussing that which by its own definition is unknowable, he generates a remarkably illuminating account of it. Wetters achieves this via painstaking readings in which he upholds his promise to "allow the individual moments of the presentation to exist simultaneously, paratactically, each with its own implications, none definitively reducible to the others" (5). This makes for difficult but rewarding reading.

Wetters charts metamorphoses of the demonic in chapters on Spengler, Benjamin, Lukács, and Doderer, and though he claims not to have written a "Goethe book," he begins the volume with three dazzling chapters on Goethe that are invaluable for understanding the later history. These include a terrifically productive reading of "Urworte Orphisch," which, as he goes on to show, constitutes a paradigmatic but not exclusive rubric for conceiving the demonic in Goethe's oeuvre (he includes a translation of Goethe's cycle and commentary in an appendix); a subsequent chapter on morphology, in which he uses his reading of "Urworte" to reveal fundamental linkages in Goethe's philosophies of science and religion; and, finally, a chapter on Dichtung und Wahrheit, in which he demonstrates the misprision (embodied by Gundolf's Goethe) of equating das Dämonische with the Dämon of "Urworte" and thereby exposes the fallacy of reading Goethe's autobiography as the fateful narrative of a great man coming inevitably into his own. No doubt these chapters will spur vigorous discussion among those for whom the demonic is an object of study, but they introduce such dynamic lines of inquiry into so many dimensions of Goethe, including the poetic, scientific, religious, and autobiographical, that they will undoubtedly prove fecund for Goethe scholars at large.

Having read the exposition of the demonic in Goethe, readers may be tempted to cherry-pick from among the later chapters of the book, but this would be to miss the broader historical thesis that Wetters so convincingly argues: namely, that Goethe's enigmatic statements on the demonic gave rise to intense theorization of the matter for more than a century after his death. Indeed, one of the book's great strengths is its uncovering of mutually reflective tensions that emerge in subsequent appropriations and transformations of Goethe's demonic. Astute though they are in their own right, Wetters's arguments concerning Gundolf and Spengler, for example, amount to much more than mere correctives of myopic readings of Goethe; in actuality, they bring into definition the details of an until now vague "demonic history" against which Benjamin had reacted in his essay on Wahlverwandtschaften, and in so doing, they demonstrate the theoretical disagreements occasioned by Goethe's scattered statements. Rather than devolving into the pure abstractions of theory, these discussions build toward two climactic chapters in which Wetters—first uncovering the centrality of...