Goethe: Journeys of the Mind by Gabrielle Bersier, Nancy Boerner, and Peter Boerner (review)

This fine volume has much to recommend it. The late Peter Boerner left behind a project he began about Goethe as "armchair traveller" (vii) which was then completed by Gabrielle Bersier and Nancy Boerner. Those two have woven together three voices that are, at least for me, indistinguishable. Their prose is graceful and a pleasure to read; their book informative and illuminating. The only quibble I have is the very occasional comment concerning what Goethe 'might' or 'could' have thought or felt or desired. Such speculation is a truly minor deficit in an otherwise excellent treatment of the material. Apart from that infelicity, the book does not disappoint and deserves genuine praise.

As the title indicates, this book presents the journeys the polymath Johann Wolfgang Goethe took in his mind. That is, it acquaints readers with Goethe as someone who does not venture to faraway places, but instead travels there vicariously with the help of those who did and who provided accounts of their journeys. Readers of reports about circumnavigating the earth, none other than Daniel Defoe averred, learned more than many an illiterate sailor who had made the journey himself (3). Goethe's "journeys of the mind" are a part of his life that can easily be overlooked, yet the habit deserves notice as it reflects an enduringly curious mind open to a wide range of new ideas, always hungry for more knowledge, even into advanced age. What the authors of this study have set forth so well is that good writers brought Goethe to distant lands and brought those lands to life for him. For Goethe, something like Alexander von Humboldt's "worldwide vision" even "had the power to erase space and time in the act of the imagination" (60). The travel narratives, journals, and reports Goethe read enabled him to take part in the actual journeys of others.

The authors do not neglect to mention the actual travels Goethe undertook during his long life, journeys to Switzerland; northeastern France; Bohemian spas; the lands of the Rhine, Main, and Neckar rivers; and most famously, Italy. As they point out, he did not really venture so very far or so very often from his home in Weimar, especially not in the final decades of his life. For example, he never went to London, Paris, Prague, Vienna, or Berlin, even declining personal invitations to visit the capital of Prussia. Bersier and the Boerners concentrate instead on the places, people, and cultures Goethe never saw himself, but visited by way of the words of others. For the most part, Goethe perused travel narratives and journals, but he also learned of other lands from conversation and through correspondence with travelers, not to mention the fiction and poetry of foreign lands. As this book reveals, he was a voracious reader, and what he read took him to places both nearby and far-off: England, Persia, Central and South America (including Brazil), the South Seas, North America (specifically, the United States), Vienna, the Baltic region, Greifswald, Dresden, the Netherlands, Munich, even China. In some cases, these "journeys" resulted in or even found expression in Goethe's own literary productions, including his History of the Theory of Colors, West-East Divan, Faust II, the Wilhelm Meister novels, or his lyrical cycle Chinese-German Book of Seasons and Hours. Bersier and the Boerners identify, for instance, "a wealth of contemporary travel readings" as a source for the "parable of violent domination fuelled by a European drive to colonial expansion and enrichment" presented in Part Two of Faust (88).

The writers who afforded him those experiences were, among others, Oliver Goldsmith, Karl Philipp Moritz, Charles Dupin, Mohammed Schemsed-din Hafez, Alexander von Humboldt, Georg Forster, Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, Count Kaspar von Sternberg, Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Duke Carl Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, Carl Friedrich Zelter, Marco Polo, and his own son August. Goethe, in...