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  • Imagination & Meisterschaft / Mastery: Neue und frühere Goethe-Studien plus Essays on Goethe written in English by Helmut Ammerlahn
  • Jane K. Brown
Helmut Ammerlahn. Imagination & Meisterschaft / Mastery: Neue und frühere Goethe-Studien plus Essays on Goethe written in English. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2021. 206 pp.

It is an honor and a pleasure to have been asked to review this book for the Goethe Yearbook. Hellmut Ammerlahn and I have been colleagues at the University of Washington since 1988, but of course I knew his work long before that. Despite apparently quite different starting points, our mutual respect and admiration have only increased during that period. This volume contains selected essays written since the early 1990s; since the last one was written for a volume dedicated to me, I will not comment on it here.

Hellmut Ammerlahn's reputation as a major Goethe scholar on two continents was established by his first two published essays, now classics, on Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift in 1968 and Monatshafte in 1972. In further essays and in his magisterial analysis of the Lehrjahre in the [End Page 296] book Imagination und Wahrheit: Goethes Künstler- und Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre—Struktur, Symbolik, Poetologie, published in 2003, he consolidated his reading. For most of us, 400 brilliant pages on Wilhelm Meister and imagination would have seemed enough, but not for Hellmut Ammerlahn. Despite the similarity of this new book's title and despite the fact that it contains three essays about Wilhelm Meister (and numerous references in the rest of the collection), it quickly becomes clear that for him enough is never enough—fortunately for us. The eight essays in this volume, four in German, four in English, two never before published, all deal with imagination, symbolism, and poetics in both Wilhelm Meister novels (and the "Theatralische Sendung"), in both parts of Faust, and in the three fairy tales, with ample passing references to the classical plays, the poetry, and relevant essays on aesthetics and science. It would be wrong and, in a certain sense, disrespectful to say that Ammerlahn's views on Goethe and the imagination have changed over the last half century. His central concerns remain the imagination as agent of trauma, healing and creation, the morphological reading of structure, Goethe's symbolic language, and the covert autobiography beneath most of his works. Nevertheless, in the process of amplifying, interweaving, and nuancing all these themes, he offers us constantly fresh and inventive readings. Ammerlahn suggests the essays can be read in whatever order the reader likes. Any of them stands effectively alone as an analysis of its given topic. Read in order, the essays generate a wonderful sense of the combinatorics of Goethe's oeuvre, a phenomenon that will not surprise the readers of this journal, but a healthy reminder that there is always more to say about Goethe.

The best moments for me are the unexpected juxtapositions between the works and ideas adumbrated in the essay titles. The first essay, "Von der 'Lustigen Person' zum 'Dämon der Gewalt': Goethe über die Mephistophelische I-Magi[e]-Nation," exemplifies all my generalizations and more. The title of this previously unpublished essay nods playfully to deconstructionist titles: anyone who knows Ammerlahn's work knows that he reads all of the scholarship and tries to learn from it, even as his own methodology was grounded in Wilhelm Emrich's close "symbolic" approach. This title announces the separate parts of the argument—the tradition of lustige Person, Mephistopheles as evil principle, magic—all reconstructed into "imagination." The argument takes off from the lustige Person as an essentially negative moral concept; Mephistopheles's evil magic is actually a form of imagination, but instrumental, trivial, focused on the material world (Verstand), in contrast to the creating imagination (Vernunft) toward which Faust develops. Ultimately the moral dichotomy of Faust is really a dialectic of imagination in Kantian terms, expressed in a formulation that becomes standard for the book, in "allegorisch-symbolischer Bildlichkeit." In effect, the essay elegantly marries the moral issues of the play to the epistemological ones in an unpretentious but grand synthesis. And here, as elsewhere, Ammerlahn reads in sympathy with...

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