After Jena: Goethe's Elective Affinities and the End of the Old Regime by Peter J. Schwartz (review)

Peter J. Schwartz's monograph is the first volume in the Goethe Society series "New Studies in the Age of Goethe," published by Bucknell University Press. The Society and the series are both well served by this monograph which is marvelously bold and elegantly written. In the Introduction, Schwartz proposes to offer "as much a historical contextualization as an interpretation" of Die Wahlverwandschaften, and he succeeds in combining these agendas in ways that offer compelling new insights into Goethe's 1809 novel as well as into the aesthetic and political concerns that propelled its production. Through an eclectic yet generally utterly convincing analysis of the Zeitgeist surrounding the production of the novel, Schwartz's monograph offers another layer to Goethe's much-analyzed work. Combining a magisterial knowledge of Wahlverwandschaften and Goethe scholarship, of philosophical considerations on fate and aesthetics, and even of less traditional topics such as Greek and Roman symbolism in commemorative medals for Napoleon (to name just a few of the concerns of the book), Schwartz offers his readers a wealth of insights and knowledge that make this monograph a true pleasure to read.

After Jena covers topics as diverse as the new legal codes introduced by Napoleon in Germany, gesture and social rank in the late Enlightenment, and the vagaries of "fate" in the transitional period following Napoleon's acquisition of German territories. Schwartz pays careful attention to time and timing, focusing in large part on the particular time of Goethe's novel (1809) and the events that take place within and outside of the novel. Schwartz is particularly sensitive to the shift in the Ständeordnung brought on by Napoleon's modernism that is reflected in multiple ways in Die Wahlverwandschaften. He links the sociopolitical crisis of the disintegration of the social order as a consequence of the French Revolution and Napoleon's appropriation of German lands to the unresolved crises depicted in Goethe's novel. Schwartz's book consists of nine chapters (the first being an Introduction), each tackling the question of crisis, history, and social relations in a particular manner. Chapter Two is enticingly entitled "Why Did Goethe Marry When He Did?" which Chapter Three continues with "And What Does That Have to Do with Elective Affinities?" Other chapters focus on the egotism of Eduard, on discourses on fate, on the importance of Napoleon for the novel (and as a Doppelgänger for Goethe), on Ottilie's function as an agent of social change, on the failure of sacrifice to bring about reconciliation in the novel, and, finally, on Goethe's Spinozan (and, perhaps, Adornian) aesthetics of reflection.

Schwartz initially tackles the question of timeliness via Goethe's marriage to Christiane Vulpius on October 19, 1806, "five days after Napoleon's victory over Prussia at the battle of Jena-Auerstedt" (40). Schwartz argues that Goethe likely married Vulpius at this time due to his awareness of the changing times and his assumption that new and modern laws influenced by Napoleonic republicanism would arrive soon in Weimar. Concerned with the imminent shift in marriage and property laws, Goethe likely married Vulpius in order to secure property for his family and to ensure that his son August would inherit his property. Marriage, a trope at the heart of Goethe's novel, is a "metonym for social relations" (58) that were changing rapidly. In the subsequent two chapters, Schwartz argues convincingly for a reading of Eduard as a weak prince, a bad nobleman who fails the test of political legitimacy at the heart of the vagaries of the French Revolution. Goethe, Schwartz reminds us, was both critical of the revolution and desirous of entering the new period productively. The novel represents, for Schwartz, both a productive response to the dissolution of the social order and a critical reflection on the failure of the noble class to live up to the social...