Goethe's Allegories of Identity

Chapter 7. Goethe’s Angst

c h a p t e r 7 Goethe’s angst When passion was repressed and turned inward in the previous chapter, it seemed reduced in intensity: anger and guilt appeared merely as Verdruss. The most recognizable form of this phenomenon for children of the twentieth century is the reduction of the German Angst (fear of what is to come) to anxiety or “angst” as used in English, the generalized sense of insecurity coupled with ill-defined feelings of guilt modeled in the pervasive mood of Franz Kafka, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, or Edvard Munch, the often formless fear that arises with no objective external threat. The topic is hardly obvious for Goethe, whom even Harold Bloom declared free of the anxiety of influence.1 The turbulent emotions of the young Goethe of the 1770s are too conscious, too articulated: one can speak of hysteria, perhaps, but not angst. The Olympian serenity of the classical and older Goethe, as he was understood into the last generation, may have generated a good deal of angst in his readers, but hardly in him.2 to be sure, Goethe shared in the political anxieties of his age: he experienced the collapse of a social order widely understood to have been in place for centuries. His letters between 1790 and 1817 express almost constant worry about the political situation and its sometimes very immediate effects on him and his far-flung circle of friends. Goethe experienced angst as a debilitating concern with overwhelming circumstances, but he also struggled to transform it from an incapacity to act into constructive deed. This struggle, to be described below, reveals that his angst is actually a more general version of the paralyzing paranoia into which rousseau collapses in the later parts of his Confessions. In this respect Goethe’s efforts to control anxiety reflect his continuing attempts to deal with the great predecessor precisely as he identifies rousseau’s importance for modernity. Yet if Goethe experienced angst, he did not express it, unlike, for example, his freely artic- 124 the language of interiority ulated feelings of guilt for abandoning an early beloved, Friederike Brion. Hence the language and specific literary techniques that express angst point more clearly toward his linguistic contribution to expressing the unknown feelings of the inner self. although contemporary German usage aligns only Angst with fear of the indefinite or undefined, and both related terms, Furcht and Sorge, with a definable object, Goethe more commonly used the word Sorge for what is known today as Angst, or “angst.”3 Sorge occurs 451 times in the literary works, about three times as often as Angst.4 It expresses inner anxiety that arises from within the subject;5 the fear arising from an external cause Goethe calls Furcht.6 Sorge results from concern about what might happen or what ought to happen; at issue is not an objective cause of fear but an imagined one. It also has a second meaning, that of “caring for” (sorgen für) rather than “worrying about” (sorgen um). There is a kind of care that leads to constructive action, but this meaning can also lead to anxiety that a responsibility will not be fulfilled or that the object of one’s care might suffer. Goethe uses the word in both senses, as did Martin Heidegger in his later well-known distinction.7 as the self-generated fear of circumstances that do not really exist or not yet exist, Sorge is the clearest marker for Goethe of what is now called “angst.” Sorge occurs throughout the literary works, but not equally distributed. It appears at best once or twice in early works like Werther and Götz, then with particular intensity in the 1790s and first decade of the nineteenth century.8 Of course the revolution and terror in France made the 1790s an anxious decade, but Goethe’s protagonists in this period encounter similar problems to those of the earlier works.9 Werther suffers intense emotions, personal insecurity, and a threatened identity just as do Egmont, tasso, and Faust. They are all trapped in their own interiors and their limited views of their own identities, so that the world recedes and becomes inaccessible and incomprehensible. The dramatically increased use of Sorge reveals not that the problems of character have changed, but that they are experienced and expressed differently in ways now to be examined—less explicitly, with less emphasis on feeling and more on imagination. as it turns out, the term Sorge...