This article traces George Bancroft's engagement with Goethe and his writings from his early meetings with him in Weimar and spanning his reviews in the North American Review (1824) to his essay, 'The Age of Schiller and Goethe' (1855). Bancroft's evolving response over a quarter of a century - from early admiration of Goethe's poetic genius to moral and political repudiation - illuminates the transatlantic tensions between aesthetic autonomy and moral responsibility in the early nineteenth century. Educated at Harvard, and then G & ouml;ttingen, Heidelberg, and Berlin, Bancroft absorbed German methods of historical and philological inquiry. His successive reviews of Goethe's works reveal his insistence that artistic excellence ought to dovetail with moral purpose and republican civic virtue. Bancroft's judgement that literature ought to be in the 'service of humanity' exposes a key faultline in Goethe's nineteenth-century American reception, where aesthetic genius and aristocratic patronage confronted the ethical imperatives of a democratic age.
The dominant historiographic narrative about late nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary has held that nationalist and colonialist thinking pervaded cultural and political life, conceiving the empire's diverse population as divided along binary and increasingly exclusive lines of identity and difference. Not least, nationalist tendencies characterized Germanophone discourse in Central Europe. Propagating ideas about cultural superiority, for example over the empire's Slavic-language speakers, such discourse often merged tropes of inner-European difference and exoticist imagery of European colonialism overseas. Inspired by recent revisions in Habsburg historiography, this paper, which emerged from the EGS's annual Prawer Lecture, will discuss the ways in which some German-language writers in Austria-Hungary challenged the divisive rhetoric of their times on the level of narrative form, by creating alternative narrative languages that foregrounded sameness and commonality. Taking the prose fiction of Moravian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) as the primary example for exploring this so far neglected 'aesthetics of sameness', I will demonstrate how she contested nationalist ideas of separation by rendering ambiguous markers of national, ethnic, and linguistic belonging through the formal design of her stories.
This essay argues for abandoning the Germanic concept of the 'classical period' ('Klassik'), a term that negates Goethe's affiliation with the European Enlightenment and Romanticism and obscures the characteristic features of Goethe's writing as well as its international impact. The term was established in Germany solely for political, not academic, reasons and persists to this day without objective justification, a creature purely of habit.
The article explores the extended tradition of the German classical epic by focusing on three works that in each case constitute the author's magnum opus and convey a distinctive Weltanschauung of cosmic dimensions. Klopstock programmatically situated his religiously inspired Messias in the epic tradition and adapted the classical hexameter in order to enable German literature to compete at the highest level with other national traditions. While Goethe followed suit with hexameter epics during his 'classical' period, he subsequently developed his early Faust project on the German protagonist's pact with the devil into a two-part mega tragedy that displays an exuberant array of different verse forms. Rilke's Duineser Elegien engage with the human condition through the poet's voice in free verse that draws above all on hexameter rhythms. The article argues that the hidden inspiration Goethe and Rilke derived from Klopstock's epic contributed vitally to their landmark works in different genres.
Although Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg (1924) has often been understood as a 'polyphonic' novel, little attention has been paid to the human bodies which give rise to its throng of voices. Drawing on materialist studies of vocality, this essay asks how Mann's interest in the voice as a figure of the body illuminates discussions of technology and the nation within the novel. In particular, the X-ray, the gramophone, and the discursive technology of psychoanalysis are identified as instances of technology which enter the body, and by extension the voice, into complex relation with the project of nation-building. This process is first explored using the example of Madame Chauchat, whose exoticized voice destabilizes the perceived link between nation and language. Similar questions are raised by the introduction of the gramophone, which intervenes in the privileged relationship between music and German identity operative in much of Mann's fiction.
This essay turns towards the figure of the Beautiful Soul in German Classicism and contemporary critical theory. I will first examine its appearance as an aside in a 2018 interview with the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupancic, and explore the Beautiful Soul's relationship to hysteria as first identified by Jacques Lacan in his reading of Freud's Bruchstuck einer Hysterie-Analyse (1905). Then, I will turn to some passages from Hegel's Phanomenologie des Geistes (1807), read with and against Book vi of Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795). I will conclude with a brief reading of the Beautiful Soul through the lens of affect theory, with reference to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Rita Felski. In my readings, I am looking for modes of interpretation that pay attention to how the terms of the material, historical world incapacitate certain subjects, maybe so-called Beautiful Souls, to fully occupy their place in the ethical relations of embodied life.
Throughout his life, Goethe was occupied with architectural studies. His essays on architecture are proof of this, as well as his numerous contributions to the planning of buildings in Weimar. His interest in architecture is also reflected in literature, particularly in his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809). This essay focusses on the motif of the 'Lusthaus' in the novel and its narrative implications. Especially the conversations between Charlotte and Ottilie, who plan and discuss their further course of action in the 'Lusthaus', are at the centre of attention. The article shows that the 'Lusthaus' is the ideal space for the women's discussions because of its material and symbolic design. That none of their decisions are put into practice can be attributed to this building as well.
The Ida Herz Lecture 2024 examines Thomas Mann's significant engagement in the political events of his time, particularly in situations where moral principles were at stake. Focusing on Mann's reaction to the 1948 decision by the US government to withdraw support for the partition of Palestine, the lecture illustrates his sustained efforts to influence public opinion and, at times, concrete policy. The lecture underscores Mann's approach to democracy as one that extends beyond theoretical reflection, grounded in ongoing self-examination and an openness to intellectual shifts.
When Goethe described the royal coronation of Joseph II in Frankfurt on 3 April 1764 in Dichtung und Wahrheit, the Roman-German Empire no longer existed. Looking back, he stylized the spectacle, which he had witnessed as a child, as a ghostly 'world theatre' that 'concealed a certain interpretation, indicated some inner relationship'. This article outlines the myth of the empire, which was subject to increasing criticism in the eighteenth century, and it examines how Goethe perceived the imperial constitution in retrospect, how he interpreted the empire's dissolution, and what role the traditional rituals of rule played in it.
Among Holderlin's most important works in the period from 1803 to 1804 are a sequence of nine poems (the Nachtges & auml;nge), and a sequence of nine Pindar translations with commentary (the Pindarfragmente). The coincidence in both number and dating suggests a relation between these two enigmatic late projects. Whilst a one-to-one correspondence between the two sequences cannot always be assumed, this article examines the relation between two of the more straightforward members of each: the ode 'An die Hoffnung' and the Pindarfragment 'Das Alter'. Both concern the phenomenon of hope, or its absence. It is argued that under the concept of hope 'Das Alter' also reflects upon the reception and renewal of the classical tradition. A connection is traced with Weimar Classicism, as exemplified by Goethe's mock epic Herrmann und Dorothea, and with Erasmus's commentary to the adage 'Festina lente'.
This essay examines Friedrich Theodor Vischer's (1807-1887) reception of Goethe's Faust and argues that, despite his sharp criticism of Goethe and the Goethe cult, Vischer is no exception to the nationalistic Perfektibilismus of his time. He shares with the Perfektibilisten the fundamental belief that Faust should be read as a drama of development and perfectibility, guiding the Germans towards political self-realization. Consequently, he dismisses the second part of the tragedy, which does not align with his interpretative framework, as a product of Goethe's senility. In Vischer's Faust III, particularly in the second act, the author's intention to correct Goethe's 'mistakes' and thereby elevate his vision of Faust to a figure of national identification becomes evident. By having Goethe appear at the end of the drama and agree with his image of Faust, Vischer makes it clear that he seeks only the confirmation and justification of his own philosophical and political ideas in Goethe's Faust.
This paper concerns Goethe's poetic recreation in Part iv of Dichtung und Wahrheit of his engagement with Lili Sch & ouml;nemann and its termination in 1775. The issue of social incompatibility between the families that ended the engagement of Goethe and Lili is mirrored in the social incompatibility that dooms the marriage of Clavigo and Marie Beaumarchais in Goethe's play Clavigo, written in 1774. Although Part iv was not seriously undertaken until 1824, seven years after Lili's death, Goethe had already begun to give poetic shape to the relationship with her in Part iii, which appeared in 1814, with the account of the 'marriage game' as the genesis of Clavigo. In contrast to the scholarly acceptance of Goethe's account of the play's genesis, this paper argues that the marriage game was an invention on Goethe's part to suggest the incompatibility he felt in 1775 between marriage and domestic existence and his own poetic career.
Christian August Crusius has tended in recent assessments to be identified as a philosopher who prioritizes experience or existence or actuality over logical or essentialist abstraction. Broadly speaking I agree with this assessment, but it risks ignoring the fact that his writings often accord value to the methods and fruits of abstraction, even to the extent of contradiction with his remarks on existence and actuality. This paper aims to redress the balance in readings of Crusius's work by highlighting the several ways in which abstraction is accorded value in his writings, in terms of the aims and methods of philosophy. It will also explore the reasons for the ambivalence that this gives rise to, in the form of Crusius's sense of the inherent and insuperable limitations of either approach and his sense of the complexity of reality, which limits the possibility and value of separating out necessary and contingent aspects of reality, and essential from extraneous grounds.
Inspired by recent scholarship in the blue humanities, this article explores the role of oceanic imagery in Friedrich Schiller's 'Der Ring des Polykrates' (1797). The ballad, which reworks an episode from Herodotus' Histories, centres on a Greek king who throws his ring into the sea in an ill-fated attempt to forestall divine envy. By tracing how Schiller's source material extends beyond Herodotus to a wider array of Greek myths and tragedies, including Euripides' Hecuba, the article argues that the ocean figures as a site of ambiguity in which lost objects take on alternately tragic and comic resonances. Schiller's poem both acknowledges the ballad genre's longstanding association with maritime imagery, and also ironizes this trope by showing how its protagonists recoil from looking too deeply into the sea. The article concludes by considering the afterlife of Schiller's ballad in Korngold's comic opera, Der Ring des Polykrates (1916).
Goethe endorsed the involvement of imagination in thinking nature, promoting what this essay calls a 'literary ecology' not only in poetically expressing ideas about the natural world, but also in the necessarily imaginative means required to understand it in ecological terms. Through an examination of both literary and scientific works, this essay demonstrates that for Goethe an ecological understanding of nature requires imaginative participation on the part of the observer that resonates with the creative becoming of nature itself; that Goethe's recognition of the meaningfulness of nature and the organic generation of meaning - his implicit biosemiotics - contributes to overturning the segregation of nature and thought now regarded as framing the exploitation and misuse of nature; and that Goethe's thinking supports a crucial reassessment of the human place within the ecosphere. Goethe's reliance on imagination in both intuiting and expressing nature's interconnections may have implications for ecological and planetary thinking more broadly.
