Some of my readers may have been wondering about my long silence. I am sure I mentioned sometime back that I was starting to work on my own book on Goethe, which I have been doing for the past two years, but it was September 2025, the last date of a post, that I sat down in earnest to work. I have read and read and read and taken thousands of notes. I have reached the point where I am beginning to…
It's been a while, as I have been working away at my Goethe book. Lately, I am rereading Goethe's autobiography ( Poetry and Truth in English), which plays a big role in the book I am writing. I mentioned in the previous post the lack of detail in Goethe’s works, even in letters to friends, where he is actually writing about himself, but without offering many details of the environment. But I came…
Even in his letters from I call his “apprentice years,” from 1768 to 1775, there are few moments in which Goethe informs us (or his addressee) of what is going on is his surroundings or of what is happening around him at a given moment. To give a sense of where I am heading, consider an exception, a letter to his friend J. Ch. Kestner dated Christmas Day of 1772. “It is still night, dear Kestner.…
The title above is the subject of the book I am writing on Goethe, and the work itself explains my long blog silence. I am definitely progressing, am in the midst of drafting chapter 4, which concerns the 1774 epistolary novel The Sufferings of Young Werther , which made Goethe famous among German readers, but also from Paris to Saint Petersburg. But in 1774 he was not yet the "literary Olympian"…
Portrait of Goethe, ca. 1764 It’s been too long since I have posted. In the meantime I have noticed that Goethe had more to say in his autobiography about Gellert (see previous post), but my work on my book on Goethe (I am now writing a draft of the third chapter) has kept me too occupied. I have been prompted into action, however, by a posting by my friend Genese Grill who is writing a biography…
This post is going to be all over the place. In my work on the "young" Goethe, i.e., his oeuvre before he went to Weimar at the age of twenty-six in 1775, I would come across the name and work of Gellert , a professor in Leipzig, whose classes on literature and essay writing Goethe attended while a student there. Gellert was one of the major writers in the generation at mid-18th century. Among…
I subscribe to the TLS, which does pretty good coverage of German literature and history, including Goethe. (I have even written a few reviews in the TLS on Goethe, which you can check out online.) But I also read literary coverage generally. Often reviews of other literary traditions lead me to consider Goethe, which was the case with a recent review: The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of Memory,…
As usual, I am caught up in many things, including an article on Goethe's 1774 play Clavigo , which I am completing (the footnotes took ages) for publication. It is not a play that we in the U.S. hear much about, and at the time of its publication there were people in Germany who didn't believe it was by Goethe. It appeared in the same year as The Sorrows of Young Werther while Götz von…
This is the concluding part of the previous post on the subject of refugees and émigrés during the French Revolution in Goethe's works. As with Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten , discussed in the earlier post, I am not dealing with the poetic character or literary values of Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea . (Another time perhaps!) As preparation for my participation on a panel at an…
Unterhaltungen dt. Ausgewanderten onstage in 2016 The East Coast American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ECASECS) is holding its annual conference at the end of October, for which I will be traveling to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It’s an opportunity to hear what one’s colleagues in 18th-century studies are up to. Samuel Johnson always seems to hold a special place in the conferences, as…
Goethe's Clavigo Clavigo and Marie meet after a long absence Lots of things have been going on since my last blogpost that have kept me from posting regularly, even though what has kept me occupied has concerned Goethe. In fact I have been immersed in Goethe, trying to get my “Goethe book” off the ground. But I also had to bring to completion an article on Goethe’s early (1774) play Clavigo . (So…
The Blue Flower My previous post was all over the place. As I wrote, the Jena circle and its influence is a complex story. The cast in the opening paragraph of the post includes people whose names are unfamiliar to most of us today, but whose works, as I wrote, had major influence on writers outside of Germany. Today, I want to draw attention to Novalis , whose real name, Friedrich von Hardenberg,…
Jena 1779 The “story” — for it is a story that will be told — opens with a scene in the parlor of a house in the university town of Jena. The residents have gathered of an evening, after a day filled with poetic and other intellectual production, to discuss projects on which they have been working in seclusion in their rooms during the day. It is late in the year 1799, and on this evening tea,…
Goethe was never actually in Copenhagen, certainly not in 1932, but it shows the extent of his reach and influence and the general knowledge of his works that a parody on his play Faust was performed in the city in 1932, and by some very smart people at that. It was the 100th anniversary of his death; this is my third post on the commemorations in that year. Like many of my posts on this blog, the…
The previous post discussed Goethe's travels in the summer of 1774. It was still "Genius" time in 1774, but a year later things had changed, which is prefigured in the last paragraphs of Book 15 of his autobiography. His sister Cornelia had married, and he observed that his parents had their eyes on a young woman for him. At the end of the book he writes that he came upon his mother in the attic…
Sometimes it is necessary to lift your eyes from the written words and try to see what Goethe saw. Goethe has been characterized as an "Augenmensch." As Richie Robertson has written: "The German language distinguishes Augenmenschen (eye-people) and Ohrenmenschen (ear-people). Although Goethe appreciated music, and was a competent pianist, he was emphatically an Augenmensch. He was also from an…
As I wrote in my previous post, 1932 marked the 100th anniversary of Goethe’s death, with commemorations organized worldwide. Another such commemoration has been documented by my Goethe Society colleague, Robert Kelz , in an article in volume 29 of the Goethe Yearbook . Professor Kelz has also documented the 1949 festivities in Buenos Aires in volume 28. Both occasions were darkened, of course, by…
A “true” socialist, I have learned, is a humanist. And a humanist, per 19th-century German socialist writer Karl Grün , was Goethe. Or so he tried to make Goethe out to be in a biography that appeared in 1846 entitled Über Goethe vom menschlichen Standpunkte (On Goethe from the Human Standpoint). Friedrich Engels took umbrage at this portrait and critiqued it in five installments in the Deutsche…
I am currently involved in de-cluttering my apartment. Many of you know the feeling: too many books! A book dealer came over and took fifty off of my hands, but I am putting many out on my stoop to allow neighbors to pick through. Many of these belonged to my late husband, who taught physics and whose books are on scientific subjects. Before consigning them to the garbage, I check the index to see…
Brad Pitt as Achilles In the previous post, concerning the pastoral genre, I sought to convey how much Goethe drew on traditional poetic genres in his poetry and dramas, but which he "modified" in such a way as to create something new poetically. I have recently come across an illuminating account of the epic poetic transmission that throws light on Goethe's innovations. For instance, he wrote…
I am back in New York City after three months on a small island adjacent to Port McNeill on northern Vancouver Island. As I wrote in earlier posts, my intention was to read as much of "young Goethe" as possible this summer, and I managed it. Today's brief post is simply to note a few things that were on my mind as I flew high in the sky from Vancouver to New York. Goethe grew up in a time when it…
No, Goethe fans, this post will not be about Goethe's love life, although there is much to be said in that connection. As mentioned in an earlier post I have been reading this summer, among other writings, Goethe's Roman Elegies , and at some date I will do a post on the subject. In a few days I will be leaving this island on which I have spent the summer. This will be the last post before I am…
Yes, August 29 has rolled around again. And, again, another mention on this blog of Goethe's birthday. This year, however, it struck me that Goethe was a Virgo. And yesterday was the annual Virgo Party on this small island. Above some of the Virgos present, including myself, along with a few friends. The party, held at the end of August or beginning of September, marks the end of my stay out here,…
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I planned this summer to concentrate on Goethe’s pre-Weimar writings, having brought with me Karl Eibl’s two-volume edition of Der junge Goethe . (The five-volume Fischer-Lamberg edition was too much to carry.) But as often happens when following up one thing on Goethe, I become diverted. In any case, I never thought I would be making my way this summer through…
Consider the following a book review of a very small volume (47 pp.) of translations of poems by Goethe entitled Nightwalker’s Song . I saw an ad for the book in the London Review of Books and wrote the publisher, Arc Publications, expressing my interest in writing about it for the blog. Arc kindly sent me a copy. The translator is John Greening, and the selection of poems, with German and English…