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.
