Abstract: In 1795, three years after the outbreak of war between revolutionary France and conservative-reactionary European powers, Goethe composed Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten , a cycle of heterogeneous stories embedded within a frame narrative resembling that of Boccaccio’s Decameron . His work differs crucially from its predecessor, however, by replacing Boccaccio’s plague with the political upheaval of the French Revolution as the cause of a small group seeking refuge in the country and engaging in diverting literary discourse. What Boccaccio presents as a natural calamity, Goethe transforms into a human-made “plague.” Its cause, he suggests, is an uncritical embrace of political extremism. Because an addictive or seductive edge adheres to extremist political rhetoric, it primes escalations of verbal and conceptual violence inimical to the liberality of mind that the arts speak to and, at their best, cultivate. Habituation to coarsened thought and feeling gives license to and normalizes political violence. The wager underlying Goethe’s collection is that the best therapy against the debilitating conceptual, moral, and practical effects of political extremism is not an alternative political discourse but rather the indirection of literary art. Aesthetic broadening of imagination and sympathies is likely to do more reformative and corrective work by the back door than by front-door political confrontation.
Abstract: Despairing at the senseless brutality she has witnessed in Paris at the height of the Terror, Engel Christine Westphalen’s fictionalized Charlotte Corday from her eponymous 1804 historical tragedy resolves to strike as a brave martyr at the force that has thrown France into chaos: Jean-Paul Marat. Through her actions, Westphalen’s Corday hopes to rescue the blind and misled Volk from the clutches of demagogic Jacobins. Despite the drama’s focus on the Volk, this amorphous category is almost entirely excluded from the stage, relying instead on witness and testimony by historically based characters. The repeated use of testimony based on specific historical facts contains a subtle inversion of the Terror’s chronology that alters the causation of provincial revolts while simultaneously assigning all guilt to Marat and key leaders in the Convention. This inversion of key events further contributes to a portrayal within the drama of the Volk as both corrupted by the evil machinations of Marat and utterly incapable of meaningful political engagement. Westphalen’s depiction of the Volk as a violent yet blind force, essentially equating the term with the Parisian sans-culottes, presents a model of republican politics that excludes the immediate viability of mass participation.
Abstract: The Athenaeum , the only production of the early Romantics as a group , is often only seen as a publishing platform rather than a work of art in its own right. Yet the contributors’ unique emphasis on the unity of spirit reveals that a collective work takes shape on the basis of a coherent aesthetic principle— Sympoesie or Symphilosophie . The way in which its contributions interrelate to one another demonstrates how the journal materializes its own ideals of sociability and collectivity through the careful curation and cultivation of a “romantisch” community. The juxtaposition of how ancient Greek idyll fragments, translation, and John Flaxman’s outline illustrations are treated in the journal exemplifies this process of aesthetic approximation as a social practice as part of the journal’s production. By refusing to be read in isolation, the individual parts of the Athenaeum coalesce, allowing for a holistic approach to the journal and the possibility of seeing it as the epitome of early Romantic aesthetic principles and practice.
