Goethes Euphrat. Philologie und Politik im "West-östlichen Divan." by Marcel Lepper (review)

In this compact volume, Marcel Lepper presents an interpretation of Goethe's West-östlicher Divan, in particular the poem "Lied und Gebilde," that moves past the tendency of previous scholarship to elide historical and political particulars on the way to general "poetological" readings; in doing so, he takes seriously the contradictions and difficulties within the work and attends to the ways in which poetological readings can themselves be attempts to avoid historical and political particularities. His approach begins with grammatical-rhetorical aspects of the text, then examines its historical-lexigraphical underpinnings before tracing the text's development in the context of Goethe's works and finally considers its intertextual references and contexts. Doing so enables Lepper to make the poetological implications of the poem and the cycle more concrete, which in turn breaks down static oppositional structures in each (139–40). These are crucial contributions, and they make the volume essential for readers studying "Lied und Gebilde" or the West-östlicher Divan generally. There are a few drawbacks: it is not always clear how the components of Lepper's expanding model of reading fit together. Moreover, the volume uses Goethe's prose section (Noten und Abhandlungen zu besserem Verständnis des west-östlichen Divans) very little. The texts mentioned there should not, of course, be taken for granted as Goethe's only sources, and his representations of them should not be absorbed without analysis, but the Noten und Abhandlungen does indicate the directions of Goethe's interest and attention that Lepper investigates, and the moments where Lepper draws on it are some of the most convincing in the volume.

The opening chapter introduces Lepper's method and draws out the problems for interpretation posed by "Lied und Gebilde," in particular its large number of apparent antitheses. In chapter two, "Grammatisch-rhetorischer Ansatz," Lepper points out that the distinctions between plastic/Greek and musical/Oriental often used to read the poem as performing a turn from "classical" to "post-classical" were a trope of literary history around 1800 and thus should not be used to describe it (41). The chapter demonstrates "grammatical-rhetorical" reading by analyzing numerous asymmetries (in length, rhyme scheme, verb tense etc.) throughout the poem. The third chapter investigates the poem's lyric register, following several crucial words (e.g., "Lied," "Euphrat," "der Grieche") through their appearances in the Divan. Lepper points out that, since "Lied" appears over forty times in the text, readers should be cautious about taking any single instance of it as outlining a poetological program (57–58). Lepper's assertion that "Lied und Gebilde" does not exhibit song-like characteristics ("Singbarkeit, erzählerische oder beschreibende Einfachheit, Liebes-, Geselligkeitsoder Naturthematik") is somewhat less convincing—one could argue that the poem stages a type of simplicity in its brevity, while its metrical form (alternating four and three stresses per line) is one that Goethe uses in his ballads (e.g., "Der Fischer"). Lepper analyzes the word "Euphrat" in somewhat wider contexts, including the budding field of Assyriology (71–72) and in Friedrich Hölderlin's poem "Lebensalter," which he uses to draw out contrasts as well as similarities between Hölderlin's and Goethe's references to the Euphrates. Finally, Lepper turns to "der Grieche" in "Lied und Gebilde" and points out the unusual association with clay ("Thon") rather than marble. Because clay is mixed with water and is more provisional and temporary than stone, "der Grieche" becomes a hybrid figure described in a lightly ironizing tone that mixes tropes of Greek antiquity and the Orientalist philology that began to call philhellenic fantasies into question (92–94).

In the fourth chapter, Lepper uses a "textgenetisch-werkbiographischer Ansatz," examining the edition history of "Lied und Gebilde" and elaborating various dating hypotheses, ultimately settling on a likely point of composition toward the early work on the collection, in the "Übergangsphase" between war and postwar in Europe in 1814–15 (106–8). He contends that taking the poem's composition at...