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FROM GOETHE
TO GUNDOLF
From Goethe to Gundolf

Essays on German Literature

and Culture

Roger Paulin
 https://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2021 Roger Paulin

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 Contents

Foreword vii

GOETHE AND SCHILLER: GOETHEZEIT ix

1. Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers 1
2. Goethe and Stolberg in Italy: The Consequences for 25
Romantic Art
3. Schiller: Wallenstein 45
4. Laocoon, Dante, Shakespeare, August Wilhelm Schlegel 59
and the Overcoming of Tragedy
5. Adding Stones to the Edifice: Patterns of German 79
Biography
6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses. Some Remarks on the Use of 95
Mythology in Penthesilea
7. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom 123

ROMANTICISM 145
8. Fairy Stories for Very Sophisticated Children: Ludwig 147
Tieck’s Phantasus
9. Gundolf’s Romanticism 161

NINETEENTH CENTURY 177

10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of 179
Wilhelm Müller
11. Heine and Shakespeare 207
12. The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859 and the ‘Shakespearefest’ 223
of 1864. With Some Remarks on Theodor Fontane’s
Contributions
13. Under the Horse’s Tail: The Poets, Statuary and the 245
Literary Canon in Nineteenth-Century Germany
vi From Goethe to Gundolf

POETRY 271
14. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: ‘Der Zürchersee’ 271
15. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff 293
16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten: In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90 313

BOOKS 337
17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, 339
Cambridge

Bibliography 365
List of Illustrations 389
Index 393
 Foreword

These essays are a selection of my research papers and public

lectures over a period of nearly forty years. They represent my
major interests — Romanticism, and the reception of Shakespeare in
Germany — but also excursions into other areas that have caught my
imagination. I have always taught across a broad spectrum of German
literature, and these essays reflect that scope. With three exceptions,
they have all appeared in scholarly journals or collected volumes,
between 1982 to 2010. Most have been subject to some reformulation,
but their substantial arguments have not been changed. I have taken the
opportunity to correct some errors and to add references to more recent
scholarship.
This collection draws on pieces which were in the true sense
‘occasional’, and others which arose out of my major research interests.
Those in the former category include the chapter on Kleist (Chapter
6), inspired by Charles Tomlinson’s Clark Lectures in Cambridge and
very much an early ‘one-off’; while the chapter on Academic Freedom
(Chapter 7), my Inaugural Lecture in Cambridge in 1990, pertinent
then, still retains its relevance today. Several chapters reflect my abiding
love of poetry in all its forms and my pleasure in teaching it. They are
all based on public lectures given in Cambridge (Klopstock, Chapter
14; Werther, Chapter 1; Wallenstein, Chapter 3; Annette von Droste-
Hülshoff, Chapter 15; Rilke’s Tenth Elegy, Chapter 16). My interest in
Romanticism, its origins and its pervasive influence, is displayed in the
chapters on Goethe and Stolberg (Chapter 2), Fairy Stories (Chapter 8)
and Gundolf (Chapter 9). They cover concerns not always central to
present-day Romantic studies. Chapter 4 is a brief but in-depth study
of an aspect of August Wilhelm Schlegel, that cosmopolitan writer of
whom I wrote a biography in 2016. Similarly, Heine and Shakespeare
(Chapter 11) and the ‘Schillerfeier’ (Chapter 12) look at detailed issues
viii From Goethe to Gundolf

in Shakespeare’s reception in Germany that arose in the composition of

my monograph on the same subject (2003). The link between the lives of
the poets, their commemoration and the literary canon, has always been
an interest of mine: ‘Adding Stones to the Edifice’ (Chapter 5) examines
the German biographical tradition, Wilhelm Müller (Chapter 10) serves
to illustrate the problems of a ‘minor’ poet, and ‘Under the Horse’s
Tail’ (Chapter 13) looks at the public memorialization of the poets. My
chapter on Julius Hare’s books in Trinity College Library (Chapter 17)
tells of the treasures of German literature to be found there and records
my lasting love of books in all forms, however obscure or recondite.
The translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
I wish to record my gratitude to my friend and colleague Peter
Hutchinson, who was responsible for commissioning and originally
publishing five of these pieces.
I have been encouraged in this endeavour by the example of my
late friend and colleague, Hugh Barr Nisbet, whose dedication to
scholarship — and whose stoicism in adversity — I here acknowledge.
The Managers of the Schröder Fund, Department of German,
University of Cambridge, made a generous grant towards the production
of this book.
I wish to record my thanks to all at Open Book Publishers who have
seen this book through to its completion, not least their patience and
forbearance with an author whose IT literacy leaves much to be desired.
GOETHE AND SCHILLER:
GOETHEZEIT
Fig. 1 James Hervey, Meditations and Contemplations (London: J. Goodwin, 1812).
 1. Goethe:
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers

Goethe and the Novel

Only superlatives will do for Werther. For Thomas Mann, for instance,
it remains ‘ein Meisterwerk’.1 For this and other modern masters of
the theme of death such a reaction might come more from literary
mediation than through direct access. For earlier generations, however,
it came straight from the experience of the heart. Werther concentrates
many of the aspirations and strivings of the Sturm und Drang (‘Storm
and Stress’) and is its finest literary expression. It is the textbook from
which the German Romantics learn their Weltschmerz (‘melancholy’).
Their European counterparts in mal du siècle can create Adolphe, René,
Ortis or Manfred2 because Werther has shown the way. At home, a
succession of tragic heroes, Bonaventura, Roquairol and Danton,3 can
pronounce on the futility of existence with an eloquence lent by the
earlier model. Yet against such specific literary influence one must set the
sheer importance of the text for the whole of German literature — and
for Johann Wolfgang Goethe himself as its representative. It is the first

1 ‘A masterpiece’. For a selection of modern reactions to Werther see Johann Wolfgang
Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Ein unklassischer Klassiker. Neu herausgegeben
und mit Dokumenten und Materialien, Wertheriana und Wertheriaden, ed. by Hans
Christoph Buch, Wagenbach Taschenbücher 898 (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1982), 248–51.
This chapter was originally published as the Introduction to Goethe, Die Leiden des
jungen Werthers, ed. by Roger Paulin (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), vii-xxvi.
2 Benjamin Constant, Adolphe (1816), François-René de Chateaubriand, René (1802),
Ugo Foscolo, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1816), Lord Byron, Manfred (1817).
3 Heroes in, respectively, Jean Paul, Titan (1800–03), [Ernst August Friedrich
Klingemann], Die Nachwachen des Bonaventura (1805), Georg Büchner, Dantons Tod
(1835).

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.01

2 From Goethe to Gundolf

German novel to gain international fame, and nothing Goethe or any

other German writes in this mode will catch Europe’s attention again
for well over a century. It is Goethe’s only novel to sustain narrative
breath from start to finish. It is his only true tragedy. It might even be
said that the young man of twenty-four wrote nothing better. The fame
and scandal it attracted to his name, while not inhibiting his creativity,
certainly did stamp him in the eyes of many as the author of just one
book and as such was an encumbrance and an embarrassment in
his middle years — ‘ein Unheil, was mich bis nach Indien verfolgen
würde’.4 But by 1824, fifty years after the first printing and in the year
of his poem ‘An Werther’, Goethe — now well over seventy — cannot
help admitting that ‘Es sind lauter Brandraketen!’,5 that the novel still
packs an explosive charge. There is pride here at having written Werther
at twenty-four, and by implication, at having been a celebrity ever since.
Goethe claimed in a conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann early
in 1824 that he had read the novel only once since its first appearance,
presumably for the revisions carried out from 1782 onwards. However
that may be — and there is no reason necessarily to doubt him — Goethe
certainly had little to say about his most famous work until drawn in
1808 by no less an interlocutor than Napoleon Bonaparte. And it was a
combination of real circumstances and the reflexion on circumstances
once real, that caused him to return again to the work and its implications.
The suicide of the stepson of his friend Carl Friedrich Zelter in 1812
brings back the memory of taedium vitae. It was that surfeit of life, that
had once gripped his vitals, in the experience leading up to Werther, and
that he had escaped (‘den Wellen des Todes […] entkommen’).6 The
reflexion on his own life, as his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit/
Poetry and Truth enters into its ‘Werther phase’ in 1813, causes him to
pause for thought on how it may have been and now seemed. There
could of course be no question of stating how it actually was, but a
disparate and confused set of events could now be stylized into the

4 ‘A misfortune that might pursue me as far as India’. All Goethe quotations are
taken where possible from Goethe, Der junge Goethe. Neu bearbeitete Ausgabe in fünf
Bänden, ed. by Hanna Fischer-Lamberg, 5 vols (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1963–74) (DjG),
and Goethe, Goethes Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. by Erich Trunz et al., 14 vols
(Hamburg: Wegner, 1948–60) (HA); here, HA, VI, 530. The text of Werther is that of
the first edition of 1774.
5 ‘Fireworks, the lot of them’. HA, VI, 534.
6 ‘Escaped from the waves of death’. HA, VI, 534.
 1. Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers  3

coherent whole that is conditional on reflective maturity. To protect the

integrity of a life so portrayed, Goethe warned against ‘zerrupfen und
die Form zerstören’,7 an injunction to respect both Werther the work of
art and the account of its genesis. Later generations of commentators,
armed with more factual evidence than Goethe during his lifetime was
willing to surrender, do well to remember this warning. But if it is the
novel that we wish to understand and appreciate better, the biographical
background should enhance rather than detract from it.
Yet care is needed in linking life and work too closely. In writing
Werther in the epistolary mode, Goethe was obeying urges that were
certainly more literary than personal. Among the extraordinary
collection first edited over a century ago as Der junge Goethe, there
is the opening of a fragmentary Roman in Briefen/Novel in Letters.
No longer attributed to Goethe, it dates from 1770–71, Goethe’s
Strasbourg interlude. Its theme of a love just ended and the heart’s
‘Wallendes Sehnen nach Etwas’8 suggest an early draft of Werther, or
rather of that shadowy web of relationships in the novel’s first page
or two, abandoned once it finds its true tone and style. Above all, it
indicates that Goethe’s novel-writing is not ‘naïve’, in the sense that
he is fully aware of a current European fashion. He had already
displayed an ambition sufficient not only to sum up Shakespeare’s
world in his Zum Schäkespear’s Tag/On Shakespeare’s Day but also
to write the Shakespeareanizing Götz von Berlichingen; he would
not regard the presence of Samuel Richardson’s or Jean-Jacques
Rousseau’s epistolary novels as an impediment to fiction-writing. The
mode was now so popular that its debasements — those ‘Miß Jennys’9
that once occupied Lotte’s few leisure hours — were almost as well-
known as its high achievements. The epistolary novel appeals for
its very ability to present character, motives and heart’s stirrings as
spontaneous and genuine but yet also morally structured. The Roman
in Briefen — two letters and a few fragments — seems to conform to
that pattern. It is at any rate not yet moving towards the device that
gives Werther its uniqueness: the absence of replies. For by denying

7 ‘Unpicking and ruining the form’. HA, IX, 592.

8 ‘Waves of longing for something’. The fragment is still attributed to Goethe by Ernst
Beutler in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke. Artemis-Gedenkausgabe, ed. by Ernst Beutler, 18
vols (Munich: dtv, 1977), and it is quoted here after that edition, IV, 263.
9 Cf. DjG, IV, 116.
4 From Goethe to Gundolf

Werther’s correspondents the chance to articulate a counter-position,

Goethe seems to present Werther’s heart as the sole moral reference
and arbiter, overriding others’ qualifications or tiresome interjections.
Thus it is that Werther’s style and presentation, this view of himself
and others, are the only ones ‘in character’, and as such they seize us.

Wetzlar
‘Und doch muss man einmal erfahren dass Mädgen — Mädgen sind’.10
Were these words of the Roman in Briefen by Goethe, they would suggest
a young man of great talent but considerable emotional instability and
egoism. His callous abandonment of Friederike Brion in Strasbourg in
1771 is witness to this. Yet Strasbourg had also stood for legal studies
and not just for the heart or letters. At his father’s insistence the
young doctor of law was now to gain further legal experience at the
‘Reichskammergericht’ in Wetzlar.11 It was following family tradition,
to convey some of that same professional solidity to yet another
generation. Despite Joseph II’s reforms, this imperial appeal court
was still a circumlocution office, one of those tottering institutions of
the old regime waiting only for Napoleon to give it the final push. In
1772, however, delegations from the various sovereign states within the
Holy Roman Empire were still representing their interests there; it made
Wetzlar the town into a place where the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie
and the people — all knowing their stations — came together and kept
apart. In all this, Goethe was a free agent, but he soon found social
contact with young men of his own age: Johann Christian Kestner, a
secretary with the Hanoverian delegation, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem
from Brunswick, even a fellow-poet, Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter from
Gotha. From May to September 1772, Goethe’s pursuits were hardly
juridical; he was a member of a burlesque order of chivalry where he
bore the name of ‘Götz’, and he enjoyed numerous visits — more than
would prove decorous — in the Buff household. Kestner was engaged
to Charlotte Buff, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the estate-manager
of the ‘Deutschordenshof’,12 who, after the recent death of her mother,

10 ‘And still one has to learn that girls — are girls’. Artemis-Gedenkausgabe, IV, 265.
11 Imperial Appeal Court.
12 Property belonging to the German Order.
 1. Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers  5

was caring for her eleven brothers and sisters. Kestner had every reason
to observe this young man‚ ‘in allen seinen Affecten heftig’, ‘Aller
Zwang ist ihm verhaßt’, ‘Er liebt die Kinder’,13 ‘bizarre’. At a ball given
in the nearby village of Volpertshausen on June 9, 1772, ‘Dr Goede’
danced with Charlotte and promptly fell in love. It took him some
months before he faced the fact that he was very much in the way. He
departed precipitately on September 11, without a formal leave-taking
from either Kestner or Lotte. Returning on foot to Frankfurt, he spent
some time with the La Roche family near Ehrenbreitstein: Sophie von
La Roche’s novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim/The History of
Mademoiselle de Sternheim (1771), with its story of court intrigue and
virtue preserved, had made her a celebrity. But Goethe was attracted
to their daughter Maximiliane. She however was already promised to
the Frankfurt merchant Peter Brentano. Goethe returned abruptly to
Frankfurt, which was to be his base for the next eighteen months. On
October 30, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem shot himself in Wetzlar with pistols
borrowed from Kestner. As Goethe was to learn in a long account from
Kestner, an impossible attachment to a married woman had been but
the last in a series of personal calamities that had befallen him. On April
4, 1773, Kestner and Lotte were married; in January 1774, it was Maxe
von La Roche and Peter Brentano’s turn. From February to May, 1774,
Goethe was occupied with writing his novel, which Weygand in Leipzig
published in September as Die Leiden des jungen Werthers.

The Question of Autobiography

These raw facts produce at a basic level a series of coincidences with the
text of the novel. Goethe’s first readers were aware of this and Goethe
knew that they knew. Thus began the most tiresome aspect of study of
this novel, to explore:

Ob denn auch Werther gelebt? ob denn auch alles fein wahr sei?14

as a manuscript variant of Goethe’s own Römische Elegie II of 1795 puts it.

13 ‘Violent in all his feelings’; ‘Detests all constraint’; ‘Loves children’. Goethe in
vertraulichen Briefen seiner Zeitgenossen, ed. by Wilhelm Bode, 3 vols (Berlin: Aufbau,
1979), I, 36.
14 ‘Did Werther really exist? Was it all really true?’ HA, I, 492, VI, 530.
6 From Goethe to Gundolf

Kestner, who had every reason to believe that he was the Albert of the
original, was not long in informing Goethe that he was ‘schlecht erbauet’15
by the novel and its mixture of fact and fiction, at the way real persons
had been ‘prostituirt’.16 Yet Kestner was magnanimous: for Goethe, only
a matter of weeks after the novel’s publication, was already complaining
to him of the ‘Verdacht, Missdeutung pp. im schwäzzenden Publikum’,
that ‘Heerd Schwein’.17 But that ‘herd of swine’ contained many of the
soulful fraternity, those who read from the heart and expected the heart
to ratify as true any specific or identifiable reference. It embraced others,
notably Gothold Ephraim Lessing, for whom the overt associations of
Jerusalem’s suicide — not to speak of a copy of Emilia Galotti open on
the desk — were a travesty of all that his young friend had stood for. His
letter to Johann Joachim Eschenburg of October 26, 1774 has become
famous:

ja, wenn unseres J[erusalem]s Geist völlig in dieser Lage gewesen wäre,
so müßte ich ihn fast —verachten. Glauben Sie wohl, daß je ein römischer
oder griechischer Jüngling sich so und darum das Leben genommen?
Gewiß nicht. Die wußten sich vor der Schwärmerey der Liebe ganz anders
zu schützen; [...] Solche kleingrosse, verächtlich schätzbare Originale
hervorzubringen, war nur der christlichen Erziehung vorbehalten, die
ein körperliches Bedürfniß so schön in eine geistige Vollkommenheit zu
verwandeln weiß.18

Goethe faced the danger of his novel becoming a mere roman à clef. More
seriously, however, he might be seen as ghoulishly creating fiction out
of the real circumstances of a young man now dead and no longer able
to defend himself. The first, and the added suspicion that the novel
reflected Goethe’s own views (‘ich fürchte, viele werden glauben,

15 ‘Highly displeased’.
16 ‘Travestied’. DjG, IV, 381.
17 ‘Suspicion, distortion etc. among my chattering readers’, ‘herd of swine’. DjG, IV,
255.
18 ‘Yes, if our Jerusalem’s mind had been in that state, then I would just about have
to — despise him. Can you imagine a Roman or Greek youth taking his life for
this cause in such a fashion? Of course not. They knew of other ways of protecting
themselves against the flights of love. […] Only a Christian upbringing could
produce such puny and contemptible types, adept at changing a physical need into
a perfection of the mind’. Goethe in vertraulichen Briefen, I, 74.
 1. Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers  7

daß Goethe selbst so denkt’),19 would not outlive initial reactions to

the work. The second would not go away quite so easily. For Goethe
had requested from Kestner a full and circumstantial account of
Jerusalem’s last days20 and had made extensive use of it in the novel.
Genius is not fastidious. Perhaps Goethe’s stress in his later account in
Dichtung und Wahrheit (Part Three, Book 13) on the symbolic unity of
the work and the impossibility of unravelling the strands of fact and
fiction, is designed partly to play down his own involvement in all these
events. The atmosphere of taedium vitae described there, has, he claims,
been induced more by literature than by real life — by the brooding,
melancholic or elegiac poetry of English provenance, into which both
novel and remembered experience may be integrated. Instead of a
detailed account of Jerusalem’s circumstances, we have a stanza from
Thomas Warton’s poem ‘The Suicide’,21 a ‘case’ that is typical and non-
specific. Autobiographical truth, as he wrote in a letter of 1830, stood
for ‘das eigentlich Grundwahre’,22 not objective reality. Thus Goethe can
claim that it was Jerusalem’s suicide that first caused the plan of Werther
to ‘freeze’ into place as a ‘solide Masse’.23 It was, however, to be well
over a year, after the further distress of the marriages of Lotte and Maxe,
that he was to sit down and, as it were, write Werther out of his system.
Yet the suicide of Jerusalem did, perhaps in another sense, provide the
germ of the novel. On hearing of this shocking event, Goethe wrote the
following letter to Kestner in early November 1772:

Der unglückliche Jerusalem. Die Nachricht war mir schröcklich und

unerwartet, es war grässlich zum angenehmsten Geschenck der Liebe
diese Nachricht zur Beylage. Der unglückliche. Aber die Teufel, welches
sind die schändlichen Menschen die nichts geniessen denn Spreu der
Eitelkeit, und Götzen Lust in ihrem Herzen haben, und Götzendie[n]st
predigen, und hemmen gute Natur, und übertreiben und verderben die
Kräffte sind schuld an diesem Unglück an unserm Unglück hohle sie der
Teufel ihr Bruder. Wenn der verfluchte Pfaff sein Vater nicht schuld ist

19 ‘I fear that quite a few will believe Goethe himself thinks this way’. Goethe in
vertraulichen Briefen, I, 85.
20 DjG, IV, 351–56.
21 HA, IX, 583.
22 ‘The basic underlying truth’. Quoted in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher
und Gespräche, ed. by Dieter Borchmeyer et al., 40 vols (Frankfurt am Main:
Deutscher Klasiker Verlag, 1985–98), II, 2, 209.
23 HA, IX, 583.
8 From Goethe to Gundolf

so verzeih mirs Gott dass ich ihm Wünsche er möge den Hals brechen
wie Eli. Der arme iunge! wenn ich zurückkam vom Spaziergang und er
mir begegnete hinaus im Mondschein, sagt ich er ist verliebt. Lotte muss
sich noch erinnern dass ich drüber lächelte. Gott weis die Einsamkeit hat
sein Herz untergraben, und — seit sieben jahren kenn ich die Gestalt, ich
habe wenig mit ihm geredt, bey meiner Abreise nahm ich ihm ein Buch
mit das will ich behalten und sein Gedencken so lang ich lebe.24

Kestner’s long reply was written in response to this impulsive note.

Whereas Kestner’s letter adopts a uniform, almost forensic tone in
both report and commentary, Goethe’s is notable for the way in which
levels of style succeed and overlay each other. It is the characteristic
style of the young Goethe’s letters. There are two distinct reactions to
the imperative question: why? The first seizes on those whose vanity
and idolatry — biblical words — have corrupted human nature, a
Rousseauistic response overlaid with the vocabulary and tone of Martin
Luther’s Bible. But if they were not the offenders, then Jerusalem’s
theologian father was, and, searching the scriptures for a terrible
example, Goethe wishes on him the fate of the high priest Eli, whose
‘neck brake’ when he fell at hearing of the deaths of his sons (1 Samuel
4:18, AV). But then perhaps personal experience, in both Leipzig and
Wetzlar, may confirm a further reason for the tragedy. Goethe diagnoses
a condition: solitary walks in the moonlight, something which the
medicine of the century would have called ‘melancolia errabunda’, here
with the special manifestation of solitude. The phrase ‘die Einsamkeit
hat sein Herz untergraben’ recurs in another letter from about the same
time, and it recalls the letter in Werther of August 18 in Part One, in which
the experience of solitude amid God’s creation, once the source of well-
being and exaltation, in the contemplation of a well-ordered harmony,
has become one great open grave, the scene of universal Moloch-like

24 ‘Poor unhappy Jerusalem. The news was terrible, unexpected, an awful postscript
this news was to your so pleasant gift of love. Poor unhappy lad. But the devils, the
scoundrels whose whole sustenance is the chaff of vanity and who make lust their
heart’s idol, and preach idolatry, and keep back the goodness of nature and push
our forces to extremes and pervert them, are to blame, the devil take them their
brother. If his damned parson of a father isn’t to blame then God forgive me if I wish
he’d break his neck like Eli. The poor lad! When I used to come back from my walk
and I met him out there in the moonlight, I said he’s in love. Lotte must remember
that I found it amusing. God knows solitude has undermined his heart — and I
have known this person for seven years, spoken but little with him, when I left I
borrowed a book from him, I will keep it and his memory as long as I live’. DjG, III,
7.
 1. Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers  9

destruction: ‘Mir untergräbt das Herz die verzehrende Kraft, die im

All der Natur verborgen liegt’.25 Does Goethe, in his first, unrehearsed
reaction to the news, sense that here was also the stuff of a good novel?
The question has been asked, and must be asked again. It may have been
the reason for his request from Kestner for more details, some of which
actually go verbatim into the text of the novel. Genius is unsentimental
and does not draw life and art into neat partitions. Even if Goethe was
not planning a novel, let alone writing one, there is already some of the
stuff of the novel in the above letter: the biblical style, interspersed with
the colloquial, the abrupt transitions, the sentences that do not finish. In
the novel, they are conscious devices, symptomatic of one whose heart
is indeed consumed and undermined by total solitude. More than that
one cannot say.
Another whole series of later statements by Goethe must also be
considered. It had been his purpose, he claims, to remain alive in order
to leave an account of how it actually was. His creative urge proved to
be sufficiently robust to resist the enticements of self-inflicted death
and was the ‘Talent, das in mir steckt’26 that kept him going through
the vicissitudes of life. It is the reverse side of his awareness of being
the favourite of the gods, the happy man: instead, he is the one chosen
to survive, like Job’s servant (‘Herr, alle Deine Schafe und Knechte
sind erschlagen worden, und ich bin allein entronnen, Dir Kunde zu
bringen’),27 like the pelican (‘Das ist auch so ein Geschöpf, […] das ich
gleich dem Pelikan mit dem Blute meines eigenen Herzens gefüttert
habe’),28 or best-known of all, ‘An Werther’ (1824):

Noch einmal wagst du, vielbeweinter Schatten,

Hervor dich an das Tageslicht,
Begegnest mir auf neu beblümten Matten
Und meinen Anblick scheust du nicht.
Es ist als ob du lebtest in der Frühe,
Wo uns der Tau auf Einem Feld erquickt,
Und nach des Tages unwillkommner Mühe

25 ‘The consuming force hidden in the whole of nature is my heart’s undoing’. DjG, IV,
139.
26 ‘the talent I have within me’. HA, VI, 534.
27 ‘Lord, all thy flocks and servants are perished, and I only am escaped to tell thee’.
Based on Job I, 13ff. HA, VI, 533.
28 ‘That too is such a creature […] that I like the pelican have fed with my heart’s
blood’. Ibid.
10 From Goethe to Gundolf

Der Scheidesonne letzter Strahl entzückt;

Zum Bleiben ich, zum Scheiden du erkoren,
Gingst du voran — und hast nicht viel verloren.29

In every crucial respect, Goethe is not identical with Werther. Goethe

runs from the situations that would endanger him, out into self-
preservation: the anguish of heart produced is sufficient for the work
of art. Werther significantly fails to do this. True, he also feels the need
to create, to follow nature, not rules, to observe, to record in word
and graphic image. He reflects Goethe’s own thinking in many ways,
but Goethe does not wish his hero to appear creative — that would
be a betrayal of art. For art — everything Goethe says at the time and
subsequently bears out — is a matter of energy and observation, genius
and limitation, all in one. Werther’s longings and urges cannot fulfil this.
Hence ‘zum Scheiden du erkoren’.

Empfindsamkeit30
How are we to read this novel? Goethe’s immediate contemporaries
were in no doubt. Wilhelm Heinse‘s response is typical of many:

Das Herz ist einem so voll davon, und der ganze Kopf ein Gefühl
von Thräne […] Für diejenigen Damen, die das edle volle Herz des
unglücklichen Werthers bey Lotten für zu jugendliche unwahrscheinliche
Schüchternheit, und seinen Selbstmord mit einigen Philosophen für
unmöglich halten, ist das Büchlein nicht geschrieben.31

29 ‘Again, you much-mourned shadow, you make bold

To step out in the brightest light of day;
You counter me in flowery field or fold,
My eye meets yours, yours does not turn away.
You live, it seems, now in the early dawn
When dew on grass refreshes and restores,
The parting sun’s last rays adorn
And irksome day is over, with its chores.
I stay, you leave, so fate has deemed it fit,
You went ahead, and have not missed a whit’. HA, I, 380 (‘To Werther’).
30 ‘Sensibility’.
31 ‘One’s heart is so full of it, and one’s head one whole feeling of tears. […] For those
ladies who hold poor Werther’s noble full heart with Lotte to be too much youthful
bashfulness and not true to life, his suicide impossible, as some philosophers do,
this book was not written’. Der junge Goethe im zeitgenössischen Urteil, ed. by Peter
Müller, Deutsche Bibliothek 2 (Berlin: Akademie, 1969), 208, 210. There were
similar reactions from Gleim, Lavater, Bürger, Voss, Stolberg and many others.
 1. Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers  11

It is also to the man or woman of feeling that Goethe addresses the

preface of his novel, with the appeal to ‘Bewunderung’, ‘Liebe’,
‘Thränen’,32 even that ‘schöpfe Trost aus seinem Leiden’33 for the
weaker brethren. Interestingly enough, Goethe rejects a more overtly
premonitory alternative prefatory statement in favour of the appeal to
readers’ sensitivities. In many ways this is surprising, for Goethe could
already rely on the culture in which most of his readers were situated to
engage those faculties. This culture was ‘Empfindsamkeit’. The strand
of sentimentality, the cult of feeling, runs right through the culture of
the eighteenth century, never more prominently than when this novel
was written. The inward-looking mystical tradition in German religious
culture, the insistence of the movement known as Pietism that faith is
not merely a question of knowledge, credal statements or articles of faith,
but an experience of the heart, that self-analysis is the key to one’s state
of soul — all of these elements become in the course of the eighteenth
century aesthetic, moral and social postulates. Writing should move
the heart. This was essentially the notion of ‘herzrührende Schreibart’
(‘style that moves the heart’) as advocated in the 1740s by the Swiss
critics Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann Jacob Breitinger. Language and
aesthetic decorum will make way for ‘Empfindung’, ‘feeling’ or rather,
‘Empfindung’ will create a new set of aesthetic criteria. When seeking
to arouse emotion, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert‘s Praktische Abhandlung
von dem guten Geschmacke in Briefen/Practical Treatise on Good Taste in
Letters of 1751 informs us, ‘so lasse man sein Herz mehr reden, als seinen
Verstand; und seinen Witz gar nicht. Man wisse von keiner Kunst, von
keiner Ordnung in seinem Briefe’.34 Paramount are the subjugation of
the rational powers of discrimination and distinction to the forces of the
heart, the identification with the subject, not critical distance from it. In
writing, it means effusion, outpouring; in reading, it means a passionate
attempt to take the work concerned ‘to heart’. The self-centred sense of
joy in feeling will find expression in tears — the manifestation of virtue

32 ‘Admiration’, ‘love’, ‘tears’.

33 ‘Draw consolation from his sorrows’. DjG, IV, 105.
34 ‘So let one’s heart speak more than one’s understanding, and one’s wit not at
all. One should admit no artifice, no order, in one’s letter’. Christian Fürchtegott
Gellert, Sämmtliche Werke, Sammlung der besten deutschen Prosaschriftsteller, 9
vols (Carlsruhe: Schmieder, 1774), IV, 64.
12 From Goethe to Gundolf

and a ‘fühlendes Herz’.35 This phrase right at the beginning of the novel
(like ‘Fülle des Herzens’, ‘Fühlbarkeit’ or ‘ergießen’,36 themselves the
secularized language of religious emotion) becomes the touchstone of
behaviour, that one’s ‘heart is in the right place’.
‘Empfindsamkeit’ creates its own literature, or borrows freely
from the poetry of reflective inwardness so favoured by the English.
Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1741–45), with its lugubrious and
grandiose tedium, becomes a cult book, not just for its nocturnal setting
and brooding melancholy, but for its sentiments on ‘Life, Death and
Immortality’. It calls on the reader to withdraw into solitude, into creative
introspection, to reflect amid tears and the awareness of one’s inner
virtue, on the universe and its creator. As the world and its design, set in
motion by a benevolent deity, support all life and allow no manifestation
of nature to go unexplained, so our lives and relationships do not end
with earthly existence. Instead, we may look forward to reunion with
our dead friends, who, as Young puts it, are ‘Angels sent on Errands
full of Love’.37 The poetic cult of love, separation and future union is
associated in Germany especially with the name of Friedrich Gottlieb
Klopstock. This cult, but also Klopstock’s creative use of the language
of the heart and the Bible, are the reasons which underlie one of the
climactic passages in the novel: Werther’s and Lotte’s meeting of souls
in the invocation of the poet’s name.
‘Empfindsamkeit’ is also a movement of restrained and decorous
feeling. There are always warnings against over­ indulgence or over-
identification. Goethe’s contemporary Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz,
not perhaps best known for reined-in sentiment, draws attention to
the ‘leidenschaftlicher Leser’, who reads ‘auf Kosten seiner Vernunft
und Moralität’, instead of ‘mit fester Seele’.38 It is the danger of making
literature into a surrogate for established modes of experience. Solitude,

35 ‘Heart full of feeling’. DjG, IV, 106, 119.

36 ‘Heart’s fulness’, ‘given to feeling’, ‘outpour’.
37 Edward Young, Night Thoughts. Night the Third (London: Dodsley, 1742), 21.
38 ‘Passionate reader’; ‘at the expense of his reason and morality’; ‘with resolute
soul’. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Werke und Schriften, ed. by Britte Titel and
Hellmut Haug, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Goverts, 1966), I, 664. See Georg Jäger, ‘Die
Wertherwirkung. Ein rezeptionsästhetischer Modellfall’, in Historizität in Sprach-
und Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Walter Müller-Seidel et al. (Munich: Fink, 1974),
389–409 (402).
 1. Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers  13

which Dr Johnson calls the retreat into ‘lonely wisdom’,39 must, like
melancholy, involve only a temporary turning away from human society
and friendship. Excess may affect the harmony between body and soul
by which the medical and devotional literature of the century lays such
store. This is the burden of the standard work on the subject, Johann
Georg Zimmermann’ s Von der Einsamkeit/On Solitude (1773): the man
who cannot live in harmony with himself cannot live without others.
The balance of the emotions, the interaction of body and soul, the
avoidance of wrong stimuli, are arguments also adduced in the century’s
discussion of suicide. In introducing this theme into his novel, Goethe
is touching on a subject that preoccupied his age and the one preceding.
The European-wide debate sees suicide as the ultimate challenge to
a sense of order and reason, an affront to divine and natural law, to
design and providence. It opens up a world of chaos and disorder; it
undermines social cohesion and moral reference. It can be ‘explained’
only in terms of mental aberration or confusion: Kestner’s account to
Goethe does precisely this in referring to those structures and norms
that for Jerusalem no longer have validity. Werther quotes the standard
arguments in favour. ‘Das süsse Gefühl von Freyheit, und daß er diesen
Kerker verlassen kann, wann er will’,40 is based on Johannes Robeck’s
De morte voluntaria/On Voluntary Death of 1736; it is essentially the case
propounded by Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes/Persian Letters of 1721
and in its second edition of 1754, for the preservation of human dignity
by putting an end to an intolerable existence.41 Significantly, Werther’s
suicide has nothing ultimately to do with either of these philosophical
positions: it is committed in a state of madness, beyond the reach of
rational argument and for reasons so bizarrely and tragically deluded as
to cancel out so much in him that was both good and dignified.
Goethe was familiar with the culture of Empfindsamkeit and moved
freely within it. His letters from the period — emotional, disjointed,

39 Or, at least, the phrase is attributed to Dr Johnson. See Solitude. Or the Effect of
Occasional Retirement […], Originally by M. Zimmermann (London: Verner and
Hood, 1800), Preface, ix.
40 ‘The sweet feeling of freedom, and that he may leave this prison when he chooses’.
DjG, IV, 111.
41 See Roger Paulin, Der Fall Wilhelm Jerusalem. Zum Selbstmordproblem zwischen
Aufklärung und Empfindsamkeit, Kleine Schriften zur Aufkärung 7 (Göttingen:
Wallstein; Wolfenbüttel: Lessing-Akademie, 1999), 10f.
14 From Goethe to Gundolf

parenthetic like Werther’s — take up the language of the heart or the

Bible. He shares the cult of Klopstock and absorbs his language, even
writing to the poet himself of ‘mit welch wahrem Gefühl meine Seele
an Ihnen hängt’.42 The culture into which he places Werther is thus
not alien, but intimately familiar. Goethe, too, was aware that a cult
of sentiment is not proof against introspection, anguish and despair.
He had sensed it in Jerusalem, and knew it in his worst moments
after Wetzlar. He was to make Werther, his creation, experience that
the opening up of the self, or the descent into one’s own heart, the
search for totality through inward identification, when unchecked and
narcissistically indulged, become a ‘sickness unto death’ (‘Krankheit
zum Tode’).43

Werther’s ‘Leiden’44
Werther is a novel, not a case history. It is not a mere clinical subject
for what in Goethe’s own day was known as ‘Erfahrungsseelenkunde’
(‘clinical psychology’) and what in ours has become psychoanalysis.
Goethe, as he was putting the last touches to the novel, did express
himself in these remarkably matter-of-fact terms:

darin ich einen jungen Menschen darstelle, der mit einer tiefen reinen
Empfindung und wahrer Penetration begabt, sich in schwärmende
Träume verliert, sich durch Speculation untergräbt, bis er zuletzt durch
dazutretende unglückliche Leidenschaften, besonders eine endlose
Liebe zerrüttet, sich eine Kugel vor den Kopf schiesst.45

We should however not overlook the ‘tiefe reine Empfindung und

wahre Penetration’. For Goethe’s dilemma (ours rather less) was to
keep ‘Bewunderung und Liebe’46 in balance with the pathology, the
psychopathology, of his hero. For without this pathological dimension,

42 ‘With what true feeling my heart hangs on you’. DjG, IV, 17.
43 DjG, IV, 137.
44 ‘Sufferings’ or ‘sorrows’.
45 ‘In which I present a young person who, endowed with a deep and pure feeling
and true penetration, loses his way in extravagant dreams, is undermined by
speculation, until at last, shattered by unhappy passions newly visited, not least a
hopeless love, he blows his brains out’. DjG, IV, 22.
46 ‘Admiration and love’. Ibid., 105.
 1. Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers  15

the work, even despite the starkness of the ending, might appear to
favour suicide.
In those terms it is easy to overlook Werther’s manifest virtues, just
as it is not hard to expect of him things that ‘normal’ behaviour takes for
granted. We do wrong to play down his genuine sympathy (‘Mitleiden’)’47
with others, his generosity and openness of mind, affronted as it is by
peevishness and niggardliness, his love of children, his quick powers of
human observation, his artistic talent that is by no means uncreative. He
rails, sometimes rightly, against restriction:

O meine Freunde! warum der Strom des Genies so selten ausbricht,

so selten in hohen Fluthen hereinbraust, und eure staunende Seele
erschüttert. Lieben Freunde, da wohnen die gelaßnen Kerls auf beyden
Seiten des Ufers, denen ihre Gartenhäuschen, Tulpenbeete, und
Krautfelder zu Grunde gehen würden…48

Above all, we should acknowledge the nobility of his resolve at the end of
Part One, to renounce and leave. Were these qualities more in evidence,
it could be said that there would be no catastrophe and Part One would
end in the style of Rousseau’s famous novel of 1760, La Nouvelle Héloïse,
but with an even greater and more generous sacrifice. But Werther cannot
ever ‘be himself’, cannot fulfil himself in the terms of ‘normal’ social or
psychological conventions: ‘ich soll, ich soll nicht zu mir kommen!’49 His
ideas of fulfilment are always changing as successive attainments prove
to be illusory. He will not listen to others telling him the way to himself,
to effectuation and happiness. Perhaps again he cannot be blamed for
aspirations that are incompatible with restriction, rules or utility. To do
him justice, the excellent and impeccable advice given to him by others
never seems to bear fruit, or circumstances prevent it when it appears to
be within his grasp.
Other heroes of Goethe’s Sturm und Drang period rebel against
restriction: Faust, Prometheus, Götz von Berlichingen. But unique to this
novel are the ‘Leiden’, the suffering, the sorrows ‘des armen Werthers’,

47 ‘Sympathy’. Ibid., 103.

48 ‘O my friends! Why does the stream of genius so seldom break forth, so seldom
burst out in great floods and shakes your astounded soul to the core. Dear friends,
on both banks live stick-in-the muds whose summerhouses, tulip beds and cabbage
patches would be ruined’. Ibid., 112.
49 ‘I shall never, never be myself!’. Ibid., 164.
16 From Goethe to Gundolf

‘unser Freund’, ‘der arme Junge’, ‘Ihr könnt […] seinem Schicksaale eure
Thränen nicht versagen’.50 All of these references are from the opening
paragraph of the novel. They are, to some extent, outside of the main
text, in that they represent the commentary of — presumably — the
editor of the papers that have survived. Is he reliable? We have to take
him on trust and accept that it is as he says: that the mass of papers,
some of which never reach their addressees, represent in sequent form
accurately and sympathetically the state of Werther’s body and soul
over a period of a year and a half. We have to take his word for instance,
that Werther’s ‘Verdruß’51 was a contributory cause in his final, rapid
disintegration, whereas the hero’s own statements reflect other and more
radical preoccupations. We might wish to be told, except by implication
and deduction, that Lotte and Albert survive and that somehow life
goes on after the catastrophe. But the hero’s words must be left largely
to speak for themselves. Werther’s ’sufferings’ must be evident in the
course of his letters; otherwise the editor’s interspersed commentary
would assume a weight that the economy of the novel requires it should
not. What does Goethe imply by calling the novel ‘Die Leiden’ (pl.)?
For the editor also invites the vulnerable reader to draw comfort ‘aus
seinem Leiden’ (sing.). Does he wish to distinguish between the hero’s
‘anguish’, his ‘sorrow’ and his sufferings? For the echoes of the Passion,
with its sacrificial connotations, are present both in the title and the text
itself. They represent the wild regions of a mind that does not scruple
to exploit the ultimate Christian association, down to the hero stylizing
himself into an offering for others. It is part of the whole theological
pathology that assails the reader towards the end of the novel, made
compelling because of its perverse logic and deliberateness. ‘Leiden’,
singular and plural, both have religious echoes. The singular invites
us to read the novel, not as something aberrant and monstrous, but
more as a descent into affliction and despair. ‘Das Leiden’ will engage
the reader with the process of self-loss and sickness unto death. The
plural — reflected in the title — highlights perhaps the acutely deluded
nature of Werther’s madness — and to overlook this is to miss the point
of the novel at a very basic level.

50 ‘Sufferings of poor Werther’; ‘our friend’; ‘the poor lad’; ‘you cannot keep back your
tears at his fate’. DjG, IV, 105, 168f.
51 ‘Vexation’. Ibid., 150.
 1. Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers  17

‘Die heilige belebende Kraft,

mit der ich Welt um mich schuf’52
By turning to the inner self, the ‘heart’, as the eighteenth century calls
it, to create a world, and by ratifying every experience only by reference
to the inner life, Werther has no objective reality beyond himself. The
mystics — and Werther uses their language of flowing and fullness and
penetration — also look inwards because it is only there that the union
with the higher divine force takes place. Werther uses the vocabulary of
this experience — notably in the letter of May 10 — without achieving
little more than exaltation of spirit. The images pile up: ‘mit ganzem
Herzen’, ‘für solche Seelen geschaffen […] wie die meine’, ‘näher an
meinem Herzen’.53 This is not to deny the dynamic power of that letter
and its impulsion towards a state beyond words. Its free borrowings
and eclecticism — from Spinoza, the Bible, neo-platonism — need
not trouble us, for no image is ultimately adequate to articulate the
inexpressible. Werther does not meet the divine in nature; he meets
a series of disparate and impalpable impressions in his ‘heart’. He
uses the Platonic image of the mirror — also common in Christian
mysticism — but it expresses at most the hypothetical, unattainable, the
longed-for, the conditional mode of a union between man and nature
that might be. The experience lasts as long as the heart or soul can
sustain it, and then it fades away. For all his ‘Fülle des Herzens’,54 he is
always in a state of longing. The gesture of arms opened accompanies
so many of his actions, but these are arms extended to seize what eludes
his embrace. And so nature appears to reject him. But it is no longer
nature ‘out there’. It is merely his momentary sensations, overlaid and
stylized by so many associations of a literary, sentimental and quasi-
philosophical kind.
Thus a nature that is merely the subject of the fugitive disarray of
successive fluctuations of ‘Herz’ will lose all structure and congruity. Its

52 ‘The sacred enlivening force with which I created a world around me’. Ibid., 161.
53 ‘With whole heart’; ‘made for souls such as mine’; ‘nearer to my heart’. Ibid., 106f.
54 ‘The heart’s fulness/the heart brimming over’. This expression derives ultimately
from Pietist religious writing. Its classic expression is Friedrich Leopold von
Stolberg’s dithyrambic essay, Ueber die Fülle des Herzens (1777). See August Langen,
Der Wortschatz des deutschen Pietismus (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968), 22f.
18 From Goethe to Gundolf

changes will have no sense. Commenting on this, Goethe reminds his

readers in Dichtung und Wahrheit:

Der Wechsel von Tag und Nacht, der Jahreszeiten, der Blüten und Früchte
und was uns sonst von Epoche zu Epoche entgegentritt; damit wir es
genießen können und sollen, diese sind die eigentlichen Triebfedern des
irdischen Lebens. Je offener wir für diese Genüsse sind, desto glücklicher
fühlen wir uns; wälzt sich aber die Verschiedenheit dieser Erscheinungen
vor uns auf und nieder, ohne daß wir daran teilnehmen, sind wir gegen
so holde Anerbietungen unempfänglich: dann tritt das größte Übel, die
schwerste Krankheit ein, man betrachtet das Leben als eine ekelhafte
Last.55

This is encapsulated in the novel in that alarming contrast between

May 10 and August 18 in Part One, from an experience of plenitude
and perceived oneness to a sense of loss and imperilment and finally
universal destruction: ‘Mir untergräbt das Herz die verzehrende Kraft,
die im All der Natur verborgen liegt’:56 an image articulated amid the
same plenitude of landscape and vista that produced the May 10 and
‘Klopstock!’ It removes any sense of hope or enjoyment of nature.
With it, Werther is turning his face away from order, design and self-
preservation, all that his education and reading have taught him.
Rejected by nature, he embraces the hope of taking Lotte in his arms,
and, denied this, he seizes on the ultimate insane projection, ‘vor dem
Angesichte des Unendlichen in ewigen Umarmungen’.57

‘Mein Herz hab ich allein’

For Werther the culture of the heart has instead become its tyranny.
He speaks self-indulgently of ‘mein Herzgen’, ‘Mein Herz hab ich
allein’, ‘dies Herz mein einziger Stolz’.58 Whatever else others may

55 ‘Day and night ever changing, with the seasons, the flowers and fruits and what we
encounter from epoch to epoch; so that we may enjoy it — as we should — these are
the sustainers of earthly life. The more open we are to such enjoyments, the happier
we feel; but if we see these things as a mere succession of events and take no part
in them, then the very worst happens, the gravest malady; one looks on life as an
intolerable burden.’ HA, IX, 578.
56 ‘My heart sinks at the consuming power hidden in nature’s all’. Ibid., 139.
57 ‘Before the face of the Infinite in embraces without end’. DjG, IV, 182.
58 ‘My little heart’; ‘my heart I have alone’; ‘this heart my sole pride’. DjG, IV, 108, 155.
 1. Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers  19

have — preferments, settled existence, limited horizons — Werther has

his heart. It is part of that ‘herrlich Ding’, ‘Freude an sich selbst’.59 It
conditions the ultimate self-indulgence that can declare of Lotte, ‘wie
ich mich selbst anbete, seitdem sie mich liebt’,60 an enormity of egoism
were its consequences not also deeply tragic. Yet Werther’s heart is
capable of the noblest of sensations, and his sensitivities often become
persuasively ours, the readers’. But too often his heart and its effects are
the ‘krankes Kind’.61 Like those many images of sickness and malady,
real or imagined, they are designed ultimately to draw attention
to himself. They become part of the willing surrender of the self to
dissolution and chaos. For instance: Werther loves children because he
can indulge them, a blessed relief in an insistently pedagogical century.
But he also projects that indulgence on to himself. As children grasp
after everything (‘Greifen die Kinder nicht nach allem..?’), so he may
gratify his every wish (‘Und thu ihm seinen Willen’).62 The theme
of children, like so many themes and images of the novel, provides
no fulfilment: childhood becomes self-love, limitlessness turns into
constriction. All flights end where they begin; all is subject to change
and decay. Thus in Part Two we see the pathology of childhood — the
mad clerk who so unsettles Werther (‘eine Erscheinung, die mich aus
aller Fassung bringt. Heut! o Schicksaal! o Menschheit!’)63 — that is a
collapsed identity resulting from an impossible infatuation (for Lotte).
It raises for Werther the overhanging threat of madness, and its terrible
corollary, the thought of homicide. It leads him to his ultimate delusion,
that of sacrifice. In that, too, he assumes the role of the child, the son
who will be cherished in the self-constituted after-life, where God the
Father and Lotte’s mother will comfort him — ‘biß du kommst’.64
Thus when he is confronted at several turnings in the story with
decisions or moral imperatives to which he cannot or will not accede,
he follows his own logic. Hence there can be no real dialogue, one of
the most noticeable features of this epistolary novel. The letters have a
monologic character: we know of Wilhelm, to whom the letters (except

59 ‘That wonderful thing joy in oneself’. Ibid., 150.

60 ‘How I worship myself now that she loves me’. Ibid., 128.
61 ‘Sick child’. Ibid., 108.
62 ‘Do children not reach after everything?’; ‘and do what it wants’. Ibid., 161.
63 ‘A sight that shakes me to the core. Today! O fate! O mankind!’ Ibid., 164.
64 ‘Till you come’. Ibid., 182.
20 From Goethe to Gundolf

at the very end) are addressed, mainly because Werther rejects his good
advice. For Wilhelm, to some extent like Albert, is a point of reference, a
propositional bearing, to be countered or disregarded at will.
And so for Werther his own heart is the sole means of self-fulfilment:
‘Ich kehre in mich selbst zurük, und finde eine Welt’.65 The admission,
‘Ich könte das beste glücklichste Leben führen, wenn ich nicht ein Thor
wäre’,66 states that his relationship with Lotte is absurd, but… There is
no hope, but then… He hates qualifications and restrictions, the ‘Zwar’,
the ‘modificiren’.67 Reason and feeling cannot interact as long as it is
the heart that determines: ‘gewiß ist’s, daß unser Herz allein sein Glük
macht’.68 Thus Werther has rejected the notion of clear alternatives: ‘In
der Welt ist‘s sehr selten mit dem Entweder Oder gethan’.69 He speaks
these words to Albert. Albert of course thinks in terms of moral choices,
for his is a world circumscribed by order and duty, reflecting the claims
of a wider body politic, representing a counter-position to Werther’s.
Albert thus demonstrates that an ordered society is one in which moral
decisions depend on categorizing human behaviour, a procedure
unacceptable to Werther.
It is against this background that we come to Werther’s tragic love
for Lotte. He persists in approaching the unattainable ideal. There is
nothing new in this, for ‘Empfindsamkeit’, too, has its Petrarchan streak,
the pursuit of the unachievable. She cannot be his; her hand is promised
to another; her true element is family, affection, self-sacrifice, self-
abnegation. He recognizes these as her true qualities, and he realizes
that his own role can at most be that of a spectator. Yet he acts as if
what he does not wish to see were not there; his commitment is to an
inward response nurtured by the surrogate experience of literature and
the cult of feeling. Lotte, however, meets him on much narrower ground.
She may join him in ‘Klopstock!’, in sentimental hopes of reunion after
death (‘Wiedersehen’)70 or Ossian; she can indulge the sentiment and
‘Schwärmerei’ that Albert, his feet too solidly on the ground, cannot
fulfil. She does not even wish all this away; she would not have it

65 ‘I turn in on myself and find there a world’. DjG, IV, 133.
66 ‘I could lead the happiest of lives were I not a fool’. Ibid., 133.
67 ‘Although’, ‘qualify’ (in German the word ‘zwar’ must be followed by a qualifying
word). Ibid., 134.
68 ‘One thing is certain: our heart alone brings happiness.’ Ibid., 133.
69 ‘In the world things are hardly ever either or’. Ibid., 132.
70 ‘Reunion’.
 1. Goethe: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers  21

otherwise. The ending of Part One, a tour de force of that culture, puts
her at the centre of that most ‘empfindsam’ of scenes. Hence, for most
of the novel, Lotte tolerates Werther. It is the very passivity of their
relationship that leads to tragedy: he will not leave; she will not force
him to do so. For there is — until the novel’s last pages — none of the
aggressive sexual jealousy one might expect, no hint of a ménage à trois,
no attempt to possess the object of one’s desire by force. Werther, to
do him full credit, while seeking fulfilment with the only being who is
denied him, actually does succeed at the end of Part One in renouncing
her. But the tyranny of his heart demands that he return, to continue
his previous behaviour after their marriage, to live in a state of infantile
dependence on her every favour, imagined look or feeling (‘sie fühlt,
was ich dulde’).71 All three — Lotte, Albert and Werther — seek to
avoid hurt, not to precipitate the crisis. When it does come, its anguish
is all the greater for that ‘zum erstenmal’ and ‘zum leztenmale’,72 with
Lotte’s first real admission of her feelings for Werther, their first and last
embrace, and the lunacy of Werther’s reaction to those words.
It is a measure of the artistry of this novel that what could be
potentially absurd seizes the reader in its tragic grip. Themes take on
an intensity, attitudes become obsessions, being oneself means losing
oneself — all with a narrative inexorability leading towards the final
implosion and collapse. It affects the characters differently. Lotte wakes
up from an unreal world: it is literature (the reading of Ossian) that
is the agent of her awakening. Werther indulges unreality and believes
that renunciation can succeed a second time — but this time through
the sacrifice of himself. As at the end of Part One, he wishes no hurt on
another person: ‘mache den Engel glüklich’73are his last words to Albert.
For others, life in the here and now may continue. For him, there can be
no sexual union with the beloved, and he sacrifices himself to expiate
his carnal lusts. Only in the afterlife will things be ordained differently:
the child will become ‘Mann’74and enter into the sexual territory that
on earth is forbidden. This time, all the wishes of his sick heart will be
fulfilled. These fantasies end in the maimed body and bloody death of

71 ‘She feels what I am going through’. DjG, IV, 163.

72 ‘For the first time’; ‘for the last time’. Ibid., 181.
73 ‘Make the angel happy’. Ibid., 184.
74 This term means both ‘man’ and ‘husband’. Ibid., 162.
22 From Goethe to Gundolf

the hero and in the disintegration of the extended family of which he felt
so much a part. Goethe does not spare his readers, indeed he dare not.

Society and ‘Verdruß’75

Did society force Werther into the inward life by denying him an outlet
for his talents and apportioning him only the terrain of melancholy
and solitude? The novel does represent a structured society where, on
the face of it, Werther has no clearly ordained place. It is based on the
hierarchy of absolutist ruler, court, administration, established religion
and university, the family unit representing a microcosm of the larger
order. Werther has been trained at university, presumably for useful
employment, not merely for private study or literature. He chooses
to reject the grand monde of society in which his talents and character
might otherwise guarantee him a career. Instead, he constitutes an anti-
society, a society within society. Lotte (when time permits) may join him
there. There, all is sensitivity, the barriers of society or class fall down,
religion may be de-institutionalized, the imagination and nature hold
sway. To do him credit, he does try accommodation with the real world,
but falls foul of its rules and conventions. These are patently absurd,
and we admire his stand against mere class and privilege. We know all
the same that Werther is familiar with the charade into whose pretence
he no longer wishes to enter. The ‘Verdruß’ — Werther’s being asked to
leave the soirée — does reflect society’s inflexibility and arrogance, but
it need not spell the end of his career. But does it not suit him all the
same? It is employment in that very society, with its pretensions, that
stands between him and the return to what he has so nobly renounced.
The ‘Verdruß’ and its aftermath occur neatly between the letters
expressing the ‘Hölle’76 of Albert’s and Lotte’s forthcoming union, and
the ‘vergebliche Wünsche’77 of a lost possession. He will come back, he
must come back: ‘Und ich lache über mein eigen Herz — und thu ihm
seinen Willen’.78

75 ‘Vexation’ or ‘mishap’.
76 ‘Hell’. Ibid., 150.
77 ‘Forlorn wishes’. Ibid., 156.
78 ‘And I laugh at my own heart — and do its bidding’. Ibid.
Fig. 2 View of the Bay of Naples. Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg, Reise in Deutschland
der Schweiz, Italien und Sicilien in den Jahren 1791 bis 1792, in Gesammelte Werke
der Brüder Christian und Friedrich Leopold Grafen zu Stolberg, 20 vols (Hamburg:
Perthes und Besser, 1820–25), VII, plate facing p. 340.
 2. Goethe and Stolberg in Italy:
The Consequences for Romantic Art1

The eighteenth century saw travel literature come into its own as a major
literary genre. Not only did it give accounts of actual travels: it also
contained useful information for the traveller, real or intended, on what
to see, which places to visit, which paintings to look at (which hazards to
avoid). With the emergence of the Grand Tour in Italy in the eighteenth
century, travel accounts provided the necessary vade-mecum. When
Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Leopold von Stolberg went to
Italy, within five years of each other in the latter part of that century, they
used travelling companions and artists as guides, but also had recourse
to — by then — standard travelogues, some of which they also cite by
name: Johann Heinrich Bartels and Patrick Brydone (Stolberg) and
Johann Hermann von Riedesel and Johann Jacob Volkmann (Goethe).
But I run ahead of my subject. We should take a moment to refresh
our memories of the essential facts of Goethe’s Italienische Reise/Italian
Journey. Travelling through Italy had been his lifelong desire, and this
was finally fulfilled in September 1786, when he left Carlsbad and
made his way over the Brenner, through Venice, Bologna, Perugia and
Rome. Afterwards, he stopped in Naples and Sicily, and then returned
to Rome. He kept records throughout his travels, including notes and
letters home, and in 1789, he published his first work relating to Italy, Das
Römische Carneval/The Roman Carnival. This was to be the first of several.2

1 An earlier version of this paper was given at the University of Groningen in 1992.
On the subject of Goethe and Romantic art, see the older but still essential work by
Richard Benz, Goethe und die romantische Kunst (Munich: Piper, 1940) and the more
recent ‘Ein Dichter hatte uns alle geweckt’. Goethe und die literarische Romantik, ed. by
Christoph Perels (Frankfurt am Main: Freies Deutsches Hochstift, 1999).
2 These are found in Erich Schmidt, ed., Tagebücher und Briefe Goethes aus Italien
an Frau von Stein und Herder, Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft 2 (Weimar:

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.02

26 From Goethe to Gundolf

Goethe wished to return to Italy a second time to create an exhaustive

description of the country, its people and their customs. However,
despite his evidently thorough preparations, the Revolutionary Wars
prevented him from doing so.3
While working on his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit /Poetry
and Truth, begun in 1813–14, and thus in self-reflective mood, Goethe
revisited his notes on his Italian journey of 1786–87. They were to
appear in published form as Italienische Reise, in three parts; the first
two volumes detailed his time up to and including Sicily and appeared
in 1816–17, while the last volume (Zweiter Römischer Aufenthalt/Second
Sojourn in Rome) came out in 1829. Goethe showed little sentimentality
towards his sources, cutting up letters he had received during his travels
and sticking them on to the manuscript of his autobiography. Posterity
may be aghast, but why do unnecessary copying? The Italienische Reise,
however brought about, is worth the result.4
The facts concerning Goethe’s Italienische Reise and its emergence
as a cult book — W. H. Auden is one of its more recent admirers and
translators5 — need not be further rehearsed here. My purpose is to
record reactions from some of Goethe’s younger contemporaries, the
Romantics — themselves no mean travellers — and to explain their
mainly aggrieved tone at reading his Italian Journey and what followed
it. It will be necessary to quote from Goethe’s original, but to contrast
it with the account of Italy given by Friedrich Leopold Count Stolberg,
whose four volumes of Reise durch Deutschland, die Schweiz, Italien und
Sicilien in den Jahren 1791–92/Travels through Germany, Switzerland, Italy
and Sicily in the Years 1791–92 came out in 1794. (Goethe later quotes

Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1886) and Goethes Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrage der

Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen-Weimar, 143 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919), Abt.
iii, i and Abt. IV, 8.
3 Goethes Werke, XXXIV, ii.
4 See Melitta Gerhard, ‘Die Redaktion der “Italienischen Reise” im Lichte von Goethes
autobiographischem Gesamtwerk’, Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1930),
131–50; Albert Meier (ed.), Ein unsäglich schönes Land. Goethes ‘Italienische Reise’ und
der Mythos Siziliens/Un paese indicibilimente bello. Il ‘Viaggio in Italia’ di Goethe e il mito
della Sicilia’ (Palermo: Sellerio, 1987); Gerhard Schulz, ‘Goethes Itaienische Reise’,
in: Goethe in Italy, 1786–1986. A Bi-Centennial Symposium November 14–15, 1986,
University of California, Santa Barbara: Proceedings Volume, ed. by Gerhart Hoffmeister,
Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur, 76 (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1988), 5–19.
5 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Italian Journey, 1786–1788, trans. by W. H. Auden and
Elizabeth Mayer (London: Collins, 1962).
 2. Goethe and Stolberg in Italy: The Consequences for Romantic Art
 27

from them.) Through quotation and comparison, we may gain some

insight into why the Romantics reacted as they did. It will emerge
that Stolberg’s account in many ways prefigures much of what the
Romantics were later to espouse. Our comparison makes sense in that
Goethe and Stolberg were near contemporaries; more than that: they
were acquaintances, having gone together to Switzerland in 1775, and
were within a few years of travelling to Italy on their separate — and
very different — journeys. The much later publication date of Goethe’s
Italian Journey is crucial to Romantic reactions. It was not the Goethe to
whom they had once looked up and revered. When Stolberg reissued
his account of Italy in 1821–23, many of his attitudes to art and culture
of 1791–92 would be accepted and welcomed by an even younger
generation of German painters, mainly based in Rome and known as
the Nazarenes.
It is crucial, as said, to note the late year of publication of Goethe’s
Italian Journey (nearly thirty years after the event) and the similarly late
reactions of the two Romantics cited, Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig
Tieck. For both of them, Goethe’s later attitudes to art, as encapsulated
in his Italian Journey are hurtful to their mature sensitivities but are
representative of a Goethe whom they had clearly misunderstood.
They were however the ones who had changed, not Goethe. True, the
brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel had adulated Goethe
and had made him the centre of a cult in the 1790s, and he in his turn
had been gracious to them. Their periodical Athenaeum (1798–1800) had
placed Goethe on a pedestal, elevating him to the very incarnation of
modern progressive poetry, while Goethe in his turn liked the energy
and verve of these young men, who also included Tieck. But this mutual
relationship was one based on selection and a willingness to overlook
major differences. Goethe did not care for the increasingly Christian
tendencies of their art appreciation and their preference for religious
art. Goethe revered Raphael, as they did, but saw him through classical
Greek eyes and not only as the sublime painter of the Sistine Madonna.6
The Romantics chose not to look too closely at the passages in Goethe’s
periodical Propyläen (1798–1800), many of which stood at variance with

6 Cf. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Artemis-Gedenkausgabe, ed. by Ernst Beutler, 18 vols

(Munich: dtv, 1977), XIII, 846 (all subsequent references to Goethe’s works are from
this edition, cited as SW).
28 From Goethe to Gundolf

what they themselves professed on art in Athenaeum (notably in August

Wilhelm Schlegel’s long article Die Gemählde/The Paintings of 1799).7
Goethe, in presenting Schlegel with a complimentary copy of Propyläen,8
may not have drawn his special attention to Heinrich Meyer’s article
there on the ‘subjects of art’.9 For Meyer, Goethe’s acolyte and guide in
matters of art, had effectively excluded many sacred icons of Christian
art from the artist’s repertoire (no crucifixions, no martyrdoms). But
attitudes had not yet hardened, as they would later, and the Romantics
believed that a co-existence was possible. They could not yet read
Goethe’s ungracious words of 1805 about ‘das klosterbrudrisierende,
sternbaldisierende Unwesen’, which were directed against the young
Tieck and his now dead friend Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and
what Goethe perceived as the fakery of their veneration of Christian art.10
But then again Goethe could equally not yet have read August Wilhelm
Schlegel’s epistle from Rome in the same year that elevated a new school
of German art there, one which would continue to alienate Goethe.11
Furthermore, the Romantics were increasingly turning to Italian masters
who were never Goethe’s favourites: Antonio da Correggio was a good
example.
Yet in technical terms, the differences between Goethe and the
Romantics were more apparent than real. In matters of subject, however,
Goethe preferred the bright light of Classicism, not the penumbra — as he
saw it — of religious rite and the cult of death. Both schools paid homage
to the classical principles enunciated by Johann Joachim Winckelmann,
but Goethe — again in 1805 — had forced the issue by publishing a
Life of the great art historian, little more than a hagiography, and had

7  Athenaeum. Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel, 3 vols (Berlin:
Vieweg, 1798; Unger 1799–1800), II, i, 39–151.
8  See Roger Paulin, ‘Der kosmopolitische Büchersammler. Zu August
Wilhelm Schlegels Verzeichniß meiner Bücher im December 1811’, in Kooperative
Informationsstrukturen als Chance und Herausforderung, ed. by Achim Bonte and
Juliane Rehnolt, Thomas Bürger zum 65. Geburtstag (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter,
2018), 317–25, ref. 322.
9  ‘Über die Gegenstände der bildenden Kunst’ (co-authored with Goethe), in
Propyläen. Eine periodische Schrift von Goethe, 3 vols (Tübingen: Cotta, 1798–1800), I,
i, 20–54.
10 ‘Trumpery of Sternbald and the art-loving friar’. Benz, Goethe und die romantische
Kunst, 119f.
11 August Wilhelm Schlegel, ‘Schreiben an Goethe über einige Arbeiten in Rom
lebender Künstler. Im Sommer 1805’, Sämmtliche Werke, 12 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann,
1846–47), IX, 231–66.
 2. Goethe and Stolberg in Italy: The Consequences for Romantic Art
 29

stressed the pagan side of Winckelmann’s art appreciation.12 Further

polarities ensued when Friedrich Schlegel converted to Catholicism in
1808, while Tieck and August Wilhelm Schlegel had at various times
stood in the odour of Catholicizing proselytism.
While it is one-sided to claim that Goethe wrote his Italienische Reise
against the grain of Romantic art appreciation — and similar claims
have been made for his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften — it is certainly
true that his account, playing down as it does religious observances
and religious art and identifying more with the ‘klassischer Boden’, the
subsoil of classical culture, might offend some Romantic sensitivities.
Tieck and August Wilhelm Schlegel had already been to Italy and
could draw their own conclusions (Friedrich would go in 1819). But
the publication in 1817 under Goethe’s sponsorship of the article Neu-
deutsche religios-patriotische Kunst was bound to ruffle some feelings.13 For
its main target was the school of young religious painters in Rome, the
Nazarenes, who also included Friedrich Schlegel’s stepsons, Johannes
and Philipp Veit. Schlegel in his turn was no longer the co-editor of
Athenaeum, once so well-disposed to Goethe, but was about to embark
on the ultramontane and conservative periodical Concordia. His reaction
has to be seen against this background:

Goethe hat selbst bey seinen entschiedensten Anbetern mit seinem

Angriff gegen die neue Kunst gar kein Glück gemacht. Endlich habe ich
denn nun diese sämtlichen Kunst- und Druckhefte auch gelesen und kann
nicht genug erstaunen über den über, oder beßer zu sagen unter aller
Erwartung miserablen Mischmasch und Quark. In der That laßen sich
doch die Deutschen alles bieten, wenn sie einmal einen Narren an einem
gefressen haben. Dagegen lese ich seine erste italiänische Reise von 86
mit vielem Vergnügen. Das ist doch frisch und unbefangen beschrieben
und sehr viel Schönes darin, obgleich auch schon viel Feindliches und
Schlechtgesinntes daneben. Besonders sieht man aber aus mehrern
äußerst naiven Bekenntnissen, wie er eigentlich damals (wie auch noch
jetzt) gar nichts von der Kunst verstanden. Von den unbedeutendsten
oder gemeinsten Sachen macht er einen großen Lärm und das Größte
läßt er unbemerkt vorübergehn.14

12 ‘Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert’, SW, XIII, 407–50.

13 Ueber Kunst und Alterthum, 6 vols (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1816–27), 2. Heft (1817), 5–62,
135–62.
14 ‘Even Goethe’s most devoted acolytes were unhappy with his attack on the new art
style. At last I too have found time to read the whole lot of these art brochures and
prints, and what an amazing and incredible farrago they are. The Germans will
30 From Goethe to Gundolf

Schlegel is here conflating the Italian Journey, parts of which he had

clearly enjoyed, with Goethe’s (and Meyer’s) rejection of the up-and-
coming school of painters in Rome to which he felt ideologically and
personally close. Where the Italian Journey had veiled much under its
engaging style, it was now galling to read in all clarity that the Nazarene
school, based on the so-called Italian primitives, stood for credulity and
dogma in its manifestations of art. It had not always been so: Goethe
shared some of the Romantic enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, indeed
it was he who had helped to touch off the cult of things medieval away
back in the 1770s. He had admired the Boisserée collection of medieval
art (now in Munich) and had cultivated its sponsors. But, Schlegel
avers, he had not acknowledged the Romantics’ part in opening up the
appreciation — veneration — of this older art. Hence the tone of pique
and affront.
Ludwig Tieck’s letter of 1816 is equally querulous:

Goethes Buch über Italien hat mich angezogen und mir äußerst
wohlgetan. Nicht, daß ich seiner Meinung immer wäre, daß ich
dieselben Dinge zum Teil nicht ganz anders gesehen hätte; sondern
diese Erscheinung hat mich nun endlich nach vielen Jahren von dem
Zauber erlöst (ich kann es nicht anders nennen), in welchem ich mich
zu Goethe verhielt: […] Ist es Ihnen nicht auch aufgefallen, wie dieses
herrliche Gemüt eigentlich aus Verstimmung, Überdruß sich einseitig
in das Altertum wirft und recht vorsätzlich nicht rechts und nicht
links sieht? Und nun: ergreift er denn nicht auch so oft den Schein des
Wirklichen statt des Wirklichen? […] Er vergißt um so mehr, daß unsere
reine Sehnsucht nach dem Untergegangenen, wo keine Gegenwart uns
mehr stören kann, diese Reliquien und Fragmente verklärt und in jene
reine Region der Kunst hinüberzieht. Diese ist aber auch niemals so auf
Erden gewesen, daß wir unsere Sitte, Vaterland und Religion deshalb
geringschätzen dürften […] Ich hatte auch die Antike gesehen, Sankt
Peter, und konnte den Straßburger Münster nur um so mehr bewundern.
Nach dem auswendig gelernten Raffael verstand ich erst die Lieblichkeit

really swallow everything once they have taken a shine to someone. On the other
hand I really am enjoying reading his first Italian journey of 86. Its style is fresh and
direct and it is full of lovely things but of course a lot that are hostile and wrong-
headed as well. But above all a number of extremely naive admissions make clear
just how little he understood about art then and of course still does now. The most
trivial and base things he makes a great fuss about and the greatest things he passes
over’. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. by Ernst Behler et al. (Paderborn:
Schöningh, 1958-), XXX, 211.
 2. Goethe and Stolberg in Italy: The Consequences for Romantic Art
 31

und Würde altdeutscher Kunst — und dies wäre Oberflächlichkeit,

Einseitigkeit etc. in mir gewesen? Ich liebe die Italiener und ihr leichtes
Wesen, bin aber in Italien erst recht zum Deutschen geworden.
Und nun! Ist Goethe als Greis nicht gewissermaßen von neuem irre
geworden? Und etwa durch neue Entdeckungen? Durch dasselbe, was
auch in seiner Jugend da war, was er zum Teil kannte, durch Gedanken,
die er zuerst ausgesprochen. Ohne Vaterland kein Dichter! Sich von
diesem losreißen wollen, heißt die Musen verleugnen.15

The testiness of this letter is all the greater for Tieck’s once having been
one of Goethe’s most sedulous admirers. He is suggesting that Goethe’s
insistence on the timeless and classical in art had alienated him from
national values, that Goethe in Italy had in effect ‘gone native’. He, Tieck,
by contrast, had discovered his own true national identity there. But
the fact is that Tieck, had by 1816 also moved on. He had of course not
neglected his early Romantic beginnings: the collection of stories and
plays called Phantasus (1812–16) was witness to that.16 Nor had he been
disloyal to the memory of his dead friends Wackenroder and Novalis.
But he was devoting more and more time to Shakespeare, for whom
Goethe by now had but qualified enthusiasm, and he was rediscovering
Heinrich von Kleist and Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, in his eyes

15 ‘I was much taken with Goethe’s book on Italy and I read it with great pleasure.
Of course I did not always share his views, and our ideas on some things diverged
utterly. But the publication of this book has finally broken the spell (I have no other
word for it) in which Goethe kept me bound. […] Have you not noticed as well how
this man with his wonderful mind has gone charging into antiquity at the expense
of everything else? And pique and peevishness make him deliberately overlook
what is there for all to see? And now: does he not grasp at the appearance of things
instead of the things themselves? […] He forgets all the more that when we express
a pure longing for past things without letting the present interfere, it transfigures
these relics and fragments and draws them over into the pure sphere of art. But
nowhere has this meant that we should find no value in our own custom, country
or religion […] I too had seen Roman ruins, St Peter’s, but that led me to admire the
Strasbourg Minster all the more. Only when I knew Raphael backwards did I begin
to understand Old German art and its grace and dignity. And was I being merely
being one-sided or superficial? I love the Italians and their easy ways, but it was in
Italy that I first really became a German.
And now! Has Goethe taken leave of his senses again in old age? Were new things
and discoveries responsible? It was the same things that were there in his youth. He
knew them in part, and he was the first to articulate these thoughts. There can be no
poet without his native land! Tear yourself loose from this and you deny the Muses’.
Tieck to Solger, December 16, 1816. Goethe in vertraulichen Briefen seiner Zeitgenossen,
ed. by Wilhelm Bode, 3 vols (Weimar: Aufbau, 1979), II, 667f.
16 See Chapter 8 in this volume.
32 From Goethe to Gundolf

wrongly neglected authors, in Goethe’s, however, objects of abhorrence.

There were clearly misunderstandings on both sides, a talking past
each other that would culminate in Goethe’s famous disqualification of
Romanticism in 1829 as ‘das Kranke’, the ‘unhealthy’.17
How justified were these reactions? Even allowing for the one-
sidedness of Schlegel’s and Tieck’s contrariety, it is evident that Goethe’s
Italienische Reise brought out a body of resentment on the part of his
erstwhile admirers. Was there a view of Italy which was more suited to
their sensitivities? There is no evidence that they preferred Stolberg’s
Reise durch Deutschland, die Schweiz, Italien und Sicilien in den Jahren 1791–
92 (published 1794),18 for the simple reason that he was not Goethe. And
yet a comparison of selected passages from Stolberg’s Reise of 1794 and
Goethe’s later redaction of his notes from 1786–87, the Italienische Reise,
show that in many ways Stolberg was closer to their way of thinking.
It will at any rate enable us to think beyond the aggressive tones of
Schlegel and Tieck and look at essentials.
In many ways the very titles suffice by way of comparison, for
Stolberg’s account is not restricted to Italy — after 300 pages he has only
got as far as Geneva — although clearly the sections on Germany and
Switzerland are a lead-up to the ultimate southern experience. Goethe,
as he makes clear, was following an urge away from the German lands
to the long-awaited fulfilment of imperative wishes and could not wait
to achieve that aim. True, as already said, Goethe had planned a less
rushed visit with the intention of giving a more comprehensive account
of the country, its antiquities and moeurs, but nothing had come of this.
It is not entirely surprising that the Romantics took little immediate
notice of Stolberg’s Reise: it is almost wearingly comprehensive. True,
he took with him in his baggage a set of ideological presuppositions
altogether different from Goethe’s, some, but not all, of which might
appeal to the younger generation. But he was also still in many ways
rooted in the 1770s, still unashamedly ‘empfindsam’, given to the cult of
feeling that had once produced Werther. That novel still had resonances

17 As recorded by Eckermann on April 2, 1829. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit
Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. by Ludwig Geiger (Leipzig: Hesse, n.d.
[1902]), 265.
18 4 vols (Königsberg, Leipzig: Nicolovius, 1794). All references to this work and to
others by Stolberg are found in Gesammelte Werke der Brüder Christian und Friedrich
Leopold Grafen zu Stolberg, 20 vols (Hamburg: Perthes u. Besser, 1820–25) (referred
to subsequently as GW with volume number).
 2. Goethe and Stolberg in Italy: The Consequences for Romantic Art
 33

with the young Romantics, and his adulation of Edward Young (of the
Night Thoughts)19 would find an echo in Novalis’s reading of that text.
But no-one still shared the cult of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, with
whom Stolberg was exchanging reverential letters and whose relations
with Goethe had notably ended in a fracas. But there was more.
Whereas Goethe’s Greekness was pagan, sensuous, Stolberg — also
a notable translator from the Greek — sought to reconcile Plato and
Christ. Stolberg’s remarks on Raphael lead almost seamlessly into the
Romantic cult of ‘der göttliche Raphael’. What is more: Stolberg was to
attack Friedrich Schiller’s poem, ‘Die Götter Griechenlands/The Gods of
Greece’, with its threnody for the old Greek pantheon; Schiller was for
him seeking ‘after strange gods’. Worse (depending on one’s viewpoint)
was to come. Stolberg’s conversion to Catholicism in 1800 was to cause
general éclat. It helped to define ideological positions, for a step taken
by a member of the high nobility might attract those of lower social
status. While remaining on good terms with Goethe, Stolberg became
a Catholic apologist and saw history and art through that tinted lens.
He became a kind of older, aristocratic mentor to Romantic converts like
Friedrich Schlegel. This was, however, some time in the future.
For all that, Goethe and Stolberg as sojourners in Italy are looking for
essentially the same things and follow the same antiquarian authorities,
even if Stolberg may try our patience with endless quotations from
classical authors (or from Klopstock). They look at the identical
landscape, the antiquities, the art, yet with different consequences. We
notice a difference in tone: Stolberg is serious to a fault, while Goethe
has his lighter moments. Each has his own view of ‘klassischer Boden’,
Goethe conveying a real sense of how people and customs form a
unity with antiquity and art, not shying away from seemingly prosaic
details of a botanical or geological nature (which doubtless so annoyed
Friedrich Schlegel). Yet compared with Stolberg, Goethe is selective.
Stolberg — who had chosen to come over the Alps whereas Goethe had
come via the Brenner — does not omit any notable city or feature and
proceeds systematically as if following a guidebook. Behind this is a
purpose: while sorting through his notes towards the planned Reise,
Stolberg could write to Christoph Martin Wieland on January 30, 1794

19 With whom he corresponded. The Correspondence of Edward Young 1683–1765, ed. by

Henry Pettit (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 539.
34 From Goethe to Gundolf

of how his enjoyment of Italy was to be subjected to high moral uplift

and an amplitude of scope:

Elisische Schönheit der Natur, Milde u: Ergiebigkeit des Klima,

Charakter des Volks. Flüchtiger Blick auf die Geschichte der Länder u:
Städte, besonders in Großgriechenland u: Sicilien; Vergegenwärtigung
der alten Schriftsteller, vorzügl: der Dichter u: Geschichtschreiber, durch
Darstellung des Localen u: der Sitten; Wercke der alten u: der neuen
Kunst, in sofern ein Dilettante der hierin Leie ist, u: nur seine Empfindung
reden läßt, [davon sprechen kann,] das sind meine vorzüglichsten
Gesichtspuncte. Daß während eines volljährigen Aufenthalts in ltalien
u: Sicilien, unter dem lebhaftesten Volk Europens, einem Volck dessen
Geisteslanlage sehr ausgezeichnet ist, dessen Liebenswürdigkeit von
vielen verkannt wird, manche kleine Charakterzüge mir auffallen müßten,
stellen Sie sich leicht vor. Unter dem liebenswürdigen Landvolk der
paradisischen Insel Ischia, u: im hohen Felsenthal am Meer bey Sorento,
habe ich die glücklichsten Monate der Reise zugebracht. Ich habe zwey
Eruptionen des Vesuv, eine glühende Lavakatarakte des Aetna, u: vom
Gipfel des Aetna ganz Sicilien gesehen. Die meisten Reisenden gehen
nur bis Neapel. Wenn sie nur die ganze Küste des Neapler Meerbusens
u: dessen Inseln besuchen, u: Vietri u: Cava besuchen wolten, so sähen
sie schon Paradiese, aber die wenigsten thun einmal das.20

There we have it. Where commentators have noted Goethe’s reticences

or ambivalences (on Christian iconography, on ruins) and thus a
certain preferentiality of detail, Stolberg’s published text by contrast is
concerned to integrate all of Italy into a higher scheme of things sub
specie aeternitatis, as this passage further illustrates:

20 ‘The Elysian beauty of nature, a mild and fruitful climate, the national character.
A fleeting glance at the history of the regions and cities, esp. in Magna Graecia
and Sicily. Bringing alive the ancient authors, esp. the poets and historians, by
describing local customs and ways; works of ancient and modern art, if a dilettante,
who can only be a layman and can only speak through his feelings, may have his say
on them. These are the things that I am mainly looking for. You may well imagine
that I took note of characteristics here and there, having a whole year’s stay in Italy
and Sicily among the liveliest people in Europe, a people with a fine spirit, whose
friendliness has been misunderstood by many. I have spent the happiest months
of the journey staying with the lovely country folk on the island of Ischia, a real
paradise, and in the lofty crags on the coast at Sorrento. I have seen two eruptions
of Vesuvius and the fiery lava flowing down the slopes of Etna. From the top of Etna
I have seen the whole of Sicily. Most travellers only go as far as Naples. If only they
were to visit the whole of the coast of the Bay of Naples and its islands, and Vietri
and Cava, they would already see paradises. But hardly anyone does even that’.
Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg, Briefe, ed. by Jürgen Behrens, Kieler Studien zur
deutschen Literaturgescbichte 5 (Neumünster: Wachhholz, 1966), 304.
 2. Goethe and Stolberg in Italy: The Consequences for Romantic Art
 35

Es ist ein großer Anblick, wenn man diese Alpen hinter sich sieht. Sie
trennen nicht nur Italien von Savoyen, sie trennen unsere neuere Welt von
jener ehrwürdigen, älteren, von welcher wir alles, was gesittete Menschen
von Barbaren unterscheidet, Künste, das Licht der Wissenschaften, ja
das heilige Feuer der Religion erhalten haben. ltalien war genau mit
Griechenland verbunden, dessen Pflanzstädte dem untern Theile dieses
Landes den Namen Groß-Griechenland gaben. Andre griechische Völker
wohnten in Klein-Asien; ihre Pflanzstädte waren auf der Küste von
Afrika und von Asien zerstreut, in Egypten saßen griechische Könige
auf dem alten Thron der Pharaone, ehe es eine römische Provinz ward.
Die Herrschaft Roms vereinigte alle Völker, die das mittelländische Meer
umwohnen. Bald hoffe ich am Gestade dieses Meers zu stehen, dessen
Wogen Italien und Sicilien, die Trümmer von Karthago, Griechenlands
Vesten in Europa und Asien, wo jeder Strom und jedes Vorgebürge
durch Fabel und Geschichte berühmt ward, seine besungenen Inseln, das
mystische Egypten, und Israels geweihtes Erbe anspülen, wo die durch
lange Morgenröthe ihrer Geschichte, und durch das Hahnengeschrei der
Propheten angekündigte Sonne der Wahrheit und der Liebe aufging,
welche bald über Alpen und Meere, vom Ganges bis zum Eisgestade
strahlend, die Völker leuchtend erwärmte; zwar durch aufsteigende
Erddünste oft verdunkelt wird, aber an ihrem Himmel auch am Ende
der Tage nicht untergehen soll!21

We tread here the realm of comparative mythology, with not just Italy
but the whole of the Mediterranean, its cosmogony and the cultures
issuing from it. One notes the all-enveloping nature of the physical
and historical panorama, with an accompanying insouciance for

21 ‘A huge vista opens up when one stands facing away from the Alps. They do not
merely separate Italy from Savoy; they separate two worlds, that of today from the
other venerable and more ancient one. From it has come down everything that
separates men of culture from barbarians, the arts, the light of science, even the
sacred fire of religion. Italy was closely bound up with Greece, and its colonies in
the bottom part of this country were given the name of Magna Graecia. Other Greek
peoples lived in Asia Minor, while other colonies were scattered along the coast of
Africa and Asia. In Egypt, before it became a Roman province, Greek kings sat on
the ancient throne of the pharaohs. Under Roman rule all the peoples who lived
round the Mediterreanean coast were united. Soon I hope to stand on the shore of
this sea. Its billows lave Italy and Sicily, the ruins of Carthage, Greek fortresses in
Europe and Asia. There, every stream and every foothill was famed by fable and
history, its islands sung in song, mystic Egypt and the sacred inheritance of Israel.
The sun of love and truth, heralded in the long dawn of history and the prophets’
clarion call, was soon radiating over alps and seas, from the Ganges to Greenland,
shedding its warming light on the peoples. Vapours ascending from the earth may
obscure it, but this sun in its heaven will never set, even at the end of time’. GW, VI,
311.
36 From Goethe to Gundolf

distinctions. This is Stolberg’s grand entry into Italy. Goethe, on the

other side of northern Italy, for his part notes a specific topographical
and meteorological feature:

Nach Mitternacht bläst der Wind von Norden nach Süden, wer also den
See hinab will, muß zu dieser Zeit fahren; denn schon einige Stunden
vor Sonnenaufgang wendet sich der Luftstrom und zieht nordwärts.
Jetzo nachmittag wehet er stark gegen mich und kühlt die heiße Sonne
gar lieblich. Zugleich lehrt mich Volkmann, daß dieser See ehemals
Benacus geheißen, und bringt einen Vers des Virgil, worin dessen
gedacht wird:

Fluctibus et fremitu resonans Benace marino.

Der erste lateinische Vers, dessen Inhalt lebendig vor mir steht, und
der in dem Augenblicke, da der Wind immer stärker wächst und der See
höhere Wellen gegen die Anfahrt wirft, noch heute so wahr ist als vor
vielen Jahrhunderten. So manches hat sich verändert, noch aber stürmt
der Wind in dem See, dessen Anblick eine Zeile Virgils noch immer
veredelt.22

While Stolberg is kept warm by his religious zeal, Goethe studies the
weather. But Volkmann, his travel guide, has conveniently provided a
quotation from Virgil’s Georgics, bringing ‘klassischer Boden’ alive to
him in a way that perhaps the reams of Stolberg’s Latinity (and Greek)
do not.
But what of the obtrusive evidence of earlier civilizations? Both
travellers have their artist companions like Christoph Heinrich Kniep
or Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein or Jakob Philipp Hackert,
their experts like Karl Philipp Moritz, to keep them on the straight
and narrow and record or explicate the archaeological sites and the

22 ‘After midnight the wind starts blowing from north to south. The traveller down
the lake must set out at this time, as already an hour or two before sunrise the air
current veers to the north. Now, in the afternoon, the wind is blowing strongly in
my face and cools the sun’s hot rays very nicely. At the same time Volkmann informs
me that this lake was formerly called Benacus and quotes a line of Virgil alluding to
it:
Fluctibus et fremitu resonans Benace marino.
The first line of Latin whose subject I have seen with my own eyes. As I write, with
the wind increasing in strength and the traveller having to face higher waves on the
lake, the verse is as true today as many centuries ago. Much has changed, but the
wind still whips up storms on the lake, its aspect still is ennobled by a line of Virgil’.
SW, XI, 31 f.
 2. Goethe and Stolberg in Italy: The Consequences for Romantic Art
 37

vistas. Goethe himself does drawings. Hackert illustrates the first

edition of Stolberg’s Reise, an unnamed artist the second. Thus, ruins
(a necessary corollary of antiquarian tourism) could be made into
accessories or aids to the picturesque, and the many illustrated editions
of Goethe’s Italienische Reise do precisely this. Their description in the
text is another matter. Both authors, Goethe and Stolberg, face the
question as to whether ruins are part of the natural order of things or
supervenient, the result of catastrophe or natural disaster. Goethe had
come to change some of his views. Long before going to Italy, Goethe
had written a poem, ‘Der Wandrer/The Wanderer’ (1774),23 in which
an idyllic conversation takes place among classical ruins which have
reverted through nature to provide the dwelling for a bucolic couple
and their child. Vegetation — nature — has smoothed over the wrecks
of time; a resolution is found in the style of ‘peinture des ruines’. In
Goethe’s poem, the ‘Wandrer’ is on his way to the archaeological site
of Cumae, which Goethe was to visit in 1786. In his account of Sicily,
Goethe was to describe the temple ruins of Segesta rising up from
among the late spring flowers, in one of the descriptive high points of
the Italienische Reise, drawing attention to the landscape, not the (for
him) less impressive archaeological ambience. But it was to be Stolberg
who came closest to the spirit of Goethe’s early poem. For Goethe, the
Sicilian ruins — Segesta, Girgenti — seemed out of scale and did not
conform to Vitruvian or Palladian norms of the classical orders.24 In
Girgenti, he saw disorder — heaps of masonry — and struggled to find
a natural explanantion:

Der Tempel des Herkules hingegen ließ noch Spuren vormaliger

Symmetrie entdecken. Die zwei Säulenreihen, die den Tempel hüben
und drüben begleiteten, lagen in gleicher Richtung wie auf einmal
zusammen hingelegt, von Norden nach Süden; jene einen Hügel
hinaufwärts, diese hinabwärts. Der Hügel mochte aus der zerfallenen
Zelle entstanden sein. Die Säulen, wahrscheinlich durch das Gebälk
zusammengehalten, stürzten auf einmal, vielleicht durch Sturmwut
niedergestreckt, und sie liegen noch regelmäßig, in die Stücke, aus
denen sie zusammengesetzt waren, zerfallen. Dieses merkwürdige

23 SW, I, 378–84.
24 See Wilhelm Erich Mühlmann, ‘Goethe, Sizilien und wir’, Germanisch-Romanische
Monatsschrift, NF 26 (1976), 440–51, ref. 442; Ernst Osterkamp, ed., Sizilien.
Reisebilder aus drei Jahrhunderten (Munich: Winkler, 1986), 370ff.
38 From Goethe to Gundolf

Vorkommen genau zu zeichnen, spitzte Kniep schon in Gedanken seine

Stifte.25

One observes how Goethe, a convinced ‘Neptunist’, surrounded by the

evidence of seismic or eruptive activity — as it were, in the shadow of
Etna — is not willing to admit this as possible cause of the degradation.
It must have been a storm: hence the regularity of the fallen columns. If
this explanation does not suffice, art, in the form of Kniep the landscape
artist, will come to restore order. The contrast with Stolberg could not
be greater:

lch bin versichert, daß diese Tempel, so wie auch die von Selinus, durch
ein fürchterliches Erdbeben, vielleicht durch verschiedene, in solche
Steinhaufen verwandelt worden. Zerstörende Menschenhand wirft alles
flach über einander; nur der Natur gewaltiger Arm vermochte diese
ungeheuern Massen so durch einander zu schleudern.
Siegend lächelt sie jetzt, diese immer junge Natur; unter den
Trümmern der stolzen gegen sie ohnmächtigen Kunst. Mitten unter
den Steinhaufen entgrünet dem Boden ein Hain von Feigen- und
Mandelbäumen. Im Tempel des olympischen Zeus sah ich zum erstenmal
einen Pistazienbaum. Er war schon bedeckt mit vielen noch kleinen
röthlichen Nüssen, und blühete zugleich.26

Stolberg stands at two removes from the scene of ruination. There is

nature, and for him this is always ‘die göttliche Natur’, a divine agency,
whose ‘mighty arm’ has been manifested in this scene of destruction. It is

25 ‘The temple of Hercules on the other hand still betrayed traces of a symmetry it once
had. The two rows of columns at right and left which accompanied the temple at
each end lay in the same direction, as if they had fallen down together, from north
to south, one uphill, the other downhill. The hill may have been formed out of the
body of the temple as it collapsed. The columns, no doubt held together by the
structure, collapsed all of a sudden, perhaps flattened by a violent storm, and they
lie still in order, their ruins in the sections from which they were formed. Kniep
was already mentally sharpening his pencils at the idea of recording this strange
phenomenon’. SW, XI, 302.
26 ‘I am told on good authority that these temples, like those at Selinus, were reduced
to such heaps of rubble by a terrible earthquake, perhaps by several. The destructive
hand of man lays everything flat; only the mighty arm of nature was able to topple
and jumble these huge masses.
Now she rules in triumph, nature ever young; powerless against her, proud art lies
in ruins. Sprouting up among the lumps of stone is a grove of figs and almonds. In
the temple of Olympian Zeus was where I saw for the first time a pistachio tree. It
was already covered with a mass of reddish nuts, quite small yet, and was flowering
at the same time’. GW, VIII, 464.
 2. Goethe and Stolberg in Italy: The Consequences for Romantic Art
 39

the same force that shows itself in the earthquake, the volcano (Stolberg
climbed Etna) or in the plant-life which comes to restore order, where an
impotent art cannot. Here we see the parallel with Goethe’s early poem,
with that ‘entgrünet’, ‘sprouting up’, as a nice Klopstockian touch. But
we are incidentally only one year after the publication of Constantin
de Volney’s Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les Révolutions/The Ruins, or
Meditations on Revolutions and Empires (1791), where ruins are made
to relate to the grand scheme of human affairs (for Stolberg, of course,
ruins formed part of a larger religious framework).
In Rome this time, not in Sicily, Goethe and Stolberg see an essentially
different Eternal City, in the Colosseum and the Pantheon respectively.

Von der Schönheit, im vollen Mondschein Rom zu durchgehen, hat

man, ohne es gesehen zu haben, keinen Begriff. Alles Einzelne wird
von den großen Massen des Lichts und Schattens verschlungen, und
nur die größten, allgemeinsten Bilder stellen sich dem Auge dar. Seit
drei Tagen haben wir die hellsten und herrlichsten Nächte wohl und
vollständig genossen. Einen vorzüglich schönen Anblick gewährt das
Coliseo. Es wird nachts zugeschlossen, ein Eremit wohnt darin an einem
Kirchelchen und Bettler nisten in den verfallenen Gewölben. Sie hatten
auf flachem Boden ein Feuer angelegt, und eine stille Luft trieb den
Rauch erst auf der Arena hin, daß der untere Teil der Ruinen bedeckt
war und die ungeheuern Mauern oben drüber finster herausragten; wir
standen am Gitter und sahen dem Phänomen zu, der Mond stand hoch
und heiter. Nach und nach zog sich der Rauch durch die Wände, Lücken
und Öffungen, ihn beleuchtete der Mond wie einen Nebel. Der Anblick
war köstlich. So muß man das Pantheon, das Kapitol beleuchtet sehn,
den Vorhof der Peterskirche und andere große Straßen und Plätze. Und
so haben Sonne und Mond, eben wie der Menschengeist, hier ein ganz
anderes Geschäft als anderer Orten, hier, wo ihrem Blick ungeheure und
doch gebildete Massen entgegenstehn.27

27 ‘You have no idea how beautiful it is walking through Rome in the moonlight: one
must have seen it for oneself. Every detail is swallowed by the huge masses of light
and shadow, and only the greatest and most readily visible images stand out. For
the last three days we have been enjoying to the full the brightest and most splendid
of nights. Among the beautiful sights the Coliseum stands out. It is closed at night.
A hermit has his lodging in a little chapel, and beggars find shelter in the ruined
vaults. They had built a fire on the flat ground, and in the stillness of the air the
smoke was driven out over the arena, so that one could not see the lower part of
the ruins, and the massive walls above stood out in the darkness; we stood at the
lattice and watched the spectacle, the moon standing high and serene. By and by
the smoke escaped through the walls, cracks and openings, in the moon’s light, like
40 From Goethe to Gundolf

Goethe’s is an artist’s description, and another of the high moments of

its kind in the Italian Journey, but not one of the standard views of the
Colosseum like those of the painters Giovanni Volpato, Luigi Vanvitelli
or Richard Wilson. It is in prose and must make use of the devices
which that medium can offer. The great sights of Rome, antique or
Renaissance, become fused in the interplay of light and shade, as the
city is bathed in moonlight. There are questions of mass and contour, but
the Colosseum also offers a friendly, human aspect (it is not the former
scene of martyrdoms), populated as it is by Roman vagrants, with the
impalpable column of smoke from their fires having the aesthetic effect
of blurring contours and bringing out ‘gebildete Massen’. Light effects
also dominate Stolberg’s view of the Pantheon:

Ein großes Gefühl ergreift einen, wenn man mitten in der Rotunda steht,
umfangen vom Eindruck der hohen Einfalt, die von allen Seiten auf
das Auge, tief auf die Empfindung wirkt. Die Reihe der Jahrhunderte,
welche seit der Gründung dieses Tempels entflohen sind, schwebet mit
ihren in Staub gesunknen Menschengeschlechtern vor dir vorüber. Die
Erde war mit Götzenaltären bedeckt, als Agrippa dieses Denkmaal von
der Macht des Augustus erhub. Es wehete die Morgenröthe der Sonne,
welche den Erdkreis erhellen sollte. Dem lebendigen Gotte ist nun der
Götzentempel gewidmet. lch empfand es mit frohem Schauer, sah auf,
und da strahlte über der offnen Wölbung die Bläue des unendlichen
Himmels. Wolken umhüllen ihn dann und wann, aber sie weichen dem
Strahl der allerleuchtenden Sonne.28

Stolberg carries out an immediate shift of meaning, from the stance of

the beholder, to that of the worshipper. The Pantheon’s former function

a fog. It was a wonderful sight. This is the way one must see the Pantheon and the
Capitol lit up, the forecourt of St Peter’s and other great streets and squares as well.
And so like the spirit of man, sun and moon have tasks other than elsewhere, for
here their rays strike up against huge masses, once formed into shapes’. SW, XI, 182f.
28 ‘The beholder is seized by a great feeling, standing in the centre of the rotunda,
and is impressed by the higher simplicity around him. The eye and the soul are
everywhere profoundly affected. Centuries one after the other have vanished since
this temple was founded; they rise up before you, and the generations that lived
then and now are returned to dust. The earth was covered with altars to idols when
Agrippa set up this monument to the might of Augustus. The first rays of the sun
were being shed, to lighten the whole world. Now this pagan temple is for the
worship of the all-living God. I felt it. Joy ran through me as I looked up: the blue
of the vast sky shone over the open vault. Now and again clouds obscure it, but the
ray of the sun disperses them and spreads its light over all things’. GW, VII, 274.
 2. Goethe and Stolberg in Italy: The Consequences for Romantic Art
 41

as a sanctuary to the gods is seized on, but given new significance as

a temple of the Christian rite, symbolized in the shaft of light shining
down from the rotunda. By implication: as once Augustus exemplified
in his person the universal sway of Rome, so the newly functioned
temple stands for the new dawn of the Roman-Christian era. Here,
the proximity of Stolberg, already in 1792, to the later, ultramontane
Friedrich Schlegel, is striking.
When, however, both Goethe and Stolberg both describe a painting
by Raphael, they proceed aesthetically from common ground. They are
both schooled in the art appreciation that has been handed down from
French theory and connoisseurship to Winckelmann: the description is
not technical in the modern sense but is intended rather to bring out
states of mind and moral categories.

(Goethe) Trifft man denn gar wieder einmal auf eine Arbeit von
Raffael, oder die ihm wenigstens mit einiger Wahrscheinlichkeit
zugeschrieben wird, so ist man gleich vollkommen geheilt und froh.
So habe ich eine heilige Agathe gefunden, ein kostbares, obgleich nicht
ganz wohl erhaltenes Bild. Der Künstler hat ihr eine gesunde, sichere
Jungfräulichkeit gegeben, doch ohne Kälte und Roheit. lch habe mir
die Gestalt wohl gemerkt und werde ihr im Geist meine ‚Iphigenie‘
vorlesen und meine Heldin nichts sagen lassen, was diese Heilige nicht
aussprechen möchte.29

(Stolberg) Im Pallaste Ranuzzi ist eine heilige Agatha von Rafael,

welche mir lieber ist, als die viel berühmtere Cecilia. Jene hat den vollen
Ausdruck erhabner Ruhe, mit weiblicher Anmuth verbunden, welche
kein Maler so wie Rafael darzustellen weiß.30

We are at the high point of European Raphael adulation, but still in the
eighteenth century before the later discipline of art history puts an end
to speculative attributions. For the Raphael they both admire — like
the one that the young Tieck and Wackenroder claimed to see in

29 ‘Coming back to a work by Raphael or one that is fairly likely to be ascribed to him,
I feel my health and joy restored. And so I have found a St Agatha, a wonderful
picture, although not in a very good state of preservation. The artist has given her a
healthy and serene virginity, but without it being frigid or coarse. I have taken this
figure in. I will imagine myself reading my ‘Iphigenie’ to her and will not allow my
heroine to say anything that this saint would not wish to utter’. SW, XI, 116.
30 ‘In the Palazzo Ranuzzi there is a St Agatha by Raphael. I prefer her to the much
more famous Cecilia. She has the full expression of sublime calm, and with it goes
a feminine grace, that no painter is able to represent like Raphael’. GW, VII, 42f.
42 From Goethe to Gundolf

Pommersfelden in 1793 — is alas not the genuine article, something

that Goethe even hints at. Both, as said, are heirs to Winckelmann’s
notions of classical repose, order and nobility in the work of art, and
neither is concerned with technical details. Neither Goethe nor Stolberg
spends time on the vita sacra behind the painting’s subject. Nor is this
surprising, given Goethe’s dislike of aspects of the iconography of
Christian legend. What Goethe sees in Raphael— or expects to see—are
human qualities, pleasurable sensations that are good for the mind and
the soul. The picture in question exudes a ‘healthy chastity’ (no ecstasies,
no aureoles) which can immediately be related to the work by Goethe
which in Italy reached its final form: Iphigenie auf Tauris/Iphigenia in
Tauris. It has always been noted that this Euripidean adaptation — blank
verse instead of trimeters — neatly fuses the moral and spiritual values
and language of Platonism with those of Christianity, but secularized,
non-dogmatic and of general human import: friendship, fraternal love,
gentleness, mercy, kindness, truthfulness. That these were not always
to the fore in Euripides is not the issue. Thus, Goethe’s Iphigenia and
Raphael’s St Agatha may meet in common human values across the
divide of religious observance. Indeed, in 1818 Goethe was to state that
Raphael — for the young Tieck and the older Friedrich Schlegel the
unattainable model of later Christian art — had become a Greek, that in
fact every genuine artist had to become one.31
Stolberg’s admiration for Raphael comes out at various turnings
of his Reise. After visiting the stanze of Raphael in the Vatican, he is
inspired to write the nearly four-page-long dithyrambic poem, ‘Rafael’.
It rehearses the Raphael hagiography, not least a nightly vision to the
Pantheon (the site of Raphael’s grave), where the Muse of Apelles (the
ultimate in Greek painting) speaks the lines:

Und dankbar weihtest der Religion

Deiner Pinsel Zauber und Empfindung dar.32

It is ‘der unsterbliche Rafael’, the ‘immortal Raphael’, but a step from

Wackenroder and Tieck’s ‘divine’ Raphael of 1796 and his sanctification
in Romantic art criticism. The prose passage here tells us nothing of

31 SW, XIII, 846.

32 ‘Devote in thanks to religion
Yours brushes and their magic touch’. GW, VII, 220.
 2. Goethe and Stolberg in Italy: The Consequences for Romantic Art
 43

the painting itself; the pre-Romantic (Stolberg) and the Romantic

(Wackenroder and Tieck) cult of Raphael is not concerned with
painterly qualities: it reads from the heart. Both, as said, are heirs to
Winckelmann’s notions of classical repose, order and nobility in the
work of art, but nevertheless they regard Raphael differently and note
what they are predisposed to seeing. Stolberg falls back on the language
of feeling which is never far from aesthetic discourse in the last quarter
of the eighteenth century: ‘erhabene Ruhe’, ‘weiblicher Anmuth’ could
be pure Winckelmann, were it not for the fact that Stolberg is describing
not an antique statue but the Renaissance depiction of a Christian saint.
Had the Romantics looked at what Goethe had had to say, instead
of living in the world of Werther or Iphigenie, had they looked with
intent at Propyläen or his Winckelmann essay, they might have been less
affronted by the Italian Journey and its reservations about many aspects
of Christian art. Had they read his periodical Ueber Kunst und Alterthum
(first volume 1816), they would have noted a lively human interest in
the Christian Middle Ages that stopped short of veneration or surrender
to dogma. Stolberg could never replace Goethe in their scheme of things,
but his journey to Italy, published twenty years before Goethe’s account,
was already closer to their aspirations. These two passages, by Friedrich
Schlegel and Tieck, thus shed light on the causes of the Romantics’
often troubled relationship with Goethe and offer an alternative to his
uncompromising Greekness.
Fig. 3 W
 allenstein, from Friedrich Schiller’s drama trilogy Wallenstein, steel engraving
after a drawing by Friedrich Pecht, c. 1859. Wikimedia, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wallenstein_aus_Schillers_Wallenstein.jpg, public
domain.
 3. Schiller:
Wallenstein1

Critics and commentators are in general agreement that Wallenstein

represents the pinnacle of Friedrich Schiller’s achievement as a
dramatist.2 Contemporaries like Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Wilhelm
von Humboldt sensed that this was a new high point in German tragedy.
Goethe had followed the genesis of the play in his correspondence
with Schiller and was even behind the idea of using a trilogy as the
only aesthetically satisfactory means of presenting the vast panorama of
history. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and Benjamin Constant’s translations
are an indication of its reception beyond Germany.
Only those critics who identified one-sidedly with another tradition
or with different notions of tragedy found fault with Wallenstein.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel around 1800 saw no religious sense
behind the presence of fate in the drama, comparing it unfavourably

1 This chapter is largely based on my ‘Schiller, Wallenstein’, in Landmarks in German

Drama, ed. by Peter Hutchinson (Berne: Peter Lang, 2002), 47–57. It also appeared as
the introduction to Flora Kimmich’s translation of Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein: A
Dramatic Poem (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017), https://doi.org/10.11647/
OBP.0101
2 For an account of the reception of Wallenstein, with an extensive bibliography, see
Schillers ‚Wallenstein‘, ed. by Fritz Heuer and Werner Keller, Wege der Forschung
420 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977). See also Friedrich
Schiller, ‚Wallenstein‘: Erläuterungen und Dokumente, ed. by Kurt Rothmann, Reclams
Universal-Bibliothek 8136 [3] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982). Recent studies in English
include T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre. Goethe and Weimar 1775–1832 (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1980), 136–49; T. J. Reed, Schiller, Past Masters (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 80–85; Lesley Sharpe, Schiller and the Historical
Character. Presentation and Interpretation in the Historiographical Works and in the
Historical Dramas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 72–105; Lesley Sharpe,
Friedrich Schiller, Drama, Thought and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 217–50; F. J. Lamport, ‘Wallenstein on the English Stage’, German Life
and Letters, 48 (1995), 124–47.

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.03

46 From Goethe to Gundolf

with Greek tragedy.3 Ludwig Tieck, in 1826, found the love scenes
superfluous and not organic to the action, making comparisons with
Shakespeare’s very different technique in Romeo and Juliet.4 Otto Ludwig,
in 1859, found Wallenstein’s ‘reflective’ nature unheroic and untragic
and — crucially — un-Shakespearean.5 Wallenstein does not reduce so
easily to the classic relations between free will and necessity that inform
traditional tragic practice.
These criticisms indicate nevertheless that the modern writer of
tragedy is bound to be subjected to the scrutiny of the two major
traditions that go before him: Greek drama and Shakespeare, in German
terms ‘fate’ versus ‘character’. Anyone who cares to look will find
elements of Sophocles or Shakespeare (especially Henry IV, Macbeth and
Richard III) or even Racine in Wallenstein. We know that the reading of
Shakespearean plays during the early stages of work on the play helped
Schiller to resolve, to his own satisfaction, the questions of history, fate
and character. But we need to bear in mind that Schiller’s historical and
aesthetic sense was that of his own age and its needs. He was deeply
aware of the unique and irrevocable nature of classical antiquity, the
‘unrepeatability’ of Sophocles. Similarly, his reading of Shakespeare
recognized elements irreconcilable with his own dramatic practice. His
dramatic development — from Die Räuber/The Robbers to Fiesco to Don
Carlos — shows a move away from Shakespearean characterization to
figures in the guise of the idealist. These act not so much out of passions
and emotions in themselves, but come to represent a kind of philosophical
postulate (freedom in the case of Karl Moor, ‘Gedankenfreiheit’6 in the
case of Marquis Posa). In that sense, Wallenstein, with its ambiguities, is
hardly a continuation of Schiller’s dramatic practice of the 1780s.
There is another major difference. Schiller, between writing Don
Carlos and Wallenstein, had been active on two fronts. He had been a
practising historian, and he had committed to writing abstract notions
about the idea of human moral freedom in the work of art. Is Wallenstein
therefore a demonstration in dramatic form of, say, Schiller’s reception
of Immanuel Kant? It has been common to test Wallenstein against some

3 G. W. F. Hegel, ‘Über Wallenstein’, in Schillers ‚Wallenstein‘, ed. by Heuer and Keller,
15f.
4 Ludwig Tieck, ‘Die Piccolomini. Wallensteins Tod’, ibid., 21–40.
5 Otto Ludwig, ‘Schillers Wallenstein’, ibid., 47–52.
6 ‘Freedom of thought’.
 3. Schiller: Wallenstein  47

aspects of Schiller’s indebtedness to Kant: the categories of ‘erhaben’

and ‘schön’,7 of ‘Realist’ and ‘Idealist’, of ‘moralisch’ and ‘ästhetisch’.
But none in practice gives secure purchase. The aim of theatre to create
‘die wahre Kunstwelt des Poeten’, the world of aesthetic ‘Schein’, of
‘freies Spiel’8 against the merely material, is only partially fulfilled in the
sombre interplay of mankind and history.
We must always remember that Schiller is a dramatist to his
fingertips, not a philosopher who thinks in dialogue. Yet it is right
to seek a philosophical, theoretical and dramatic centre to this play,
a problem around which it revolves. Goethe, so much involved
in its genesis, believed he had put his finger on it in 1799: it was the
‘phantastischer Geist’ associated with ‘das Große und Idealische’, as
against ‘das gemeine wirkliche Leben’.9 But how could one square those
fairly abstract ideas with the material that underlies the whole action,
the history of Wallenstein in his own age? Wilhelm Dilthey, looking
back on the emergence of the genre in the nineteenth century, called
Wallenstein the first German historical drama.10 That is certainly true in
the sense that Schiller is in this play closer to his historical sources than
in any other (despite the invention of Max and Thekla). It is also true
in that Schiller agonized over the material he had expertly marshalled
in his Geschichte des dreissigjährigen Krieges/History of the Thirty Years’
War and its sources and over the best way to present it dramatically.
We might question whether his deference to Goethe’s suggestion of a
trilogy was the best solution, especially since Schiller was acutely aware
of Goethe’s shortcomings as a dramatist.
Yet Schiller never regarded history as more than the quarry from
which he drew the raw material for the finished work of art. History
is a means to an end, nothing more. But he possesses nevertheless
the historian’s sense of a great figure standing out from his own age,
incorporating it, explaining its currents and impulses, part of it yet
transcending it. He does not abandon the ability to document, but he
has the capacity to sum up what is dramatically essential in history. ‘So
fiel Wallenstein, nicht weil er Rebell war, sondern er rebellierte, weil er

7 ‘Sublime’; ‘beautiful’.
8 ‘The true artistic world of the poet’; ‘seeming’; ‘free play’.
9 ‘Phantastic spirit’; ‘the great and idealistic’; ’common and everyday life’. Goethe,
‘Die Piccolomini. Wallensteins erster Teil’, ibid., 3–9 (9).
10 Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Wallenstein’, ibid., 74–103 (76).
48 From Goethe to Gundolf

fiel’11 is the proposition in Geschichte des dreissigjährigen Krieges. It is a

philosophical paradox, and an aphorism, held together in the figure
of the chiasmus. It is stating that Schiller is not primarily concerned
with the tradition of the rise and fall of the great, the pattern that
informed Greek and Senecan and seventeenth-century German tragedy.
Wallenstein cannot be explained solely in terms of superbia, hubris,
overweening ambition, although they are part of his character. Rather
he displays a sense of the inadequacy of the material world, a will to
change that glimpses beyond the world of the senses to some kind of
ideal state. This is the aspect of Wallenstein which Schiller found most
fascinating. He is not like Macbeth, in whom we can clearly trace the
steps leading up to his crime and the stages towards his downfall. The
dramatic graph is different. At the time of the action, over a decade of the
Thirty Years’ War is past, with Wallenstein’s greatest deeds of heroism
and generalship, the years of the Count of Tilly and Gustavus Adolphus,
the battle of Lützen, now over.
Rather it is the sense of an age that Schiller wishes to convey. Indeed,
his prologue had expressed the appropriateness of the work of art to
sum up the essentials of his own times:

Nicht unwert des erhabenen Moments

Der Zeit, in dem wir strebend uns bewegen.12

Historical drama, as an aesthetic exercise, may point to the great

movements and commotions of its own age, in Schiller’s case the
aftermath of the French Revolution (the reference is to the First
Consul, Bonaparte). By the same token, the work of art is not bound
to the limits of its own circumstances; art by its very nature raises and
transcends:

Ja danket ihrs, daß sie das düstre Bild

Der Wahrheit in das heitre Reich der Kunst
Hinüberspielt, die Täuschung, die sie schafft,
Aufrichtig selbst zerstört und ihren Schein

11 ‘Thus Wallenstein fell, not because he was a rebel, but he rebelled because he was
falling’. All quotations from Schiller are taken from Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Gerhard
Fricke, Herbert G. Göpfert and Herbert Stubenrauch, 5 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1960),
here IV, 688. References in footnotes indicate part and line number.
12 ‘[…] Not unworthy of the exalted hour,
The time in which we strive and live’. Prologue, 55–56.
 3. Schiller: Wallenstein  49

Der Wahrheit nicht betrüglich unterschiebt,

Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst.13

How can ‘das düstre Bild der Wahrheit’ and ‘das heitre Reich der Kunst’
be reconciled, and how can they be made to reflect both the historical
moment and a transcendent ideal?
Schiller’s use of the trilogy to some degree reflects the resolution
of this. Wallensteins Lager/Wallenstein’s Camp presents us with the
great general’s power base, not the man himself; Die Piccolomini/The
Piccolomini centres on the conflict between father and son, Octavio and
Max Piccolomini; Wallensteins Tod/Wallenstein’s Death brings us the
act of rebellion and the downfall. Each part of the trilogy has its own
terms of reference and ‘feel’. Schiller does not follow the Shakespearean
pattern of alternation between high and low styles — a pattern that
has consequences for nineteenth-century verse tragedy in general.
Die Piccolomini and Wallensteins Tod are characterized by the interior
setting of French tragedy, with its restricted numbers on stage, and use
of verse (here blank verse). The Lager stands out formally through the
use of ‘Knittelverse’ and their ‘altteutsch’ (‘old German’) or Faustian
associations and the comic mode of the Capuchin monk’s sermon.
Wallenstein does not appear. For this is the army that is occupying
Bohemia and draining its substance. It is characterized by venality,
materialism, the forces of ‘Glück’ and ‘Spiel’.14
Schiller‘s own commentary is ‘Sein Lager nur erkläret sein
Verbrechen’.15 Here he is close to the sense of baroque drama. For there
is an interpenetration of all spheres of the high tragedy by the Lager. We
see this in the very first scene of Die Piccolomini, where the generals, not
the ‘Soldateska’ (‘soldiery’) are assembled, with its military language,
its use of ‘Fremdwörter’ (‘foreign words’) and above all the accentuated
theatricality of its stage directions (‘nachdenkend’, ‘mit Bedeutung’,
‘betroffen’).16 Buttler’s ‘Wir gehn nicht von hier, wie wir kamen’17 has

13 ‘[…] Thank her that she the gloomy face

Of truth brings over into art’s serene
Domain, the feinted, her creation,
Breaks with her own hand, and truth
Does not give out for its appearance.
Serious is life, but art serene’. Prologue, 133–38.
14 ‘Fortune’; ‘game’.
15 ‘His camp alone explains his crime’. Prologue, 118.
16 ‘Deep in thought’, ‘pointedly’, ‘taken aback’. Piccolomini, 40, 41, 77.
17 ‘We leave this place, but not the way we came’. Piccolomini, 81.
50 From Goethe to Gundolf

an ominous ring — when we know of his later role in Wallenstein’s fall.

We sense that Wallenstein’s power base is built not on high ideals but on
mercenary service and plunder. The much-vaunted charismatic power of
Wallenstein to raise armies — another reason why Buttler must murder
him in the night before the Swedes are due to arrive — is based also
on his power to pay (‘der Königlichgesinnte’,18 as the venal condottiere
Isolani calls him). Wallenstein is aware of this, as he stoically notes when
Isolani deserts him for the Emperor.19 It is the world of the Lager — but
reflected in its highest officers — that enters into the proceedings at the
banquet in Die Piccolomini where Isolani and Illo brawl; that disturbs
the action of Wallensteins Tod, in the representatives of the Pappenheim
regiment; that explains the mentality of Buttler and his hired assassins,
and which ultimately underlies the punchline of the play, ‘Dem Fürsten
Piccolomini’.20
We should not overlook that, at significant moments in the play,
Wallenstein does fulfil the claims made about him in the Lager: he
demonstrates an unsentimental and almost brutal attitude towards those
in power and those close to him. We might cite here the scenes with
Questenberg and Wrangel, his attitude to Thekla, and his insensitive
dismissal of Max as a potential son-in-law. Instead, once his power to act
is invoked — as at the end of Wallensteins Tod I — his personality shows
a formidable and awesome aspect, confirming Max’s words at the end
of Die Piccolomini:

Denn dieser Königliche, wenn er fällt,

Wird eine Welt im Sturze mit sich reißen,
Und wie ein Schiff, das mitten auf dem Weltmeer
In Brand gerät mit einem Mal, und berstend
Auffliegt, und alle Mannschaft, die es trug,
Ausschüttet plötzlich zwischen Meer und Himmel,
Wird er uns alle, die wir an sein Glück
Befestigt sind, in seinen Fall hinabziehn.21

18 ‘With soul of kings’. Piccolomini, 66.

19 Tod, 1620ff.
20 ‘To Prince Piccolimini’. Tod, 3867.
21 ‘[…] For this kingly man’s downfall
Will bring a world down when it collapses,
And as when a ship upon the main
Goes up in flames and bursts
Apart, and all its crew
 3. Schiller: Wallenstein  51

The first two lines suggest the Shakespearean analogy with Caesar;
the image of ship and fortune — but with explosive power of
expression — reminds us the century that produced both the historical
Wallenstein and baroque drama.
Goethe, in the first important analysis of the play, contrasted the
‘gemeine Wirklichkeit’ (‘base reality’) of power and the ‘phantastischer
Geist’ (‘fantastic mind’) of an ideal that this world cannot fulfil.22 We
note in Die Piccolomini and in the early scenes of Wallensteins Tod the
preoccupation with the word time, ‘Zeit’: that it is not yet time to act,
that things will be ordained in their own time. This is not merely the
hubris of the Macbeth-like ruler (for hubris involves choosing the wrong
time): Wallenstein also believes in a constellation of things beyond time.
Think of the opening of Wallensteins Tod:

WALLENSTEIN. Glückseliger Aspekt! So stellt sich endlich

Die große Drei verhängnisvoll zusammen,
Und beide Segenssterne, Jupiter
Und Venus, nehmen den verderblichen,
Den tückschen Mars in ihre Mitte, zwingen
Den alten Schadenstifter mir zu dienen.
[…]
SENI. Und beide große Lumina von keinem
Malefico beleidigt! der Saturn
Unschädlich, machtlos, in cadente domo.
WALLENSTEIN. Saturnus‘ Reich ist aus, der die geheime
Geburt der Dinge in dem Erdenschoß
Und in den Tiefen des Gemüts beherrscht
Und über allem, was das Licht scheut, waltet.
Nicht Zeit ists mehr zu brüten und zu sinnen,
Denn Jupiter, der glänzende, regiert
Und zieht das dunkel zubereite Werk
Gewaltig in das Reich des Lichts - Jetzt muß
Gehandelt werden, schleunig, eh die Glücks-
Gestalt mir wieder wegflieht überm Haupt,
Denn stets in Wandlung ist der Himmelsbogen.
(Es geschehen Schläge an die Tür).23

Flings out, up in the air,

So he will tear down in his fall
All those dependent on his fortunes’. Piccolomini, 2639ff.
22 Goethe, ‘Die Piccolomini’, 8f.
23 W. ‘See! In our favour, how at last
Fate’s hand unites the mighty Three,
52 From Goethe to Gundolf

Here Jupiter (majesty) and Venus (beauty) hold destructive Mars in

check, Saturn, the earth powerless. ‘The shining one’, not ‘all that shuns
the light’, is in control. This alone gives Wallenstein the assurance
that he can act. How different from Macbeth who trusts the witches.
And yet he cannot act as he would wish. Note the stage directions
(knocks at the door); Terzky arrives, then Wrangel. In the next scene,
the instruction (‘Er macht heftige Schritte durchs Zimmer, dann bleibt
er wieder sinnend stehen’)24 stresses the anguished necessity of acting
within time. Political man does not enjoy the luxury of reflexion, of
‘des Mutes freier Trieb’, of ‘Überfluß des Herzens’,25 let alone the ideal
aesthetic freedom which Schiller sees as vested in the beautiful, ‘das
Schöne’. This scene, relatively abstract in its language, trusting in
trope, where the images do not come tumbling out as in Shakespeare,
is in many ways the turning-point of the tragedy. But is everything
programmed for downfall and disaster merely because Wallenstein has
decided that his options are foreclosed and he must act? Rather, it talks
of things that once seemed to be (‘Traum’; ‘Gedanken’; ‘Hoffnung’;
‘Überfluß des Herzens’) and that no longer are.26 These are words
connoting freedom from constraint, creations of the mind, imaginings
indulged. They lifted him from time: now he must act in time. They

While Jupiter and Venus, ascendant,

Force devious Mars between them
To make him serve me.’
S. ‘And both great Lumina not crossed
By any Malifico! While Saturn
Shorn of power, in cadente domo.’
W. ‘Saturn’s rule is ended, he who
Controls the secret birth of things
In earth’s womb and in the humours’ depths,
Commanding all that shuns the light.
This is no time to brood now or to ponder,
For jovial Jupiter commands
And draws the processes of darkness
Over to the realm of light.
Now we must act, and quick, before
My lucky star flies out beyond my ken,
For the arc of heaven is constantly at move.’
(There are knocks at the door.) Tod, 9–35.
24 ‘He strides agitatedly through the room, stands still, in contemplation’. Tod, 183.
25 ‘Courage light and free’, Tod, 180; ‘the overflow of heart’, Tod, l74.
26 ‘Dream’, Tod, 143; ‘thought’, Tod, 148; ‘hope’, Tod, 151; ‘the overflow of heart’, Tod,
174.
 3. Schiller: Wallenstein  53

raised him above the demeaning effects of ‘das ganz Gemeine’:27 he

now must grapple with them.
This pivotal scene may tell us what the tragedy of Wallenstein is. Of
course, Schiller only calls Wallensteins Tod ‘ein Trauerspiel’: the whole
play is ‘ein dramatisches Gedicht’,28 the more neutral term that Gothold
Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise/Nathan the Wise made current.
Does that mean that the world of Wallensteins Lager, as it spills over
into Die Piccolomini, is less tragic than the trilogy’s dénouement? The
first two parts are more closely linked with the actual stuff of political
power and the jostlings for supremacy in that world. Wallenstein’s great
monologues, like the one in Wallensteins Tod I, 4, seem hardly to form
part of this, showing as they do a character too complex to be confined
in categories of good generalship or a warlord’s fortune. He has always
been complex: trusting moods, intuitions, signs, coincidences, as he
chooses. Now, he is forced to act. That does not make him tragic, although
there is a tragic irony underwriting all of his tactical decisions. Surely
what makes the major characters in this play tragic, not just Wallenstein,
but Max, Thekla or Octavio, is that they have identified something
beyond the historical and political moment, to which they appeal — in
vain. It is summed up in the abstract noun that occurs repeatedly in
this play: ‘Herz’, heart. It signifies something different at each usage,
and it is never uncontaminated with other, often baser, associations. It
situates this play in both the lexis and self-awareness of idealism and
‘Empfindsamkeit’, the cult of feeling; not the grand events that spur
on the action in Shakespeare, but the appeal to inner sentiments. It
is one reason why Schiller, in his explicit stage directions, wishes us
to experience the interplay of inner and exterior reactions. It is what
always sets Schiller apart from Shakespeare, even when the sentiments,
as with Karl Moor or Marquis Posa, are often stridently expressed or
inadequately excogitated. Had Wallenstein been Macbeth, he would
have said at Max’s death: ‘He should have died hereafter’. Instead, his
pondering of what ‘das Schöne’ in a human life might mean takes him
into a moral sphere quite different from Macbeth’s. Had he been merely
the ‘Realist’ of Schiller’s theory, he would not have allowed his mind to
rise above the pragmatics of the situation. But ‘Herz’ is multivalent and

27 ‘The common round’, Tod, 207f.

28 ‘Tragedy’; ‘a dramatic poem’.
54 From Goethe to Gundolf

ambiguous, like ‘remembrance’ in Hamlet or ‘honest’ in Othello. It means

love, honour, probity, the integrated self; it helps to explain why loyalty
can become a key issue in this historical drama, so unlike the naked
struggles in Shakespeare’s Histories. But examining one’s heart means
also consulting other interests: Octavio’s appeal to Max’s heart also
involves imperial and dynastic loyalties; Wallenstein, similarly, but also
Max’s ‘zwischen dir und meinem Herzen’,29 which, as we know, means
as much choosing Thekla as remaining loyal to Emperor Ferdinand.
‘Herz’ also invites us to think, not in categories (such as ‘schöne Seele’,
‘beautiful soul’) but according to human experience. Max’s desperate
end cannot be read as ‘schön’: what is there left to live for? Wallenstein’s
heart goes out to Max — it is in human terms the most convincing love
in the play — but it cannot be divorced from retaining the Pappenheim
regiment and it rules out Max as a son-in-law. Hence we are seized and
moved by Wallenstein’s ‘Herz’ in the elegiac mode of Acts Four and
Five of Wallensteins Tod when there can be no more manoeuvrings and
temporizings — and when thugs are planning his murder. Octavio is
never more tragic than when he realises at the end that ‘Herz’ involves
losing a son in the cause he espouses.
The figure of Max distinguishes this play further from Shakespeare,
a figure who represents ‘das Schöne’, while, as we saw, being drawn into
the world of reality by family affiliation and profession. Shakespeare’s
technique is different: his villains, Richard or Macbeth, are so
commanding that they steal the show from the powers of legitimacy
(Richmond, Malcolm). Yet Schiller’s play is not just a conflict between,
in his terms, the ‘idealist’ and the ‘realist’. Max’s despair and death
do not belong in the pure realm any more than Wallenstein’s actions.
But it is Wallenstein who enunciates the principle of pragmatic action,
while also looking beyond it. That is the sense of his famous speech
in the second act of Wallensteins Tod, ‘Schnell fertig ist die Jugend mit
dem Wort’,30 with its awareness of the contrasting spheres of ‘weit’ or
‘rein’ as opposed to ‘hart’, ‘grob’, ‘böse’ or ‘falsch’,31 its essential call for
compromise, its opposition to what Max calls ‘Herz’. Through an irony,
it is only after Max’s death that Wallenstein can appreciate the ‘dream’
of humanity he sees Max as representing:

29 ‘Between you and my heart’. Tod, 718.

30 ‘How glib the tongue of youth’. Tod, 779ff.
31 ‘Wide’; ‘pure’; ‘hard’; ‘rough’; ‘bad’; ‘false’.
 3. Schiller: Wallenstein  55

Er machte mir das Wirkliche zum Traum.32

Max, as son, as the object of affection (‘Kind des Hauses’),33 brings out
the inner side of the ruler, hidden from the world of the Lager.34 One
thinks of Thomas Mann’s gloss on the line ‘Daß mich der Max verlassen
kann’,35 where Wallenstein’s familiar, slightly colloquial word sums up
his moral dilemma. He is bound by forces of affection, but he also needs
Max’s regiment as part of the retention of power.
Max, too, is linked with that other aspect of Wallenstein’s belief
in some higher awareness. Pragmatists simply write off Wallenstein’s
vision as chance (‘Zufall’). For Wallenstein, it confirms that he may
implicity rely on Max’s father, Ocatvio. One is reminded of the well-
known speech in Wallensteins Tod, II, 3 (‘Und mitten in der Schlacht
ward ich geführt / Im Geist’).36 Wallenstein’s belief is guaranteed by an
inner sense of security and wellbeing. But we note that Max, by an irony
in the economy of the action, finds his death in a scene (IV, 10) which
echoes Wallenstein’s original dream vision.
Thus in the last scenes of the play, as Wallenstein accepts the guilt for
Max’s death, we sense almost a sublimity (‘Erhabenheit’, in Schiller’s
sense) entering in. It is not real, but dramatically devised. Wallenstein
has not so much changed; he is not on an ascendant moral curve. But our
aesthetic satisfaction demands that his end be different from Macbeth’s or
Richard’s. Think of the moving scene V, 3, with its renunciation (‘trüglich
wankenden Planeten’).37 It contrasts with the tragic sense of impending
catastrophe and end, and rises above the sphere of the brutal Buttler
and his henchmen. The heavens are darkened; the atmosphere is lyrical;
Max is the light of his life, not extinguished, but safe from the things that
have held Wallenstein in their thrall, ‘Schicksal’, ‘Planeten’, ‘Unglück’
and ‘Stunde’.38 Yet for all that, Wallenstein has not entirely abandoned
his hopes for the coming day, which for him will never dawn. It takes
us back to his earlier monologue in the first act (I, 4). His ambition is

32 ‘He made real things into a dream’. Tod, 3446.

33 ‘The son of the house’, Tod, 2160.
34 Tod, III, 18.
35 ‘That Max, my Max, can leave me’ [my italics]. Tod, 2162. Thomas Mann, ‘Schillers
Wallenstein’, ed. by Heuer and Keller, 139–56 (141).
36 ‘And in my mind was led into the thick of the fray’. Tod, 926ff.
37 ‘Fickle shifting planets’. Tod, 3428.
38 ‘Fate’, ‘planets’, ‘misfortune’, ‘hour’. Tod, 208ff.
56 From Goethe to Gundolf

not just to rule, but to fulfil a vision of change, to set new values against
‘Gewohnheit’, ‘sich befestigt’, ‘das ganz Gemeine’, ‘das ewig Gestrige’,
‘alter Hausrat’ and ‘Erbstück’.39 It is a vision, not of habitual recurrence,
but of change. It lifts us — momentarily only — above intrigue. It
deludes Wallenstein into thinking that ambition, double-dealing and the
naked exercise of power may be justified if the end is worthwhile. It is
this vision which constitutes the major difference between Octavio (and
by extension the Emperor) and Wallenstein, between the old order and
a glimpse of the new. It is related to Max’s vision of peace and humanity,
‘Menschlichkeit’, in Die Piccolomini I, 4. But Wallenstein is too taken up
with the present, with the ambition of a crown, a dynasty, a pax romana,
to grasp the full implications of this ‘Menschlichkeit’. He sees fulfilment
in the other, Max, not in himself. Wallenstein still sets his face against
the real future, which we know will bring his demise and the tragic
denouement; for Max there is no future to fear:

Für ihn ist keine Zukunft mehr, ihm spinnt

Das Schicksal keine Tücke mehr, — sein Leben
Liegt faltenlos und leuchtend ausgebreitet,
Kein dunkler Flecken blieb darin zurück,
Und unglückbringend pocht ihm keine Stunde.40

39 ‘Habit’, ‘holds fast’, ‘the common round’, ‘the eternal yesterday’, ‘old lumber’,
‘inheritance handed down’. Tod, 197, 198, 208, 213, 214.
40 ‘For him there is no future, and no fate
Spins malice in its toils,
His life is bright and without crease
Unfolded, no dark spot there to mar,
Fate knocks not at the door with its bad tidings’. Tod, 3422–26.
Fig. 4 L
 aocoon and his Sons, also known as the Laocoon Group. Marble, copy after
an Hellenistic original from ca. 200 BC. Found in the Baths of Trajan, 1506,
Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Laocoon_Pio-Clementi
no_Inv1059-1064-1067.jpg, public domain.
 4. Laocoon, Dante, Shakespeare,
August Wilhelm Schlegel and
the Overcoming of Tragedy1

A more precise title for this chapter would be simply ‘Overcoming

Tragedy Around 1800. A German View’. To a scholar of German, the
idea of overcoming tragedy would have immediate associations. We
think of discussions about what Aristotle really meant by pity and fear,
and whether perhaps he was talking more about empathy, and certainly
not about terror. We note the choice of dramatic subjects that kept tragic
action in the background and concentrated more on the values of the
human heart. One thinks of how Johann Wolfgang Goethe adapted
Euripides’ Iphigenia story to this very effect; or how Friedrich Schiller
constructs a whole theory of tragedy around the notions of ‘sublime
soul’ or ‘beautiful soul’ and seeks to illustrate this in the 1790s in his
two tragedies Wallenstein and Maria Stuart; even how Schiller in 1800
produces a version of Macbeth with distinctly neoclassical overtones.
And, finally, we recollect how August Wilhelm Schlegel, the great
translator and critic — the main subject of my remarks here — in 1797
produced a reading of Romeo and Juliet that played down the stark
connotations of the young Shakespeare’s tragedy and instead read in
it values of the human heart that mitigated ‘never was a story of more
woe’.
Since writing my book on Shakespeare’s critical reception in Germany,2
I have come to see Schlegel’s essay of 1797 in a wider context: this context

1 This chapter developed out of a paper, hitherto unpublished, given at the

Shakespeare Institute in Stratford on Avon in 2010.
2 Roger Paulin, The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1914. Native
Literature and Foreign Genius, Anglistische und Amerikanistische Texte und Studien
11 (Hildesheim, New York: Olms, 2003).

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.04

60 From Goethe to Gundolf

did not necessarily cast more light on his attitude to Shakespeare per se,
but it made that reading of Romeo and Juliet more plausible. For within
a year of his Romeo and Juliet essay, Schlegel had been translating parts
of Dante and writing a commentary on him.3 He had been faced with
the stark awfulness of the story of Ugolino della Gherardesca in Dante’s
Inferno.4 In grasping for words to express what was plainly there in the
text but from which he instinctively recoiled, Schlegel mentioned the
name of Laocoon (from Greek mythology). In the same year as his essay
on Romeo and Juliet, Schlegel wrote a poem which states with brevity and
succinctness the insights that the essay develops at greater length and
with sometimes deliberate shifts of meaning. This is the background
to my remarks. It is what enables images of Laocoon and Ugolino to
cohabit with Shakespeare and how these can be incorporated into a
wider discourse, even one where his name is not even mentioned.
Ultimately, however, my subject has to do with the reception of
Shakespeare in Germany, and also with the wider issues raised by that
particular debate. The primary question is: what is it that draws the
Germans to Shakespeare and confers on them — or leads them to confer
on themselves — a special relationship to Shakespeare, so that Schlegel
in 1796 could speak of Shakespeare as ‘ganz unser’ (‘entirely ours’).5
I am not posing these questions in the abstract, because they impinge
quite directly on my subject. What is it then that accords to the Germans
that special relationship to Shakespeare?
One can safely state as a general principle that all non-English
reception of Shakespeare is really a debate with existing national
traditions and their preoccupations, especially in the eighteenth
century.6 The French for instance spend more time on the question of
Shakespeare and their own drame classique that on anything else. The
Italians ask themselves whether some of the qualities being exhibited in
Shakespeare do not relate to their own golden age (Dante) and whether

3  ugust Wilhelm Schlegel, ‘Dante’s Hölle’, in Die Horen eine Monatsschrift, ed. by
A
Friedrich Schiller (Tübingen: Cotta, 1795–97), 1. Jg. (1795), 3. Stück, 22–29, 4. Stück,
31–49, 8. Stück, 35–74.
4 ‘“Ugolino und Ruggieri” Fortsetzung von Dante’s Hölle’, ibid., Jg. 1795, 8. Stück,
35–74.
5 August Wilhelm Schlegel, ‘Etwas über Hamlet bey Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters’,
Die Horen, 2. Jg. (1796), 4. Stück, 57–112, ref. 79.
6 See Roger Paulin, ‘Ein deutsch-europäischer Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert?’, in
Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. by Roger Paulin, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert.
Supplementa 3 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 7–35.
 4. The Overcoming of Tragedy  61

a renaissance of their national literature is possible. The eighteenth

century in Germany, when the reception of Shakespeare begins in
earnest and at whose end we have that extraordinary proprietary claim,
‘ganz unser’, is — I am simplifying complex processes here — a time
of self-definition. The question is being asked: do we have a national
literature? And if we do not, how are we to go about acquiring one?
Are we to follow foreign models — the French, the Greeks, the English,
or elements of all three? Or are we to look to the resources of our own
native tradition? The history of German literature in the eighteenth
century involves all of these elements. For some writers and poets,
Shakespeare is an irrelevance. For many however he is not. He is the way
forward, in terms of self-definition, inspiration, attitudes to form and
its models, and much else besides. They are remarking and absorbing
a Shakespeare as known in the eighteenth century, Shakespeare as
mediated by Voltaire, or Alexander Pope, or John Milton, or Edward
Young, or Mark Akenside or Ossian. Shakespeare is made to relate to the
issues that occupy each successive generation. The eighteenth century
sees two important moments of self-definition in German literature,
both of them conducive to the Germans finding their own voice and their
own stylistic expression, one commencing in the 1740s, the other around
1770. The second of these is known as the Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and
Stress), and it is, as the name suggests, explosive, urgent, concerned
with issues of originality, nature, creative forces, the definition of the
self, and the expression of all of this in poetry and prose. In this period
the Germans first begin to say things about Shakespeare that are their
own and not borrowed from others. It is also worth reminding ourselves
in terms of European Shakespeare reception that 1770, using this as a
rough date, is the time around which a major reaction takes place in
European Shakespeare reception, a rejection of his alleged ‘faults’ and
imperfections, a reaction against the ‘misrepresentations of Mons. de
Voltaire’,7 as Elizabeth Montagu states in 1769, and an attempt to explore
the nature of his genius.
An example from Germany in this very period is the dithyrambic
essay Das Hochburger Schloss/The Ruined Castle of Hochburg of 1777 by

7 Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare Compared with
the Greek and French Dramatic Poets. With Some Remarks Upon the Misrepresentations of
Mons. de Voltaire (London: Dilly, 1772), title page.
62 From Goethe to Gundolf

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751–92). It is a rejection of Voltaire and

Pope, of anyone who dares, who presumes, to raise a voice of criticism
against Shakespeare. Who, he says, can utter reservations about King
Lear? Who is not shattered to the core by this spectacle? Who can even
begin to speak of it, to find words to express it? ‘Doch wer darf über
Laokoon reden? Und über Lear, wer darf das? — ’8 For all its impulsive
force, this is a rhetorical figure, a variation on the ‘words fail me’ trope
(called hyperoche): Shakespeare will lead us into the realms of the
unsayable, the inexpressible. But why Laocoon, and, one might venture
to ask, who dares bracket him with Lear?
Laocoon is, of course, the Trojan priest who was punished by the
goddess Athena for warning the Trojans about the wooden horse.
The goddess sent venomous snakes out of the sea to bite and strangle
him and his two sons. The Laocoon, a Hellenistic group of statuary
discovered in Rome in 1506, becomes in eighteenth-century Germany
a cipher for all kinds of aesthetic and moral debates and a criterion
of taste. Depending on one’s views, it is an unsurpassed model of
classical harmony in art, an exemplar of stoical suffering and moral
greatness, or a martyr enduring the pain of death, offering defiance
to the gods in the very act of punishment. The question of why
Laocoon and his sons suffer in the way they do is not in the forefront
of eighteenth-century debates. The contemplation of this group of
statuary is concerned rather with drawing out of it qualities of human
endeavour, inner capacities of mind and soul. Thus it is that everyone
who matters in the eighteenth century has something to say about
Laocoon: Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gothold Ephraim Lessing,
Johann Gottfried Herder, Schiller, Goethe, and many others, a roll-call
of the great names of eighteenth-century German criticism, thought
and poetry.9 Such observations are not restricted to Germany; witness
Sir Joshua Reynolds noting that the Laocoon can depict but the

8 ‘Who may venture to speak of Laocoon? Who of Lear, who dares it?’ Jakob Michael
Reinhold Lenz, Das Hochburger Schloß (1777), in Shakespeare-Rezeption. Die Diskussion
um Shakespeare in Deutschland. I: Ausgewählte Texte von 1741 bis 1788, ed. by Hans-
Jürgen Blinn (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1982), 148.
9 See the definitive account by Hugh Barr Nisbet, ‘Laocoon in Germany. The
Reception of the Group since Winckelmann’, in On the Literature and Thought of the
German Classical Era (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021), 241–90, http://doi.
org/10.11647/OBP.0180
 4. The Overcoming of Tragedy  63

‘general expression of pain’.10 And so Lenz’s shorthand reference to

Laocoon taps into current debates and aligns him with those who see
in this statuary the depiction of tragic suffering. But Lenz goes further:
he is saying that for him Laocoon represents, like Lear, the limits of
the expressible, takes us out beyond analysis, outside of articulation,
beyond critical debate, into spheres of the absolute. We do not concern
ourselves with details, with motivations, with questions of guilt or
innocence. Words do not suffice.
Let us now jump nearly twenty years, to 1795, to a figure better
known in German Shakespeare reception, August Wilhelm Schlegel, the
great translator and the author of the Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst
und Literatur/Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature that so influenced
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Except that in 1795 he is neither of these things.
Although he has produced a draft version of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream,11 he is for the moment occupied with other matters, notably with
Dante. Whereas references to Dante and Shakespeare in eighteenth-
century English Shakespearean discourse are so rare as hardly to count,
the position in Germany is different. For them, the great figures of world
literature represent a continuity of poetry, in different epochs, in cyclical
progression. But poetry remains whole and undivided all the same.
Schlegel’s brother Friedrich expressed this in 1798 in the following
terms:

Dante’s prophetisches Gedicht ist das einzige System der transcendenten

Poesie, immer noch das höchste seiner Art. Shakespeare’s Universalität
ist wie der Mittelpunkt der romantischen Kunst. Goethe’s rein poetische
Poesie ist die vollständigse Poesie der Poesie. Das ist der große Dreyklang
der modernen Poesie [..]12

10 The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. by John Burnet (London: James Carpenter,
1842), 114.
11 See Frank Jolles, A. W. Schlegels Sommernachtstraum in der ersten Fassung vom Jahre
1789 nach den Handschriften herausgegeben, Palaestra 244 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek &
Ruprecht, 1967).
12 ‘Dante’s prophetic poem is a system of transcendental poetry in one, and still the
highest of its kind. Shakespeare’s universality is like the midpoint of Romantic
art. Goethe’s pure poetic poetry is poetry of poetry at its most perfect. This is
the great threefold chord of modern poetry […]’. Athenaeum. Eine Zeitschrift von
August Wilhelm Schlegel und Friedrich Schlegel, 3 vols (Berlin: Vieweg, 1798; Unger,
1799–1800), I, 244.
64 From Goethe to Gundolf

You will see from this quotation that poetry does not stand still. It is
progressive and extends into the modern period as well (Goethe). The
Romantics, August Wilhelm Schlegel among them, never hesitated to
name Dante and Shakespeare as the highest ‘archpoets’, and so in a sense
what he says about Dante can by analogy be applied to Shakespeare.
I am going to take what he says in 1795 about Dante and apply it by
analogy to his attitude to Shakespeare, especially Shakespearean
tragedy, around 1800.
And so first of all to Dante. Schlegel is translating selected parts of the
Divine Comedy, hitherto never rendered in the original verse form, and in
1795 he is translating the first part, the Inferno. (We should not forget that
Schlegel did translations from Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Sanskrit,
as well as of Shakespeare.) The Dante essay and translation appears
in Schiller’s periodical Die Horen/The Horae, a journal concerned with
bringing together all men of good will in a common purpose. Schlegel
was in good company, for it is here that Schiller published his Briefe über
die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen/Letters on the Aesthetic Education
of Man and Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung/On Naïve and
Sentimental Poetry, Goethe his Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten/
Conversations of German Refugees and Römische Elegien/Roman Elegies,
and it was in this same journal that Schlegel also published his first
important statements on Shakespeare. Schlegel, in translating the
Ugolino episode, then commenting on it, was not plucking his example
out of the air. He knew that the subject had a pre-history.13 Precociously
knowledgeable as he was, he must have been be aware that, as far back
as 1741, the Swiss critic Johann Jacob Bodmer had drawn attention to
this passage and had even translated a part of it.14 (Over his later drama
Der Hunger-Thurn in Pisa, based on the same episode in Dante, a veil is
best drawn.)15 Bodmer is also one of the founding figures of German

13 On the Ugolino episode and its various mutations, see the old positivist study, still
useful, by Montague Jacobs, Gerstenbergs Ugolino. Ein Vorläufer des Geniedramas,
Berliner Beiträge zur germanischen und romanischen Philologie 14 (Berlin: Ebering,
1898); and more recently, Frances Yates, ‘Transformations of Dante’s Ugolino’, Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 14 (1951), 92–117; Yvonne-Patricia Ahlefeld,
‘“Der Simplicität der Griechen am nächsten kommen”. Entfesselte Animalität in
Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenbergs Ugolino’, Herder Jahrbuch, 6 (2002), 63–82.
14 Jacobs, Gerstenbergs Ugolino, 16f.
15 Johann Jacob Bodmer, Der Hunger-Thurn in Pisa. Ein Trauerspiel (Chur und Lindau:
Typographische Gesellschaft, 1769).
 4. The Overcoming of Tragedy  65

Shakespeare reception. The juxtaposition of these two ‘archpoets’ was

therefore not the Romantics’ invention. It was, however, not in Schlegel’s
interests, writing as he was in Die Horen, a journal at the cutting edge of
criticism and philosophical reflexion, to allude to a figure so unmodern
and dated. He may not have known that Schiller himself, from early on,
had taken a lively interest in the most notable manifestation in Germany
of Dante’s Ugolino episode, Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg’s
tragedy Ugolino (1768).16 Not only that: Gerstenberg is an important
voice in the Shakespearean reception of the Sturm und Drang, and for
him Shakespeare and Dante are commensurate figures. Do you expect
smoothness in the works of genius, his Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der
Literatur/Letters on Curiosities of Literature (1766–67) asks (‘denn großen
Genies sind Auswüchse wesentlich: erinnern Sie sich des Dante und
Shakespear [sic]?’).17 Thus it is that Schlegel can find admiring words
for Gerstenberg while nevertheless admitting that the subject is hardly
suitable for dramatic adaptation, at least not in the form chosen.18
Lessing, too, had alluded to Ugolino in a passage in his Laokoon (1766)
referring to repellent subjects in poetry.19 It was however not he who was
to review Gerstenberg’s play, but Herder, in 1770.20 Herder was generally
laudatory, but with some reservations. The chief of these is that Gerstenberg,
Shakespeareanizing in typically Sturm und Drang fashion, had overlooked
the essential difference between Ugolino and Shakespeare’s subjects.
While horror is penetratingly present in Shakespeare, it is never the main
point; it never forms, as here, the whole substance of the dramatic plot.
Similar points are to be found later in Schiller, himself never averse to the
spectacle of cruelty in dramatic subjects.21

16 Jacobs, Gerstenbergs Ugolino, 125f.

17 ‘For irregularities are an essential part of genius: do you remember Dante and
Shakespeare?’ Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der
Literatur. Vollständige Neuausgabe mit einer Biographie des Dichters, hg. von Karl-
Maria Guth, Sammlung Hofenberg (Berlin: Contumax, 2013), 2. Sammlung, 12.
Brief, 70.
18 Schlegel, ‘“Ugolino und Ruggieri”’, 65–67.
19 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke, ed. by Franz Muncker, 12 vols (Stuttgart:
Göschen, 1890), VII, 360.
20 Herder’s review is most accessible in Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, Ugolino.
Eine Tragödie in fünf Aufzügen. Mit einem Anhang und einer Auswahl aus den
theoretischen und kritischen Schriften, hg. von Christoph Siegrist, Reclams
Universal-Bibliothek 141 (2) (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1977), 74–86.
21 See Karl S. Guthke, ‘Schiller, Shakespeare und das Theater der Grausamkeit’,
Shakespeare im 18. Jahrhundert, 181–94.
66 From Goethe to Gundolf

This pre-history — which can only be sketched here — is doubtless

the reason why Schlegel chooses this particular passage for translation
and comment. Not his very first public statement on Dante, it has
nevertheless a milestone quality in that it contains the first version of the
rhyme-scheme terza rima in German (Schlegel refers nowhere by name
to the previous prose translation by Johann Nicolaus Meinhard, only
disdainfully to ‘mattere Umschreibungen’).22 Foretaste samples of the
first blank-verse translations of Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest and Julius
Caesar, also by Schlegel, were to be published in Die Horen, followed
by his two great essays on Shakespeare. Echoing Herder, Schegel, too,
considers what Shakespeare might have made of such as subject as
Ugolino.23 Of course such an idea was never in Shakespeare’s mind.
Schlegel must nevertheless come to terms with tragic horror in all its
starkness, whether in Dante or in Shakespeare; whether in Dante’s
account of Ugolino and his sons’ death by starvation or the action in
Romeo and Juliet, where the number of corpses even exceeds Dante’s. But
first, Ugolino.
As a translator, Schlegel is confronted with the passage in Canto
XXXIII of the Inferno that for him and many other readers besides
represents the scene of the most appalling horror: the story of Ugolino.
For what was seen as an act of treachery, Ugolino, his sons and grandsons
were incarcerated and left to die of hunger. Dante, with his guide and
mentor, Virgil, meets Ugolino in Hell and hears his story. Schlegel the
translator makes two points: he is inadequate to express the full force
of Dante’s original, but must nevertheless do justice to what Dante has
written.24 For the text hints at even worse: how Ugolino was tempted to
commit two desperate acts, to feed on his dead sons, and also to put an
end to his own life, but did neither, as Dante puts it, ‘Until hunger did
what anguish could not do’.25
Despite this, Ugolino is punished eternally in Hell, for betraying
the trust that was placed in him. But Schlegel sees deeper processes at
work in Dante’s depiction. He says that Dante, by using Ugolino’s own
words as he describes his own torture and death, appeals to our hearts,

22 ‘Fairly dull transcriptions’. Schlegel, ‘“Ugolino und Ruggieri”’, 58. Meinhard’s

translation in Gerstenberg, Ugolino, 72–74.
23 Schlegel, ‘“Ugolino und Ruggieri”’, 67.
24 Ibid., 58f.
25 In Schlegel’s version: ‘Dann that der Hunger, was dem Schmerz mislang’. Ibid., 57.
 4. The Overcoming of Tragedy  67

to our sympathies: ‘no-one could pass by and not be affected’, is how

Schlegel puts it.26 Over this whole account, says Schlegel, are written in
an invisible hand the words ‘To Humankind’.27 Through the atrocities
he is forced to recount, there shines Dante’s own sense of humanity,
his own natural innocence and his sense of natural recompense. There
must, Schlegel avers, be here a belief in a divine justice higher that the
events depicted. Otherwise, our hearts and souls would revolt at the
sights and sounds evoked in the poetry and we would wish them veiled
from our sight; the punishment would be out of all proportion to our
sense of justice. In all, we sense virtues, heroism and self-sacrifice; after
horror, we are filled with admiration and pity; as an equilibrium is
restored in our hearts, we are healed and reconciled.28 You will note that
here Schlegel is using the well-tried vocabulary of catharsis, the pseudo-
Aristotelian theory of inner purification through the spectacle of pity
and fear at others’ sufferings. Is Schlegel attempting to accommodate
Ugolino to Schiller’s notion of tragic art that is essentially concerned
with inner moral values? If so, Schiller does not seem to have minded
having the extreme example of Dante’s translated text published in his
journal. Even then, Schlegel seems to wish to mitigate: Ugolino is not
Dante’s invention, but history’s;29 he merely reports what he has learned
through other sources (which overlooks Ugolino’s punishment in Hell).
This argument is somewhat specious, for Dante did after all choose
his subject. Or: Dante is only recording history; he is not its inventor,
suffused as he is by a natural sense of justice. But we might just as easily
say that Shakespeare did not invent the child murders in King Henry VI,
King John and King Richard III, but he chose nevertheless to display them
to dramatic effect. Schlegel is seeking factors that might compensate and
balance the ‘Ekel und Abscheu’ (‘disgust and abhorrence’), what he calls
‘Entschädigung’.30 Our natural sense of pity at the deaths of children is
invoked, rather than our distress at the sight of the cannibalism to which
Ugolino is condemned eternally, inflicted on his earthly adversary,
Ruggieri.

26 ‘Wer hier untheilnehmend vorübergienge, müßte seine Natur verläugnen oder

vergessen’; ‘An die Menschheit’. Ibid., 59.
27 Ibid., 57.
28 Ibid., 60.
29 Ibid., 59.
30 Ibid., 61,
68 From Goethe to Gundolf

Even that, says Schlegel, cannot suffice. We may be able to bear

the spectacle of others’ physical sufferings — as with Philoctetes (the
Greek hero of the Trojan war who endured a wound for ten years)
or Laocoon31 — but there is something infinitely more terrible in the
thought of Ugolino being part of a chain of sin and retribution (‘I
shudder even to imagine this idea’, says Schlegel).32 Was he reminded of
the doctrine of eternal punishment in which his own father, a Lutheran
pastor, had still believed? The real crime that Ugolino committed stands
in no proportion to the sufferings he underwent. But Dante’s sense of
truth and justice is inerrant, almost inhumanly so. We admire, but do
not wish to enter into these regions ourselves.
The brief, passing reference to Laocoon is interesting, not as an
explanation of the Ugolino story but as an analogy. It would suggest that
Schlegel subscribes to the view of Laocoon as eliciting our admiration
and our empathy through the spectacle of his suffering and that of his
sons. It is a reference that takes us out of literature proper and into the
fine arts, away from the story as such and into its depiction in this group
of statuary. Without referring to it by name, Schlegel turns to the subject
of Lessing’s Laokoon of 1766: the distinction between the art forms, the
visual arts and poetry. Can a painting or sculpture elicit our empathy
in the way that Dante’s text has done? I find it interesting that Schlegel
near the end of his essay refers briefly to the painting of Ugolino and his
sons by Sir Joshua Reynolds.33
It seems to me that this painting has some affinities with Laocoon:
not so much with the bodies writhing in their last agonies, but with
the pyramidal structure of the Laocoon group, a feature that many
eighteenth-century observers note.34 Reynolds’s Ugolino sits stoically,
heedless of his imploring sons and grandsons, who alone represent an
unruly element in the painting. I see similar analogies with contemporary
paintings of Shakespearean scenes, notably those in the Boydell Gallery,
James Northcote’s or Josiah Boydell’s depiction of the father and son
dying on the battlefield in 3 Henry VI, for instance, or James Barry’s
of Lear and Cordelia, even perhaps John Opie’s of Romeo and Juliet. I

31 Ibid.
32 ‘Ich schaudre mich weiter in diese Vorstellungen zu vertiefen’. Ibid., 61f.
33 Ibid., 73.
34 See Nisbet, ‘Laocoon in Germany’, 251.
 4. The Overcoming of Tragedy  69

Fig. 5 J oshua Reynolds, Count Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon (1770–73),
National Trust Collection.

do not wish to pursue these iconographical links any further,35 at least

not here. At most, they all point to some reconciliation beyond tragedy,
some resolution: Laocoon’s nobility (as many saw it), Ugolino’s stoicism
(not the pangs of starvation), an artistically harmonious solution in the
Shakespearean paintings through the juxtaposition and ensemble of
bodies live and dead, as indeed the theory of history painting at the
time demanded.
With this, we leave Laocoon, but not Ugolino. In 1799, Schlegel writes
an enthusiastic review of the outline engravings of scenes from Dante
done by John Flaxman, the great neoclassical illustrator and sculptor.36
Flaxman cannot rightly omit Ugolino, nor indeed does he disappoint
us. Flaxman is not Reynolds. Reynolds’s Ugolino could, Schlegel says,
be ‘any old man starving’,37 not Dante’s character. Not so Flaxman. He
makes two scenes out of Dante’s story, and thus shows a ‘much higher

35 See The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, ed. by Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick in
collaboration with the German Shakespeare Society (Bottrop: Pomp, 1996), 261,
262, 281, 283.
36 ‘Ueber Zeichnungen zu Gedichten und John Flaxman’s Umrisse’, Athenaeum, II, ii,
193–246.
37 Ibid., 212.
70 From Goethe to Gundolf

perception’.38 For the first sheet shows the arrest of Ugolino and his
family, how they are jostled and bound by rough soldiery, the man
Ugolino, unbroken and unshaken in their midst forming the central
character around which everything else in the engraving is resolved. His
accusers skulk in the background, aware of the enormity of what they
are about to perpetrate. (He does not say it, but one thinks by analogy of
the arrest of Christ.) The second sheet shows Ugolino surrounded by his
dying and dead sons and grandsons. Schlegel quotes two lines of Dante,
without commentary, and restricts himself to a short technical note on
how Flaxman centres the figure of Ugolino.39 Nothing more. There are
no words now on the inexpressibility of horror and judgment. In fact,
it seems that Schlegel in this essay is only too happy to escape from the
pressing repugnances of Inferno to the etherealities of Paradiso, in other
words, to avoid the pressing reality of sheer tragedy.

Fig. 6 
John Flaxman, illustration of Dante, Inferno, Canto 33 (Rome?, 1802),
showing Ugolino and his sons. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of
Trinity College, Cambridge.

38 ‘Viel höhere Ansicht’, ibid.

39 Ibid.
 4. The Overcoming of Tragedy  71

Fig. 7 
John Flaxman, illustration of Dante, Inferno, Canto 33 (Rome?, 1802),
showing Ugolino and his sons. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of
Trinity College, Cambridge.

I have spent some time on Laocoon and Ugolino because I think that
they provide for us important analogies for Schlegel’s attitude to
Shakespeare and tragedy. He never obliges us, like Lenz, by mentioning
Lear and Laocoon in one breath, or indeed Ugolino and Lear. But he
does show how you can, as it were, ‘face up’ to what is staring you
starkly in the face by seeing inner structures, by referring to higher
orders of cause and effect, by seeing those words that are not there in
the text: ‘To Humankind’.
But first of all, some facts and some chronology. Schlegel’s remarks on
Ugolino were, as we saw, published in 1795. In 1796, Schlegel published
his programmatic essay on translating Shakespeare, in 1797, his great
essay on Romeo and Juliet, and in the same year, 1797, he begins issuing
his translation of Shakespeare. The play that ushers in the translation,
with the first volume, is Romeo and Juliet. Not only that: in the same year
again, he publishes a seven-stanza poem in ottava rima, a dedication to
Romeo and Juliet. Hamlet, a far greater test for the translator, has to wait
until 1798.
72 From Goethe to Gundolf

It is worth noting which plays Schlegel did translate and which he

did not, in the creative burst of translation activity between 1797 and
1802: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
The Tempest, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice and all of
the Histories except Henry VIII. He then puts down his pen until 1810,
to issue Richard III, then nothing more. There are clearly some notable
absentees: no Macbeth, no Lear, no Othello, no ‘problem plays’. In a sense,
he is translating those plays that appeal to the taste of his own age,
or which, like Hamlet, have been the subject of prolonged discussion
and debate. Goethe and Schiller, however, wanted the big tragedies
for performance on the Weimar stage. Schiller had to do a version of
Macbeth himself in order to meet that need. Schlegel seemed to have
other priorities. (And, incidentally, Schiller’s version has a special
interest, in that it is one great dramatist translating another.)
Of course, the Histories are not short of tragic themes or moments
of pity and terror — those deaths of children in King John, 3 Henry VI
or Richard III — but the Histories have a special agenda of their own in
Schlegel’s thinking, one that transcends these dark points in the dramatic
narrative. Schlegel is not concerned with linking the deaths of innocents
in the Histories with their equivalents in the so-called Big Tragedies.
When in the Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808) he comes to
talk about the Histories, he places them very much in a political context
that has resonances for his own day.
Given that Hamlet is the subject of several essays in German during
the 1790s and indeed is a determining factor in the first part of Goethe’s
novel Wilhelm Meister in 1795–96, it is noteworthy that Schlegel’s essay
of 1796 has relatively little to say about the play itself or about its central
character. It is, under the disguise of its title ‘Some Remarks on Hamlet
Occasioned by Wilhelm Meister’, really Schlegel setting out his stall
as a critic, and it is a statement of Schlegel’s translation principles. By
emphasizing how one puts Shakespeare into German, he is in effect
saying: read my text, a line-by-line version, and explore that text for
yourselves. The text is to be read for itself, not to be explicated.40 Thus
the evidence points to Romeo and Juliet, not Hamlet, as being for Schlegel

40 See the distinction drawn in this respect between Coleridge and Shakespeare by
Reginald Foulkes, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge’, in Voltaire, Goethe, Schlegel, Coleridge,
ed. by Roger Paulin, Great Shakespeareans 3 (London, New York: continuum,
2010), 128–72 (146), https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472555557.ch-004
 4. The Overcoming of Tragedy  73

the paradigmatic text with which to introduce Shakespeare to a wider

audience, the reading public, but also the spectators in the theatre. It
had, like Hamlet, been part of the repertoire in adapted form since the
1760s; it is the first tragedy that Schlegel translates, and it becomes, as
said, the subject of an essay and a long poem.
For Schlegel, criticism is part of the creative process; it is related, as
he says in the Hamlet essay of 1796, to the ‘divine power, ability, to create
for oneself’.41 There is criticism which is merely carping and atomizing,
for example Samuel Johnson’s, and there is ‘real criticism’42 that enters
into these workings of the spirit. Not only that: there is ‘philological
criticism’ and there is criticism that makes connections and links and
is able to see the essentials in related phenomena, what he later calls
‘vermittelnde Kritik’ (‘criticism that crosses borders’).43 And so, as we
approach the Romeo and Juliet essay, we may expect to see elements of
the ‘set piece’ work of criticism. Now, there were views on Romeo and
Juliet circulating in the group that in this same decade was to call itself
‘Romantic’, that Schlegel certainly knew.44 His own brother Friedrich
had stressed the antithetical nature of the play; how these antitheses
are never resolved; they remind us, amid the insouciance of youth, of
the general pointlessness of life itself, the emptiness of all existence.
Using other images, it is a ‘thunderstorm amid the full blossoms of a
spring day’, a ‘rose, with a thorn that goes to the very core’. Schlegel’s
wife Caroline, who copied out the manuscript of the play for the printer,
saw in it occasional ‘harshness and lack of beauty’. Ludwig Tieck had
noted privately that ‘melancholy’ and ‘Schwärmerei’ (a difficult word
to translate, but its connotations are enthusiasm, fanciful visionary
aberrations of the mind), in other words a failure to connect with reality
is at the base of the play. In fact what we note is that Schlegel took a
number of these images, the ones from his brother and his wife, and
incorporated them into his essay, but with a different emphasis, with the
sharp edges blunted, the blossoms divested of their thorns. It is therefore
interesting to note what Schlegel does not say about Romeo and Juliet, let
alone about Hamlet, for that matter: that the stage is littered with corpses

41 Schlegel, ‘Etwas über Hamlet bey Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters’, 60.

42 Ibid., 59.
43 Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur, Kritische Ausgabe der
Vorlesungen, IV, i, ed. by Stefan Knödler (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2018), 282.
44 See Paulin, The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany, 288–94.
74 From Goethe to Gundolf

at the end, as befits the ‘tale of woe’. True, Schlegel had said in 1795 in
connection with Dante, that Shakespeare would never have chosen a
subject like Ugolino, with its never-ending suffering. Instead, he sought
resolution, essentially Herder’s point of 1773. Shakespeare nevertheless
confronts us with horror, with death on the stage. But Schlegel will have
none of this, sharing as he does the late eighteenth century’s reluctance
towards such displays (Schiller, for instance, in his version of Macbeth,
leaves out the killing of the children, and he has Macbeth’s armour and
crown, but not his head, borne in triumph at the end).
Schlegel45 takes the play away from any historical context it may have
(such as being an early work of Shakespeare’s) and transposes it into a
realm of its own, a kind of capsule, an ‘inner unity’ whose secrets we
are to fathom, to sound (the verb he actually uses, ‘ergründen’, means
more than that; it is related to its stem-word ‘Grund’, which in German
has religious and mystical connotations of depth, the fathomless love
of God). Into these ‘inner depths’, as he calls them, the critic is called
to descend, not to be content with surface analysis and ‘conventional
explanations’.46 True, the play rests on a conflict, an antithesis, the feud
between the two houses, but Schlegel is concerned to mitigate the effects
of this dissonance: words like lyrical, tender, sacred, true, mild, determine
his discourse, despite the necessary acknowledgment of reality and
the sense of a fate that is intent on frustrating this tender, spring-like
love. And so Schlegel has the lovers inhabiting a sphere where nothing
matters but love, a place inaccessible to reason, where their actions, their
language, the very mannerisms of love, their sense of being wrapped
up in themselves are everything; not the pressing realities of life ‘out
there’, not the malevolence of some higher agencies. He can exonerate
the lovers, as living in a capsule of their own, speaking language that
only they understand and which even in its extravagances was for them
natural and appropriate. It was, one might say, a Petrarchan reading that
removed the negative connotations of the word ‘conceit’, that made this
poetic language ‘right’; it was not evidence that the lovers had lost all
sense of dimension and proportion. Of course, Schlegel cannot deny the
tragic outcome: but the play, he emphasizes, despite everything, ends
in reconciliation; it does not end abruptly, but on a note of circularity,

45 ‘Ueber Shakespeare’s Romeo und Julia’, Die Horen, 3. Jg. (1797), 6. Stück, 18–48.
46 Ibid., 24.
 4. The Overcoming of Tragedy  75

in that the asperities with which it began are now overcome and the
‘course of things’ may begin again.
Schlegel’s poem of the same year, ‘Zueignung des Trauerspiels
Romeo und Julia’/’Dedication of the Tragedy Romeo and Juliet’,47 is less
well-known. Free of the element of critical commentary, it concentrates
even more than the essay on the good and positive things that Romeo
and Juliet stand for, their loss of self in love, their heedlessness of the
outside world, their triumph over adversity, the inventiveness of their
love, their union of body and soul. Their language, not governed by real
constraints, seeks extreme and extravagantly polar expression. Their
love, though fleeting, is nevertheless fulfilled; they are to be admired,
not merely pitied, because they found the joy that is given to the gods
(‘Götterwonne’). It is fleeting and brief, but not evanescent, in that the
lovers still stand for the fulfilment of the moment; it is not all inconstancy
and frailty: as lovers, they enter ‘heaven’s gate’.
And yet they die. Forces are marshalled against them that frustrate
even the purest and most fulfilled of loves. Shakespeare, as we know,
has a whole range of expressions for this: calamity, happy, misfortune,
hanging in the stars, and the like. Schlegel the translator does not have
this array at his disposal, and so the words in German that he chooses
have a monosyllabic finality about them: ‘Glück’, ‘Noth’, balancing the
‘Lieb’ and ‘Leiden’.48 Despite this linguistic insistence on the lexis of fate
and death, we are told that Romeo’s and Juliet’s love did last in the face
of fate or fortune. They did know that state where, as the poem declares,
‘Love drowns in bliss inside its very chalice’,49 but even that love must in
the end be extinguished.
If Schlegel’s choice among Shakespeare’s tragedies falls on one that
in his terms can demonstrate a reconciliation beyond tragedy, this is
also the case when he comes in 1802–03 to speak of the tragedy of the
Greeks. He is now lecturing to an audience in Berlin on the history of
poetry. He must face up to the terrible realities of Greek tragedy, just as
he had confronted Dante’s. This he indeed does: he must explicate the
mythology that informs Greek tragedy, in conflict with human striving,

47  ugust Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, 12 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846–47),

A
I, 35–37.
48 ‘Bliss’, ‘oppression’, ‘love’, ‘suffering’. Ibid., 36, 38 (‘Glück’), 36 (‘Noth’), 35, 37
(‘Lieb’, ‘Leiden’).
49 ‘Ertränkt sich Lieb’ im Becher eigner Wonnen’, ibid., 36.
76 From Goethe to Gundolf

and he must allude to its darkly orgiastic beginnings. Significantly, his

preference falls on Sophocles, and on the Oedipus trilogy, not so much
on the Oedipus Rex, with its story of murder, incest, suicide and blinding,
but on the Oedipus at Colonus, the sequel as it were, for Schlegel the
resolution, the harmonization of dissonances that were so strident in
the earlier part of the play. He does not see only starkness and bleakness;
instead, we have the ’mildness of humanity’, as the Furies lead the hero
away from the horror into a blissful grove, where the tragic effect is
diminished — or so he would have us believe.50
The same applies to Schlegel’s so-called Vienna Lectures on Dramatic
Art and Literature, 1808 (published 1809–11) where he discusses the
full range of Shakespeare’s plays. When Schlegel comes to treat Romeo
and Juliet in this framework, he does little more than rehearse what he
had had so say in 1797, but more succinctly: reunion beyond the grave,
purity of heart, gentleness of spirit, an idealistic canvas, triumph over
the forces that separate them, a ‘sigh that never ends’.51 This is romantic
vocabulary (with a small r). In 1797, as we saw, there was no question
of relating this play to its tragic neighbours. In his Lectures, Schlegel
must now do this, and we sense that he does it only because he must.
After the section on Romeo and Juliet comes that on Othello. The red skies
of dawn that in Romeo and Juliet announce the storm of a sultry spring
day, give way to the dark and sombre colours of Othello. Desdemona’s
love, while noble and innocent, cannot match Juliet’s. Othello’s defiance
of Venice he does liken to the feud of the Montagues and Capulets, but
whereas language is adequate to describe the exemplary love of Romeo
and Juliet, ‘no rhetoric is capable of expressing the destructive force of
the catastrophe in Othello’, ‘which in one moment plumbs the abysses
of eternity’.52 Hamlet leaves Schlegel with a distinctly uneasy feeling
about the character of the hero, and the fate of humans caught up in this
tragic conflict is likened to an enormous sphinx, ready to tear into the
abyss all those who cannot solve her riddles.53 Both tragedies are about

50  ugust Wilhelm Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, ed. by Ernst Behler
A
et al., 4 vols (Paderborn, etc.: Schöningh, 1989-), I [Vorlesungen über Ästhetik I
1798–1803], 745.
51 ‘Unendlicher Seufzer’. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur,
330.
52 Ibid., 331.
53 Ibid., 335.
 4. The Overcoming of Tragedy  77

inexpressibility, about forces that consign humans to the nether regions,

mysterious, uncontrollable.
What of Macbeth?54 Schiller, Schlegel says, was wrong to make the
witches into Greek Furies, thus mitigating what is by nature obscene
and magical and inexplicable. Yet Schlegel is prepared to alleviate the
starkness. He is not above comparing the workings of fate in Macbeth
with those of the ancient dramatists. The natural heroism of Macbeth’s
character is not extinguished by his crimes. In the same way as Aeschylus
and Sophocles wrote their tragedies to their greater glory of the Greek
state of Athens, so the story of Macbeth has national connotations.55 With
King Lear, hardly finding adequate words to express his revulsion at
the horrors piled one on top of the other, Schlegel nevertheless sees
a moment of light in the chaos and darkness and points to Cordelia,
who shares the same beauty of soul (‘Seelenschönheit’) as Sophocles’
Antigone.56
Schlegel needs desperately to be able to save something of common
humanity out of a world of moral and political disorder. Hence his
recourse to Greek tragedy in the case of Macbeth and Lear. For Romeo and
Juliet, however, the qualities are innate to the play itself; the characters
have their own sets of values with their own validity and congruences.
We may — by analogy — read moral greatness and obliviousness to fate
into the writhings of Laocoon; we may see a banner with ‘To Humanity’
as Ugolino and his sons and grandsons starve to death. In the same
way, though fate seems to ordain otherwise, we may read into Romeo
and Juliet a reconciliation and a love that has its own validity in the face
of adversity.

54 Ibid., 336–39.
55 Ibid., 339.
56 Ibid., 341.
Fig. 8 [ Karl Gottlieb Hofmann], Pantheon der Deutschen, 3 parts (Chemnitz: Karl
Gottlieb Hofmann, 1794–1800), part 2 (1795), frontispiece and title page.
 5. Adding Stones to the Edifice:
Patterns of German Biography1

Despite disavowals in its country of origin, there is such a thing as a

great German biographical tradition. Why, then, do we not hear more
of it, and what has happened meanwhile to the art of biography in
the German-speaking lands? Inevitably, comparisons are made with
the Anglo-Saxon tradition of biographical writing and scholarship.
These are of only limited help. For German comment on Anglo-Saxon
literary or scholarly traditions tends to notice only two things. One is
the sense of continuity, the unbroken succession of literary modes, the
straightforward acceptance of institutions that are deemed satisfactory
and that ‘work’. The other is a certain lack of depth or bottom, a
tendency to dwell on the surface, even to pursue readability and general
accessibility at the expense of high seriousness and reflection. Thus,
in the art of biography, the Anglo-Saxons, it is said, get on with the
business of writing, insouciant of charges of reductionism or positivism,
and even deserve a measure of grudging admiration for such moving
and doing.
The Germans, it is maintained, do not have such an uninhibited
relationship to past traditions in any field of intellectual endeavour.

1 An earlier version of this chapter is found in Mapping Lives. The Uses of Biography,
ed. by Peter France and William St Clair (London: The British Academy; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 103–14. Since I wrote this chapter, a whole new
wave of biography has emerged in Germany, accompanied by a new critical
assessment of theory and practice. This chapter thus reflects another important
aspect of literary reception: changes in attitude and taste. See Christian Klein,
Grundlagen der Biographik. Theorie und Praxis des biographischen Schreibens (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 2002) and Christian Klein, ed., Handbuch Biographie. Methoden, Traditionen,
Theorien (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009) and my reviews of both of these books, Modern
Language Review 99 (2004), 119f. and 106 (2011), 607–09.

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.05

80 From Goethe to Gundolf

Political considerations are made partly responsible for this. While one
should not lightly underestimate their effects, they are not the only
factors for discontinuity. In purely formal terms, biography has never
been fully accepted into the scheme of German poetics. To some extent,
the answer lies in the nature of the German biographical tradition itself.
It has always been seen as part of historiography, so that its development
belongs rather to ‘Wissenschaftsgeschichte’ (‘History of Science’) than
to belles-lettres. Thus, Thomas Carlyle belongs fairly and squarely to
English literature as well as to historical writing, whereas Leopold von
Ranke, the most readable of the German historian-biographers, does not.
Then there is the function of this biographical tradition. It is not
just the record of great names, but a hierarchy of cultural role models,
canonical literary figures and representative individuals. As a determiner
of national moral values — spiritual and political — it does more than
merely memorialize. It is one of the many intellectual institutions
before 1871 that speak for a German nation not yet politically in being
but which coalesces in cultural terms around a shared linguistic and
historical heritage. ‘Representatives of the nation’ can thus become focal
points for all kinds of aspirations not yet underwritten by actual political
institutions. Gustav Schwab’s much-read biography of Friedrich Schiller,2
for example, aligns itself with a visible sign of national greatness, the
first statue erected to the poet’s memory, in 1840. And it is not by chance
that so many German liberal aspirations before 1871 centred on public
celebrations of Schiller’s life and works, of which biographies are one
important manifestation.3
It is also not fortuitous that the great age of the German biography is
roughly 1830–90, spanning the period that gave us works as disparate as
Johann Gustav Droysen’s life of Alexander the Great (1833),4 Herman
Grimm’s of Michelangelo (1860–63),5 Ranke’s of Wallenstein (1869),6
and Erich Schmidt’s of Gothold Ephraim Lessing (1884–92),7 the
years leading through reaction and revolution up to the ‘Gründerzeit’

2 Gustav Schwab, Schiller‘s Leben in drei Büchern (Stuttgart: Liesching, 1840).

3 Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat
(Munich: Beck, 1984), 722.
4 Johann Gustav Droysen, Geschichte Alexander des Grossen (Berlin, Finke, 1833).
5 Herman Grimm, Leben Michelangelo‘s (Hanover: Rümpler, 1860–63).
6 Leopold von Ranke, Geschichte Wallenstein‘s (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1869).
7 Erich Schmidt, Lessing: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften, 2 vols (Berlin:
Weidmann 1884–92).
 5. Adding Stones to the Edifice: Patterns of German Biography  81

(‘founding period’) of the Second Empire and its apogee. All relate
in their several ways to these processes and refer to them. Droysen
reflects on the nature of the ‘monarchic organism’,8 Grimm on the
role of great men in the events of history, Ranke similarly on the
relationship of the individual to the general development of an epoch,
Schmidt on the emergence of German literary culture. Each one is a
kind of monumental ‘Representative Man’ for which Carlyle’s The Life
of Friedrich Schiller (1825) provided an early model. This would link the
German biography to the high seriousness of the Victorians. But the
German biographies also reflect the nineteenth century’s awareness
that the Life forms an entity in itself around an ‘organizing centre’9 that
aggregates and co-ordinates the individual events that befall it. In that
sense, nineteenth­century biographers are heirs to the insight, enshrined
in German idealist and Romantic thought, that the individual is the
visible and tangible representative of the total forces — intellectual,
moral, historical — of an age or culture. Thus the Life and the Works
reflect one another, support each other, and in the final analysis bear the
same relation to the ‘Ganzes’, the totality.
Seen in these terms, the German biographical tradition might appear
to be the product of national liberalism, its function to annex the lives of
the great for the sake of overarching cultural and political ends. Schmidt’s
monumental life of Lessing could serve as a prime example. It is not
for the faint-hearted: it is huge, ‘philological’, painstaking, supremely
‘wissenschaftlich’, and it sets the capstone (if that is the right image for
so weighty a work) on nearly a century’s proclamation of Lessing as the
founder of modern German literature and thought.
But had the biography, the heir to both positivism and historicism,
become crushed under the weight of its erudition? Friedrich Nietzsche,
speaking of a ‘biographical epidemic’,10 seemed to think so. And others,
who shared Nietzsche’s disdain for diligent philology as an end in itself
and applauded his remarks on mere progress or utilitarianism — the

8 Droysen, Geschichte, 538.

9 Wilhelm Dilthey‘s phrase, ‘die organisierende Mitte‘, quoted in Ulfert Ricklefs,
‘Leben und Schrift: Autobiographische und biographische Diskurse. Ihre
Intertextualität in Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft‘, Editio: Internationales
Jahrbuch für Editionswissenschaft, 9 (1995), 37–62 (47).
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. by Karl Schlechta, 3 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1969), III,
366.
82 From Goethe to Gundolf

harnessing of art or scholarship to an ‘official’ culture — would have

concurred. Instead, if there were to be ‘Lives’, they must be of the
aristocrats of the mind, representing timeless poetic genius; they should
be sufficient in themselves, adequate in their powers of utterance,
beholden to no tradition; they should transcend mere influence and
be explicable only in terms of the epoch on which they stamped their
individuality — figures such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ludwig
van Beethoven or Richard Wagner. The German biographical tradition
comes to an end as it bifurcates into accounts of unapproachable genius
(e.g. Friedrich Gundolf’s studies of Caesar, Shakespeare, Goethe or
Stefan George) or popular (and immensely readable) accounts by the
likes of Emil Ludwig or Stefan Zweig.
All along, however, the biography had had a competitor in the
form of the scholarly apparatus to those historical-critical editions,
or the volumes of edited correspondence, that are in many ways the
greatest German contribution to scholarship. There is an unwillingness
to make this corpus of material readily available to the non-specialist
reader, an unease at the potential loss of scholarly standards. There
are inhibitions at material being allowed to float freely in the narrative
mode. A good example would be August Wilhelm Schlegel, of whom
there has never been a biography: Schlegel, companion to Madame
de Staël, following her from Coppet to St Petersburg and back, whose
Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur/Lectures on Dramatic
Art and Literature had proclaimed Romantic doctrine ‘from Cadiz to
Edinburgh, Stockholm and St Petersburg’.11 Comtesse Jean de Pange,
coming from another biographical tradition (and perhaps a little too
close to its André Maurois wing) documented Staël and Schlegel.12 But
Germany has produced volume after volume of edited correspondence,
its apparatus fairly bristling with biographical facts. Schlegel was
captious, vain (Byron disliked him, a sure sign), generally unattractive
as a person (so was Staël), but his Life has never been structured or
documented except through the letters. This is not an isolated example.13

11 Georg Hirzel, ‘Ungedruckte Briefe an Georg Andreas Reimer‘, Deutsche Revue,

XVIII (Oct.-Dec. 1893), 98–114, 238–53 (249).
12 Comtesse Jean de Pange, Auguste-Guillaume Schlegel et Madame de Staël d’après des
documents inédits (Paris: Albert, 1938).
13 When I originally wrote this article in 2002, I little knew that I was to write the
first extended biography of Schlegel. See Roger Paulin, The Life of August Wilhelm
Schlegel. Cosmopolitan of Art and Poetry (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016),
https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0069
 5. Adding Stones to the Edifice: Patterns of German Biography  83

After 1945, commentators were in fairly broad agreement that there

was no going back to what many now claimed was a nineteenth-century
discipline, although many of the older biographies remained in print.14
Friedrich Sengle’s Wieland (1949) remained for long the only large-scale
literary biography combining readability, empiricism and scholarly
reassessment.15 It has not found many successors, if any. German
biographies often are anti-biographies, breaking with older, discredited
conventions, amalgams of fiction and autobiography. The conventional
form requires some sense of conviction. Thus, in the eyes of one critic
(and historian of biography), Golo Mann’s splendid Wallenstein (1971)
takes us little further than the nineteenth century!16 This remark was not
intended to be a compliment: it was not the same as a modern Anglo-
Saxon biographer hearing a flattering comparison with Elizabeth Gaskell
or Hallam Tennyson. It illustrates the discontinuous and problematic
tradition of historical or literary biography in Germany. Indeed, the
potential German biographer might instead be told that he or she is
breaking taboos, is entering a terrain not accessible to theory or scholarly
criticism, is challenging modern anti-narrative positions, is positing an
‘individual’ where Freud or Foucault have told us that there is, properly
speaking, no such thing. Above all, he or she may learn that this kind of
thing is best left to the Anglo-Saxons and their tradition of the Lives of
the Poets.17 While I do not rate highly the chances of a revival of German
biographical writing, I am encouraged by an increasing willingness to
explore what there once was. The rest of this chapter therefore focuses
on one aspect of that ‘German biographical tradition’, one that involves
the relationship between hagiography and national literary canon.

14 Such as Droysen, Herman Grimm or Carl Justi. I pointed this out in my review of
Klein, Handuch Biographie in Modern Language Review, 106 (2011), 609.
15 Friedrich Sengle, Wieland (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1949).
16 Helmut Scheuer, ‘Biographie: Überlegungen zu einer Gattungsbeschreibung’, in
Vom Anderen und vom Selbst: Beiträge zu Fragen der Biographie und Autobiographie, ed.
by Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Königstein im Taunus: Athenäum, 1982),
9–29 (10).
17 See esp. Gerhart von Graevenitz, ‘Geschichte aus dem Geist des Nekrologs: Zur
Begründung der Biographie im 19. Jahrhundert’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift
für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 54 (1980), 105–70 (105–10); Ernst
Ribbat, ‘Der Dichter und sein Monograph: Zu den Aussichten einer fragwürdigen
Gattung’, in Germanistik: Forschungsstand und Perspektiven (Vorträge des Deutschen
Germanistentages 1984, 2. Teil. Ältere Deutsche Literatur. Neuere Deutsche Literatur, ed.
by Georg Stötzel (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1985), 589–99. Fortunately, these
commentators have been proved wrong (see footnote 1).
84 From Goethe to Gundolf

The emergence of German literary biography — Lives of the

Poets — in the late eighteenth century has to be seen in the context
of a national identity that was not fully realized until three or four
generations later. Its background is a tentatively emerging national
canon, centred on but a few commanding figures. There was, of course,
agreement on a supranational canon — Homer, Dante, Tasso, Ariosto,
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Ossian — but Germany had produced nothing
commensurate. The different critical schools in the German-speaking
lands could not agree on indigenous models. Outstanding figures were
few. The many lives of Martin Luther — some fifty between 1546 and
the end of the eighteenth century — reflected the concentration of
German spiritual and intellectual culture in the Protestant heartlands;
while Joachim von Sandrart’s memorialization of Albrecht Dürer
accorded a German painter a pre-eminent status, akin to Raphael or
Michelangelo.18 Much of the biographical activity of the period was, in
any case, conducted in the spirit of learned compendia or necrologies.
One might have to search diligently among the dross to find nuggets of
excellence.
Where individual names did provide the focus for an emergent
literary canon, other traditions of biography had to be invoked. The first
German poet to become part of this new canon was Friedrich Gottlieb
Klopstock, the author of Der Messias (1749–73) and as such the most
translated German author of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In
Klopstock converge the Homeric, the Miltonic, the Youngian, all strands
of ‘original composition’. But this achievement can only be fused with the
Life through another strain of biography: hagiography. It is, of course, no
longer veneration per se, but the structuring and schematizing of a life
around considerations of edification, amplification and transfiguration.
The rich seam of pietism can be tapped and merged with the inspirational
theory of poetry and the aspirations of national cultural renewal. Thus,
Klopstock is also the first major modern German poet to be the subject of
a biography during his own lifetime.19 And it is Klopstock more than any

18 Joachim von Sandrart, ‘Albrecht Dürer Mahler/Bildhauer/Kupferstecher und

Baumeister von Nürnberg’, in L‘Academia Todesca delle Architectura, Scultura & Pittura:
Oder Deutsche Academie der Edlen Bau- Bild- und Mahlerey-Kunste, 2 vols (Nuremberg:
Miltenberger, 1675–79), I., II. Theils III. Buch, III. Capitel, 222–29.
19 Carl Friedrich Cramer, Klopstock: Er, und über ihn, 5 vols (Hamburg: Schniebes,
Dessau: Gelehrten Buchhandlung; Leipzig and Altona: Kaven, 1780–92).
 5. Adding Stones to the Edifice: Patterns of German Biography  85

other canonical figure who receives the accolade of ‘divine’,20analogous

to the Renaissance ‘alter deus’ or ‘divino artista’ but now harnessed to the
religious connotations of genius. Like the prophetic patriarch Edward
Young, to whom Klopstock had once addressed an early ode, age and
venerability (Klopstock lived to be seventy-nine) go hand in hand with
the biblical virtues which his Life illustrates.
The ‘minor canonizations’ — in the form of biographical
prefaces — of poets from the Klopstock circle who died young
and without the fulfilment of age show a similar insistence on the
association of life and works.21 It informs much of the discussion of
individual poets or artists as suitable models for a literature that is
not merely national in name but which illustrates the national virtues
(also sung by Klopstock) of honesty, loyalty or forthrightness of mind.
Schiller’s stringent review of the works of the Sturm und Drang (‘Storm
and Stress’) poet Gottfried August Bürger (1791) also makes this link,
placing severe obligations on the poet’s individuality if he is to rise to the
supreme challenge of reflecting humanity as a whole. And the Romantic
imitation of Giorgio Vasari, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig
Tieck’s Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders/Heart’s
Outpourings of a Lay Brother Devoted to Art (1796) regarded all personal
aberrations or freakishness as a barrier to ultimate artistic greatness.
Klopstock’s life centred on the fulfilment of Der Messias. After his
death, the religious poet and his epic poem could merge in symbiotic
form under the heading ‘representative of the German nation’.22 The
same could not, however, be said for Lessing. Lessing had died in 1781,
not much over fifty. In contrast to Klopstock, he had led a shifting and
unstable existence, subject to exigencies and deprivations, some of his
own making, often due to his generosity. Yet his life, too, could be made
to suit the record of his works, an achievement which an early biographer
saw fit to compare with Christopher Columbus’s or James Cook’s.23

20 ‘Von diesem Göttlichen’. See Klamer Schmidt, ed., Klopstock und seine Freunde
(Halberstadt: Bureau für Literatur und Kunst, 1810), iv.
21 As in the biographical prefaces to the works of Nikolas Dietrich Giseke (1767) and
Ludwig Heinrich Christoph Hölty (1783).
22 As the preface to his works states: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Sämmtliche Werke, 10
vols (Leipzig, 1854–55 [1844–45]), I, xxx.
23 Johann Friedrich Schink, ‘Charakteristik Gotthold Ephraim Lessings’, in Pantheon
der Deutschen, ed. by Karl Gottlieb Hofmann, 3 vols (Chemnitz, Leipzig: Hofmann,
1794–1795), II, 1–192 (5f.).
86 From Goethe to Gundolf

Even so, the individual uniqueness of Lessing’s life could be subsumed

under the commonplaces of hagiography and the cult of genius.
While Klopstock’s works would, in the eyes of his contemporaries,
be dominated by the supreme Messias, much of Lessing’s oeuvre
remained to be revealed. Thus the first Lessing biography is a two-
volume introduction to works not published during his lifetime.24 The
works therefore suspend the arbitrariness and relative brevity of the
life. In the extraordinary letter from Moses Mendelssohn to Lessing’s
brother, with which the first volume of the life ends, his achievement
is likened to Nicolaus Copernicus, who ‘discovered a new system, and
died’.25 He had achieved everything in the realm of the senses and had
passed into the supersensory realm: ‘Like the sons of the prophets,
they looked in wonderment at the place from which he went up and
was seen no more’.26 The Jewish hagiography (II Kings 2, 11) — easily
merged with its Christian counterpart — equates acceptance into
the canon with Elijah’s translation in the whirlwind. It is too good a
quotation for Johann Friedrich Schink, Lessing’s next biographer, to
miss and he duly repeats it.27 But Schink’s concern as a biographer is
couched in terms of a different, if ultimately also religious, image, that
of the monument. Indeed, his biography forms part of a three-volume
Pantheon der Deutschen/Pantheon of the Germans, and his stated task is to
add ‘a few stones to the edifice begun by German patriotism, leaving
the columns themselves to posterity’.28 Schink’s biography stands free
of the works themselves (it is he who is prepared to press the analogies
with Columbus and Cook). But to fulfil the patterns of edification, to
make the life appear more exemplary and yet more humanly accessible,
he adds two plates: one shows the young Lessing’s obedience to his
parents, the other his integrity as a pursuer of truth, and both are as
such obliquely hagiographic.
Both Klopstock and Lessing enter the canon foremost as German
writers in an established German line of achievement. ‘He stands as the
first column of German originality’,29 states an early nineteenth-century

24 Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Leben, nebst seinem noch übrigen litterarischen Nachlasse, ed.
by K. G. Lessing, 3 vols (Berlin: Voss, 1793–95).
25 Ibid., I, 451.
26 Ibid., I, 452.
27 Schink, ‘Charakteristik Gotthold Ephraim Lessings’, 192.
28 Ibid., 7.
29 [K. Nicolai], Klopstock: Ein Denkmahl zur Säcularfeier seines Geburtstages am zweiten
Julius 1824 (Quedlinburg: Basse, 1824), 6.
 5. Adding Stones to the Edifice: Patterns of German Biography  87

Klopstock biography, also finding the monumental image congenial.

They illustrate how language and culture establish national bonds, not
the scattered multiplicity of political institutions that called themselves
the ‘German lands’. Part of the anecdotal — and incidental — material
on Klopstock’s and Lessing’s lives recounts how they moved as equals
among kings and princes, yet spurned preferments that might inhibit
their genius. (This would overlook the negative role of Frederick the
Great in the establishment of German literature, or the hopes both
placed in the young reforming emperor Joseph II.) It is a variation
on Renaissance commonplaces, relevant to readers aware that it was
culture, and not so much rulers, that held the nation together. Christoph
Martin Wieland, a contemporary of Lessing and Klopstock, found
less automatic entry into the German literary pantheon. For some, he
might appear too cosmopolitan to deserve the accolade of ‘deutscher
Dichter’ (‘German poet’). But the nearly thousand-page biography
which his editor, Johann Gottfried Gruber, appended to his edition
of the works, removes such doubts by recounting Wieland’s meeting
with Napoleon in 1806.30 They converse on the basis of equality, not
deference; worldly authority (it is just after the battles of Jena and
Auerstädt) acknowledges the power of the intellect — across national
borders. Again, this somewhat implausible point is too good for others
to miss. Schiller’s sister-in-law Caroline von Wolzogen, in her biography
of 1830, embellishes his life-story with the fantasy that Schiller, had he
lived, would have encountered the ‘world conqueror’ with equal dignity
and composure,31 as the representative of ‘Humanität’ (‘Humanity’). (It
is also a tactical ploy to get round Schiller’s marked progression from

30 J. G. Gruber, C. M. Wielands Leben, 4 vols (Leipzig: Göschen, 1827–28), IV, 420–28.
This forms vols L-LIII of Sämmtliche Werke, 53 vols (Leipzig: Göschen, 1824–28).
There is a venerable tradition for this. We learn for instance how the great
scholars Selmasius, Lipsius and Heinsius were fêted by potentates and kings but
remained true to their métier. Adolphus Clarmundus, [Johann Christoph Rüdiger],
VITAE CLARISSIMORUM in re literaria Virorum. Das ist Lebens-Beschreibung
etlicher Hauptgelehrten Männer/so von der Literatur profeß gemacht. Worinnen Viel
sonderbahre und notable Sachen/ so wohl von ihren Leben/als geführten Studiis entdecket.
Allen curieusen Gemüthern zu sonderbahrem Nutzen und Vergnügen entworffen/von
ADOLPHO CLARMUNDO. (Wittenberg: Christian Gottlieb Ludwig, 1704–05).
31 [Caroline von Wolzogen], Schillers Leben, verfaßt aus Erinnerungen der Familie, seinen
eigenen Briefen und den Nachrichten seines Freundes Körner, 2 vols (Stuttgart,Tübingen:
Cotta, 1830), II, 297. Cf. Lesley Sharpe, ‘“Wahrheit allein sollte mich leiten”: Caroline
von Wolzogen’s Schiller Biography’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 68
(1999), 70–81.
88 From Goethe to Gundolf

rebellious and antiauthoritarian youth to respect for crowned heads in

maturity.)
The biographical commonplaces — of hagiography, of traditional
panegyric, of the ‘divino artista’ — that accompany this early stage of
German Lives of the Classical Poets, can be concentrated so as to make
life and works one ‘single entity’, one ‘symbolic form’, one ‘individuality’.
These are phrases taken from Friedrich Schlegel’s Ueber Lessing/About
Lessing of 1801,32 not a biography as such, but a ‘Charakteristik’, the
attempt to reduce to their essentials the adventitious and cluttered
details of personality and writings. This symbolic unity is the ideal, not
the norm or the reality: ‘the golden age of literature will be when prefaces
are no longer needed’ (one might say, biographical introductions).33 As
yet, however, the Life was deemed necessary as an accompaniment or
corroboration of the Works.
Shortly after Schlegel’s essay on Lessing, Goethe attempted
something similar to this ‘Charakteristik’. He, too, was concerned to
elevate his subject, the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, to
canonical status. He had no less serious a purpose than had Lessing’s or
Klopstock’s sponsors. As an account of the father of modern European
Neoclassicism, it is not free of an ideological or even polemical — anti-
Romantic — intention. But it records that Germany’s greatest living poet
saw the function of biography as a means of making a public statement.
His Skizze zu einer Schilderung Winckelmanns/Sketch towards a Description
of Winckelmann (1805) is not free-standing, but forms the introduction
to a collection of Winckelmann’s letters. Goethe’s approach is different
from Schlegel’s, in that it refers less to ‘das Ganze’, the whole,34 than to a
series of abstract categories, superimposed on the mass of biographical
detail (‘ancient art’, ‘friendship’, ‘beauty’, ‘Rome’, ‘passing’). They
structure a life that already conforms in some respects to hagiographic
patterns (humble origins overcome through higher intervention leading
to career and ultimate apotheosis). We do not read the essay to be

32 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Ueber Lessing’, in Charakeristiken und Kritiken, ed. by August

Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel, 2 vols (Königsberg: Nicolovius, 1801), I,
170–270: ‘Beziehungen aufs Ganze’, 266; ‘symbolische Form’, 263; ‘Individualität’,
193.
33 Ibid., 124.
34 Cf. Hans-Martin Kruckis, ‘Ein potenziertes Abbild der Menschheit‘: Biographischer
Diskurs und Etablierung der Neugermanistik in der Goethe-Biographik bis Gundolf,
Probleme der Dichtung 24 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1995), 47.
 5. Adding Stones to the Edifice: Patterns of German Biography  89

informed of the mere facts of Winckelmann’s life: there is not a single

date in the text. Such account of the life as there is, and of its various
stages, is determined completely by the work, and not vice versa:
‘everything that he produces is extraordinary and estimable because his
character was revealed in item’.35 Goethe embellishes and harmonizes.
Like Raphael, Winckelmann dies at the apogee of his career: the squalid
circumstances of his life in Rome and especially of his death (he was
robbed and murdered in Trieste) are passed over. Instead, we have this
extraordinary final section:

So war er denn auf der höchsten Stufe des Glücks, das er sich nur hätte
wünschen dürfen, der Welt verschwunden. Ihn erwartete sein Vaterland,
ihm streckten seine Freunde die Arme entgegen, alle Äußerungen der
Liebe, deren er sehr bedurfte, alle Zeugnisse der öffentlichen Achtung,
auf die er so viel Wert legte, warteten seiner Erscheinung, um ihn zu
überhäufen. Und in diesem Sinne dürfen wir ihn wohl glücklich preisen,
daß er von dem Gipfel des menschlichen Daseins zu den Seligen
emporgestiegen, daß ein kurzer Schrecken, ein schneller Schmerz ihn
von den Seinigen hinweggenommen. Die Gebrechen des Alters, die
Abnahme der Geisteskräfte hat er nicht empfunden, die Zerstreuung der
Kunstschätze, die er obgleich in in einem andern Sinne, vorausgesagt,
ist nicht vor seinen Augen geschehen. Er hat als ein Mann gelebt, und
ist als ein vollständiger Mann von hinnen gegangen. Nun genießt er
im Andenken der Nachwelt den Vorteil, als ein ewig Tüchtiger und
Kräftiger zu erscheinen, denn in der Gestalt, wie der Mensch die Erde
verläßt, wandelt er unter den Schatten, und so bleibt uns Achill als ewig
strebender Jüngling gegenwärtig.36

35 ‘Daß alles dasjenige, was er hervorbringt, hauptsächlich deswegen merkwürdig

und schätzenswert ist, weil sein Charakter sich immer dabei offenbart’. Johann
Wolfgang Goethe, ‘Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert’, Sämtliche Werke, 18 vols
(Zurich: Artemis, 1977), XIII, 407–50 (443).
36 ‘Thus, at the summit of the good fortune he could only have wished for himself, he
was removed from this world. His native country was expecting him, his friends
awaited him with outstretched arms, all the expressions of affection, so essential
to him, all the terms of public recognition, so important for him, waited for his
advent, to overwhelm him. And in this sense we may call him fortunate, that he
has gone up from the summit of human existence to join the immortals, that a
brief moment of terror, a quick second of pain snatched him away from the living.
He did not experience the infirmities of age, the diminution of his intellectual
powers; the dispersal of art treasures, that he said would happen, if perhaps in
another sense, did not occur before his eyes. He lived as a man, and as a man at the
height of his powers he has departed this life. Now in the memory of those he has
left behind he enjoys the good fortune of appearing always forceful and worthy
through and through: for in the shape that a man leaves the world, so he walks
90 From Goethe to Gundolf

That remarkable image of Achilles, like its biblical equivalent in the lives
of Lessing, was not to be restricted to Winckelmann alone. Goethe is
clearly making a legend of Winckelmann, laying down the essentials of
artistic existence and their application. Winckelmann becomes a symbol,
in that Goethe fuses the particular, the Life, with the ancient world
and its afterlife, the general. It comes therefore as no surprise to find
Goethe’s Achilles passage invoked as part of much more potent cultural
myth-making: Gustav Schwab’s life of Schiller (1840). It belongs to the
retouching of detail which is so necessary for the construction of literary
monuments. The quotation is (correctly) attributed to Goethe and
dated 1805, the year of its appearance and also of Schiller’s death.37 The
biographer must somehow reconcile Goethe’s attested close friendship
with Schiller with his failure to attend Schiller’s funeral. Goethe, as
is well known, hated the panoply associated with death and could
not bring himself to join the sparse number of mourners at Schiller’s
hurried burial. The resourceful Schwab makes a virtue out of necessity
by stating that ‘Goethe stepped forward and spoke to the nation’.38 But
Schwab is merely continuing a hagiography that had even extended to
Schiller when living. He recounts the false report of Schiller’s death in
1791, which had caused his Danish friends to create a secular memorial
around ‘Freude, schöner Götterfunken’,39 and later to rejoice at the
‘resurrection of our immortal and deathless Schiller’.40 Such veneration
and legend-making moves effortlessly among the mythologies and cults
and plucks at will the images needed for its purposes.
While Lessing and Klopstock found general acceptance in terms
of the symbolic unity of life and works, other figures had a less easy
passage into canonicity. The Romantics remembered Schiller as their
most implacable opponent and found little pleasure in his sanctification
by biographers and editors (especially when these included Goethe and
Wilhelm von Humboldt). Hearing the threnodic note of a Schiller dying
at the height of his powers, they could reflect that their own movement
also had its necrology and cult of remembrance, not merely those figures

among the shades, and thus Achilles remains ever present for us as a young man,
ever striving’. Ibid., 450.
37 ‘Vor die Nation aber trat Göthe und sprach’. Schwab, Schiller’s Leben, 633f.
38 Ibid., 663.
39 ‘Joy, thou lovely spark immortal’, ibid., 366f.
40 ‘von des unsterblichen und ungestorbenen Schillers Auferstehung’, ibid., 368.
 5. Adding Stones to the Edifice: Patterns of German Biography  91

now being enthroned by Goethe and his Weimar acolytes. Ludwig

Tieck, as the senior surviving poet of German Romanticism, wished
to set the record straight — through the life-and-works approach. The
opportunity was afforded by the reissue in 1815 of the works of his close
friend Friedrich von Hardenberg, known as Novalis. Part of the last
section of the short biography reads:

So starb, ehe er noch das neun und zwanzigste Jahr vollendet hatte, unser
Freund, an dem man eben so sehr seine ausgebreiteten Kenntnisse, sein
philosophisches Genie, wie sein Dichtertalent lieben und bewundern
muß. Da er seiner Zeit so vorgeeilt war, so durfte sich das Vaterland
außerordentliche Dinge von ihm versprechen, wenn ihn dieser frühe Tod
nicht übereilt hätte, doch haben seine unvollendeten nachgelassenen
Schriften schon viel gewürkt und viele seiner großen Gedanken werden
noch in Zukunft begeistern und edle Gemüther und tiefe Denker werden
von den Funken seines Geistes erleuchtet und entzündet werden. […]
dem geübteren Auge aber bot er die Erscheinung der Schönheit dar. Der
Umriß und der Ausdruck seines Geistes kam sehr dem Evangelisten
Johannes nahe, wie wir ihn auf der herrlichen großen Tafel von A. Dürer
sehn, die Nürnberg und München aufbewahrt’.41

Here artistic integrity, religious piety, national pride and genius are
conflated. The reminiscence of the Dürer portrait not only invokes a
Christian iconography opposed to Goethe’s pagan reference to Achilles;
it is a reminder of the religion of art which Tieck himself and his dead
friend Wackenroder had propounded as young men, centred on Raphael
and Dürer. In the same way as Goethe’s vision of Winckelmann makes
its subject into the exemplar of the Classicism that Goethe affirms, so
Tieck fashions Novalis according to an image that stresses the Romantic
poet, seer and visionary.

41 ‘Before he reached his twenty-ninth year, our friend thus died, whose extensive
knowledge, philosophical genius and poetic talent one can only love and admire.
He hastened ahead of his time, so that his native country ought to have expected
extraordinary things from him, had this early death not overtaken him. The
unfinished writings he left have been widely received and many of his great
thoughts will in future still inspire, and noble minds and profound thinkers will
be illumined and fired by the sparks of his intellect. […] For the more experienced
eye his aspect was one of beauty. The outline and expression of his face approached
that of John the Evangelist as we see him in the wonderful great picture by A. Dürer,
once to be seen in Nuremberg, now in Munich’. Ludwig Tieck, preface to the third
edition of Novalis: Schriften (1815)’, in Novalis, Schriften. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe,
ed. by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel et al., 6 vols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1960–88), IV, 551–60 (558).
92 From Goethe to Gundolf

This pattern of commemoration was especially suited to writers

whose brief lives denied them the canonical status of those who had had
full use of their powers. Gustav Schwab’s accounts of Wilhelm Müller
and Wilhelm Hauff,42 both writers who died in their twenties, conform
to its general conventions. It could be turned on its head, as Tieck
himself did with his biographical introduction to the works of Heinrich
von Kleist.43 Despite his admiration for Kleist’s poetic talent, and his
tolerant words for a writer who had taken his own life, Tieck cannot find
the unity, the symbolic wholeness that Friedrich Schlegel’s account of
Lessing had posited. The works and the life diverge and follow patterns
of their own, the one leading to the hope of future recognition, the other
registering the failure of the person to fulfil the talent with which he
undeniably was blessed by nature. This highly influential biographical
essay is a factor in the withholding of recognition from Kleist during the
nineteenth century and the denial of his place in the canon. His life and
works are pulled apart; his qualities of poetic genius are countered by
symbolic patterns of light and darkness. Here, Tieck is unable to employ
the hagiographic patterns of explication and selective embellishment
that hitherto had done service and continued to be potent forces in
the establishment of a German national literary canon for the rest of
the century. It is not his last word on these matters. Later in the same
decade, he was wrapping these biographical devices in a fictional guise,
to produce the ultimate ideal ‘Life’: William Shakespeare’s.44 It was
intended to suit all the needs of nineteenth-century cultural ideology.
Thus, not only Lessing, Klopstock or Schiller, but also the greatest
English ‘Representative Man’ may be annexed for the purposes of
national role models.

42 Gustav Schwab, ‘Wilhelm Hauff‘s Leben [1827]’, in Wilhelm Hauff, Sämmtliche

Werke, ed. by Gustav Schwab, 5 vols, 5th ed. (Stuttgart: Brodhag, 1853), I, 5–20;
Gustav Schwab, ‘Wilhelm Müller‘s Leben’, in Wilhelm Müller, Vermischte Schriften,
ed. by Gustav Schwab, 5 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1830), I, xvii–lxii.
43 Heinrich von Kleist, Hinterlassene Schriften (Berlin: Reimer, 1821) and Gesammelte
Schriften (Berlin: Reimer, 1826).
44 Ludwig Tieck, Dichterleben (1826, 1831), most accessible in Ludwig Tieck, Schriften,
20 vols (Berlin: Reimer, 1828–46), XVIII.
Fig. 9 Ernest Julian Stern and Heinz Herald, ‘Penthesilea, Reinhardt und seine Bühne,
Bilder von der Arbeit des Deutschen Theaters’, 1919, Wikimedia, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Penthesilea_(Kleist)_-_Amazone.jpg,
public domain.
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses.
Some Remarks on the Use of
Mythology in Penthesilea1

Gods of the wingèd shoe!

With them the silver hounds,
sniffing the trace of air!
Haie! Haie!
These were the swift to harry;
These were the keen-scented;
These were the souls of blood.
(Ezra Pound, ‘The Return’)2

It has never been exactly fashionable to talk about the sources of Heinrich
von Kleist’s plays. One can see why: Amphitryon does not make adequate
sense in terms either of Plautus or Molière; Die Hermannsschlacht/
Hermann’s Battle has little essentially to do with Friedrich Gottlieb
Klopstock (or Tacitus); Prinz Friedrich von Homburg/The Prince of
Homburg very soon moves away from its already dubious historical
base. We find that, even having established sources and influences, we

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘Kleist’s Metamorphoses.

Some Remarks on the Use of Mythology in Penthesilea’, Oxford German Studies,
14 (1983), 35–53. Kleist studies have moved on a great deal since this paper was
published. Above all, the subject of metamorphosis and sacrifice has been enhanced
by application of the insights of Walter Burkert, Homo necans: Interpretationen
altgriechischer Opferriten und Mythen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1972). Examination of
Kleist’s sources is, however, still not a superfluous occupation.
2 This is a much-expanded version of a paper read at Trinity College, Dublin in April,
1982. The Ezra Pound poem I include by way of acknowledgment of my debt to
Mr Charles Tomlinson’s Clark Lectures on the Metamorphic Tradition, given in
Cambridge during the Lent Term, 1982 and published as Poetry and Metamorphosis
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.06

96 From Goethe to Gundolf

are nowhere into the works, still outside their frame of reference and
ignorant of the interplay of characters. Or at least one assumes this to be
so. For most of the monographs on Kleist over the last two generations
or so — and it is not my intention to list them — tend to discuss heroes,
plot, language, feeling, fate and tragedy, without referring substantially
either to Kleist the man in his times or Kleist the user of sources. Most of
the discussion of his neoclassical tragedy Penthesilea, with some notable
exceptions,3 falls into this same category.
But even so it might not really matter. For the use of classical sources
in the Classical and Romantic periods is no absolute guide to the nature
of a work. Examples spring to mind. We have still a great deal to explore
once we have established that Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Iphigenie auf
Tauris/Iphigenia in Tauris is based on Euripides or that Die Braut von
Messina/The Bride of Messina has affinities with Oedipus Rex. We might
well recognize that these two works are more ‘modern’ than ‘classical’:
that, despite the costume, neither play is ‘antique’; that each has its own
age’s, not antiquity’s, view of mythology; that there is consequently no
single absolute and given ‘world picture’, but several; that each play is
general and tends toward set formulae of expression. Having established
this, however, we should be well on our way towards understanding the
text: not only as a ‘timeless’ work but also as a product of its time;4 as
the product of a certain understanding of classical antiquity, whereby
ancient myth or archetypal situation is ‘metamorphosed’ to suit the
need of a special, later age.

3 For a useful discussion of the mythological sources in Penthesilea see Gerhard

Kaiser, ‘Mythos und Person in Kleists “Penthesilea”’, in Wandrer und Idylle. Goethe
und die Phänomenologie der Natur in der deutschen Dichtung von Gessner bis Gottfried
Keller (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1977), 209–39; see also Denys Dyer,
‘The Imagery of Kleist’s “Penthesilea””, PEGS, NS 31 (1960–61), 1–23; Volker Klotz,
‘Tragödie der Jagd. Zu Kleists “Penthesilea”, in Kurze Kommentare zu Stücken und
Gedichten, Hessische Beiträge zur deutschen Literatur (Darmstadt: Roether, 1962),
14–21; also the relevant sections of Hilda M. Brown, Kleist and the Tragic Ideal. A
Study of Penthesilea and its Relationship to Kleist’s Personal and Literary Development
1806–1808, European University Papers I, German Language and Literature 203
(Berne, Frankfurt, Las Vegas: Lang, 1977); Albrecht Sieck, Kleists Penthesilea. Versuch
einer neuen Interpretation, Literatur und Wirklichkeit 14 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1976).
4 Cf Friedrich Sengle, ‘“Die Braut von Messina”’, in, Arbeiten zur deutschen Literatur
1750–1859 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965), 94–117; Wolfgang Schadewaldt, ‘Schillers
Griechentum’, in Schiller. Reden im Gedenkjahr 1959, ed. by Bernhard Zeller (Stuttgart:
Klett, 1961), 258–70.
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  97

And yet with Kleist it seems to be different. If we try to compare

Penthesilea with the other classicizing dramas just cited, we find
irreconcilable differences, gulfs fixed, between Kleist and the traditions of
Weimar. Indeed, Kleist seems to have wished it so: in a letter of February
6, 1808, Adam Müller, Kleist’s collaborator in Phöbus, could write to
Friedrich Gentz : ‘Demnach ist Kleist sehr mit Ihnen zufrieden, wenn Sie
von der Penthesilea sagen, dass sie nicht antik sey’.5 Penthesilea, Müller
avers, is not beholden to tradition; it eschews ‘Ruhe’ and ‘Wohllaut’ and
‘Annehmlichkeit’6 — the accepted bienséance of classicizing tragedy in
any tradition; indeed, it deliberately does not imitate the Greeks in the
manner received in Iphigenie or Die Braut von Messina. Nor even does
it veer in the opposite direction; it is not Christian in the Romantic,
medievalizing, sense of, say, Friedrich Schlegel’s Alarcos or Zacharias
Werner’s Attila or Ludwig Tieck’s Genoveva. Coming closer to the ‘antik’,
it is not Goethe’s Pandora or the mellifluous trimeters of Wilhelm von
Schütz. Indeed, Ludwig Robert, writing in 1824 to Kleist’s first editor,
Tieck, remarked on the play’s ‘derbe Auffassung des Antiquen’,7 as if
anticipating those many reactions, right up to the present day, to the
supposed anti-classical, anti-Iphigenie, anti-Pandora strain of the tragedy.
It would of course depend on what one understood by ‘classical’. It
would also depend on the choice of subject. For Penthesilea is not, like
Iphigenie, based on a single Greek original; nor is it, like Die Braut von
Messina, a freely invented story in a framework of classical tragedy. It is
known to be an adaptation of several different stories, or myths, from
Greek antiquity. The dignity of the classical subject, yet the dynamic
urgency towards action on or off stage, remind us, however, of Kleist’s
stated ambition from the outset of his career as a dramatist: his bid
to conjoin Sophocles and Shakespeare, but also, with a female central
character and a suitably tragic subject, to outdo Friedrich Schiller.
Going back beyond the later Schiller, it would even seem to retain
much of the Sturm und Drang’s (‘Storm and Stress’) active and dynamic
understanding of Shakespeare, and some of that movement’s energetic,

5 ‘This would make Kleist very pleased with you if you say of Penthesilea that is not
antique’. Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea. Dokumente und Zeugnisse, ed. by Helmut
Sembdner (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1967), 20. The full letter quoted in H. M.
Brown, Kleist and the Tragic Ideal, 136–38.
6 ‘Calm’, ‘euphony’, ‘harmony and balance’.
7 ‘Crude notion of the antique’. Penthesilea, ed. by Sembdner, 43.
98 From Goethe to Gundolf

‘Dionysian’ attitude to classical antiquity. But all this must remain

speculation until we examine the subject matter itself.
Where did Kleist find the subject in the first place? It is worth noticing
first of all where he did not seek it: he did not follow the standard
practice of neoclassical writers and look to Sophocles or Euripides
or Seneca, not, therefore, to the lineage of Cristoph Martin Wieland’s
Alceste or Goethe’s Iphigenie or even August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Ion.
Another possibility open to him was the extension of an existing story,
and here the parallel with Goethe’s epic fragment Achilleis springs to
mind. But Penthesilea is, if anything, certainly not Homeric, even though
it draws briefly on sources relating to the continuation of the Trojan War.
Instead of a single story, Kleist seems to have taken several, disparate,
mythologically seemingly unrelated elements and to have moulded
them into an organic whole. The source he used — this was established
generations ago — was Benjamin Hederich’s Gründliches mythologisches
Lexicon/Compendious Mythological Dictionary. I repeat this highly
accessible piece of information solely because Kleist scholars only rarely
draw on it.8
Hederich’s Lexicon is a garrulous, ramshackle and fusty mythological
compendium, an inventory of all the stories of gods and heroes that
antiquity had to offer. The subtitle of the 1770 edition makes its stated
function clear: ‘Zu besserm Verständisse der schönen Künste und
Wissenschaften nicht nur für Studierende, sondern auch viele Künstler
und Liebhaber der alten Kunstwerke’.9 Such compendia belong to the
hidden stock-in-trade of so much of German Classicism. Goethe is
known to have used Hederich, if not exactly to have noised the fact
abroad. The continued popularity of such lexica is indicated by Goethe’s
former companion in Rome, Karl Philipp Moritz, producing a dictionary
of mythology more in keeping with Weimar Classicism, Götterlehre
oder mythologische Dichtungen der Alten/The Gods of the Greeks and their

8 The classical parallels were established in the apparatus to the first critical edition
of Kleist, Werke. Kritisch durchgesehene Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Erich Schmidt, Georg
Minde-Pouet and Reinhold Steig, 5 vols (Leipzig, Vienna: Bibliographisches
Institut, 1904–05). Helmut Sembdner draws on this material in his editions of Kleist
and Penthesiliea.
9 ‘For a better understanding of the fine arts and sciences not only for students but
also for many artists and aficionados of the antique art works’. Benjamin Hederich,
Gründliches Mythologisches Lexicon […] (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1770; repr. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967).
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  99

Mythology of 1791, and interlarding its sections with suitable quotations

from Goethe’s poetry and from Iphigenie. But such a compendium
on classical antiquity could only be a kind of charnel-house of dead
knowledge until metamorphosed by poetry into life. Goethe makes
this plain in Faust II, in the scene ‘Laboratorium’. There, Wagner, not
inspirited by the essential life-giving quality of the material he has
assembled in his retort, is left behind by Homunculus, not joining the
great festival of mythological creatures, gods and demigods, inert and
living elements, which is the ‘Klassische Walpurgisnacht’.
Wagner — whose fate is to collect and collate — and the quirkily
loquacious Hederich assembled much that was contradictory,
superfluous or plain unsuitable. Kleist’s way of dealing with them was
to be the same as Goethe’s: to give the disparate a symbolic unity. For if
Goethe strove in the ‘Klassische Walpurgisnacht’ and the Helen scenes
for a harmony of the Euripidean and the Baroque, the tragic and the
grotesque, spirit and flesh, the Bacchic and the Winckelmannian, so
Kleist in Penthesilea would draw — through Hederich — on Euripides
and Ovid, but also on a whole host of unconnected, seemingly mutually
irreconcilable material and conflate a private mythology, if one
incompatible with all that Goethe’s stood for.
The main points of Kleist’s reading of Hederich can be summed up
fairly briefly; it is their implications that are more important. We can
safely assume that he found his subject in the Lexicon. For, even supposing
that ‘Amazonian’ subjects were not unknown to an eighteenth century
much more eclectic in its attitude to classical antiquity than is generally
acknowledged,10 it is certain that an impetuous and ambitious Kleist
would not search for information which is tucked away in Hyginus and
Dictys, is the subject of a sustained simile in the eleventh book of the
Aeneid, when it is all the time conveniently related by the indefatigable
Hederich. But even that obliging well of information offered different
accounts from its various sources: Penthesilea, who some — indeed
most — say was vanquished by Achilles, is credited in one single
obscure source with having conquered and killed the hero:

So erzählen auch wiederum andere, sie habe den Achilles erst selbst
erleget , es sey aber solcher auf der Thetis, seiner Mutter, Bitten, wieder

10 Cf. Paul Kluckhohn, ‘Penthesilea’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift II (1914),

276–88.
100 From Goethe to Gundolf

lebendig geworden, und habe sodann erst die Penthesilea wieder

hingerichtet.11

This Kleist changes. One may assume, because the myths place Achilles
in the foreground; like Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, the play which Kleist
enjoins Heinrich von Collin, in the famous letter of December 8, 1808, to
see in polar relation to Penthesilea,12 the man is to be but the inadequate
interpreter of woman’s signs and intuitions. The arrogant and heedless
Graf Wetter vom Strahl is to be led to understanding by one who is as a
child; the Homeric demigod is to gain intimations of a love which has no
place in Homer’s account.
Did Kleist’s eyes then light on the next entry in Hederich, on the
same page as ‘PENTHESILEA’: ‘PENTHEVS’,13 the story of a man torn
to pieces by women, recorded in Euripides’ Bacchae and in Book Three
of Ovid’s Metamorphoses? Did he use Hederich’s excellent system of
cross-references, to move from PENTHEVS to the genealogical table
of the descendants of Cadmus, finding that Agaue, the mother of
Pentheus, was also the sister of Autinoë, the mother of the unfortunate
Actaeon, another Ovidian metamorphosis of man into beast? Actaeon,
whose name crosses the lips of one of the maidens bathing in Kleist’s
unsettling, disturbing and distinctly unpleasant attempt at a Boucher-
like rococo idyll, Der Schrecken im Bade/Fright while Bathing,14 and like
the first Actaeon reminiscence in the original fragment of Penthesilea,
also published in Phöbus? At any rate, the Amazon queen’s mastiffs
which ‘ein grässliches Geheul anstimmen’15 bear names taken not only
from Ovid, but from Hederich’s compendious list under ‘ACTAEON’.16
So, too, the monstrous account of the practices of the Amazons which
Penthesilea relates to an incredulous Achilles, is, even if Kleist introduces
a slightly different device for Amazonian self-mutilation, borrowed from
Hederich.17 Again — but here we enter the realm of speculation — he

11 ‘On the other hand there are sources recounting that she herself slew Achilles, but
that he was restored to life at the pleading of his mother Thetis and thereupon put
Penthesilea to death’. Hederich, Gründliches Mythologisches Lexicon, col. 1940.
12 Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Semdner, 2 vols
(Munich: Hanser, 1961), II, 818. Henceforth cited as SW in references.
13 Hederich, Gründliches Mythologisches Lexicon, col. 1940f.
14 SW, I, 15–20.
15 ‘Which set up a frightful howling’. SW, I, 405.
16 Hederich, Gründliches Mythologisches Lexicon, col. 52f.
17 Ibid., col. 203–10.
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  101

might have established from the ingenious cross-reference system and

the excellent mythological tables, that Penthesilea, through Otrere, was
a descendant of the terrible Mars, but that Cadmus and his unfortunate
descendants are also ultimately of the same lineage.18
But all this, these fragments of classical myth, even though bound
by a thematic relation, would go nowhere towards constituting a work
of art. Not even the overt reminiscences of Euripides or Ovid, which
Erich Schmidt and others established so long ago, would do that. It
is nevertheless not irrelevant to reflect on what this mass of material
amounts to. It is, as commentator after commentator has remarked,
not the line of ‘Griechentum und Goethezeit’; of ‘Götterstille und
Göttertrauer’, which in Walther Rehm’s titles sum up the consensus of
eighteenth-century Classicism.19 It seems rather the world of antiquity,
the ‘Heathen World’, of which Alexander Pope, in the preface to the
Iliad, noted with Augustan displeasure: ‘Who can be so prejudiced in
their Favour as to magnify the Felicity of those Ages, when a Spirit of
Revenge and Cruelty, join’d with the practice of Rapine and Robbery
reign’d thro’ the World’.20 And indeed, the Homeric heroes of Kleist,
Achilles excepted, are not paragons except in their lustfulness and
brutality. But is the well-ordered Amazon state, its practices and its
cult, anything other than monstrous and unnatural? Are we really
supposed to believe in a contrat social, a divinely ordained hierarchy?
Can the reminiscences of Jean-Jacques Rousseau be any other than a
cruel parody of human equality, such as deludes the characters in Das
Erdbeben in Chili/The Earthquake in Chile, like the noble ideas of the Abbé
Raynal so dashed in Die Verlobung in St. Domingo/The Engagement in
St. Domingo or the natural justice saved only in the nick of time, and
with a conviction born of comedy, by the chance interventions in Der
zerbrochne Krug/The Broken Jug? Nor is the Amazon state compatible
with Hermann’s patriotic — if equally monstrous — vision of country
before right and justice, or the Brandenburg of Homburg’s poetically
idealized, paradisal dream. The Amazon state, of which Penthesilea is

18 Ibid., TAB. XIII.

19 ‘The Greek Spirit and the Age of Goethe’; ‘The Calm of the Gods and Their
Mourning’. Walther Rehm, Griechentum und Goethezeit. Geschichte eines Glaubens
(Berne: Francke, 1951); Götterstille und Göttertrauer. Aufsätze zur deutsch-griechischen
Begegnung (Munich: Lehnen, 1951).
20 The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 10 vols (London: Methuen,
1939–69), VII, 14.
102 From Goethe to Gundolf

admittedly not the willing servant, stands between her and fulfilment.
We should not overlook one of her last instructions, as she prepares for
death: to scatter their most sacred relic, the ashes of Tanaïs.
Allusions to the Bacchic-Dionysian and Orphic revivals in German
poetry do not provide a satisfactory answer to Penthesilea, either. For
‘Zeus erhabner trunckner Sohn’,21 as Klopstock so eloquently addresses
him, the Dionysus of the early Goethe and of Heinse, even more that of
Friedrich Hölderlin, while he belongs to a world of dark urge, mystery and
numinousness, is also the god of the Dionysian, dithyrambic and frenzied
line, who proclaims that poetry will be born out of tension, not stasis, out
of dissolution into formlessness and primeval articulation — ‘spotten
des Spotts mag gern frohlokkender Wahnsinn’22 — into living form,
civilization in enthusiasm. As Klopstock’s opening to ‘Auf meine
Freunde’, one of the century’s great Dionysian preludes, admits,
echoing Plutarch centuries before and anticipating Nietzsche a century
later, Dionysus is the god of manifold change, whose worship is full
of destructions and disappearances, rending limb from limb; hence he
continues with the line ‘Wie mit dem goldnen Köcher Latonens Sohn’,23
stressing that Apollo’s simplicity, unity and purity are needed to achieve
form. The Dionysian, Euripidean, allusion in Penthesilea, to Pentheus,
and Agaue, has to do rather with the awesome bull-headed Bromius,
the ‘sexual animal’ who punishes with death and madness those who
defile his worship.24
Prothoe’s words — ‘Es ist die Welt noch, die gebrechliche, /Auf die nur
fern die Götter niederschaun’25 — suggest that the gods’ interventions
in human affairs are inscrutable, ineffable, if not malevolent, impervious
to human goodness, feeling and love, rendering frustrate man’s attempts
to reach out to his fellows in nobler endeavour, in dignity and affection.
Kleist’s Diana seems more like the goddess described in Johann Arnold

21 ‘Zeus’ mighty, drunken son’. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Werke und Briefe.
Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. by Horst Gronemeyer et al., 26 vols (Berlin, New
York, De Gruyter, 1979-), I, i, 6.
22 ‘May jubilant madness laugh at those who deride it’ (Michael Hamburger).
Friedrich Hölderlin, Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. by Friedrich Beissner et al., 8 vols
in 15 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1946–1985), II, I, 91.
23 ‘As with the golden quiver Latona’s son’. Klopstock, Werke und Briefe, I, i, 6.
24 R. P. Winnington-Ingram, Euripides and Dionysus. An Interpretation of the Bacchae
(Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1969), 9.
25 ‘It is the world still, the fragile,/ On which the gods look down but from afar’. SW,
I, 2854f.
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  103

Kanne’s Mythologie der Griechen/Greek Mythology of 1805, demanding

blood sacrifice, closer to her dog-headed sister Hecate;26 the ‘queen and
huntress chaste and fair’ is not the one who ministers to women, but
she, who, not content with tearing men apart who unwittingly stray
into the sphere of her virginity, exacts a terrible punishment of maidens
who break their vow to her. And Phoebus Apollo, whom Penthesilea
invokes, whom she sees in the unattainable demigod Achilles, is not so
much Musagetes, the god of healing and light and form, as seemingly
the arrow-shooter, the god of plague and sudden death.
There is however nothing surprisingly new in Kleist’s depiction of the
gods in an inhumane aspect. It might indeed be hasty to see in Penthesilea
the anti-Iphigenie which it so manifestly seems to be. For Goethe’s so
morally virtuous heroine has nevertheless to live with a Diana who
demands appeasement by blood sacrifice and whose barbarous cult
can be revived at any moment, and with an Apollo whose obedience
requires, or seems to require, deceit. The ‘Parzenlied’27 is an integral part
of the play, not a mere reminiscence of a theogony now relegated to the
past. If Iphigenie triumphs, then it is through her own inner strength
of moral will and integrity, not because the gods themselves dispense
harmony and light and humanity.14 Moritz‘s Götterlehre was not silent
on this side of the gods: ‘Denn der Mensch ist in diesen poetischen
Darstellungen der höhern Wesen so etwas Untergeordnetes, dass auf
ihn überhaupt, und also auch auf seine moralischen Bedürfnisse wenig
Rücksicht genommen wird’.28 And he shows percipience in interspersing
into his compendium the solemn verses of Goethe’s poem ‘Gränzen der
Menschheit/Limits of Humanity’ [sic] and Iphigenie’s ‘Parzenlied’.29
Nor did Goethe’s later forays into Greek mythological drama exclude
this aspect. Pandora contains in its completed form and in the planned
continuation, the element of Dionysian frenzy and destructive mania.
The scene ‘Vor dem Palaste des Menelas’ in Faust II is suffused with
Euripidean dread and blood worship. And the same Goethe, who in

26 Johann Arnold Kanne, Mythologie der Griechen, Erster Theil (Leipzig: Breitkopf und
Härtel, 1805), 105, 120.
27 ‘Song of the Fates’.
28 ‘For in these poetic representations of the higher beings man is something so
subordinate that little notice if any is taken of his moral needs’. Karl Philipp Moritz,
Götterlehre oder mythologische Dichtungen der Alten, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Unger, 1804), 4.
29 Ibid., 76ff., 263f.
104 From Goethe to Gundolf

1826 evinced only ‘Schauder und Abscheu’ at the memory of Kleist,30

was, a year later, to publish a fragment from the very scene of Euripides’
Bacchae that provides Kleist with his Euripidean quotation in scene 24
of Penthesilea.31 Yet the answer to all this is ready at hand. It is never
Goethe’s final word; for him, daemonic, undirected energy never stands
alone without reflexion, contemplation and inner self-awareness.
Without entering in to a discussion of the ground of Goethe’s
notions of wholeness and harmony, we may remark that his view of
classical mythology is shared by his younger contemporaries. For the
Weimar-oriented mythology or theogony of Karl Philipp Moritz and the
Romantic philosophy of symbol and myth had one significant feature in
common: while admitting man’s impotence before the divine numen,
the ‘Spiel der höheren Mächte’ (Moritz), ‘Alles, was nur geahnet wird’
(Georg Friedrich Creuzer), they were in basic agreement that myth was
a means of leading to the absolute, the ‘Hülle der reinsten Liebe’ (Joseph
Görres), ‘im Unendlichen das Endliche’ (Creuzer);32 as Ernst Cassirer
says of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling: ‘ein Prozess, in dem Gott
selbst wird, in dem er sich, als der wahre Gott, stufenweise erzeugt’.33
It leads, as Cassirer sums up the thought underlying the Romantic
preoccupation with myth, to a sense of ‘unmittelbare Totalität des
Daseins und Geschehens’, to ‘Einheit eines universellen Raumgefühls’.34
Thus when Goethe uses, for instance, Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie

30 ‘Revulsion and abhorrence’, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, 18 vols

(Zurich: Artemis, 1977), XV, 294–97. Cf. Karl Kerényi, ‘Die Bacchantinnen des
Euripides’, in Auf Spuren des Mythos, Werke in Einzelausgaben, II (Munich, Vienna:
Langen-Müller, 1967), 277–84.
31 In the review ‘Ludwig Tiecks Dramaturgische Blätter’, in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke,
XIV, 129.
32 ‘Play of the higher powers’; ‘everything that can only be fathomed’; ‘fulness of
purest love’; ‘the finite in the infinite’. These quotations are taken from Karl Kerényi,
ed., Die Eröffnung des Zugangs zum Mythos. Ein Lesebuch, Wege der Forschung 20
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), 8 (Moritz), 36 (Creuzer),
32 (Görres), 35 (Creuzer). The notions of myth as recorded by Kerényi are
confirmed by Heinz Gockel, ‘Mythologie als Onotologie. Zum Mythosbegriff im
19. Jahrhundert’, in Mythos und Mythologie in der Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed.
by Helmut Koopmann, Studien zur Philosophie und Literatur des neunzehnten
Jahrhunderts 36 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1979), 25–58.
33 ‘A process in which God becomes himself, in which he, as the true God, generates
himself step by step’. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, 3 vols
(Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1923–29), II, 10.
34 ‘Direct totality of existence and events’; ‘a unity in universal awareness of space’.
Cassirer, Philosophie, 97, 80.
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  105

der alten Völker/Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient Peoples, he is

sharing an underlying religious and philosophical perception of myth.
Kleist — although analogies with Creuzer or Schelling are helpful and
illuminating — seemingly does not. It is the same with other Romantics
and their contemporaries: Friedrich Schlegel’s Über das Studium der
Griechischen Poesie/On the Study of Greek Poetry of 1795–97 or Geschichte der
Poesie der Griechen und Römer/History of the Poetry of the Greeks and Romans
of 1798 see the Bacchic, and the formal discipline, in Greek poetry, as
equally valid parts of a historical process of organic development. (His
brother August Wilhelm, while less an admirer of Euripides’ Bacchae,
never abjures his allegiance to Johann Joachim Winckelmann.) Even
Kleist’s friend Adam Müller, to whom I shall return later, shares the
same underlying views of Greek tragedy as the Schlegels or Karl Wilhelm
Ferdinand Solger, Tieck’s friend and the translator of Sophocles.
But, one may ask, is mythology really the key to Kleist’s play?
Might he, like the Goethe of the recently-published Pandora, not simply
abandon myth-making and concentrate on the psychological mysteries
of his heroine? Could the mythological apparatus not be merely a
means to an end? It is the perennial problem of classical adaptations,
taking the elements one needs and adjusting them to one’s own, later
culture, often running counter to the established mythological base (as
in Goethe’s Iphigenie) or in Kleist’s case actually reversing the standard
Homer-based narrative. I doubt it. For Kleist’s Greeks, Amazon piety is
a source of bemused wonderment, even for Achilles the son of Thetis.
But for the Amazons, the mythology (based, incidentally, fairly closely
on Hederich) is binding, valid and imperative. Their mythology is
their very existence. Their Amazon-ness is the key to their actions and
to Penthesilea’s as well.35 Achilles’ presupposition seems to be, as was
Schelling’s belief of Greek religion, that serving Mars before Troy is part
of his own particular social order — different from Penthesilea’s — of
some intelligible sense of community, of ‘Volk’, of family in the accepted
sense; that, in Cassirer’s words again, ‘der “Götterstaat” wird zum
getreuen Abbild des Organismus des sozialen Lebens’.36 For Achilles, it is
natural that Penthesilea should return as his queen to Phthia, where, as a

35 Kaiser, ‘Mythos und Person’, 222f.

36 ‘The “gods’ state” becomes a true image of the organism of social life’. Cassirer,
Philosophie, 218.
106 From Goethe to Gundolf

reflection of the divine community on Olympus (where such conquests

are also not unknown) the social order may be re-established. But such
a human society, with dynasty, ruler and subject, as a macrocosm of the
family, is for Penthesilea a consideration of secondary importance.

ACHILLES. Und woher quillt, von wannen ein Gesetz,

Unweiblich, du vergibst mir, unnatürlich,
Dem übrigen Geschlecht der Menschen fremd?

PENTHESILEA. Fern aus der Urne alles Heiligen,

O Jüngling: von der Zeiten Gipfel nieder,
Den unbetretnen, die der Himmel ewig
In Wolkenduft geheimnisvoll verhüllt.
Der ersten Mütter Wort entschied es also,
Und dem verstummen wir, Neridensohn,
Wie deiner ersten Väter Worten du.37

‘Er nennt sich marserzeugt, mein Völkerstamm’38 is for Penthesilea all

she needs to know. Mars the bringer of war and discord, has, it is true,
freed the Amazons from male bondage and slavery, if by deceit and
massacre. It is, as it were, the stories of Judith and Holofernes or Jaël
and Sisera, extended to a whole state. But Mars’ service is not perfect
freedom; it is ‘unweiblich’, ‘unnatürlich’, capricious, heedless of personal
choice, inexorable in obedience. Small wonder that Otrere, Penthesilea’s
mother, in order ‘Mars […] weniger zu gefallen’,39 has tried to subvert
the Amazonian rules in her daughter’s favour by recommending
Achilles to her as a chosen mate. Mars, the father of Otrere (here Kleist
changes the mythology slightly), but also of Harmonia, the mother of
Cadmus, dwells, not in Olympian splendour, but in Hades, attended by
the Furies:

37 ACHILLES: ‘Whence springs a law, and when,

Not woman’s, pray, ‘gainst nature,
Not known to mortal race elsewhere?
PENTHESILEA: Far, from the urn of all that’s sacred,
O youth, from the pinnacles of time,
Untrod, which heaven keeps
Wreathed in mysterious clouds.
Our primal mothers’ word decreed it so,
We silently obey, o Nereid’s son,
As you the words of your first fathers.’ SW, I, 1902ff.
38 ‘My people trace their origins to Mars’. SW, I, 1825.
39 ‘To please Mars less’. SW, I, 2167ff.
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  107

CHOR DER JUNGFRAUN mit Musik.

Ares entweicht!
Seht, wie sein weisses Gespann
Fernhin dampfend zum Orkus niedereilt!
Die Eumeniden öffnen, die scheusslichen:
Sie schliessen die Tore wieder hinter ihm zu.40

The Eumenides, the black-skinned, grey-garmented maiden bitch-

goddesses,41 the ‘Rasereyen’, ‘welche diejenigen nach Verdienste
peinigten, die etwas böses begangen hatten und darüber mit den
Göttern nicht wieder waren ausgesöhnet worden’,42 from Gryphius’
Papinian to Goethe’s Iphigenie associated with melancholy of soul, are
part of Penthesilea’s own consciousness. For she in her turn associates
her own emotional confusion, the welling turmoil of her breast, her
‘Freud’ and ‘Schmerz’,43 with the same Eumenides, who flee only in that
moment when she senses that ‘Zum Tode war ich nie so reif als jetzt’.44
But Diana, too, whose cult is celebrated in the orgies at Themiscyra,
is a stern goddess who exacts cruel revenge on the disobedient. It is
under the aegis of the austere huntress, the arrow-shooter, that love is to
be consummated in a feast of animal-like procreation. When Penthesilea
in her despair once involuntarily invokes the love goddess Aphrodite,
the priestesses of Diana expostulate:

DIE OBERPRIESTERIN. Die Unselige!

DIE ERSTE PRIESTERIN. Verloren ist sie!

DIE ZWEITE. Den Erinnyen

Zum Raub ist ihre Seele hingegeben!45

40 ‘Ares goes hence!

See how his white steeds
Flee panting down to Orcus!
The Eumenids, frightful sisters,
Open for him the doors and shut them’. SW, I, 1735ff.
41 Karl Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks, Pelican Books 429 (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1958), 41f.
42 ‘Who tormented those according to their deserts who had done something wicked
and were not reconciled again to the gods’. Hederich, Gründliches Mythologisches
Lexicon, col. 1129.
43 ‘Joy’, ‘pain’.
44 ‘For death was I never so ripe as now’. SW, I, 1682.
45 ‘HIGH PRIESTESS: Accursed one!
FIRST PRIESTESS: She is lost!
108 From Goethe to Gundolf

Aphrodite, the other love, not of mate for mate, but of partner for
partner, which has no place in Themiscyra, is a name sacrilegious to the
Amazons. We saw, too, how Diana’s brother, Phoebus Apollo, has his
part in Penthesilea’s yearnings for Achilles. Yet he, too, is Ovid’s ‘deus
arcitenens’ (‘bow-wielding god’), Klopstock’s ‘mit dem goldnen Köcher
Latonens Sohn’, whose arrows can bring life or death.
The mythology therefore contains a symbolic unity, which is further
sustained by important patterns of imagery in the play itself. The
emblem of Mars’ sovereignty over the Amazons is the great bow borne
by the queen; Diana and Apollo are marked by the same attribute. The
Furies are deities of pursuit. All is now ready for the drama of chase and
hunt.46 The imagery of the hunt has now become sufficiently established
by commentators as to form part of the standard repertoire of studies on
Penthesilea;25 bow and arrow, hounds and stag or lion are the dominant
figures which bear the action along from the merely pictorial at the
beginning to the enacted grisliness of the end. From the image of
Achilles pursuing Penthesilea:

Denn wie die Dogg entkoppelt, mit Geheul

In das Geweih des Hirsches fällt: der Jäger,
Erfüllt von Sorge, lockt und ruft sie ab;
Jedoch verbissen in des Prachttiers Nacken,
Tanzt sie durch Berge neben ihm, und Ströme,
Fern in des Waldes Nacht hinein: so er,
Der Rasende, seit in der Forst des Krieges
Dies Wild sich von so seltner Art, ihm zeigte.47

to Penthesilea’s savage revenge on the ‘stag’ Achilles:

Jetzt unter ihren Hunden wütet sie,

Mit schaumbedeckter Lipp, und nennt sie Schwestern,

THE SECOND: Her soul is given to the Furies

For spoil!’. SW, I, 1231ff.
46 As in the studies by Dyer, Klotz, Brown, Kaiser and Sieck, referred to above in
footnote 3.
47 ‘And like the baying hound once off the leash
Leaps on the antlered stag; and the hunter
Alarmed, calls out to entice it back:
But it, its teeth sunk in the noble neck,
It dances at his side through stream and heights
And forest’s night; so he,
The crazed one, since through the trees of war
A prize as rare as this one crossed his path’. SW, I, 213ff.
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  109

Die heulenden, und der Mänade gleich,

Mit ihrem Bogen durch die Felder tanzend,
Hetzt sie die Meute, die mordatmende,
Die sie umringt, das schönste Wild zu fangen,
Das je die Erde, wie sie sagt, durchschweift.48

The tearing to pieces of Achilles is, in every sense, the climax of the
play, the end towards which the female hunting instinct, the paradoxical
affront to inviolate chastity, and the frenzy of frustrated feeling, must
impel. It is, mythologically speaking, Ares, Diana, and now, Dionysus.
Indeed, the climax of the action brings about a mythological process
whereby humans not merely use the language of the chase, but are
actually transformed, in reality or deluded frenzy, into beasts.
It is what the ancients called metamorphosis.49 It is the passing of
one form to another, an alteration of appearance, circumstances and
character, in myth, for which Ovid’s stories of Echo and Narcissus,
Apollo and Daphne, Philemon and Baucis, or Orpheus and Eurydice,
have become archetypes. But metamorphosis is also the poetic process
by which we see these religious myths reshaped and remoulded to
suit the changing emphases of human consciousness from the times
of the Greeks down to Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound or
T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden or Hans Werner Henze. They serve differing
symbolic functions for aspects of human behaviour and emotions; they
flesh out abstractions; they give some utterance towards saying that
which otherwise cannot be spoken. Metamorphosis may be the act of
kindness by which the gods transform men or women into birds or
plants: Philomela the nightingale or Phyllis the almond tree or Daphne
the laurel. It is that ‘Wolle die Wandlung’ of Rilke’s Orpheus.50 But not
all of the Ovidian metamorphoses are benevolent or beneficent: indeed,
Book Three of the Metamorphoses records the dreadful catalogue of

48 ‘Now among her dogs she rages,

Foam-lipped, and calls them sisters,
Amid their howls, and Maenad-like,
Dancing through the fields with her bow,
Urges the pack, on murder bent,
Encircling her, to catch the finest prey
That ever, as she says, roamed on the earth’. SW, I, 2567ff.
49 On the modern use of mythological metamorphosis see Sister M. Bernetta Quinn,
The Metamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry (New York: Geordian Press, 1972), esp.
2–5.
50 ‘Wish for change’.
110 From Goethe to Gundolf

punishment on the children of Cadmus, the fearful vengeance of Juno

and Diana and Dionysus. On this, Kleist seizes.
We do not know whether Kleist had read Kanne’s Mythologie der
Griechen — there is no evidence; yet Kanne makes an interesting remark
about the nature of metamorphosis: ‘die Strafe eines Gottes hatte
Menschen in Thiere verwandelt und nur menschenähnlich lebten diese
im Thiere fort. So entstand die Metamorphose’. Later, Kanne informs us,
it was ‘nicht Strafe, sondern Mitleiden der Götter’.51 And here Philomela
or Daphne spring to mind. If we follow Kanne’s point further, we might
say that Kleist has gone back to the primitive roots of Greek religion,
beyond notions of pity or justice or compassion, to that of punishment.
Actaeon was punished as part of the gods’ displeasure with the house of
Cadmus; but the immediate cause was his unwitting incursion into the
chaste regions of Diana’s bathing-place. Like Achilles, he unknowingly
provoked the goddess’s wrath and was transformed immediately into
a stag. Penthesilea, affronted, outraged, incensed by what she reads
as Achilles’ deception, sees him as the stag on to which she sets her
Ovidian-named hounds. But the frenzy, the Maenad-like dismembering
of the object of her love, is Agaue’s. For as Agaue believes that she has
torn a young lion and returns in triumph bearing instead the head of
her son Pentheus, so Penthesilea emerges speechless, somnambulant,
in a trance:

PENTHESILEA nach einer Pause, mit einer Art von Verzückung.

Ich bin so selig, Schwester! Überselig!
Ganz reif zum Tod o Diana, fühl ich mich !
Zwar weiss ich nicht , was hier mit mir geschehn,
Doch gleich des festen Glaubens könnt ich sterben,
Dass ich mir den Peliden überwand.52

Agaue’s frenzy was induced by Dionysus, for her failing to believe in

the divinity of his mother, her sister Semele;53 and Pentheus’ death

51 ‘The punishment of a god had changed men into animals, and these lived on like
men in the animal. Thus metamorphosis came about’, ‘not punishment, but the pity
of the gods’. Kanne, op. cit., xx, xxi.
52 ‘PENTHESILEA after a pause, in a kind of transport.
I am so blissful, sister, more than bliss!
Ripe for death, Diana, is how I feel!
What came over me I do not know,
But in the sure belief I could now die
That the Pelid fell to me in single combat’. SW, I, 2864ff.
53 Kerényi, ‘Die Bacchantinnen’, 281.
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  111

was a fearful reminder that the gods requite the merest slight to their
divinity, amid cruel mockery.54 Penthesilea, in the terms of the Amazon
state, and in the eyes of its priestesses, has been made to become as
one of Actaeon’s mastiffs or as the fawnskin-draped Bacchante Agaue,
because she has disobeyed Mars and Diana. Her very attempt to
worship or approach Achilles, the unattainable Phoebus, had been
suffused with intimations of a bliss near to death, an awareness that
the hunt could never bring her to the object of her desire. What she in
human terms most ardently and naturally desires is a blasphemy and
affront to a divine order, ‘In Wolkenduft geheimnisvoll verhüllt’. Like
another heroine visited with madness because the order of state denies
her heart’s fulfilment — Ophelia — Penthesilea, also in a frenzied state
which reveals the true extent of her sexual longing, decks herself ‘with
fantastic garlands’, ‘fantastically dressed with straws and flowers’:

Seht, seht, ihr Fraun! - Da schreitet sie heran,

Bekränzt mit Nesseln, die Entsetzliche,
Dem dürren Reif des Hag‘dorns eingewebt,
An Lorbeerschmuckes Statt, und folgt der Leiche,
Die Grässliche, den Bogen festlich schulternd,
Als wärs der Todfeind, den sie überwunden!55

This modern Shakespearean analogy, with a play whose scenic

structure has more affinity with Shakespeare, seems in many ways
more appropriate than one from religiously-based Greek tragedy. For
Euripides’ Bacchae, and the Roman Metamorphoses, are originally texts
relating to religious cult. As Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
remarks:

Wir sehen bei Euripides, dass ein Vertreter des Gottes, ein Träger
seines Geistes da sein muss, der die Gläubigen weiht, den Geist auf sie
durch sakramentale Handlungen überträgt, sie die erforderten heiligen
Handlungen, die Orgia, lehrt.56

54 Winnington-Ingram, Euripides and Dionysus, 10f.

55 ‘Look, women, look, how she prances,
Crowned with nettles, fearful sight,
Woven in with thornbush hoar
In place of bays, behind the corpse,
Gruesome view, shoulders the festive bow,
As if her deadliest enemy she’d conquered’. SW, I, 2704ff.
56 ‘We see in Euripides that a representative of the god, a bearer of his spirit, has to be
there, who inducts the faithful, transfers his spirit on to them in sacramental acts,
and teaches them the required sacred acts, the orgia’. Wilamowitz-Moellendorf,
112 From Goethe to Gundolf

Yet we seem to be closer to Kleist in a remark made in 1808, the year of

Penthesilea, by August Wilhelm Schlegel, talking of a ‘Romantic’ Hamlet:
‘Das Schicksal der Menschheit steht da wie eine riesenhafte Sphinx, die
jeden, der ihr furchtbares Rätsel nicht zu lösen vermag, in den Abgrund
des Zweifels hinabzustürzen droht’.57 Kleist’s striving for a fusion of
Greek tragedy and Shakespeare had, to borrow Schlegel’s words again,
little of the religious ‘Besitz’, the ‘Boden der Gegenwart’ which are
the Goethezeit’s secularized notions of Greek tragedy, but at most the
modern ‘Sehnsucht’, ‘Schwermut’ and ‘Ahnung’58 of a postlapsarian
view of man. Kleist had metamorphosed Hederich’s account of ancient
religious belief and practice into a ‘letter that killeth’.
This would have Penthesilea presenting a uniformly bleak,
uncompromising, cheerless and desperate aspect. And yet it might be
possible, by turning to a source other than Hederich, to find a different,
more positive, sense of ‘metamorphosis’ for this play.
My argument hitherto has been based on a simple application of
known source material to the text of the play. It is possible to extend such
evidence, this time more in the direction of biographical documentation,
to a similar end. The merely biographical, of course, ‘proves’ nothing.
On the other hand, a certain legitimacy seems to have established itself
in studies of Penthesilea, whereby analogies from contemporary poetry
and criticism are adduced by way of corroboration. In this way, it has
been possible· to avoid the extreme position of seeing Kleist as a poet
writing out of no tradition, or solely in reaction against it (as in the case
of his reading of Kant), while circumnavigating another promontory:
that of seeing Kleist merely as the sum of impulses or reactions from
outside. The notion of ‘metamorphosis’, as already defined, involves
both assimilation, and recreation under the stamp of an independent
personality. The assumptions behind my remaining remarks are largely
biographical, not textual. They state facts readily available. It would
of course be simplistic to rely too much on such evidence if there did

Griechische Tragödien übersetzt von Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, xiii: Euripides,

Die Bakchen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1923), 17.
57 ‘The fate of man stands there like an enormous sphinx, which casts everyone who
fails to grasp her dreadful riddle into the abyss of doubt’. August Wilhelm Schlegel,
Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, IV,
i, ed. by Stefan Knödler (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2018), 335.
58 ‘Possession’; ‘the ground of the present’; ‘longing’; ‘melancholy’; ‘intuition’. Ibid., V,
25.
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  113

not seem to be some thematic links with the play in question and its
metamorphosis from mere source material into art. The facts in question
are, simply, that Kleist attended Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s lectures in
Dresden in the winter of 1807 and that Kleist, the co-editor of Phöbus,
accepted and published material on the nature of tragedy. The question
is: could he have been attracted by what he heard, and may he have
assimilated ideas similar to those published?
Schubert’s lectures, delivered during the period in which Kleist is
assumed to have been writing Penthesilea, were published in 1808 as
Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft/Intimations of the Night
Side of Science. There is a general consensus that Schubert’s notions of
‘Ahndung’59 and somnambulism, of higher intimations occasioned by
states of magnetic sleep, mesmerism or hypnosis, are of considerable
importance for our understanding of Das Käthchen von Heilbronn.60 That
would seem appropriate for the ‘grosses historisches Ritterschauspiel’61
and its ‘romantic’ connotations, some of which even a tried practitioner
like Ludwig Tieck found too extreme. Schubert it is, too, who uses the
analogy of the negative and positive poles (of a magnet) to distinguish
between active striving for a higher existence, ‘Selbstthätigkeit’, on the
one hand (positive) and ‘wahrhafte Passivität, welche uns der höheren
Einwirkung fähig macht’ (negative), on the other.62 It might be the
germ of Kleist’s much­quoted letter to Collin about the interrelation of
Käthchen and Penthesilea: yet there is no reason why Kleist, who already
uses the image of magnetic poles in his letter to Marie von Kleist, which
Sembdner dates as late autumn 1807,63 could not have lighted on the
analogy independently.64 It is not my intention to force an interesting
image common both to Kleist and Schubert. I mention it for what it may
be worth. There are nevertheless, on the surface at least, striking parallels

59 ‘Intuition’.
60 Cf. Ursula Thomas, ’Heinrich von Kleist and Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’,
Monatshefte, 51 (1959), 249–61 (NB: Thomas does not discuss Penthesilea).
61 ‘Grand romantic historical spectacle’.
62 ‘The activity of the self’; ‘true passivity that makes us receptive to higher intuitions’.
Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft
(Dresden: Arnold, 1808), 323 (all subsequent references to Schubert are taken from
this text).
63 SW, II, 797.
64 There might, however, be some justification for redating the letter to the actual time
when Schubert was giving his lectures, i.e. winter 1807.
114 From Goethe to Gundolf

between certain passages in the Ansichten and Penthesilea. Again, we must

be circumspect, for aspects of Schubert’s nature mysticism, with their
roots in various hermetic traditions (Jacob Böhme) and their echoes of
Novalis or Steffens or Schelling or Ritter, may well not have appealed
to Kleist, grounded as he was in less heady mathematical and scientific
parallelism. Yet we know that Kleist’s fellow-countryman Achim von
Arnim — for all their differences in outlook and temperament — who
began in the empirical school of Ludwig Wilhelm Gilbert’s Annalen der
Physik/Annals of Physics, was strikingly drawn by speculative mysticism
such as Heinrich Jung-Stilling’s Theorie der Geisterkunde/Theory of
Spectrology and Schubert’s Ansichten. All the same, passage after passage
in Schubert has a striking ring when read with Penthesilea in mind. I
quote a few of the more remarkable:

Es ist ein ewiges Naturgesetz, das so klar da liegt, dass es sich dem Geist
des Menschen zuerst aufdringen müssen, dass die vergängliche Form der
Dinge untergeht, wenn ein neues, höheres Streben in ihnen erwacht, und
dass nicht die Zeit, nicht die Aussenwelt, sondern die Psyche selber ihre
Hülle zerstört, wenn die Schwingen eines neuen, freyeren Daseyns sich
in ihr entfalten. Ich habe in dem ersten Theil meiner schon angeführten
Schrift, da wo ich von einem scheinbaren Streben der Dinge nach ihrer
eignen Vernichtung gehandelt, in vielen Beyspielen gezeigt, dass gerade
in der Gluth der seeligsten und am meisten erstrebten Augenblicke des
Daseyns, dieses sich selber auflöset und zerstört. Es welkt die Blume
sogleich, wenn der höchste Augenblick des Blühens vorüber ist, und
das bunte Insekt sucht in der einen Stunde der Liebe zugleich die seines
Todes, und empfängt in dem Tempel der Hochzeit selber sein Grab.
Ja es sind bey dem Menschen gerade die seeligsten und geistigsten
Augenblicke des Lebens, für dieses selber die zerstörendsten, und wir
finden öfters in dem höchsten und heiligsten Streben unsres Wesens,
einen seeligen Untergang.65

65 ‘It is an eternal law of nature, and one so evidently clear, that the human mind
needs to be made conscious of it, that the transitory form of things perishes when
a new, higher striving awakes in them, and that it is not time, not the eternal world,
but the psyche that breaks free, when the wings of a new and freer existence unfold
in it. I have shown with many examples from the first part of my already quoted
publication, in the section dealing with a seeming urge of things towards their
destruction, that in the very glowing heat of the most blissful moment, the object of
the highest striving, this dissolves and destroys itself. The flower fades in the very
highest moment of its flowering, the shiny insect seeks in the one hour of love that
of its death, and receives in the nuptial temple its own grave. With humans it is the
very highest blissful and spiritual moments that are for them the most destructive,
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  115

Es hat auch die Vorwelt in diesem Gesetz, welches die höchsten

Momente des Lebens unmittelbar mit dem Tode verknüpft, das
Geheimniss der Liebe und des Todes, die Hoffnung einer unsterblichen
Fortdauer unsres Wesens, und den Trost über den Untergang der hohen
alten Vergangenheit gefunden. Es wurde deshalb in den Mysterien der
Egypter und zu Eleusis, auf die Geschichte der alten Zeit gedeutet,
und den Eingeweiheten die Zuversicht einer seeligen Fortdauer nach
dem Tode gegeben. Das Bild, unter welchem in den Mysterien der Tod
erschien, stellte diesen dem Gemüth vielmehr lieblich und süss als
schrecklich dar, und die Einweihung wurde deshalb als ein Mittel gegen
die Furcht vor dem Tode gepriesen. Ja es ward noch den Sterbenden, und
nach einem frommen Glauben selbst den Todten der Hinübertritt in ein
neues Daseyn durch die heilige Weihe erleichtert.66

So erschienen Liebe und Tod, das seeligste Streben des Gemüths und der
Untergang des Individuums vereint.67

So ist in allen jenen Mysterien, der Tod und die Liebe, der Untergang
und die Wiedererneuerung der Dinge, zu Einem Bild vereint, dargestellt
worden.68

So ist es ein Hauptinnhalt der meisten Mysterien und heiligen Sagen, dass
der Tod aus der Liebe, Untergang des Individuellen aus dem höchsten
Streben der Seele hervorgienge. Hiermit verliert der Tod seine Schrecken,
und es erscheint in ihm der Moment, wo jene höheren Organe, jene
höheren Kräfte, die wir während des Lebens vergeblich erstrebt haben,
in uns durch die Flamme eines grossen Augenblicks erweckt werden.
Alsdann wird der Psyche diese Hülle zu enge, es vergeht diese Form,
damit eine neue höhere aus ihr wiederkehre.69

and often we find in the highest and most sacred strivings of our being a blissful
end’. Schubert, Ansichten, p. 69f.
66 ‘From earliest times there has been a law that unites the highest moments of life
as one with death, the secret of love and death, the hope of continuing life forever,
and the consolation for the loss of a past both ancient and great. For this reason
the mysteries of the Egyptians and of Eleusis were taken to refer to the history of
ancient times, and the initiates were granted the certainty of life continuing after
death. The image in which death appeared in the mysteries was pleasant and sweet
rather than terrible, and the initiation was therefore praised as a means against the
fear of death. Indeed the dying and those who died in pious faith were assisted in
their passing into a new existence’. Ibid., 71f.
67 ‘Thus love and death, the most blissful striving of the mind and individual’s end,
seemed united’. Ibid., 73.
68 ‘Thus, in all these mysteries, death and love, the end and the renewal of things, was
represented as one image’. Ibid., 76.
69 ‘Thus it is a major component of most mysteries and sacred lays that death proceeds
from love, the end of the individual out of the highest strivings of the soul. Thus,
116 From Goethe to Gundolf

Schubert is also able to fuse his important notions of animal magnetism

with the above:

Ueberhaupt ist es diese Verwandtschaft des thierischen Magnetismus mit

dem Tode, welche die vorzüglichste Aufmerksamkeit verdient. Die Natur
hebt solche sonst unheilbaren Krankheiten, die nur dem Magnetismus
weichen, durch den Tod, und giebt so durch eine vollkommene
Umwandlung, der kranken menschlichen Natur die verlohrne innre
Harmonie zurück. Der Magnetismus, welcher nicht selten ein Erstarren
der Glieder wie im Tode, und andre hiermit verwanden Symptome
zur ersten Wirkung hat, ist auch hierin das im Kleinen, was der Tod im
Grossen und auf eine vollkommnere Weise ist.70

We can distil from these quotations the following points: that the self-
destruction of the psyche in the blissful moment of death is the natural
transition to new life, indeed that all religious mysteries and mystical
beliefs are based on this awareness of ‘ein neues Daseyn durch die heilige
Weihe’;71 that this is indeed a ‘Naturgesetz’ which enables humans to
find a ‘Trost über das frühe Versinken des alten Glücks’.72 We find in fact
a different, more comforting, more reassuring perception of the word
‘metamorphosis’ than our previous examinations of this notion allowed
us to entertain. For there are those, says Schubert, who in the moment
of death receive the utterance denied them in life, a ‘striving’ so much in
contradiction with the rest of their existence, ‘dass wir noch fast an der
Gränze des Lebens eine höhere Metamorphose ihres Wesen eintreten
sehen’.73
If we for a moment relate these passages to Penthesilea, we find the
following. That the heroine, caught in an inhumane system, inimical to

with this, death loses its terror, and in it is revealed the moment where those
higher organs, those higher forces, that we strive for in vain in life, are awakened
in us through the flame of a great moment. And then their outward mortal cocoon
becomes too restricted, this form passes away, to let a new and higher one return
from it’. Ibid., 79.
70 ‘Generally it is this relationship of animal magnetism with death that deserves the
utmost attention. Nature annuls maladies, otherwise incurable and only accessible
through animal magnetism, through death, and thus through the complete
transformation affected in human nature’s malady it restores the inner harmony
that was lost. Magnetism, whose first effect so often is to paralyse the limbs as in
death, and other related symptoms, is thus on a small scale what death is on a large
scale and in a more perfect form’. Ibid., 357.
71 ‘A new existence through a higher consecration’. Ibid., 72.
72 ‘Natural law’; ‘consolation for the early loss of its former happiness’. Ibid., 80.
73 ‘That almost on the brink of life we see a higher metamorphosis of its being’.
Schubert, Ansichten, 319.
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  117

the feeling which would free her for a higher existence and fulfilment of
her personality, feels, in a manner unable to be articulated in words, the
bliss of imminent death in those very moments when her imaginings
are most obsessively engaged with Achilles. They run, sometimes linked
with the image of the unattainable sun-god, through all the main strands
of the action.

Doch taub schien sie der Stimme der Vernunft.74

Ach, meine Seel ist matt bis in den Tod!75

Da liegt er mir zu Füssen ja! Nimm mich –

Sie will in den Fluss sinken76

Ich will in ewge Finsternis mich bergen!77

Zum Entzücken! […] Bin ich in Elysium?78

Ich bin so selig, Schwester! Überselig!

Ganz reif zum Tod o Diana, fühl ich mich!79

Ich sage vom Gesetz der Fraun mich los,

Und folge diesem Jüngling hier80

Denn jetzt steig ich in meinen Busen nieder81

The images in the play which might run counter to this passivity,
those of stoic acceptance (the arch) or of heroic grandeur (the oak)
are significantly not Penthesilea’s own, but Prothoe’s. They are a
commentary on the tragic greatness of the heroine who stands and
falls while ‘tücksche Götter uns die Hand [führen]’.82 Penthesilea
herself must experience the constant draw of death as the consequence
of her attraction to Achilles, must metamorphose herself and her

74 ‘But deaf she seemed to reason’s voice’. SW, I, 1074.

75 ‘Ah, my spirit is heavy unto death’. Ibid., 1237.
76 ‘There he lies at my feet, Yes, take me –
She makes to sink into the river’. Ibid., 1388.
77 ‘In everlasting darkness I will hide’. Ibid., 2351.
78 ‘O transport! Am I in Elysium?’ Ibid., 284f.
79 ‘I am so blissful, sister, more than bliss!
Ripe unto death, o Diana, is how I feel’. Ibid., 2864f.
80 ‘I free myself from the women’s law
And follow this young hero here’. Ibid., 3012f.
81 ‘And now descend down into my bosom’. Ibid., 3025.
82 ‘Fickle gods guide our hand’. Ibid., 2890.
118 From Goethe to Gundolf

lover into animals, pursuer and pursued, before the ecstatic vision of
‘höhere Metamorphose’ is granted to her. There is no clear suggestion
that she enters into a higher existence with Achilles in death, only
that in metamorphosis and death, she gains the sense, the feeling
of fulfilment, as if their deaths were indeed a union of body and
soul, a vision of the dignity of existence which divine malevolence
otherwise denies her. Only in this sense of a changed state of mind,
induced by a frenzied longing for love in death, can Penthesilea’s
‘metamorphosis’ be transfigured from the bleakest, starkest of
tragedies into a tragedy where vision and intimation open the inner
eye to paradisal, blissful states not granted to humans in time and
space but in hope and dream. In this we see also a thematic sequence
which leads from Kleist’s Marionettentheater/Marionette Theatre to
Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. We see, too, the thematic continuity of the
motif of physical unconsciousness, of fainting or psychic disturbance,
which accompanies the moment of ‘Ahndung’, intuition, in so many of
Kleist’s works — independent of Schubert or any other source.
If Penthesilea, then, ends on a note of loss, but also of glimpsed
vision, it also has affinities with the theories of tragedy published in
extract by Adam Müller in Phöbus. One thinks especially of his chapter,
‘Vom religiösen Character der griechischen Bühne’,83 in which he
adumbrates those moments of tragic experience which lead, ladder-like,
to a higher existence: ‘Auferstehungsmoment’, ‘höherer Todesmoment’,
‘Himmelfahrtsmoment’.84 The analogy is interesting and has been
pursued before;85 indeed the evidently Christian connotations of
Müller’s categories for Greek tragedy are no contradiction in times
when Zacharias Werner postulates a higher fusion of Schiller and
Pedro Calderón, and Müller himself invokes Goethe’s classicizing elegy
‘Euphrosyne’. To Kleist wrestling with Sophocles and Shakespeare,
such ‘Romantic’ connotations of tragedy might well lend themselves.
Yet we remember Müller’s own words to Friedrich Gentz, which warn
us against the pursuit of too close a parallel with Tieck’s, the Schlegels’
or Werner’s practice. There is no heaven for Penthesilea, none of the

83 ‘On the Religious Character of the Greek Stage’. Adam Müller, ‘Vom religiösen
Character der griechischen Bühne’. Phöbus. Ein Journal für die Kunst, ed. by Heinrich
v. Kleist und Adam H. Müller (Dresden: Gärtner, 1808), 9. u. 10 Stück, 7.
84 ‘Moment of resurrection’, ‘higher moment of death’, ‘moment of ascension’.
85 Cf. Brown, Kleist and the Tragic Ideal, 44ff.
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  119

‘Unvergänglichkeit und Himmel’,86 of which Müller’s Phöbus lecture

speaks and which is the tacit understanding behind Schubert’s
‘Ahndung’. Rather, we might quote Müller‘s words:

Welches Heilige man nicht auf würdige Weise zu entschleiern vermag,

sollte man, sagt‘ ich in der vorigen Stunde, lieber verschleiert lassen:
dieser mir selbst gegebenen Vorschrift folge ich, der ich den Verdacht
des Mysticismus scheue, und würde dennoch stolz darauf sein, durch
das bisher gesagte, in manchem Mitgliede dieser verehrungswürdigen
Versammlung, eine Ahndung erweckt zu haben, wie nemlich die
Tragödie auch bei uns zu dem erhoben werden könnte, was sie bei den
Griechen war, zum religiösen Fest.87

Yet one other contributor to Phöbus, Wilhelm Nienstädt, the now-

forgotten author of the essay ‘Von der didaktischen Poesie’,88 did see fit to
link his remarks with Schubert. Nienstädt’s remarks are less heady than
Müller’s, more concerned with the actual dichotomies of poetry and life,
more reflective of the national penchant ‘Jegliches zuvor inwendig zu
verarbeiten, ehe man ihm nach aussen Gestaltung giebt’, conscious of
the perils of ‘Innerlichkeit’ if poetry is to be truly ‘didaktisch’, that is,
expressive of the ‘harmonischer Staat’ and not merely ‘luftiges Gebilde’.
Schubert, says Nienstädt, is ‘wahrhaftig zeitmässig und didaktisch’ and
affords us insight into a future union of the subjective and the objective.89
Further words of Nienstädt would, however, seem more apposite to
Penthesilea:

In einem Zeitalter daher, wo man immer tiefer und mit immer neu
aufgeregter Begier dem Unendlichen nachforscht, zugleich aber auch
immer klarer der eignen Freiheit, der Höhe und Tiefe des Geistes inne
wird, muss auf jener Seite die Freude am Unvergänglichen auf dieser
das Vorgefühl des Besitzes sich vor andern kund thun, wie davon das

86 ‘Imperishability and heaven’.

87 ‘Whatever sacred mystery that cannot be unveiled in seemly fashion we should
rather leave veiled; as I said in the previous lecture. I follow this self-imposed
ordinance, shying away from all suspicion of mysticism, but would still be proud
if my previous words had kindled in some members of this worthy assembly an
inkling of how tragedy in our land could be elevated to the status it enjoyed under
the Greeks, a religious festival’. Müller, ‘Vom religiösen Character’, 9.-10. Stück, 5.
88 ‘On Didactic Poetry’.
89 ‘To go through everything inwardly before giving it an external shape’; ‘inwardness’;
‘harmonious state’; ‘airy substance’; ‘truly fit for our times and didactic’. Müller,
‘Vom religiösen Character’, 8. Stück, 27.
120 From Goethe to Gundolf

Lyrische in unsern Poesien Zeuge ist. Was hülfe es dem Menschen auch
alles jenes, wenn es nicht mit seiner unergründlichen Natur vereinbart
und unter den Menschen eingebürgert würde, wie es nur die Poesie
vermag?90

In Penthesilea, it is only ‘Poesie’, the moment of higher imagining and

perception, that affords possession (‘Besitz’). But that possession is
never real outside the inner sphere; it is the creation of ‘Poesie’, a ‘Begier
nach dem Unendlichen’,91 but one that human social and political reality
can only thwart and frustrate. The ‘metamorphosis’ into the mythical
reality of Actaeon and Agaue is the only means of breaking — with
ferocious tragic violence — out of a world ruled by capricious gods
of evil intent. Yet the Schubertian metamorphosis ‘an der Gränze des
Lebens’92 is no less ‘Poesie’. It is the glimpse of paradise, of prelapsarian
harmony and knowledge, given to fragile humanity, yet also taken away
in the demands and limitations of existence:

Ach! Wie gebrechlich ist der Mensch, ihr Götter!93

As an ideal, however, it receives dignity by the very desire to reach out

into spheres not troubled by human imperfection and frailty:

Sie sank, weil sie zu stolz und kräftig blühte!94

As a ‘mythological’ tragedy, but also as the tragedy of personal

relationships, Penthesilea is a witness to Kleist’s powers of metamorphosis.
Indeed, as in his play the man becomes the sacrificial victim and the
woman is transformed into the Bassarid, Kleist may have recognized
that myth has less to do with the clarity of Apollo than with the darker
urges of which in our own day Robert Graves speaks:

90 ‘In an age, therefore, that is so intently searching after the infinite, but at the same
time is with greater clarity conscious of its own freedom and the heights and depths
of the spirit, there must above all on the one hand be joy in things imperishable, on
the other the expression of a possession yet to be gained, to which the lyrical part
of our poetry bears witness. What would all this avail mankind if it were not joined
with its unfathomable nature and was received among men, as only poetry is able?’
Ibid., 26.
91 ‘Desire for the infinite’.
92 ‘On the brink of life’.
93 ‘O how fragile humans are, you gods!’ SW, I, 3037.
94 ‘She sank, too proud and forceful was her flowering!’ Ibid., 3040.
 6. Kleist’s Metamorphoses  121

Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the
moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of
poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the
lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of
the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies
bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of: ‘Kill! kill! kill!’ and
‘Blood! blood! blood!’95

95 Robert Graves, The White Goddess. A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London,
Boston: Faber & Faber, 1961), 448.
Fig. 10 [Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm], Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Reimer,
1819–22), vol. 1 (1819), frontispiece and title page. Courtesy of the Master and
Fellows of Trinity College.
 7. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm
and Academic Freedom1

My subject is German professors. It may need a word by way of

prefatory explanation. For if in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, especially in
the nineteenth century, so few men and women of excellence in letters,
the arts and learning in general were associated with universities, the
old ones in particular, the opposite was true for Germany. In 1842, John
Sterling, the friend of Julius Hare and John Stuart Mill and F. D. Maurice
and the subject of a Life by Thomas Carlyle, wrote an essay, ‘Characteristics

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and
Academic Freedom. An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Cambridge
9 May 1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). It seemed to me
in 1990, not long after the Education Reform Bill was enacted, that academic
freedom was a relevant subject for an inaugural lecture. It still does. See Stefan
Collini, What Are Universities For? (London: Penguin, 2012) and by same author,
Speaking of Universities (London, New York: Verso, 2017); Stanley Fish, Versions of
Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution, The Rice University Campbell
Lectures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), https://doi.org/10.7208/
chicago/9780226170251.001.0001. On German universities in general, see the
still indispensable account in Friedrich Paulsen, Die deutschen Universitäten und
das Universitätsstudium (Berlin: Asher, 1902), trans. as The German Universities
and University Study by Frank Thilly and William W. Elwang, preface by M. E.
Sadler (London: Longmans Green 1906). A much shortened version is found in
Friedrich Paulsen, ‘Überblick über die geschichtliche Entwicklung der deutschen
Universitäten mit besonderer Rücksicht auf ihr Verhältnis zur Wissenschaft’, in Die
Universitäten im deutschen Reich, ed. by W. Lexis, Das Unterrichtswesen im Deutschen
Reich 1 (Berlin: Asher, 1904), 1–38; now standard is Charles E. McClelland, State,
Society, and University in Germany 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980). Of further general interest are Richard Graf du Moulin Eckart,
Geschichte der deutschen Universitäten (Stuttgart: Enke, 1929); S. D. Stirk, German
Universities — Through English Eyes (London: Gollancz, 1946); Ernst Anrich, Die
Idee der deutschen Universität und die Reform der deutschen Universitäten (Darmstadt:
Wissensschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, I960); Hans Peter Bleuel, Deutschlands
Bekenner. Professoren zwischen Kaiserreich und Diktatur (Berne: Scherz, I968).

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.07

124 From Goethe to Gundolf

of German Genius’. After praising German ‘elevation and fulness’,2

‘reflection’ and ‘earnestness of heart’,3 he produced a list of about thirty
German notabilities in what he called the ‘three great forms assumed
by the genius of the Germans, — in History, Philosophy, and Poetry’.4
Over half of the names listed were at some time university professors
(he forgot Martin Luther): Cristoph Martin Wieland, Friedrich Heinrich
Jacobi, Friedrich Schiller, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Karl Friedrich Eichhorn, Johannes von Müller, both
Schlegel brothers, F. A. Wolf, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte,
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Johann Heinrich Voss, Barthold
Georg Niebuhr, Friedrich Carl von Savigny (both brothers, Jacob and
Wilhelm Grimm, were closely associated with the Humboldt brothers,
Wilhelm and Alexander).5 Some of these are also poets, and the list of
poet-academics in Germany could also be extended. We are not dealing
here with a subject marginal to German culture, but one which is
central. It is therefore important to clear away misapprehensions and to
see aright its role in the specific area which I have chosen from among
the many possibilities it offers: academic freedom.
The Times Higher Education Supplement, commenting on Lord Jenkins
of Hillhead’s successful amendment of May 26, 1988 to the Education
Reform Bill then before the House of Lords, whereby academics were
guaranteed the freedom to question established knowledge, to advance
new ideas irrespective of their controversial or even unpopular nature,
without the danger of losing post or privileges in the institutions in which
they work, went on to say: ‘Lord Jenkins’s amendment does not insist on
the lehrfreiheit [freedom in teaching] enjoyed by Prussian universities
in the 19th century. In our evaluation of academic freedom we have
fallen below Bismarck’s Germany’.6 The tone suggests acquaintance
with the high moral stance of Matthew Arnold. It is nevertheless hard
to know quite what the leader-writer meant, but I take the inference to
be drawn to be this: that, if Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, which we
know to have been strident, rampageous, illiberal to Catholics and Social

2 John Sterling, ‘Characteristics of German Genius’, in Essays and Tales, Collected and
Edited, With a Memoir of his Life, ed. by Julius Charles Hare, 2 vols (London: Parker,
1848), II, 383.
3 Ibid., 406, 409.
4 Ibid., 417.
5 Ibid., 415.
6 The Times Higher Education Supplement (May 27, 1988), 36.
 7. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom  125

Democrats, expansionist, pushy, could nevertheless guarantee academic

freedom, should we, in more enlightened times and with the benefit of
a historical perspective, settle for less than they enjoyed a hundred years
ago? Such a view is not new. In 1846, perhaps with more justification,
Walter C. Perry, in his book German University Education, or the Professors
and Students of Germany (a work that, incidentally, anticipates much of
what Matthew Arnold has to say) states:

We find it difficult, at first, to understand how such a degree of liberty

can consist with an arbitrary form of government like that of Prussia. Yet
we know that this ‘Lehrfreiheit’ is no empty boast, but a solid, and, to a
country without a constitution, an invaluable privilege — a privilege so
dear to every German’s heart, that there are probably not more than two
or three of the sovereigns of Germany who would desire or venture to
infringe upon it.7

Probably true. Perhaps we students and teachers of German in this country

are partly to blame that sentiments, certainly true in 1846, can in 1988
be applied by a reputable journal with little differentiation to the years
1871–90. For the Germans themselves of Bismarck’s day were acutely
aware that academic freedom, which now — let us not forget — went
hand in hand with a great deal of political and constitutional freedom,
had not been bought without a struggle and was a prize most securely
to be held on to. Indeed, if there was a period in German history in
which academics positively luxuriated in privileges guaranteed by the
state, it was under Bismarck. But it was also a time when academics, of
the distinction of Theodor Mommsen or Rudolf Virchow, were active
in liberal politics. But, then again, we are using a generalization which
is slipshod and misleading. In mentioning Bismarck, let us not forget
that, in matters of higher education, the Prussian writ did not run in at
least half of the German universities; and important centres of culture,
academic or otherwise, were to be found outside the confines of that
state or its chancellor.
Whether in Protestant Berlin or in Catholic Munich, the privileges
were the same: addressing the University of Munich in 1867 (not long
before German unification), Ignaz von Döllinger was able to speak of

7 Walter C. Perry, German University Education, or the Professors and Students of Germany.
To which is Added, a Brief Account of the Public Schools of Prussia, with Observations on
the Influence of Philosophy on the Studies of the German Universities, 2nd ed. (London:
Longman, Brown, Green, 1846), 11.
126 From Goethe to Gundolf

universities as the ‘highest court of appeal in matters of the intellect’,

its teachers as a ‘priesthood’ of scholarship.8 The historian Friedrich
Meinecke, looking back in his memoir, Die deutsche Katastrophe/The
German Catastrophe, on his own university days in Bismarckian Berlin,
recalled that while these were but the silver age of classical liberalism,
not the golden, they were days in which men like his academic teachers,
Johann Gustav Droysen, Heinrich von Treitschke and Wilhelm Scherer,
were still scholars of real distinction, while the thought of a cultural
collapse such as that later produced by National Socialism seemed
impossible.9 There were, of course, academics in those days who abused
their privileged status (some would say that of the historian Treitschke,
even more so of that Berlin professor who called the university the
spiritual life guards of the house of Hohenzollern).10 There were
voices which warned of the pernicious encroachments of the state, of
particular interests, on the universities’ hallowed ground11 (Meinecke
tells how the plan to set up a chair of history in a faculty of Catholic
theology was seen by Mommsen as an axe laid to the tree of academic
freedom).12 These were perhaps not good days in which to be a Social
Democrat and an academic, but, then again, the state could be secure
in its assumption that very few academics were.13 Eduard Spranger,
writing in 1913, spoke doubtless for most in saying that those who are
subject to direct state intervention usually owe it to their ill-chosen and
tactless behaviour (‘reichlich ungeschickte Formen’).14 The assumption
that universities should be guaranteed maximum freedom to pursue

8 Dr. Joh. Jos. Ign. von Döllinger, Die Universitäten sonst und jetzt, 2nd ed. (Munich:
Manz, I867), 50, 52.
9 Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe, in Werke, ed. by Friedrich-Meinecke-
lnstitut der Freien Universität Berlin, Hans Herzfeld et al., 8 vols (Stuttgart: Köhler,
1958–69), VIII, 333f. Also Erlebtes 1862–1901, loc. cit., 50–5.
10 The words, quoted in various different forms, were uttered by Emil Du Bois-Reymond
in his rectorial address on August 3, 1870: ‘Nun wohl, die Berliner Universität, dem
Palaste des Königs gegenüber einquartiert, ist durch ihre Stiftungsurkunde das
geistige Leibregiment des Hauses Hohenzollern’. Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Reden,
ed. by Estelle Du Bois, 2 vols, 2nd ed. (Leipzig; Veit, 1912), I, 418.
11 For one among many see Ernst Bernheim, Die gefährdete Stellung unserer deutschen
Universitäten, Festreden der Universität Greifswald 8 (Greifswald: Abel, 1899), esp.
13 and 21.
12 Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe, 139.
13 A reference to the notorious ‘Lex Arons’. See F. Paulsen, The German Universities,
252; and McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 267f.
14 Eduard Spranger, Wandlungen im Wesen der Universität seit 100 Jahren (Leipzig:
Wiegandt, 1913), 13.
 7. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom  127

research and to teach — within widely extended limits — was one which
still informed two of Max Weber’s most important essays, ‘Der Sinn der
“Wertfreiheit” der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften/
The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality in Sociology and Economics’ (1917)
and ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf/Science as a Vocation’ (1919). It was not
always so, and it was not always to remain so. For the rest of my time,
I wish to examine, not how academic freedom actually was won and
certainly not how professors basked in it, but how university and state
collided in their separate interests and how this typifies the intellectual
climate of Germany in what Meinecke called its ‘golden age’.
What is academic freedom? What did the Germans mean by it? How
was it defined? Why was it so important? The very phrase has a German
ring to it, for it was a peculiarly German concern. Let us begin with the
definition used by an acute observer of the German university system,
Matthew Arnold: ‘Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit, liberty of the teacher
and liberty for the learner; and Wissenschaft, scientific knowledge
systematically pursued and prized in and for itself, are the fundamental
ideas of that system’.15 That was by and large the reality which Arnold
was able to observe in Bismarckian Germany. Writing earlier in the
century, before 1848, however, Perry, in the already-cited book on
German university education, gave the whole matter a rather different
slant:

It is this important feature in their constitution which has gained for the
universities the honourable designation of the ‘last bulwark of German
freedom’. It is this which ensures to the highly-gifted minds of Germany,
the means and opportunity for the full and free development of their
powers, and a fitting sphere of usefulness and honour. It is this which
secures a ready entrance for newly-discovered truths of science into the
minds of the rising generation, at the very time when they are most free
from prejudice, and filled with the most disinterested love of truth and
knowledge. If in an evil hour — and there are many who are capable
of advising such a measure — the sovereigns of Germany should be
induced to circumscribe or destroy the liberty of teaching of their

15 Matthew Arnold, ‘Superior or University Instruction in Prussia’, in Schools and

Universities on the Continent, ed. by R. H. Super, The Complete Prose Works (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), IV, 263.
128 From Goethe to Gundolf

professors, the glory of their universities will quickly pass away, and the
progress of science itself will receive a powerful check.16

Perhaps even more tellingly, Perry goes on to quote Jacob Grimm’s

dictum that academic freedom was ‘freedom from restraint which is
enjoyed at the university, and there alone’,17 thus a permitted liberty
which it was in the interest of the state to promote and foster.
Depending on how you approached them, German universities in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a double function: to train
suitable candidates for the civil service and state administration, and to
promote scholarship. In the eighteenth century, these two aims rarely
met on common ground.18 The University of Halle, the first Prussian
university institution effectively to deserve that name, may serve as a
convenient illustration. Its statutes of 1694 had been based on the notion
of ‘libertas philosophandi’,19 the freedom to teach and do research.
Yet time and time again, the university and its professors were to be
reminded by the state, often in trenchant personal memoranda from
the king himself, that what was required was orthodoxy, in matters of
religion and philosophy; it wanted utilitarian courses completed in a
minimum of time, and it wanted results — hence the infamous order
from King Frederick William I to the rationalist philosopher Christian
Wolff in 1723, to leave Halle and all Prussian territories within forty-
eight hours on pain of death;20 but, even under his great-nephew
Frederick William II in 1794, instructions to two theologians to stop
teaching the new theology if they wished to avoid dismissal.21 Or
the instruction to the professors of 1731 that ‘die Professores fleissig,
sowohl publice als privatim über nützliche Materien lesen, auch die
Collegia in jeder Fakultaet dergestalt mit einander concertiren sollen,
damit die Studiosi so geschwind als es möglich, ein jeder in der Scientz

16 Perry, German University Education, 11.

17 Ibid., 16.
18 See Notker Hammerstein, ‘Zur Geschichte der Deutschen Universität im Zeitalter
der Aufklärung’, in Universität und Gelehrtenstand 1400–1800, Büdinger Vorträge
1966, ed. by Hellmuth Rössler and Günther Franz, Deutsche Führungsschichten
der Neuzeit 4 (Limburg/Lahn: Starke, I970), 5–82; Gertrud Schubart-Fikentscher,
Studienreform. Fragen von Leibniz bis Goethe, Sitzungsberichte der Sächsischen Akad. d.
Wiss. zu Leipzig, Phil.-hist. Klasse 116.4 (Berlin: Akademie, 1973).
19 Paulsen, The German Universities, 46.
20 Wilhelm Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universität zu Halle, 2 vols (Berlin:
Dümmler, 1894), II, 459.
21 Ibid., 480.
 7. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom  129

worzu er Lust hat, seinen cursum bequemlich absolviren könne’;22

or Wilhelm von Humboldt’s predecessor as minister responsible for
education, Julius Eberhard von Massow, decreeing as late as 1804
that the notion of independent research being superior to teaching
the young was not even worthy of further discussion.23 In the thirty
universities that the German-speaking lands had around l800, the
general tone was hardly different: at most it depended on the ruler
or his appointed servants. Christian Thomasius, incidentally the first
German professor to lecture in his native language, and also the first
rector of the University of Halle, might show concern for general
education, seeing the universities as seminaria reipublicae, ‘Pflanz-
Garten des Friedens’.24 But these were far removed from notions of
‘Bildung’ or ‘self-cultivation’, as defined by my predecessor W. H.
Bruford.25 Johann Gottfried Herder’s ‘friedliche Provinz’,26 that he
imagined as he sketched a grand scheme of education on his way
from Riga to Nantes in 1769, remained for most of his lifetime remote
from reality. In real life, academic existence was dismal, repetitious,
straitened, apart perhaps from the kingdom of Hanover’s show-
case University of Göttingen; its only real advantage perhaps being
that it offered to those of poor and humble background — Kant, the
classicist Christian Gottlob Heyne, Fichte among them — the chance
to rise through the state’s pedagogical province into a social status
and respect that the less gifted of their estate could not achieve, to
escape the rigidity of the social hierarchy.27 And yet, as the century
proceeded, some of these universities, Halle in terms of freedom of
pedagogical activity, Göttingen in terms of the freedom of political
thought and Jena in terms of speculative philosophy, became places

22 ‘The professors, to read diligently both privately and in public on useful subjects,
coordinating courses in each faculty in such a way that the students, each one in his
chosen discipline, may finish their courses as swiftly as possible’. Ibid., 464.
23 Ibid., 494.
24 ‘Seedbeds of peace’, Gertrud Schubart-Fikentscher, Studienreform, 13.
25 See W. H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to
Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
26 ‘Peaceful province’. Johann Gottfried Herder, Journal meiner Reise im Jahre 1769,
Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols (Berlin 1877–1913), IV, 37f.
27 See Anthony J. La Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit. Poor Students, Clerical Careers,
and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
130 From Goethe to Gundolf

where alternatives to the state-ordained and state-dominated system,

the mere maid­servant of absolutism, were posited. The new critical
philosophy of Kant, the French Revolution, the speculative systems
of Romantic idealist philosophy, and not least the collapse of the old
political order in the German states, notably after 1806: all of these
factors contributed to the formulation of new ideas of university and
state and their interrelation.
The key word was ‘Wissenschaft’, a word difficult to translate
accurately into English, only satisfactorily rendered as ‘science’ in
the older and no longer current sense of the unity of all knowledge.
Kant, in 1798, in his Der Streit der Fakultäten/The Contest of Faculties,
had claimed that it was the role of philosophy to establish truth for
all branches of knowledge, speculative or practical, thus positing an
overarching principle of truth as opposed to one of mere utilitarianism.28
In statements all made in the first decade of the nineteenth century,
Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Henrik Steffens, and Wilhelm von
Humboldt, later Hegel, all proceeded from the central notion of the unity
of all knowledge, its universal totality, its organic wholeness.29 Thus, for
Fichte, science was a process of continuous intellectual productivity; for
Schelling, it was an organism, whole in itself, in which even the smallest
part of the organization reflects that whole.30 In Schleiermacher’s
formulation,31 it was the concern of a university to waken in the young
the idea of ‘Wissenschaft’; to enable this idea to take hold in each
specialized area of study, so that it would be as second nature to relate
everything to ‘Wissenschaft’; not to examine each area on its own, but in
its relation to and in connection with the ‘großer Zusammenhang’, the

28 Spranger, Wandlungen im Wesen der Universität, 10f.

29 For the following see McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 77ff.;
Spranger, Wandlungen im Wesen der Universität, 9–15; Spranger, Wilhelm von Humboldt
und die Reform des Bildungswesens, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1960), 201–08.
30 F. W. J. Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums. Auf
der Grundlage des Texts der Ausgabe von Otto Weiss, ed. by Walter E. Ehrhardt,
Philosophische Bibliothek 275 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1974), l11.
31 Quoted from Idee und Wirklichkeit einer Universität. Dokumente zur Geschichte der
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin. In Zusammenarbeit mit Wolfgang Müller-
Lauter u. Michael Theunissen, ed. by Wilhelm Weischedel, Gedenkschrift der Freien
Universität Berlin zur 50. Wiederkehr des Gründungsjahres der Friedrich-Wilhelms-
Universität zu Berlin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1960), 125 (referred to subsequently as
Weischedel, Idee und Wirklichkeit).
 7. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom  131

wider and general contexts and issues; bearing in mind at all times the
unity and totality (‘Einheit und Allheit’) of perception, which will lead
to independent research, discovery, and presentation.32 How was such
an ideal to be realised? How was such ‘Wissenschaft’ to thrive, when,
in Schelling’s words, it was part of ‘Urwissen’, primal knowledge itself
and drawn from the absolute realm of infinity,33 where ‘Wissenschaft’
ceases to be itself the moment it is relegated to being a mere means to an
end and not an end in itself? There were basically two answers, neither
of them radically different in their ultimate implications. Either the state
must be excluded altogether from the affairs of ‘Wissenschaft’, that
is, the university in its proper calling (Schleiermacher’s, Humboldt’s
and Fichte’s view); or, in Schelling’s and Steffens’ view, the state must
become the bearer and agent of all the very highest ideas, and thus
function as the guarantor of independent and disinterested scientific
endeavour.34 Schelling and Steffens were doubtless naive; but they had
none of the shameful self-confidence with which Martin Heidegger in
1934, over a century later, helped to preside over the complete sell-out of
the Humboldtian idea and tradition to the National Socialist state.
All of these notions were in the air, and formed part of the founding
declarations of the great University of Berlin which came into being in
1810, the first German university consciously and deliberately set up
in a capital city at the centre of state control, but to be independent of
it. There were also very practical ideological reasons for not wishing to
be meshed with the state: the French, as occupying powers in Prussia
and elsewhere in Germany, had closed the University of Halle and were
planning to abolish others and set up a number of separate specialist
schools in the kingdom of Westphalia. The recent political shake-up had
seen a number of universities, once ancient and venerable, disappear
in reorganization or conquest: Erfurt, Mainz, Wittenberg, Helmstedt, to
mention but four. Berlin would provide — and this is also Wilhelm von
Humboldt’s vision — a place where the state and true humanity would
kiss each other, where ‘Bildung’ and statecraft would lie down together
in an organism that was humane and liberal. The state would leave the

32 Weischedel, Idee und Wirklichkeit, 123.

33 Schelling, Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums, 12f.
34 Spranger, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Reform des Bildungswesens, 203–94; Spranger,
Wandlungen im Wesen der Universität, 14.
132 From Goethe to Gundolf

sciences (‘Wissenschaften’) to themselves, where they would work out

the unifying principle behind all knowledge. All must be subject to one
ideal, derived from one principle; these two in their turn to be subsumed
under one overall idea.35 The air this university would breathe would
be, in Fichte’s word, academic freedom, this itself vested in divine and
natural law.36 Small wonder that, when Hegel delivered his inaugural
lecture in Berlin 1818, he could proudly claim that the closed entity
of the universe has no power that can resist the force of philosophical
perception.37 For it was to be the philosophers who were to believe above
all in this system that the state university seemed to guarantee and
underwrite. It might not occur to them, as it did to the great physician
Virchow in his rectorial address in 1893, looking back over the century,
that while Wilhelm von Humboldt’s University of Berlin in 1810 may
have been the finest expression of the philosophical age, the return in
1827 to Berlin of his brother, Alexander von Humboldt, ushered in the
‘naturwissenschaftliches Zeitalter’, the age of science and its inevitable
specialization.38
Whereas the Prussian state universities, and subsequently all within
the German confederation, were to accept the principle of freedom of
teaching and learning, academic freedom in a very general sense, this did
not mean that the state was handing over the authority for its institutions
of higher learning to a state-free republic of letters and sciences. For, as
an irony, Prussia introduced state examinations for candidates for its
administrative service in 1810, the very year of the foundation of the
University of Berlin, the ‘Staatsexamen’ that has become an accepted
part of the universities’ function ever since.39 Indeed, the price to be paid
for freedom within the university system, a liberty, which, as the English
commentators noted, was not enjoyed by most of their fellows, was in
fact an arrangement with the state; the state, for very practical reasons
but also out of concern for prestige, not wishing to lose its reputation for
fostering learning and scholarship. This meant, in effect, a deal between
the state and the university teacher. We see for instance August Wilhelm

35 Weischedel, Idee und Wirklichkeit, 193–06.

36 Ibid., 231.
37 Ibid., 314.
38 Ibid., 417.
39 Spranger, Wandlungen im Wesen der Universität, 15.
 7. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom  133

Schlegel, professing Sanskrit at the new Prussian University of Bonn,

engaged in epistolary tussles with the Prussian authorities over his
status, and privileges and salary,40 while stating grandly elsewhere that
historical criticism must, if it is to prosper, enjoy total autonomy, not
be subservient to any authority outside itself, it alone to decide on the
veracity of its own problems (Weber’s ‘Wertfreiheit’).41 The state did,
indeed, put up with behaviour on a personal level that hardly sat well
with Fichte’s or Schelling’s ideals. Schleiermacher and Hegel were at
daggers drawn; Fichte was as prickly a colleague as one could imagine;
Wilhelm von Humboldt echoed other university administrators in
likening academics to a bunch of actors42 (an ominous foreshadowing of
King Ernest Augustus of Hanover’s analogy with harlots and dancing-
girls, on the occasion of the dismissal of the Göttingen Seven). The state
could, and did, tolerate the prima donna (Hegel, for instance) where
its own interests were not in question. Yet, where strong academic
personalities, in the name of freedom — an extension of academic
freedom — came into direct conflict with the state, the reaction was
different. Already the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 saw in Prussia dismissals
and suspensions and a general clampdown.
The two examples to which I now turn and which form the actual
title of my lecture on academic freedom and the long and difficult way
towards its eventual achievement, are those of Johann Wolfgang Goethe
and the brothers Grimm, one the university administrator, the others
professors, in their separate ways caught up in their concern for academic
standards inside a constitutionally guaranteed system, both illustrating,
again in different ways, the gulf fixed between Humboldtian ideals and
Realpolitik. I can only touch on the main points as I see them, but in my
view they are significant ones for the subject under discussion. For here

40 This is documented in Briefe von und an August Wiilhelm Schlegel, ed. by Josef Körner,
2 vols (Zurich, Leipzig, Vienna: Amalthea, 1930), I, 362, 373.
41 August Wilhelm Schlegel, ‘Abriß von den Europäischen Verhältnissen der deutschen
Literatur’, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by Eduard Böcking, 12 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann,
1846–47), VIII, 207–19. See generally Christian Renger, Die Gründung und Einrichtung
der Universität Bonn und die Berufungspolitik des Kultusministers Altenstein, Academica
Bonnensia 7 (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1982).
42 Weischedel, Idee und Wirklichkeit, xxii. Goethe’s colleague, the minister C. G. von
Voigt, referred to the Jena professors as ‘eine dem Theatermenschen ähnliche
Faction’. Quoted in Schubart-Fikentscher, Studienreform, 27.
134 From Goethe to Gundolf

we see Goethe the universal poetic genius submitting to the restrictions

of state polity.
The subject of Goethe and the university, like Goethe and the law,
Goethe and justice, Goethe and revolution, is not one easily addressed
or easily answered. On the one hand, one can say that Goethe saw
universities rather as a means to an end than as an end in themselves.
His own university career in law had been a practical training for legal
practice and stood him in good stead as an administrator and eventually
a minister of state in the small duchy of Saxe-Weimar, where he was
later to assume responsibility for the affairs of the scientific collections
and institutes of learning, notably the University of Jena. Goethe’s own
forays into the world of learning and scientific endeavour were not those
of the academic expert, but rather of the privatier — in the eighteenth-
century sense — the individualist who has no need to concern himself
with the merely academic side of a debate or a merely academic
audience. On the one hand, in administration, Goethe was an eighteenth-
century cameralist; on the other, he was concerned that there should be
interdependence between the estates and organic progression towards
improvement of the common weal. But universities raised particular
problems of statecraft, especially in the post-revolutionary ferment.
On the one hand, Goethe regarded the University of Jena as a ‘geistiger
Freihafen’,43 a haven of the intellect, where ideas that elsewhere might
seem seditious could be expressed; but the other side involved the real
concern that things might get out of hand, the students might become
even more riotous as they picked up the ideas current in Paris; there
might be the need to restrain the ruling Duke Carl August — a Prussian
general to boot — from sending in the troops against the students and
provoking the very violence from which Goethe by nature recoiled.
There had been the recent calamitous and damaging incident in 1799
of the dismissal by the duke of none other than Fichte44 from his post

43 
Hans Tümmler, ‘Goethes Anteil an der Entlassung Fichtes von seinem Jenaer
Lehramt 1799’, in Goethe in Staat und Politik. Gesammelte Aufsätze, Kölner Historische
Abhandlungen 9 (Cologne, Graz: Böhlau, 1964), 132–66 (155).
44 
On the Fichte affair, see Waldtraut Beyer, ‘Der Atheismusstreit um Fichte’, in
Debatten und Kontroversen. Literarische Auseinandersetzungen in Deutschland am Ende
des 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Hans-Dieter Dahnke and Bernd Leistner, 2 vols (Berlin,
Weimar: Aufbau, 1989), II, 154–45; Friedrich Sengle, Das Genie und sein Fürst. Die
Gesschichte der Lebensgemeinschaft Goethes mit dem Herzog Karl August (Stuttgart,
Weimar: Metzler, 1993), 168–75.
 7. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom  135

as professor extraordinary at Jena, originally on a charge of atheism,

but in fact for maledictio principis, insulting the ruling prince through
unhelpfully intemperate outbursts that impugned the honour of all who
disagreed with him. But then, the presence in Jena of an unruly and
unpredictable intellectual was probably more than a small state and its
university administration could cope with. It might detract from the
university’s reputation. Its existence was precarious enough, with only
the petty states of Weimar, Gotha, Meiningen, and Coburg to finance it.
Universities like Wittenberg and Helmstedt were being closed; might
Jena go the same way? Yet Fichte had been imprudence itself in his
behaviour in Jena and had quarrelled with most of his colleagues; his
very presence invited student unrest. Goethe’s role in all this is not
unequivocal: he was prepared to use his power base in Weimar when
it suited him and no amount of ‘Goethepietät’ can get round that. The
damage done by Fichte in Jena was in fact nothing compared with that
caused by him once out of Jena; it moved a number of able men to leave
Jena (Schelling, for instance) and was contributory to the break-up
of the Romantic circle in Jena; the student numbers sank. For this we
cannot blame Goethe; instead, we must acknowledge that his position of
confidence and trust with Duke Carl August involved him in severe tests
of loyalty where even-handedness was not a possible option. Yet Goethe
shared his master’s fear of disorder and revolutionary stirring: he passed
over the prospect of obtaining Schelling for Jena in 1816, fearing not only
a re-run of the Fichte affair but revolution itself (whatever that might
mean).45 Ironically, Schelling went on to have many ribbons pinned to
his coat and to accept a Bavarian patent of nobility — the other, and less
attractive, aspect of academic freedom.
The case of the Jena professor Lorenz Oken46 may, however, have
been the immediate cause of Goethe’s unwillingness to have Schelling
around to compound his troubles. Here are the main points. Oken, like

45 Hans Tümmler, ‘Der Minister Goethe und die Jenaer Universitätsreform’, in Das
klassische Weimar und das große Zeitgeschehen. Historische Studien, Mitteldeutsche
Forschungen 78 (Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau, 1975) 12–40 (22).
46 On the Oken affair, see esp. Max Pfannenstiel and Rudolph Zaunick, ‘Lorenz
Oken und J. W. von Goethe’, Sudhoffs Archiv f. Geschichte der Medizin u. der
Naturwissenschaften, 33 (1941), 113–73; Hans Tümmler, ‘Goethe, Voigt und die
Weimarische Pressefreiheit 1815–1819’, in Goethe in Staat und Politik, 240–69;
Hermann Bräuning-Oktavio, Oken und Goethe im Lichte neuer Quellen (Weimar:
Arion, 1959), Sengle, Das Genie und sein Fürst, 368ff.
136 From Goethe to Gundolf

Fichte, from humble background and with the same forthrightness

of expression and lack of deference that had been Fichte’s undoing,
had come to Jena in 1807 as a ‘prof. extr. Med’. His inaugural lecture
as a professor of zoology, in 1809, Ueber den Werth der Naturgeschichte,
besonders fur die Bildung der Deutschen/On the Merit of Natural History
Especially for the Education of the Germans,47 owed much to the spirit of
Fichte and Schelling in its emphasis on the dependence of all specialized
science on a philosophy of nature which is itself the ground and
guarantor of all moral, political, and legal systems. Echoing Schelling,
that philosophy is now returning to its roots in nature philosophy, he
states the need for ‘ein Ganzes’ 51 (‘a whole’) as the basis of all scientific
endeavour, involving not just the systems of nature itself, the animal and
plant world, but its relationship to man and the state. His peroration
pleads in a direct address to the students that they have not come to
university for ‘Versorgung’, i.e., to provide for later professional needs,
but for ‘universale Bildung’ (‘education on a universal scale’).48 Thus
the professor of zoology is making here the unchallenged claim for
academic ‘Lehrfreiheit’ as the basis of all his subsequent lecture courses
(Humboldt avant la lettre). Goethe would not be in basic disagreement
with any of this, only he had a different emphasis, seeing in the closely
observed phenomenon, the limited sphere of activity, not just in the
grand system, evidence of the same universal type or archetype that
is Oken’s concern. He may not however, have been best pleased that
Oken nowhere made reference to his discovery of the intermaxillary
bone, where we have conclusive proof that Oken knew of Goethe’s work
in comparative anatomy and never mentioned it.49 That was, to say the
least, undiplomatic and was not to help him when he issued a direct
challenge to state authority.
For what happens when academic freedom, as defined in the very
general terms of Fichte and Schleiermacher, becomes a weapon for
political freedom? Notions of academic freedom that surrounded the

47 Ueber den Werth der Naturgeschichte, besonders für die Bildung der Deutschen. Von Oken,
bei der Eröffnung seiner Vorlesungen über Zoologie (Jena: Frommannn, 1809). The only
copy of this rare work in this country appears to be in Julius Hare’s collection in
Trinity College. See Chapter 17 in this volume.
48 Ibid., 18.
49 Bräuning-Oktavio, Oken und Goethe, 35.
 7. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom  137

foundation of the University of Berlin were not out of place in the

atmosphere of Prussian reform and the calls before 1815 for a nation
that would throw off the French yoke. After 1815, however, more care
might be needed. True, the petty state of Saxe-Weimar had put on a
liberal face by adopting a constitution, admittedly of a very limited
sort, yet allowing for freedom of the press. Goethe, his political
instincts normally conservative, was not pleased, fearing opposition,
not harmony, between the estates. His attitude to Oken remained
ambivalent: while admitting (later, and privately) that Oken’s work
might be mentioned in the same breath as Alexander von Humboldt’s,50
he found Oken’s overbearing behaviour (and failure to show deference
to him, Goethe, the scientist) unbearable. His worst fears about
press freedom were confirmed when in 1816 Oken began publishing
his periodical Isis (our hermetic tradition again).51 For Isis was not
only a platform for Oken’s scientific ideas — for which it remains
important in the history of zoology; it used (abused, in Goethe’s
view) its press privilege to offer affront and insult to other states in
the post-1815 settlement. One is indeed surprised that Oken got away
for so long with what he did and that the authorities (that included
Goethe) chose to ignore him for as long as they did.52 A compromise
was mooted: banning the printer in Jena, but not the publisher. But
then the Wartburg student festival in the summer of 1817, warmly
supported by Oken and Isis, although not in any revolutionary sense,
had been on Duke Carl August of Weimar’s territory. More powerful
neighbours like Austria and Prussia took note: Goethe had had what
may have been a mauvais quart d’heure with Metternich in Carlsbad on
the subject.
An insult offered to a Russian official in February of 1819 brought
things further to a head; if that was not enough, the former Jena student
Karl Sand chose that moment to murder the poet, courtier and Russian
police spy August von Kotzebue in Mannheim. It only needed §78 of the
Carlsbad Decrees for Oken’s dismissal to become inevitable; for here
academic freedom was hedged around with words concerning ‘misuse

50 Ibid., 74.
51 Isis oder Encyclopedische Zeitung von Oken (Jena: Expedition der Isis, Leipzig:
Brockhaus, 1817–48), esp. I, xi, xii, 64–87.
52 For most of this see Bräuning-Oktavio, Oken und Goethe, 75–95.
138 From Goethe to Gundolf

of position in influencing the minds of the young’,53 which was open

to very large and commodious interpretation. The Berlin theological
professor de Wette, who had written a letter to the mother of Carl Sand,
lost his post — despite energetic protests from his colleagues.54 The Jena
professors — to their credit — did the same in respect of Oken (whose
dismissal had none of the grim immediacy surrounding Christian
Wolff’s from Halle nearly a hundred years earlier). Goethe’s position
in this is, again, equivocal. It is all very well to say that Goethe opposed
the institution for which Oken stood, not the man himself.55 That is
only applying sophistry to a thoroughly disagreeable and unedifying
incident. If we do wish to see it in perspective, it might be worth saying
instead that Oken’s pattern follows closely that of Fichte’s: the anti-
courtly, anti-authoritarian strain of the university generation around
1790 (with the explorer and revolutionary Georg Forster as a kind of
academic mentor) or the rhetoric of the Freikorps and Burschenschaften
found their limits in severe test cases where the state saw its function as
restoring order. And Goethe was for order, in the form of a paternal and
patriarchal enlightened absolutism. Yet that was hardly compatible with
the inhibiting spirit of the Carlsbad Decrees.
Oken’s tragedy had been his failure to recognize that ‘Bildung
zur ernsten Humanitaet’ and ‘Liebe zum Ganzen’ (phrases from his
inaugural lecture)56 were not proof against the interests of the state, if
the state saw these threatened by a freedom of utterance underwritten
by ‘libertas philosophandi’. Cynics might say that Oken should have
done like so many academics of his generation and enjoyed the rich
pickings offered by a regenerated university system that was prepared
to tolerate more from its academic citizenry than from the rest of its
subjects. But even those in positions of some prestige — Schleiermacher,
for instance — knew that vigilance was necessary if academic freedom

53 Ibid., 78.
54 Weischedel, Idee und Wirklichkeit, 275–84.
55 Hans Tümmler speaks of ‘spezifisch Goethesche Humanität’. ‘Goethe, Voigt und
die Weimarische Pressefreiheit 1815–1819’, Goethe in Staat und Politik, 256. A very
fair assessment of Goethe‘s difficult position in Friedrich Sengle, ‘Zum Problem
der Goethewertung: ein Versuch’, in Neues zu Goethe. Essays und Vorträge (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1989), 235–54 (252f.).
56 ‘Education promoting serious humanity’; ‘love of the whole’. Oken, Ueber den Werth
der Naturgeschichte, 11.
 7. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom  139

was to be little more than the heady rhetoric of a founding generation.57

Wilhelm von Humboldt, it should be noted, had withdrawn completely
from the vita activa into the private vita contemplativa of comparative
linguistics, where the real needs and concerns of the university no
longer intrude. And, in fairness to Goethe, it must be recorded that he
too refused to continue in university politics after the Oken affair.
My second example, the case of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the best
known of the so-called Göttingen Seven, is linked with Humboldt and
his reforms in an important way. On a perhaps superficial level it marks
the Grimm brothers’ emergence out of the world of purely private
scholarship into that of the university and its peculiar responsibilities.
For the Grimms were, until their translation to Göttingen in 1830,
librarians and archivists, not immune to the conflicts between state and
scholarship (they had to work for King Jerome in Kassel) but shielded
from some of its effects. In securing them, the University of Göttingen
was enhancing its reputation as a centre of pure scholarship — in
the national language and literature, something that the Romantic
movement had brought about. In another sense, it was aligning
itself with the main thrust of the Humboldtian ideal in scholarship.
Jacob Grimm’s autobiographical sketch of 1831 makes that clear. The
reminiscence of student days in Marburg leads over to the awareness
that, since then, the state has extended its influence over university
affairs — through those very Staatsexamina that were part of the price
paid for the Humboldt reform.58 Uniformity, pressure of examinations,
coverage of material, all these are factors which impede the flight of the
intellect (Grimm’s image). If the state can never allow the student fully
to pursue his course of study without some consideration of the end
in view, he hopes that professors at least may be free from prescription
in the material on which they lecture. For Grimm’s account of himself
makes it clear that it was not the study of the law in itself (his original
course), but the incidental study of history and literature that made
him what he was later to become. In a way more concrete than Fichte
or Schelling or Schleiermacher could formulate it, the Grimm brothers,
in their various philological, lexicographical, literary and antiquarian

57 Weischedel, Idee und Wirklichkeit, 293–98.

58 Jacob Grimm, ‘Selbstbiographie’, in Kleinere Schriften, 8 vols (Berlin: Dümmler,
1879–1884, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1890), I, 7f.
140 From Goethe to Gundolf

studies, proceed from an original unity. They may not use words like
‘Allheit’, but they do believe in the essential oneness of all cultural
manifestations that are informed by language, a common language
that is the key to national past, national present, national personality,
national progress, national virtue. It will involve the shift of meaning
in the word ‘Vaterland’ from being the place in which one was born
and grew up, to the territory in which all are united in a political
‘Allheit’ through language. (That is the stated ideal.) This will involve
the most careful scrutiny of the past, the present, and the future — as
both brothers formulated it in letters to their friend, the Romantic poet
Achim von Arnim.59 The scrutiny of that national continuum requires
of the scholar and liberal intellectual a vigilance towards the state and
its constitutional guarantees.60 If, therefore, a constitution granted
by King William IV of Great Britain and Hanover is peremptorily
suspended by his brother and successor, the brutish Ernest Augustus
(the least attractive of Queen Victoria’s assortment of uncles), the
intellectual must raise his voice. Jacob Grimm makes the point that if
beneficiaries of a freedom unique to universities do not speak out, who
then will?
The case of the Göttingen Seven, dismissed by King Ernest Augustus
and told to leave Hanoverian territory, becomes the test against which all
subsequent questions of university and state in Germany are measured
(even more than 1848–49). It is very interesting to find the standard
books on the German universities, written about the turn of the century,
looking back at Göttingen and registering how far we have come since
then61 (perhaps not without the satisfying thought that Göttingen was
now Prussian). Yet, in referring to ‘German’ universities, I am committing
an all-too-common solecism: commentators at the time and since have
not been slow in pointing out that the Göttingen Seven need only cross
the border into Hesse-Cassel and enter into the service of other states
in the confederation62 where the ruler did not refer to his professors as

59 As set out in Achim von Arnim und die ihm nahe standen, ed. by Reinhold Steig and
Herman Grimm, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1894–1913), III, 5–44.
60 Set out in Jacob Grimm, ‘Ueber meine Entlassung’, Kleinere Schriften, I, 25–56.
61 Such as Paulsen, The German Universities, 260.
62 Ibid., 77.
 7. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom  141

‘Huren und Tänzerinnen’.63 (And the only time, incidentally, when it

was true to speak of ‘German’ universities under central state control,
was under National Socialism.)
And yet it would be wrong to leave the Grimm brothers and
academic freedom on that note. Wilhelm Grimm is incidentally one
of the many professors at the Frankfurt parliament of 1848–49. Their
courage, liberalism and quiet dignity finds its best expression in a place
where perhaps we would least expect it and in a work that has been read
throughout the world more than Goethe or Schiller or Thomas Mann
or Kafka: the famous Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
No English reader of the tales then and now would read the preface
to the 1840 edition, for these prefaces were never translated, and few
modern readers of the German edition will find those words reprinted,
except in a scholarly context.64 Students of the nineteenth century will
find, to my mind, no book more symbolical in iconography, layout
and text than this one of 1840, in expressing at once the ‘elevation and
fulness’ that so appealed to John Sterling, their appeal to ‘Gemüth’,
where the soul, emotions, and the finer sensitivities meet, and the
sobriety conditional on experiencing political tyranny. For we proceed
from a frontispiece (Brother and Sister) with its child, deer, flower-
bearing angel, witch and owl (the underlying message of the stories)
to a title page decorated with the life-giving symbols of insects, to the
second preface to Bettina von Arnim, whose children had been the first
recipients of the collection.65 Wilhelm Grimm had sent her the revised
edition in 1837, still affirming the tradition of scholarship in Göttingen
as professed by the great classicist Heyne; shortly after he and his family
were forced out of Göttingen, it was she who had received them and
given them succour. Now in the spring of 1840 nature comes to foster

63 ‘Whores and dancing-girls’. Briefe von Alexander von Humboldt an Varnhagen von Ense
aus den Jahren 1827 bis 1858 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1860), 11.
64 See David Blamires, Telling Tales. The Impact of Germany on English Children’s
Books 1780–1918 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2009), 147–80, https://doi.
org/10.11647/obp.0004
65 Wilhelm Grimm, dedication to Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Göttingen: Dieterich,
1840), quoted here from Kleinere Schriften, ed. by Gustav Hinrichs, 4 vols (Berlin:
Dümmler, 1881–83, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1887), I, 318f. The standard edition of
the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 3 vols (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1837, 1855) omits this
controversial section.
142 From Goethe to Gundolf

love and temper hatred, a reminder of how, in the spring of 1813, when
the first volume appeared, the Russians had been garrisoned in Kassel
and the hope of liberation was as spring (‘war das Gefühl der Befreiung
der Frühlingshauch’). Yes, Romantic language from one of the great
representatives of the Romantic movement. Yet a reminder that the
movement and its great achievement in university reform — perhaps
its greatest lasting achievement — was caught up in the real issues of
politics and was forced to come to terms with the exigencies of a system
that represented but few of the ideals that ushered in the University of
Berlin. The fairy-tales — and their preface — are part of that Romantic
cultural ‘Allheit’, the most accessible part no doubt; but they stand
symbolically beyond that for academic integrity in the face of crude
deployment of power and for a proper sense of the role of the university
in the life and affairs of the nation.

Mit diesen Worten sendete ich Ihnen das Buch vor drei Jahren aus
Göttingen, heute sende ich es Ihnen wieder aus meinem Geburtslande,
wie das erste Mal. Ich konnte in Göttingen aus meinem Arbeitszimmer
nur ein Paar über die Dächer hinausragende Linden sehen, die Heyne
hinter seinem Hause gepflanzt hatte, und die mit dem Ruhm der
Universität aufgewachsen waren: ihre Blätter waren gelb und wollten
abfallen, als ich am 3. Oktober I838 meine Wohnung verliess; ich glaube
nicht dass ich sie je wieder im Frühlingsschmuck erblicke. Ich musste
noch einige Wochen dort verweilen und brachte sie in dem Hause eines
Freundes zu, im Umgange mit denen, welche mir lieb geworden und lieb
geblieben waren. Als ich abreiste, wurde mein Wagen von einem Zug
aufgehalten: es war die Universität, die einer Leiche folgte. Ich langte in
der Dunkelheit hier an und trat in dasselbe Haus, das ich vor acht Jahren
in bitterer Kälte verlassen hatte: wie war ich überrascht, als ich Sie, liebe
Bettine, fand neben den Meinigen sitzend, Beistand und Hülfe meiner
kranken Frau leistend. Seit jener verhängnisvollen Zeit, die unser ruhiges
Leben zerstörte, haben Sie mit warmer Treue an unserem Geschick Theil
genommen, und ich empfinde diese Theilnahme ebenso wohlthätig als
die Wärme des blauen Himmels, der jetzt in mein Zimmer herein blickt,
wo ich die Sonne wieder am Morgen aufsteigen und ihre Bahn über die
Berge vollenden sehe, unter welchen der Fluss glänzend herzieht; die
Düfte der Orangen und Linden dringen aus dem Park herauf, und ich
fühle mich in Liebe und Hass jugendlich erfrischt. Kann ich eine bessere
Zeit wünschen, um mit diesen Märchen mich wieder zu beschäftigen?
Hatte ich doch auch im Jahre 1813 an dem zweiten Band geschrieben, als
wir Geschwister von der Einquartierung bedrängt waren und russische
Soldaten neben in dem Zimmer lärmten, aber damals war das Gefühl der
 7. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Academic Freedom  143

Befreiung der Frühlingshauch, der die Brust erweiterte und jede Sorge
verzehrte.66

Cassel am 17. September 1840

66 ‘With these words I sent you the book three years ago from Göttingen; today I send
it to you again from the place where I was born, like the first time. In Göttingen I
could see from my study lime trees rising high above the roofs, planted by Heyne
at the rear of his house, that had grown up with the university’s renown: the leaves
were yellow and about to drop when I left my dwelling on 3 October 1838: I do
not believe I shall ever catch sight of them again in full spring leaf. I was detained
there some weeks, which I spent in a friend’s house, in the company of those whose
affections I shared. When I took my leave, my carriage was held up by a procession:
it was the university joining a funeral cortege. I reached here in the dark and entered
the same house that I had left eight years ago in the bitter cold: how surprised I was
when I found you, dear Bettina, sitting beside my loved ones and giving aid and
succour to my ill wife. Since that fateful time that destroyed my peaceful existence
you have been warm and loyal in sharing our lot, and the feeling that imparts is like
the beneficent warmth of the blue sky that now casts its light into my room, where
I see again the sun, from its rise in the morning until it completes its course over the
mountains, the river flashing by at their feet: the scent of oranges and limes makes
its way up to me from the park and I feel that I am youthfully invigorated in love
as in hate. Can I wish for a better time to take up these fairy-tales again? For it was
in the year 1813 that I was working on the second volume, when my brothers and
sisters and I could scarcely move for troops billeted in our house, Russian soldiers
making noise in the next room; but in those days the feeling of liberation was the
spring air that made us breathe freely and made off with every care’.
ROMANTICISM
Fig. 11 Adrian Ludwig Richter, Genoveva (1820–84), The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, public domain.
 8. Fairy Stories for Very
Sophisticated Children:
Ludwig Tieck’s Phantasus1

No movement spoke more of children, their simplicity and innocence,

or the symbolic significance of children and youth, than did the German
Romantics. Yet by the same token, never was such childlike simple-
heartedness expressed with greater sophistication or invested with
more subliminal meaning. Romantic iconography, as perhaps the most
accessible of the movement’s art forms, bears this out. Philipp Otto
Runge’s best-known paintings of children, The Hülsenbeck Children, Rest
on the Flight to Egypt and the final version of Morning, place the new-
born or the young into a cyclical process of transience and renewal. The
symbolic flowers that accompany the images of children are guarantors
of the mystical pervasiveness of divine love, seen, at several neo-platonic
removes from its ideal source and centre, in the lasting values of marriage
and family life. Runge contributed two Low German stories to the most
famous of all German collections for children, the Grimms’ Kinder- und
Hausmärchen/Grimms’ Fairy Tales. This is not the place to discuss those
two tales, Von den Fischer un siine Fru/The Fisherman and His Wife and Van
den Machandel-Boom/The Juniper Tree, or the context in which they stand.
Yet no-one today, despite the dedication of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen
to the real child of real friends (Bettina von Arnim and her son Johannes

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Bulletin of the John Rylands University
Library of Manchester, 76 (1994), 59–68. On these aspects of Runge see Werner
Hofmann, ‘Antiker und christlicher Mythos — Natursymbolik — Kinder — Familie
und Freunde’ in the catalogue Runge in seiner Zeit (Hamburg, Kunsthalle and
Munich: Prestel, 1977), 278–79, 288–9.

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.08

148 From Goethe to Gundolf

Freimund) and the later intermarriage of the two families, regards the
collection as naive.
True, the artist member of the Grimm family, Ludwig Emil, did in
the frontispiece and vignettes do his best to foster a kind of naivety
through a deliberately stylized lack of sophistication. But neither the
early editions, nor the revised one of 1840, could be read without their
prefaces, with their scholarly credo, and in the case of the later revision,
their unrepentant affirmation of academic freedom.2 Ludwig Emil
Grimm had also done the frontispiece for an earlier Romantic collection
for children: Kinderlieder/Nursery Rhymes (1808), the third part of the
famous Des Knaben Wunderhorn/The Boy’s Magic Horn compiled by
Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Ludwig Emil was at that
stage still in his teens and not yet fully in charge of his individual
style. Yet students of the Romantic engraving will not fail to notice the
connection with those done in 1806 by the Riepenhausen brothers for
Ludwig Tieck’s Genoveva3 and the use of the sweetish faux-naif in the
service of piety and simplicity of heart. The Kinderlieder themselves
were not free of this kind of concession to the religious connotations
of folk custom. They were, however, also a record of the local variants
of children’s rhymes and of verse enactments by and for children. They
had a basis in the wider context of popular oral and written culture
that German Romanticism also sought both to compile and foster. Some
of these verses came later to be interpolated into a work by another
member of this extended clan: Brentano. His Gockel Hinkel Gackeleia of
1838, a re-telling of Italian fairytales, with plates provided by Ludwig
Emil Grimm and others, is part of Brentano’s late religious and poetic
symbolism, where poetry is the ladder that leads through the sufferings
of this world into eternity. And Brentano was, as an earlier essay of his
shows, aware even at this level of the complementary functions of icon
and extrapolated significance.4
Tieck, although Runge’s vignettes for his Minnelieder aus dem
Schwäbischen Zeitalter/Love Songs from the Swabian Era (1803) associate him

2 See Chapter 7 in this volume.

3 Franz and Johannes Riepenhausen, Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva (Frankfurt
am Main: Varrentrapp und Wenner, 1806).
4 Clemens Brentano, ‘Erklärung der Sinnbilder auf dem Umschlage dieser Zeitschrift’,
in Werke, ed. by Wolfgang Frühwald, Bernhard Gajek and Friedhelm Kemp, 4 vols
(Munich: Hanser, 1963–68), II, 1046–54, esp. 1046.
 8. Fairy Stories for Very Sophisticated Children  149

with this thematic complex, was less concerned with the multivalence
of symbolic or mythological iconography. Having introduced Runge
to Jacob Böhme and the hermetic tradition in which he stands, Tieck
withdrew from what seemed too disjunct a view of the world, one too
sharply divided into the symbols of light and darkness. Tieck could not
embrace Runge’s child-like and implicit faith through which alone these
seeming disharmonies might be resolved. But he had stated (or had
had a character state) in his most-read and most influential book for
the younger generation, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen/Franz Sternbald’s
Journeyings (1798):

Alle Kunst ist allegorisch. […] Was kann der Mensch darstellen, einzig
und für sich bestehend, abgesondert und ewig geschieden von der
übrigen Welt, wie wir die Gegenstände vor uns sehn? Die Kunst soll
es auch nicht: wir fügen zusammen, wir suchen dem einzelnen einen
allgemeinen Sinn aufzuheften, und so entsteht die Allegorie. Das Wort
bezeichnet nichts anders als die wahrhafte Poesie, die das Hohe und Edle
sucht und es nur auf diesem Wege finden kann.5

Brentano echoed this fourteen years later in stressing ‘Die tiefere

Bedeutung, das freie Gleichgewicht und die zierliche Zusammenstellung’6
of symbolic icons, free of conventional associations, yet concrete, not
ethereal. This is central Romantic doctrine, akin to that ‘Hindeutung
auf das Höhere, Unendliche’7 of Friedrich Schlegel’s Gespräch uber die
Poesie/Conversation on Poetry in Athenaeum (1800) or Novalis‘s aphoristic
definition of ‘Romantisieren’. True allegorical art will be co-extensive
with true Romantic art in that it is the things and objects accessible
to the finite mind and senses that will supply the link to a higher
perception and will point to the absolute. It is Caspar David Friedrich‘s

5 ‘All art is allegorical. […] What can man depict, sufficiently in itself, separate and
forever remote from the rest of the world, as we see the objects before us? Art also
should not attempt it: we put together, we seek to attach a general meaning to the
individual, and thus allegory comes into being. The word denotes nothing less than
true poetry that seeks the high and noble and can only find it by this route’. Ludwig
Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, ed. by Alfred Anger, Reclams Universal­
Bibliothek 8715–21 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966), 257f.
6 ‘Deeper significance, free balance and graceful accentuation’. Brentano, ‘Erklärung
der Sinnbilder’, 1046.
7 ‘“Pointing to the higher, never-ending”. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Gespräch über die
Poesie’, in Athenaeum. Eine Zeitschrift von August Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel, 3
vols (Berlin: Vieweg, 1798; Unger, 1799–1800), III, i, 121.
150 From Goethe to Gundolf

later quasi-mystical insight, in respect of this higher function of art: ‘Der

Maler soll nicht bloß malen, was er vor sich sieht, sondern auch, was er
in sich sieht’.8
Tieck returned to these notions of allegory in a seemingly unexpected
place, the discussion of ‘Märchen’ (‘Fairytales’) in the first part of his
Phantasus (1812).9 A brief description of this work, published in Berlin
in three parts between 1812 and 1816, may be appropriate. Its subtitle,
‘Eine Sammlung von Mährchen, Erzählungen, Schauspielen und
Novellen, herausgegeben von Ludwig Tieck’ (‘a collection of fairytales,
tales, plays and novellas, edited by Ludwig Tieck’), is not without the
agreeable irony of that fictional editorship. For the author of all the
works is none other than Tieck himself. The device was not new: in 1798,
Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen also bore ‘herausgegeben von Ludwig
Tieck’ on its title page (a ploy borrowed from Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister). But in those days, the imparting of the sacred truths of
art demanded self-effacement, like the common venture with Wilhelm
Heinrich Wackenroder of 1796, Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden
Klosterbruders/Heart’s Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar, innocent of all
authorial attribution. Now, in 1812–16, the irony was one of distance
from works, once associated with his name over a period of some
fifteen to twenty years, that he was now ‘editing’ with commentary, and
subjecting to the scrutiny of a sophisticated country-house gathering.
That society, full of literary associations to its very fingertips, is in its turn
ironically aware of playing a literary game first invented by Giovanni
Boccaccio (sharing their creator’s prejudice for the pre-1789 Goethe,
the assembled persons overlook Goethe’s recent revival of the form for
Germany, or Christoph Martin Wieland’s).10
It is fair to say that the re-publication of his various earlier works in
Phantasus (itself reprinted in 1828) gave them a cohesion that they had
lacked before; augmented by three more in a slightly different vein, they
establish the essential corpus of the Romantic tale of wonder or terror

8 ‘The painter is not merely to paint what he sees in front of him, but also what he sees
in himself’. Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen, ed. by Sigrid Hinz
(Berlin: Henschel, 1984), 129.
9 All references to Phantasus are taken from Ludwig Tieck, Schriften in zwölf Bänden,
ed. by Manfred Frank et al., 6 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag,
1985-) VI.
10 Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten/Conversations of German Émigrés
of 1795 and Wieland’s Hexameron von Rosenhain of 1800.
 8. Fairy Stories for Very Sophisticated Children  151

before it becomes associated with E. T. A. Hoffmann or Arnim, not to

speak of less fastidious devotees of the mode. Five of them are the ones
chosen by Thomas Carlyle in 182711 to signal the, for him, most significant
developments in modern German short prose fiction: Der blonde Eckbert/
Fair-Haired Eckbert, Der getreue Eckart/Faithful Eckart, Der Runenberg/The
Rune Mountain, Die Elfen/The Elves and Der Pokal/The Goblet (without,
however, the uncanniest of all, Liebeszauber/Love’s Magic). But included
in Phantasus would be other, discrete works, some of which specifically
bore the subtitle ‘Märchen’, such as the dramatic adaptations of Charles
Perrault, Rothkäppchen/Red Riding Hood, Der Blaubart/Bluebeard, Der
gestiefelte Kater/Puss in Boots and Däumchen/Hop o’ My Thumb.12 The long
(and somewhat tedious) chapbook adaptation, Fortunat, is also subtitled
‘Ein Märchen’. This placed it in a category with Die schöne Magelone/
Fair Magelone, the other ‘Volksbuch’ reworking, given here pride of place
over a number of earlier ones now excluded.13 The tone of the collection
thus appears to be dominated by a wide and commodious definition
of fairytale. The 125 pages of introductory conversation in volume one
that precede the reading and discussion of the stories, is not essentially
restricted to matters of genre or tone. And it is here that Tieck comes the
closest in his middle years to defining what ‘Märchen’ means and what
it takes in or excludes.
A number of these works, prose or drama, had appeared first in 1796
in a collection called Volksmährchen/Folktales.14 That they manifestly were
folktales only in respect of the traditions of other nations, or that they

11 [Thomas Carlyle], German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors, 4 vols (Edinburgh
and London: Tait, 1827).
12 Der Blaubart is a dramatic adaptation of Bluebeard, in prose. Originally published
in 1796, it was Tieck’s attempt at producing a ‘fantastic’ subject for the stage, along
the lines of Gozzi. It was never a stage success, being too literary and too self-
consciously aware of that literary quality. Der gestiefelte Kater, first published in 1797,
is similarly a drama in prose. It is both a satire on the contemporary theatre and
its bad taste, and a ‘play within a play’ with audience participation. Many critics
have taken it to illustrate the principles of Romantic irony, particularly on account
of its deliberate breaking of dramatic illusion. Rothkäppchen appeared in 1800. This
time in verse, this little play introduces more direct satire on conventional piety
and popular philosophy, with the wolf as ‘sansculotte’ into the bargain. Däumchen
was first published in Phantasus in 1812. Here there is much more literary satire,
including some unlikely mixtures, such as the classical trimeter and the Arthurian
court.
13 These are Die Geschichte von den Heymons Kindern, Denkwürdige Geschichtschronik der
Schildbürger, and Sehr wunderbare Historie von der Melusina.
14 Popular Fairy Tales, ed. by Peter Leberecht, 3 vols (Berlin: Carl August Nicolai, 1797).
152 From Goethe to Gundolf

teased and tweaked the reader with fictitious places of publication such
as ‘Bergamo’ or ‘Istambul’, need not concern or surprise us unduly.15
Johann Carl August Musäus, whose tone of ironic archness is a source of
particular irritation to the Tieck of Phantasus, had called his collection of
1782–86 Volksmärchen der Deutschen/German Folktales, and this they too
by no means all were. The early Tieck was scrupulous enough to recall
that all adaptations — whether from German sources or others — were
in a sense ‘popular’. Only, the ironic, bantering, witty aside-taking of the
reader occasionally suggested the sophistication of the Cabinet des fées or
even the French rococo, and the introduction of stock figures from the
commedia dell’arte was doubtless rooted in Tieck’s precocious reading of
Carlo Gozzi as a schoolboy. The circle of young literary men and women
in Berlin and Jena, who saw themselves as creating a new awareness of
poetry, poetic tradition, and the poetic process, and who were to call
themselves ‘Romantic’, saw Tieck’s ‘Märchen’ as a demonstration of what
they, too, were striving for. August Wilhelm Schlegel’s review of Ritter
Blaubart/Sir Bluebeard (as it was then known) and Der gestiefelte Kater
in the Jena Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung in 179716 can with justification
be seen as one of the important first links forged between Tieck and
the Jena circle. The continuation of the Volksmährchen that came out in
1799–1800, now bore the name of Romantische Dichtungen/Poetic Works
in a Romantic Vein. And it would be fair to say that, for Tieck at least,
‘Romantic’ was indeed synonymous with three elements of his early
works summed up in these titles: ‘Volksdichtung’, but its adaptation in
a succession of sophisticated self-mirrorings (as in his Romantic legend
drama Genoveva);17 ‘Märchen’, but in the widest sense, giving fullest rein
to the creative imagination; and as the movement’s name of ‘Romantic’
implied, the receptive and eclectic drawing on a wide range of poetic
traditions from the Middle Ages to the present.

15 
The title pages read: Der gestiefelte Kater. Kindermärchen in drei Akten, mit
Zwischenspielen, einem Prologe und Epiloge von Peter Leberecht. Aus dem Italienischen.
Erste unverbesserte Auflage. Bergamo 1797. In Commission bei Onario Senzacolpa. Die
sieben Weiber des Blaubart. Eine wahre Familiengeschichte herausgegeben von Gottlieb
Färber. Istambul, bey Heraklius Murusi Hofbuchhändler der hohen Pforte; im Jahr der
Hedschrah 1212.
16 
August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by Eduard Böcking, 12 vols
(Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846–47), XI, 136–50.
17 
Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva. Ein Trauerspiel. In: Romantische Dichtungen von
Ludwig Tieck, 2 vols (Jena: Frommann, 1799–1800), II, 1–272.
 8. Fairy Stories for Very Sophisticated Children  153

In that sense, ‘Märchen’, as he was to define it in the exchange of

opinions in Phantasus, was part of Tieck’s wider programme of literary
renewal and reception. The dedication of Phantasus to August Wilhelm
Schlegel, with its reminder of their once close association, reinforces the
connection. The themes, the old and new loves, but also the prejudices
that are rehearsed in the framework discussion in Phantasus, are a
catalogue of his literary interests over more than a generation, often of
his unrepentant advocacy, against all the evidence, of the influences he
considered to be formative on his youthful poetic development. They
need not concern us here, except in the sense that the discussion of
‘Märchen’ is positioned amid a shifting swirl of images, all stations in a
pilgrimage (Tieck uses the words ‘andächtige Wallfahrt’)18 to the scenes
of old acquaintances and affections. The discussions are ‘framed’, but
Tieck initiates inside each frame processes that inform of unfulfilled
states, longing, reflections that constantly change perspective and
dimension. Of that longing, ‘Sehnsucht’, a discussion partner speaks in
these telling words:

[…] ja, es gibt eine ewige Jugend, eine Sehnsucht, die ewig währt, weil
sie ewig nicht erfüllt wird; weder getäuscht noch hintergangen, sondern
nur nicht erfüllt, damit sie nicht sterbe, denn sie sehnt sich im innersten
Herzen nach sich selbst, sie spiegelt in unendlich wechselnden Gestalten
das Bild der nimmer vergänglichen Liebe, das Nahe im Fernen, die
himmlische Ferne im Allernächsten.19

Thus the polyvalency of poetry is but part of this self-reflection, this

reaching out in order to turn in on oneself, this self-discovery in all
objects ‘out there’. In the same way, no landscape stands still, but shifts
and undulates in the movement of the eye, always withholding new
perspectives yet to be discovered, as music is lost even as the melodic
line takes shape. And these two means of sensory perception join forces
with the spoken word to produce, not merely a symposium of opinions
and readings, but a synaesthesia.

18 ‘Devout pilgrimage’. Phantasus, 15.

19 ‘[…] yes, there is an eternal youth, a longing that lasts forever, because it forever
cannot be fulfilled; neither deceived nor betrayed, but only not fulfilled, so as not to
die, for it longs in its innermost heart for itself, it mirrors in an endlessly changing
array of figures the image of a love that never passes away, the near in the distant,
heavenly distance in that which is the very closest’. Phantasus, 33.
154 From Goethe to Gundolf

By the same token, there is no contradiction in a work seemingly

so devoted to the celebration of German traditions, for the whole to
be ‘framed’, at the beginning and end of the discussion, between Italy
and Spain. In the evocation of Lago Maggiore at the beginning (called
‘romantisch’), the Italian landscape seen through German eyes (as
Goethe at that very moment was preparing to recall), we are reminded
of how the Nazarenes, the school of German Romantic painters, enter
into the sensuousness of Italy through a meticulousness that owes much
to Dürer; and the ending in a ‘spanische Glosse’, a contrived technical
strophic device, can nevertheless conjoin music, love and longing as one
aesthetic experience. They remind us that ‘romantisch’ may also mean
the lands of romance, ‘das alte romantische Land’20 of the opening to
Wieland’s Ariostian verse epic Oberon of 1780. And without that ‘romance’
component, Tieck’s collection would lack its love story, Magelone; even
its dramatized tale of human folly, Fortunat, draws on so many themes of
common provenance in other literatures. The lowering, threatening and
terrifying, as exemplified in the German forest landscape (Der blonde
Eckbert, Der Runenberg) or enacted in the narrow lanes of a German
town (Liebeszauber) are complemented by the wit, elegance and very
sophisticated playfulness of Ludovico Ariosto or Perrault. This, too, is
quintessentially Romantic. For the Schlegel brothers, the publication of
Old French or Provençal texts was not subordinated to a preoccupation
with things Germanic. And for Tieck, the ultimate in poetic incarnation,
William Shakespeare, is unthinkable without the widest associations
with the literature of the European Renaissance.
In a similar way, the landscapes invoked in the framework discussion
serve a variety of functions. They are in one sense ‘real’, in that beholders
stand in front of them and feel drawn to them. They are, however,
extended as ‘mythische Gegenden’21 that summon up the widest and
most varied sets of associations, human, artistic, musical. They become
symbols of other poetic processes; the romantic landscape becomes
the Romantic poem; its sinuosities and undulations, its relationship of
near and far suggest the Romantic narrative and its constant reference
beyond itself to unfulfilled desires and longings. But ruins, waterfalls,
formal parks and English gardens all have associations with the widest

20 ‘The old romantic land’.

21 ‘Mythical regions’. Phantasus, 18.
 8. Fairy Stories for Very Sophisticated Children  155

manifestations of art forms, even when our aesthetic sense may be

offended by eccentric invention or excrescence. Thus Ariosto’s ‘zarter,
blumenartiger Witz’22 suggests the arabesque, Pedro Calderón the formal
garden of French provenance, and Shakespeare, not surprisingly, the
English park. Tieck does not exclude even the grotesque, the Bomarzo-
style monstrosity, from the range of landscape evocation.
All this has significant implications both for Tieck’s definition of
‘Märchen’ and for his practice as a narrator. Wieland, in his Hexameron
of 1800, for instance, had seen little distinction between short fiction
narratives (‘Erzählung’) and ‘Märchen’. The first section of Phantasus
(that is, after the introduction) and the one that contains the prose
narratives in the collection, is preceded by two attempts to qualify
‘Märchen’, one real and the other allegorical. The group of literary friends
and acquaintances wishes, before it hears fairy stories read aloud, to
decide among itself what this art form is. But is it merely a phenomenon
restricted to aesthetic or poetological criteria? Evidently not; for, a few
pages earlier, it having been decided that their story-telling should begin
with a ‘Märchen’, it had been variously described as relating to deeper
processes of experience. ‘Mit Märchen […] fängt das Leben an’,23 one of
the company volunteers; they are the means by which the child’s play
and imagination take shape and form. But the spectacle of the sinking
sun elicits the response: ‘Auch ein Märchen’.24 The onset of night, the
stealing in of shadows, awaken the sense of longing for what is about
to be lost forever from our sight. In its main discussion, the company
proceeds from concrete examples: the ones some do not like (Hamilton’s
in the Cabinet des fées or Musäus), the ones others do (Goethe, Novalis).
If the witty rococo-style tale suffers all kinds of interruptions and
interpolations, the real ‘Märchen’ calls for consistency of composition,
and instead of that knowing cleverness, an innocence that is neither too
obtrusive nor too mannered. This is where Goethe and Novalis reap
praise, evidence, should any be needed, of Tieck’s manifestly literary
preferences. The mention of Ariosto (literature again) elicits a double
response: some find him lacking in shape and order, too fragmented,
others defend his lightness of touch, his deft moves from one theme

22 ‘Gentle, flower-like wit’. Phantasus, 108.

23 ‘Life begins with fairytales’. Phantasus, 98.
24 ‘A fairytale too’. Ibid.
156 From Goethe to Gundolf

or adventure to another. As neither nature nor architecture can abide

an excess of unheightened expanse, but require this to be broken and
relieved, so Ariosto fulfils this decorative, arabesque-like function to
perfection (here follows a disquisition on garden style).
The remaining general discussion is brief but crucial. If the ‘Märchen’
could hitherto be informed by the processes of the imagination and
longing, its other side now comes to the fore. The ‘Märchen’ also
comes about where our premonitions and intimations, our existential
angst, take over and populate a landscape, symbolic or real, with
the projections of our inner anxieties. The unnerving and ultimately
terrifying aspect of such tales is that commonplace or banal objects are
invested by the imagination with a significance beyond themselves. It
is here that the word ‘allegorisch’25 occurs and the link is forged with
central tenets of Romantic poetic theory. It is the awareness that no
product of the imagination, no form of poetic expression of whatever
kind, has substance without that higher referentiality.
Tieck is not Novalis (or Friedrich Schlegel). He is concerned less
with the philosophical connotations of allegory than with its actual
manifestation. How better to do this than in the allegorical poem,
Phantasus, that follows. If the winged boy Phantasus has affinities with
Puck or Ariel, it is also he who leads away from brooding introspection,
book-learning and speculation, into a symbolic landscape. The plants
and metals there, or the sunrise over all of nature, suggest Philipp Otto
Runge’s world of higher significance, the glimpse of an ‘ldeenparadies’
in the symbolic progression from earth to heaven, from darkness to
light. But Tieck’s imagination never becomes ethereal: we are still in the
world of ‘Märchen’. Its allegorical denizens have names: ‘Schreck’, ‘liebe
Albernheit’, ‘Scherz’ and ‘Liebe’.26 Only ‘Liebe’ shares affinities with
Runge’s cosmic vision, as that force that is felt by all things, animate and
inanimate alike. But here Tieck abruptly switches mythologies. True to
the awareness that the universal may be hidden in the objects around us,
Phantasus brings about the ultimate allegorical transference of meaning.
The landscape of mountain, grotto and forest reveals itself as a huge
head or face:27 it is the god Pan himself, ‘von allem der Erhalter’, the

25 ‘Allegorical’. Phantasus, 113.

26 ‘Fright’, ‘sweet silliness’, ‘pleasantry’, ‘love’.
27 Cf. modern examples of the anthropomorphic landscape in: Ferdinand Hodler,
Landschaften, ed. by Oskar Bätschmann et al., Schweizerisches Institut für
 8. Fairy Stories for Very Sophisticated Children  157

source and upholder of all things. Perhaps Tieck wishes less to strain the
limits of allegory as to remind us — in a reminiscence of allusions that
stretch from Hieronymus Bosch and François Rabelais or both Tassos
to his contemporary Joseph Görres28 — that well-being and terror are
never far from each other. In August Wilhelm Schlegel’s review of 1797,
that realm had been characterized by the co-existence of these two,
‘Behagen’ and ‘Entsetzen’.29 But we must not overlook Tieck’s particular
emphasis. Pan produces horror, it is true, ‘Graun’ and ‘Schauder’ (strong
words)30 but also ‘Schreck’. Earlier in the poem it is ‘Schreck’ and ‘liebe
Albernheit’, fright and agreeable silliness, who aid and abet each other
in games of terror whose outcome is predictable but deliciously chilling
all the same. And no-one is fonder of sheer ‘Albernheit’ than, by his own
admission,31 Tieck himself. His Hop o’ My Thumb adaptation, Däumchen,
for all its parodistic asides, is ample proof, if any were needed.
It is true that the stories now read in the society tend towards the
uncanny and the horrific. Der blonde Eckbert adds the fantastic for good
measure, but fetches it back into our present consciousness in order to
blur distinctions between imagination and reality, moral responsibility
and malign contingency. Liebeszauber suggests that by looking in on
any window in any back alley we may be confronted with visions of
terror and obscenity, unmotivated and consuming, that may re-emerge
as destructive, if avenging forces. It is thus significant that, of all the
stories, Die schöne Magelone is provided with a preface. The garden or
landscape symbols there are invoked anew in order to summon up, not
terror, but the wondrous world of a past in which this exemplary love-
story is situated. The aesthetic justification of renewal or modernization
of an old story (with the attendant perils of the falsely archaic) must
lie in the revocation of the near-paradisal state of lost innocence where

Kunstwissenschaft (Zurich: Verlagshaus Zürich, 1987), 42f.; Max Klinger, Wege zum
Gesamtkunstwwerk (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1984), 221.
28 Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth. Manier und Manie in der europäischen
Kunst. Von 1520 bis 1650 und in der Gegenwart, rowohlts deutsche enzyklopädie
50–51, 2 vols (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957), I , 86f.; Elisabeth Stopp, ‘Die Kunstform
der Tollheit: zu Clemens Brentanos und Joseph Görres‘ “BOGS der Uhrmacher”’, in
Clemens Brentano. Beiträge des Kolloquiums im Freien Deutschen Hochstift 1978, ed. by
Detlev Lüders (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980), 358–76, esp. 375.
29 ‘Contentment’ and ‘revulsion’. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, XI, 136.
30 ‘Spine-tingling horror’ and ‘awfulness’.
31 Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 62,
358.
158 From Goethe to Gundolf

once all things stood in harmony with each other, the world summoned
up by Novalis in the Atlantis story in his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen.
To tell of that innocence, unaffected by time or transience, must also
be the function of the ‘Märchen’. It is the substance of some of Tieck’s
most-quoted lines, from his adaptation of another ‘Volksbuch’, Kaiser
Octavianus (1804):

Mondbeglänzte Zaubernacht,
Die den Sinn gefangen hält,
Wundervolle Märchenwelt,
Steig‘ auf in der alten Pracht!32

These lines become a kind of poetic credo when chosen in 1828 to lead the
procession of products of that imagination in volume one of Tieck’s own
definitive edition of his works (Schriften) begun in that year. Titles like
Romantische Dichtungen are no longer necessary: the symbolic evocation
of the past and its wondrous harmony and unity, the celebration of the
love and chivalry recorded in romance (of whatever provenance), also
constitute ‘Märchen’ and are by definition ‘romantisch’. But we dare not
overlook that that world of ‘Märchen’ has to co-exist with the panicked
terror produced when the harmonious landscape that we see before us
suddenly turns into one of the monsters in the Bomarzo garden.

32 ‘Moonbeam-lit magic night,

That holds the mind in thrall,
Wondrous magic world,
Rise up in glory as of old!’
Kaiser Octavianus. Ein Lustspiel in zwei Theilen von Ludwig Tieck (Jena: Frommann,
1804), 35.
Fig. 12 Friedrich Gundolf, photograph by Jacob Hilsdorf (1911), University Library
Heidelberg, Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Friedrich_
Gundolf_(HeidICON_33461).jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0.
 9. Gundolf’s Romanticism1

Romantik und Kritizismus (Schriftstellertum). Schlegel. Wackenroder. In

der ganzen Romantik ist der Geist, die Ironie die Hauptsache. Sie ist tief
literarisch. Tieck. Wackenroder, ein Standard Werk der Romantik, ganz
analytisch-schriftstellerisch. Und naiv. Ebenso Lucinde. Die Romantiker
im Ganzen keine starken Plastiker: philosophisch. Ihre Naivetät (sic) ist
Raffinement. ‘Welch ein Wissen vom Dichterischen, von Sprache und
Bildung…’ (Gundolf).2

This jotting by Thomas Mann, written sometime after 1907, after the
appearance of Friedrich Gundolf’s Romantiker-Briefe/Romantics’ Letters,
may serve by way of introduction to our subject. It demonstrates
how pervasive and influential an approach to Romanticism such as
Gundolf’s could be, one that was free of mere scholarly or academic
detail or pedantry, which was presented with an analytical sweep, a
self-confidence in judgement, a contentiousness reinforced at every
turn by intriguing and tantalizing formulation, and above all a control
of language; the whole revealing its author to be one who had, in a
masterly and masterful fashion, read widely and in detail but had also
drunk deep at the well of historical and philosophical speculation that
owed much to Jacob Burckhardt or even Friedrich Nietzsche. Mann’s

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘Gundolf’s Romanticism’, in

Deutsche Romantik und das 20. Jahrhundert. Londoner Symposion 1985, ed. by Hanne
Castein and Alexander Stillmark, Stuttgarter Arbeiten zur Germanistik 177
(Stuttgart: Heinz, 1986), 25–40. On this subject, but with a different accentuation,
see Peter Küpper, ‘Gundolf und die Romantik’, Euphorion 75 (1981), 194–203.
2 ‘Romanticism and criticism (writings authored by them). Schlegel. Wackenroder.
In all of Romanticism spirit, irony is predominant. It is deeply literary. Tieck.
Wackenroder, a standard work of Romanticism, analytical and literary to the core.
And naïve. Lucinde the same. The Romantics in general have no strong sense of
form. Philosophical. Their naivete is over-cultivation. “What knowledge of matters
poetic, of language and culture…” (Gundolf)’. Thomas Mann, quoted in T. J. Reed,
Thomas Mann. The Uses of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 129.

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.09

162 From Goethe to Gundolf

(and others’) knowledge of German Romanticism may have come from

reading of single writers (notably Novalis and E. T. A. Hoffmann) or
through the mediation of Richard Wagner; but one is also tempted to
say that the synthetic and highly individual approach to the whole
movement used by Gundolf not only in 1907, but time and time again
in other writings, had an influence on the intellectually and culturally
aware reader that may have been incalculable.
If we turn from the incalculable to the certain, the following seems
to emerge. It is customary to see Gundolf’ s views on Romanticism as
an emanation of the Stefan George circle, the critical prose obbligato to
the severe poetic tones of the master to whom Gundolf — publicly and
privately — so selflessly and abjectly deferred. Seen thus, Gundolf’s two
works on Romanticism, the Romantiker-Briefe of 1907, and Romantiker/
Romantics of 1930–31, but notably also Shakespeare und der deutsche
Geist/Shakespeare and the German Spirit (1911), seem to reflect the
preferences and prejudices of an exclusive circle. I believe this view to
be in some need of revision: for the very simple, primary and obvious
reason that the actual scholarly activity of the George circle or its
associates cannot be subsumed under such general categories. One has
only to mention the names of Norbert von Hellingrath, and his work
on Friedrich Hölderlin, Karl Wolfskehl and his energetic activity on the
literature of the Middle Ages and the Baroque, and Gundolf himself,
with his highly disparate oeuvre, to remind oneself that the circle
encompassed a wide range of intellectual and scholarly endeavour:
editions, essays, translations, anthologies, critical studies.
Yet the especial closeness of Gundolf to George, his role as the beloved
disciple, the boundless love and respect of one for the other, seems to
admit of a distinction in the case of Gundolf. Romanticism, seen from
this perspective, might seem to represent rather more the crumbs from
off the table where the feast of great names from history’s temple of
fame is served: Caesar, Dante, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang
Goethe, Nietzsche and George himself, confirming George’s own view
of the nineteenth century as an age of spiritual and intellectual decline,
as he writes on June 11, 1910 to Gundolf, with the following adaptation
of Nietzsche:

Wie kommt es dass das gesamtergebnis kein GOETHE sondern ein

CHAOS ist, ein nihilistisches Seufzen, ein nicht-wissen wo-aus-wo-ein ein
 9. Gundolf’s Romanticism  163

instinkt von ermüdung der in praxi immer dazu treibt zum achtzehnten
JAHRHUNDERT ZURÜCKZUGREIFEN?3

This would leave us with only the ‘great figures’ of earlier history, or
those few of the nineteenth century who have upheld standards against
the rush of so-called progress and materialism, those names from across
the ages that George invokes in the opening pages of Der siebente Ring/The
Seventh Ring: Dante, Goethe, Nietzsche, Arnold Böcklin. To these names
from the previous century Gundolf would hasten to add Burckhardt,
Leopold von Ranke, Theodor Mommsen, Herman Grimm (the
biographer of Michelangelo), even Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, for having
kept their heads high amidst ‘unsäglich öden stoffseligen doktrinären
und bildungswütig-seichten Zeitalter der Presse, der Technik, des
naturwissenschaftlichen Forschtriumphes und eines missverstandenen
Bismarck’.4 The return to Goethe in particular is a means of confirming
a new and more exclusive awareness of culture and the poetic office; the
return to the age which Goethe dominated, to which in Gundolf’s eyes
he gave its quintessential poetic expression, receives — but essentially
through the reference to Goethe — its most adequate justification.
In these terms, two strands emerge in Gundolf’s writings, both
affirmations, but one distinctly subordinated to the other. This seems
to me to be at the very heart of Gundolf’s approach to literature — and
by extension to Romanticism. Karl Wolfskehl, on receiving proofs of the
Friedrich Schlegel section to Gundolf’s introduction to the Romantiker-
Briefe, put his finger on the problem in this highly perceptive statement:

Dass das Aufregende, Saaten Streuende, wetternde, pflügende,

das Vorbotenhafte, Mehr, wichtiger, menschlicher sei als die Zeiten
oder Wesen der Erfüllung sag ich nicht, ich sage nur es sei eine

3 ‘How is it that the end result is not a GOETHE but CHAOS, a nihilistic sighing, not
knowing one way or the other, an instinct of lassitude that in practice impels us back
to EMBRACE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY?’ Friedrich Gundolf, Briefwechsel, ed.
by Robert Boehringer and Georg Peter Landmann (Munich, Düsseldorf: Küpper,
1962), 202.
4 ‘An age that was unbelievably tedious, materially-oriented, doctrinaire and
embracing culture but shallowly, an age of the press, technology, triumphant
scientific progress and a Bismarck they failed to appreciate’. Letter to Wolfskehl,
September 29, 1905. Karl and Hanna Wolfskehl, Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Gundolf
1899–1931, ed. by Karlheinz Kluncker, 2 vols, Publications of the Institute of
Germanic Studies, University of London (Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini, 1977),
II, 30.
164 From Goethe to Gundolf

Geschmacksfrage, wie Nietzsche am besten und — Peinlichsten zeigt, ob

einem Heraklit lieber ist oder Platon.5

Heraclitus or Plato? Gundolf sees it in less philosophical terms, but the

implications are the same. In almost every major work of Gundolf’s or in
almost every statement about a, for him, major figure, we will find these
two opposite positions stated and their polarity defended:

Fur Platon waren die Ideen, für Jesus das Himmelreich, für Hölderlin
Hellas gelebte Gegenwart, für die Romantiker waren sie die Ferne, das
Andre, das Noch-nicht oder Nicht-mehr.
(Caesar)6

Die Romantik hat sich nicht in großen Menschen erfüllt und nicht in
Werken ihr eigentümliches Leben zusammendrängen und festhalten
können. Nur dichterische und gedankliche Bruchstücke geben uns Kunde
von ihr als einer — weit über ihre Ergebnisse hinaus — eindringlichen
und umfassenden Bewegung, wie angespülte Trümmer vom Sturm.7

Schon nach dieser Weltverfassung konnten die Romantiker nicht das

Individuum suchen wollen, an Ausbildung der Persönlichkeit dachten
sie nur, sofern dadurch ihr Spiel und die Fülle ihrer Gesichte gesteigert
wurde. Sie sind darin die Widerrenaissance und stellen das Goethesche
Ideal in Frage. Sie fühlten sich als Fragmente, als Wellen einer großen
Vibration.
(Romantiker-Briefe)8

5 ‘I won’t say that excitement, dissemination, lightning flashes, tilling, pointing the
way — are more, more significant, more human than times of fulfilment and their
agents. I merely say: it is a matter of taste, as Nietzsche best shows — and most
notoriously so — whether Heraclitus is more to one’s taste than Plato’. Ibid., II, 48.
6 ‘For Plato it was ideas, for Jesus the kingdom of heaven, for Hölderlin Hellas, the
very present times they lived in, for the Romantics it was the distant, the other,
the as yet fulfilled or not yet fulfilled’. Gundolf, Caesar. Geschichte seines Ruhms
[1924], reprinted in Caesar. Geschichte seines Ruhms (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1968), 251.
7 ‘Romanticism did not find fulfilment in great names and was not able to concentrate
and give form to the essential features of its life. Only fragments of poetry and
thought bear witness to it — and far beyond what it actually produced — as an
encompassing and penetrating movement — like jetsam after a storm’. Gundolf,
Beiträge zur Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte, ed. by Victor A. Schmitz und Fritz
Martini, Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung
Darmstadt 54 (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1980), 85 (referred to subsequently
as Beiträge).
8 ‘Given their way of seeing the world, the Romantics could not and would not seek
the individual; they were only concerned with the development of personality, and
 9. Gundolf’s Romanticism  165

Allerdings hat in der eigentlichen Dichtung das klassischplastische

Prinzip seinen endgültigen Ausdruck nur in dem einen Goethe
gefunden. Die Romantik hat sich in der Dichtung nicht bis zu eigenen
Formen verdichten können, ist Tendenz geblieben.
(Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist)9

Sein Hellas hat also nichts mit Ruinen-sentimentalität, auch nicht — wie
man seit Haym meist annimmt — mit romantischer Sehnsucht zu tun,
die aus der Leere kommt und durch Traum ersetzt, was die Wirklichkeit
versagt.
(Hölderlins Archipelagus)10

Es ist ein wesentliches Zeichen der klassischen Naturen daß bei

ihnen Instinkt, Genie und Denken in derselben Richtung arbeiten.
Ihr Denken ist nur die bewußte, hell gewordene Verlängerung des
dunklen Lebensstroms der aus ihrer Mitte bricht, nur der genaue und
gewissenhafte Vollzieher dessen was der Grundtrieb ihres Lebens ihm
befiehlt, ihr Denken hat nicht, wie bei den Romantikern, Mystikern,
Musikern eine eigene gesetzgebende oder gesetzstürzende Gewalt,
sondern nur eine exekutive. Bei solchen Naturen sind die Äußerungen
des formenden Bewußtseins nur der getreue Index dessen was in der
dunklen Mitte und Tiefe vorgeht, die Helle ihrer Glut, der Logos ihres
Eros. Denn Logos und Eros sind dann nicht notwendige Gegensätze, es
sind nur verschiedene Helligkeitsgrade desselben Zustandes. Für diese
klassische Geistesart, welche im Altertum uns immer wieder als Norm
bezaubert, ist in der neuen Welt Goethe das größte, sicher das deutlichste
Beispiel.
(Goethe)11

that only to enhance their play and their multiform visions. In that respect they are
the Counter-Renaissance and they call the Goethean ideal into question. They had a
sense of being fragments, waves of a great vibration’. Ibid., 88.
9 ‘Of course in real poetry a classical principle of form found its final and ultimate
expression in Goethe. Romanticism was unable to achieve concentrated form and
has never gained established status’. Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist
(Berlin: Bondi, 1920 [1911]), 322.
10 ‘His Hellas has nothing to do with a sentimental cult of ruins, or — as Haym would
have us believe — with Romantic longing, that comes out of the void and supplants
through dream what reality does not supply’. Gundolf, Dem lebendigen Geist, ed. by
Dorothea Berger und Marga Frank, Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Akademie
für Sprache und Dichtung Darmstadt 27 (Heidelberg, Darmstadt: Lambert
Schneider, 1962), 30.
11 ‘It is an essential characteristic of classical natures that instinct, genius and thought
all work in one and the same direction. Their thinking is but the extension, made
166 From Goethe to Gundolf

Die Romantik lebte in einer Zwischenschicht zwischen den ewigen

Kräften und den Zeitzuständen, in der „Bildung“: sie wucherte auf
den von Goethe, Herder, Kant begründeten Ordnungen üppig weiter,
ohne mit ihren Wurzeln in den Grund selbst hinunterzureichen. (…)
Der Historismus, der nur Vergangenes sieht, das Epigonentum, das nur
Vergangenes treibt, sind ihre Erben, ohne ihre Höhe und ihr Feuer, mehr
und mehr dem toten Stoff verfallend und den leeren Formen.
(George)12

It is not by coincidence that the most extreme polarization and the most
severe rejection of Romanticism come in the context of Shakespeare,
Goethe and George. But we will find in Gundolf’s discussion of
Romanticism proper words or phrases like the following, which
characterize his position very clearly: ‘Bewegung’, ‘Spiel’, ‘Vorliebe für
alles Schwanke, Schwebende, Nacht, Geheimnis und Dämmerung’,
‘grenzenlos’, ’expansiv’.13 In his very percipient — and remarkably
fair — review of Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, Oskar Walzel, no
mean synthesist himself, takes Gundolf to task for not examining
seriously enough the actual philosophical ideas of the Romantics, for
overlooking its very marked sense of programme and system, for seeing
only the ironical and protean side of the movement, and for rejecting
almost the entire nineteenth century that followed.14 Gundolf’s view

clear and conscious, of the dark life-stream gushing forth from their inward parts,
but the exact and conscientious executor of their basic urge and its demands. Their
thinking, not as with the Romantics, or as with mystics or musicians, has power to
make rules or overthrow them, only of putting into action. With natures like these
the utterances that give conscious form are but an accurate indication of processes
in their dark centre and depths, the bright flame of their blaze, the logos of their
eros. For logos and eros are then not necessarily opposites; they are only different
degrees of brightness of the same state. For this classical frame of mind, which
fascinates us ever again, as a norm in classical antiquity, Goethe in the new era is
the greatest and surely the most obvious example’. Gundolf, Goethe (Berlin: Bondi,
1930 [1916]), 12f.
12 ‘Romanticism lived in a median realm between the eternal forces and the events
of its day, in ‘culture’: a rank growth on the foundations laid by Goethe, Herder
and Kant, but not taking root as they did. Historicism, which only sees the past,
epigonism, which only furthers the past, are their inheritance, without their status
and their fire, ever more given over to dead material and its empty forms’. Gundolf,
George (Berlin: Bondi, 1930), 5.
13 ‘Movement’; ‘play’; ‘prefer everything that is wavering, floating, night, mystery and
twilight’; ‘expansive’; ‘without borders’. Beiträge, 87, 88, 95.
14 Oskar Walzel, ‘Review of Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist’, Jahrbuch der deutschen
Shakespeare-Gesellschaft 48 (1912), 259–74.
 9. Gundolf’s Romanticism  167

of Romanticism is less a rejection of what Walzel stood for than a

disdainful declaration that the patient philology of Erich Schmidt, Jakob
Minor, Carl Schüddekopf or Reinhold Steig was at most an inadequate
means to a dubious end: but it comes perilously close to the notion of
‘romantische Schule’ which we may trace back to Karl Rosenkranz and to
Heinrich Heine, and then to those very different figures, Rudolf Haym,
Wilhelm Dilthey and Ricarda Huch; Haym, with his rejection of the
Romantics as unstable, lacking moral fibre, inchoate, formless; Dilthey,
fairer, but distinguishing perhaps too little between individual figures
of the movement and submerging personalities into some higher entity;
Huch with her vitalism. This Gundolf does too. For him Romanticism is
‘ein Individuum’:15 ‘Wir haben das Recht, die ganze Romantik wie eine
Person anzusehen’.16
There is more to this than the mere prejudice it seems to be and
certainly is. We see this from Gundolf’s essay ‘Jacob Burckhardt und
seine “Weltgeschichtlichen Betrachtungen”’ in the Preußische Jahrbücher
of 1907, the same year as his Romantiker-Briefe.17 In numerous other
statements in various places, Gundolf makes it very clear that he sees
himself by calling and inclination as the successor to the great tradition
of ‘der einzige Ranke’,18 the historiography of the nineteenth century
(as opposed to mere ‘historicism’): ‘Grundsätzlich erstrebe ich nichts
anderes als Scherer oder Ranke, Erkenntnis dessen was geschehen
ist’.19 The Burckhardt essay makes a few aspects of his method clearer.
He admires in the great historian the ‘Bedürfnis nach philosophischer
Durchdringung des Materials bei bewußter Ablehnung philosophischer
Methode und Spekulation’,20 he admires Burckhardt’s ‘irae et studia’,21
his willingness to abandon mere objectivity for the sake of a compelling
truth that is dear to his heart, his rejection of ‘alles Systematische’.22 But

15 ‘An individual’. Beiträge, 100.

16 ‘We have the right to see Romanticism in its entirety as one individual’. Beiträge, 88.
17 ‘Jacob Burckhardt and his “Reflections on History”’. Beiträge, 58–71.
18 ‘The inimitable Ranke’. Gundolf, Briefe. Neue Folge, ed. by Lothar Helbing and Claus
Victor Bock (Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini, 1965), 80.
19 ‘Basically, I am striving for nothing different from Scherer or Ranke: awareness of
that which has once been’. Ibid., 221.
20 ‘The need to penetrate the material philosophically while rejecting philosophical
method and speculation’. Beiträge, 59.
21 Ibid., 60.
22 ‘Everything systematic’. Ibid., 60.
168 From Goethe to Gundolf

Burckhardt also incorporates an ‘Aristokratismus’,23 a disdain for mere

progress or utilitarianism, not as extreme as Nietzsche’s immoralism,
not as mystically one-sided as Carlyle’s cult of the hero. What especially
attracts Gundolf in Burckhardt is the ‘Verdichtung des Weltgeschichtlichen
in den Heroen’,24 the view — allied to Hegel’s — that ‘große Männer’ are
‘Vollzieher eines über ihr Individuum hinausreichenden Willens’,25 are
(here closer to Nietzsche, if not to the ‘Übermensch’ or ‘Jenseits von Gut
und Böse’) ‘das Entscheidende, Reifende, und allseitig Erziehende’.26
It would seem to me that this essay explains much of what we find in
Gundolf’s studies of Caesar, Goethe, Shakespeare and George: there are,
on the one hand, figures representing timeless poetic genius, sufficient
in themselves, adequate in their powers of utterance, beholden to no
tradition, or transcending mere influence, not explicable only in terms
of their own age but instead giving their personality to a whole epoch.
Hence the classic formulation on Shakespeare of 1928: ‘Wir fassen nicht
Shakespeares Werk aus seinem Zeitalter, sondern sein Zeitalter durch
sein Werk’.27 On the other hand we have movers and initiators, explorers
of the intellect and of the poetic imagination, those for whom the pursuit
of new vistas of the mind is an end in itself. These were not of the first
rank, but without them our century would be impoverished. This is
Gundolf’s more conciliatory view of Romanticism. In German terms,
therefore, without Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Tieck, especially without
August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Shakespeare, the realm of the intellect and
the imagination, the scope of poetic expression would be diminished.
In European terms, without Byron, Heine, Victor Hugo, Alphonse de
Lamartine or Adam Mickiewicz, there might not be a Mommsen or
Burckhardt or even a Nietzsche; for they, too, are part of that process
directed against ‘historistische Lähmung’,28 the reaction against which
reaches its zenith in Nietzsche’s ‘seelenkünderische Wissenschaft’.29

23 Ibid., 64.
24 ‘The concentration of world history in heroes’. Ibid., 62.
25 ‘Great men’ are ‘the executors of a will that extends beyond them as individuals’.
Ibid., 67.
26 ‘What is decisive, brings fruition, gives universal instruction’. Ibid., 68.
27 ‘We do not grasp Shakespeare’s works by way of his age; we grasp his age through
his works.’ Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, 2 vols (Berlin: Bondi, 1928), I,
11.
28 ‘Historical paralysis’. Gundolf, Caesar im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, in Caesar, 252.
29 ‘A science that proclaims the soul’. Ibid.
 9. Gundolf’s Romanticism  169

And so if we examine in more detail Gundolf’s statements on

German Romanticism, we are left with the impression that he saw a
gulf fixed between the ‘great’ unapproachable names and the eminently
approachable Romantics. Whereas the ‘great’ names are meaningless in
mere human or biographical terms, the Romantics must be seen in just
that very light, as products of their own age, if they are to be appreciated
at all. In his Romantiker-Briefe and Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist,
Gundolf suggests that there is a ‘romantische Schule’ in the older, less
complimentary sense, an entity that is more communal than individual,
where single figures reflect a corporate ethos or spirit, where the same
characteristics, kaleidoscopically changing, recur in constant variations
and refractions. His two-volume Romantiker of 1930–31 seem much
more concerned with the individual figures (notably Ludwig Tieck)
and are less stringent in their chronological definition of Romanticism
(hence they include Franz Grillparzer, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and
Eduard Mörike) and more concerned to hold on to what the early to mid­
nineteenth century was able to achieve before positivism, historicism or
materialism swept all standards away. Goethe, of course, remains extra-
territorial; similarly, Hölderlin’s ’positiver hellenischer Glaube’30 cannot
be subsumed under mere groupings; while Heinrich von Kleist’s fierce
individualism excludes him from the start,31 and Gundolf is inclined
to keep Jean Paul separate.32 Gundolf does not of course alter a jot of
his anti-Romantic stance in the third edition of George in 1930,33 but
in the different context of Romantiker in 1930–31 he is more willing to
see Romanticism as the interrelation of various notable personalities,
not a mere amorphous and inchoate state of non-fulfilment. This does
not mean to say that Romantiker is free of prejudice or even outrageous
near-travesty (especially the essay on Friedrich Schlegel), but it speaks
with a greater — if sometimes misguided and partial — authority than
Romantiker-Briefe of 1907.
For Gundolf the disciple of George cannot entirely deny in himself
the scholarly training received at the hands of Erich Schmidt and Gustav
Roethe (if later repudiated); he cannot abjure a love of the obscure

30 ‘Positive Hellenic faith’. Gundolf, Dem lebendigen Geist, 36.

31 Beiträge, 85.
32 Ibid., 37.
33 Gundolf, George, 5, 10.
170 From Goethe to Gundolf

reference, the recondite print, the antiquarian edition. He may cover

his tracks very well by disdaining the footnote or even the index, but
the intimate acquaintance with texts, the ‘homework’, if one so will,
is there. The best example is Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, a book
whose conclusion and climax in August Wilhelm Schlegel’s translation
nobody has to date effectively challenged and the patterns of which are
reflected in nearly all the anthologies of material relative to Shakespeare
in Germany.34 But we note also Gundolf’s historical sense if we compare
him with Wilhelm Dilthey, Ludwig Klages or Herbert Cysarz. All this is
to some extent nurtured within the George circle itself: there is George’s
own philological austerity and lack of self -indulgence guiding Gundolf
on Shakespeare; there is Wolfskehl’s less orderly spirit suggesting all
kinds of excursions and anabases into the world of the curious and the
erudite. One feels therefore that the ‘public’ contexts, the prefaces, the
articles, the occasional addresses, display a greater openness of spirit.
Gundolf claimed in a letter that he was ‘mehr menschensichtig als
problemgriffig’.35 If we apply this statement to his view of Romanticism,
we are bound to say that he is more successful in discussing figures
who have, in his eyes at least, some human interest or some lasting
achievement. In response to Wolfskehl’s criticism of his treatment
of Friedrich Schlegel, Gundolf replies ‘dass es meine Aufgabe war,
Menschen zu zeichnen und nicht Gährungen’.36 Indeed his aspect of
Friedrich Schlegel is too much one of a man blown about by doctrines,
responding feverishly to the times and exploring restlessly every path
of the intellect — but little more. August Wilhelm Schlegel, on the
other hand, although not emerging as a person, receives Gundolf’s
accolade of approval for having produced Shakespeare in ‘unauflösliche
Gestalt’.37 True, the Shakespeare translation is not an ‘Urerlebnis ’,38 but
the mere ‘Anwendung der durch Goethes sprachgewordenes Erleben
geschaffenen Sprachmöglichkeiten auf Shakespeares Werk’.39

34 Such as Shakespeare-Rezeption. Die Diskussion um Shakespeare in Deutschland. 1.

Ausgewählte Texte von 1741 bis 1788., ed. by Hansjürgen Blinn (Berlin: Erich Schmidt,
1982).
35 ‘Better at seeing people than solving problems’. Gundolf, Briefe, 220.
36 ‘It was my task to depict people and not ferments’. Wolfskehl-Gundolf, Briefwechsel,
II, 46.
37 ‘A figure, one and indivisible’. Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, 349.
38 ‘Fundamentally new experience’. Ibid., 353.
39 ‘Using the resources of the language released by Goethe’s experience and become
word, and applying them to Shakespeare’s works’. Ibid.
 9. Gundolf’s Romanticism  171

There is however one particular aspect of Gundolf’s reception of the

Romantics which shows him to be not so much — or not only — the
recorder of their subordinate status compared with the ‘great figures’,
but in a deeper way the continuer of their work and their attitudes. One
is perhaps not surprised that Gundolf fails to honour August Wilhelm
Schlegel’s other side, his critical achievement in the Berlin and Vienna
lectures, leaving only the translator of Shakespeare. His view of Tieck,
too, although he scrupulously discusses nearly all the many facets of that
writer’s long and many-sided career, is more concerned with showing
Tieck’s importance than his intrinsic quality;40 that is, his significance as
the great initiator of so much in subsequent fiction, drama and poetry,
the butterfly drinking from every flower, bewitched by every tradition.
It is true that so much of Tieck did, as it were, slip into the mainstream
of German literary and intellectual culture without its originator being
recognizable in the end product: the European and American tale of
terror, the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ of Wagnerian provenance, the vision of
the Renaissance later seen by Burckhardt or Conrad Ferdinand Meyer,
the discursive, conversational mode of fiction perfected by Theodor
Fontane, the celebration of the ‘great’ figures of national poetry, Dante,
Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Luís de Camões, Goethe. Some of
these Gundolf found congenial, many distinctly not. Thus it may be that
Gundolf, himself in thrall to that ‘Verdichtung des Weltgeschichtlichen
in den Heroen’,41 while recognizing Hegel’s or Carlyle’s, Burckhardt’s or
Nietzsche’s role in isolating and celebrating greatness, chose to overlook
that the Romantics themselves began this process — in other terms and
for other purposes — with their establishment of a canon of Romantic
poetry enshrined in names like Dante, Shakespeare or Cervantes (the
trinity of the Schlegels’ Athenaeum), with Goethe only, never Schiller,
as the modern embodiment of the rebirth of the universal poetic spirit.
Indeed this opening up of the national literature to the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance — the Romantic — may rightly be seen as the
real lasting achievement of the Schlegel brothers. It explains why so
much of their endeavour is directed towards the figures of Goethe and

40 First published as ‘Ludwig Tieck’ in Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1929),
99–195, subsequently in Romantiker. Neue Folge (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Heinrich
Keller, 1929), 5–139. Cf. E. C. Stopp, ‘Wandlungen des Tieckbildes’, DVjs. 17 (1939),
252–76.
41 ‘Concentration of world history in heroes’.
172 From Goethe to Gundolf

Shakespeare, why, in Tieck’s case, these two became a preoccupation

and an obsession.
Bardolatry one can certainly hold against Tieck;42 Goetheolatry,
certainly in later life, rather less so. Gundolf places both on the altar of his
idolatry. What is more, he adduces one in defence of the other. For it is the
Goethe of Shakespeare und kein Ende! that Gundolf invokes in both of his
works on Shakespeare, in order to justify the somewhat shaky thesis that
first Herder and then Goethe had established Shakespeare as something
indivisible from ‘deutscher Geist’. Shakespeare is thus not essentially of
the stage, is ‘wahrer Sinn’ as opposed to mere ‘Handlung’.43 This enables
Gundolf to play down the theatrical, rhetorical tradition represented
by Schiller44and later by Grillparzer whom he condemns on account
of his very theatricality.45 It affords a convenient side-swipe against
the ‘Synthetiker’ Hugo von Hofmannsthal.46 This view of Shakespeare
would not necessarily separate him from Schlegel, whose notion of the
stage has less to do with theatre than with national character expressed
in dramatic form. It would however go against everything that Tieck
stood for. In several other significant ways, Gundolf stood in agreement
or coincidence with much of what is representative of both Schlegel
and Tieck as Shakespeare scholars and critics.47 First: his purely literary
knowledge of English (plus a dislike of the nation itself)48 which made
him choose the Romantic-Classical, ‘Goethean’ Schlegel translation as
the model for his own version of the Shakespeare text49 and to disregard
or disdain any subsequent attempts to render Shakespeare into German.
Second: the open disregard for source material and philological
apparatus (although statements in letters make it quite clear that he

42 See Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985),
239–59.
43 ‘True sense’; ‘action’. Cf. Eudo C. Mason, ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’, Shakespeare
Jahrbuch, 98 (1962), 110–77, esp. 123f. On Gundolf and Shakespeare cf. further
Rudolf Sühnel, ‘Gundolfs Shakespeare. Rezeption-Übertragung-Deutung’,
Euphorion, 75 (1981), 245–74.
44 Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, 187f.
45 Beiträge, 349.
46 Ibid., 134.
47 The main points set out by Mason, ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’, without parallels
being drawn.
48 George-Gundolf, Briefwechsel, 259.
49 Cf. Shakespeare in deutscher Sprache. Neue Ausgabe in sechs Bänden, ed. and trans. by
Friedrich Gundolf (Berlin: Bondi, 1922), I, 5, 7.
 9. Gundolf’s Romanticism  173

did use them),50 notably those of English provenance. Like Schlegel’s

Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur/Lectures on Dramatic Art
and Literature of 1809–11, Gundolf’s two-volume Shakespeare. Sein Wesen
und Werk/Shakespeare. His Life and Work of 1928 rises up seemingly from
the pure source of the Bard himself, innocent of the footnote or the merely
learned aside. Indeed, one might say that this discreet covering of tracks
is one of the sources of fascination for the reader of any of Gundolf’s
works and a compelling source of authority. (It is, in fairness, worth
remembering that nineteenth­century commentators51 also do this, the
much-despised Georg Gottfried Gervinus and the more respected Otto
Ludwig.)52 Third: Gundolf’s interest in character rather than in dramatic
action is central to Schlegel’s approach to Shakespeare, but also indicates
how closely he, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the same time, sees the
plays in terms of dominating, often eponymous, figures.
There are indications that Gundolf occasionally repeats or continues
the particular emphases of his Romantic predecessors. Take Lady
Macbeth, one of Tieck’s more daring, even outrageous, attempts to break
with traditional characterization in Shakespeare, and in this case, with
Schiller’s, which was to postulate a more female, femininely tender, Lady
Macbeth. For Gundolf, too, she is ‘kein selbstisches Mannweib’, but ‘die
schmiegsam kluge und starke Gefährtin’ with ‘geselliges Weibstum’,
‘Hausfrau und Schaffnerin’, ‘höfliche, umsichtige, ja bezaubernde
Wirtin’, ‘die Berechnende’ as opposed to ‘der Besessene’ who is her
husband.53 Take Falstaff. Like Schlegel, Gundolf, while fascinated by the
breath-taking effrontery of this character and the sheer impudence of his
wit, does not overlook that he is underneath it all ‘alt und dabey lüstern
und liederlich’ (Schlegel),54 ‘ein saftiger Lump’ (Gundolf).55 Or, turning
this time away from character to action, take A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

50 Cf. George-Gundolf, Briefwechsel, 184, 191, 275.

51 Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, 353.
52 Wolsfkehl-Gundolf, Briefwechsel, I, 86.
53 ‘No self-possessed virago’; ‘accommodating, wise and strong companion’;
‘welcoming female presence’; ‘housewife and housekeeper’; ‘polite, gracious and
charming host’; ‘calculating’; ‘possessed’. Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und
Werk, II, 296. Paulin, Ludwig Tieck, 252f.
54 ‘Old and loose and lascivious’. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über
dramatische Kunst und Littteratur, Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, IV, i, ed. by Stefan
Knödler (Paderborn, etc.: Schöningh, 2018), 352.
55 ‘An out and out rascal’. Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, I, 296.
174 From Goethe to Gundolf

Both Schlegel and Gundolf draw especial attention to the different levels
of action — the wedding of Theseus, the quarrel between Oberon and
Titania, the two pairs of lovers, and the ‘rude mechanicals’ and how they
form part of one indivisible whole: ‘so leicht und glücklich verflochten,
daß sie durchaus zu einander zu gehören scheinen, um ein Ganzes
zu bilden’ (Schlegel),56 ‘ein rhythmisch ausgewogenes Zusammen,
Gegeneinander und Durcheinander’ (Gundolf).57 I draw particular
attention to these three examples, which are not randomly chosen:
they are those on which Eudo Mason dwells in his article ‘Gundolf
und Shakespeare’ as instances of Gundolf’s perception and sensitivity
as a Shakespeare critic.58 For me, they show in addition a remarkable
case of the persistence of Romantic approaches to Shakespeare — so
very different from the technical and analytical approach of, say, Otto
Ludwig, to whom Gundolf was nearer in time if not in spirit.
Even then our analogies are not exhausted. This time, Gundolf
seems nearer to Tieck than to Schlegel. Take his tripartite division of
Shakespeare’s life,59 a central part of Tieck’s fragmentary Buch über
Shakespeare/Book about Shakespeare60 and incidentally also integral to
Coleridge’s chronology of Shakespeare. Like both Tieck and Coleridge,
Gundolf is once or twice only (to his credit) tempted to postulate a
chronology of Shakespeare’s works different from the usual standard,
in order to accommodate a seeming inconsistency or contradiction.
Thus, for instance, he dates Henry V before Henry IV.61 But Gundolf
comes closest to Tieck in his assertion of Shakespeare’s uniqueness,
as the one figure bestriding all like a colossus.62 Tieck, who knew his
Elizabethans and Jacobeans much better than Gundolf did, was of
course concerned to relate every aspect of English drama between 1580
and 1615 to Shakespeare, to prove that no development came about
without the Bard. It led him, on the one hand, to ludicrous extensions of

56 ‘Lightly and felicitously woven together that they seem to belong together and form
a whole’. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Littteratur, 325.
57 ‘A rhythmical balance of coherence, antagonism and confusion’. Gundolf,
Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, I, 210. The same point is made by Gundolf in the
discussion of most of the Comedies.
58 Mason, ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’, 116f., 118f.
59 Cf. ibid., 125.
60 Cf. Paulin, Ludwig Tieck, 246f.
61 Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, I, 373.
62 As, for instance, in his assertion that Titus Andronicus contains all of Marlowe’s
achievement. Ibid., I, 27.
 9. Gundolf’s Romanticism  175

the Shakespeare canon, a craziness of which we cannot accuse Gundolf.63

It led him also, and here we see Gundolf coming nearer to Tieck, to
diminish and disparage the achievements of other Elizabethans, notably
Marlowe. Both Tieck and Gundolf, in different contexts, are concerned
to prove that the nobility, the magnanimity, the spiritual greatness, the
heroic wilfulness, manifested in the plays are all part of Shakespeare’s
own character. Tieck does this in fictive guise, in a contrast between
Shakespeare’s assumed character and that of his contemporaries;64 for
Gundolf, such a contrast is a postulate worthy of the ‘Allgeist’65 that is
Shakespeare. Shakespeare, too, while absorbing elements of the Middle
Ages or of ‘Renaissance-individualismus’66 displays these, significantly
enough, only in the early stages of his career, as the author of Henry VI
or Love’s Labour’s Lost, but not in the mature works where he is beholden
to no ‘influence’ or ‘school’. Christopher Marlowe, by contrast, is ‘der
eigentliche elisabethanische Renaissance-dramatiker’.67 In this, Tieck
would heartily concur.
One final coincidence of ideas binds Tieck and Gundolf. Both are
connoisseurs of the German drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries (Tieck its first real editor).68 Both, although separated by a span
of a hundred years, are unable to appreciate the peculiar style of drama
that the Jesuits, the Dutch, the German Silesians and, to some extent,
Pierre Corneille brought about. Here the contrast with Shakespeare
serves to do little more than cloud the issue, as in Gundolf’s short
monograph on Andreas Gryphius.69 For Tieck, this might be pardonable,
for Gundolf, less so. It was to be Walter Benjamin who first demonstrated
convincingly that there is little to be gained by confronting the ‘great
names’ of Aeschylus or Calderón or Shakespeare with Martin Opitz,
Andreas Gryphius or Daniel Casper von Lohenstein. Similarly, we are
bound to say that it was a pupil of Gundolf’s Heidelberg colleague
Max von Waldberg, the young Richard Alewyn ,70 who was to establish

63 Cf. Paulin, Ludwig Tieck, 245f.

64 Ibid.
65 ‘Universal spirit’. Cf. Mason, ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’, 138.
66 Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, I, 79.
67 ‘The quintessential Elizabethan Renaissance dramatist’. Ibid.
68 Cf. Tieck’s Deutsches Theater (1817).
69 Gundolf, Andreas Gryphius (Heidelberg: Winter, 1927), 20.
70 Richard Alewyn, ‘Vorbarocker Klassizismus und griechische Tragödie. Analyse
der “Antigone”-Übersetzung des Martin Opitz’, Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher (1926),
3–63.
176 From Goethe to Gundolf

that tradition and study of formal devices were of greater assistance

in the understanding of seventeenth-century literary texts than some
amorphous notion of ‘Geist’.
I have said much of Gundolf’s limitations as a writer on German
Romanticism. His writings nevertheless remain to this day eminently
readable and stimulating and are part of the ‘Geistesgeschichte’ of the
first decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps the time has come, nearly
fifty-five years after Gundolf’ s death, to view them less in terms of
strict philology or academic literary criticism, but as creative insights,
the product very of their own age, written not in an anxious awe of
the letter or the page but with imagination and sometimes uncanny
intuitive vision, conjuring up, not through factual accumulation or
adherence to doctrine, some of the essential spirit of a movement: in
short, as literature.
NINETEENTH CENTURY
Fig. 13 Wilhelm Müller, engraving by Johann Friedrich Schröter (c. 1830), Wikimedia,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wilhelm_M%C3%BCller_by_
Schr%C3%B6ter.jpg, public domain.
 10. Some Remarks on
the New Edition of
the Works of Wilhelm Müller1

To coincide with the two-hundredth anniversary of Wilhelm Müller’s

birth in l794, the first collected edition of his works since 1830 has been
produced.2 This must be regarded as a literary event that will give
pleasure alike to friends and lovers of ‘Die schöne Müllerin’ (‘The Fair
Maid of the Mill’) or ‘Die Winterreise’ (‘The Winter Journey’) and to
scholars of Romanticism and Biedermeier. Not everyone may be aware
that there is an ‘Internationale Wilhelm Müller-Gesellschaft’; its support
was an important factor in the production of this much-needed edition.
The catalogue of an exhibition mounted in his birthplace, Dessau, marks
the same event with useful documentation and fascinating pictorial
material.3 The word ‘minor’ punctuates the whole literature on Müller,

1 This chapter was originally published in Modern Language Review, 92 (1997), 363–78.
2 Wilhelm Müller: Werke, Tagebücher, Briefe, ed. by Maria-Verena Leistner, intr. by
Bernd Leistner, 5 vols (Berlin: Mathias Gatza, 1994). This edition is referred to in
footnotes by volume and page number. Vol. I: Gedichte I; Vol. II: Gedichte II; Vol. III:
Reisebeschreibungen. Novellen; Vol. IV: Schriften zur Literatur; Vol. V: Tagebücher. Briefe.
There is a separate index volume. I have attempted to establish some holdings in
the British Isles of works by Müller now considered rare. The holding institutions
are identified in footnotes by abbreviations: London, British Library [BL]; London,
Senate House Library [L]; Cambridge University Library [CUL], Trinity College
Library, Cambridge [CTrin]; Oxford, Bodleian Library [OB]; Oxford, Taylorian
Institution [OT]; John Rylands University Library of Manchester [JRULM];
Scotland, National Library of Scotland [Nat]; St Andrews University Library [StA];
Glasgow University Library [Glas]; and Edinburgh University Library [Edin].
3 Wilhelm Müller. Eine Lebensreise. Zum 200. Geburtstag des Dichters, ed. by Norbert
Michels, Kataloge der anhaltischen Gemäldegalerie Dessau (Weimar: Böhlau,
1994). Cited henceforth as Cat.

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.10

180 From Goethe to Gundolf

but surely it is on this occasion not inappropriate to speak of a ‘minor’

literary sensation.
Wilhelm Müller is one of those figures in the history of German
literature who stand in the shadow of others mightier than themselves.
First there is Franz Schubert. It is now surely impossible to unravel the
composer of ‘Die schöne Müllerin’ and ‘Die Winterreise’ from their
author, so much have they assumed an existence of their own. Then there
is Heinrich Heine. To many, perhaps to most, Müller appears as Heine’s
forerunner. The famous and much-quoted letter of July 1826, a little
over a year before Müller’s tragically early death, for all its deferentiality
(and its pleasure at being well reviewed by the other),4 places Müller in
most readers’ minds in a relationship where personal genius lies finally
with the essentially greater figure, with Müller the spur for the superior
achievement:

Ich bin groß genug, Ihnen offen zu bekennen, daß mein kleines lntermezzo-
Metrum nicht blos zufällige Ähnlichkeit mit Ihrem gewöhnlichen
Metrum hat, sondern daß es wahrscheinlich seinen geheimsten Tonfall
Ihren Liedern verdankt, indem es die lieben Müiller‘schen Lieder waren,
die ich zu eben der Zeit kennen lernte, als ich das Intermezzo schrieb. lch
habe sehr früh schon das deutsche Volkslied auf mich einwirken !assen,
späterhin, als ich in Bonn studirte, hat mir August Schlegel viel metrische
Geheimnisse aufgeschlossen, aber ich glaube erst in Ihren Liedern den
reinen Klang und die wahre Einfachheit, wonach ich immer strebte,
gefunden zu haben. Wie rein, wie klar sind Ihre Lieder und sämmtlich
sind es Volkslieder. In meinen Gedichten hingegen ist nur die Form
einigermaßen volksthümlich, der lnhalt gehört der conventionnellen
Gesellschaft. Ja, ich bin groß genug, es sogar bestimmt zu wiederholen,
und Sie werden es mal öffentlich ausgesprochen finden, daß mir durch
die Lectüre Ihrer 77 Gedichte zuerst klar geworden, wie man aus den
alten, vorhandenen Volksliedformen neue Formen bilden kann, die
ebenfalls volksthümlich sind, ohne daß man nöthig hat, die alten
Sprachholperigkeiten und Unbeholfenheiten nachzuahmen. Im zweiten
Theile Ihrer Gedichte fand ich die Form noch reiner, noch durchsichtig
klarer — doch, was spreche ich viel von Formwesen, es drängt mich
mehr, Ihnen zu sagen, daß ich keinen Liederdichter außer Goethe so sehr
liebe wie Sie.5

4 ‘Über H. Heine’ (1823), in Wilhelm Müller, Vermischte Schriften. Herausgegeben mit

einer Biographie Müller‘s begleitet von Gustav Schwab, 5 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus,
1830), V, 440. Cited henceforth as VSchr. [BL, L, OT, Edin].
5 ‘I can freely admit to you that my little Intermezzo does not have a mere chance
similarity to your accustomed metre, but that it most likely owes the inner secret of
 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 181

There is a double irony here (a word purposely chosen). The Sieben und
siebzig Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten/
Seventy-Seven Poems from the Literary Remains of a Travelling Horn Player
(the seventy-seven poems referred to), with their dedication to Ludwig
Tieck, are, like all of Müller’s collections, a miscellany: naturally and pre-
eminently, ‘Die schöne Müllerin’, but also ‘Wanderlieder’, ‘Reiselieder’,
‘Ländliche Lieder’,6 sonnets, poems to nature, to wine, to love, to
friendship. The second part of the collection, which Heine in his letter
claims so much to have enjoyed, contains ‘Johannes und Esther’, poems
with another conventional theme, unfulfilled love, but in a context
that gives the Petrarchan patterns a particular twist: boy (Christian)
loves girl (Jew). It is the subject (or rather, one of them) of Müller’s
later Novelle Debora and none the better for appearing in that collection
of modish narrative clichés. Heine is prepared to be accommodating.
For Müller, with consummate grace and ease, has assembled the most
accessible lyrical forms and themes of the almanacs and florilegia both
of the late eighteenth century and of Romanticism. With the exception
of some sonnets, which Müller, like Heine, can turn as well as the next
poet, these are by and large in ‘Volksliedstrophen’, but there are sections
that will recall the anacreontic poetry so popular in Germany since
Hagedorn and rarely exceeded in quality since his day. The esoteric,
‘difficult’, un-folk-like Romance stanzaic forms are absent from Müller’s
collection, but not, as his reviews make clear, from the efforts of so many
early Biedermeier poetasters. Another irony lies in the reflection that

its modulation to your songs, in that it was the sweet Müller songs that I became
acquainted with when I wrote the Intermezzo. I have from very early on absorbed
the German folksong; later, when I was a student in Bonn August Schlegel opened
up a number of metrical secrets to me, but I believe it was in your songs first that
I believed I had found the pure sound and the true simplicity that I had always
sought after. How pure, how clear your songs are, every one of them a folksong. In
my songs, by contrast, only the form is approximately folk-like, while the content
belongs to conventional society. Yes, I freely repeat it again, and you will duly find it
stated in public, that reading your 77 poems brought home to me how one can create
new forms from the old folksongs that we have, that are just as folk-like, but without
the need to imitate the old jingles and bad rhymes. In the second part of your poems
I found the form even purer, of even brighter clarity — but what is all this talk of
formal matters, I feel the urge to tell you that I love no song-writer, Goethe excepted,
more than you’. Heinrich Heine, Säkularausgabe. Werke. Briefwechsel. Lebenszeugnisse,
ed. by the Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen
Literatur in Weimar and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris,
27 vols (Berlin: Akademie; Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1970–84), XX, 250.
6 ‘Songs of the Wayfarer’; ‘Songs of Travel’; ‘Country Songs’.
182 From Goethe to Gundolf

Müller himself said words similar to Heine’s about both Ludwig Uhland
and Justinus Kerner, not privately but in print, in the important article
in Brockhaus’s periodical Hermes, ‘Über die neueste lyrische Poesie der
Deutschen’ (‘On the Latest Lyrical Poetry of the Germans’, 1827).7 Heine
is thus enunciating not so much a statement of personal discipleship
as a set of criteria to which nearly all the great lyrical poets of the
nineteenth century subscribed. Theodor Storm, whose two anthologies
of l859 and l870 draw generously on both these poets, articulates in
his credally formulated introductions the principles that Müller and
Heine had expressed before him. Yet all of them know and admit that
it was Gottfried August Bürger and Goethe who first showed them
the simplicity of poetic language producing the ‘Natursprache’, the
‘Urmutter aller Poesie’,8 that can appeal directly to the heart. It will be
rhymed, readily set to music, not rhetorical (Klopstock’s and Schiller’s
failing), not archaicizing, arch, or faux-naif (the lesser Romantics’
weakness).
Goethe, whom Heine placed on a rather higher altar of his idolatry,
seems to have had an off day when Müller visited him in Weimar in
1827, committing unflattering comments to Kanzler von Müller (‘eine
unangenehme Personnage, sagte er, süffisant, überdies Brillen tragend,
was mir das Unleidlichste ist’).9 Heine linked Goethe and Müller as lyric
poets, but both the Italienische Reise/Italian Journey and Müller’s highly
readable Rom, Römer und Römerinnen/Rome, Roman Men and Roman
Women of l820, largely forgotten today, are formative texts for his own
Italian memoirs and point forward to Heine’s own inimitable style.
The sentence from Heine‘s Reise von München nach Genua/Journey from
Munich to Genua, ‘ach, er [Müller] war ein deutscher Dichter!’10 thus
places him in a double relationship, as a lyrical poet in the folk mode,
but also as a master of the witty and interesting travelogue.
Müller, born in 1794, was six years younger than Byron, for whose
fame and reputation in Germany he did so much, and three years older
than Heine, whose eloquent admissions of debt I have just quoted.
These are years of brief spans of talent (like Wilhelm Hauff, 1802–27)

7  Wilhelm Müller, IV, 297–342.

8 ‘The language of nature’; ‘the earth-mother of all poetry’. Ibid., 299.
9 ‘An unattractive person, he said, full of himself, and in addition wearing spectacles,
something I absolutely cannot bear’. Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und
Gespräche, ed. by Ernst Beutler, 27 vols (Zurich: Artemis, 1948–71), XIII, 514–15.
10 ‘Oh, he was a German poet!’. Heine, Säkularausgabe, VI, 55.
 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 183

or genius (like Franz Schubert, 1797–1828). Whatever else Müller may

have in common with Byron and Heine, arguably the two greatest
masters of poetic form of their century, he shares the problem of their
true place in literary history and of their subsequent reputations. But
am I not setting my sights just a little too high in linking Müller with
these manifestly superior names? It is a matter of degree. To deal with
the last aspect first: it is understandable that Müller’s reputation, while
freeing itself in the course of the century from the mild hagiography
of Gustav Schwab’s introductory ‘Wilhelm Müller’s Leben’ of 1830,11
had nothing to fear from the kind of personal revelation that was to
prove injurious to Byron and to some extent Heine. But in associating
the three poets I am making a slightly different point. All three belong,
for differing reasons, fairly and squarely in the century that gave them
birth, and yet (allowing for Müller’s lesser stature) they are associated
with revolutionary movements that are part of the political tissue of the
nineteenth: Greek, and to some extent Italian, national determination,
or the future constitution of the German nation. Müller had taken
part in the Wars of Liberation in 1813–15, and there is no doubt that
this experience and his subsequent association with figures like (and
as unlikely as) ‘Turnvater’ Jahn or Kalckreuth senior and junior, or
Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, were at least factors in his admiration
for the hero of Missolonghi. The young Müller shared briefly some of
the inanities of patriotic professors and firebrand students, but he did
also cherish liberal ideals, especially after the clampdown of Karlsbad.
His short career as a writer had to contend with censorship, known,
it is true, for its severity but also its capriciousness. Generally, Müller
politically played safe and sailed less close to the wind than Heine
was (later) to do. The example of Béranger across the border was not
encouraging, but it did not prevent Müller from writing a generous and
warm-hearted defence of the man and poet, at that time in prison for
his views.12 His several reviews and articles on Byron, quoting copious
extracts from the man himself, sentimental, witty, but also outrageous
and subversive (‘Lord Byron ist vielleicht das größte und fruchtbarste,
aber auch das gefährlichste Dichtergenie unsers Zeitalters’),13 send

11 VSchr, I, xvii-lxiii.
12 Wilhelm Müller, IV, 151–55.
13 ‘Lord Byron is perhaps the greatest and most fertile, but also the most dangerous
genius of our age’. VSchr, V, 156.
184 From Goethe to Gundolf

out an encoded message to his liberal-­minded and educated readers

arguably more effective than all the young poets who were emulating
Cain or Manfred. It is a message different from Goethe’s: what the older
man found fascinating was daemonic poetic genius, not a heroic death
in the Morea. If Müller never created an Euphorion (or Heine’s William
Ratcliff), he does deserve some credit as the man who for a short period
of years kept the name of Byron fairly and squarely before the literary
reading public.
There is, in a literary age so given to eclecticism, no contradiction
between the folk mode and that of the ‘conventionnelle Gesellschaft’.14
And, as both Byron and Heine demonstrate, the mastery of form is no
barrier to the expression of deep feeling. At his level of achievement,
Müller’s poetry reflects both these willingly borne constraints. It also,
I feel, shares in the fortunes of both Byron’s and Heine’s receptions.
The oeuvre of both these great poets survives during the latter part of
the nineteenth century essentially on a reduced and narrowed base.
Byron cannot easily provide a ready model for generations that produce
Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti or Algernon
Charles Swinburne; Heine, so formative for Storm, has less to say to
Gottfried Keller and nothing at all to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, let alone
Hugo von Hofmannsthal or Stefan George. But both have passed on
enough into the life-stream of their respective national poetic traditions
to ensure that they are known and read, and can be revived when
times are more receptive to their particular styles. Müller at his level, is
altogether more vulnerable. He survives as part of the ‘Hausschatz der
deutschen Lyrik’,15 and as the sung text of two of Schubert’s song cycles.
His complete poetry is never out of print during the nineteenth century:
Gustav Schwab’s edition of 183716 is succeeded by, among others, Max
Müller’s reissue of his father’s poems in 1868 and a nearly 400-page
Reclam volume in 1898.17 But the five-volume Vermischte Schriften edited
by the same Gustav Schwab in 1830, which are the essential monument

14 ‘Conventional society’.
15 ‘Treasury of German Poetry for the Home’.
16 Gedichte von Wilhelm Müller. Herausgegeben und mit einer Biographie Müller‘s begleitet
von Gustav Schwab, 2 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1837). [BL, L, CTrin]
17 Gedichte von Wilhelm Müller. Mit Einleitung und Anmerkungen herausgegeben von Max
Müller, 2 parts, Bibliothek der Deutschen Nationalliteratur des achtzehnten und
neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1868) (henceforth cited as Gedichte
(1868)); Gedichte von Wilhelm Müller. Gesamt-Ausgabe. Mit einer biographischen
 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 185

to the full range of Müller’s achievement, have had to wait until 1994
for the nearest approach to a reprint. The reception of Heine’s works,
by contrast, with the exception of the shameful interlude of 1933–45, is
clearly and deservedly different.
My association of Byron and Heine with Müller is not intended to
crank his reputation up to a level with theirs. Nor do the nearly twenty-
five pages of entries in the standard bibliography, the 1905 edition of
Karl Goedeke’s Grundriß,18 necessarily justify a major rehabilitation of
all aspects of his oeuvre, although they make for interesting and salutary
reading. Friedrich Sengle, for whom Müller was a significant (but
not central) figure in his Biedermeier constellation, dealt with him in
a few deft and masterly strokes and stressed the centrality of ‘Lieder-
Müller’.19 The editors of the new edition also place the major (but not
sole) emphasis on the song-writer and the range of his lyrical activity.
My own view is that much of Müller, not just the lyrical poetry but even
the less-read and less-readable output, can serve to place a period and
its major figures in focus. For that reason, I now dwell a little on his short
life and his circumstances.
Schwab, the dutiful chronicler of Schiller’s and Hauff’s lives, produced
a short biography of Wilhelm Müller for the Vermischte Schriften, which
appeared in 1830. Schwab made Müller’s personal acquaintance in the
last year of his life, and this note tinges his assessment of the other poet’s
work and character:

Wenn mich schon seine Lieder dem liebenswerthen Dichtergeiste recht

nahe gebracht hatten, so versprach die Woche, die ich ihm ausschließend
widmen durfte, mir ein langes, inniges Verhältniß mit Müller dem
Menschen. Seine Gedichte ließen harmloses Wohlwollen gegen
jedermann, schnelle Begeisterung für Schönes und Gutes, Talent für
Geselligkeit und geistreiche Unterhaltung zum voraus ahnen. Im nähern
Umgang aber entwickelte sich bei ihm auch ein Ernst der Gesinnung, ein
biederer Sinn, eine sittliche Zuverlässigkeit, die, wenn man sie einmal

Einleitung und einem Vorwort herausgegeben von Curt Müller (Leipzig: Reclam, 1898)
(henceforth cited as Gedichte (1898)).
18 Karl Goedeke, Grundriß zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung […], cont. by Edmund
Goetze, Vol. VIII, i: Vom Weltfrieden bis zur französischen Revolution 1830 (Dresden:
Ehlermann, 1905), 255–78, 707–09.
19 Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit. Deutsche Dichtung im Spannungsfeld zwischen
Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971–80), II,
517–18.
186 From Goethe to Gundolf

erkannt hatte, auch den leichtesten Producten seiner heitern Muse ein
besonders reizendes Ansehen verliehen, wie Lusthütten, die auf Felsen
gebaut sind.20

His famous son, Max Müller, in the preface to his edition for the
‘Bibliothek der Deutschen Nationalliteratur’ in 1868, could also
write from the heart, and his words ‘ich habe ihn ja kaum gekannt’21
have a certain poignancy. But he was, or was to be, in possession of
family papers that showed his father in a more human light, notably
his early diaries. Max Müller, as befits the times, and, it is fair to say,
his own convictions, writes more of his father’s political views and
his contention with the censor than does Schwab. He is by the same
token now aware that not all of his father’s oeuvre is secure. Both of
these biographical sketches stress the harmony between Müller’s
poetic persona and his actual character, and that is in keeping with
nineteenth-century literary biography in general. Schwab’s comments
are, however, telling. For there was no immediate reason why Müller,
a North German, should appeal to the Swabian school of poets, to
Schwab himself in particular, but also to Ludwig Uhland and Justinus
Kerner. But Schwab, later mercilessly harried by Heine along with his
fellow-countrymen, is making the point that the happy coexistence
of simple lyricism, ‘Talent for Geselligkeit’,22 and what Heine called
‘conventionnelle Gesellschaft’, was not regionally limited and that it
appealed to a broad national reading public. Indeed, Heine’s style
was not very much different from that favoured in Stuttgart except for
its being more witty, less conventional, and, crucially, more talented.
One could, after all, read Heine without approving of him. Prince
Metternich read Heine’s love poetry attentively while also allowing
his minions to wield the blue pencil on the political writings; he may
have also enjoyed Müller’s ‘biederer Sinn’ (‘honest sense’) while

20 ‘If his Lieder brought this agreeable poetic personality very close to me, the week
that I was to devote exclusively to him promised me a long and intimate relationship
with Müller the man. His poems gave intimation of innocence, benevolence towards
everyone, a quick enthusiasm for the beautiful and good, a talent for conviviality
and witty conversation. But on closer acquaintance one was also made aware of a
serious-mindedness, an inner worth, a sureness in moral matters, which, once one
was made aware of them, gave even his lightest products a particularly charming
aspect, like summer-houses built on rocks’. VSchr, I, lvi-lvii.
21 ‘I hardly knew him’. Gedichte (1868), xi.
22 ‘Talent for conviviality’.
 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 187

noting his more carefully phrased subversiveness. In terms of the

history of style and taste, Müller represents what he himself, talking
of the ultimate model Goethe, called ‘Vieltönigkeit’.23 It is the principle
of versatility and even eclecticism that can be found in nearly all the
poets, great and small, in the Biedermeier period, that dominates their
major publication outlet, the literary almanac, and that provides the
most important factor of continuity with the century that first allowed
poésies fugitives, ‘Volkslied’ (‘folksong’), and sentimentality to coexist:
the eighteenth. Thus Müller, who so admires in Schmidt von Lübeck
the ‘echt deutscher Liedersänger von reiner, voller und herzlich
bewegter Stimme’24 and in Kerner ‘jenes rückhaltslose Erschließen des
innersten Herzens’,25 is equally at home in the poetry of wine and mild
eroticism, of friendship and ‘deutscher Sang’, but he can also display
an intolerance of revealed religion’s embrace of political reaction.
None of these positions is incompatible with the other. They were not
all handed down to the poet; some, indeed, would need the impulse of
his own times for their acquisition and mastering.
Müller lived and died in Dessau, the capital and residence of
Anhalt-Dessau, one of the more liberal, if patriarchal, states of
the post-1815 ‘Bund’. If Dessau later gave him a professional base
and enabled him to carry out a wide range of literary activities for
publishers in several different centres, it was Berlin that proved
in the first instance formative. Müller’s father was a master tailor,
who, after a period of financial uncertainty, and a second marriage,
could be called fairly well-off. It seemed reasonable and proper that
his son should proceed to the liberal and enlightened ‘Hauptschule’
in the town, and Müller’s excellent knowledge of both classical and
modern languages was certainly acquired there. When later giving an
account of Byron’s miserable schooldays and love-hate relationship
with the ancient classics, Müller might well reflect that however
much Germany lacked in Byronic panache and effrontery, it certainly
produced well-educated writers. Anhalt not having a university of
its own, the choice for higher study fell on Berlin. Again, the contrast
between Humboldt’s University of Berlin and Byron’s Trinity College,

23 ‘Singing in many tones’. Wilhelm Müller, IV, 417.

24 ‘True German song-writer of pure, full voice, moved from the heart’. Ibid., 426
25 ‘This opening of the inner heart without any restraint’. Ibid., 476.
188 From Goethe to Gundolf

as yet innocent of William Whewell, Julius Hare or Connop Thirlwall,

cannot be stressed too much, except, of course, for the poets it brought
forth. Yet for a young man of a scholarly turn of mind, it might be bliss
to be alive in Berlin in 1813, in the university of Friedrich August Wolf,
of Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, of August Böckh, Johann Wilhelm
Süvern, Friedrich Rühs (the list could be extended). Müller’s father
could finance Wilhelm’s studies, but was immediately confronted (his
reaction is not recorded) with a less studious side of his son’s character.
Müller, at the age of eighteen, responded to the King of Prussia’s call to
arms after Napoleon’s defeat in Russia. This was easily enough done,
until one considered that Anhalt-Dessau, despite the ‘Alter Dessauer’26
and his role in Frederick II’s greatness, was not a Prussian fief. Clearly,
local dynastic differences were not holding back the patriotic fervour
of the young. From 1813 to 1815, Müller was a soldier, rising to the
rank of lieutenant. This puts him in the company of those other soldier
poets and painters (Joseph von Eichendorff, Max von Schenkendorf,
Theodor Körner, Friedrich Rückert, Fouqué, Ferdinand Olivier,
Philipp Veit, and others) whose formative experience was the Wars
of Liberation. Yet Müller never wrote anything approaching ‘Der gute
Kamerad’ or even ‘Lützows wilde Jagd’;27 we have no images of him
in uniform, as in Georg Friedrich Kersting’s well-known painting of
Körner and comrades.28 It may therefore come as a surprise to find the
singer of ‘Die Winterreise’ as a young man expressing animadversions
like these:

Aus Franzenschädeln trinken wir

Dort unsern deutschen Trank
Und feiern Wilhelms Siegeszier
Mit altem Bardensang.29

26  rince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau (‘the Dessauer’) was a general in Prussian service

P
under Frederick William I and Frederick the Great.
27 ‘The Good Comrade’, ‘Lützow’s Mad Wild Chase’, two of the best-known patriotic
poems from the Wars of Liberation, by Uhland and Körner respectively.
28 Illustrated in The Romantic Spirit in German Art 1790–1990, ed. by Keith Hartley
et al., Exhibition Catalogue (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland; London:
South Bank Centre; Munich: Oktagon, 1994–95), 248.
29 ‘From Frenchmen’s skulls we quaff
There our German wine
And mark Wilhelm’s victory bays
With bard-song as of yore!’. Wilhelm Müller, I, 4.
 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 189

These calamitous verses are from Müller’s first collection of poetry,

Bundesblüthen (1816).30 It is significant that neither Schwab nor any
subsequent nineteenth­-century editor, even in an age fairly flowing
with patriotic gore, chose to include this early stuff. The later Lieder der
Griechen/Songs of the Greeks, where the skulls might be Turkish and the
wine Chian, would be sufficient reminder of Müller the political bard.
This side of his oeuvre cannot be overlooked, and, as already stated, it is
part, but part only, of his admiration for Byron and political freedom.
For all that, it did mean that he had actually wielded the ‘Schwert’ while
also stringing the ‘Leyer’,31 and that his warrior pose was marginally
more convincing than had been Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim’s
enfeebled calls to arms under Frederick (or even the minor Romantics’
under Frederick William III).
Müller saw action at Grossgörschen and Kulm in 1813, then postings
at headquarters in Prague and Brussels. In Brussels there was a shadowy
love-affair with ‘Therese’, and there have been those who have wished
to identify her as the Jew of ‘Johannes und Maria’ and later of Debora.
Returning to Berlin in the autumn of 1815, he was to experience another
variant of the Petrarchan cycle; meeting the young artist and bemedalled
war veteran Wilhelm Hensel and entering his house circle, Müller fell
in love with his sister Luise. That might be too gross an expression for
this relationship; the two lovers met in a common religious inwardness:
their virginal devotion was to be sustained by the suppression of the
flesh and its earthly lust (‘böse Erdenlust’).32 Luise’s spirituality and
ethereality were later to try the sexual patience of Clemens Brentano,
ever ready to sublimate his baser desires in other­worldly devotion. If
Müller’s diary fragments from the period reveal less self­-maceration,
they are documents of a young man urgently eager to be pure, patriotic
and poetic. The relationship with Luise came to nothing. Yet Müller,
like Heine, both knew the Petrarchan literary mode and experienced
its real-life counterpart. Brooding melancholy, but also the forceful
overcoming of introspection, are as much part of the tissue of his poetic
cycles as they are of Heine’s Buch der Lieder/Book of Songs. But whereas

30 Bundesblüthen, compiled by Georg Graf von Blankensee, Wilhelm Hensel, Friedrich

Graf von Kalckreuth, Wilhelm Müller, Wilhelm von Studnitz (Berlin: Maurer, 1816).
[BL].
31 A reference to Körner’s collection Leyer und Schwert/Lyre and Sword (1814).
32 ‘Wicked earthly lust’. Wilhelm Müller, V, 55.
190 From Goethe to Gundolf

Heine compensates by challenging accepted norms, Müller more often

than not has recourse to conviviality and friendship as the cure for
Weltschmerz.33 It was with friends, including Hensel and the young count
Friedrich Kalckreuth, that the collection Bundesblüthen of 1816 came
about. It displeased the Prussian censor, not for its exquisite badness,
but for its possible seditiousness.34 With these particular friends it
could be said that Müller had fallen socially and professionally on his
feet. His rather bland portrait drawing joins the gallery of Biedermeier
notables (Heine, the Mendelssohns, Brentano, Rahel Varnhagen) in
Hensel’s portfolio.35 Kalckreuth is the son of the Prussian field marshal.
Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, a mere baron and a major, receives a letter
containing this sentence: ‘Und so war es auch gestern abend, als er
den freundlichen Händedruck des Mannes fühlte, dem er nächst Gott
und seinen Eltern das Meiste und Beste verdankt, ich meine nicht die
vergänglichen Wohltaten des Lebens, sondern die immergrüne Saat des
Guten und Schönen in ihm, so jung sie auch noch sein mag, mit einem
Worte, ein deutsches Herz und einen deutschen Geschmack’.36 Müller
later had cause to be ashamed of such sentiments, and of his association
with the ‘Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache’, the Germanophile society
that harboured the xenophobia, illiberalism and anti-­Semitism of Berlin
notables like Jahn, Böckh, or Rühs. Yet his first non-poetic publication, if
one will, his first scholarly effort, was a product of these circles: Blumenlese
aus den Minnesingern/Florilegium from the Minnesingers (1816).37 Was this
just an interest in Petrarchism, this time German-style, or a harbinger of
something deeper? Müller reprints Johann Jacob Bodmer’s Middle High
German based on the Manesse text, adding his own modern version
en face (it is not encouraging to find the Kürenberger’s famous poem

33 ‘Melancholy’, ‘mal du siècle’.

34 Wilhelm Müller, I, 279.
35 Wilhelm Hensel 1794–1861. Portraitist und Maler. Werke und Dokumente. Ausstellung
zum 200. Geburtstag, veranstaltet vom Mendelssohn-Archiv der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-
Preußischer Kulturbesitz 15. Dezember 1994 bis 29. Januar 1995 (Wiesbaden: Reichert,
1994), 23.
36 ‘And thus it was yesterday evening, too, when he felt the friendly hand-clasp of
the man to whom next to God and his parents, he owed the most and best, I do not
mean the fleeting benefits of life, but the evergreen seed of the good and beautiful
in him, however young it may be, in a word, a German heart and German taste’.
Wilhelm Müller, V, 109–10.
37 Blumenlese aus den Minnesingern, ed. by Wilhelm Müller (Berlin: Maurer, 1816). [BL,
OT, StA].
 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 191

masquerading as ‘Fräuleins Klage’).38 Other eighteenth-century revivals

of Minnesang, Gleim’s or Bürger’s, had been more interested in the
psychological stance of speaker and addressee than in textual niceties.
The Romantics, Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen,
modernizing and making accessible texts they saw as appealing to the
spirit of their times, were at the same time continuing the previous
century’s antiquarianism. Tieck, following Friedrich Schlegel, had
postulated a continuity of ‘Eine Poesie’39 throughout the undulations
and anfractuosities of the historical process. Müller’s preface reflects
his deference to the great Friedrich August Wolf and his ‘Liedertheorie’
of Homer, already turning the heads of sober classical scholars like
Niebuhr. The mode of transmission from the heroic age or even the
‘schwäbisches Zeitalter’,40 of epic or lyrical texts in older Germanic
dialects might, in Müller’s eyes, best be compared with that of the songs
of Homer as they passed through many hands and became remoter
from the texts that the rhapsodists had once sung. As a philologist (and
Müller can lay claim to this title) he sides less with academic scholars
like Georg Friedrich Benecke or the Grimms or Karl Lachmann. There is
a wider reading public in mind; the style is clear and elegant; his models
are Johann Heinrich Voss, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Goethe.41
‘Wissenschaftliche Prosa’42 of this kind was still highly regarded by
teachers of aesthetics and ‘Beredsamkeit’ (‘eloquence’), and it has the
advantage of accessibility and readability: it is the tradition that became
great in the hands of Ranke and Mommsen, Alexander von Humboldt
and (later) the Grimm brothers.
Of further significance during Müller’s period in Berlin was the circle
around August von Stägemann and his wife Elisabeth. Stägemann was
a man of affairs, close to the chancellor Karl August von Hardenberg,
but, on less secure ground, also a poet of sorts. His wife’s salon brought
together Berlin notabilities: here Müller met Friedrich Förster, whose
Die Sängerfahrt/The Minstrel’s Journey is one of the key texts of Berlin
late Romanticism, and most likely Achim von Arnim, with whom he
was to collaborate in translating Christopher Marlowe. The Stägemann

38 ‘Young Lady’s Complaint’.

39 ‘One sole poetry’.
40 ‘Era of the Swabian emperors’.
41 Wilhelm Müller, IV, 75.
42 ‘Scholarly prose’.
192 From Goethe to Gundolf

house was musical, convivial and literary: it contained the elements that
were to launch Müller on a career in letters. We may assume that his
contributions to almanacs and literary magazines (such as Friedrich
Wilhelm Gubitz’s much-read periodical Der Gesellschafter, in which
both Arnim and Brentano published) were in some measure due to the
contacts the concourse in the Stägemanns’ house afforded. Some of these
early efforts contain the first versions of the works that were to bring
Müller fame: Der Gesellschafter for 1818, for instance, contained twelve
‘Müller­-Lieder’, some written for a lyrical dramolet in the Stägemann
house and now taking on lineaments of their own.
Before Müller emerged as a literary persona, he had to undergo
yet another formative influence: Italy. It was to have been Greece, but
unromantic circumstances deemed otherwise. Had it been Greece,
it is conceivable that he might have followed an academic career,
for Friedrich August Wolf was involved in the matter. He had been
approached by Baron Albert von Sack, a gentleman of means and leisure
who wished to spend two years travelling in Greece and the Near East
and sought a suitably qualified young travelling companion. Wolf and
Böckh recommended Müller, who in his turn had good reason to turn
away from the cloying religious and patriotic atmosphere of the last two
years. This was in August, 1817; the journey was to lead from Vienna to
Constantinople. In Vienna, Müller met for the first time Greeks exiled
through the political circumstances of their native country; it was the
germ of the later Lieder der Griechen. In Vienna, too, the news reached
the travellers that an outbreak of plague had made the Ottoman lands
unsafe. Baron Sack, not lacking resource, decided to do the Italian leg
of the journey, originally planned for the return stage. Thus it was that
Müller made the journey to Rome; his other travelling companion was
the Nazarene artist Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, for whose society
he later had cause to be grateful. Once arrived in Rome, Müller parted
company with Sack amid recriminations, and he was glad of contacts
among the Nazarenes: Schnorr43 and Philipp Fohr did portrait drawings
of him (Schnorr’s the kind of superbly severe head-and-shoulders
likeness in which the brotherhood excelled), and the art historian and
patron Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, ever interested in young men, lent
him money. It may be hard to imagine Müller among the company in

43 
Cat., 120.
 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 193

the Caffè Greco depicted by Fohr before his tragic death in the Tiber:44
there was already too much ‘altdeutsche Tracht’,45 too much intense
seriousness, too much religiosity. But like the Nazarenes, Müller sought
relief from the Roman heat in the Albano mountains, not idealizing the
local inhabitants as backdrop studies for religious paintings, as their
scenes of Olevano tend to do, but trying to understand their mentality.
Although Müller befriended August Sigismund Ruhl,46 one of the
few Nazarenes who actually broke his bond with the brotherhood, he
seems to have found the company of Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom,
the Swedish Romantic, more congenial. Each is commemorated: Ruhl is
the dedicatee of the sonnet collection ‘Die Monate/The Months’ in the
Sieben und siebzig Gedichte, while Atterbom is more aptly remembered in
the preface to Book II of Rom, Römer und Römerinnen/Rome, Roman Men
and Roman Women. That text, which appeared in 1820,47 revealed that the
Italian experience was a search for both his personal and his national
identity, while claiming to offer some insights into the mentality of a
people much written about by the Germans but equally often misjudged
by them. Müller did not echo Tieck‘s testy words of 1816 to his friend
Solger: ‘Ich liebe die Italiener und ihr leichtes Wesen, bin aber in
Italien erst recht zum Deutschen geworden’.48 That was an ungenerous
reaction to Goethe’s Italienische Reise, a text that had not scrupled to
treat Romantic sensibilities with some little severity. Müller, for his part,
did not omit some unflattering asides on the subject of the Nazarenes,
but that was all part of the business of casting off native prejudices and
inborn preconceptions. The servants of revealed religion do not emerge
well from Müller’s account, except where they display scholarship and
learning, but by the same token Northern Protestant ‘Verinnerlichung’49
emerges as the main barrier to understanding the Italian character and

44 Illustrated in Deutsche Romantik. Handzeichnungen, ed. by Marianne Bernhard, 2 vols

(Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1974), I, 306–07.
45 ‘Old German costume’.
46 Deutsche Romantik. Handzeichnungen, I, 1476.
47 Rom, Römer und Römerinnen. Eine Sammlung vertrauter Briefe aus Rom und Albano mit
einigen späteren Zusätzen und Belegen von Wilhelm Müller, 2 vols (Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 1820). [BL, CTrin, OB, OT].
48 ‘I love the Italians and their easy ways, but Italy first made a German of me’. Goethe
in vertraulichen Briefen seiner Zeitgenossen, ed. by Wilhelm Bode, 3 vols (Berlin and
Weimar: Aufbau,1979), II, 667–68. See Chapter Two of this volume.
49 ‘Inwardness’.
194 From Goethe to Gundolf

its notions of right and wrong. Müller does see religion in Italy, but it is
enshrined in observances that are already present in the mythology and
customs of Roman antiquity. This mythological interest could be called
Romantic, but it also casts a wry and dispassionate eye over things
considered sacred and ‘naive’ by the Nazarenes. Above all, Müller seeks
to discard received moral and cultural ideas, to understand a national
character while gaining comprehension of himself. In practical terms
that means learning the language and its dialects, not blenching at its
sexual mores or its robust folk-song, playing the flâneur, listening and
keeping one’s eyes open. These are also features that the best Roman
sections of Goethe’s Italienische Reise contain. Rom, Römer und Römerinnen
keeps the figure of the exploring author firmly before the reader; he may
not be the famous ‘pittore’ hiding his identity, but he is a young man
bent on finding his psychological feet in a foreign land.
One senses that Müller returned from Italy late in 1818 having cast
off his priggishness and many of his inhibitions. He did, however, face
a crucial decision. What could one do after Berlin and Rome? A matter-
of-fact solution was reached: to return home to Dessau. Had Müller
abandoned the monde that had seemed to beckon, or the hopes of
academic preferment? Perhaps not without some sense of resignation,
he seems, like so many of his contemporaries, to have concluded
that home is best. If Dessau was not Berlin or Leipzig or Dresden,
in a pre-railway age it was not far from these cultural centres either.
Literary magazines and almanacs could be published even in Altona
or Karlsruhe or Bunzlau and still reach the reading public on which
they depended. Yet Müller as a teaching assistant at the Latin school
that had replaced his own old institution does seem a depressing climb-
down, a Carl Spitzweg painting without the humour or the whimsy. He
found an outlet in the duties of a librarian, for Dessau was to receive a
public library, and, after struggles with his superiors, he was eventually
to be entrusted with its charge. But that was not until 1823. He had first
to establish himself socially and economically. The irony is that he had
only a few more years to live, and the tragedy is that he seems almost to
have worked himself to death.
The return from Italy coincided with publications reflecting the first
flush of his lyrical energy, but also Die Sängerfahrt and Doktor Faustus.50

50 
Die Sängerfahrt. Eine Neujahrsgabe für Freunde der Dichtkunst und Mahlerey […]
Gesammelt von Friedrich Förster […] (Berlin: Maurer, 1818), ed. by Siegfried Sudhof
 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 195

The former, so significant for its stories by Brentano and Arnim, hardly
does Müller credit. For the latter, Müller was certainly better versed
in English than Arnim and certainly more knowledgeable. Not even
Arnim’s preface would touch off any great wave of interest in Marlowe’s
work in Germany, an uphill task against the ‘Shakespearomanie’ in
which neither poet, to their credit, chose to join. But Arnim was generous
and entrusted one of his longer and better poems to Müller’s short-lived
periodical Askania.51
For the remainder of his short life, Müller pitched himself into a
frenetic series of activities. This, at least, is how they seem to the observer
at today’s distance. It does, however, emerge that Müller was tidy, well
organized, wrote easily, and could readily draw on the vast fund of
literary knowledge in several languages that he had acquired in Berlin
and Italy. In 1821 he married Adelheid Basedow, the granddaughter of
the famous educationalist of the Philanthropin: Wilhelm Hensel obliged
this time with a double portrait, anodyne like the first and lacking the
forceful character of Schnorr’s. Like most of Hensel‘s portrait drawings,
it bore an autograph: ‘Werde glücklich wie der durch ein Weib wie die!’,52
the Biedermeier marriage ideal in a nutshell.
Müller was professionally a librarian. In the terms of his day that
also meant being an antiquarian, a side that emerges in his editions of
seventeenth-century German poetry. He remained a classical scholar, but
of the more popularizing kind: Homerische Vorschule/Homer’s Forebears
is the result. He was well and truly harnessed into what might seem
the ephemeral world of reviewing and contributions to reference works.
He kept several almanacs stocked with his occasional verse, including
Amadeus Wendt’s Taschenbuch zum geselligen Vergnügen/Almanac for
Social Enjoyment, even his own Askania, the mayfly that did not outlive
the year 1820, and out of these emerged the collections for some of which
he is remembered today. He joined in gregariousness and conviviality of
all kinds: so much of his verse seems to have been written for occasions
where time stood still and the song and the wine flowed. But there

(Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, n.d. [1969]); Doktor Faustus. Tragödie von Christoph
Marlowe, trans. by Wilhelm Müller, preface by Achim von Arnim (Berlin: Maurer,
1818). [BL, L, CUL).
51 ‘Elegie auf den Tod eines Geistlichen/Elegy on the Death of a Clergyman’. Askania.
Zeitschrift für Leben, Litteratur und Kunst, 1 (1820), 364–69. [BL].
52 ‘Be happy like him with a wife like her!’ Cat., 119.
196 From Goethe to Gundolf

was also a shrewdness underlying this flurry of activity. He chose his

publishers with care: Friedrich Arnold, and later Heinrich, Brockhaus in
Leipzig, had every cause to be satisfied with their young author in Dessau,
and they paid well for work always punctually delivered. Friedrich
Arnold Brockhaus, as an astute publisher, kept a variety of different
enterprises going: Literarisches Conversations-Blatt/Literary Conversations,
Hermes oder kritisches Jahrbuch der Literatur/Hermes, or Critical Yearbook of
Literature, the almanac Urania, the famous Conversations-Lexicon. Müller
contributed to them all, but he also kept his options open, playing off the
cautious Brockhaus against the mighty Johann Friedrich Cotta and his
Morgenblatt für die gebildeten Stände/Morning Paper for Educated Classes,
yet not entrusting his Waldhornist collections to either and having them
printed locally in Dessau. As his literary reputation increased, he could
bargain for better royalties, not quite yet in the league of popular writers
like Heinrich Clauren or Carl Franz van der Velde or Tieck, but the mild
tussle with Brockhaus over Debora shows Müller standing his ground in
monetary matters.53
Müller was well received in literary circles, notably those in Dresden,
and especially those around Ludwig Tieck. The dedications of the
Waldhornist volumes to Tieck and Carl Maria von Weber respectively
are not mere conventional deferentiality. Weber (also working himself
to death) was a reminder of the important links between poetry and
music; that the naked text of so much seemingly trivial verse of the
period is calling out for the decent covering of a musical setting. For a
younger writer, Tieck was a model in both a positive and negative sense.
His poetry, by then at last available in collected form,54 would provide
the base line for so many of the young generation, the vocabulary,
the attitudes, the clichés. His Novellen, the product of a pen that
Müller rightly calls ‘flüchtig’,55 might convince the younger and less
experienced that they too could extract a fairly good story from a set of
stock situations. Perhaps Wilhelm Hauff could; Müller certainly could
not. Tieck was a warning example of how not to dissipate one’s time
and talents in conflicting and multifarious projects. Yet Müller did not
share Tieck’s consuming passion for the theatre and for Shakespeare.

53 Wilhelm Müller, V, 413–14.

54 Gedichte von L. Tieck, 3 parts (Dresden: Hilscher, 1821–23).
55 ‘Fugitive’. Wilhelm Müller, IV, 411.
 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 197

His corpus of reviews at their best recall more of the later Goethe’s
range of interests, in their catholicity, their sense of ‘Weltliteratur/World
literature’, their admiration of the folk traditions of southern Europe,
their (differently accentuated) fascination with Byron. If the actual
meeting with Goethe went badly, at least Müller’s reception in Dresden
compensated, where he stayed in the grandeur of the Kalckreuths’ Villa
Grassi. There he joined the lesser lights of that city, Malsburg, Förster,
Loeben, as they revolved around the star attraction of Tieck, or paid
brief homage to Weber.
How many of the writings of this almost manic spurt of activity
actually deserve to survive? With this question I also approach the
problems of the selection principles faced by past and present editors.
Leaving aside the poetry proper for the moment, it emerges that nearly
all of his writings actually impact on questions of poetic tradition,
taste, or convention, on the relationship of the written to the spoken
word. Rom, Römer und Römerinnen, already alluded to for its function
in Müller’s development, has important sections on Italian folksong,
which it quotes liberally, noting the ability of unlettered Italian street
singers to improvise, but also their extraordinary feats of memory
(a point also observed by Goethe).56 Hearing an Italian recite from
memory canto after canto of Tasso is a living reminder of the ‘Geist der
alten natürlichen Poesie’,57 the oral tradition that exists outside written
documentation or inscription, and adapts to the times in which the
stories are being recounted, which is inevitably accompanied by dance
and music. The quotation comes from Müller‘s Homerische Vorschule.
Eine Einleitung in das Studium der Ilias und Odyssee/Homer’s Forebears. An
Introduction into the Study of the Iliad and the Odyssey,58 easily written off
as Friedrich August Wolf made accessible for the aesthetic tea-table (it is
his only scholarly work to go into a second edition), yet for Müller proof
that natural sung language is a reflection of the essence of those who
sing, the ‘Stimme der Völker’.59 His praise of the Volkslied and of those
who practise it well (Goethe, Uhland, Kerner) links him with Herder’s

56 Goethe, Gedenkausgabe, XIV, 410.

57 ‘Spirit of ancient natural poetry’.
58 Homerische Vorschule. Eine Einleitung in das Studium der Ilias und Odyssee (Leipzig:
Brockhaus, 1824). [BL, OB, Glas]. I use the second edition, ed. by Detlev Carl Wilh.
Baumgarten-Crusius (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1836), 22. [BL, CUL, OB, OT, JRULM].
59 ‘Voice of the nations’.
198 From Goethe to Gundolf

concerns half a century or so earlier, but, as already noted, it postulates

a national poetry for the Germans that will be from the heart, natural,
and free of artifice. It speaks the language of Goethe’s famous review of
Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and it is fair to say that Müller, by precept and
example, is a major factor in the process that eventually denies legitimacy
to mere formalism and rhetoric in lyrical poetry. These concerns inform
his best literary criticism, in a negative sense his unease at what formal
poets like Platen or Rückert were producing, his ill-concealed contempt
for so much of the poetic almanacs (and his ironic self-deprecation at
being so dependent on them); more positively, his praise of the best
Swabian poetry, but a word of commendation for the ‘durch heitre Ironie
gemilderte Schwermut’60 of lesser lights such as Schmidt von Lübeck.
When Müller produced his major anthology Bibliothek deutscher Dichter
des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts/Library of German Poets of the Seventeenth
Century61 he was not pursuing mere antiquarianism (although collating
the texts also involves that) but seeking to reacquaint the Germans with
a tradition of their own poetry on which they had all but turned their
backs. Modern Baroque scholars should pay some deference to Müller
as one who tried, but ultimately failed, to secure some of the best older
lyrical poetry for the nation. If he preferred Paul Fleming and Simon
Dach to Martin Opitz and Andreas Gryphius, this is consistent with his
general criteria, where ‘bürgerliche Biederkeit und Unumwundenheit’62
(referring to Dach) rank higher than formal correctness or vanitas. In
rehabilitating Johann Christian Günther as the only genuine poet in a
half-century of aridity, he had Goethe’s judgement on his side.
These criteria extend without qualification to foreign literatures.
The translator must know how to employ them in his task of
‘Eindringen und Untergehen’63 in an alien tongue. I draw attention to
the word Müller uses for particularly successful translations in these
terms, namely ‘Ueberdichtungen’, a word not known to the Deutsches

60 ‘Melancholy tempered with a light touch of irony’. Wilhelm Müller, IV, 424.
61 Bibliothek deutscher Dichter des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts. Herausgegeben von Wilhelm
Müller, 14 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1822–38) (vols XI–XIV, 1828–38, bear the
subtitle ‘Begonnen von Wilhelm Müller. Fortgesetzt von Karl Förster’). [BL, CTrin
(i–vii only), OT].
62 ‘Good old-fashioned forthrightness’. Wilhelm Müller, IV, 106.
63 ’Penetrating and submerging’. ‘Gries und Streckfuß Uebersetzungen von Tasso‘s
befreitem Jerusalem’, Hermes oder kritisches Jahrbuch der Literatur, 18, 2. Stuck (1823),
261–300 (280). [BL, CUL, CTrin, OB, JRULM, Nat, StA].
 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 199

Wörterbuch/German Dictionary and not readily translatable,64 yet one

that expresses concerns peculiarly close to nineteenth-century German
poetic endeavour. Müller himself is no great translator:

War das der Blick, der tausend Schiffe trieb

ln‘s Meer, der Trojas hohe Zinnen stürzte?65

This is hardly the Marlowe we know and love. His major corpus of
translated work, Neugriechische Volkslieder/Modern Greek Folksongs, is
itself a reworking of Claude Charles Fauriel’s French version.66 When
discussing Pierre-Jean de Béranger or Byron or Thomas Moore or
modern Greek poetry, Müller blends his remarks with factors that are
more or less overtly political. The texts of Neugriechische Volkslieder pre-
date the main struggle for independence and are in some ways closer to
older ballad traditions or even the Serbian folksongs that so appealed
to Goethe. They gain through their formulaic quality a tone that is alien
to Müller’s own Lieder der Griechen, where moral outrage (and even
rant) are never too far from the surface. In reviewing Moore’s poetry
for Hermes in 1823 Müller made a crucial distinction between verse that
was merely ‘demagogisch’ and patriotic poetry that could produce
‘unmittelbare Begeisterung durch die Zeit’.67 While admitting that Moore
did not always observe this rule, Müller might well have reflected that
his Lieder der Griechen were closer to the former than to the latter. It is
hard to be fair to political poetry at the best of times. To cite an analogy:
Heine at his best would satisfy the nobler of Müller’s two categories;
Ferdinand Freiligrath or Georg Herwegh would fall into the lesser. It is
easy to write off German ‘Griechenlieder/Songs of the Greeks’ (Müller’s
are but one example among many) or ‘Polenlieder/Songs of the Poles’
as being vicarious or surrogate, as not addressing directly the need for
freedom at home and, with questionable honesty, embracing the needs
of those conveniently remote in space and culture. His interest in Byron

64 ‘Transpoeticization’, perhaps. Ibid., 281.

65 ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ Doktor Faustus, 131.
66 Neugriechische Volkslieder, ed. by C. Fauriel, trans. by Wilhelm Müller, 2 parts
(Leipzig: Voss, 1825). [BL, CUL, CTrin, OB, Edin].
67 ‘Demagogic’; ‘with the times providing direct enthusiasm’. ‘Ueber die Gedichte
des Thomas Moore’, Hermes oder kritisches Jahrbuch der Literatur, 20, 4. Stuck (1823),
184–211 (207–08).
200 From Goethe to Gundolf

and Moore and Walter Scott and so much other foreign literature might
by the same token be a mere attempt to counteract the political stuffiness
and limitation which he was powerless to change. Neither of these views
is really fair. I therefore quote in full his poem ‘Die verpestete Freiheit/
Freedom under the Plague’, not for its poetic qualities, although its
contained rage is not without effect, but for what it actually says:

Was schreit das Pharisäervolk so ängstlich durch die Länder,

Die Häupter dick mit Staub bestreut, zerrissen die Gewänder?
Sie schreien: Sperrt die Häfen zu, umzieht mit Quarantänen
Die Grenzen und die Ufer schnell vor Schiffen und vor Kähnen!
Die Pest ist unter ihrer Schar. Da seht die Strafgerichte,
Damit des Herrn gerechte Hand Empörer macht zunichte!
Die Freiheit selber, wie es heißt, ist von der Pest befallen,
Und flüchtet sich nach Westen nun mit ihren Jüngern allen.
O seht euch vor, daß in das Land die Freiheit euch nicht schleiche,
Und der gesunden Völker Herz mit ihrem Hauch erreiche!
Sie kleidet sich zu dieser Zeit in vielerlei Gestalten:
Bald Weib, bald Mann, bald nur ein Kind, bald hat sie greise Falten.
Drum lasset keinen Flüchtling ein, der kommt vom Griechenlande,
Daß nicht die Freiheit ihre Pest bring in die guten Lande!68

This is Müller accepting the limits imposed by censorship and political

constraint, but also registering a point that still (alas) has relevance in
the Europe of 1995 (or 2021).
Inevitably, the two collections, Sieben und siebzig Gedichte aus den
hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten of 1821 (dedicated
to Tieck and containing ‘Die schöne Müllerin’) and Gedichte aus den
hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten of 1824 (dedicated to

68 ‘Why do the Pharisees rage so excitedly through the lands,

Their heads strewn with dust, garments torn to bands?
They cry: Close down the ports and put a quarantine
On all our borders, ship and barquentine!
The plague has broken out. See the court that sits,
For the Lord’s just hand to smite his enemies in bits!
For freedom, so we hear, the plague has got,
And is fleeing westwards bringing all her lot.
Beware that freedom does not slip into the land
And taint the people’s hearts with pestilential hand!
She puts on many guises in our day:
Man, woman, child, even heads grey.
Keep out all refugees arriving from Greek isles,
Or freedom brings its plague and with it all its wiles!’. Wilhelm Müller, II, 285.
 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 201

Carl Maria von Weber and containing the full text of ‘Die Winterreise’)
must command more attention than any other aspect of his oeuvre, for
these encapsulate quintessentially the ‘Lieder-Müller’ whose survival
is assured. It will, however, not do simply to isolate the Schubert texts
and forget the rest, for that would overlook the complexity of the
relationship between melodic and poetic line. It is also not merely a
question of noting where the major differences lie between Müller’s and
Schubert’s respective order and phrasing (especially with reference to
‘Die Winterreise’). Müller set both these lyrical cycles of ‘Rollenlieder’ in
collections (sometimes containing further, different sets of ‘Rollenlieder’)
and he seems to be inviting the reader of the Waldhornisten poems, as
it were, to forget Schubert and look at the overall context. The phrase
‘durch heitre Ironie gemilderte Schwermut’,69 quoted above in respect
of Schmidt von Lübeck, can serve as a cautionary superscription to
both of these collections. In giving them the titles he does, Müller is
making a statement about the mixed nature of his poetry, or rather, the
unforced coexistence of various components in forming a harmonious
whole. Thus, while ‘Die schöne Müllerin’ and ‘Die Winterreise’ are
undoubtedly texts of Weltschmerz (‘melancholy’), there is enough in the
collections that frame them to counteract any sense of utter existential
loss. ‘Die schöne Müllerin’ even contains those two poems, ‘Der Dichter,
als Prolog/The Poet as Prologue’ and ‘Der Dichter, als Epilog/The Poet
as Epilogue’, ironizing through a deliberate ‘Stimmungsbrechung’70 the
lapse from fulfilment into despair that the encapsulated poems express.
But the titles of these poetic collections’ titles keep a similar set of
contradictory components in balance: the ‘Waldhornist’ immediately has
associations with Tieck’s Romantic novel Franz Sternbald and its constant
horn serenades amid forest glades, ‘reisend’ as befits a novel that never
reaches its destination, with ‘hinterlassene Papiere’ suggesting perhaps
that he, too, has gone the way of the young miller. We must, however,
accept the fiction that the ‘Waldhornist’ in his turn is also the author of
all the poems, ‘Reiselieder/Songs of Travel’ or ‘Ländliche Lieder/Songs
of the Country’ or ‘Tafellieder/Drinking Songs’, that contain the therapy
against the despair of the ‘Winterreise’. Schubert, never otherwise noted
for the sureness of his literary taste, found ‘Die schöne Müllerin’ in

69 Wilhelm Müller, IV, 424.

70 ‘Break in tone’.
202 From Goethe to Gundolf

the 1821 collection and promptly excluded the prologue and epilogue
poems. This changes Müller’s text and leads the way for the domination
of words by music. ‘Die Winterreise’ is more complex, in that Schubert
first composed the twelve poems that had come out in Urania (1823),
with an order slightly different from the 1824 edition, then added the
remaining poems, but in a sequence that was not Müller’s but his own.
Thus, while the Weltschmerz of ‘Die schone Müllerin’ comes out fully
only in the musical setting, the text of ‘Die Winterreise’ is altogether
more pointed in its message. Winter already has bleak connotations. We
are clearly not in the late eighteenth-century rococo winter landscape
of, say, Günther von Goeckingk’s ‘Als der erste Schnee fiel/When the
First Snow Fell’,71 with Nantchen wrapped up in her muff, but in a world
of doors that close, houses that remain shut, nature that is inimical,
trackless, without destination, where wandering is a symbol of the
human state. Schubert, even without altering the text, intensifies the
Weltschmerz (‘melancholy’) and makes it the dominant tone; the poet,
in his turn, invites us to read back or read on and find a more cheerful
collection to raise our spirits, perhaps those ‘Tafellieder’ that appealed
to two other composers, not alas of Schubert’s stature.
Müller’s remaining lyrical collection, Lyrische Reisen und
epigrammatische Spaziergänge/Lyrical Journeys and Epigrammatic Strolls
(1827), is presumably to be read in a similar fashion: ‘Lieder aus
dem Meerbusen von Salerno/Songs from the Gulf of Salerno’, ‘Lieder
aus Franzensbad bei Eger/Songs from Franzensbad Near Eger’,
‘Frühlingskranz aus dem Plauenschen Grunde bei Dresden/Spring
Nosegay from the Plauenscher Grund near Dresden’, ‘Muscheln von
der Insel Rügen/Shells from the Island of Rügen’ (echoes of Heine
here), ‘Berenice. Ein erotischer Spaziergang/Berenice. An Erotic
Promenade’. He did not live to unite other remaining disparate items.
Fatigued, with eye and heart trouble, seeking convalescence on Rügen
or in Franzensbad, even granted a temporary Tusculum in Dessau by
his reigning prince, he worked on to the end. The visit to Stuttgart
and Tübingen, to Schwab, Uhland and Kerner, was his last personal
triumph. A heart attack brought his life to an end on September 30,
1827, just short of his thirty-third birthday. It was left to Gustav Schwab
to commemorate his newly found friend in the five-volume Vermischte

71 A well-known anthology poem (1778).

 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 203

Schriften of 1830, and the two-volume Gedichte of 1837 that reprinted the
first two parts of the earlier edition.
An editor of Müller’s works will be both constrained and encouraged
by the printing history of his disparate oeuvre, whereas a commemorative
volume will seek to do justice to all significant aspects of the man
and writer. The Vermischte Schriften contain the poetry, the Novellen
and the major critical essays (including those on the Tasso and Dante
translations, on Uhland and Kerner, on almanac literature, on Rückert
and on Willibald Alexis’s Walladamor), the crucial account of Byron’s life
and works, and a miscellany of almanac and magazine contributions.
They exclude much that was still in print in l830, such as the collections
and editions. The first two volumes provided a basis for the various
editions of the poems, enabling these to remain within reach of the
reading public. The poetry in both the 1830 and 1837 editions, even in
Max Müller’s 1868 edition, was grouped round thematic clusters, not
in strict chronological progression. The diaries and letters were edited
by Philip Allen and James Hatfield in 1903,25 publishing the early Berlin
diary and such correspondence as was available at the time. Hatfield in
his turn did a critical edition of the poems in 1906,72 and Heinrich Lohre’s
‘Lebensbild’ of 1927 added important letters to Brockhaus.73 Much of the
material in the later volumes of the Vermischte Schriften has never been
reprinted, but Debora, for reasons best known to the compilers, made its
way into Paul Heyse’s and Hermann Kurz’s Deutscher Novellenschatz.74
Rom, Römer und Römerinnen has until now never been republished in its
entirety. Doktor Faustus was reprinted in 1911,75 and the recent reprint
of Die Sängeifahrt/The Minstrels’ Journey picked up the few, hardly
significant, contributions Müller made to that collection. Neither of
these works is, however, truly central to Müller. Much else is in the rare
book category and difficult of access: the Müller scholar still needs a

72 Diary and Letters of Wilhelm Müller, ed. by Philip Schuyler Allen and James Taft
Hatfield (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1903).
73 Gedichte von Wilhelm Müller. Vollständige kritische Ausgabe, ed. by James Taft Hatfield,
Deutsche Literaturdenkmale des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts 137 (Berlin: Behr, 1906);
Wilhelm Müller als Kritiker und Erzähler. Ein Lebensbild mit Briefen an F. A. Brockhaus
und anderen Schriftstücken, ed. by Heinrich Lohre, Aus dem Archiv F. A. Brockhaus,
Zeugnisse zur Geschichte geistigen Schaffens 2 (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1927).
74 Deutscher Novellenschatz, ed. by Paul Heyse and Hermann Kurz, 24 vols (Munich,
Leipzig: Oldenbourg 1871–74), XVIII, 1–148.
75 Ed. by Bertha Badt, Pandora 11 (Munich: Georg Müller, 1911).
204 From Goethe to Gundolf

‘hands-on’ approach to texts; reprinted prefaces alone do not give the

feel, texture or scope of many of the large-scale works.
Müller is not an author for whom a historical-critical approach
is appropriate. Thus this multi-volume and splendidly produced
edition by Maria-Verena Leistner is inevitably a selection, a generous
and judicious one for all that. The poetry and the diaries and travel
accounts are virtually complete; the letters are well chosen. I could
have done without the Novellen, but that is a personal judgement and
not a scholarly criterion. My own selection of the critical writing might
well have been different from the editor’s, but only in detail (I should
have preferred the Tasso and Moore pieces to one or two published
here). I should single out for special mention the prefaces to the
Minnesinger and Opitz selections (republished for the first time), the
large and important article on Byron, and the review of Uhland and
Kerner. I regret that the decision was made, however understandable,
to exclude the contributions to encyclopaedias: the printing history of
these publications is a bibliographer’s nightmare, and not even Goedeke
ventured into this veritable minefield. Encyclopaedias are, however, the
single most important mode of dissemination of useful knowledge in
the period, Müller almost coinciding with the inception of Brockhaus’s
or Ersch-Gruber’s enterprises. They also represent a factor of continuity
amid the changes of critical theory and literary canon.76 The scholarly
apparatus of this edition consists of a fifty-eight-page introduction
to Volume I, by Bernd Leistner, short introductions to each work or
set of works, and notes. Volume V contains a select bibliography of
primary and secondary literature, an important orientation for non-
specialist and specialist alike. The editorial principles set out in the
same volume are matter-of-fact and without fuss. While accepting
that most of Müller’s work does not exist in manuscript, and that he
made alterations to his own works during his lifetime, the principle of
manuscript or first printing is adhered to, with variants available in the
notes. The spelling has been modernized in accordance with good sense
and practice. The notes themselves, especially those of a bibliographical
nature, are useful, and clearly much research into sources has gone into

76 Walther Killy, ‘Große deutsche Lexika und ihre Lexikographen 1711–1835. Hederich,
Hübner, Walch, Pierer’, in Große deutsche Lexika. Aufklärung und neunzehntes
Jahrhundert (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1992), 1–35.
 10. Some Remarks on the New Edition of the Works of Wilhelm Müller
 205

them. Unlike those of the ‘Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker’, for instance,

they are more cryptic than expansive. Thus in some cases just a few
more chosen sentences of introduction would have been useful, as on
Byron, or the Greek wars of independence, or even on, say, the Bibliothek
deutscher Dichter des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts/Library of German Poets of the
Seventeenth Century. True, Leistner’s highly useful introductory essay to
Volume I does this in a few, sometimes very few, well-weighed words.
The decision not to document except in passing Müller’s contributions
to encyclopaedias means that references to these are not as clear as they
might be. These are very small criticisms to raise of an edition of this
scope and significance.
The commemorative volume, Wilhelm Müller. Eine Lebensreise/
Wilhelm Müller’s Life’s Journey contains contributions by both Bernd and
Maria-Verena Leistner, but also by a dozen other experts.77 These range
from essays of more local interest to articles dealing with major aspects
of Müller’s oeuvre and thinking. These roughly 100 pages form a corpus
of knowledge (I have drawn on it extensively for this article) that will,
I hope, help to bring Müller back into a wider general consciousness,
and, who knows, attract visitors to his birthplace. There are superb
illustrations based on the exhibition that gave rise to the volume.

77 The contributions are: Bernd Leistner, ‘Wilhelm Müller. Leben und Werk’, 11–31;
Ulla Jablonski, ‘Wilhelm Müller in Dessau. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft der kleinen
Residenzstadt um 1800’, 33–39; Annette Gerlach, ‘Wilhelm Müller als Bibliothekar’,
41–45; Maria-Verena Leistner, ‘Wilhelm Müller als Literaturkritiker’, 47–55; Roswitha
Schieb, ‘“Die schöne Müllerin” und “Die Winterreise”. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen
romantischen Sprechens’, 57–69; Andreas Klenner, ‘Kein Sänger der Weltflucht.
Wilhelm Müller als kritischer Beobachter seiner Zeit’, 71–75; Barbara Czerannowski,
‘“Ohne die Freiheit, was wärest du, Hellas? Ohne dich, Hellas, was wäre die Welt?”.
Wilhelm Müller und der Philhellenismus’, 77–83; Hildegard Eilert, ‘“Ich denke doch,
wir müssen die Römer mit ihrer eigenen Nase beurteilen”. Wilhelm Müllers Kritik
des deutschen Italien-Bildes in “Rom, Römer und Römerinnen”’, 85–95; Hans­-Udo
Kreuels, ‘“Die Winterreise” des Wilhelm Müller (und des Franz Schubert). Versuch
einer behutsamen, gegenseitigen Distanzierung’, 97–102.
Fig. 14. A
 nna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical. With Fifty
Vignette Etchings, second edition (London: Saunders & Otley, 1833), volume 1,
p. 1. The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.
 11. Heine and Shakespeare1

William Shakespeare is a major figure of bearing, reference and

identification in Heinrich Heine’s oeuvre and also the subject of a whole
work, Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen/Shakespeare’s Girls and Women
(1838).2 The experts cannot agree whether it is a minor piece with major
overtones, or perhaps a larger complex that remains fragmentary (a
Shakespeare project) or even a kind of extension of his ‘Deutschland-
Schriften’3 which start around 1832. Certainly it has elements of all these,
but above all it is an occasional piece, eclectic, pluralistic, open-ended,

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as: ‘Heine and Shakespeare’,
in Heine und die Weltliteratur, ed. by T. J. Reed and Alexander Stillmark (Oxford,
London: Legenda, 2000), 51–63.
2 For Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen, see particularly the apparatus to Heinrich
Heine, Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. by Manfred Windfuhr et al., 16 vols in 23
(Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1973–1997), X (referred to henceforth as DA);
Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. by Klaus Briegleb, 6 vols in 7 (Munich:
Hanser, 1968–76), VII (referred to henceforth as SS); Heinrich Heine, Shakespeares
Mädchen und Frauen, ed. by Volkmar Hansen (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1978);
Walter Wadepuhl, ‘Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen. Heine und Shakespeare’, in
Heine-Studien (Weimar: Arion, 1956), 114–34; Siegbert Prawer, Heine’s Shakespeare.
A Study in Contexts. Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 5
May 1970 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Karl Josef Höltgen, ‘Über Shakespeares
Mädchen und Frauen. Heine, Shakespeare und England’, in Internationaler Heine-
Kongreß. Düsseldorf 1972. Referate und Diskussionen, ed. by Manfred Windfuhr
(Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1973), 464–88; Walter Wadepuhl, Heinrich Heine.
Sein Leben und seine Werke (Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau, 1974), 225–39. On the general
background see Werner Habicht, ‘Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century Germany.
The Making of a Myth’, in Nineteenth-Century Germany, ed. by Modris Ecksteins
and Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel (Tübingen: Narr, 1983), 141–57; Werner
Habicht, Shakespeare and the German Imagination, International Shakespeare-
Association Occasional Paper 5 (Herford: International Shakespeare-Association,
1994); Roger Paulin, ‘“Shakspeare’s allmähliches Bekanntwerden in Deutschland”.
Aspekte der Institutionalisierung Shakespeares 1840–1875’, in Bildung und
Konfession. Politik, Religion und literarische Identitätsbildung 1850–1918, ed. by Martin
Huber and Gerhard Lauer, Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur 59
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), 9–20.
3 ‘Writings on Germany’.

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.11

208 From Goethe to Gundolf

like so much of Heine’s own creation and his view of creation itself. It is
also, as opposed to allusions, his last major statement on Shakespeare.
Under the disarming subtitle of Erläuterungen/Explanatory Notes and
with Heine adopting the role of the guide to a kind of stately home,
throwing open the various rooms, he manages to address subjects well
known from the major works of the 1830s: the role of the poet as diviner
or seer, standing above ‘mere’ history; the question of national literature
and national appropriation; the monarchy of states and letters as against
the république, and much besides. I do not wish to discuss all, or for that
matter any, of these in any systematic way. Rather, I hope to enter into
the spirit of improvisation that breathes through these pages.
It is a pity that Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen does not have a
section on The Winter’s Tale. We know of course that Heine was aware of
the connotations of ‘Wintermärchen’ when he chose that subtitle for his
imaginary journey through Germany. As a nineteenth-century German
Shakespeare edition defines it, a ‘Wintermärchen’ is ‘[e]ine schauerliche
oder rührende Geschichte’.4 It is also a world encompassing antiquity
and Renaissance, improbabilities and coincidences, oracles and bears,
disguises and revelations. Above all, it is mythical and ends happily.
It is not unlike his general view of Shakespeare, and, with the notable
exception of that happy ending, it is not dissimilar to his view of
Germany.
Our symposium has the overall theme ‘Heine and World Literature’.5
That notion of ‘world literature’ is by common agreement, if not
necessarily a Goethean creation, certainly a coining of Johann Wolfgang
Goethe’s, and is a reflection of the opening up, from the 1790s on,
of perspectives across national, cultural, and linguistic borders, the
‘Kosmopolitismus des Blicks’6 of which Jean Paul had spoken, the
throwing open of windows in which the Romantics had had such a
part. On a more modest scale it was fostered by Heine’s much-revered
Wilhelm Müller. To all this, Heine is heir, but also to its controversies
and polemics. One notes with what care Goethe chooses a paradigm

4 ‘A ghastly or touching story’. William Shakespeare’s dramatische Werke, trans. by

Friedrich Bodenstedt et al., 38 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1867–71), XXX, iv.
5 See footnote 1.
6 ‘Cosmpolitanism of outlook’. Horst Günther, ‘Klassik und Weltliteratur’, in
Literarische Klassik, ed. by Hans-Joachim Simm, suhrkamp taschenbuch 2084
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 87–100 (92).
 11. Heine and Shakespeare  209

for the process by which a foreign literary culture may transfer back
to its country of origin an insight and a penetration not yet available
at home. It is, of course, Thomas Carlyle’s Life of Schiller. The example
is right and proper and well chosen. One does note, however, that
Shakespeare (except in the very broadest sense) is less prominent in
this Goethean construct of ‘Weltliteratur’. The English Romantics almost
to a man — and one of them, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, coming mightily
close to plagiarism — were saying that it was now the Germans who
were leading the field in Shakespeare studies. Would that not also
constitute a prime example of those cosmopolitan border-crossings and
fructifications? But Goethe had chosen the model of Carlyle and Friedrich
Schiller because in addition it demonstrated that, while Schiller’s
reputation in Germany was slumping in the 1820s, it had entered into
the blood-stream of world literature, and that was what mattered. Who
was responsible for that collapse in German esteem? The Romantics,
of course. It is thus no coincidence that Goethe in 1828–29 published
his correspondence with Schiller, in the lifetime (just) of both Schlegel
brothers, whose critical machinations (as Goethe might perceive it) had
seen to it that Goethe’s reputation increased while Schiller’s decreased.
By giving such prominence to literary politics and controversy I
am perhaps distorting the many coincidences and areas of agreement
between these literary generations. Is this one of the bad habits
one picks up as a literary biographer? It is however observable that
Shakespeare — our subject, not Goethe or Schiller — is a divisive and
unruly force in the German republic of letters. One notes that three
of the most devastating annihilations of reputation and character in
German literary criticism occur in the context of Shakespeare or to
figures once involved in his reception: Gothold Ephraim Lessing’s of
Johann Christoph Gottsched, Schiller’s of Gottfried August Bürger,
and Heine’s of August Wilhelm Schlegel. The task was done with such
thoroughness that these names are all but expunged from the annals
of literature, the victims referred to in hushed embarrassment, like a
mad aunt or uncle in an otherwise respectable family. Take August
Wilhelm Schlegel: there has been no proper critical edition of his works
since 1846, no satisfactory critical edition to date of the world-famous
Vorlesungen uber dramatische Kunst und Literatur/Lectures on Dramatic
Art and Literature (even the Düsseldorf Heine edition has recourse to
210 From Goethe to Gundolf

an unsatisfactory edition),7 no biographer, no scholarly reprint of the

original Shakespeare translation of 1796–1810. His reputation has
been subject to the continuing ‘destruction’ in the nineteenth century
of the older Romantics (note the speaking title of Rudolf Haym’s Die
romantische Schule/The Romantic School [1870]) in favour of the more
accessible talents of Clemens Brentano, Arnim or Eichendorff. He is not
even mentioned in Friedrich Gundolf’s Romantiker of 1929. Did Heine’s
infamous attack on Schlegel in Die romantische Schule bring this about?
Of course not: teleological reductionism makes for bad criticism and bad
literary history. Schlegel’s reputation lived on in France and England.
He was, besides, in later life singularly unattractive, and himself no
mean controversialist. There is another answer. Siegbert Prawer, in his
inaugural lecture of 1970, draws attention to the visceral image that
Heine employs in Die romantische Schule, of Indigenous peoples of North
America killing their elders when they become old and decrepit.8 Like
James Frazer’s potent image of the priests of Nemi, it reminds us, too,
that the stiletto knife in the back is Heine’s ultimate sanction.9
Leaving such severities, it is much more profitable to see Heine and
Schlegel and Heine and Shakespeare in another and better perspective.
As with so many internecine inter-generational relationships, there is
more in common between Heine and Schlegel than what separates them.
Surely Schlegel is an important model for the elegant style Heine so
cultivates and which is one of the few qualities in the older man singled
out for praise in Die romantische Schule.10 More importantly, Schlegel’s
critical method and historical perspective is close to Heine’s. Schlegel
followed only to a limited extent Johann Gottfried Herder’s notion
of organic development, change and decay, or revolution, in German
culture. He is far happier setting up constructs, pairs of opposites
(Classical and Romantic being the best-known) only loosely based on
some kind of historical continuity and owing more to inner artistic or
aesthetic qualities. The Heinean notions of ‘Romantische Schule’, set up

7 August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, ed. by
Giovanno Vittorio Amoretti (Bonn and Leipzig: Schroeder, 1923). See DA, X, 377.
8 Prawer (note 1), 7.
9 Note of 2021: this was the case when I wrote this in 1997. Fortunately the situation
has now much changed for the better, although it has taken 150 years to do so. See
below, footnote 38.
10 
SS, V, 417.
 11. Heine and Shakespeare  211

against its cosmopolitan or Protestant or classical counter-equivalents,

or even the notion of a ‘Kunstperiode’,11 are not alien to general Romantic
thinking, Schlegel’s or others’. The Romantics’ term ‘universal’ could
have embracing connotations similar to Heine’s ‘cosmopolitan’. Heine
in Die romantische Schule notes that Schlegel’s Shakespeare translation
is hardly in keeping with his usual (perceived) Christian, Catholic,
anti-cosmopolitan, mystical and Calderonian orientation.12 Of course,
August Wilhelm’s embrace of Catholicism (as opposed to Friedrich’s)
had been short-lived. More importantly, his Shakespeare translation
is the work of a philologist, not an apologist, and the polarization of
Schlegel and Voss in Die romantische Schule is a critical device to tear apart
two figures who basically converge on the same object from different
corners, making ‘classical’ literature (in the fullest sense, antiquity and
Renaissance) available to the educated German reader. Schlegel is also
the only classical philologist of his day to face Johann Heinrich Voss on
equal terms.
On the other hand, Heine may not have known how much Schlegel
hated the English — as opposed to Shakespeare, of course. By and
large, the German Romantics are not great anglophiles. Schlegel the
Hanoverian cannot comprehend that ‘die frostigen, stupiden Seelen
auf dieser brutalen Insel’13 could have produced such genius. Hence
his lack of interest in the ‘Life and Times’ of Shakespeare. The greatest
disappointment in Ludwig Tieck’s life was his trip to England in 1817.
Heine could find in William Hazlitt the insight that the older English
Shakespeare critics, Samuel Johnson especially, had failed to appreciate
Shakespeare’s genius: but it was already there in Schlegel, and English
readers duly noted and deferred to it. Heine, despite his fine poetic
ear, is not a philologist or translator. We cannot take too seriously his
plan for an illustrated prose translation in 1839. He is unfair to Schlegel
the translator, but his unfairness is that of a younger generation that
regarded rendering of Shakespeare into German as a process in being
and not one already concluded. Not only do the various different sources

11 ‘
The epoch of art’. Heine’s ‘Ende der Kunstperiode’ can be applied historically to
the long and daunting shadow of the Goethean achievement, to Shakespeare’s
similarly.
12 Ibid., 4n and 375.
13 ‘The frigid stupid souls on that brutal island’. Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel,
ed. by Edgar Lohner (Munich: Winkler, 1972), 23.
212 From Goethe to Gundolf

for his quotations in Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen bear witness to

that fact14 (as well as to his hasty improvisation). His generation by and
large did not regard the positions reached by Schlegel or Tieck as fixed
or final. Georg Herwegh and Ferdinand Freiligrath are examples, as is
also the young Theodor Fontane, and it was only the adoption by the
Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (founded in 1864) of the so-called
‘Schlegel-Tieck’ that conferred on this translation the classic status
it still, rightly or wrongly, enjoys. In the final analysis, Schlegel and
Heine are not so much divided over Shakespeare as over more concrete,
personal factors: Schlegel had revived his noble title and had accepted
preferment in the Prussian state. That was where Romanticism got you.
Heine, despite being disrespectful and malicious to the old ‘Hofrat’
Tieck, is much more appreciative of his Shakespearean studies and his
general contribution to ‘Capriccio’ and ‘Scherz’,15 certainly more than he
deserved. He may not have known that it was Schlegel who put Tieck
on to the idea of translating Cervantes while he got on with Calderón.
Now, while Heine rightly sensed that he had knifed Schlegel the old
priest in the sacred grove, he was aware that Schlegel’s colleague, Tieck,
was still at large. One reason for his urgency in throwing together
Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen is the fear that Julius Campe might turn
to Tieck!16 In the event, Heine need not have feared. It is nonetheless
right to see Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen in the wider context of
German Shakespeare reception: of all those translations, of course, but
also illustrated editions, biographies, life and works, analyses of plays, a
huge activity predicated on the awareness that Shakespeare is German
property and inheritance, a classic. In the words of Franz Horn, a figure
much maligned by Heine, ‘wir wollen streben, daß Shakspeare ganz der
unsrige werde’.17
Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen is, of course, different from
Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur of 1808 in
that its concern, by and large (and when it does not allow itself to be
side-tracked) is with character, not with plot structure, especially with
character as it is realized both in its textual and dramatic development.

14 DA, X, 356.
15 SS, V, 421–31.
16 Heine, Shakespeares Mädchen, ed. Hansen, 221.
17 ‘We wish to do our utmost to make Shakespeare our own’. Franz Horn, Shakespeare’s
Schauspiele, 3 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1823–31), I, 444.
 11. Heine and Shakespeare  213

In this respect, Goethe was of little assistance as an alternative to

Schlegel. For Shakespeare und kein Ende!/Shakespeare and No End (last
part 1826) had postulated a Shakespeare above concerns of character
and stage, a kind of ‘Urphänomen’ of creativity, a measure of the
creative process itself. Schlegel’s lectures had held out the hope that a
historical drama could now be within the Germans’ grasp, were poets
but to use the historical past in respectful imitation of Shakespeare.
Goethe (but this time more in private) had warned that Shakespeare
was a great inhibitor of talent (a warning too little heeded in the
nineteenth century).18 Christian Dietrich Grabbe’s Über die Shakespearo-
Manie/On Shakespeare Mania of 1828 had set up danger signs for the
would-be Shakespeareanizing dramatist and the pitfalls he might
face. The stridency of Grabbe’s tone, his presumption in drawing
attention to Shakespeare’s ‘faults’ (about which little had been heard
since Herder banished them from the critical agenda), his pointing
to other, safer models, are indications that, for him, Shakespeare
might well cause a loss of national literary identity. Heine, too, has
his word in season for Shakespearean imitators, but they again are
not his major concern. Above all, the consistency, not to say stridency,
of Grabbe’s essay is not his approach. He found much more common
ground in Tieck’s Dramaturgische Blätter/Essays on Drama (1826), a
loose concatenation of drama reviews that, as it were incidentally,
also turned to deeper issues of character and interpretation (often
controversially), allowing digressions and anabases and asides. The
seeming outrageousness of Tieck’s reading of Hamlet and Macbeth was
an indication that he perceived a need to break with what were by
then ‘standard’ interpretations. So as not to show too much deference
to the old Romantic for whom he had a soft spot, Heine pushes one of
Tieck’s less favoured authors, Hazlitt, into the foreground. It is Hazlitt
in translation, of course, which made him sound more German. Thus
Heine found Hazlitt’s attack on Johnson to his liking.19 It reminded him,
perhaps, of his own dealings with August Wilhelm Schlegel, without
of course the personal, scandalous and wounding aspects. The English

18  oethe to Eckermann, December 25, 1825. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gedenkausgabe

G
der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, ed. by Ernst Beutler, 27 vols (Zurich, Munich:
Artemis, 1948–54), XXIV, 167.
19 ‘On Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays’ (1817). The Complete Works of William Hazlitt,
ed. by P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London, Toronto: Dent, 1930–34), IV, 174–78.
214 From Goethe to Gundolf

Romantics’ sense of literary continuity means that, while they may not
like the Augustan age or Johnson the critic, they are nevertheless aware
of the ‘debt of the past’ and sense acutely the ‘anxiety of influence’.
Hazlitt (and to some extent Anna Jameson) escape the anathema Heine
visited on the English. His account of French Shakespearean reception
is however rather sketchier and more skewed. With few exceptions, he
says, the French have read Shakespeare through a trivialized Romantic
vision, have failed to distinguish atmosphere and stage-property from
substance, have elevated plurality of style to an absolute without an
understanding of Shakespeare’s subtleties, especially in his comedies.
They are, as imitators, more like Christopher Marlowe or Thomas
Heywood.20 Had Heine been reading Tieck’s Novelle Dichterleben/The
Life of the Poet, where the so-called minor Elizabethans have an uncanny
resemblance to the younger generation of poets of his own day. Only
François Guizot, the historian and critic, receives Heine’s favour, as
one who is able to see Shakespeare in a wider span of English history,
something his contemporaries, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny and
Alfred de Musset, with their uncreative frenzies,21 fail to do. Heine’s
point is interesting. Doubtless it was the Shakespeareanizing Hugo,
not so much Shakespeare himself, who influenced the young Georg
Büchner (the translator of Lucrèce Borgia and Marie Tudor).
Guizot’s remarks on the several approaches to comedy by Aristotle,
Molière and Shakespeare raise the discussion on to the level of the
nature of the comic muse herself, in place and historical time. We are
close here to Heine’s passing insight on Molière’s greatness from the
first book of Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland/
On the History of Philosophy and Religion in Germany: ‘Darum ist eben
Moliere so groß, weil er, gleich Aristophanes und Cervantes, nicht
bloß temporelle Zufälligkeiten, sondern das Ewig Lächerliche, die
Urschwächen der Menschheit, persifliert’.22 It is the cosmic trope of
a world theatre, the comedy of human history, in which these poets
share. It is also the other distinction that Heine draws, between
‘Weltgeschichte’, with its disharmonies and clangour, and ‘Geschichte

20 SS, VII, 283.

21 Ibid., 281–90.
22 ‘Molière is so great for that reason, because, like Aristophanes and Cervantes, he
pokes fun not just at the casual matters of everyday life but at the ever-ridiculous,
the inborn foibles of humanity’. Ibid., V, 535.
 11. Heine and Shakespeare  215

der Menschheit’,23 where in Heine’s image one can hear above the
din of human affairs the sweet eternal melodies of mankind. Heine’s
canonically ‘great poets’ inhabit these regions — and Shakespeare
is almost always to the fore because of the primacy of drama (here
we see Schlegel’s influence as well as Hegel’s). Does it matter that
Heine’s ‘core canon’ is essentially the Romantics’, itself formulated
embryonically by the Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’) generation?
Certainly, the Schlegel brothers in their Athenaeum incarnation would
not have dissented from the triumvirate (the ‘Dichtertriumvirat’)24 later
set up by Heine, of Goethe, Miguel de Cervantes and Shakespeare. It
remained essentially Tieck’s trinitarian position in his poetic doctrine.
Where Tieck spoke of ‘Erzpoeten’,25 Heine refers to ‘Urpoeten’26 (his list
is Aristophanes, Goethe and Shakespeare). These transcending figures
are of course wreathed in myth (the ‘Kunstperiode’ is one such), are
heroic, supernal, ‘Napoleonic’, if you will. They represent universals,
just as their names were associated in Romantic discourse with the
notion of ‘Universalpoesie’. They stand, not for thought, not for political
engagement, not even for ‘esprit’, but for ‘poetry’ or ‘art’. That, in the
final analysis, is the criterion of their canonicity. I used before the term
‘inhibitor of talent’, and indeed all of Heine’s ‘Urpoeten’ are that. The
image of the poet-genius standing above quotidian human concerns
is of course not new (think of the opening of Herder’s Shakespeare
essay). As there, it is also a metaphor of creativity. ‘Shakespeare gesellt
sich zum Weltgeist’,27 says Goethe in Shakespeare und kein Ende!, through
him we gain insight into the living processes of which we are part.
Heine, too, speaks of Shakespeare and the ‘Weltgeist’. In the Jessica
section of Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen, we read that Shakespeare,
in writing The Merchant of Venice, may have wished to write comedy, he
may have even wished to present us with ‘einen gedrillten Werwolf’28
in Shylock:

23 ‘Human history’, ‘history of mankind’. Ibid., 69.

24 ‘Triumvirate of poets’. Ibid., III, 260.
25 ‘Archpoets’. Ludwig Tieck und die Brüder Schlegel, ed. Lohner, 25.
26 ‘Real poets’. SS, III, 287.
27 ‘Shakespeare allies himself with the world spirit’. Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke,
XIV, 758.
28 ‘A tamed werewolf’. SS, VII, 251.
216 From Goethe to Gundolf

Aber der Genius des Dichters, der Weltgeist, der in ihm waltet, steht
immer höher als sein Privatwille, und so geschah es, daß er in Shylock,
trotz der grellen Fratzenhaftigkeit, die Justifikation einer unglücklichen
Sekte aussprach, welche von der Vorsehung, aus geheimnisvollen
Gründen, mit dem Haß des niedern und vornehmen Pöbels belastet
worden, und diesen Haß nicht immer mit Liebe vergelten wollte.
Aber was sag‘ ich? Der Genius des Shakespeare erhebt sich noch
über den Kleinhader zweier Glaubensparteien, und sein Drama zeigt
uns eigentlich weder Juden noch Christen, sondern Unterdrücker und
Unterdrückte […].29

Of course a little care is needed here, for this is not a subject about
which Heine could be objective. It may be an astute rhetorical ploy to
introduce that ‘Weltgeist’ and then smuggle under its accommodating
wings a private reading of The Merchant of Venice. But so often, for so
many different purposes, Heine is inviting us to see a problem from
a universal, cosmic, mythical angle. It is essentially the device used to
exculpate Jessica, the convert. Is she not, like Desdemona or Imogen, a
‘Tochter Evas’,30 wilful, disobedient, unheeding — like the mother of us
all? And so Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen ends with the grand cosmic
conceit, indeed a plurality of worlds, with the sun (Miranda), the moon
(Juliet), and the comet (Cleopatra), the three stages of civilization, from
‘unbefleckte[r] Boden’, ‘schauerliche Reinheit’, to the ‘Sinnenglut’ of the
Renaissance, and ‘erkrankte Zivilisation’ and ‘Zerstörungslust’.31
It follows that Heine is not really interested in the Shakespearean
ideologies current in his time, such as the ‘Life’ and the ‘Man’, nor in
what can be called ‘Shakespeare-Philologie’. Thus his learned reference
to William Prynne’s Histriomastix is simply part of his anti-English
agenda, the Puritan, Cromwellian, stolid, pragmatic streak of Albion
that he so detests.32 A poet in touch with the ‘Weltgeist’ will be above

29 ‘But the poet’s genius, the world spirit that operates in him, always ranks higher
than his private will, and so it came about that he enunciated in Shylock, despite
having made a crude caricature of him, the justification of an unfortunate sect, that
providence, for reasons best known to itself, has saddled with the hate of the rabble,
high and low, and that did not always wish to pay back this hate with love.
But what am I saying? Shakespeare’s genius rises above the petty squabbles of the
two sectarian factions, and his drama shows us in real fact neither Jew nor Christian,
but oppressors and oppressed’. SS, VII, 251.
30 ‘Daughter of Eve’. Ibid., 257.
31 ‘Unsullied ground’; ‘fearsome purity’; ‘sensual fire’; ‘civilization in decay’;
‘destructive passion’. Ibid., 292–93.
32 Ibid., 175.
 11. Heine and Shakespeare  217

anecdotes, even above rigid genre distinctions (Heine subdivides the

plays more than most critics). Above all, the critic may look behind any
historical context of the plays or any possible intention on the part of
the poet (as with The Merchant of Venice), and see things that are new,
startling, perhaps even seditious.
Which brings me finally to Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen itself.
Certainly it must rank as one of the most ‘occasional’ of Heine’s major
works, in the sense that it came about in an improvised and hand-to-
mouth fashion. As the only major work devoted to a single non-German
author, it makes no pretensions to ‘mere’ objectivity; its strength is in
details, not in encompassing arguments. It quite openly accommodates
current ideologies inside its framework; indeed it welcomes them. Thus
in a sense the whole work is responding to Karl Gutzkow’s promptings
that there should be a Young German position in the wider debate
on Shakespeare33 (the same Gutzkow, incidentally, who in 1864 will
give the official tercentenary address in Weimar!). I have indicated
unexpected fraternalities between Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen and
other Shakespeare studies. It likes to confront, outrageously if necessary.
Who, for instance, had ever begun a study of Shakespeare’s characters
with Troilus and Cressida? (Anna Jameson does not even refer to this
play.) Its loves and hates are plain for all to see, although it is a pity that
Heine is so uncomplimentary about the French in their second great
wave of Shakespeare reception, but that of course had been initiated
by Schlegel’s companion, Madame de Staël. Perhaps there is more than
a hint of rivalry. At least there is no sign yet of those later proprietary
claims by German nineteenth-century Shakespearean scholarship which
deny the French houseroom altogether. Naturally, it owes much to Anna
Jameson (in translation),34 and it defers not a little to the unfortunate
Franz Horn, whose gentle soul had expired the year before. In 1831,
Horn wrote this:

In Shakespeare‘s Werken finden wir die vollständigste Galerie der Frauen,

die, wenn wir sie Jahre lang und mit Genauigkeit und Liebe betrachtet
haben, uns endlich überzeugen muß, daß nie ein Dichter gelebt, der dem
weiblichen Geschlechte so reine Huldigung dargebracht hat wie er. Es

33 Heine, Shakespeares Mädchen, ed. Hansen, 221.

34 Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Woman. Moral, Political, and Historical, 2 vols
(London: Saunders and Ottley, 1832).
218 From Goethe to Gundolf

giebt in seinen Werken keinen männlichen Charakter, in welchem der

Verein des Guten und Schönen, des Freien und Nothwendigen, der Tiefe
und Klarheit, der Anmuth und Würde zu einer ganz vollendeten Einheit
gebracht worden wäre […].35

This ‘Galerie der Frauen’ Heine supplies in 1838, in the form of the
series of English lithographs which accompany his text. And the less
said about them the better, except that they are very much of their time.
Many of the most memorable passages in Shakespeares Mädchen und
Frauen are only tenuously about Shakespeare himself: the assassination
of the English character, the mouse dialogue, the lament for the Jewish
people which goes far beyond Jessica (or even Shylock) and extends in
a great parabola before ending on that ‘Jessika, mein Kind’.36 Let me take
that wonderful mouse vision as an example.37 Note that these mice are
the device employed to introduce the Histories, the plays that Schlegel
calls a ‘historisches Heldengedicht’,38 and to which he gives an attention
never hitherto granted them. Heine does not even subdivide the plays
into Histories as such, grouping instead their heroines chronologically.
That is of course not the same as writing about history itself. Historical
drama is however another matter. ‘Ein alter Mauserich’,39 with long
experience of human affairs, is Heine’s witness. It is essentially a catalogue
of ‘eine nur maskierte Wiederkehr derselben Naturen und Ereignisse’;40
‘man amüsiert sich mit weiser Gelassenheit’.41 The historical drama as
such (not least Ernst von Raupach’s ‘Hohenstaufenbandwürmer’,42 in
Friedrich Hebbel’s dismissive phrase) tells us about theories of history

35 ‘In Shakespeare’s works we find the most complete gallery of women, which, when
we have closely and lovingly studied them for years, must in the end convince us
that never has a poet lived who has paid such pure homage to the female sex as he
did. There is no male character in his works in whom the good and the beautiful,
freedom and necessity, depth and clarity, grace and dignity combine in perfect
unity’. Horn, Shakespeare’s Schauspiele, V, 98.
36 ‘Jessica, my child’. SS, VII, 266.
37 Ibid., pp. 215–17.
38 ‘Historical epic poem’. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische
Kunst und Litteratur, Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, IV, I, ed. by Stefan Knödler
(Paderborn, etc.: Schöningh, 2018), 346.
39 ‘An old father mouse’.
40 ‘A recurrence of the same natures and events, only masked’. SS, VII, 215.
41 ‘One takes a wise, amused view of it’. Ibid., 211.
42 ‘Hohenstaufen tapeworms’. Friedrich Hebbel, preface to Maria Magdalene. Werke,
ed. by Gerhard Fricke, Werner Keller and Karl Pörnbacher, 5 vols (Munich: Hanser,
1963–67), I, 325.
 11. Heine and Shakespeare  219

(hence the account of the ‘Souffleur’ with Hegelian overtones), but not
about man’s ‘progress’ as such. And Heine is using his mice to tell us
that it is not the business of historical drama to do so. By following Anna
Jameson’s device of selecting Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen — female
characters — he is automatically downgrading the Histories; for
the heroines are only there ‘weil die darzustellende Historie ihre
Einmischung erforderte’,43 not because they are part of the integral
portrayal of historical events. But the opportunity afforded by historical
examples or incidents is quite another matter. Shakespeare knows more
than we do. With due respect to Friedrich Schlegel, he becomes ‘ein in
die Vergangenheit schauender Prophet’;44 he does not depict history
itself but fills ‘die Lakunen der Historie’.45 Our attention is seized by his
historical figures because they bear out our own experience with kings
and rulers in our own times. Knowing Heine as we do, we must expect
some unflattering parallels. We have one in the sustained comparison
of Bolingbroke in Richard II and Louis Philippe: ‘ein schlauer Held, ein
kriechender Riese, ein Titan der Verstellung, entsetzlich, ja empörend
ruhig, die Tatze in einem samtnen Handschuh, und damit die öffentliche
Meinung streichelnd […]’46 Although this is supposed to relate to the
section on Lady Gray from Henry VI, we leap from Richard II to 2 Henry
IV, to the usurper king’s last words to his son, ‘die Shakspeare schon
längst für ihn [i.e. Louis Philippe] aufgeschrieben’.47 Thus, too, the Joan
of Arc section (I Henry VI) insists on the multiform injustices of the
English towards the French, from the Maid of Orleans — to Napoleon.
Heine had of course been reading some history, the ‘geniales Buch’
of Jules Michelet.48 Heine is not interested in Michelet’s basic thesis that
English literary culture is anti-Christian. He does not utilize Michelet’s
rather cheap point that the Shakespearean legends depict the Bard
beginning as a butcher. But he cannot resist Michelet’s sustained account
of English commercialism, mercantilism and hard-headedness, the

43 ‘Because history, as it was to be presented, required them to be involved’. SS, VII,

218.
44 ‘A prophet able to look back into the past’. Ibid., 230.
45 ‘The gaps in history’. Ibid., 229.
46 ‘A cunning hero, a creeping giant, a Titan at deception, calm to a terrible, even
outrageous degree, his claws in a velvet glove, stroking public opinion with it.’ Ibid.,
231.
47 ‘That Shakespeare had long since written down for him’. Ibid.
48 ‘Brilliant book’. SS, VII, 226.
220 From Goethe to Gundolf

technical superiority by which their foot-soldiery at Crécy destroyed the

‘fine fleur’ of French chivalry. Immediately Heine sees the opportunity
for another image: the battle between prose and poetry. We almost
believe that he is going to fall for the French ‘Ritteromantik’49 that Hugo
and Alexandre Dumas père so eloquently represent. But his return to
‘objectivity’ is half-hearted: ‘Die Triumphe der Engländer sind immer
eine Schande der Menschheit, seit den Tagen von Crécy und Poitiers, bis
auf Waterloo. Klio ist immer ein Weib, trotz ihrer parteilosen Kälte, ist sie
empfindlich für Ritterlichkeit und Heldensinn; und ich bin überzeugt,
nur mit knirschendem Herzen verzeichnet sie in ihre Denktafeln die
Siege der Engländer’.50
I believe it is also essentially from Michelet that Heine introduces
into Shakespeare discussion the notion of ‘Renaissance’.51 At least I
am not sure of its use before him. By introducing it into his account
of Portia (also at the end, in his description of Juliet)52 he places the
Christian-Jewish contrast into even sharper relief, between ‘Glück’ and
‘Mißgeschick’,53 between the ‘Nachblüte des griechischen Geistes’54 and
the claustrophobic restrictions of Judaism. I need not tell this company
that this is a conflict unresolved in Heine himself. For nineteenth-
century Shakespeare studies at large, the notion of Renaissance is a
means towards situating his work historically and culturally inside a
framework that involves France, Italy and England. And that in itself
shows how Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen succeeds — if that is the
right expression — in remaining outside institutionalized German
Shakespeare reception.

49 ‘Chivalric Romanticism’.
50 ‘The triumphs of the English are always a scandal to humanity, from the days of
Crécy and Poitiers to those of Waterloo. Clio is always female, and despite her cold
even-handedness, she has a soft spot for chivalry and heroics, and I am convinced
that she only lists the victories of the English in her annals through gritted teeth’. SS,
VII, 229.
51 Ibid., VI, 262.
52 Ibid., VII, 292.
53 ‘Fortune’ and ‘calamity’. Ibid., 262.
54 ‘Late flowering of the Greek spirit’.
Fig. 15 Engraving by Carl Jäger, Erinnerung an die Schillerfeier 1859, “erfunden und
radirt von C. Jaeger.”; erschienen im Nürnberger Künstlervereins-Album; C. H.
Zeh’sche Buch & Kunsthandlung in Nürnberg. Wikimedia, https://de.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Datei:Karl_J%C3%A4ger_Erinnerung_an_die_Schillerfeier_1859_80
0x1296pixel.jpg, public domain.
 12. The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859 and
the ‘Shakespearefest’ of 1864.
With Some Remarks on
Theodor Fontane’s Contributions1

Occasional poetry has a double focus. It may involve the immediate

(or seemingly immediate) reaction to events (victories, celebrations).
It may stand back from those events, in reflection or reconsideration
of the implications of adventitious happening, and try to wrap mere
contingency in some explanatory religious or ethical or philosophical
envelope. The event may, on the other hand, bring to the surface untried
forms and formulations, now ‘occasioned’. The centenary of Friedrich
Schiller’s birth in 1859 was,2 like our millennium, an event plotted and
prepared for, and it reflected that directional quality. It was also an
occasion that touched off spontaneous reactions. The story of Schiller as
a subject in German poetry does not of course start in 1859, nor does it
end there.3 Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s later poem and anthology piece
‘Schillers Bestattung/Schiller’s Burial’ (1882) can afford to be sparse and
economical in detail because it comes towards the end of a biographical
(hagiographical) and historicizing century that had both documented
Schiller and rhetoricized his achievement. It sets aside the merely

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published with the same title in History and
Literature. Essays in Honor of Karl S. Guthke, ed. by William Collins Donahue and
Scott Denham (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000), 351–65.
2 Cf. above all Rainer Noltenius, Dichterfeiern in Deutschland. Rezeptionsgeschichte als
Sozialgeschichte am Beispiel der Schiller- und Freiligrath-Feiern (Munich: Fink, 1984),
esp. 71–181; Noltenius‚ ‘Die Nation und Schiller’, in Dichter und ihre Nation, ed. by
Helmut Scheuer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 151–75.
3 Cf. Hans Mayer, ‘Schillers Nachruhm’, Sinn und Form, 11 (1959), 701–14.

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.12

224 From Goethe to Gundolf

circumstantial and gives us the punchline, ‘Der Menschheit Genius

war’s’.4 Like Karl Gutzkow’s earlier remark on the same subject — ‘Es war
der Genius des deutschen Volks’5 — it ends the anecdotal speculation
begun, say, by Gustav Schwab’s biography of 1840, and now states a
myth. At the other end of the scale, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s poem
‘Epilog zu Schillers “Glocke”/Epilogue to Schiller’s “Bell”’ of 1805 is
also an occasional poem (his attempt at a more elaborate apotheosis of
Schiller in 1805 collapsed).6 Unlike the Romantics, who saw the vacant
throne left by Schiller rather than his actual achievement, Goethe used
his authority to foreclose such counter­claims and to reinstate Schiller in
the national canon where he felt him to belong:

Denn er war unser! Mag das stolze Wort

Den lauten Schmerz gewaltig übertönen!
Er mochte sich bei uns im sichern Port,
Nach wildem Sturm, zum Daurenden gewöhnen.
lndessen schritt sein Geist gewaltig fort
Ins Ewige des Wahren, Guten, Schönen,
Und hinter ihm, in wesenlosem Scheine,
Lag, was uns alle bändigt, das Gemeine.7

Those words, ‘Denn er war unser!’ might be a stumbling-block to some

in 1805, but in 1859 few would dare to contradict their self-evident
validity. The irony was that, at face value, they were equally applicable

4 ‘It was mankind’s genius’. Where possible, quotations relating to the reception
of Schiller are taken from Schiller — Zeitgenosse aller Epochen. Dokumente zur
Wirkungsgeschichte Schillers in Deutschland, ed. by Norbert Oellers, 2 vols, I:
1782–1859. II: 1860–1966, Wirkung der Literatur. Deutsche Autoren im Urteil ihrer
Kritiker, 1–2, ed. by Karl Robert Mandelkow (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1970),
II, 476 (henceforth cited as Schiller).
5 ‘It was the genius of the German people’. Karl Gutzkow, Vom Baum der Erkenntnis,
Werke, ed. by Reinhold Gensel, 12 vols (Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, Stuttgart: Bong, n.d.
[1910]), XII, 119, also 282f.
6 Goethe, ‘Schillers Todtenfeyer’, Goethes Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrage der

Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen-Weimar, 143 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919), XVI,
56l-69.
7 ‘For he was ours! And may the mighty word
Sound louder than our cries of pain!
He felt at ease with us in our safe port,
The storm now past, to settle was his gain.
His spirit now in giant strides set forth
Towards eternal truth and goodness, beauty’s fame,
Behind him lay, reduced to dimmest light,
What binds us all, the base and common plight’. Schiller, I, 484.
 12. The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859 and the ‘Shakespearefest’ of 1864  225

to Shakespeare in 1864, indeed after Franz Dingelstedt’s proprietary

statement of 1858, ‘Unser Shakspeare’,8 the present tense would seem
more appropriate.

***

This is, rightly speaking, a large subject, and one whose wider
implications I do not wish to explore. The commemoration of Schiller’s
hundredth birthday in 1859,9 however strong it might have been on
ideology, hardly produced much poetry of the quality of Goethe’s
in 1805. The event proper commands more attention. It has national,
nation-wide and international significance — celebrated in 440 German
and fifty foreign towns — ‘zu Melbourne in Australien wie zu Valparaiso
am Stillen Ozean’ in Jacob Burckhardt’ s embracing phrase10 — and as
such it has been documented in almost exhaustive detail. Quite the
same cannot be said of the Shakespeare festivities in Germany in 1864.
On a much more modest scale and with another emphasis, it too is an
important event for German ‘Bildungsbürgertum’ (educated middle
class). Whereas the national occasion could command names to conjure
with — Jacob Grimm, Paul Heyse, Ferdinand Freiligrath, Friedrich
Theodor Vischer, the young and still unknown Wilhelm Raabe, and just
across the border Jacob Burckhardt and Gottfried Keller, to mention
but a few — the international happening was by its very nature more
restricted. There were a few who lent their voices to both events, notable
Shakespearean scholars or translators featuring prominently in 1859:
Hermann Marggraff, Friedrich von Bodenstedt, Franz Dingelstedt,
Rudolph Genée (and in exile, Freiligrath and Georg Herwegh). Karl
Gutzkow, forgetting his earlier animus against Schiller, is represented at

8 Franz Dingelstedt, Studien und Copien nach Shakspeare (Pesth: Hartleben, 1858), 5.
9 An indication of the extent of the celebrations may be gained from two contemporary
publications: Adolph Büchting, Verzeichniß der zur hundertjährigen Geburtsfeier
Friedrich von Schiller‘s erschienenen Bücher, Kunstblätter, Kunstwerke, Musikalien,
Denkmünzen etc. […] (Nordhausen: Büchting, 1860) and Karl Tropus, Schiller-
Denkmal, 2 vols (Berlin: Riegel, 1860) (henceforth cited as Schiller-Denkmal). In
addition, the names are listed in Karl Goedeke, Grundriß zur Geschichte der deutschen
Dichtung, continued by Edmund Goetze et al., 10 vols (Dresden: Ehlermann, 1893),
V, i, 128–32.
10 ‘In Melbourne in Australia as in Valparaiso on the Pacific Ocean’. Schiller, I, 415.
226 From Goethe to Gundolf

both events.11 Friedrich Hebbel, ambivalent as ever on the subject of the

relative merits of the two great poets, restricted his views on Schiller to
a smaller circle, having refused Dingelstedt’s suggestion that he might
complete Schiller’s unfinished Demetrius.12 In 1864, he was already dead.
Otto Ludwig, his trenchant distinction between Shakespeare and Schiller
not yet available to the reading public, took no part. Franz Grillparzer’s
scepticism towards the event kept him from delivering the speech he had
written.13 Both occasions produced institutions, the ‘Schillerstiftung’,
and the ‘Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft’, respectively, and it is fair
to say that the ‘official’ and ’institutional’ set the tone for both 1859
and 1864. Then there was Theodor Fontane, addressing the ‘Tunnel’
society in 1859 with the poem ‘Zum Schillerfest des “Tunnel”/For the
“Tunnel”’s Schiller Festival’ and in 1864 delivering the extended speech
known as ‘Zum Shakespeare-Fest’. In the scheme of things in both years,
and among the many names of the great and the good, Fontane’s could
as yet mean little to most of his contemporaries. 1859 was not another
stepping-stone to higher preferment and enhanced reputation, as it was,
say, for his old associate Heyse.14
Inside Fontane studies, it is not a subject that has commanded much
interest. This need not matter unduly, for surely his later theatrical
criticism is the major area in his oeuvre where Schiller and Shakespeare
meet. That critical corpus serves a double function. The following remark
from 1873 is not untypical: ‘Meine Empfindung verwirft Uriel Acosta
und ist umgekehrt nicht nur durch alles Shakespearsche hingerissen,
sondern sogar auch durch die Räuber’.15 Schiller and Shakespeare serve
to remind his readers that there is a canon superior to contemporaries
like Paul Lindau, Rudolf Gottschall, Ernst von Wildenbruch (or — the
example cited — Karl Gutzkow). At the same time, however, Fontane is

11  utzkow‚ ‘Ein Schillerfestspruch vom 9. November 1859’, in Vom Baum der Erkenntnis,
G
X, 95–100; same author, Eine Shakspearefeier an der IIm (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1864).
12 Ludger Lütkehaus, ‘Hebbels Schiller-Feier — unsere Hebbel-Feier. Dichterfeste
zwischen Jubiläum und „Jubilitis“’, Hebbel-Jahrbuch (1989), 231–42.
13 Schiller, I, 428f., 583f.
14 Heyse’s contributions can be found in Paul Heyse, Lyrische Dichtungen, 4 vols
(Stuttgart and Berlin: Cotta, 1911), II, 319–25.
15 ‘My feeling rejects Uriel Acosta [a play by Gutzkow], but by the same token is not
just enraptured by all of Shakespeare, but also by the Robbers’. Theodor Fontane,
Werke, Schriften und Briefe, ed. by Walter Keitel and Helmuth Nürnberger, 20 vols
(Munich: Hanser, 1964–84). Henceforth cited as SW, followed by section, volume
and page number; here IV (Briefe), i, 431f.
 12. The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859 and the ‘Shakespearefest’ of 1864  227

making important distinctions and registering preferences, inside both

Schiller’s and Shakespeare’s oeuvre as they appear in Berlin productions.
My concern here is not to open up a far-ranging discussion of Fontane’s
attitudes to Schiller and Shakespeare — ‘ein zu weites Feld’ — but to set
him in a more general context where he also has his place.
Before turning specifically to Fontane, it may do to sketch in a
little of the background to the two events in which he shared. Neither
occasion — if we except the unforeseen and unforeseeable political
development of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis in 1864 — seemed to
do little more than confirm tendencies and developments already
culminant. Who needed the fortuitous cycle of birthdates to remind
one of reputations already securely and firmly established? Certainly
the animadversions expressed about Shakespeare in 1864 had been
common currency for the best part of half a century and hardly needed
the rhetorical reiterations and insistences of German professors and
‘Oberlehrer’. No one was in doubt as to Shakespeare’s supernal and
universal genius: history’s arsenal of commensurate names would
include Homer, or Michelangelo, Columbus or Raphael.16 There was
general agreement, too, on the Germanic brotherhood that embraced
Shakespeare, with the added piquancy that the German part of that
confraternity had turned the tables on the English and was now, by
general admission, taking the lead in Shakespearean appreciation and
scholarship. Direct comparisons between Shakespeare and Schiller
(or Goethe) on the other hand, were a problem (only really solved by
Friedrich Gundolf’s ideologically charged Shakespeare und der deutsche
Geist/Shakespeare and the German Spirit of 1911).17 They were best avoided.
One could distinguish the national (Schiller) from the universal
(Shakespeare), and accord to each its validity. Or one could invoke
the powerful ideological mythologies and self-assured teleological
reductionisms that associated the renewal of German literature proper
with the ‘Geistesheld’ Lessing, the true forerunner of Weimar greatness,
and his crucial sponsoring of Shakespeare against the French. This did

16 Cf. A. L. Lua, William Shakespeare. Eine Festrede, gehalten bei der volksthtümlichen Feier
des dreihundertjährigen Geburtstags des Dichters im Saale des alten Weinbergs zu Schidlitz
(Danzig: Constantin Ziemssen, 1864), 11. Heinrich Kuenzel, William Shakespeare.
Zum Gedächtniss seines dreihundertjährigen Geburtstages am 23. April 1864 (Darmstadt:
Victor Gross, 1864), 3.
17 Friedrich Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Berlin: Bondi, 1911).
228 From Goethe to Gundolf

not involve reading the small print of Lessing’s seventeenth Literaturbrief

of 1759, an approach not seemly to the broad-brush technique of
nineteenth-century German literary historiography.18
These positions were not without their differentiations, paradoxes,
and inconsistencies. There was what appeared like a tacit agreement
between the older Romantics, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig
Tieck, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to raise Shakespeare above
any indigenous dramatic production, notably Schiller’s. Instead, the
aim was to make Shakespeare the exemplar of principles, features
and ideas that knew no national or temporal constraints. In reality
however, useful though it may be to compare the older Romantics
and Hegel in their respective attitudes to Shakespeare and Schiller,
there are major divergences. Schlegel saw Aeschylus, Sophocles and
Shakespeare as supernal representatives of the tragic, equally valid,
yet separated through time, culture, and religion, the ‘Classical’ as
against the ‘Romantic’. Hegel by contrast, perceived in Shakespeare’s
major figures affinities with the ultimate creations of classical Greek
tragedy; only Shakespeare’s modern, ‘innerlich’ position was for him
the last strand of Romantic art before its dissolution into subjectivity.19
Where they converged was in the Romantic disapproval of Schiller and
their cult of Shakespeare, and in Hegel’s interest in Shakespeare as the
representative of the post-classical, Romantic drama, and his growing
disenchantment with Schiller the dramatist and thinker.20 Be that as it
may, sets of prejudices — the Romantics’ animus against Schiller, or
their Bardolatry — were hardly good either for dramatic production
or for a proper understanding of one’s own indigenous traditions. The
first major reaction against this comes, not by chance, from Christian
Dietrich Grabbe, a dramatist beholden to both Shakespearean and
Schillerian practice, but concerned also to find a ‘national’ style: in his

18 Cf. my article ‘“Shakspeare‘s allmähliches Bekanntwerden in Deutschland”.

Aspekte der Institutionalisierung Shakespeares 1840–1875’, in Bildung und
Konfession. Politik, Religion und ldentitätsbildung 1850–1918, ed. by Martin Huber and
Gerhard Lauer, Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur 59 (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 1996), 9–20.
19 Cf. Emil Wolff, ‘Hegel und Shakespeare’, in Vom Geist der Dichtung. Gedächtnisschrift
für Robert Petsch, ed. by Fritz Martini (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1949),
120–79.
20 Cf. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Die Funktion der Kunst in der Geschichte, Hegel-
Studien Beiheft 25 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1984), esp. 353–59.
 12. The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859 and the ‘Shakespearefest’ of 1864  229

Über die Shakespearo-Manie/On Shakespeare-Mania of 1827. The attempts

by the first major nineteenth-century literary historians — August
Koberstein, Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Julian Schmidt, Hermann
Hettner, August Friedrich Vilmar — to accord Schiller his rightful
place in ‘Nationalliteratur’ and to counteract both Romantic and Young
German strictures, were also not without their problems.21 For often
these same historians, like Koberstein, Gervinus and Schmidt, were
also votaries of Shakespeare, who if pressed would make unflattering
contrasts between the merits of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan age, and
current literary and cultural conditions in Germany. The Shakespeare
cult could conveniently join forces with neo-Hegelian aesthetics, more
often than not lacking Hegel’s differentiated analysis — Hermann
Ulrici, Heinrich Theodor Rötscher, Friedrich Theodor Vischer — and
inclined to see in Shakespeare’s world the workings of a ‘Grundidee’ or
a ‘Weltgesetz’.22
That is, in Gustav Freytag’s later phrase, the ‘ideal nexus’ of the
discussion of Schiller and Shakespeare, the debate reserved for the
aestheticians, the theoreticians, and the professoriate. But what of its
‘pragmatic’ coefficient, the popular reception, the reactions of the general
educated reader? In the 1840s, it is Shakespeare’s Hamlet who appears,
in Ferdinand Freiligrath’s terms at least (‘Deutschland ist Hamlet’), to
be a symbol more appropriate to Germany’s political condition than,
say, Schiller’s Marquis Posa. But even Freiligrath’s famous reference
should not be exaggerated beyond its immediate significance. Above
all, one should not overlook the place of Schiller in the articulation of
national political aspirations. Whatever doubts literary historians or
aestheticians might express, Schiller was assuming a commanding
status, backed by a popular movement of considerable momentum.
Some of this energy was directed towards the fostering of local patriotic
pride: the celebrations of the Stuttgart ‘Liederkranz’ in 1825 and 1826, for

21 Cf. Eva D. Becker, ‘Klassiker in der deutschen Literaturgeschichtsschreibung

zwischen 1780 und 1860’ (1968), in Literarisches Leben. Umschreibungen der
deutschen Literaturgeschichte, Saarbrücker Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft 45
(St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 1994), 7–26; Jürgen Fohrmann, ‘“Wir besprechen uns in
bequemen Stunden…” Zum Goethe-Schiller-Verhältnis und seiner Rezeption im
19. Jahrhundert’, in Klassik im Vergleich. Normativität und Historizität europäischer
Klassiken, DFG Symposion 1990, ed. by Wilhelm Vosskamp (Stuttgart, Weimar:
Metzler, 1993), 571–93, esp. 580ff.
22 ‘Basic idea’, ‘world law’.
230 From Goethe to Gundolf

instance, or the unveiling in Stuttgart of Thorwaldsen’s statue of Schiller

in 1839 (before the monuments to Goethe in Frankfurt and to Lessing in
Braunschweig), or Andreas Streicher’s, Gustav Schwab’s and Hermann
Kurz’s biographies. The ‘Schiller-Vereine’ of the 1840s, in Leipzig, in
Breslau (Hoffmann von Fallersleben), and in Stuttgart, were actual
centres of ‘Vormärz’ opposition and liberal aspiration. In some sense,
therefore, the particular national, political and cultural significance of
the Schiller year of 1859, without which the occasion could not have
burgeoned into what it did, lay very much in galvanizing forces already
present, active, and vociferous.23
Could the same be said about Shakespeare? At such a popular
level, clearly not. The claim that Shakespeare was ‘ours’ did not need
Dingelstedt’s much­quoted declaration of 1858, for it had been current at
least since Tieck and Schlegel. Everything seemed to speak for the validity
of the statement made in 1864 by a Marburg professor: ‘Jetzt steht der
brittische Shakespeare im deutschen Gewande in der Bibliothek eines
jeden gebildeten deutschen Hausvaters’,24 and there would be not just
the ‘Schlegel-Tieck’ translation, but many different versions to choose
from. Bibliographical evidence alone indicates a wide range of reception,
from ‘Familien-Shakespeare’ or popular biography, translations of
Shakespeareana from the English or the French, or illustrated works, to
studies of characters or scholarly enquiries into matters of text or dating.
Again, the year 1864 merely crystallizes momentarily a whole process;
yet it, too, has its unmistakable time reference.
The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859, and its correlatives, the ‘Schillerstiftung’
and the ‘Schillerpreis’ — on this all modern scholars are agreed — was
an eminently political occasion.25 It united all liberal and national

23 Cf. Noltenius, Dichterfeiern and ‘Die Nation’; Lucie Prinz, Schillerbilder. Die Schiller-
Verehrung am Beispiel der Festreden des Stuttgarter Liederkranzes (1825–1992) (Marburg:
diagonal-Verlag, 1994); Paul Raabe, ‘Lorbeerkranz und DenkmaI. Wandlungen der
Dichterhuldigung in Deutschland’, in Festschrift für Klaus Ziegler, ed. by Eckehard
Catholy and Winfried Hellmann (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968), 411–26; Jörg Garner,
‘Goethe-Denkmä!er — Schiller-Denkmäler’, in Denkmäler im 19. Jahrhundert.
Deutung und Kritik, ed. by Hans-Ernst Mittig and Volker Pagemann, Studien zur
Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts 20 (Munich: Prestel, 1972), 141–62.
24 ‘Now the British Shakespeare in German guise is to be found in the library of
every educated German husband and father’. L. O. Lemcke, Shakspeare in seinem
Verhälltnisse zu Deutschland. Ein Vortrag gehalten im Rathhaussaale zu Marburg am 16.
Febr. 1864 (Leipzig: Vogel, 1864), 26.
25 On the ‘Schillerfeier’: Noltenius, Dichterfeiern and ‘Die Nation’; Karl Obermann,
‘Die deutsche Einheitsbewegung und die Schillerfeiern 1859’, Zeitschrift für
 12. The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859 and the ‘Shakespearefest’ of 1864  231

forces across a wide spectrum of the population and across the divides
of educational attainment. It was perhaps short on landowners and
peasants, on Catholic clergy, officers or the nobility, as those least
affected by the atmosphere of liberalism that characterizes the late 1850s
and the early 1860s. That such a popular demonstration did not attend
the truly muted celebrations of Goethe’s anniversary in 1849 is a tribute
to the change in course since that year of reaction. Yet we should not
forget Gottfried Kinkel, Freiligrath and Georg Herwegh, who added
their voices to the general jubilation, while still exiles from the year of
revolutions. It was a reflection of Schiller’s status as ‘Nationaldichter’,
despite the monumental symbol of Ernst Rietschel’s statue in Weimar,
on which both poets, Goethe and Schiller, clasp the same laurels. On
the intellectual level, Rudolf Haym’s article in the recently-founded
Preussische Jahrbücher sums up the best national, liberal and cultural
expectations of the event:

Wie kein zweiter Dichter lebt dieser unsterblich in dem Herzen seines
Volkes. Die Welt hat das unvergleichliche Schauspiel gesehn, daß die
getheilten Stämme, ja die zerrissenen und über den Erdball zerstreuten
Glieder unsres Volkes in der Verehrung dieses Dichters sich ähnlich
einmüthig begegnen, wie einst die Griechen in dem Preise und dem
Verständniß des Homer. Es war diese Novemberfeier, wie es in einer der
Festreden heißt, die uns vorliegen, ein ‚rechtes Siegesfest des Geistes’, ein
Beweis von der Dauer, ja von der unvergänglichen Lebendigkeit geistiger
Wirkungen. Sie war vor Allem ein Nationalfest. Ein Bekenntniß legte
die deutsche Nation ab, daß sie, wie zerrissen auch äußerlich, innerlich
unzerreißbar ist, und daß die Symbole ihrer Einheit ihr über Alles
theuer sind. Mehr aber als das. Man darf sagen, daß eine Unsterblichkeit
und ein Ruhm wie dieser noch niemals ausgetheilt worden ist. Denn
mit der Größe des Dichters haben wir auch das gefeiert, was ihm zur
letzten Vollendung noch mangelte. lndem wir mit dem Dichter den
Menschen feierten, ist er uns als ein Symbol aller der moralischen Güter

Geschichtswissenschaft, 3 (1955), 705–34; Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte

1800–1866. Bürgerwelt und starker Staat, 2nd ed (Munich: Beck, 1984), 722; George
L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses. Political Symbolism and Mass Movements
in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Howard
Fertig, 1975), 87–89. On the ‘Schillerstiftung’: Wolfgang Sowa, Der Staat und das
Drama. Der preußische Schillerpreis 1859–1918. Eine Untersuchung zum literarischen
Leben im Königreich Preußen und im deutschen Kaiserreich, Regensburger Beiträge
zur deutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Reihe B. Untersuchungen 36
(Frankfurt am Main, Berne, New York, Paris: Lang, 1988).
232 From Goethe to Gundolf

erschienen, die uns noch vorenthalten sind, und zu denen wir daher in
einer Stimmung emporblicken, welche die Grundstimmung sämmtlicher
Schillerschen Dichtungen ist.26

Yet one senses that this nobility of tone — Jacob Grimm reaches similar
heights, like Burckhardt, who understandably omits any reference to
the German nation — was reserved for the discriminating audience
or reader. When Dr. Oskar Jäger (later head of the Königl. Friedrich
Wilhelm Gymnasium in Cologne and a pillar of Wilhelmian rectitude)
addresses the festive gathering in Prussian Wetzlar, he also stresses to
his young charges the ‘Einmütigkeit’ occasioned by the event, but casts
an eye back to Schiller’s place (as he saw it) in the political developments
around 1813, his ‘nationale Gesinnung’, his role as ‘Seher’. Stepping
outside of the assembly hall and into the open, he declares his hand:
‘Ja, meine Herren, jetzt, wo unter den Auspizien eines hochherzigen
Regenten Preußen die Fahne dieser maßvollen und männlichen Freiheit
den deutschen Stämmen voranträgt’27 (the rest is predictable). Again,
one senses that the authorities, elsewhere nervous about the occasion
getting out of hand and provoking civil disorder, would warm to the
appropriateness of these sentiments. Perhaps it is worth recalling that
the ‘Schillerfeier’, for all its laudable and almost universally expressed
notions of ‘bürgerliche Freiheit’,28 did not infect all its participants

26 ‘Like no other poet he lives immortal in the hearts of his people. The world has
seen the unforgettable spectacle of the divided tribes, our people torn apart in great
numbers, scattered throughout the globe, meeting together in the veneration of
this poet, just as once the Greeks did in their praise and appreciation of Homer.
This November celebration, as one of the festive speeches we have read called
it, was a ‘true victory festival of the mind’, a testimony to the lasting power and
imperishable liveliness of the workings of the spirit. It was above all a national
festival. The German people admitted that, however outwardly torn, it is inwardly
indestructible, and that the symbols of its unity are more dear to it than anything
else. But more than that. One can say that immortality and fame like this has never
before been bestowed. For with the poet’s greatness we have celebrated what he
was still lacking in ultimate perfection. By celebrating the man with the poet, he has
appeared as a symbol of all the moral qualities that we are still lacking and towards
which we cast our eyes, filled with the same sensation that the whole of Schiller’s
poetry engenders in us’. Rudolf Haym, ‘Schiller an seinem hundertjährigen
Jubiläum’, Gesammelte Aufsätze (Berlin: Weidmann , 1903), 49–120 (118f).
27 ‘Accord’; ‘national feeling’; ‘seer’; ‘Yes, gentlemen, now that, under the auspices
of a magnanimous regent, Prussia bears the banner of this measured and manly
freedom to the German lands’. Oskar Jäger, Zu Schillers Gedächtnis (Wetzlar: n.p.,
1859); Jäger, Pro Domo. Reden und Aufsätze (Berlin: Seehagen, 1894), 3–10 (3, 7, 9).
28 ‘Civic freedom’.
 12. The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859 and the ‘Shakespearefest’ of 1864  233

with high solemnity: Gottfried Keller’s, Paul Heyse’s and Friedrich

Hebbel’s private reactions are revealing.29 It also had elements that
were less spontaneous. On November 9, 1859, by royal decree of the
regent of Prussia, was issued the declaration of the ‘Schillerpreis’ and
the ‘Schillerstiftung’.30 If the popular demonstrations reflected political
liberalization (however short-lived) and liberal notions of ‘Volk’ and
culture, the ‘Schillerpreis’ was a more overt attempt at annexing for
cultural politics the name of the greatest German dramatist, to harness
the theatre, the temple of art, the ‘sittliche Idee des Staates’ (Rudolf
Gottschall’s words).31 The great and good on the jury — Leopold von
Ranke, Theodor Mommsen, Johann Gustav Droysen, Georg Gottfried
Gervinus, Gustav Freytag, later Hermann Hettner, Julian Schmidt,
Heinrich von Treitschke and Wilhelm Scherer — and their association
with this attempt to raise literary standards in the drama, had little effect
on the generally mediocre level of those honoured (only Hebbel and
Otto Ludwig stand out, both now spent forces).
As the ‘Schillerfeier’ merged into the ‘Shakespearefest’, the irony
was that these years, while reflecting the high status of dramatic art, its
classical authority and the canonicity of its major representatives (with
Shakespeare in first place of esteem), were generally ones of epigonal
formalism and imitation, accompanied by a dearth of real talent.32
Grillparzer was silent; Hebbel and Ludwig, as mentioned, were cut off
through the supervention of circumstances. As Helmut Schanze has
shown, 1859 is symbolic in seeing the publication of two major works
which dispense with conventional dramatic theory: the third edition of
Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung/The World as Will
and Representation, and the posthumous Philosophie der Kunst/Philosophy
of Art of F. W. J. Schelling.33 These exceptions apart, the problems

29 Cf. Lütkehaus, ‘Hebbels Schiller-Feier’; Gottfried Keller, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. by

Carl Helbing, 4 vols (Berne: Benteli, 1950–54), I, 441; II, 91; III, i, 11; Der Briefwechsel
zwischen Emanuel Geibel und Paul Heyse, ed. by Erich Petzel (Munich: Lehmann,
1922), 122f.
30 Cf. Sowa, Der Staat, 30–125 (42).
31 ‘The moral idea of the state’. Ibid., 42.
32 Helmut Schanze, ‘Die Anschauung vom hohen Rang des Dramas in der zweiten
Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts und seine tatsächliche Schwäche’, in Beiträge zur
Theorie der Künste im 19. Jahrhundert, vol. I, ed. by Helmut Koopmann and J. Adolf
Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, Studien zur Philosophie und Literatur des neunzehnten
Jahrhunderts 12.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1971), 85–96.
33 Schanze, ‘Die Anschauung’, 87–9; Schanze, Drama im bürgerlichen Realismus (1850–
1890). Theorie und Praxis, Studien zur Philosophie und Literatur des neunzehnten
234 From Goethe to Gundolf

attendant on celebrations of this kind were that they elevated poets to

paradigms or absolutes, and placed them on pedestals beyond the reach
of the young and not-so-young alike. They imposed patterns — the
historical drama springs most readily to mind — that had once been
appropriate in their own time, in both Shakespeare’s and Schiller’s,
indeed eminently worthy of emulation, but that were not endlessly
transferrable to Hohenstaufens, or Habsburgs — or Hohenzollerns.
These awarenesses form part of the current general discussion of
dramatic technique, which, while not coinciding exactly with these
celebrations, certainly provided its broad theoretical background. What
is more, they bring together the names of Shakespeare and Schiller as
role models for a German tragedy of the future.34
For all that its rhetorical gesturings and orotundity seemed to
indicate a rehearsal of 1859, the ‘Shakespearefest’ of 1864 nevertheless
had accentuations of its own. Even those who saw the links between
the occasions were aware of this. Dr. Paul Möbius, who addressed the
festive assembly in Leipzig, makes this point:

Selbst das wichtigste und großartigste von allen, die Schillerfeier von
1859, durch welche erst der Grund für die nachfolgenden geebnet wurde,
so verschiedenartig noch während der Festtage selbst ihre eigentliche
Bedeutung aufgefaßt wurde, galt zuletzt doch nichts Anderem, als
was nachher ein Schützenfest zu Frankfurt, ein Turnfest zu Leipzig
und endlich in ebendemselben Jahre die erhabene Gedenkfeier unseres
Vaterlandes von französischer Knechtschaft noch zu klarerem Ausdrucke
bringen sollte.
Es war die herzerhebende Freude, in dem Dichter einen Mittelpunkt
für alle Stämme und Parteien der Nation gefunden zu haben, einen
Mittelpunkt, der Bürgschaft zu geben schien, daß der Geist, der schon
vorhanden, sich zuletzt doch noch eine Form verschaffen werde, die auch
den rauhesten Stürmen der Wirklichkeit Widerstand zu leisten vermöge.
Und heute feiern wir abermals das Geburtsfest eines Dichters und
abermals ist es nicht unsere Stadt, nicht unser Land allein, das an dieser
Feier Theil nimmt. Schon längst drang die Kunde zu uns, daß auch
diesmal, ähnlich wie 1859, an den Orten der verschiedensten Länder, ja

Jahrhunderts 21 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1973), 26–30.

34 For an indication of the extent of these discussions, see the bibliography in Realismus
und Gründerzeit. Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1848–1880, vol. I,
ed. by Max Bücher, Werner Hahl, Georg Jäger and Reinhard Wittmann (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1976), 452–56.
 12. The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859 and the ‘Shakespearefest’ of 1864  235

Welttheile, wo Deutsche zu Deutschen sich gefunden, sie zu festlichem

Beginnen zusammentreten und das Andenken des großen Shakespeare
feiern wollen..35

Of note is that insight that a poet has become the ‘Mittelpunkt für alle
Stämme und Parteien der Nation’.36 Certainly in 1859 Schiller the poet
was the focus for whatever was associated with the idea of a nation.
But could Shakespeare fulfil such a function in 1864? Clearly not in
the same way. For Möbius, in common with most speakers, goes on to
stress the special nature of the Shakespeare celebrations. Here, also, two
different strands are apparent. Clearly this cannot be a national occasion
except in a very general sense; rather, other phrases from Möbius like
‘Blick auf das Ewige’ or ‘Weltbürgertum’37 indicate the overarching,
universal appeal of the Shakespearean achievement, one that, if pressed,
speakers might declare to be superior to Goethe’s or Schiller’s, indeed
the greatest of all time. But, whether in verse pageants, declamations,
speeches or whatever — all along the lines of 1859 — particular
German concerns obtrude. The main note is ‘er ist unser’;38 we have
annexed him and Germany is his ‘zweite Heimath,’39 the scene of a new

35 ‘Even the greatest and most signal of all, the Schiller celebrations of 1859, which
laid the ground for the ones that followed, despite the differences in their actual
significance, that became manifest as they unfolded, was in reality aimed at nothing
which would not be expressed at rifle-club festivals in Frankfurt or a gymnastics
display in Leipzig, and in the same year as the mighty commemoration of our
fatherland’s liberation from French vassalage.
It warmed the heart to find the poet providing a focal point, an earnest, for all the
regions and parties of the nation, for our hopes, that the spirit, already present, will
find a form that will be able to withstand even the roughest storms of reality.
And today we celebrate again the birthday of a poet, and again it is not our city,
not our country alone, that joins in this festival. We have long since received the
news that this time, like as in 1859, in places in the most disparate countries, or
continents, where German meets German, they come together to celebrate and to
mark the memory of the great Shakespeare’. Paul Möbius, Shakespeare als Dichter
der Naturwahrheit. Festrede bei der Shakespearefeier zu Leipzig am 23. April 1864 gehalten
(Leipzig: Voigt & Günther, 1864), 5f.
36 ‘Focal point for all regions and parties of the nation’.
37 ‘A view into the eternal’; ‘citizenship of the world’. Möbius, Die deutsche
Shakespearefeier. Eine Rechtfertigung derselben nach einem im kaufmännischen Vereine zu
Leipzig gehaltenen Vortrage (Leipzig: Julius Werner, 1864), 5; Möbius, Shakespeare als
Dichter, 15.
38 ‘He is ours’. J. J. Rietmann, Shakspeare und seine Bedeutung. Festrede gesprochen an der
Shakespearefeier in St. Gallen (St. Gallen: Huber, 1864), 13.
39 ‘Second homeland’. August Schwartzkopff, Shakespeare, in seiner Bedeutung für die
Kirche unserer Tage dargestellt […], 2nd ed. (Halle: Richard Mühlmann, 1864), 3.
236 From Goethe to Gundolf

‘Bellalliance’40 (note the terminology). This, in its turn, has a double

emphasis. Following Julian Schmidt’s insight of a few years earlier, it
is Shakespeare the ‘Protestant’,41 the representative of a literary culture
for so long denied in Germany who is ultimately responsible for the
‘Wiedergeburt des zweiten goldenen Zeitalters’42 across the water, who is
the ‘Vater und Meister’43 of modern German poetry. But this annexation
has meant that the Germans —Coleridge, after all, had said it — are now
the true guardians of the sacred flame of the Shakespearean heritage
(‘am Hausaltare deutscher Nation’).44 In this Germanic brotherhood,
‘Fleisch vom eignen Fleisch’, ‘Blut vom eignen Blut’,45 it is Shakespeare
who represents the deepest and most lasting bond. For it was ‘deutsches
Talent, deutscher Geschmack, deutscher Scharfsinn und deutscher
Fleiß’46 that had been largely responsible for the current revival of
things Shakespearean, the restoration of the Shakespearean text, or
philosophical and historical insights into the plays themselves. And it
is true that the translations into English of major German Shakespeare
scholars like Hermann Ulrici, Georg Gotfried Gervinus, later Karl Elze,
or the seeming over-representation of Germans in the notes to the great
Variorum edition started in 1874, might well bear this out. The main
product of the German Shakespeare celebrations of 1864 is of course the
foundation of the ‘Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft’.47 This is not the
place to discuss the significance of that society. Suffice it to say, however,
that the statement of intent prepared in 1863 by Wilhelm Oechelhäuser,
later its president, stresses the wider, national, propaedeutic function of
the society and its forthcoming celebration:

Es wird vielmehr in dieser Beziehung die wesentliche Aufgabe des

beginnenden vierten Jahrhunderts nach Shakespeare’s Geburt bleiben,

40 A reference to the battle of Waterloo. Kuenzel, William Shakespeare, 44.

41 Lua, William Shakespeare, 11.
42 ‘Rebirth of a second golden age’. Kuenzel, William Shakespeare, 2.
43 ‘Father and master’. F.A.Th. Kreyssig, Ueber die sittliche und volksthümliche
Berechtigung des Shakespeare-Cultus. Festrede, bei der Shakespeare-Feier in Elbing am 23.
April 1864 gehalten (Elbing: Neumann Hartmann, 1864), 9.
44 ‘At the tutelary altar of the German nation’. Ibid.
45 ‘Flesh of our flesh’; ‘blood of our blood’. Möbius, Die deutsche Shakespearefeier, 12.
46 ‘German talent, German taste, German intelligence, and German industry’.
Kreyssig, Ueber die sittliche, 8.
47 Cf. Robert Fricker, ‘Hundert Jahre Shakespeare-Jahrbuch’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch
(West), 100 (1964), 33–67; Martin Lehnert, ‘Hundert Jahre Deutsche Shakespeare-
Gesellschaft’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 100–01 (1964–65), 9–54.
 12. The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859 and the ‘Shakespearefest’ of 1864  237

seine Werke und deren klare Erkenntniss noch viel weiter zu verbreiten,
damit sie noch weit tiefer in das Volk, soweit dessen Bildungsgrad
es überhaupt dazu befähigt, eindringen mögen. Für die gesunde
Fortentwicklung, nicht bloss unserer dramatischen Literatur, sondern
des ganzen sittlichen und intellectuellen Lebens der Nation, ist das
Wachsen der Erkenntniss dieses grossen Apostels der Humanität und
echten Lebensweisheit ein wahres Bedürfniss.48

There is an irony that this takes place against a background where the first
cloud to overshadow Anglo-German political relations had appeared on
the horizon: the Schleswig-Holstein affair. Several anniversary speakers
are at pains to remind their audiences that the England with whom they
are culturally bonded is not that of Palmerston, Russell and the free
press.49 The ‘Shakespeare-Gesellschaft’ is, of course, too fastidious to
bring politics of this nature into its founding statements (a scruple which
it abandons but briefly in 1870–71). It is also worth reflecting that the
great period of early Victorian reception of things German — Fontane
still experiences its high point while in London — was now moving
into a less uncritical phase. And there is in German historiography and
historical thinking the awareness that, whereas Shakespeare might
represent the highest modern human achievement in poetry, he does
not possess the ‘innere geistige Reife’ of the classical German tradition
or its association with philosophy and scholarship and its rooting in
antiquity.50 Nor does the open-handed acceptance of the Shakespearean
Weltanschauung and its political and intellectual implications involve
an identity with his present-day countrymen or their institutions.
Which brings me back to Theodor Fontane. Any reader of his works
and letters will need no reminder of the respect and love that both Schiller

48 ‘In this regard the essential task of the fourth century after Shakespeare’s birth, now
upon us, will remain the further dissemination of his works and the clear message,
towards a deeper understanding among the people, inasmuch as its education
permits. For our dramatic literature, but also the whole moral and intellectual life
of its nation, to develop and prosper an enhanced awareness of this great apostle of
humanity and of a genuine understanding of life, is what we truly need’. Wilhelm
Oechelhaueser [sic], ‘Die deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft’, Shakespeareana
(Berlin: Springer, 1894), 1–22 (3f.).
49 Möbius, Shakespeare als Dichter, 7; Möbius, Die deutsche Shakespearefeier, 3–5; Kreyssig,
Ueber die sittliche, 6f.; Lemcke, Shakespeare 12; Kuenzel, William Shakespeare, 28f. Cf.
Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1860–1914 (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1980), 13.
50 ‘Inner spiritual maturity’. Conrad Hermann, Philosophie der Geschichte (Leipzig:
Fleischer, 1870), 590.
238 From Goethe to Gundolf

and Shakespeare enjoy in his esteem. It is not unqualified or uncritical,

especially in Schiller’s case. The words in a letter to Maximilian Ludwig
of 1878 — ‘Daß ich im Uebrigen meinen Schiller aufrichtiger liebe
und bewundere, als es das nachplappernde Phrasenvolk, das Salon
und Schule unsicher macht, beim besten Willen imstande ist, brauche
ich Ihnen nicht erst zu versichern’51 — come after fairly uncharitable
remarks on Die Räuber/The Robbers. Even at the very beginning of
his poetic career, brought up as he was on a forced diet of Schillerian
ballads, he had made fun of the Schiller cult. His occasional poem ‘Zum
Schillerfest des “Tunnel”’ is a toast or ‘Trinkspruch’, an occasional poem,
which gains its dignity from the ‘occasion’:

Es sprach Apoll: “Ich bin der Lieder müde

Zu Ehren all der Damons und Damöte,
Ich mag nicht mehr, was unwahr und was prüde”.

Und siehe da, anbrach die Morgenröte

Der deutschen Kunst, vom Berge stieg zu Tale
Die hehre Doppelsonne Klopstock-Goethe.

Geboren war die Welt der Ideale;

Hell schien das Licht; nur für die nächt‘gen Zeiten
Gebrach uns noch das Feuer der Fanale;

Gebrach uns noch das Feuer, das von Weiten

Zu Waffen ruft, von hohem Bergeskamme,
Wenn‘s gilt für Sitte, Land und Thron zu streiten;

Gebrach uns noch die hohe, heil‘ge Flamme,

Die unsren Sinn von Kleinheit, Selbstsucht reinigt
Und uns zusammenschweißt zu einem Stamme;

Und Schiller kam und Deutschland war geeinigt.52

51 ‘That I incidentally am a far greater lover and admirer of Schiller than all the cliché-
mongers who are at large in salons and schools are capable of, however hard they
try, I hardly need to assure you’. SW, IV, ii, 567.
52 ‘Apollo spoke: “I’m tired of songs
That honour all the swains and their swainesses
And all that to untruth and prudes belongs”.
Lo and behold, the dawn undid her tresses
On German art, from mount to dale
The double sun of Klopstock–Goethe presses.
And born was now the world of true ideals;
Bright shone the light; but for the hours of night
 12. The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859 and the ‘Shakespearefest’ of 1864  239

The occasion is all-important. This is not Zurich, where Gottfried Keller

produces stanza after stanza of high-sounding verse to impress elevated
seriousness on his fellow-citizens. This is the more intimate atmosphere
of the ‘Tunnel’ society, among fellow-poets, as it were; without the whole
declamatory apparatus that lesser and greater talents were inflicting
on captive audiences. Indeed one states in less hushed and reverential
terms what speaker after speaker was saying (or was going to say, for
the ‘Schillerfeier’ of the ‘Tunnel’ took place on the 8th, not on the 9th of
November, the actual birthday).53 Clearly this is not a poem which sustains
too great a degree of formal analysis. It is clearly tongue-in-cheek: the
disjunction between the rhetorical flights it perpetrates and the rhyme
framework (terza rima) it employs, gives it away. ‘Damöte’/‘Morgenröte’
might seem bad enough, but ‘Und siehe da, anbrach die Morgenröte’
is certainly no better. One notes with interest, however, a coincidence
between Fontane’s two opening stanzas and a section of Jacob Grimm’s
speech, with its progression from ‘poesielose Orgons- und Damonstücke’54
to the heights and achievements of Klopstock and Goethe. But Grimm
in his turn was rehearsing the perceptions — the clichés — attendant
on nineteenth-century awareness of ‘Nationalliteratur’. The insight
that the ‘Schillerfeier’ restores ‘was uns gebrach’55 and is a force for the
spiritual unanimity that must precede actual political union, is the real
point of Fontane’s poem, one in 1859 reiterated endlessly at various
levels of sophistication. It is not even the only poem produced by the
‘Tunnel’ for the occasion. Fontane’s friend and fellow-poet Scherenberg
delivered himself of several execrable stanzas,56 overladen with rhetoric
and inventive conceits, against which Fontane’s seems restrained and
apposite. For all that has been noted about its tone, it is enshrined in
Adolph Büchting’s Verzeichniß/Directory of 1860, an important source of

We needed fire to follow on its heels.

We needed fire to call out from the night
To arms, from highest mountain top,
For home and hearth and throne to fight;
We needed sacred lofty flame — no sop –
To clear our minds in pettiness benighted
And weld us in one undivided knot.
And Schiller came: and Germany was united’. SW, VI, 470f.
53 Ibid., I, 470.
54 ‘Orgons and Damons and their unpoetic stuff’. Schiller, I, 444.
55 ‘What we were lacking’.
56 Schiller-Denkmal, I, 199–221.
240 From Goethe to Gundolf

information about the 1859 celebrations,57 and its text graces Tropus’s
Schiller-Denkmal of the same year.58
Fontane’s Shakespeare piece was, however, not published in his
lifetime and has not been the subject of any significant critical interest.59
We need not take too seriously his diary entry that it was ‘aufs Papier
hingeschmissen wohl oder übel’.60 He had made notes, which suggests
a degree of reflexion. In essence, however, he needed no preparation.
Shakespeare was already long since enshrined in his scheme of things,
through a knowledge of the text, and experience of live performance
at home and in London.61 Fontane is part of the generation that
includes Freiligrath, Herwegh and Bodenstedt; like the first two, he
is aware of the political charge of the Shakespearean text (as in that
early poem, ‘Shakespeare an einen deutschen Fürsten/Shakespeare
to a German Prince’);62 like all three of them, he does not regard the
so-called ‘Schlegel-Tieck’ version as definitive. There had been the rash
experiment of a Hamlet translation (a version of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream is lost), the theatre criticism from London, with its emphasis
on authenticity and closeness to human experience. He had noted the
way in which Shakespeare was still a ‘Dichter des Volks’ in England,63
part of an almost unbroken tradition of theatrical performance and role
creation — in contrast with Germany, where Schiller had that function,
whereas Shakespeare is ‘etwas Apartes’.64 It is worth mentioning that
his two other English-language role models, Walter Scott and Charles
Dickens, are in a sense part of a wider texture of Shakespeare reception,
through the intertextual allusions which form part of the tissue of their

57 Büchting, Verzeichniß, 74. The title in Schiller-Denkmal reads ‘Toast auf Schiller
von Th. Fontane, gesprochen im literarischen Sonntags-Verein (Tunnel) am 8.
November’.
58 Schiller-Denkmal, I, 121.
59 The full text is published, as ‘Rede zum Shakespeare-Fest’, in SW, Aufsätze, I,
195–204.
60 ‘Dashed off as it comes’. SW, Aufsätze, I, 798.
61 See Helmuth Nürnberger, Der junge Fontane. Politik. Poesie. Geschichte 1840 bis 1860
(Hamburg: Wegner, 1967), 100–04; Peter Michelsen, ‘Theodor Fontane als Kritiker
englischer Shakespeare-Aufführungen’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (West) (1967), 96–122;
Andrea Deffner, ‘Die “Hamlet”-Ubersetzung Theodor Fontanes’ (unpublished
doctoral thesis, University of Heidelberg, 1991).
62 SW, I, 758f.
63 ‘Poet of the people’. SW, Aufsätze, I, 110.
64 ‘Something very special’. Ibid., 107.
 12. The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859 and the ‘Shakespearefest’ of 1864  241

work. Both Shakespeare and Scott come together to influence those

early historical fragments, Wolsey, and especially the drama Carl Stuart.
Fontane is aware of the discussion of Shakespeare in his formative years
as a writer (Wagner’s Das Drama der Zukunft [sic], for instance)65 without
necessarily subscribing to its proprietary claims. Above all — and this
is crucial for his Shakespeare speech and marks it out from all others
in 1864 known to me at least — he had been to the sacred place of
pilgrimage, Stratford, the ‘Pilgerstätte’, the ‘Wallfahrtsort’.66 Again, that
gave his remarks the stamp of authenticity that a more literary approach
could not.
That is not to say that Fontane’s speech does not have a specifically
German emphasis or an accentuation that is peculiarly his own. With
others as well, he distinguishes Schiller the ‘Lieblingsdichter’67 of 1859
from the superior genius of Shakespeare. The Germanophile proprietary
claim ‘Shakespeare ist unser’68 is qualified by the later reference to
‘[die] ganz[e] gebildet[e] Welt’69 (another important difference from
Schiller), the universal commonalty of Shakespearean connoisseurship
and appreciation that knows no national boundaries. Fontane is
steering a middle course between crude German partisanship (there is
no mention of Schleswig-Holstein, for instance, a subject about which
he has decided views) and an uncritical Anglophile stance. For all his
fascination with English historical fact and fiction, he is not willing, as
Gervinus or Julian Schmidt had been, to berate his fellow-countrymen
for their failure to achieve a symbiosis of political and literary culture
like that from which Shakespeare once emerged. At most the Histories
could serve that function. The great tragedies — Hamlet, King Lear,
Othello, Romeo and Juliet — are however free of these associations: their
presentation of the human heart is the key to their appeal in all ages and
nations. This point, it need hardly be said, had been common currency
in German Shakespeare appreciation since Herder and was one of the
first indications of an independence from English-language criticism.
Quoting the words ‘Wunderkind’ or ‘Naturkind’,70 Fontane evokes

65 Ibid., 99.
66 Ibid., 202.
67 ‘Favourite poet’. Ibid., 195.
68 ‘Shakespeare is ours’. Ibid.
69 ‘The whole of the educated world’. Ibid., 196.
70 ‘Wondrous child’; ‘nature’s child’. Ibid., 197.
242 From Goethe to Gundolf

the oldest strands of Shakespearean reception and not the nineteenth

century’s sophistication, and frees notions like ‘nature’s child’ or
‘negative capability’ from any anchorage in space and time and sites
such genius anywhere — if need be, in Germany.
Fontane’s seemingly magisterial dismissal of the old biographical,
anecdotal approach to Shakespeare — another of the nineteenth
century’s obsessions — is however subject to gradations. Instead, he
turns to topography: London and Stratford. Here, too, there are clear
affinities with his own preoccupations, which find their expression
not only in Ein Sommer in London/A Summer in London, Aus England/
From England and Jenseit des Tweed/Beyond the Tweed, but also in his first
major literary achievement, Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg/
Walks through the March of Brandenburg. London (and to some extent
Manchester) emerges in Fontane’s account not so much as the living
site of past history, but as the repository of evidence and documentation
of that past. London, the huge seething city, then as we now know
at the apogee of its world-wide influence, lacks in Fontane’s eyes
the quality of a past time-frame, of history caught in arrest, of living
historical associations. This he finds in Waltham Abbey, in Oxford, in
Chester, almost everywhere in Scotland (he turns aside from a visit to
Glasgow) — and not least in Stratford. England, a country so obsessed
with the changes conditional on world trade and naval and military might,
has swept away so much of the old — in London more radically than
elsewhere — and has thrown up edifices of the new. Thus Shakespeare’s
London (Fontane accepts the effects of the Great Fire) exists only in
images and documents or inscriptions. Its icon is not some haunt on the
South Bank, but the bust in Poets’ Corner (and Fontane cannot resist
the reference to Shakespeare’s near-neighbour in that place, Handel,
a near-topos of German Shakespearean studies). Warwickshire, and
more especially Stratford itself, is an enclave amid change and progress
(witness its proximity to the cradle of the Industrial Revolution). Its
cultural roots go even deeper than Shakespeare, back to the old folk
ballads of a pre-industrial, pre-enclosure era. Thus Stratford — and
Fontane knows all the other literary associations of Warwickshire — is
all the more precious for having living traces of ‘das alte heitre Land’.71
But we are, as it were, with the writer all the time; he accompanies us

71 ‘The old happy land’. Ibid., 201.

 12. The ‘Schillerfeier’ of 1859 and the ‘Shakespearefest’ of 1864  243

to this place of pilgrimage (‘Pilgerstätte’, ‘Wallfahrtsort’); we stoop

to enter the humble birthplace, we add our fingers to the thousands
who have touched its walls. We are made aware — Washington Irving,
who becomes a kind of spiritual ancestor of the Wanderungen,72 made
the same point much earlier — that this may be against all reason and
factual foundation, but we enter willingly and consciously into these
pious delusions. And our human sense and our experience of life is
invoked when Fontane examines the inscription on Shakespeare’s tomb
and declares: ‘Es sind Worte, die nichts andres ausdrücken wollen, als
die tiefe Sehnsucht nach Ruhe’.73 The vignettes, the linking of history
and personal musing, the blending of the concretely factual with wider
spheres of human experience, that ‘wir’ that involves us vicariously in
the experience — all these point forward to the Fontane of Wanderungen
durch die Mark Brandenburg, on which he was then working . And — to
revert to our overall theme — among the many speeches delivered on
the occasion of Shakespeare’s tercentenary, it is unique for these very
qualities. But let us not forget that the technique being unfolded in the
Shakespeare piece and in the Wanderungen is also the basis of his later
mature novel style: the importance of ‘place’, but above all its symbolism
and human associations, the awareness that the particular and the local
also involve, if not the universal, but certainly insights conditional on the
widest range of human experience and (if we could but see it) human
wisdom.

72 Ibid., 202.
73 ‘They are words that express nothing more than the deep longing for peace’. Ibid.,
204.
Fig. 16 Theaterplatz in Dresden. Photo by author, CC BY-SA 4.0.
 13. Under the Horse’s Tail:
The Poets, Statuary and the Literary Canon
in Nineteenth-Century Germany1

My real subject in this chapter is ‘lieux de mémoire’, ‘Erinnerungsorte’,

‘loci memoriae’ or ‘places of memory’. I shall be looking at three
examples in a German context and will be examining them as
they affect the national memory and its myths, but also the way the
nation viewed its national poets and the emergent canon that served
to galvanize national cultural aspirations. If we look at the ‘Urtext’
of this cult of memory, Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–92)2
and especially its German equivalent, Étienne François’ and Hagen
Schulze’s Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (2000),3 we notice that the concept
of these national monuments, places or spaces, common to both works,
is very commodious. It can be a place, like the Minster in Strasbourg or
the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin or the city of Dresden. It can also be a
person, like Arminius or Frederick the Great or Otto von Bismarck. Or it
can be an event like the year 1968. These figures all mark out a space in
the national memory and consciousness. Seen in these terms, therefore,
figures in the literary canon like Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich
Schiller, the one with Faust, the other with Wilhelm Tell, also constitute
such places.
And yet we must be aware of the separateness of places of memory
in France and Germany as presented by Nora and François and Schulze
respectively. There can be no Rheims or Panthéon for Germany (no

1 This is the much expanded and revised version of a paper first written in 2002, but
hitherto unpublished.
2 Pierre Nora et al., Les Lieux de mémoire, 7 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992).
3 Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, ed. by Étienne François and Hagen Schulze (Munich:
Beck, 2003 [2001]).

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.13

246 From Goethe to Gundolf

Westminster Abbey); Victor Hugo, Jules Michelet, François Guizot

and Augustin Thierry may have created the nineteenth-century view
of France that in many ways is still current, but Germany has no
Hugo, and the greatest of its nineteenth-century historians, such as
Leopold von Ranke or Theodor Mommsen, are focused elsewhere.
The Teutoburger Wald, Potsdam, the Wartburg, the Walhalla are all
expressions of a nineteenth-century desire for nationhood, but none of
them is in a capital city like Paris. The monuments in royal capitals like
Munich or Berlin, though attempts at creating a historical panorama or
progression, are nevertheless above all tokens of Bavarian or Prussian
achievements and are unthinkable in any other context. This is not to
diminish the significance of such representations of the national history,
but a comparison with France is not in the first instance workable or
desirable.4
François’ and Schulze’s volumes do recapture much of what the
nineteenth century would have regarded as the central symbolism and
iconography of its aspirations before and after 1848 or 1871, whereas
places of memory in the twentieth century cannot be disassociated
from the memorialization of a less positive past, ‘Mahnmale’, warning
monuments, not just ‘Erinnerungsorte’.5 Thus the city of Dresden, which
these volumes mark,6 is at once the ‘Elbflorenz’, the pearl of German
cities, the cultural jewel with its matchless art collections, but also the
city ravaged and laid waste on February 13, 1945, the city, too, described
in Victor Klemperer’s diaries that was still overseeing the deportation
of its Jews almost up to the eve of that terrible night. I will stay with
Dresden because it is a convenient example with which to lead into my
subject. Today, one may be grateful for every corner of Dresden that
has survived the fire from heaven in 1945 and has been subsequently
restored. We should not however forget that the city and its famous
skyline, already immortalized in the eighteenth century by Canaletto
and Bernardo Bellotto, is a cultural artefact made up of various styles,

4 A point which emerges in François and Schulze’s introduction, ‘Einleitung’, in

Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, I, 9–24.
5 As in the articles by Peter Reichel, ‘Auschwitz’ and by Klaus Neumann, ‘Mahnmale’
in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, III, 600–21 and 622–57. Cf. also Aleida Assmann,
Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich:
Beck, 1999), 328–39.
6 Olaf B. Rader, ‘Dresden’, in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, I, 451–70.
 13. Under the Horse’s Tail  247

eclectically framed together over nearly two centuries (and let us not
forget that the same Bellotto records its bombardment in 1759–60 during
the Seven Years’ War, an act of vandalism at the hands of Frederick the
Great, about whom more later).
Whereas it is appropriate and legitimate in identifying
‘Erinnerungsorte’ to refer to historical cultural manifestations in the
widest of terms, as in the article ‘Dresden’ in François and Schulze, the
cultural or literary or art historian may wish to examine aspects of these
places with an emphasis different from mine. (I qualify only as a literary
historian.) Thus when my wife and I stood in 2002 on what was once
called the Schlossplatz and has become the Theaterplatz, armed with
a camera and some memories of our first visit to Dresden in 1974, we
remarked that we were standing on a many-layered ‘lieu de mémoire’,
not least because two of the constituent buildings, the royal palace and
the opera house, still ruins in 1974, had been rebuilt since the 1980s, so
that the symbolism of the royal capital of Saxony that the city once was,
had been restored for a purpose very different from that intended in the
nineteenth century. For if we take in all sides of this square — as we are
intended to do — we move from the royal palace, mainly Renaissance
and much restored in 1890–1902,7 to the baroque Hofkirche (now Dom),
to Gottfried Semper’s picture gallery (behind which one can see that
baroque extravaganza the Zwinger), to the opera house (after Semper’s
design: the original building was destroyed by fire) to the centre, the
equestrian statue of King John of Saxony (König Johann), by Johannes
Schilling and erected in 1889 (see Fig. 16).8
Clearly this is a congeries of buildings demonstrating royal power
and its cultural attachments in the widest sense. The king, who reigned
from 1854 to 1873, dominates the scene from his vantage point above a

7 Fritz Löffler, Das alte Dresden. Geschichte seiner Bauten (Dresden: Sachsenverlag,
1958), 353.
8 On King John of Saxony see especially König Johann von Sachsen. Zwischen
zwei Welten, ed. by der Sächsischen Schlossverwaltung und dem Staatlichen
Schlossbetrieb Weesenstein (Halle: Janos Stekovics, 2001) and Zwischen Tradition
und Modernität. König Johann von Sachsen 1801–1873, ed. by Winifried Müller and
Martina Schattkowsky, Schriften zur sächsischen Geschichte und Volkskunde
8 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2004). Reference will be made to the
individual essays in these volumes. On the statue itself, see Simone Mergen, ‘Die
Enthüllung des König-Johann-Denkmals in Dresden anlässlich der Wettin-Feier
1889. Jubiläum und Denkmal im monarchischen Kult des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in König
Johann von Sachsen, 425–48.
248 From Goethe to Gundolf

high and elaborate plinth, the whole competing with the great squares
of Europe (see Fig. 17). Looking at the king, with his accoutrements,
the traditional royal mantle and sceptre over a modern uniform, with
stirrups, we might be tempted to see here the symbol of military power.
But this is not, say, King Ludwig I of Bavaria on the Odeonsplatz in
Munich with raised sword and defiant gesture. It is an essentially
unmartial king, who tried to preserve Saxony’s independence, but
backed the wrong side in 1866 and was only spared the fate of Hanover
through Bismarck’s generosity. He is a king who went without great
enthusiasm into the ‘Reich’ of 1871 (he was not present at Versailles and
does not figure on the definitive version of Anton von Werner’s famous
monumental painting of the proclamation of the German Empire). Yet
a monument to a king will hardly commemorate what he did not do.
What sort of monument is this?

Fig. 17 E
 questrian statue of King John of Saxony, Dresden Theaterplatz,
by Johannes Schilling (1889). Photo by author, CC BY 4.0.
 13. Under the Horse’s Tail  249

In his seminal article in the Historische Zeitschrift in 1968,9 Thomas

Nipperdey identifies five different kinds of monuments which express
and symbolize German ideas and aspirations in the nineteenth century.
1) The national and monarchic or dynastic (such as Frederick the Great’s
statue in Berlin, about which more later, or Kaiser William’s (now
lost); 2) the memorial church; 3) the monument to the national culture
(such as the Walhalla near Regensburg); 4) the national monument of
a democratically constituted nation (the Befreiungshalle at Kelheim or
Hermann dominating the Teutoburg Forest); or 5) the monument of a
nation now politically coalesced (the many commemorating Bismarck).
The monument to King John has manifestly elements of several of
these. Erected by his son, the martial and highly popular King Albert, it
is the dynastic homage to the royal house of Wettin (as indicated by the
crown on the rear of the plinth), but also to the constitutional monarch
(although instinctively conservative), the ‘father of his people’, who
presides over the arts of war and peace, the ‘Landesvater’. For if we read
the frieze on the plinth from right to left, we see in order of sequence
soldiers in the uniforms of the Franco-Prussian War, the industrial arts
and crafts and agriculture, then the fine arts. There are links here with
nineteenth-century kings of the stamp of King Frederick William IV of
Prussia or King Ludwig I of Bavaria, both of whom were indeed King
John’s brothers-in-law, one with artistic leanings and the other a poet
in his own right, but both very different all the same. Albert, Prince
Consort, in this country, has perhaps more affinities. For the figures
on the plinth are not merely borrowed from traditional iconography;
they reflect the king’s lively interest in all of his kingdom’s activities,
technical, administrative and cultural (see Fig. 18).
But what of the back of the plinth, directly under the horse’s tail?
It is clearly not a place of dishonour, but rather of distinction, for there
one will remark the royal crown of Saxony and, below it, a relief portrait
of Dante (see Fig. 19). It is a reminder that the king is also Philalethes,
who as Prince John of Saxony produced a metrical (iambic) translation
of the Divine Comedy between 1830 and 1849 and who as king issued a
revised edition in 1866. Dante on the plinth does not come as a surprise
when we know that the great Italian poet had already formed part of

9 Thomas Nipperdey, ‘Nationalidee und Nationaldenkmal in Deutschland im 19.

Jahrhundert’, Historische Zeitschrift, 206 (1968), 529–85.
250 From Goethe to Gundolf

Fig. 18 Equestrian statue of King John of Saxony, detail of plinth. Photo by author,
CC BY 4.0.

Fig. 19 Equestrian statue of King John of Saxony, rear of plinth. Photo by author,
CC BY 4.0.
 13. Under the Horse’s Tail  251

the king’s official iconography during his lifetime, a Dante bust already
featuring on several of his official portraits or representations10
He is also noted for assembling around him an ‘Accademia Dantesca’
that included the poet and translator Ludwig Tieck, the translator Wolf
von Baudissin, and the physician and painter Carl Gustav Carus, who
between them had the oversight of the royal translation and offered
their several poetic or scientific skills and insights. This is not the place
to discuss the merits of this translation, as compared, say, with his
contemporaries August Kopisch or Karl Ludwig Friedrich Kannegiesser
or Karl Streckfuss, nor the role of the ‘Accademia’.11 What is important
in this context is that Philalethes’ Dante is one those projects in the
nineteenth century which linked foreign and native cultures, thereby
representing a symbiosis between German ‘Bildung’ and alien poetry.
It descends lineally from the German reception of the Greeks, then of
Shakespeare, Cervantes and others, including Dante. Its origins lie in
the idea that a cultivated nation, while not yet politically united and
without a capital city, may nevertheless make its mark in cultural terms.
As Georg Forster formulated it in 1791:

Geographical position, political constitution and various other factors

have given the Germans the eclectic character by which they can explore
without prejudice and for its own sake the beautiful, the good and the
perfect which is scattered in fragments and adaptations all over the
earth’s surface, collecting and collating it until such time as the edifice of
human knowledge stands complete before us.12

10 See König Johann von Sachsen. Zwischen zwei Welten, frontis., plates 29, 299.
11 See Sebastian Neumeister, ‘Philalethes: König Johann als Dante-Übersetzer’ in
Zwischen Tradition, 203–16; but also Elisabeth Stopp, ‘Ludwig Tieck: Unveröffentlichte
Aufzeichnungen zu Purgatorio VI–XXIII anläßlich der deutschen Übersetzung von
Philalethes, ediert und erläutert’, Deutsches Dante Jahrbuch, 60 (1985) , 7–72 and
‘Ludwig Tieck and Dante’, Deutsches Dante Jahrbuch, 60 (1985), 73–95.
12 Georg Forster, Sämtliche Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe, ed. by Deutsche Akademie der
Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 18 vols (Berlin: Akademie, 1963-), IV, 285. The original
reads: ‘Gleichwohl hat uns geographische Lage, politische Verfassung und so
manches mitwirkende Verhältniß den eklektischen Charakter verliehen, womit
wir das Schöne, Gute und Vollkommene, was hie und dort in Bruchstücken und
Modifikationen auf der ganzen Erdoberfläche zerstreut ist, uneingennüzig um
sein selbst willen erforschen, sammlen und so lange ordnen sollen, bis etwa der
Bau des menschlichen Wissens volendet da steht, —oder unsre Rolle gespielt ist
und künftige Menschenalter die Steine, die wir zusammentrugen, zu einem neuen
Gebäude brauchen’.
252 From Goethe to Gundolf

The translator and critic August Wilhelm Schlegel,13 lecturing on

European literature in Berlin in 1801, stated that the Germans, while
yet essentially without a nationality of their own, do possess depth and
universality, a different way of expressing the German cultural embrace
of the Other. Or in 1818–19, in a very different cultural and political
climate, the literary historian Ludwig Wachler, though fixated on the idea
of the renewal of the national fibre through Teutonic virtues, nevertheless
praises openness to other nations’ attainments (Dante, Calderón,
Shakespeare) as an essentially German quality.14 Something similar is
still being echoed by Georg Gottfried Gervinus in his Neue Geschichte der
poetischen Literatur der Deutschen/New History of the Poetic Literature of the
Germans (1842) and his call there to incorporate into the national literary
culture those aspects that are common to Europe as a whole (such
as the reception of Shakespeare).15 Like the so-called ‘Schlegel-Tieck’
translation of Shakespeare, like A. W. Schlegel’s Sanskrit editions — but
exceeding both in the extent of it annotations — Philalethes’ Göttliche
Comödie sees itself as both scholarly and poetic.16
In that sense, the Theaterplatz in Dresden is a ‘lieu de mémoire’, not
just a memorial to national or dynastic values. It is, more discreetly (the
small plaque of Dante) a monument to those aspects of the national
character which expressed themselves in the belief that the Germans
had an innate empathy with certain figures of foreign national culture
and might be seen to understand them as well if not better than their
own compatriots. The example of Shakespeare springs to mind. This
place of memory might be Saxony’s response to another monument

13  ugust Wilhelm Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, ed. by Ernst Behler,
A
Frank Jolles et al., 6 vols (Paderborn etc.: Schöningh, 1989-), I, 195 (‘sie [die
Deutschen] allein verbinden Tiefe und Universalität, und ihre Nationalität besteht
darin, sich derselben willig entäußern zu können’).
14 Ludwig Wachler, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der deutschen Nationalliteratur, 2
vols (Frankfurt am Main: Hermann, 1818–19), I, 17 (‘dankbare Gerechtigkeit
gegen Gutes, Wahres, Schönes, von wannen es komme, als Gründung teutscher
Eigentümlichkeit zu gelten’).
15 See Jürgen Fohrmann, Das Projekt der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Entstehen und
Scheitern einer nationalen Literaturgeschichte zwischen Humanismus und Deutschem
Kaiserreich (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989), 38f.
16 ‘Ein Dichter wie Dante, der voll historischer, theologischer, astronomischer u.s.w.
Beziehungen ist, bleibt ohne Noten ungeniessbar’. Dante Alighieri’s Göttliche
Comödie. Metrisch übertragen und mit kritischen und historischen Erläuterungen versehen
von Philalethes, 2. unveränderter Abdruck der berichtigten Ausgabe von 1865–66, 3 vols in
2 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1871), I, i, vii (preface of 1833).
 13. Under the Horse’s Tail  253

(about which more later) that makes quite a different cultural

statement, Berlin’s statue of Frederick the Great. For that statue, like the
one to Frederick William III in Cologne, is, as we shall see, flanked by
significant ancillary figures, whereas King John stands above, but also
represents symbolically, the ‘general people’ who populate his plinth.
It might also be a restrained message to William II, the newly ascended
young Kaiser, ridden by the same cultural meddlesomeness as his great-
uncle Frederick William IV but who, unlike him, was about to embark
on two decades of royally and imperially sponsored vulgarity.
But to make the Theaterplatz a ‘place of memory’ in the full sense,
we must of course not overlook that it has on one side one of the great
world-class collections of Italian, Spanish and French art, forming
one flank of the square, a reminder that the appellation ‘Florence on
the Elbe’ was open to the widest and most positive of interpretations.
Moving however to Semper’s opera house, also in its turn a monument
to European, not exclusively national, culture, and coming round to its
right entrance, we see two over-life-size seated statues. They are Goethe
and Schiller, looking across to the king and poet-translator on his
pedestal, both classically attired and surmounting symbolic reliefs with
the connotations of genius and inspiration. They are here for what they
are, but also because as young men both underwent crucial experiences
in this city. Given their supernal status in the nineteenth century, one
might almost say that they were necessary to round off the iconography
and symbolism of this public square as a cultural and political space
and entity.
Leaving Dresden, we move to Prussia, the royal house of Hohenzollern
and the residence of Sanssouci in Potsdam. There is no need even to
begin to justify ranking this among the potential ‘lieux de mémoire’ of
Germany, any more than one would need to produce arguments for
Versailles in France, so commanding is the case for inclusion (François
and Schulze however think differently). Of course, on the surface, we
may have to look hard and possibly in vain for any connection here
with a specifically German culture, so much do Frederick the Great’s
palaces and park bear the stamp of French taste and artistic execution.
Yet let us not forget that two Prussian kings, not just Frederick, were
active in setting the mark of their very different personalities on
this cultural landscape: Frederick the Great of course, but also his
254 From Goethe to Gundolf

great-great-nephew, Frederick William IV, the so-called ‘Romantic on

the Throne’. In fact Frederick William was, out of piety for his famous
ancestor, responsible for restoring the palace of Sanssouci to its original
French rococo state. On the other hand, as crown prince and then as
king, he interspersed throughout the park of Sanssouci buildings that
stand in marked contrast to Frederick’s. They are either Italianate (like
the Neue Orangerie) or Romanesque, like the Friedenskirche, where he
and his wife are buried, with its very un-Hohenzollern sentiments on
the ‘Prince of Peace’, or they are classical Roman, like the Charlottenhof,
to which I now turn.17
Built for his wife Elisabeth, the Charlottenhof emerged between 1826
and 1851 under the guidance of the architects Karl Friedrich Schinkel,
Ludwig Persius and Peter Joseph Lenné (quite a trio in their own right).
It seems to have been transplanted from the Roman countryside, with
its Doric-columned front, its vestibule, and its park with copies of Greek
statues, and its herms. The herms, designed in 1851 by Gustav Bläser,
certainly look very classical in form until we look closer and remark that
their sculpted heads are in fact modern. For as we enter one of the alleys
of the grove to the rear of the house, we encounter Goethe and Schiller,
and on the other side Cristoph Martin Wieland and Johann Gottfried
Herder. At the other end, complementing them, are Dante, Boccaccio,
Ariosto and Tasso.
Clearly the king did not wish the park of Sanssouci to echo only to
the now departed sounds of French. To that end he had used his famous
ancestor’s Neues Palais and its rococo theatre, where in Frederick’s day
nothing in German would have been performed, for the first German
production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was that epoch-making
event in 1843, with Ludwig Tieck directing and Felix Mendelssohn
Bartholdy providing the incidental music. Eclectic to a fault, he had
also had Sophocles’ Antigone and Jean Racine’s Athalie performed,
with the same producer and composer. But nothing concrete remains
to commemorate that event in German musical and theatrical history
except the music itself.
But what of the herms, but a short walk distant from the Neues
Palais? Was the king thinking of the garden at Belriguardo in Goethe’s

17 
On the Charlottenhof, see Florian Müller-Klug, ‘Schloss und Park
Charlottenhof — Ein Arkadien’, Clio Berlin (December 2, 2014), https://clioberlin.
de/blog-architektur/76-schloss-und-park-charlottenhof-ein-arkadien.html
 13. Under the Horse’s Tail  255

Fig. 20 Herms of poets at Charlottenhof, Potsdam. Photo by author, CC BY 4.0.

Torquato Tasso, with the herms there of Virgil and Ariosto? Whatever,
these figures ensure that the park of Sanssouci has its own corner that
makes a statement about the national literary canon.
At a time (1851) when public monuments to Germany’s heroes of
culture were springing up, to Albrecht Dürer in Nuremberg (1829), to
Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz (1834), to Schiller in Stuttgart (1839), to
Ludwig van Beethoven in Bonn (1846), the king sets up his own idea
of who is significant in German — and Italian — letters. The Italians
need not surprise us: Frederick William’s additions to the park of
Sanssouci are themselves a blend of the German and the Italianate.
But the Romantic on the Throne, who shared his love of Dante with his
royal cousin and brother-in-law in Dresden and who followed closely
the progress of Philalethes’ translation,18 would know that it was the
German Romantics who had done so much for the mythology of the great
‘archpoets’, Dante especially. But Wieland and Goethe, too, form part
of the statuary of the Charlottenhof, the one (Wieland) also associated
with the Ariostian epic in German guise, the other (Goethe) with the

18 Cf. Hubert Ermisch, ‘König Johann und König Friedrich Wilhelm IV.’, Neues Archiv
f. Sächsische Geschichte und Altertumskunde, 32 (1921), 89–135 (95).
256 From Goethe to Gundolf

troubled life of Tasso. (And both had revived the Boccaccian novella
in their respective collections.) The Italians were there too in Schiller’s
Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung/On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry
(where Schiller even tried his hand at translating a passage of Ariosto)
and in Herder’s grand schemes of western poetry and its canon. In a
sense, by inviting the frail and elderly Ludwig Tieck to be a kind of
court poet in Potsdam, Frederick William was honouring not only the
Shakespearean scholar but also the former member of his royal cousin
Philalethes’ ‘Accademia Dantesca’.
The king’s taste in German literature still accorded with the general
classical ranking granted to Goethe and Schiller, whose status was
beyond doubt, but also to Wieland and Herder. True, a liberal historian
(and liberal politician) like Georg Gottfried Gervinus, might withhold
some recognition from Weimar Classicism and its court culture,19 for
him a triumph in poetic terms only, but not the galvanizing force of a
cultural nation. Seen thus, all four German poets in the Charlottenhof
garden — Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland — could be seen to represent
a Weimar under princely patronage. It is a conservative canon: there is
no Gothold Ephraim Lessing, but Berlin would make up that deficiency
(as the statue of Lessing in Brunswick already had). But German poets
had received no recognition from Frederick the Great, and so here, in
this very Frederician ‘lieu de mémoire’, they are receiving some belated
remembrance.
Lessing, as said, had not been forgotten, but his initial commemoration
in Prussia was to be almost incidental, in a much more public space than
Sanssouci: on Unter den Linden, the most important thoroughfare in
Berlin, but as a supporting figure on one of its most prominent features,
the statue of Frederick the Great by Christian Daniel Rauch, unveiled on
March 31, 1851, the same year as the herms of Sanssouci (see Fig. 21).
(Lessing did not receive his own memorial in Berlin until 1890, the one
still standing in the Tiergarten.)
Frederick, it hardly need be said, is an ‘Erinnerungsort’ in his own
right.20 The statue has a storied past. Suffice it to say that plans for such
a commemoration went back as far as the last years of the great king’s

19 G. G. Gervinus, Neuere Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen.

Vierter Theil (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1843), 5f.
20 Frank-Lothar Kroll, ‘Friedrich der Große’, in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, III, 620–35.
 13. Under the Horse’s Tail  257

Fig. 21 Equestrian statue of Frederick the Great by Christian Daniel Rauch (1851),
Unter den Linden, Berlin. Photo by author, CC BY 4.0.

reign.21 Some, if executed, would have involved huge mausolea or

Trajan-style columns. Looking at Rauch’s statue today, we find it hard to
visualize it as a part of the huge ‘lieu de mémoire’ that its precinct once
was and was to become, extending from the royal palace as far as the
Tiergarten park. Thus, in 1918, at the end of the Hohenzollerns’ reign,
it would have presented the beholder with a whole forest of statuary,
from Andreas Schlüter’s equestrian Great Elector in front of the palace,
Alexander Calandrelli’s equestrian statue of Frederick William IV in
front of the National Gallery, Reinhold Begas’s enormous monument
to Kaiser William I on the other side, various allegorical nudities on the
Schlossbrücke, Prussian generals flanking Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Neue
Wache, then Christian Daniel Rauch’s Frederick himself, with Begas’s
Bismarck in front of the Reichstag building, then Kaiser William II’s
supreme folly and triumphal avenue, the Siegesallee in the Tiergarten,
with its three dozen Hohenzollern rulers in marble, a riot of dynastic
self-display and ostentation. What is left? In the mean time, the palace

21 On the history of the monuments to Frederick the Great see Friedrich Mielke and
Jutta von Simson, Das Berliner Denkmal für Friedrich II., den Großen (Frankfurt, Berlin,
Vienna: Propyläen, 1975).
258 From Goethe to Gundolf

has been blown up (the Humboldt Forum is now emerging in its place),
the Great Elector is in Charlottenburg, William I has gone (only the
lions from his monument survive, but elsewhere). Frederick William
IV is still there, but the generals languish in the Prinzessinnengarten,
Bismarck is on the Grosser Stern, and the Siegesallee, or what is left
of it, is in a private museum in Spandau.22 Unlike Paris, where in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries statues came and went,23 Berlin
ultimately had World War Two and its aftermath to thank for the radical
reordering of its monuments. (Frederick was even banished to a corner
of Sanssouci between 1950 and 1980.) That leaves Frederick isolated in
a way that he never was for a good part of the nineteenth century and
well into the twentieth. His nearest neighbours now are the brothers
Humboldt, whose statues sit in front of the former palace of the king’s
brother Prince Heinrich, today the Humboldt University. These are all
good reasons for not passing him by and for looking very hard at the
rider, the horse and what is under the tail.
The statue is the one chosen by Thomas Nipperdey to exemplify his
category of ‘national monarchical or dynastic monuments’.24 In that
sense it is very different from Frederick William IV’s private neoclassical
villa in Sanssouci. But if one looks at all aspects of the statue it emerges as
a hybrid. The king, though over-life-size, does not completely dominate
the area, for he is flanked on the plinth by numerous other figures, also
larger than life, who have been brought into the king’s ambit. Some
words of explanation are needed.
For the foundation stone to be laid on June 1, 1840, the centenary of
Frederick the Great’s accession to the throne, numerous elements had to
be in place. There had to be agreement on the form and costume of the
statue — and royal assent to it. It was not be antique; it was to reflect not
just Frederick’s military achievements but all aspects — administrative
and cultural — of his reign. These were to be represented by
supplementary figures on the plinth. It was also to be the apotheosis

22 On this see Oliver Moody, ‘Germany Offers Statue Topplers a Lesson in How to
Master the Past’, The Times (June 26, 2020), https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/
germany-offers-statue-topplers-a-lesson-in-how-to-master-the-past-9j6brshls and
generally Richard J. Evans, ‘The History Wars’, New Statesman (June 19, 2020),
https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/06/history-wars
23 June Hargrove, ‘Les statues de Paris’, in Nora, Les Lieux, La Nation II, 245–83.
24 Nipperdey, ‘Nationalidee‘, 534–40.
 13. Under the Horse’s Tail  259

of an enlightened reign: Alexander von Humboldt’s speech to the

Prussian Academy of Sciences (founded by the king in 1740) stressed
the ‘wise man on the throne’ who had reconciled the conflicting needs
of rule and freedom.25 The works of Frederick the Great (all in French)
were also issued between 1846 and 1857 by a distinguished committee
of the Prussian Academy,26 a further token of the king’s contribution
to eighteenth-century European culture. A happy coincidence saw C.
F. Köppen’s Friedrich der Große und seine Widersacher. Eine Jubelschrift/
Frederick the Great and his Adversaries. A Festive Volume appear in 1840,
with its emphasis on the king’s enlightened values. Eduard Duller’s Die
Geschichte des deutschen Volkes/The History of the German People in the same
year, with illustrations by Ludwig Richter27 and above all Franz Kugler’s
Geschichte Friedrichs des Großen/History of Frederick the Great, illustrated
by the young Adolph Menzel (also 1840 and successively reprinted)
were able to present Frederick as a figure of national identification.28
That these values were to be subject to severe constraints during the
years 1848–49 and challenged by the sentiments uttered at the unveiling
in 1851, does not affect the figures on the plinth, which are our main
concern here.
If the period roughly 1840 to 1870 sees, as one author has put it, ‘literary
history in bronze and stone’29 through the erection of monuments to the
emerging nation’s greatest poets, do those incorporated on royal statues
in Dresden, Berlin or, as we shall see, Cologne, differ in status from more
general forms of poetic memorialization? Would they not seem to be
a continuation of earlier patterns, like the poetic ‘Grabmal’ (Gellert’s
in Leipzig is the best-known example), the bust in a discreet corner of
a royal park, the plaque, the shrine-like grave (such as Klopstock’s in
Ottensen)? Whereas the free-standing civic statue is an unmistakable and

25 Richard Nürnberger, ‘Rauch’s Friedrich-Denkmal historisch-politisch gesehen’,

Jahrbuch Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 8 (1979), 115–24 (120–21).
26 Oeuvres de Frédéric le Grand, 30 vols (Berlin: Decker, 1846–47).
27 Nürnberger, ‘Rauch’s Friedrich-Denkmal’, 117.
28 Dorothea Entrup, Adolph Menzels Illustrationen zu Franz Kuglers ‘Geschichte Friedrichs
des Grossen’. Ein Beitrag zur stilistischen und historischen Bewertung der Kunst des jungen
Menzel (Weimar: VDG, 1990), 272.
29 Rolf Selbmann, Dichterdenkmäler in Deutschland. Literaturgeschichte in Erz und
Stein (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988). See also Günter Hess, ‘Panorama und Denkmal.
Erinnerung als Denkform zwischen Vormärz und Grunderzeit, in Literatur in der
sozialen Bewegung. Aufsätze und Forschungsberichte zum 19. Jahrhundert, ed. by Alberto
Martino (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1977), 130–206, esp. 150–53.
260 From Goethe to Gundolf

visual tribute to national and local pride (Schiller in Stuttgart, Goethe in

Frankfurt, Jean Paul in Bayreuth), the poetic memorialization on a royal
statue is always secondary and ancillary. Only informed beholders will
be aware of the significance of Dante on King John of Saxony’s plinth,
whereas Goethe and Schiller stand free in their own right. Even King
Ludwig’s Walhalla (inaugurated in 1842) is first and foremost a public
architectural monument with a symbolic setting between East and West.
The interior contains a (later) full-size seated figure of the king himself,
whereas the ‘worthies’, who include a number of poets, are reduced in
size under the huge vault and its allegorical representations.30
It was only in the first years of the post-1815 Restoration that
monuments to non-royal personages were permitted in the German
lands. Significantly, the first was to a military hero, Blücher (1818)
and then not in Prussia.31 The first in Prussia was the Luther statue in
Wittenberg (1821), but then again both person and place transcended
any mere local significance and took on the lineaments of a national
monument.32 Frederick William III’s opposition to a Beethoven
statue in Bonn, completed under his son Frederick William IV, is well
documented.33 It is noticeable that the first statues to figures in German
national culture are in Free Imperial Cities or their equivalent (Dürer
in Nuremberg, Gutenberg in Mainz, Goethe in Frankfurt) or in minor
residences (Lessing in Brunswick, Schiller in Stuttgart, Johann Peter
Hebel in Karlsruhe).34 In Prussia, by contrast, statues to Immanuel Kant
in Königsberg, to Lessing, Goethe and Schiller in Berlin, came relatively
later, and in the case of Berlin never in competition with the main royal
and dynastic ‘lieu de mémoire’. The inclusion of such figures (Lessing,

30 The selection of poets’ busts, done mainly some time before the completion of the
Walhalla, is eclectic but reflects literary taste around 1815: Goethe and Schiller,
Wieland and Klopstock, Herder and Johannes von Müller, Bürger and Heinse
(there is no Lessing). It is almost Madame de Staël’s pantheon. Cf. Nipperdey,
‘Nationalidee’, 556–8 (‘betont monarchiches Denkmal’).
31 Ibid., 557.
32 Ibid.
33 See Horst Hallensleben, ‘Das Bonner Beethoven-Denkmal als frühes bürgerliches
Standbild’; Susan Schaal, ‘Das Beethoven-Denkmal von Ernst Julius Hähnel in
Bonn’, in Monument für Beethoven. Zur Geschichte des Beethoven-Denkmals (1845) und
der frühen Beethoven-Rezeption in Bonn, ed. by Ingrid Bodsch, Katalog zur Ausstellung
des Stadtmuseums Bonn und des Beethoven-Hauses (Bonn: Stadtmuseum, 1995),
28–37, 39–133.
34 Hess, ‘Panorama und Denkmal’, 152.
 13. Under the Horse’s Tail  261

Kant) as ancillaries or incidentals on Rauch’s statue of Frederick the

Great is therefore of some significance. From the point of view of
art history, it is somewhat of a hybrid, while from a purely cultural
viewpoint it is an attempt to summarize in bronze a whole epoch, not its
supreme hero alone.
We need to bear in mind that eleven years passed between the
laying of the foundation stone of Frederick’s statue in 1840 and its
unveiling in 1851. The liberal hopes that had been expressed in 1840
had been subjected to the ultimate test of 1848, and the aspirations
once placed in Frederick William IV as a liberal and cultured monarch
had been severely tried. The speeches at the unveiling were thus not
free of references to the recent ‘fateful year’ and what it had boded
and to the need to reflect on the Prussian virtues for which Frederick
had stood: order, discipline, hard work, the military qualities that had
accompanied his victories.35Although the emphasis in 1851 was not
entirely or exclusively on his military prowess, it nevertheless set the
tone and helped to initiate more strident identifications with Frederick
the Great later in the century.
But we have not examined the statue itself. It shows the king in old
age in the historical costume of the eighteenth century, with tricorne
and marshal’s baton,36 his achievements behind him, not as he may have
placed himself at the head of his army as it marched eastwards along
the Frankfurter Strasse towards Küstrin, Kunersdorf or Prague. Below,
flanking the plinth, are his generals, one architect of his victories on each
corner, accompanied by allegorical representations of fame, peace and
the like. At the rear (see Fig. 22), which interests us, are the equestrian
statues of the generals Seydlitz and Zieten. Immediately below the tail
of Frederick’s horse are two allegorical figures representing the arts and
sciences, between them an image of fame, below them peace and plenty
(the branch and the cornucopia). Grouped around the base of the rear
plinth, between the generals, are Ernst Wilhelm von Schlabrendorff, the
defender of Silesia, Carl Wilhelm Finck von Finckenstein, Frederick’s

35 Nürnberger, ‘Rauch’s Friedrich-Denkmal’, 121f.

36 Mielke and Simson, Das Berliner, 17; Alfred Kuhn, Die neuere Plastik von
Achtzehnhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Delphin, 1922), 30; Walter von Zur
Westen, Zur Enthüllung des Rauchschen Friedrichsdenkmals in Berlin. Fest- und
Erinnerungsblätter aus dem Anlaß der 75. Wiederkehr des Enthüllungstages (Berlin, n.p.
1926), 10.
262 From Goethe to Gundolf

cabinet minister, Johann Heinrich von Carmer, the jurist and one of
the framers of the ‘Landrecht’, Carl Heinrich Graun, Frederick’s court
composer, then Lessing and Kant. Beneath these, there is a plaque
listing names that include Samuel von Cocceji, Georg Wenzeslas von
Knobelsdorff, Christian Wolff, Karl Wilhelm Ramler, Johann Wilhelm
Ludwig Gleim, Christian Garve, Ewald von Kleist, Christian Fürchtegott
Gellert, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, Antoine Pesne, Charles-Étienne Jordan
and Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

Fig. 22 Equestrian statue of Frederick the Great, detail of plinth. Photo by author.
CC BY 4.0.

A strategy similar to that on the later statue of King John of Saxony is

being observed; the rear of the plinth is clearly reserved for non-military
deeds or achievements. We are expected to read along the pedestal from
front to rear in a symbolic order. As we saw on the Dresden statue,
we read (German terminology) from ‘Wehrstand’ to ‘Nährstand’ to
‘Lehrstand’, defence, agriculture, learning, and we end our survey
at the rear. Frederick rarely had anything good to say about poets or
‘Scribenten’ in general, especially those writing in German. But the
sculptor, acting according to later royal wishes, has placed administration
(Jordan), law (Cocceji), music (Graun), poetry and thought in equality
of position, with Lessing and Kant as embodied representatives. I find
 13. Under the Horse’s Tail  263

it therefore surprising to read in an otherwise very informed study of

nineteenth-century monuments to poets and thinkers (1988) the view
expressed that Kant’s position ‘under the horse’s tail’ represented the
reaction of 1851, a historical panorama in which the liberal aspirations
of the educated middle classes were trampled underfoot.37 I think the
observable facts speak for themselves, remarkable enough as they are.
For the decision to include Kant and Lessing was part of a general design
approved in the 1830s by the king and the crown prince.38
If these figures or names are intended to represent the Enlightenment
for which Frederick the Great also stood, they are well chosen. Graun
illustrates the king’s love of music and deserves his prominence for
that reason, a kind of ‘Flötenkonzert’ in bronze. Kant’s admiration of
Frederick is well known and documented (and regretted by some),
although the king never received him or even set eyes upon him,
which is another matter. But Lessing is quite a different proposition:
a non-Prussian, but associated with Berlin nevertheless, no friend of
Frederick’s however. Indeed, liberal commentators on Lessing in the
1840s and 1850s make the point that Frederick was actually ill-disposed
towards Lessing.
Yet the royal committee in the 1830s had caught the spirit of things.
For Lessing emerges in the literary historiography of the nineteenth
century, from the 1820s onwards, as the great pioneer and liberator, a
second Luther, indeed a figure more positively evaluated than Goethe
and Schiller.39 And in 1851 we are chronologically not far from the
re-writing of German national literary history from roughly 1860 on,
with say Hermann Hettner, that equates Lessing’s role in the realm
of the mind with that of Frederick in the sphere of war and politics. It
prepares the way for the reinterpretation of history in the biography
by Erich Schmidt (1884–92) in which Lessing becomes a loyal Prussian
and Wilhelmian and where Bismarckian ideologies can be satisfied.
And so the ‘sacra conversazione’ on the rear of the statue, between

37 Selbmann, Dichterdenkmäler, 60.

38 Christian Eggers, Christian Daniel Rauch, 5 vols (Berlin: Duncker, 1873–91), IV,
71–103.
39 See Eva D. Becker, ‘Klassiker in der deutschen Literaturgeschichtsschreibung
zwischen 1780 und 1860’ (1968), in Literarisches Leben. Umschreibungen der deutschen
Literaturgeschichte, Saarbrücker Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft 45 (St. Ingbert:
Röhrig, 1994), 7–26 (21–23).
264 From Goethe to Gundolf

Lessing and Kant (which cannot be real) is symbolic of a coalescence of

intellectual forces as the nineteenth century perceived them. Kant seems
to be making a point to Lessing, who listens intently. But the statue is
not dealing in philosophical nuances: Kant is addressing Lessing, one
assumes, as the author of Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts/The
Education of the Human Race, less as the author of Emilia Galotti or Nathan
der Weise.
What of the ‘supplementary list’ appended below the ‘big six’? Here
we encounter some of the names mentioned and illustrated in Kugler’s
and Menzel’s popularizing account of 1840, men who surrounded
Frederick with taste and wit and learning: Knobelsdorff, the architect
of Sanssouci, Pesne, the court painter, Maupertuis, mathematician and
first president of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Jordan, Frederick’s
secretary and confidant (this would have pleased Berlin’s Huguenot
community, whose church on the Gendarmenmarkt Frederick built).
Indeed two of Menzel’s best-known images, of the circle at Sanssouci,
and of Pesne decorating the interior at Rheinsberg, are associated with
this list.40 Ewald von Kleist’s is another name in that work, as far as I
can see the only German writer whom Kugler and Menzel mention
or illustrate, not for his poetry, but for his ultimate death at the battle
of Kunersdorf. Christian Wolff, the rationalist philosopher banned by
Frederick’s father but called back by the son, needs no introduction,
except that Kant, the author of the First Critique might find his presence
dubious, and Lessing also might have his doubts. Christian Garve, the
practical moralist, is a Silesian, which commends him to Frederick the
annexer of that province, but he is also the translator of Cicero’s De officiis
for the king. The poets Gleim and Ramler both sang of Frederick’s deeds,
indeed Ramler is a kind of unofficial German court poet, while of course
never actually being received at Frederick’s court. Both Ramler and
Gleim still hold their own in histories of literature around 1850, so that
their inclusion here is not anachronistic or a retrospective canonization
merely for their association with Frederick. Gellert is still remembered in
1850 for his fables, but also for his legendary meeting with Frederick that
had entered into the royal folklore. Like Lessing, he is also a Saxon, here

40 
See generally Jost Hermand, Adolph Menzel das Flötenkonzert in Sanssouci. Ein
realistisch geträumtes Preußenbild (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch-Verlag,
1985).
 13. Under the Horse’s Tail  265

enrolled among the honorary Prussians. Winckelmann was from Stendal

and thus Frederick’s subject, but he turned his face against anything
Prussian41 and never came back to his homeland. He is doubtless here
for the sake of completeness, not of historical accuracy, for it was the
court in Dresden, not in Berlin, that enabled him on his way to Rome.
His is the only ‘big name’ among these poetae minores on the plaque, and
one might question the commodiousness and legitimacy of this account
of Frederician culture which does not stop at cultural annexation.
The omissions are also patent. Where is Anna Louisa Karsch, who
so praised Frederick? But women, it seems, must not feature in this
account of a misogynist king. (She had also slipped in general esteem.)
Where is Moses Mendelssohn, the Berliner by choice and famed well
beyond its confines? But Jews, especially ones whom Frederick refused
to receive, must not form part of this narrative either. Where is Voltaire,
so memorably portrayed by Menzel in conversation with the king at
Sanssouci? But Voltaire, unlike Frederick’s loyal Frenchmen, had become
slippery and perfidious. Not least, his enlightened scepticism could be
associated with the French Revolution and thus with recent events in
Berlin, of unhappy memory. Generally, it could be said that Frederick
William IV, through his capricious and unpredictable behaviour in 1848,
had forfeited the legacy of enlightened liberalism that people were still
willing to associate with Frederick in 1840. Nevertheless, the canon
of German writers, conceived largely in the 1830s and visible only to
diligent beholders willing to devote a thorough scrutiny to the plinth, was
one which had not lost its validity in the debates concerning the king’s
physical representation. It could be said that the martial monument and
the notion of a national or patriotic literature maintained a balance that
would be sustained for a good part of the nineteenth century.42
The less well-known equestrian figure of Frederick William III on
the Heumarkt in Cologne, sends a slightly different message. The work
of Gustav Bläser and others, with its foundation stone laid in 1865 and
unveiled in 1878, a generation after Rauch, it has elements of the Berlin
statue, the monarch represented by horse and rider but with mantle and
sceptre, and supplemented by supporting figures on the plinth. It might

41 His inclusion was at the insistence of Baron Bunsen in 1845. Eggers, Christian Daniel
Rauch, IV, 118f.
42 Hess, ‘Panorama und Denkmal’, 150–52.
266 From Goethe to Gundolf

Fig. 23 Equestrian statue of Frederick William III, Cologne. Wikimedia, https://

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reiterstandbild_Friedrich_Wilhelm_
III_K%C3%B6ln_Heumarkt.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0.

appear at first glance to symbolize the superimposition of Prussian (and

Protestant) rule on a less than willing Rhineland in 1815 under the aegis
of Frederick William III, and some features seem to bear this out. Yet
it was erected as a result of a local initiative, not through a directive
from Berlin.43 The emphasis was to be on the Wars of Liberation and

43 See Michael Puls, ‘Zur Genese des Reiterdenkmals für Friedrich Wilhelm III. in
Köln bis 1878. Ein Thema in plastischen Variationen zwischen Rauch und Begas’, in
Köln: Das Reiterdenkmal für König Friedrich Wilhelm III. auf dem Heumarkt, ed. by Rolf
Beines, Walter Geis and Ulrich Krings (Cologne: Bachem, 2004), 74–199 (76).
 13. Under the Horse’s Tail  267

the Restoration of 1815,44 years which had also seen the foundation
of the University of Bonn (under Frederick William’s son, Bonn also
received its Beethoven monument). The flanking figures are mainly
generals or administrators (Blücher, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, Freiherr
vom Stein, Prince Hardenberg, for example), with the brothers Wilhelm
and Alexander von Humboldt, Ernst Moritz Arndt and Barthold
Georg Niebuhr representing science and culture. Some (Alexander
von Humboldt, Niebuhr, Arndt) have Rhineland connections, but
all are Protestants. It is on the relief panels placed behind the main
supporting figures that we remark the useful arts, industries and trades
of the Rhineland provinces. Individual figures are picked out in friezes
representing these areas. Here at least there are some Catholics, such as
the brothers Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée or Ferdinand Franz Wallraf
(under ‘Baukunst’) or even Beethoven himself. But there are also poets
and writers. What narrative do they provide about the poetic canon in
1865 or 1878? One, August Wilhelm Schlegel, might once have been part
of such a canon, but no more;45 in fact, after Heinrich Heine’s attack of
1835 and Rudolf Haym’s disparagement of 1871 he was at the nadir of
his esteem. And so he is here as a founding professor at the University
of Bonn, under ‘Wissenschaften’ and next to the Berlin luminaries
Schleiermacher or Hegel, which might have irked him. There was
some amnesia at work in the choice of the main supporting figures, but
this was not the place for nuances: Wilhelm von Humboldt had been
dismissed by the king; Alexander, his brother, was more oriented to
France than to Berlin; at least Arndt, whom the king had suspended
from office, maintained his reputation as a poet and patriot throughout
the century and was part of its canon. Seven minute figures representing
‘Freiheitskriege’ might seem to be out of touch with the times in 1878.46
But one, Fichte, was never absent from the general consciousness, if only
for his Reden an die deutsche Nation/Addresses to the German Nation of 1808.
Three other figures, all poets, had outlived any exclusive association with
the Wars of Liberation: Max von Schenkendorf’s works were reprinted in
1871, Theodor Körner’s frequently during the nineteenth century (twice
during the 1870s), while Friedrich Rückert, who had died as recently

44 Ibid., 89f.
45 Becker, ‘Klassiker’, 24.
46 Puls, ‘Zur Genese’, 150.
268 From Goethe to Gundolf

as 1866, was now known better for his oriental poetry. As in Berlin, it
is only the enterprising beholder, climbing on to the plinth, who can
garner this information on the history of literature .
The Rauch statue in Berlin had an unfortunate sequel in the
‘Siegesallee’ that Kaiser William II created as a triumphal account of
the house of Hohenzollern.47 If Rauch’s figures still contained some
reverence for the notion of a Prussian enlightenment tinged with
French ideas, the Siegesalleee was an unadorned display of monarchical
principles and the divine right of kings. The statues of rulers, which
are unmemorable, need not concern us here, but the supporting figures
may do. For each ruler is flanked by the bust (at suitable distance)
of two prominent representatives of his respective reign. There is no
place for poets in this scheme of things, but there are some notable
redistributions. Schwerin, Frederick’s field marshal, stays with his king
but is joined — astonishingly — by the Thuringian Johann Sebastian
Bach, doubtless on account of his one visit to Sanssouci and his Musical
Offering. But Bach, near the end of his life when he came to Sanssouci,
is a rather anachronistic choice. Frederick William II is joined, as is
appropriate, by Johann Heinrich von Carmer, who saw the Allgemeines
Landrecht to its completion. But he is made to share the company of
Kant. The inclusion of Kant is truly bizarre, for the edicts of Frederick
William’s minister Johann Christoph von Wöllner had almost put an
end to Kant’s publishing and teaching career and represented a reaction
against everything that Kant had stood for. It did not worry William II,
and this late Wilhelmian statuary has in the fullest and most literal sense
stood under the horse’s tail of history, in a place of dishonour and now
of oblivion.

47 See Uta Lehnert, Der Kaiser und die Siegesallee. Réclame Royale (Berlin: Reimer, 1998).
POETRY
Fig. 24 
Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, c. 1760. Wikimedia, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Friedrich_Gottlieb_Klopstock-01.jpg, public
domain.
 14. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock:
‘Der Zürchersee’1

Schön ist, Mutter Natur, deiner Erfindung Pracht

Auf die Fluren verstreut, schöner ein froh Gesicht,
Das den großen Gedanken
Deiner Schöpfung noch Einmal denkt.

Von des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her,

Oder, flohest du schon wieder zum Himmel auf,
Kom in röthendem Strale
Auf dem Flügel der Abendluft,

Kom, und lehre mein Lied jugendlich heiter seyn,

Süße Freude, wie du! gleich dem beseelteren
Schnellen Jauchzen des Jünglings,
Sanft, der fühlenden Fanny gleich.

Schon lag hinter uns weit Uto, an dessen Fuß

Zürch in ruhigem Tal freye Bewohner nährt;
Schon war manches Gebirge
Voll von Reben vorbeygeflohn.

Jetzt entwölkte sich fern silberner Alpen Höh,

Und der Jünglinge Herz schlug schon empfindender,
Schon verrieth es beredter
Sich der schönen Begleiterin.

“Hallers Doris”, die sang, selber des Liedes werth,

Hirzels Daphne, den Kleist innig wie Gleimen liebt;

1 For a translation of this poem see Appendix One at the end of this chapter. An
earlier version of this chapter appeared in Landmarks in German Poetry, ed. by
Peter Hutchinson, British and Irish Studies in German Language and Literature 20
(Berne, etc.: Peter Lang, 2000), 41–56.

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.14

272 From Goethe to Gundolf

Und wir Jünglinge sangen,

Und empfanden, wie Hagedorn.

Jetzo nahm uns die Au in die beschattenden

Kühlen Arme des Walds, welcher die Insel krönt;
Da, da kamest du, Freude!
Volles Maßes auf uns herab!

Göttin Freude, du selbst! dich, wir empfanden dich!

Ja, du warest es selbst, Schwester der Menschlichkeit,
Deiner Unschuld Gespielin,
Die sich über uns ganz ergoß!

Süß ist, fröhlicher Lenz, deiner Begeistrung Hauch,

Wenn die Flur dich gebiert, wenn sich dein Odem sanft
In der Jünglinge Herzen,
Und die Herzen der Mädchen gießt.

Ach du machst das Gefühl siegend, es steigt durch dich

Jede blühende Brust schöner und bebender,
Lauter redet der Liebe
Nun entzauberter Mund durch dich!

Lieblich winket der Wein, wenn er Empfindungen,

Beßre sanftere Lust, wenn er Gedanken winkt,
Im sokratischen Becher
Von der thauenden Ros’ umkränzt;

Wenn er dringt bis ins Herz, und zu Entschließungen,

Die der Säufer verkennt, jeden Gedanken weckt,
Wenn er lehret verachten,
Was nicht würdig des Weisen ist.

Reizvoll klinget des Ruhms lockender Silberton

In das schlagende Herz, und die Unsterblichkeit
Ist ein großer Gedanke,
Ist des Schweisses der Edeln werth!

Durch der Lieder Gewalt, bey der Urenkelin

Sohn und Tochter noch seyn; mit der Entzückung Ton
Oft beym Namen genennet,
Oft gerufen vom Grabe her,

Dann ihr sanfteres Herz bilden, und, Liebe, dich,

Fromme Tugend, dich auch gießen, ins sanfte Herz,
Ist, beym Himmel! nicht wenig!
 14. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock  273

Ist des Schweisses der Edlen werth!

Aber süßer ist noch, schöner und reizender,

In dem Arme des Freunds wissen ein Freund zu seyn!
So das Leben genießen,
Nicht unwürdig der Ewigkeit!

Treuer Zärtlichkeit voll, in den Umschattungen,

In den Lüften des Walds, und mit gesenktem Blick
Auf die silberne Welle,
That ich schweigend den frommen Wunsch:

Wäret ihr auch bey uns, die ihr mich ferne liebt,
In des Vaterlands Schooß einsam von mir verstreut,
Die in seligen Stunden
Meine suchende Seele fand;

O so bauten wir hier Hütten der Freundschaft uns!

Ewig wohnten wir hier, ewig! Der Schattenwald
Wandelt‘ uns sich in Tempe,
Jenes Thal in Elysium!2

The eighteenth century which produced Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock

is two things. It is an age of contentment with its existing poetic
achievements, with its mastery of rules and bienséances, its crafting of
a language consonant with these aims. But it is also an age unruly in
itself, filled with an inner unease and with the hope that the masters of
German poetry might find better ways of exploring the deeper urges
of the human soul and might be more adequate to the task of saying
what the heart wishes to utter. One remedy might be to look at great
outside models and their forms, Greek and Roman, for instance, and
this poem bears some of that influence. Or one might look at one’s own
native tradition of German poetry, the great formers and moulders of
the German language. It comes as no surprise that Klopstock counts as
one of the revivers of what we might call the Germanic inheritance, not
in any strictly historical sense, but in his general awareness of standing
in a line of descent which first peaks with Martin Luther and continues
with Martin Opitz and Albrecht von Haller. When in 1750 he went to
Zurich and this poem came about, it was at the invitation of Johann Jacob
Bodmer. Bodmer counts as the first major renewer and editor of Middle
High German poetry in the eighteenth century. We associate him, not
always happily, with the movement towards a new expressiveness in
274 From Goethe to Gundolf

the German language. In this, his true, if rather wayward, disciple is

Klopstock. Klopstock dedicates an ode to him (‘An Bodmer’), written in
the same year as ‘Der Zürchersee/Lake Zurich’. It has to do with moral
and poetic models — and with friendship. Of all these factors, it is the
sense of a new mastery of poetic language that is carried over into the
poem with which we are concerned here.
Nowhere else in Europe was poetry like this being written around
1750. But it is not enough to say that Klopstock is better than William
Collins or Thomas Gray or Jean-Baptiste Rousseau or Albrecht von Haller.
As a landmark the poem remains difficult and slightly intractable. It is
‘difficult’ in the sense that today so much of it requires explanation and
explication. Its subject is friendship. This is not necessarily something
alien to modern experience, at least it shouldn’t be. But modern poems
tend to deal more with friends than with the notion or concept of
friendship itself. Thus in 1977 the East German poet Volker Braun,
actually quoting Klopstock’s poem, wrote

Aber am schönsten ist

Von des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her
in der Zeit Wirre
Die die Freunde verstreut roh
Vom Herzen mir, eins zu sein
Mit seinem Land, und
Gedacht
Mit Freunden voll das Schiff [...]3

These are lines very different in tone from Klopstock’s, despite ranging
poetry and friendship with national language and nation (‘eins zu
sein / Mit seinem Land’). For Braun’s is a political poem about friends,
‘all in the same boat’, but some are now tipped out of it by the course
which others steer. Klopstock’s poem provides for Braun the intertext
and the contexture for reflexions on nation and state that Klopstock,

3 ‘But sweeter by far

From the vineyard shores of the shimmering lake
In the tumult of times
That rudely scattered the friends
From my heart, to be one with one’s land and
Thought
Full with friends the ship’
Volker Braun, ‘Der Müggelsee’, first published in Die sanfte Revolution, ed. by Stefan
Heym and Werner Heiduczek (Leipzig, Weimar: Kiepenheuer, 1990), 42.
 14. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock  275

at least in 1750, kept out of his poetic considerations: It might seem

different when Friedrich Hölderlin, in 1789 and again in 1790, copied
out stanzas thirteen and fourteen of Klopstock’s poem for his friends
Johann Christoph Benjamin Rümelin and Clemens Christian Camerer:

Reizvoll klinget des Ruhms lockender Silberton

In das schlagende Herz, und die Unsterblichkeit
Ist ein großer Gedanke,
Ist des Schweisses der Edlen werth!

Durch der Lieder Gewalt, bey der Urenkelin

Sohn und Tochter noch seyn; mit der Entzückung Ton
Oft beym Namen genennet,
Oft gerufen vom Grabe her […]4

Yet the young Hölderlin, despite the importance for him of the
addressees of poems as a friendly and reassuring presence, extracts
from Klopstock not the notion of friendship, but the sound of poetic
fame. This is what he wants to share with his friends. And when in
another early poem, ‘Mein Vorsaz/My Purpose’, he talks of striving
after ‘Klopstoksgröße’,5 he is already aligning himself with the grand
tradition of Pindar and Horace that he sees represented in German by
the older man’s poetry. And yet, as I hope to demonstrate, Hölderlin,
like Goethe before him, engraved ‘Der Zürchersee’ in his memory and
retrieved from it something that Klopstock would have regarded as
incidental: the extraordinary landscape description.
For us today that landscape description has landmark quality. A line
like ‘Von des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her’6 has rhythm and
musicality, but also inner dynamism (‘Von […] her’) and inventiveness
(‘Traubengestaden’): not just the lake shore covered with vineyards, but
the much more concrete lake shore seemingly hanging with bunches
of grapes. When Hölderlin later writes his most famous first stanza, for
‘Hälfte des Lebens’, we note how much he has learned from Klopstock
with that merging of fruit and shore in one process (‘Mit gelben Birnen
hänget […] Das Land in den See’).7 And it is fair to say that no poet in

7 ‘Half-Way Through Life

With yellow pears hangs,
And full of wild roses,
The land into the lake’.
276 From Goethe to Gundolf

German before 1750 and few since, have managed such a good line as
Klopstock’s here, certainly Goethe and Hölderlin, but there our short
list ends. But as I said, for Klopstock the landscape is incidental, the
background, at most the scene of other things much closer to his heart.
How do we know? The opening of the poem will tell us:

Schön ist, Mutter Natur, deiner Erfindung Pracht

Auf die Fluren verstreut, schöner ein froh Gesicht,
Das den großen Gedanken
Deiner Schöpfung noch Einmal denkt.8

We can see from this prelude to ‘Der Zürchersee’ how alien a landmark
it is, certainly to post-Goethean or post-Wordsworthian sensitivities.
But a poem written 250 years ago, especially one as complex as this,
is unlikely to reveal its qualities without some understanding of the
period in which it was written and of the poet who wrote it.9 We must be
very careful not to misread this opening. Mother Nature, far from being
the commonplace it is now (although the idea of all-provident maternal
nature existed long since as a trope in religious and semi-religious
discourse),10 was regarded by Klopstock’s conservative contemporaries
as too bold and thus inappropriate. Far from suggesting with that verb
‘denkt’ (‘ponder’) that we should turn away from nature to rational
activity, Klopstock is actually using it more or less in the same sense as
‘empfinden’ (‘feeling‘).11 Thus the first stanza recognizes nature in its
fulness, but also claims for the human mind the faculty of recreating
through the processes of inward contemplation and feeling what is ‘out
there’. That still leaves us, however, with that irksome word ‘Gedanken’

8 ‘Mother Nature, how sweet when your works you unfold

On the meadows about, sweeter, a gladsome face
Pondering o’er the great thought
Of your handiwork yet again.’
9 Three studies can be recommended, two older and one more recent: Friedrich
Beissner, Klopstocks Ode ‘Der Zürcherseee’: Ein Vortrag (Münster, Cologne: Böhlau,
1952); Emil Staiger, ‘Klopstock: “Der Zürchersee”’, in Die Kunst der Interpretation:
Studien zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte (Zurich: Artemis, 1955), 50–74; Gerhard
Sauder, ‘Die “Freude der Freundschaft”: Klopstocks Ode “Der Zürchersee”’, in
Gedichte und Interpretationen, II, ed. by Karl Richter (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 228–39.
10 Cf. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. by Karl August Schleiden
(Munich: Hanser, 1962), 1228.
11 ‘Feeling’. See Gerhard Kaiser, Klopstock: Religion und Dichtung, Studien zur Religion,
Geschichte und Geisteswissenschaft 1 (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1963 ), 94ff.
 14. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock  277

(‘thought’). Time and again, Klopstock makes it clear that for him, the
religious poet that he sees himself to be, it is the creator, not creation,
that has prominence in the scheme of the universe. The opening of
the ode ‘Dem Unendlichen/To the Eternal One’ (1764) is even more
uncompromising that our poem’s:

Wie erhebt sich das Herz, wenn es dich,

Unendlicher, denkt! wie sinkt es,
Wenns auf sich herunterschaut! [...]12

Klopstock is here formulating an idea which we associate with the word

sublime (in German ‘das Erhabene’), the contemplation of the grand
and elevated to produce an effect, as he says, ‘Wie erhebt sich das Herz’
(‘How the heart leaps’). With ‘Der Zürchersee’ we are just seven years
before Edmund Burke separated the categories of the sublime and
beautiful. We find them both prefigured in a letter of Klopstock’s closely
connected in time and place with ‘Der Zürchersee’. On his way to Zurich
in 1750 he is visiting that ‘must’ for all eighteenth-century travellers, the
falls on the Rhine at Schaffhausen:

Dem Rheinfalle gegenüber

auf einem schattigen Hügel.

Welch ein großer Gedanke der Schöpfung ist dieser Wasserfall! — Ich
kann itzt davon weiter nichts sagen, ich muß diesen großen Gedanken
sehen und hören. — Sei gegrüßt, Strom! der du zwischen Hügeln
herunter stäubst und donnerst und du, der den Strom hoch dahin führt,
sei dreimal, o Schöpfer! in deiner Herrlichkeit angebetet!

Hier im Angesichte des großen Rheinfalls, in dem Getöse seines

mächtigen Brausens, auf einer holdseligen Höhe im Grase gestreckt, hier
grüß ich Euch, nahe und ferne Freunde, und vor allem dich, du werthes
Land, das mein Fuß jetzt betreten soll! Seyd mir tausendmal gegrüßet!
—O! daß ich Alle, die ich liebe, hieher versammlen könnte, mit ihnen
eines solchen Werkes der Natur recht zu genießen! Hier möcht‘ ich mein
Leben zubringen und an dieser Stelle sterben, so schön ist sie. — Weiter
kann ich davon nichts ausdrücken. Hier kann man keinen andern

12 ‘To the Eternal One

How the heart leaps when you,
Eternal One, are its thought, and how
It sinks when it contemplates you!’. HKA, I, i, 224.
278 From Goethe to Gundolf

Gedanken und keinen Wunsch hegen, als seine Freunde um sich zu

haben und beständig hier zu bleiben.

Und ich sage im Namen aller dieser Freunde: Amen! Hallelujah! ——

Klopstock.13

This remarkable passage makes it clear that ‘Der Zürchersee’ is

expressing notions of nature, creation and friendship that are close
to Klopstock’s heart. We notice words like ‘schön’ and ‘holdselig’
(‘beautiful’, ‘beauteous’) but also ‘Getöse seines mächtigen Brausens’
(‘resounding noise of its uproar’, the sublime). We note how a nature
depiction similar in its boldness to ‘Der Zürchersee’ (‘der du zwischen
Hügeln herunter stäubst und donnerst’/‘that beween the hills sprays
and thunders’) is placed in the wider context of the One who created it;
how nature becomes the expression of the soul of God himself. Equally
significant is the human relationship most appropriate for the enjoyment
of the spectacle and its implications: friendship. In this religious context,
where poetry seeks — however inadequately — to tell the wonders of
creation, it is friends who form the only appropriate companionship.
The theme of friendship as such comes as no surprise, perhaps only
its intensity and exclusiveness. For Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne, even
Voltaire and so many others, friendship is the ideal human relation; it
crosses the dividing lines of classical humanitas to embrace the virtues
common to both ancient and Christian moral thinking. In the eighteenth
century, where feeling, the practice of virtue, and social intercourse are
perceived as one human activity, giving rise to the direct expression of
emotions, the classical greatness of soul traditionally associated with

13 ‘Opposite the Rhine falls, on a shady hill. What a great thought of creation is
this waterfall — I can say no more about it here, I have to see and hear this great
thought — Greetings, stream! that between the hills sprays and thunders, and thou,
who draws the stream through, be threefold adored, Creator, in thy glory.
Here, in front of the great Rhine falls, in the resounding noise of its uproar, lying on
the grass on a beauteous height, here I greet you, friends, near and far, and above all
you, worthy country, whose soil I am about to tread! A thousand greetings! O that I
could gather here all those whom I Iove, to enjoy with them such a work of nature!
Here I would gladly spend my life and die in this place of such beauty — Words
cannot express further. Here one can have no other thought and can express no
other wish: than to have one’s friends about one and remain here forever! And I say
in the name of all of these friends
Amen! Halleluia
Klopstock’. HKA, Abt. Briefe, I, 125f.
 14. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock  279

friendship is ratified by the Christian experience of ‘where two or three

are gathered together’.14 Klopstock need not have looked farther than
the literary practice of his own time to remark the pervasiveness of
friendship as a theme. Yet, when a slightly older contemporary, Samuel
Gotthold Lange, begins a poem ‘Die Freunde’ (1745) with ‘lch will, ich
will die Freunde besingen’,15 we feel that he is cranking up a piece of
cumbersome mechanism. Klopstock, on the other hand, is prepared to
invest friendship with the supreme attributes of the high style of poetry:
his long ode in classical alcaic stanzas, ‘Auf meine Freunde/To My
Friends’ (1747), invokes in its opening stanzas Apollo, Dionysus and
Pindar before apostrophizing his friends collectively and singly. His
friends become part of the poetic act that is unfolding in verses like:

Wie Hebe, kühn und jugendlich ungestüm,

Wie mit dem goldnen Köcher Latonens Sohn,
Unsterblich, sing ich meine Freunde
Feyrend in mächtigen Dithyramben.

Wilst du zu Strophen werden, o Lied oder

Ununterwürfig, Pindars Gesängen gleich,
Gleich Zeus erhabnem truncknem Sohne,
Frey aus der schaffenden Sel enttaumeln?16

I have mentioned all of this extra-textual material to assist us on our

way into the first stanza of the poem. Before looking more closely at the
text stanza by stanza, we ought to consider the circumstances that led to
its being written in the first place. In 1750, on a journey to Switzerland
(as quoted above), Klopstock sojourned in Zurich. Zurich, the home of
Johann Jacob Bodmer and Johann Jacob Breitinger, is the centre of the
new poetry and the new aesthetics that are causing rifts and dissensions

14 Matthew, 18:20.
15 ‘The Friends’; ‘The friends, the friends, I will sing’. Samuel Gotthold Lange,
Horatzische Oden. Nebst Georg Friedrich Meiers Vorrede vom Werthe der Reime (Halle:
Hemmerde, 1747) 142.
16 ‘To My Friends
Like Hebe, bold, youthful, impetuous,
As with his golden quiver Latona’s son,
Immortal, I sing of my friends,
In paeans of mighty dithyrambs.
Would you become verse, o song, or
Unyielding, like to Pindar’s strain,
Like Zeus’ great drunken son,
Come tumbling straight from the soul, creating?’ HKA, I, i, 6.
280 From Goethe to Gundolf

in the world of German letters. Zurich is on the side of imagination and

feeling (‘hertzrührende Schreibart’). Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst/
Critical Poetics (1740) sums up ‘die bewegliche und hertzrührende
Schreibart’17 as follows:

Die Eigenschaft dieser Sprache bestehet demnach darinnen, daß sie in der
Anordnung ihres Vortrags, in der Verbindung und Zusammensetzung
der Wörter und Redensarten, und in der Einrichtung der Rede-Sätze
sich an kein grammatisches Gesetze, oder logicalische Ordnung, die ein
gesezteres Gemüthe erfordern, bindet; sondern der Rede eine solche
Art der Verbindung, der Zusammenordnung giebt, wie es die raschen
Vorstellungen einer durch die Wuth der Leidenschaften auf einem
gewissen Grad erhizten Phantasie erheischen […].18

Breitinger is not advocating chaos and disorder in poetic discourse, but

a form of order and combination not subject to mechanisms, able to
free itself from the bonds of logical order at the behest of non-rational
intimations. Klopstock, almost on cue, arrives in Zurich as the author of
the opening cantos of a religious epic, Der Messias/The Messiah, which
is a declaration in favour of the poetry of emotion, of expression, of
imagination, of bold formal experiment. Klopstock is taken by friends
on a boating excursion on the Lake of Zurich, done in his honour. He
leaves a long factual account in a letter to his cousin; Johann Kaspar
Hirzel, mentioned in the poem, wrote similarly to Ewald von Kleist,
also immortalized.19 We learn who the company was and where they
went. Klopstock flirted with the sister of one of the society. But the
bare bones of Klopstock’s account do not prepare us in any way for the
poem that arises from the occasion. I use that phrase in preference to
‘occasional poem’. For the poem that proceeds from a certain time and

17 ‘Style that moves the heart’.

18 ‘Thus the quality of this language may be so defined: in the order of its diction, in
the combination and ordering of words and styles, of the way the phrases are so
arranged so as not to be bound by any grammatical law or logical order such as a
more moderate soul requires, but gives speech such a way of combining and ordering
as are demanded by the rage of passion and a certain degree of heated imagination’.
Johann Jacob Breitinger, Critische Dichtkunst, ed. by Wolfgang Bender, Deutsche
Neudrucke. Reihe Texte des 18. Jh., 2 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1966), II, 354.
19 The letter of Klopstock to his cousin Johann Christoph Schmidt, in HKA, Briefe I,
130f; the letter of Johann Kaspar Hirzel to Ewald von Kleist (both mentioned in
the poem) in F. G. Klopstock, Oden. Eine Auswahl, ed. by Karl Ludwig Schneider,
Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 13.91102 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966), 138–42.
 14. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock  281

place transcends the occasion and arcs over into central concerns of the
poet, not subject to the bonds and constraints of time or place.
The incidentals of experience are transformed by the shaping hand
of metrical form. The dignity of classical verse removes these events
from the purely adventitious sphere and translates them into that of
rhetoric, the high style. It is classical rhetoric in the service of ‘den
großen Gedanken’, the great thought. It involves an ultimately religious
contemplation of nature, but also the active will to extract from it
a precept and an example for Christian ethics, what older religious
language called ‘conversation’. That is why the poem will not permit
‘Mutter Natur’ more than a secondary place in its scheme of things.
Klopstock chooses as his verse the fourth asclepiad ode stanza, known
to generations of schoolchildren through Horace’s ‘O fons Bandusiae,
splendidior vitro’. He takes the metrical pattern of the classical original
and makes its quantities correspond to the strong and weak beats of
German poetry. That is, his language follows the normal accentuation
of German, so that ‘Schön ist, Mutter Natur, deiner Erfindung Pracht’
can be read as a line of verse, but also as quite naturally cadenced
German. These ode stanzas (alcaic, asclepiad, sapphic) appeal because
they can express both the order and the imaginative enthusiasm that
Breitinger spoke of. Their introduction into German by Klopstock is
the major breakthrough in eighteenth-century German poetry before
Goethe. The asclepiad stanza is largely dactylic (-xx), so that there is
movement implicit in the verse form. This isn’t stately verse like the
alcaic (‘Wie Hebe kühn und jugendlich ungestüm’, the opening of ‘Auf
meine Freunde’); it is characterized by movement inside each line,
with a marked masculine ending to verses one, two and four.20 Those
strong beats are important, for they start and end each line. Klopstock
puts his connecting words at the beginning of the stanza: ‘Komm’,
‘Schon’, ‘Jetzt’, ‘Jetzo’. He often ends his stanza with a dynamically
stressed word: ‘Abendluft’, ‘vorbeigeflohn’, ‘auf uns herab’, ‘ganz ergoß’
etc. And so we hear those unusual words — new — his compounds
(‘Traubengestaden’, ‘entwölkte’, ‘vorbeigeflohn’) or his intensifying
comparatives (‘beseelteren’, ‘empfindender’, ‘beredter’, ‘bebender’,
‘sanfter’), which English cannot render, inside the structure of the verse.

20 It goes without saying that my English version cannot reproduce these features of
the original.
282 From Goethe to Gundolf

That is why the line ‘Von des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her’
is so remarkable, in terms of vocabulary, verbal experiment and poetic
musicality. Klopstock isn’t all tortuous syntax or interruption, as some
of the older standard wisdom on the subject would have it.21 It is true
that his poetry exemplifies what he calls ‘Darstellung’: ‘Unvermutetes,
scheinbare Unordnung, schnelles Abbrechen des Gedankens, erregte
Erwartung, alles dieses setzt die Seele in eine Bewegung, die sie für
die Eindrücke empfänglicher macht’.22 Stanza two, with its difficult
inversions (‘Oder, flohest du schon wieder vom Himmel auf’) might
illustrate the point, as might stanza six with its double objective ‘Hallers
Doris, die sang […] Hirzels Daphne, den Kleist innig wie Gleimen
liebt’. But anyone with a musical ear will, I hope, hear the harmony and
grace of ‘Jetzt entwölkte sich fern silbener Alpen Höh’ or ‘Jetzo nahm
uns die Au in die beschattenden/Kühlen Arme des Walds’. Through
this kind of verse — this needs to be said — German poetry is liberated
from the grip of those ‘vers communs’, rhymed iambic pentameter,
that dominate the high style or the didactic mode before the 1740s, or
from shapeless madrigal verses, such as Barthold Heinrich Brockes’s,
with their varying line length. The releasing of poetic energy with
Klopstock is unstoppable. He does not directly influence all subsequent
developments in eighteenth-century German poetry. But he produces
a willingness to respond to a whole variety of forms and influences
that produce the extraordinary ‘mix’ of the next fifty years or so of
German poetic expression. That is the essential link forward from ‘Der
Zürchersee’ to Goethe, Schiller and Hölderlin.
To return to our poem. Perhaps it is not by chance that Klopstock
often ends his rhetorical sections by introducing more cadenced nature
passages. Thus, stanza one with its double apostrophe to Mother Nature
and to a human apperception of nature, breaks off and leads over to ‘Von
des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her’. This in turn produces
the unruly and inverted stanzas two and three that apostrophize
joy. For the lake shore is only important as the place where joy, here

21 Such as the highly influential Eric Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary
Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 347.
22 ‘Representation’. ‘Unexpected seeming disorder, thought abruptly breaking off,
feverish expectancy, all this sets the soul in movement and this makes it more
receptive to impressions’. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. by
Karl August Schleiden (Munich: Hanser, 1962), 1034.
 14. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock  283

personified, descends in the evening zephyr, to produce ‘Jauchzen’, her

more ecstatic manifestation, but also gentler feelings (‘sanft’). It is as if
joy were coming down in that very moment to assist the writing of the
poem, suggesting that its artistry is really improvised on the spur of
the moment. Klopstock does not want his poem to be impersonal, so he
names the young woman who is susceptible to such tender feeling. In
the first printing of the poem he wrote ‘Sch … inn‘, meaning his cousin
Fanny Schmidt. As in that other poem ‘An Gott’ (‘To God’), so excoriated
by Lessing, Klopstock is not above introducing the object of his personal
hopes and devotion in the context of his poetic metier. It shows our poet
to be very human after all. (Fanny Schmidt rejected him.)
Klopstock then changes tense to the imperfect, to introduce five
stanzas dealing with the boat excursion, his companions, and their
feelings. The abruptness of this transition is at first bewildering: ‘Schon
lag’. We are taken into the real event, in medias res, to be told, not what
they saw, but what was already ‘hinter uns’, ‘vorbeigeflohn’. It leads over
to that remarkable line ‘Jetzt entwölkte sich fern silberner Alpen Höh’,
running slap against a sublime manifestation of nature, in a dramatic
confrontation. Stanza after stanza of Albrecht von Haller’s ‘Die Alpen’,
one of the century’s great didactic poems, never came up with a line like
this. But it is not nature, it is human company that quickens the pulse
(‘empfindender’) and gives more eloquent utterance (‘beredter’). Note
that a technical and syntactical device, much favoured by Klopstock,
the anastrophic genitive, enables him to stress — and link — ‘Höh’ and
‘Herz‘. Feeling and words now combine in that strangely tortuous next
stanza six. Once we have teased out its syntax, we might be tempted to
dismiss it as one of the poem’s weak spots. But look at its positioning
in the very centre of those five stanzas that describe the journey on
the lake. It is this invocation of names that leads over to the renewed
apostrophizing of joy, ‘Freude’ or ‘Göttin Freude’ in stanzas seven and
eight. Eighteenth-century poetry is not inhibited about naming names,
and so many of Klopstock’s poems address real persons. Hölderlin, too,
takes comfort in the presence of the friends to whom he dedicates his
poems: ‘sagst du’, ‘Aber Freund’, to Heinse in ‘Brod und Wein’, ‘mein
Sinklair’ to Isaak von Sinclair in ‘Der Rhein’.23 Klopstock’s stanza links

23 ‘My Sinclair’, ‘you say’, ‘But, my friend’, ‘Bread and Wine’, ‘my Sinclair’, ‘The Rhine’.
284 From Goethe to Gundolf

friends (Hirzel and his wife) and friends who also are poets. Hirzel’s
wife, here given the stylized Arcadian name of Daphne, sang Haller’s
ode to Doris; Hirzel, of whom Kleist is as fond as he is of Gleim. Ewald
von Kleist, Gleim and Hagedorn are poet-friends; the respected older
Swiss poet Haller is a congenial spirit. For Klopstock, poetry and
friendship belong together; the creative act is also a corporate act. Poetry
gives the legitimation to the expression of such feeling.
That stanza six, with its two-fold stressed ‘Und’ now urges over to
stanzas seven and eight, ‘Jetzo’, ‘da’, ‘auf uns herab’, ‘Dich’. The communal
experience in nature (‘in die beschattenden / Kühlen Arme des Walds’)
brings the renewed presence of joy, descending in personified guise, the
sister of its guileless companion, humanity. Eighteenth-century German
poets, from Hagedorn to Schiller, have a weakness for addresses to joy,
‘An die Freude’, or to other allegorical virtues.24 But this poem, as we see,
is not a mere ode to joy like Hagedorn’s. Its descent to Schiller’s poem is
also not direct. Were it not for those verbs of action ‘kamest […] herab’ and
‘ergoß’ (stanza 8), we might nevertheless say that the poem has moved
rapidly away from real persons in real places to abstractions. The next
seven stanzas (9–15) in fact make no direct reference to the excursion,
subsumed as they are under that general experience of joy. Instead, they
mark a process of intensification, from the visual (‘fröhlicher Lenz’),
to taste (‘winket der Wein’), to sound (‘klinget des Ruhms lockender
Silberton’). That process is plotted by nature, but a very non-specific
nature (‘Lenz’, ‘Flur’, ‘Odem’) couched in conventional language. And
nature makes feeling triumphant; it removes the inhibitions between
‘der Jünglinge Herzen’ and ‘die Herzen der Mädchen’. Wine gladdens
the heart of men, but the gladness it imparts is enhanced by moderation
(the ‘sokratischer Becher’). It is the teacher who tells us what is worthy
of ‘der Weise’. This is not an easy word to translate: it has associations
with wisdom, but also with moderation and abstinence and the stoical
satisfaction with one’s lot. It is also the subject of a poem by Friedrich von
Hagedorn, whom Klopstock has already addressed. The scale has even
higher stages. For fame, immortality that outlives its own generation,
transferred through the act of poetry, nurturing the virtues of love and

24 See H. B. Nisbet, ‘Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”: A Reappraisal’, in On the Literature and

Thought of the German Classical Era (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2021),
215–40, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0180
 14. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock  285

goodness (‘fromm’), is worthy of the highest effort of the noble soul.

The young Hölderlin clearly found this sentiment appropriate for his
friends’ commonplace books. These seven stanzas, with their invocation
of nature, wine, and fame, are also related to the earlier address to
the poet-friends. Kleist, Gleim and Hagedorn represent the strand of
eighteenth-century poetry that celebrates the gentle virtues, the happy
life without excess; Albrecht von Haller sings the high moral qualities
of the human soul. All of them value friendship. Thus, the sections are
thematically linked.
Our poem could end here. It has catalogued joy, feeling, wise
moderation, and fame, in an ascending scale. Part of that process
of impulsion upwards has been sustained by the use of absolute
comparatives: ‘schöner’, ‘bebender’, ‘Lauter’, ‘sanfter’. It cannot
seemingly mount higher. It can. ‘Gedanken’, ‘Entschließungen’, ‘Ruhm
and ‘Tugend’ cede the place of honour to ‘life’ and ‘eternity’ ‘in the arm
of a friend’ (stanza 15). Klopstock has described a huge arc from the ‘froh
Gesicht’ of stanza one, has taken in the virtues of human company and
conviviality, in order to state in this fifteenth stanza what humankind’s
highest aspiration is. But the stanza remains unspecific. Klopstock
therefore appends three further stanzas to spell out the implications
of friendship. He remembers the occasion that gave rise to the poem,
and conflates the various earlier elements of nature description,
‘schimmernder See’, ‘silberner Alpen Höh’ and ‘beschattenden / Kühlen
Arme des Walds’ to produce ‘Umschattungen’ and ‘silberne Welle’, a
poetic shorthand for those earlier lines. Note that now the gaze is not
directed upwards towards the snowclad peaks, but downwards (‘mit
gesenktem Blick’), inwards, in silence. Like the letter I quoted earlier,
the ending of the poem can imagine nothing better than the epiphany of
friends. Perhaps theophany is the right word. For the final stanza does
nothing less than equate the tabernacles of the Mount of Transfiguration
in Matthew xvii (‘Lord, it is good to be here’, ‘one for Moses and one
for Elias’), with the gathering of friends. But Klopstock, by another fine
poetic reminiscence from earlier in the poem, takes us from the unspecific
Mount of Tabor (the place of the biblical transfiguration) to the here and
now. He remembers again the ‘beschattenden / Kühlen Arme des Walds’,
and the ‘Umschattungen’ two stanzas up, and produces ‘Schattenwald’.
The wooded place in which we are standing, with its nature evocation,
286 From Goethe to Gundolf

would become the classical Vale of Tempe, the valley over there might
be the Elysian fields. Klopstock has no qualms about merging Christian
and classical mythology: it is an old Renaissance tradition. It goes hand
in hand with the adapting of classical forms to the expressive needs of
modern poetry. In this final stanza, Klopstock has fulfilled the promise
of stanza one. The delights of Mother Nature are not forgotten, only they
are translated on to a higher sphere, hypostasized into mythological
association. The great embracing of friends would take place here, amid
the ‘Schattenwald’ and ‘jenes Tal’. But thinking ‘den großen Gedanken
deiner Schöpfung’ makes them into Tabor and Tempe, the highest places
of inspiration in the classical and Christian traditions.
Klopstock’s poem has dynamics that my stanza-by-stanza analysis has
not brought out. It plots abstract and unqualified notions in ascending
order: ‘Mutter Natur’, ‘froh Gesicht’, ‘süße Freude’, ‘Empfindungen’,
‘Entschließungen’, ‘Unsterblichkeit’, ‘Elysium’. But these would be
unpoetic, at most didactic, were they not accompanied by a progression
in verbal action: ‘denkt’, ‘lehre’, ‘sang’, ‘empfanden’, ‘ergoß’, ‘steigt’,
‘winkt’, ‘dringt’, ‘klinget’, ‘bilden’, ‘gießen’, ‘genießen’. They represent
a movement away from learning or apprehending to feeling and
fulfilling. Several of those verbs are compounds: ‘flohest […] auf’,
‘kamest herab’. We saw how, in the first part especially, the poem was
impelled along by strongly stressed words like ‘Schon’, ‘Jetzto’, ‘Dann’,
‘Aber’. But the essential dynamics of the poem for the modern reader
are surely ‘Von des schimmernden Sees Traubengestaden her’, ‘Jetzt
entwölkte sich fern silberner Alpen Höh’, ‘Jetzo nahm uns die Au in die
beschatteten / Kühlen Arme des Walds’ and ‘in den Umschattungen,
/ In den Lüften des Walds’. When the young Goethe in 1775 retraced
Klopstock’s footsteps and embarked with friends on a boat on the
same lake, there was not a shadow of doubt that all involved knew
they were re-enacting ‘Der Zürchersee‘.25 It was perhaps inevitable that
Goethe, taking out his notebook and jotting down three stanzas now
known as ‘aufm Zürchersee’, was reminded of what I call the essential
dynamics of the earlier poem. Klopstock, as Werther testifies, is one of
the important influences on Goethe for a brief time. In an extraordinary
homage to Klopstock later in 1775, Goethe quotes the phrase ‘Gedanken

25 See Roger Paulin,’Von ”Der Züchersee” zu “aufm Zürchersee”’, Jahrbuch des Freien
Deutschen Hochstifts 1987, 23–49.
 14. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock  287

der Schöpfung’.26 Goethe’s is a poem very different from Klopstock’s.

Goethe, ever feline and wayward in friendship, is not interested in
‘Hütten der Freundschaft’, even if his companions may be. He is not
concerned with the catalogue of virtues in Klopstock’s poem, even
though he will come to ponder some of them in his reflective poetry
of the early 1780s. In his little poem on the lake, Mother Nature is a
nourisher so exuberant that the poet gets his images mixed up (‘Ich
saug’ an meiner Nabelschnur / Nun Nahrung aus der Welt‘).27 But he
takes, not in Klopstock’s order, the things in nature that had helped to
bear ‘Der Zürchersee’ along: ‘Und Berge Wolkenangetan / Entgegnen
unserm Lauf’, ‘Auf der Welle blinken / Tausend schwebende Sterne’ and
‘Im See bespiegelt / Sich die reifende Frucht’.28 All of these images are
bolder and more concrete than Klopstock’s, especially their evocation of
the light dancing on the waves. They are part of a process in the poem
where the young Goethe establishes the adequacy of his poetic powers
to overcome a crisis in his creative and emotional life. But generations
of commentators on this poem, agonizing over the meaning of ‘reifende
Frucht‘, might have started (where they finish is another matter) with
Klopstock’s ‘Traubengestade’ or ‘Gebirge, / Voll von Reben’. It is surely
a tribute to Goethe’s powers of observation and his sense of artistic
perspective that he first looks up (to the mountain peaks), looks down
(to the light on the waves) and then around him (at the shores covered
with vineyards, the ripening stage of the cycle of nature). Klopstock’s
poem, perhaps against its stated intention, had helped him to see these
processes. Hölderlin, over twenty-five years later, remembers just two of
the landscape features of ‘Der Zürchersee’. Its message has long since
been overtaken by mythological visions alien to Klopstock. But in ‘Der
Rhein’ (1801), we read ‘Unter den silbernen Gipfeln’ and ‘Im Schatten
des Walds’, in ‘Patmos’ (1803) ‘der schattige Wald’ and ‘der silberne

26 ‘Thought of creation’. Ibid., 37.

27 ‘I suck on my navel cord
Nurture from the world’.
28 ‘And mountains decked with clouds
Rise up to meet our path.’
‘On the wave-tops sparkle
A thousand dancing stars’
‘In the lake is mirrored
The ripening fruit’.
288 From Goethe to Gundolf

Schnee’,29 proof of the dynamic power of Klopstock’s ode to penetrate

poems about myth and history and the fulfilment of all things.

Appendix One

Translation of Klopstock, ‘Der Zürchersee/The Lake of Zurich’

Mother nature, how sweet when your gifts you unfold
On the meadows about, sweeter, a gladsome face
Pondering o’er the great thought
Of your handiwork yet again.

From the vineyard shores of the shimmering lake,

Or, if once again you to the heavens flew,
Come in the reddening ray
On the wings of the evening air,

Come and teach my song to be youthfully glad,

Sweet joy, like you, like the youth’s jubilation,
Quick, and filling the soul,
Gentle, as Fanny is, the tender.

Far beyond us lay mount Uto, at whose feet

Zurich lies in her vale, nurturing freemen in peace;
Now many a vine-clad slope
Had flashed past as we rowed our way.

The clouds now broke to reveal the heights of silvery alps.

The young men’s hearts beat in their feelings’ rush,
Words came easier
To their fair companion’s mouth.

‘Haller’s Doris”, sang she, worthy herself of the song,

Hirzel’s Daphne: Kleist loves him as he does Gleim,
And we young men sang
Full of feeling like Hagedorn.

Now the Au took us into the leafy shading

Arms of the wood, that the island surmounts;
Then, then, you descended,

29 ’Beneath the silvery peaks’, ‘in the forest shade’, ‘the shading forest’, ‘the silver
snow’. Hölderlin, Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, II, i, 142, 147, 165f.
 14. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock  289

Joy, and our cups ran over.

Joy divine, your very self, you, yes we felt you.

Yes, it was verily you, humanity’s sister,
Companion, pure in heart,
Who outpoured yourself on us.

Sweet is, springtide joy, your breath and inspiring

When the lea bears you forth, and your gentle breath
Pours into the hearts of youth
And into the maidens’ hearts as well.

O feeling triumphs through you, the breath rises,

Flourishes sweeter and beats,
Louder is the voice of love
When you loosen the magic spell.

Gently beckons wine when through it feelings,

Better desires and gentle beckon us in our thoughts,
In the Socratic beaker
Wreathed about with the dewy rose;

When it pierces the heart and resolutions are made,

To the drunkard unknown, awakens every thought,
So that we learn to abhor
What to the wise unworthy is.

Fame sounds silvery-voiced, charming, enticing

In the beating heart, and life without end is
Worthy to ponder,
Worth the sweat of the noble brow.

Passed down through song’s power to generations to come,

Its charms from daughter to son, son and daughter to be,
Often named by your name,
Often called from without the grave,

Then to shape their gentle heart and pour love

And good virtue, to pour into their gentle heart,
Is, by heaven, no trifle,
Worth the sweat of the noble brow!

But sweeter by far is yet, fairer and comelier,

In the arms of a friend, knowing that friend is yours,
Sharing life in this way,
Never-ending, and worthy too.
290 From Goethe to Gundolf

Tender affections full, in the shadowy glades,

In the breeze of the woods, with downward look of the eye
On the silvery wave,
Silent, I made the loving wish:

Were you but all here, you who love me abroad,

Scattered here and there in the land of our birth,
Whom in hours of bliss
My soul sought out and duly found:

O then here we would build tabernacles of friendship:

Ever live here, ever. The forest’s shade
To Tempe changed,
And that vale to Elysium!
Fig. 25 J ohann Joseph Sprick, Portrait of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, 1838.
Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Droste-H%C3%
BClshoff_2.jpg, public domain.
 15. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff1

How typical are German women writers of the age in which they lived?
There is Bettina von Arnim, who did not find her way to a public career as
a writer until quite late, when the Romantic movement as such might be
deemed to be over. With Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, chronologically
at least, we find an exact fit between her times and the movement
that she may be seen to represent: Biedermeier, taken roughly to refer
to German literature between 1815 and 1848, between Restoration
and Revolution. Her dates are 1797 to 1848. Thus she dies, perhaps
symbolically, in that year of revolutions, the first ripples of which she
was to feel on the Swiss shores of Lake Constance. 1848 is a difficult year
for many of her contemporaries to surmount. Some, like August von
Platen and Nikolaus Lenau and Eduard Mörike, are already silent; for
Jeremias Gotthelf, it produces a brief burst of reaction, then death; Franz
Grillparzer ceases writing altogether. These, and others, like Heinrich
Heine, Georg Büchner or Friedrich Hebbel, are her contemporaries, and

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Landmarks in German Women’s
Writing, ed. by Hilary Brown, British and Irish Studies in German Language and
Literature 39 (Oxford etc.: Peter Lang, 2007), 77–90.
No account of the vast secondary literature on Droste can be attempted here. Cf.
the Droste bibliography by Aloys Haverbusch in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff,
Historisch-kritische Ausgabe: Werke. Briefwechsel, ed. by Winfried Woesler, 14 vols
in 28 parts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971–2000), XIV, i, ii (referred to subsequently
referred to HKA with volume number). Overviews which relate Droste to the
epoch in which she lived are: Günter Häntzschel, ‘Annette von Droste­Hülshoff’,
in Zur Literatur der Restaurationsepoche 1815–1848: Forschungsreferate und Aufsätze,
ed. by Jost Hermand and Manfred Windfuhr (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970), 151–201;
Friedrich Sengle, Biedermeierzeit: Deutsche Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen
Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971–1980), III,
592–639. See also Josefine Nettesheim, Die geistige Welt der Dichterin Annette Droste
zu Hülshoff (Münster: Regensberg, 1967) and Günter Häntzschel, Tradition und
Originalität: Allegorische Darstellung im Werk Annette von Droste-Hülshoffs (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1968).

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.15

294 From Goethe to Gundolf

the test of her eminence is that her poetry and prose stands out even in
that company.
Let me rehearse some of the clichés that literary history applies to
the term Biedermeier: order, political reaction, regionalism, domesticity,
reverence for ordered nature, a Christian outlook, but also irony, disquiet,
despondency, melancholy, for which the German words Weltschmerz
(‘melancholy’) and Zerrissenheit (‘conflict’) stand. It is associated with
young talents swept away before full maturity (Büchner is but one),
writers who display brief bursts of activity followed by silence (Lenau,
Mörike), or who are troubled by physical and mental illness (Mörike,
Lenau, Grillparzer, Adalbert Stifter).
In much of this we will recognise Annette von Droste-Hülshoff,
except of course in one crucial feature: the names I have mentioned are
all male. She is a woman writer.2 That does not of course, mean that we
cannot align her with her male contemporaries. I wish to do this before
pointing out the differences. She is aristocratic, like Lenau or Platen, and
like them proud of it (it is a cachet in this period of political restoration).
She is associated with rural Westphalia in the way that Mörike is with
Swabia, Gotthelf with the canton of Berne, Stifter with Upper Austria,
and like them, she transcends it. She is conservative, but she keeps her
ear to the ground and knows what is going on, even though she may
not always approve. She is physically infirm, with heart palpitations,
migraines, attacks of breathlessness. Yet, in the few brief respites
from this, she achieves literary recognition, and then fame, with the
publication of her works by Cotta in 1844. She seems characteristically
rooted in the landscape, customs and dialect of her native Westphalia.
But it is journeys away from home, sojourns at Lake Constance, that
provide her with the necessary creativity. She is not alone in being

2 Among the many recent studies by women scholars and writers see Doris Maurer,
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff: Ein Leben zwischen Auflehnung und Gehorsam: Biographie
(Bonn: Keil, 1982); Elke Friederiksen and Monika Shafi, ‘Annette von Droste-
Hülshoff (1797–1840): Konfliktstrukturen im Frühwerk’, in Out of Line / Ausgefallen:
The Paradox of Marginality in the Writings of Nineteenth-Century German Women, ed.
by Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Marianne Burkhard (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989),
115–36; Ein Gitter aus Musik und Sprache: Feministische Analysen zu Annette von Droste-
Hülshoff, ed. by Ortrun Niethammer and Claudia Belemann (Paderborn: Schöningh,
1993). The distinguished modern poet Sarah Kirsch has produced a selection:
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ausgewählt von Sarah Kirsch (Cologne: Kiepenheuer &
Witsch, 1986).
 15. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff  295

denied the object of her affections: the family puts a stop to hopes of
marriage, and her love for Levin Schücking, a commoner and seventeen
years her junior, is accompanied by the pain of renunciation (see the
poem ‘Lebt wohl/Farewell’). Still, the relative lack of movement that her
life trajectory offers, her preoccupation with country matters that seem
traditional and stable, enable her a deeper reflective and dreamlike
power than that afforded by the tempo of more hurried lives.
Yet compared with, say, Mörike, a veritable church mouse in an
obscure village in Swabia, she is well-connected. She has links with the
aristocratic Münster circle; Dülmen, where Bettina’s brother Clemens
Brentano was writing down the visions of the stigmatized nun, Anna
Katharina Emmerick, is close by. She corresponds with a high Catholic
dignitary. She meets people from the world of letters and learning,
like Adele Schopenhauer, the Grimm brothers, Ferdinand Freiligrath,
Ludwig Uhland. The Schumanns in Bonn commission an opera text (it
is to be on the subject of the Anabaptists in Münster, also a Westphalian
theme). Her brother-in-law is Freiherr von Lassberg, the medievalist.
She is, as said, published by Cotta, who has the rights to both Goethe’s
and Schiller’s works. She knows foreign literature and she keeps abreast
with debates on science.3
And still there is the crucial and differentiating factor. Whereas many
of the men are professional writers or scholars (or both) or have another
profession to fall back on, she is barred, prohibited indeed by her social
status and her gender. Her position as the unmarried daughter of a
widowed Freifrau (baroness) is one of obedience and deference. She is
called upon to serve, to wait, to minister. She must experience constant
interruptions through the calls of domesticity. Her writing is regarded
as a source of suspicion or even downright scandal. She is painfully
aware of the role that her particular society apportions her. She lives in
an age where women often renounce their talents so as not to threaten a
male-dominated culture: Bettina only ‘goes public’ after Achim’s death
in 1831; Ludwig Tieck’s talented translator daughter Dorothea hides
behind her father’s name; Fanny Mendelssohn’s compositions must

3 On the latter see Ritchie Robertson, ‘Faith and Fossils: Annette von Droste­Hülshoff‘s
Poem “Die Mergelgrube”’, in Das schwierige neunzehnte Jahrhundert: Germanistische
Tagung zum 65. Geburtstag von Eda Sagarra im August 1998, ed. by Jürgen Barkhoff et
al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 345–54.
296 From Goethe to Gundolf

not overshadow those of her brother Felix or Clara Wieck’s those of her
husband Robert Schumann.
She knows that women writers are typecast in their choice of subject-
matter: religion, love, nature. She reflects all of this, but transcends it.
She is a religious writer, but she also writes a novel, a comedy (both
unfinished) and ballads. As a pious Catholic, she takes advice from
the prince-bishop of Breslau, Melchior Diepenbrock, himself a minor
devotional writer. Her religious poetry, however, reflects self-doubt,
crises of faith, despair at the loss of grace. She expressly excludes her
largest collection of poetry, Das geistliche Jahr/The Spiritual Year, poems
on the church calendar, from the edition of 1844. But her religion is also
a solace amid threatening nature or a disturbing physical state (think
of poems like ‘Durchwachte Nacht/Sleepless Night’, ‘Im Moose/In the
Moss’, ‘Mondesaufgang/Moonrise’, ‘Der Knabe im Moor/The Boy in
the Moor’). Or it can provide a moral framework for a theme like that
of retribution (‘Die Vergeltung/Retribution’, ‘Der Spiritus familiaris
des Rosstäuschers/The Horse Dealer’s Familiar Spirit’), most famously
visible in Die Judenbuch/The Jews’ Tree, where the issues are at once clear
but also obscure and mystifying. For this is a poet who by her own
admission has second sight, who can see beyond appearances, who has
visions, often disturbing, that give intimations but intimations only, of
events long since inaccessible to memory or record (as in ‘Des Arztes
Vermächtnis/The Physician’s Testament’).
How does she see herself as a poet in relation to the task that she
defines as the poet’s? There is nothing gratuitous, nothing lightly
undertaken in her devotion to poetry. We see this in the poems, ‘Der
Dichter — Dichters Glück’, which form a pair:

‘Der Dichter — Dichters Glück/The Poet — Poet’s Good Fortune’4

Die ihr beym fetten Mahle lacht

Euch eure Blumen zieht in Scherben,
Und was an Gold Euch zugedacht
Euch wohlbehaglich laßt vererben
Ihr starrt dem Dichter ins Gesicht,

4 A translation of the complete poem may be found in Appendix Two at the end of
this chapter.
 15. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff  297

Verwundert, daß er Rosen bricht

Von Disteln, aus dem Quell der Augen
Korall und Perle weiß zu saugen

Daß er den Blitz hernieder langt

Um seine Lampe zu entzünden
Im Wettertoben wenn Euch bangt,
Den rechten Odem weiß zu finden
Ihr starrt ihn an mit halbem Neid,
Den Geistescrösus seiner Zeit
Und wißt es nicht, mit welchen Qualen
Er seine Schätze muß bezahlen!

Wißt nicht, daß ihn, Verdammten gleich,

Nur rinnend Feuer kann ernähren,
Nur der durchstürmten Wolke Reich
Den Lebensodem kann gewähren
Daß, wo das Haupt ihr sinnend hängt
Sich blutig ihm die Thräne drängt
Nur in des schärfsten Dornes Spalten
Sich seine Blume kann entfalten

Meint ihr das Wetter zünde nicht?

Meint ihr der Sturm erschüttre nicht?
Meint ihr die Thräne brenne nicht?
Meint ihr die Dornen stechen nicht?
Ja, eine Lamp‘ hat er entfacht,
Die nur das Mark ihm sieden macht!
Ja Perlen fischt er und Juvele
Die kosten nichts als seine Seele!

II

Locke nicht, du Strahl aus der Höh

Denn noch lebt des Prometheus Geyer
Stille still, du buhlender See
Denn noch wachen die Ungeheuer
Neben deines Hortes kristallnem Schrein,
Senk die Hand mein fürstlicher Zecher
Dort drunten bleicht das morsche Gebein
Deß der getaucht nach dem Becher

Und du flatternder Lodenstrauß,

Du der Distel mystische Rose
Strecke nicht deine Fäden aus
298 From Goethe to Gundolf

Mich umschlingend so lind und lose

Flüstern oft hör ich dein Würmlein klein
Das dir heilend im Schooß mag weilen
Ach soll ich denn die Rose seyn
Die zernagte, um Andre zu heilen?5

This is, let us admit it from the start, hard poetry. I think it is hard because
Droste wants to tell us that the métier of the poet (that is, the office, if
you like), is hard, involves sacrifices and deprivations. I am reminded
of Grillparzer’s poem, ‘Abschied von Gastein/Leaving Gastein’, where
we have a similar set of images, including that of the pearl. One senses
that this is a poem which is not making concessions to atmosphere or to
nuance, but that it is coming at us with a series of seemingly unrelated
images, none of which is part of one symbolic whole but is amplifying
and illustrating the central idea of the poem: a fairly traditional use of
image or symbol. We notice the use of a regular rhyme pattern: ‘Der
Dichter’ in fact uses the traditional stanza known as ottava rima, much
favoured by Goethe’s generation and since. ‘Dichters Glück’ also has an
eight-lined stanza, but the metre has changed from iambic to trochaic,
with anapaests for variation (‘du Strahl aus der Höh’). In a fairly recent
volume of feminist studies on Droste, a contributor has spoken of the
‘metrischer Käfig’ (‘metrical cage’) in which Droste’s poetry is enclosed,
a symbol of the constraints under which her poetry was conceived and
written, indicative of the enclosure in which she found herself, socially,
emotionally, in her spiritual life.6 The same article also quotes Droste‘s
letter in which she says, ‘es kümmert mich wenig, daß manche der Lieder
weniger wohlklingend sind als die früheren, diese ist eine Gelegenheit
wo ich der Form nicht den geringsten nützlichen Gedanken aufopfern
darf’.7 It is an interesting observation, as the author goes on to show
that a few poems only, including the famous ‘Im Grase’ (see below),
escape from that cage or confinement. Historically, the statement is
problematic, as a very large part of Biedermeier lyrical poetry, indeed

5 HKA, II, i, 69f.

6 Bruna Bianchi, ‘Verhinderte Überschreitung: Phänomenologie der “Grenze” in der
Lyrik der Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’, in Ein Gitter aus Musik und Sprache, 17–34
(19).
7 ‘I am not at all worried that some of the songs sound less well than the earlier ones.
It enables me to care less about form and to follow up even the smallest thought that
I can make use of’. HKA, IX, i, 86.
 15. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff  299

nineteenth-century lyrical poetry in general, is rhyme-bound and

rhetorical, less concerned with ‘Wohlklang’ (the musical qualities of the
lyrical form) than with what is being said, the message.
Thus in technical rhetorical terms the poem opens with an apostrophe
and continues with a set of sustained phrases. It then (stanza 4)
introduces a rhetorical question with a fourfold anaphora, which neatly
takes up the themes of the first two stanzas and gives them renewed
emphasis. Image and meaning correspond exactly, provided, that is,
that you recognize the image — not always an easy feat. The second
part repeats the structure of the first, but in a shorter space and with
greater economy and density of words, with exclamation, apostrophe
and rhetorical question. Droste is here working within an accepted
framework of devices and meanings. She is not trying to mystify or
to create an atmosphere; she is trying to instruct, to spell out, to make
clear, unmistakably clear, what poetry is for her. In that sense, it is
related to that collection of her poetry that is for today’s readers least
accessible, Das geistliche Jahr, with its allegorical approach, the absolute
identification of image and meaning, the submission of the personal and
the general.
In those terms, these two poems are stating that poetry does not
have the function of exhausting its possibilities in the pursuit of
beauty; it cannot lose sight of its basic moral function, which of course
can be compatible with beauty. She says (stanza 1) that those who
succeed in the material world, or are not in touch with nature (‘eure
Blumen zieht in Scherben’8) are amazed at what the poet is able to
extract from the most unpromising or uncompromising of materials:
roses from thistles, pearls and coral from tears. The poet seems to be
the one whose gifts are richest of all: ‘Geistescrösus seiner Zeit’, a real
Croesus of the spirit. And yet they are won at a cost. The next stanza
refers to the thunderbolt of Zeus, the perilous element in which the
poet has to live and the sufferings that are necessary to the work of
art. All this is reality (hence that fourfold anaphora reinforcing the
message), but it is a reality which leads to mortal peril (‘kostet nichts
als seine Seele’). ‘Dichters Glück’ expands on the enticements of
poetic art (‘Locke nicht’). The images which refer to the experience
of poetry are total and all-consuming: Prometheus, Goethe’s ‘Der

8 ‘Grow flowers in clay pots’.

300 From Goethe to Gundolf

Fischer/The Fisher’, Schiller’s ‘Der Taucher/The Diver’, all changed

into symbols of sacrifice for art’s sake. Then the poem suddenly
becomes mysterious and difficult of meaning, yet richly evocative: ‘du
flatternder Lodenstrauß / Du der Distel mystische Rose’.9 It is a closely
observed and highly poetic image of the thistle or teasel. Yet the word
‘mystisch’ gives it away, with its religious associations. Then comes
‘Strecke nicht deine Fäden aus / Mich umschlingend so lind und
lose’.10 The ‘mystical rose’ of the thistle contains a grub or worm inside
its crown, which is healing, ‘heilend’. A poem which has up to now
operated mainly in a conventional level, with accessible images, now
confronts us with an image that few today would understand. Droste’s
interest in botany and in its application for healing purposes, in
galvanism and homeopathy, in folk cures — this, too, is part of Heimat
and ‘regionalism’ — comes out in this image. She is referring here to
a cure known in Westphalian folk medicine: a fly that lays its eggs in
the head of the thistle and whose larvae are used for various medicinal
purposes. It has been a long-hallowed tradition in religious poetry
and iconography to associate certain plants with spiritual qualities.11
It is still part of the world of the stigmatized nun at Dülmen, Anna
Katharina Emmerick, so venerated by Clemens Brentano. It makes
the link between the scientific and the mystical sides of nature. With
that essentially religious association, Droste brings herself into the
poem; it becomes linked with her experience. There is almost an air of
resignation as she takes upon herself the function of the thistle made
by poetry into a rose. She is to be consumed inwardly so that her works
may be the means of salvation (‘heilend’) to others. Is that ‘worm’ her
infirmity, her self-sacrifice? She leaves us to work that out for ourselves.
Note the transition from ‘dem Dichter ins Gesicht’ (‘staring at him’)
of the first stanza of ‘Der Dichter’ to the personal in this last stanza of
‘Dichters Glück’. It is announced by a change of metre in the last two
verses of the poem, to introduce the personal amid all the rhetoric and
metaphorical apparatus.
If the recondite associations of the nature reference in ‘Dichters
Glück’ may seem mystifying, they nevertheless serve as a reminder

9 ‘And you, fluttering teasel head, / You mystical thistle rose’.

10 ‘Do not stretch out your thread / To encircle me so close’.
11 Cf. Nettesheim, Die geistige Welt, 32f.; Häntzschel, Tradition und Originalität, 16f.
 15. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff  301

that this is a poet of minute observation and an almost encyclopaedic

display of knowledge about the realm of nature. It is not nature
randomly observed, but grasped in a sense of order and hierarchy,
almost in sequence. It is a reflection of Droste’s reading of one of the
nineteenth century’s most popular works on nature, Friedrich Justin
Bertuch’s Naturgeschichte/Natural History.12 But she is familiar also with
the writings of the nature philosopher Lorenz Oken. She knows about
the various nineteenth-century theories of the creation and origins
of the earth. Hence her vocabulary betrays more than just a passing
acquaintance with the scientific pursuits of her century, something she
shares with Goethe: ‘Den Fäden gleich, die, grünlicher Asbest, / Schaun
so behaglich aus dem Wassernest’13 or ‘Gleich Bildern von Daguerre, die
Deck entlang’14 describing the terrors of lying awake at night, with the
physiological detail of ‘wie mir das Blut im Hirne zuckt’. Even in Das
geistliche Jahr we find words like ‘Phosphorpflanze’,15 ‘elektrisch Feuer’,16
‘EMBRIO’,17 ‘galvansche Kette’.18 The collection called Heidebilder/Heath
Scenes has sections where she describes every plant or stone or notes the
light reflected on the wing-cases of a beetle; indeed, there are poems
which rehearse the names of rocks in their geological formations, marl,
gneiss, flint, mica, felspar. And yet this nature observation is never
an end in itself and is often integrated into a more conventional set of
images and topoi (sea, wild animals, house and home) that bespeak
both danger and security.
Often these nature reveries produce meditations, dreams or visions.
In one or two of the ‘geological’ poems, she sees the process of death
and petrification that has produced the formations19 — and finds herself
in the realm of forlornness and death:

12 Cf. the final stanza of ‘Die Mergelgrube’. On this, see Nettesheim, Die geistige Welt,
15–36.
13 ‘Like the threads, asbestos-green, / Gaze up from the comfort of their watery nest’.
‘Die Linde/The Linden Tree’, HKA, I, i, 44.
14 ‘Like images by Daguerre across the ceiling’. ‘Durchwachte Nacht/Sleepless Night’,
ibid., 352.
15 ‘Phosphorus plant’, HKA, IV, i, 81.
16 ‘Electric fire’, ibid., 92.
17 ‘EMBRIO’, ibid., 138.
18 ‘Galvanic series’, ibid., 145.
19 Translations of these stanzas are to be found in Appendix Two at the end of this
chapter.
302 From Goethe to Gundolf

‘Die Mergelgrube’

Und müde, müde sank ich an den Rand

Der staub’gen Gruft; da rieselte der Grand
Auf Haar und Kleider mir, ich ward so grau
Wie eine Leich’ im Katakomben-Bau,
Und mir zu Füßen hört ich leises Knirren,
Ein Rütteln, ein Gebröckel und ein Schwirren.
Es war der Totenkäfer, der im Sarg
So eben eine frische Leiche barg;20

‘Der Hünenstein’

lch wußte gleich, es war ein Hünengrab,

Und fester drückt‘ ich meine Stirn hinab,
Wollüstig saugend an des Grauens Süße,
Bis es mit eis‘gen Krallen mich gepackt,
Bis wie ein Gletscher-Bronn des Blutes Takt
Aufquoll und hämmert‘ unterm Mantelvließe.

Die Decke über mir, gesunken, schief,

An der so blaß gehärmt das Mondlicht schlief,
Wie eine Wittwe an des Gatten Grabe;
Vom Hirtenfeuer Kohlenscheite sahn
So leichenbrandig durch den Thimian,
Daß ich sie abwärts schnellte mit dem Stabe.21

Note the images of physical frailty, the disquietingly strong beat of her
pulse, the realms of terror into which she has entered (‘leichenbrandig/
like funeral pyres’).
In some of the longer ‘set-piece’ nature poems, like ‘Mondesaufgang’
or ‘Durchwachte Nacht’, the images of darkness and light take on their
traditional allegorical significance as the realms of sin and salvation,
where the moonlight or the rays of the early morning sun dispel the
terrors and dangers of the night. Her almost exact English contemporary
John Keble (the author of The Christian Year [1827]) writes there of the
‘Sun of my soul’ and ‘It is not night if Thou be near’.22
But Droste’s nature poems are not all visions or dreams or insomniac
broodings. We see her drawing nature into her feelings of love, affection,

20 HKA, I, i, 51.
21 Ibid., 44.
22 John Keble, The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays
throughout the Year (London: Review of Reviews Office, 1895), 3.
 15. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff  303

charity or friendship, the other abiding themes of her poetry. We should

not sentimentalize them, as these themes are also bound up with
isolation, renunciation or limitation. They are in many ways the only
consolation left. The following final stanzas from ‘Spätes Erwachen/
Late Awakening’ (1843–44) should be read together with the poignant
‘Lebt wohl/Farewell’:23

Wie ist das anders nun geworden,

Seit ich in’s Auge dir geblickt,
Wie ist nun jeder Welle Borden
Ein Menschenbildniß eingedrückt!

Wie fühl’ ich allen warmen Händen

Nun ihre leisen Pulse nach,
Und jedem Blick sein scheues Wenden
Und jeder schweren Brust ihr Ach.

Und alle Pfade möcht’ ich fragen:

Wo zieht ihr hin, wo ist das Haus,
In dem lebend’ge Herzen schlagen,
Lebend’ger Odem schwillt hinaus?

Entzünden möcht’ ich alle Kerzen

Und rufen jedem milden Seyn:
Auf ist mein Paradies im Herzen,
Zieht alle, alle nun hinein!24

With this, we lead over to Droste’s best-known and possibly best poem,
‘Im Grase/In the Grass’.25

Süße Ruh’, süßer Taumel im Gras,

Von des Krautes Arom umhaucht,
Tiefe Flut, tief tief trunkne Flut,
Wenn die Wolk’ am Azure verraucht,
Wenn aufs müde, schwimmende Haupt
Süßes Lachen gaukelt herab,
Liebe Stimme säuselt und träuft
Wie die Lindenblüth’ auf ein Grab.

Wenn im Busen die Todten dann

Jede Leiche sich streckt und regt,

23 A translation of this poem is to be found in Appendix Two at the end of this chapter.
24 HKA, I, i, 323.
25 A translation of this poem is to be found in Appendix Two at the end of this chapter.
304 From Goethe to Gundolf

Leise, leise den Odem zieht,

Die geschloss’ne Wimper bewegt,
Todte Lieb, todte Lust, todte Zeit,
All die Schätze, im Schutt verwühlt,
Sich berühren mit schüchternem Klang
Gleich den Glöckchen, vom Winde umspielt.

Stunden, flücht’ger ihr als der Kuß

Eines Strahls auf den trauernden See,
Als des zieh’nden Vogels Lied,
Das mir niederperlt aus der Höh‘,
Als des schillernden Käfers Blitz
Wenn den Sonnenpfad er durcheilt,
Als der fllücht’ge Druck einer Hand,
Die zum Ietzten Male verweilt.

Dennoch, Himmel, immer mir nur

Dieses Eine nur: für das Lied
Jedes freien Vogels im Blau
Eine Seele, die mit ihm zieht,
Nur für jeden kärglichen Strahl
Meinen farbig schillernden Saum,
Jeder warmen Hand meinen Druck
Und für jedes Glück meinen Traum.26

Some of the quotations or references from other poems will confirm that
many of the individual images of this poem are already pre-formulated.
Unlike the ones already cited, this poem is only partially rhymed. For
the commentator quoted earlier, it represents some breaking out of the
metrical ‘cage’ and a greater freedom and musicality.27 There are partial
rhymes like ‘See’ / ‘Höh’, ’verwühlt’ / ‘umspielt’. The rhyme scheme
does allow for some unrhymed endings, and the stress words — ‘süß’,
‘Flut’, ‘Azure’, ‘müde’, ‘säuselt’ (first stanza) — are not necessarily
the rhyme words. The metre is not clearly definable, but I cannot see
that it is basically anapaestic (as opposed to having some feet in this
metre) nor do I feel the dancing rhythm, that the same commentator
senses. In fact, it displays great subtlety in its stresses and defies exact
metrical description. For instance: already the trochaic second half of
the line consciously has the two strong stresses of ‘Von des Krautes

26 HKA, I, i, 328.
27 Bianchi, ‘Verhinderte Überschreitung’, 30.
 15. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff  305

Arom umhaucht’28 and not the anapaestic ‘Arome umhaucht’, as many

editions print it. What we can say is that it has so­called ‘masculine’
endings for every verse, and thus a stressed ending for every stanza,
‘Grab’, ‘umspielt’, ‘verweilt’, ‘Traum’.
Droste’s opening is a synaesthesia, a merging and blurring of
sense associations. The speaker is lying in the grass, on the ground, in
profound repose, producing a ‘Taumel’. ‘Taumel’ is a vertigo, a faint, a
loss of control when one is standing. Here, it is in lying, as the scents of
the grass crowd in and become the very air one is breathing: ‘umhaucht’.
Note in the midst of this vertiginous surrender to the tang of grass how
appropriate the word ‘Arom’ is instead of ‘Duft’, preparing us for the less
usual ‘Azur’. The merging into the scents of the grass becomes a flood,
‘Flut’, as the speaker, from her prone position, sees the clouds dissipated
above her. Note how the long and soporific sounds of ‘süß’ and ‘tief’
have contributed to this effect in their two and threefold repetition. The
element of time is kept in the centre of the stanza, ‘Wenn […] wenn’. It is
hard to say whether this is a ‘when’ clause or an ‘as’ clause, whether there
is a definite temporal progression of sensations, one coming after the
other, or whether past and present become blurred with the blurring of
vision, ‘schwimmendes Haupt’. But ‘süß’ leads through ‘tief’ to ‘müde’;
and in that loss of mental control, akin to fainting, ‘süß’ is repeated. We
do not have the sense of being buried in the grass and looking up into
the sky, but the sensation of sounds ‘herabgaukeln’, spirited down by
some sleight of hand, dropping mysteriously. A dear voice, ‘säuselt’, like
a sighing or trembling of the wind; also ‘träuft’, which reminds us of
water drops, or even honey. ‘Träuft’ is the first simile in the stanza: like
the blossoms of the lime tree dropping on to a grave. The lime tree is of
course the sentimental tree par excellence in German poetry, associated
also with death and graveyards: ‘Lang sah ich, Meta, schon dein Grab
/ Und seine Linde wehn’, writes Klopstock in ‘Das Wiedersehn/The
Reunion’.29 And a grave, to have a lime planted over it and in flower,
would not be fresh, but old.
This seems to be borne out by the threefold repetition in the next
stanza of ‘Todte Lieb, todte Lust, todte Zeit’.30 But the speaker is now,
as it were, in the grave, surrounded by the dead — in her mind (‘im
Busen’). As in the first stanza, repetition of associative words — ‘Leise,
leise’, ‘todt’, ‘todt’, ‘todt’ brings out the awareness of the dead, each
one coming to life in her mind’s eye, each one drawing breath, opening
306 From Goethe to Gundolf

its eyes, a kind of general resurrection of that which is nevertheless

irrevocably dead, is part of the debris and detritus of the past — until
that last image of sound, another synaesthesia, brings in sense reactions
that are feeling and haunting and lyrically associative.
Here, as I see it, the poem divides into a second half. The sense of loss
and transitoriness in a state of ‘Taumel’ and semi-dream, is balanced
by very precise, if fugitive, nature images. This is what those departed
hours were like, that are apostrophized at the beginning of the stanza:
‘Stunden, flücht’ger ihr’.31 They are a set of sustained but unrelated
images, merging only in the fact that they represent a variety of sense
impressions: the flash of light on the dark water, sensuously expressed
by a kiss, ‘Kuß’; the song of the bird, with ‘niederperlen’, which suggests
dew dropping (akin to ‘säuselt’ and ‘träuft’); the sparkling wing-cases
of the beetle in a beam of sunlight; the clasp of a hand for the last time,
‘zum letzten Male’, underlining the fleeting nature of the other images
and reminding us of the brevity of human contacts.
Stanza four is difficult. On the one hand, it is terse and laconic, on the
other insistent and repetitive (‘immer mir nur / Dieses Eine nur’).32 It is
an address to heaven that looks away from the fleeting and fugitive, a
prayer that for every transitory impression or experience the poet may
be granted an accompanying gift as an enrichment. For birdsong there
is a soul. Does that mean that she will invest each song with a soul, with
something that will give it life? Or does she think of a soul each time
she hears a bird sing? For every meagre ray of light she will give, as it
says, the full iridescence of her shot-silk hem. What can that mean? How
are we to read ‘Saum’? For feminist commentators, it means ‘Grenze’,
‘edge’, denoting the limitations of her art, thus far and thus far only.33
Yet ‘Saum’ also means ‘hem’, familiar to German Bible readers from
Isaiah 6:1 (AV, ‘train’). Is it, pars pro toto, her art? Is it God’s garment?
Is it herself and all she can offer? The text offers no clear answer, nor
do I believe that it should. But I am reminded of the analogy of two
other women poets of the nineteenth century who employ a similar
image. Christina Rossetti in ‘A Birthday’ speaks of a ‘rainbow shell’,
‘peacocks with a hundred eyes’, drawing on nature to describe her

31 ‘Hours, you more fleeting’.

32 ‘Grant only this, / But only this’.
33 Bianchi, ‘Verhinderte Überschreitung’, 32.
 15. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff  307

art.34 Emily Dickinson, describing crocuses, is bolder, with ‘Rainbow’,

‘World Cashmere’, ‘Peacock’s purple Train’, but she outlines a similar
process where nature and human artifice are merged.35 Nature becomes
more accessible to our affections as we personify it. Our affections are
enhanced by reference to the beauties of the natural world. Droste’s
poem still defies precise analysis, although the ‘World Cashmere’ may
well be part of it.
For every warm hand, hers pressed into it: an affirmation of every
human response to friendship or affection. And — she is a poet — her
dream, her vision to accompany every happiness. Droste is shifting the
emphasis away from ‘flüchtig’ to an affirmation of human activity for
good and right and virtue, finding a blessing in every kind of human
doing, discovering true humanity in the face of the very shortness and
insecurity and limitation of our existence. The poem makes no direct
appeal to our senses or our intellect. It is full of associations, snatches of
meaning and mergers of images. And yet it is a reflective poem, where
symbols are taken and presented to us without explanation, indirectly,
for us to ponder the relation between nature and human experience.

Appendix Two

Translation of Droste, ‘Der Dichter — Dichters Glück/The

Poet — Poet’s Fortune’
I

You who banquet at your ease

And grow flowers in pots of clay,
And enjoy your gold’s increase
Inherited along the way;
Into the poet’s face you look,
And wonder at the rose he took
From thistles, from the eye’s deep well
Can suck pearls and red of coral.

34 
The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition, ed. by R.W. Crump, 2
vols (Baton Rouge, London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979, 1986), I, 37.
35 
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber &
Faber, 1970), 33.
308 From Goethe to Gundolf

Lightning seizes with his hand

To set his lamp aflame;
While you are cowering from the storm
He finds the breath he needs, to draw.
You stare at him, half full of spite,
A Croesus, but one of the mind,
Unheeding of the pain it brings
For the treasures that he sings.

You know not: he is like the damned,

Living fire in his hand,
Lives in tempest and storm-cloud,
Breathes only in that sphere,
And where you hang your pensive heads
From blood he presses tears,
Where thorns press, nowhere else,
Is where his flower appears.

Does the bolt not kindle?

Does the storm not shake?
Does the tear not burn?
Do the thorns not prick?
Yes, he has lit a lamp
That sears his blood.
He fishes for pearls and jewels
At no cost - but his life.

II

Beckon not, bolt from on high,

Prometheus’ vulture lives still.
Peace, peace, luring lake,
The monsters keep yet their watch
Over your crystal casket’s hoard.
Carousing king, drink no more up,
Below are the blanching bones
Of the man who dived for the cup.

And you, fluttering teasle head,

You mystic thistle rose,
Do not stretch out your thread
To encircle me so close.
The worm whispers in my ear.
Hidden inward, healing,
I the cankered rose once fair
Health to others bringing?
 15. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff  309

Translation of Droste, ‘Die Mergelgrube/The Marl Pit’

Weary, weary, kneeling on the edge
In sand, a shower of gravel covered me,
Hair and clothes, I was a mass of grey,
A corpse entombed in stone, perhaps,
And at my feet I heard a rustling sound,
A shaking, yielding, the buzz of wings:
The death beetle in the coffin’s waste
Had found a fresh corpse on which to feast.

Translation of Droste, ‘Der Hünenstein/The Barrow Grave’

I knew at once it was a barrow-hill.
And pressing down my forehead harder still,
Sweet horror mixed with lust seized hold of me,
Till icy claws held me tenaciously,
Till, like a glacier stream my beating pulse,
Swelled and hammered under my coat’s sheet.

The ceiling over me, sunk and out of true

With moonlight casting down its ghastly hue,
A widow at the grave, her husband dead:
The herdsman’s fire of coals seemed to shine
Like flickering funeral pyres amid the thyme;
I took a stick and pushed them to one side.

Translation of Droste, ‘Spätes Erwachen/Late Awakening’

What change came over me since then,
When I first gazed into your eye,
For every wave within my ken
Bears on it your face stamped like a die.

And how I feel those hands that stay

Their warmth, their pulse’s easy strain,
The shy regards once turned away
And every breast racked in pain.

And all the paths this question set:

Where goes the way and whence the dwelling
Where living hearts are beating yet
And living breath the breast is swelling?
310 From Goethe to Gundolf

Light up the lamps on every side

And call to every weary heart:
My paradise is open wide,
All come in: never let us part!

Translation of Droste, ‘Im Grase/In the Grass’

Sweet repose, sweet faint in the grass,
The herb’s aroma my breath.
Deep flood, deep, deep drunken flood
When the cloud in the azure dissolves,
When on my weary swimming head
Sweet laughter comes dancing down,
Dear voice purls down from on high
Like the linden flower on a grave.

When in my bosom then the dead,

Each body stretches and strains,
Gently, gently draws in breath,
The eyelid flickers, once closed,
Dead love, dead desire, dead time,
The stony ground reveals its store,
Shy at first, mingle their sounds
Like the tinkling of bells in the wind.

Hours! you, more fleeting than the kiss

Of a ray on the doleful lake,
Than the song of the passing bird,
A pearly sound from the height,
Than the beetle’s lightning flash
As it catches the path of the sun,
Than the fleeting grasp of a hand
Held firm that one last time.

Yet still: heaven, grant only this,

But only this: for the song
Of each bird in the vault
A soul that shares its way.
For a ray, however dim,
The shot-silk hues of my hem,
For each warm hand my clasp,
And for every fortune my dream.
Fig. 26 Leonid Pasternak, Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke, date unknown. Wikimedia
Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonid_Pasternak
_-_Portrait_painting_of_Rainer_Maria_Rilke.jpg, public domain.
 16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten1:
In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90

It is a natural reaction to see in Elegy Ten a kind of summation of the

ideas and images of the whole cycle. The themes that we have been
tracing do of course recur: angels, flowers, lovers, mythologies. And
themes and motifs that dominate Rainer Maria Rilke’s whole poetic
oeuvre find a voice, the image of the night sky, for instance.2 But the
sombre grandeur of this elegy comes from the theme of death that
dominates it from beginning to end, coming as it does on the heels of
that affirmation of the here and now, the only existence we have, that
was first introduced in Elegies Six and Seven and then reinforced in
the sixfold ‘ein Mal’ of Elegy Nine. Not only is Elegy Ten the longest; it
introduces in its well over one hundred lines several seemingly disjunct
sequences that only move towards a thematic resolution when we are
fifty verses into the text. In its lament for the dead, but in the fierce
prophetic indignation at the loss of touch with the culture of pain and
bereftness and death, it has echoes of Elegy Five. As in Elegy Five, what
makes Elegy Ten both difficult and at the same time moving, is this
juxtaposition of disparate moods, encapsulated in a mythology that
takes us from ‘Klagen’ to ‘Leid-Stadt’ to ‘Ur-Leid’ (‘laments’ to ‘Grief

1 Originally published in Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Cambridge Readings, ed. by Roger Paulin
and Peter Hutchinson (London: Duckworth; Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1996), 171–91.
All quotations from Rilke are taken from Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, ed.
by the Rilke Archive, Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Ernst Zinn, 5 vols (Frankfurt am Main:
Insel, 1955–66), henceforth abbreviated as SW, with volume and page number; and
Ulrich Fülleborn and Manfred Engel, Materialien zu Rilkes Duineser Elegien, 3 vols
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980–82), henceforth abbreviated as DE, with
volume and page number.
2 See Rainer Maria Rilke, Gedichte an die Nacht, ed. by Anthony Stephens, Bibliothek
Suhrkamp 519 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983).

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.16

314 From Goethe to Gundolf

City’ to ‘primal suffering’). The tone ranges from Hölderlinian sonority

to the occasional foreshadowing of The Waste Land. An analogy from the
fine arts also springs to mind. In 1912, the year of the cycle’s conception
(and of the first fifteen verses of our elegy), an exhibition was held
in Cologne by the Sonderbund,3 of the most significant works of the
modern art movements. The examples ranged from Pierre-Auguste
Renoir and Claude Monet and Max Liebermann to Pablo Picasso and
Georges Braque to Robert Delaunay and Gino Severini. Cheek by jowl,
one saw traditions and positions confront and challenge each other.
(Seeing the repeat exhibition in 1962 was one of my lasting formative
experiences.) The analogy does not work entirely. At most it reminds
us that while Rilke stands at the threshold of the most radical formal
experiment the twentieth century has known, he also looks back to
and is firmly rooted in traditions that inform and shape the nineteenth
century (Rilke’s angels, for instance,4 also link him with that period).
But he does bring home to us the essential and timeless link between
poetry and myth, that is, saying in human terms the expressible about
the ultimately inexpressible mysteries of life and death, and of the
timeless role of the poet set aside to recount human response to those
mysteries. In our poem, we have two magic plants, one at the beginning
and one at the end. For where would the poetry of proclamation and of
lament, such as this is, be without its priests and their arcana?
As I said, one might expect of this elegy some kind of summation,
some statement of achievement, some climactic message or some
conspectual view. This would be a fair expectation after what may have
appeared to have been a cyclical motion through nine different phases
and modes of experience, now to become ten. There are numerous hints
in letters from the period in which the Elegies were taking shape, that
the search for meaning in ‘das Hiersein’,5 ‘das Hiesige’,6 essential for the
Neue Gedichte/New Poems and Malte Laurids Brigge/The Notebooks of Malte
Laurids Brigge, had not been abandoned. As he writes in 1915 to Princess

3 Cf. the catalogue Europäische Kunst 1912. Zum 50. Jahrstag der Ausstellung des
Sonderbundes westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler in Köln (Cologne: Wallraf-
Richartz Museum, 1962).
4 Cf. Engel. Texte aus der Weltliteratur, ed. by Anne Marie Fröhlich, Manesse Bibliothek
der Weltliteratur (Zurich: Manesse, 1991).
5 ’Being here’. DE, I, 131.
6 ’The here and now’. Ibid., 162.
 16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten: In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90 315

Marie von Thurn und Taxis, it is in the human that we find consolation.
And to this end:

es müßte nur unser Auge eine Spur schauender, unser Ohr empfangender
sein, der Geschmack einer Frucht müßte uns vollständiger eingehen, wir
müßten mehr Geruch aushalten, und im Berühren und Angerührtsein
geistesgegenwärtiger und weniger vergeßllch sein-: um sofort aus
unseren Erfahrungen Tröstungen aufzunehmen, die überzeugender,
überwiegender, wahrer wären als alles Leid, das uns erschüttern kann.7

only our eyes would need to be a shade more seeing, our ear more
receptive, we ought to take in more fully the taste of a fruit, we ought to be
more aware of our sense of smell, and in touching and being touched more
sharp-witted and less forgetful: to gain from our experiences consolations
straightway, that would be more convincing, all-encompassing and true
than all the suffering that can shake and undermine us.

Yet the breaking off of the Elegies in 1912 and their resumption after not
quite ten years, in 1921–22, tells us that this process of lyrical perception
and apprehension is beset from the outset with doubts and velleities.
The ‘ineffable’, the ’unspeakable’, the ’un-sayable’ in the realm of the
angels, is overcome only gradually in the resigned contentment with
relationships in the here and now, and in the resumption of poetic
confidence that accompanies it.
Instead of looking for some kind of grand climax in Elegy Ten, we
might reverse the process and note instead that the cycle is referential
within itself in ways that make us read back and forward. We are
always finding premonitions and preformulations of images and
motifs that achieve their definitive utterance in one or more of the
Elegies. Thus, the audience of the dead in Numbers Four and Five,
‘die unendlich Toten’, as our elegy (l. 105) will call them, beyond recall
but ever-present around us, are a more accurate point of reference
in Number Ten than the invocation at its opening of the angels. At
most, that address will serve as a reminder that Elegy Ten owes its
first fifteen verses to the initial burst of inspiration in Duino in 1912.
And yet the elegy will take up, already in its second verse, what must
be the central theme of grand poetry — and stilus altus this poetry is,
make no mistake — that of singing: ‘aufsingen’ and ‘zustimmen’ (l.

7 Ibid., 129.
316 From Goethe to Gundolf

2). We have already had ‘ansingen’ in Elegy One. Now, ‘aufsingen’

and ‘zustimmen’ are what we do and what the angels do respectively.
So, already in the first draft of 1912, as it were, Rilke had expressed
the idea that, while we cannot have a dialogue with the absolute and
the ineffable, we can have a kind of antiphonal song: we singing of
our experience, they of theirs, not in an equal contest, of course, but
in an awareness that we see what is visible, they all that is invisible.
This notion, expressed in a late letter, we can apply by extension to the
central image and theme of Elegy Ten: life and death. They represent
two spheres of equal validity, the one merely the side of the other
turned away from us for the moment, the one for the time being not
cast in light (‘des Lebens abgekehrte Hälfte’).8 And in the unity of life
and death, in this awareness, the angels have their dwelling.
But how can we sing all of this? When Rilke had completed the
Elegies, his immediate reaction was in the language of religious, even
hieratic utterance: ‘Aber nun ists. Ist. Ist. Amen’,9 ‘sehr, sehr sehr herrlich.
Wunder. Gnade’.10 This biblical and almost liturgical language is both
helpful and misleading. For we must not forget that the composition
of the Elegies coincides with one of the greatest literary events of the
early twentieth century: the first issue of the complete works of Friedrich
Hölderlin, by Norbert von Hellingrath in 1912–14.11 This suddenly
made certain kinds of poetic diction problematic. It sat in judgment
on the nineteenth, a century which had so often been satisfied with
the epigonal and the nearly good. I believe that Rilke is momentarily
caught up in this event. There are clear echoes of Brod und Wein/
Bread and Wine in Elegy One (and elsewhere). The very adaptation of
the elegiac couplet is part of this. So too the kenosis, the emptying of
oneself in the service of speaking and being spoken through; but also
the more than occasional and distinctly unnerving changes of tone from
the gnomic to the rhetorically expansive that we know in Hellingrath’s
term, as applied to Hölderlin, as ‘harte Fügung’ (’stone on stone without
mortar’). But Hölderlin and his models, Pindar, the Psalmist and the

8  DE, I, 283.
9 ‘But now it is come about. Amen’. Ibid., 236.
10 ‘Very, very, very wondrous. A sign. Grace’. Ibid., 237.
11 Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. by Norbert von
Hellingrath, Friedrich Seebass and Ludwig von Pigenot, 6 vols (Munich: G. Müller,
1913–23).
 16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten: In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90 317

prophets, are inimitable: where Rilke in other poetry between 1912–14

does in fact slip into the Hölderlinan mode, the result is not good. For
in the years 1912–22 there can be can no creating of a private mythology
or religion, such as Hölderlin’s was. True, the early twentieth century is
littered with the wrecks of such attempts, but few read Alfred Mombert
or Theodor Däubler or Rudolf Borchardt today. And so ‘sehr, sehr sehr
herrlich, Wunder. Gnade’ is an expression also of the poet’s humility at
having succeeded in sustaining — even against the awesome presence
of a Hölderlin — his own style and his own utterance.
As if to remind us that we are in the last statement of a cycle of elegies,
Rilke in Number Ten unfolds the lexis of the elegiac: Harm, Schmerz,
Leid, Klage, Ur-Leid, Zorn, Tränen, Wehmut, Trauer. The two key words
of the poem seem to be ‘Leid’ and ‘Klage’: one the experienced feeling,
the dolor, the pain and suffering at the ultimate loss in death; the other,
again crucial for the poet, its utterance, its sound and articulation, the
planctus, the lament. I would go so far as to say: the ‘lamentation’ for this
elegy is also a ‘Klagelied’, Martin Luther’s word for Jeremiah’s complaint
(and it is the same word that in German poetics was once used for the
later term ‘Elegie’). But while this elegy reproduces the cadences of the
elegiac couplet, there is no anxious attempt (as in Seven) at metrical
correctness, only the framework, structure or tone of elegiac utterance.
Yet if this Elegy is one thing, it is certainly not a mere disquisition on the
passing of all things. Its tone is not that of Weltschmerz (‘melancholy’):
we have left that ontological ‘Katzenjammer’ behind in the nineteenth
century where it belongs. No, here Rilke attempts to see beyond loss and
transience in order to perceive some sense, in a way to turn the tables
on death (John Donne’s ‘for thou are not so’, if you like, but not quite)
and to integrate death into a scheme whose totality we mortals of course
never grasp (the angels do) and whose two sides we cannot experience
simultaneously.
Although it is fair to say that the theme of death is omnipresent in
Rilke’s oeuvre, it is also worthy of note that his thinking on the subject
was intensified during the years of composition of the Elegies. It was his
concern, as he expressed it in a letter of 1915, to see death as that which
is experienced (that is, it happens to us all) and yet which in its reality
cannot be experienced. We are always conscious of it, yet never really
admit it, as ‘das gefährliche Glas unseres Glücks, aus dem wir jeden
318 From Goethe to Gundolf

Augenblick können vergossen werden’.12 For all that, as a later letter

stresses, death is not a contrary principle. Its inner essence is in reality
more conscious of life, ‘lebenswissender’,13 than our most vital moments
of life. We must make it our task therefore to win death’s confidence, to
learn daily of it, through seizing, as Rilke says, the fruit of the here and
now and biting into it.14 Indeed a letter of 1923 will state categorically that
death is the ultimate affirmer (’Ja-Sager’), it alone says, ‘Yes’ to eternity:
‘Er, der Tod (ich beschwöre Sie, es zu glauben!) ist der eigentliche
Ja-Sager. Er sagt nur: Ja. Vor der Ewigkeit’.15 In Elegy Ten, Rilke the
poet is placing himself in a new relationship to death, as life fades, and
a newer, paradoxically brighter, existence seems to beckon (although
that, too, is ultimately ‘unsäglich’). In terms of his thanatology, however,
he is also aligning himself with a strand that goes well back into the
nineteenth century, say, to Ludwig Feuerbach, stating that my death is
the fulfilment of all that I have lived for, all my human relationships
are completed in it — for there is nothing beyond.16 More significantly,
perhaps, Rilke associates himself with the Leo Tolstoy of The Death of
Ivan Ilyich.17 There we read of a life of squalid untruth, of unreality,
finding a final purpose as the man recognizes death to be no more than
the voice that declares his life to have been untrue or unfulfilled. That
voice ceases, is silent, is at an end, as physical life comes to an end. More
tellingly, we think of Sigmund Freud’s injunction of 1916, ‘man muß
an ihn [den Tod] glauben’,18 or of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ‘Bejahung des
Todes’,19 that ‘affirmation of death’ through which we both acknowledge
and also overcome its pervasive influence on life.

12 ‘The perilous glass of our happiness from which we can be poured at any moment’,
DE, I, 135.
13 Ibid., 162.
14 ‘Die ergriffene und aufgebissene Frucht des Hiesigen’, DE, I, 204.
15 Ibid., 284.
16 Ludwig Feuerbach, ‘Todesgedanken’, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. by Wilhelm Bolin
and Friedrich Jodl, 10 vols (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1903–11), I, 20. ‘[Der Tod] ist
nur die Erscheinung des Actes des inneren Ablösens, Trennens und Scheidens,
die Bewahrheitung Deiner Liebe, die Verkündigung, die Du während Deines
ganzen Lebens im Stillen bethätigt hast, dass Du ohne und ausser dem geliebten
Gegenstand Nichts bist‘.
17 DE, I, 137.
18 ‘One has to believe in it’. Sigmund Freud, ‘Unser Verhältnis zum Tode‘, in
Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod, Studienausgabe, ed. by Alexander Mitscherlich et al.,
11 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1969–79), X, 344
19 Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life. Young Ludwig, 1889–1921 (London:
Duckworth, 1988), 158.
 16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten: In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90 319

But these, necessarily sketchy, preliminaries will not take us further

than the threshold of the poem. There needs to be one more preliminary,
if the poem is not to withhold from us another dimension that is crucial
for its understanding: the poem as myth. It is, as I stressed before, not a
twentieth-century attempt at yet another private mythology, along the
lines that Hölderlin had so wonderfully and tragically plotted a century
before. Nor is it the renewal of myth in the way we see W. B. Yeats or T. S.
Eliot or Ezra Pound doing, as say in the theme of poetic metamorphosis
that Charles Tomlinson chose for the theme of his Clark Lectures some
years ago.20 Instead, Rilke is giving a mythopoeic dimension to the world
of the heart, of human feeling (the angels escape the realm of human
sensation and emotion) and then in the whole range of experiences of
the human heart that are subsumed under the key words of the poem,
‘Klage’ and ‘Leid’. It is not a world of cogent mythological equivalents,
nor is it some kind of allegory where equivalents and correspondences
slot neatly into place.21 For all that, we enter into a world that has its own
terms of reference, its own structures and hierarchies, its own beginning
and its own end.

DASS ich dereinst, an dem Ausgang der grimmigen Einsicht,

Jubel und Ruhm aufsinge zustimmenden Engeln.
Daß von den klar geschlagenen Hämmern des Herzens
keiner versage an weichen, zweifelnden oder
5 reißenden Saiten. Daß mich mein strömendes Antlitz
glänzender mache; daß das unscheinbare Weinen
blühe. O wie werdet ihr dann, Nächte, mir lieb sein,
gehärmte. Daß ich euch knieender nicht, untröstliche
Schwestern,
hinnahm, nicht in euer gelöstes
10 Haar mich gelöster ergab. Wir, Vergeuder der Schmerzen.
Wie wir sie absehn voraus, in die traurige Dauer,
ob sie nicht enden vielleicht. Sie aber sind ja
unser winterwähriges Laub, unser dunkeles Sinngrün,
eine der Zeiten des heimlichen Jahres— , nicht nur
15 Zeit— , sind Stelle, Siedelung, Lager, Boden, Wohnort.

20 Charles Tomlinson, Poetry and Metamorphosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1983).
21 DE, II, 251.
320 From Goethe to Gundolf

MAY the time come when, at the end of my terrible vision,

I raise up my song of praise and delight to the voice of the
angels.
And may the clear blows from the heart’s hammers
not strike dully on strings that are soft, doubting
5 or brittle. And may my tear-streaming cheeks
shine all the more brightly; and the weeping in secret
bloom. Oh how dear you will be to me then, you nights
of sorrow. Would I had knelt even lower, to accept you,
disconsolate sisters,
given more of myself in touching
10 your hair that was untied in mourning. We, who are wastrels
of sorrows.
We see them approach, into the endless sadness,
hoping perhaps they will end. But they are
our leaves through the winter, our dark green of
remembrance,
one of the times of the inward year— not merely
15 time —, are our place, settlement, encampment, ground,
habitation.

The poem opens with a fivefold repetition (ll. 1–6) of the word ‘daß’,
suggesting in its optative ‘may’ or ‘o that’ the rhetorical structure of
supplication or prayer or even of affirmation. We note, however, that
they are all unfulfilled statements, the first four referring to future
achievement, the fifth looking back to what was not done, and in its
turn leading over to the sententia ‘Wir, Vergeuder der Schmerzen’ (l.
10), then the long and sustained poetic metaphor on the nature of those
sorrows of which we are so prodigal. This by now familiar structure of
‘if we were to’, ‘if we but could’ forms a kind of prooemion or prologue
that is echoed and perhaps answered by the final colophon of the poem
(’But if they could […] then this’ ll. 107ff.), followed by the metaphor
and the rounding-off statement of general application. Set in between
these ‘unfulfilled’ sections are the sustained narrative, the mythopoeic
passages that trace the transition from life to death, from the ‘Leid-Stadt’
to the ‘Klage-Land’ to the ‘Berge des Ur-Leids’.
In this series of invocations or petitions, the poet begins with the
awareness that perhaps only the moment of death, some day (‘dereinst’),
at the moment of full recognition (when he emerges from the ‘grimmige
Einsicht’), will be the fitting moment to sing the angels (‘aufsingen’),
 16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten: In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90 321

receiving not only their nodding approval (‘zustimmenden’ — a double

meaning in the German) but the harmony and concinnity, where poetic
and angelic voice are part of the same process, ‘auf-’ and ‘zu-’, as one
reaches out in song and the other picks up the theme of the other voice.
Indeed, this image of singing is carried over to that of the hammers of
the piano on the strings and becomes one of performance: may they
all be tuned and taut. Song or melody leads over to weeping and the
first indication that the act of singing or invoking is also a poetic act of
charity. For the coming alive and affirmation of the nights of lamentation
is a new awareness: human acts, as Elegy Seven reminded us, are not
only worthy when they produce tower or pylon, but also the qualities
of ‘Innerlichkeit’, mercy and pity. Thus, the grief-stricken nights (l. 8) of
weeping become the first of those elegiac mythical creations: the sisters
whom I did not (past tense now) recognize for what they were (did not
kneel before, whose hair untied for the rite of mourning I did not touch),
unaware as I was that ‘Schmerz’ is not only inextricably bound up with
existence, but actually has substance, more substance perhaps than a
life that is limited only by ‘Glück’. That knowledge and consciousness is
then transferred into a supremely beautiful poetic line: ‘Sie aber sind ja /
Unser winterwähriges Laub, unser dunkeles Sinngrün’ (ll. 12–13). Here
the metre and rhythm of a near-hexameter is utilized to bring out both
the possessives ‘unser’ but also the images of evergreen growth — with
a hidden touch in that ‘Sinngrün’ that needs a brief gloss. For one might
read ‘Sinngrün’ as a bold compound metaphor, playing on ‘Sinn’ as
sense, or even on the verb ‘sinnen’, contemplation or reflection. That
association would be legitimate. Yet ‘Sinngrün’ or ‘Singrün’ (from ‘sin-’,
long past, long ago) is the plant that in German is also called ‘Wintergrün’
or ‘Immergrün’, that grows on the graves of the dead — and in English
is the humble periwinkle, vinca minor. It is also one of the magic plants
that remind us of the primitive links between divination and poetry.22
Not only that: grief and sorrow are part of the ‘inner year’ of human
experience, that is ‘heimlich’ (l. 14), both familiar (related to ‘homely’)
and secret or hidden. And from the botanical, Rilke switches images

22 
Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, ed. by E. Hoffmann-Kray and Hanns
Bächtold-Stäuble, 10 vols (Berlin and Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1927–42), IV, 673–76;
Robert Graves, The White Goddess. A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London:
Faber, 1981), 323.
322 From Goethe to Gundolf

to ones (six in all) of human habitation, the ‘Wohnort’ (l. 15), the ‘Sitz
im Leben’, where we dwell, keeping the double association that we
have in English for the word ‘dwell’, for both the physical necessities
of existence and for the inner life. Both ‘Sinngrün’ and ‘Wohnort’ are,
metrically speaking, spondees, a feature of this elegy, with their equal
stress on both syllables. In this they are quite different from the distichs
of German classical verse, where the Greek or Latin spondee is normally
rendered by a trochee. Thus, many of the key words of the poem, the
most elegiac of the cycle, have a stately accentuation in both sense and
sound (‘Leid-Stadt’, ‘Leidland’, ‘Ur-Leid’).

Freilich, wehe, wie fremd sind die Gassen der Leid-Stadt,

wo in der falschen, aus Übertönung gemachten
Stille, stark, aus der Gußform des Leeren der Ausguß
prahlt: der vergoldete Turm, das platzende Denkmal.
20 O, wie spurlos zerträte ein Engel ihnen der Trostmarkt,
den die Kirche begrenzt, ihre fertig gekaufte:
reinlich und zu und entäuscht wie ein Postamt am Sonntag.
Draußen aber kräuseln sich immer die Ränder von Jahrmarkt.
Schaukeln der Freiheit! Taucher und Gaukler des Eifers!
25 Und des behübschten Glücks figürliche Schießstatt,
wo es zappelt von Ziel und sich blechern benimmt,
wenn ein Geschickterer trifft. Von Beifall zu Zufall
taumelt er weiter; denn Buden jeglicher Neugier
werben, trommeln und plärrn. Für Erwachsene aber
ist noch besonders zu sehn, wie das Geld sich vermehrt,
anatomisch,
30 alles, das Ganze, der Vorgang —, das unterrichtet und macht
fruchtbar ……..

Alas, though, how alien the streets of Grief City,

where in the counterfeit silence, made of a surfeit of noise,
blatantly struts the form that is cast in the mould
of emptiness: the tinselly din, the statue burst open.
20 O, how an angel would trample to nothing their Cure-All Fair,
with the church hard by, the one bought to order:
tidy and shut and forlorn like the Post on a Sunday.
But outside curl around still the amusement park’s edges.
Swings of Freedom! Acrobats of Enthusiasm!
25 And prettified happiness’ shooting gallery, befigured,
targets all jostling, each jangling the other,
 16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten: In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90 323

when a good marksman scores. From claps to chance-taking

on his way he lurches; for sideshows are there for the curious.
their barkers hailing and drumming. Adults Only!
30 Special attraction! The reproduction of money (anatomical
details),
not just for amusement: money’ s organs of gender;
the whole lot, nothing left out— , what they get up to — a
lesson and.
brings you results …….

The poem now breaks off abruptly from the fifteen verses that came to
Rilke in 1912. He had drafted quite a different continuation in 1913,23 with
a sustained nature image following on from ‘winterwähriges Laubwerk’
(the 1913 variant of ‘Sinngrün’). In 1922, however, nature was first to be
alienated before being given a function in the wider scheme of the poem.
That disjunction comes also in the marked and sudden incongruity of
‘alas, though’, the fairly colloquial ‘Freilich’ (l. 16) and the high-style
‘wehe’, the elegiac word that runs through the whole cycle. From
nature’s cycle, and a secure place of dwelling, we move to the ‘Leid-
Stadt’, where there is no dwelling-place, and a long, sustained catalogue
of all that is cheap and counterfeit and vulgar. This city of grief, this
Pandaemonium, has two aspects. First, there is a section where the very
strident awfulness produces a paradoxical kind of silence, a failure to
say (‘aus Übertönung gemachte Stille’, l. 17f.), where words like ‘Lärm’,
‘prahlt’ and ‘vergoldet’ set the tone. Note ‘der vergoldete Lärm’, like
‘sich blechern benimmt’ lower down, with their bold transference of
senses, as if the poet in his outrage cannot find the connecting links of
meaning. Is it a real city, like one of those ‘Plätze in Paris’ from Elegy
Five where Madame Lamort holds sway? Certainly the drumming
and general commotion is the same. Or is it, as some commentators
have suggested (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Romano Guardini), actually
the city graveyard, the necropolis, with its false pomp, a living proof
of how outwardness has triumphed over inwardness, of how even the
church — in Rilke’s fierce joke (‘wie ein Postamt am Sonntag’) — forms
one of the sides of the ‘Trostmarkt’ (l. 20) and is thus taken over by
commerce and brokerage. The angels — the last time, incidentally, that
we encounter them in the cycle and here in a kind of apocalyptic or

23 
DE, I, 90f., SW, III, 64ff.
324 From Goethe to Gundolf

eschatological role — not knowing any distinction between the inner

and the outer life, would crush this under foot, without trace, recalling
Expressionist images like Ludwig Meidner’s imploding cities or Georg
Heym’s visions of destruction. But already we hear the sounds of ‘roll
up, all the fun of the fair!’ In Elegy Nine, human achievement was
measured in terms of the craftsman’s art. Here, everything is dominated
by frauds, mountebanks and hucksters. Rilke’s Vanity Fair takes us from
sideshows of ’Freedom!’ to ’Enthusiasm!’ to ’Happiness!’ The images
become jangled and kaleidoscopically jumbled as the things to be won
in the shooting-galleries, and the shooters themselves, change sides, as
it were (the jumping for joy of the marksman is transferred to the targets
and prizes themselves). But, ‘you haven’t seen anything yet’. Adults
Only, anatomical waxwork displays that lay bare, with the lovelessness
of the sexologist’s manual, the sex act of money, money — that makes
this world go round. If, as I suggested, this prophetic wrath reminds us
of the Expressionists’ visions of destruction, their clean sweep through
material values, it is also where Rilke comes closest to The Waste Land.
Yet we should not forget that all along, he has not abandoned his
approximation to classical elegiac verse, and in l. 34 that tone begins to
reassert itself.

….Oh aber gleich darüber hinaus,

35 hinter der letzten Planke, beklebt mit Plakaten des “Todlos”,
jenes bitteren Biers, das den Trinkenden süß scheint,
wenn sie immer dazu frische Zerstreuungen kaun…,
gleich im Rücken der Planke, gleich dahinter, ists wirklich.
Kinder spielen, und Liebende halten einander, — abseits,
40 ernst, im ärmlichen Gras, und Hunde haben Natur.
Weiter noch zieht es den Jüngling; vielleicht, daß er eine junge
Klage liebt….. Hinter ihr her kommt er in Wiesen. Sie sagt:
Weit. Wir wohnen dort draußen…..
Wo? Und der Jüngling
45 folgt. lhn rührt ihre Haltung. Die Schulter, der Hals —,
vielleicht
ist sie von herrlicher Herkunft. Aber er läßt sie, kehrt um,
wendet sich, winkt… Was solls? Sie ist eine Klage.

….O but further beyond,

35 past the last billboards, stuck over with posters for ‘Deathless’,
that bitter beer that seems sweet to the drinkers
 16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten: In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90 325

only as long as they chew fresh distractions to go with it….

Past the boards, just beyond, there, things are real.
Children are playing, lovers embracing, — away from the
others,
40 pensive, on a few blades of grass, and dogs — do as dogs do.
The boy is drawn further on; perhaps he’s in love with a young
Lament. And he follows after her over the meadows. She says:
Far. We live away out there.
Where? And the boy
45 follows, touched by her walk, her shoulder, her neck , perhaps
she’s of noble descent. But he leaves her, turns round,
about once again, waves … What’s the point? She’s a Lament.

But (‘Oh, aber’), outside, beyond the last paling fence, there is the first
vestige of reality (‘wirklich’, Rilke’s italics). Note the fences plastered
with advertisements for that ‘unreal’ ale ‘Todlos’ (l. 35), for the denial
of death is, in the terms of this Elegy, a denial of any meaningful
existence. But how real, despite the underlining of ‘wirklich’, is this
bleak space outside the city? At most we could say that here there is
some freedom — for children, lovers and dogs — some demonstration
of feeling, but it isn’t much. But it is also a final glance, almost over
our shoulders, at three of the important strands and symbolic figures in
the landscape of the whole cycle: children, imperilled in their innocence
by death; lovers, who so seldom achieve a true meeting of souls; and
animals, who do not share our sense of death.
Although there is no break in the poetry, in that Rilke does not
introduce a space such as he will do later on, the poetry now enters a
new sphere. It leaves for good that world where all is counterfeit or half-
fulfilled. But before we enter into the new realm, we the readers should
not forget with what poetic virtuosity Rilke has castigated that false and
tinselly world, keeping a kind of prophetic anger sustained in the long
near-distichs and displaying his full powers of virtuosity in the images
of city and funfair. This is one side of the lament that this poem entails,
the lamentation over the great city.
But now we have ‘den Jüngling’ (my italics), unprepared,
presumably one of the young people or lovers, for whom the few blades
of grass provided a place for their feelings. As in the great set-piece
dream sequences in Romantic novels (and as in dreams themselves),
the transition into another sphere of consciousness is imperceptible. It
326 From Goethe to Gundolf

would seem that the realm of ‘Klage’ is but an extension of the so-called
‘real’ world. We must forget the reminiscences of Homer or Virgil or
Dante — or even of Rilke’s two great poems ‘Orpheus. Eurydice.
Hermes’ and ‘Alkestis’. For here there is no descent into the shades,
no passing through waters. And yet for all that we seem to be in some
kind of transitional realm between the city of suffering and the finality
of death. Here live ‘Klagen’, the expression and manifestation of pain
both suffered and articulated. But in this space, their country, there
is paradoxically more light and beauty than in the city that has been
left behind. The boy, who follows the ‘Klage’, is presumably still alive,
not yet ready to reflect on the ultimate futility of existence in the ‘Leid-
Stadt’, and certainly not yet ready to engage in a dialogue. He turns back
(‘Was solls’).

Nur die jungen Toten, im ersten Zustand

zeitlosen Gleichmuts, dem der Entwöhnung,
50 folgen ihr liebend. Mädchen
wartet sie ab und befreundet sie. Zeigt ihnen leise,
was sie an sich hat. Perlen des Leids und die feinen
Schleier der Duldung. — Mit Jünglingen geht sie
schweigend.

Only the young dead, unheeding,

untouched by time, taking slow leave of life,
50 follow her, loving. The girls
she waits for and offers them friendship. Shows them gently
what she is wearing. Pearls of Sorrow and the fine-woven
veils of Forbearance. — With boys she walks
in silence alongside them.

Only the young dead have this capacity, as they start their journey
towards the land of silence. We have to ask ourselves a question at the
outset of this journey. Leaving aside any notion of allegory: is ‘Klage’, the
articulation of grief, its poetic expression even, that which accompanies
the dead until they are, in the real sense, fully dead? For at the end of
the journey there can be no sound, all is ‘tonlos’ (l. 106). The passage
from life to death is made clear by the words ‘ersten Zustand’ and
‘Entwöhnung’ (l. 47f.): the Lament instructs and takes under her wing
the young dead and shows them things that life knew little of, ‘Duldung
 16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten: In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90 327

und Leid’ (l. 49f.) as garments of beauty. We note in passing that it is

the young maidens among the dead who are initiated into these secrets,
an extension of those ‘Früheentrückten’ (‘who have died too soon’) of
Elegy One who no longer need us, the living. But it is in fact the boy who
is led by an older Lament into the land of the dead. She tells him — and
us — of the landscape and history, the reality of expressed suffering, in
a sequence of poetry that, appropriately, is remarkable for its expansion
of line and its sonority and dignity.

55 Aber dort, wo sie wohnen, im Tal, der Älteren eine, der

Klagen,
nimmt sich des Jünglinges an, wenn er fragt:— Wir waren,
sagt sie, ein Großes Geschlecht, einmal, wir Klagen. Die Väter
trieben den Bergbau dort in dem großen Gebirg; bei Menschen
findest du manchmal ein Stück geschliffenes Ur-Leid
60 oder, aus altem Vulkan, schlackig versteinerten Zorn.
Ja, das stammte von dort. Einst waren wir reich. —

55 But there, where they live, in the valley, one of the older
Laments
answers kindly the boy as he asks: —We were,
she says, a Mighty Nation, once, we Laments. Our fathers
dug out the mines there in the high range of mountains; men
sometimes will show you an ancient fragment of Suffering,
polished,
60 or, out of a crater, Wrath, molten, rock-hardened.
Yes, we took it from there. Once we were rich. —

This world of the Laments we must sketch briefly. It is a real and also a
mythical landscape. It reflects a hierarchical order in the affairs of men
and in nature, where all the elements shown and explained to the boy
are extensions of the rites surrounding the dead. These are the Laments
that were once part of the rites of passage and departure. Rilke describes
them in his Requiem. Für eine Freundin/Requiem for a Lady Friend (1908) as
‘Klagefrauen’, whose duty is ‘Klagen nachholen’,24 serving the function
we know in all cultures, from the Celts to the Polynesians, to keen the
dirges in the elaborate and circumstantial channelling of grief into an
accessible ritual. This, as the older ‘Klage’ explains, was what once ruled

24 ‘Lamenting women’; ‘catching up the laments’. SW, I, 653.

328 From Goethe to Gundolf

this country: ’Wir waren, / sagt sie, ein Großes Geschlecht, einmal, wir
Klagen’. Where once there was delving and digging of the passions, the
bringing up out of the depths of ‘Ur-Leid’ and ‘Zorn’ — those familiar
with German Romanticism will recognize the potent symbols of mining
as self-discovery25 — we have archaeology. Now, there are just a few
pyroclastic fragments, and silence (the loss of that ‘aufsingen’ in lament).

Und sie leitet ihn leicht durch die weite Landschaft der
Klagen,
zeigt ihm die Säulen der Tempel oder die Trümmer
jener Burgen, von wo Klage-Fürsten das Land
65 einstens weise beherrscht. Zeigt ihm die hohen
Tränenbäume und Felder blühender Wehmut,
(Lebendige kennen sie nur als sanftes Blattwerk);
zeigt ihm die Tiere der Trauer, weidend, — und manchmal
schreckt ein Vogel und zieht, flach ihnen fliegend durchs
Aufschaun,
70 weithin das schriftliche Bild seines vereinsamten Schreis. —
Abends führt sie ihn hin zu den Gräbern der Alten
aus dem Klage-Geschlecht, den Sibyllen und Warn-Herrn.
Naht aber Nacht, so wandeln sie leiser, und bald
mondets empor, das über Alles
75 wachende Grab-Mal. Brüderlich jenem am Nil,
der erhabene Sphinx — : der verschwiegenen Kammer
Antlitz.
Und sie staunen dem krönlichen Haupt, das für immer,
schweigend, der Menschen Gesicht
80 auf die Waage der Sterne gelegt.

And with ease she guides him through the Laments’ wide
expanses,
shows him the columns of temples or the ruins of
fortresses, where the Laments’ princes
65 once held wise sway. Shows him the tall

25 Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1990), 18–63. Since I first wrote this article, my friend and colleague
Patrick Boyde (who discussed Elegy Four in the volume from which this essay is
taken) has drawn my attention to Rilke’s enthusiastic reading of the Gilgamesh
epic during the crucial years before the completion of the Elegies. The phrase
‘geschliffendes Urleid’ reminds us of the journey from life to an understanding of
death, which is common to both works, ‘Urleid’ summoning up the universal grief
that they also share.
 16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten: In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90 329

tear-trees and fields of Doleful in blossom

(known to the living only when it’s still in first leaf);
shows him the creatures of sadness, grazing — sometimes
a bird starts, and unfolds, flying low as they gaze upwards,
70 the pattern of letters made by her cry in the loneness .
At evening she leads him to the tombs of the patriarchs
of the race of Laments, the sybils and sages.
At nightfall their footstep is softer, and shortly,
bright as the moonlight, looms up
75 the tomb standing watch over all,
brother to that on the Nile, the lofty Sphinx:
face of the chamber hidden in silence.
And they take in with wonder the regal-crowned head, that
forever,
not speaking, laid the face of man
80 on the scales of the stars.

But the landscape also informs of a once wise order and rule — ‘einstens’
(l. 65) — now represented by a kind of Baalbek or Palmyra. The land
itself, is, however, still fertile with plants and herds, unlike the counterfeit
and sterile ‘Trostmarkt’ and ‘Leid-Stadt’ that now seems so far behind.
Note that ‘Wehmut’ — I have rendered it as Doleful — thrives here
and flowers; here the evergreen, the symbol and emblem of mourning,
actually bursts into flower. We hear, too, from l. 62 onwards, how the
verse sustains this account by assonating the many ‘ei-’ sounds: ‘Und sie
leitet ihn leicht durch die weite Landschaft der Klagen’, ‘einstens weise
beherrscht’, ‘Zeigt ihm die hohen’.
Two words stand out in the account that follows: ‘Aufschaun’ (l. 69)
and ‘Schaun’ (l. 82). They, and the word ‘zeigen’ (ll. 62, 64) that recurs
in the poem’s colophon (l. 107), indicate a strand of seeing and showing
and signifying and indicating that is part of the elegiac process, part
of the ‘aufsingen’. But it is also the sign of a set of extraordinary poetic
images that signify not just the poetic way of seeing, but the enhanced
vision that is granted to the dead and which (in the final image of the
poem), were they able, they would grant to us. Thus the bird (l. 68f.)
that suddenly starts up before our eyes transfers the sound of its cry
to a set of written characters; the optical and the aural are no longer
in separate compartments of perception. So, too, with the image of the
sphinx (l. 76f.) and the owl.
330 From Goethe to Gundolf

We have one or two details to clear up before we attempt that image.

It is night (note that wonderful ‘mondets empor’, l. 73); we are led
down to the figures of the doubly dead, who are dead in the realm of
death and exist only as monuments — to the dead. It isn’t Egypt, but
clearly we are in a valley of tombs where a culture similar to Egypt’s
once held sway,26 and we remember that no other culture gives death a
greater significance in its cosmogony. From now on, only the moon and
the stars shine down on the land of the dead. The bold verb ‘mondets
empor’ expresses the effect of seeing the most majestic death monument
of all, in the moonlight: the sphinx — ‘erhaben’, ‘krönlich’, the lord of
all in this land, where ‘Klage’ has its supreme place in the hierarchy of
emotions. The sphinx contains a burial chamber which is hidden and
inaccessible but which through ‘Schaun’ can be seen on the face of the
sphinx, and that face, expressing human features, has taken on such
a significance that it has, in Rilke’s image (l. 77f), been placed on the
balances of the stars (a double meaning, ‘Waage’ denoting a pair of
scales and also Libra), has become like Orion or Castor and Pollux, a
named constellation. And the scales of the stars might be taken to signify
the equipoise and harmony between life and death that is achieved in
this sphere between the two states.

Nicht erfaßt es sein Blick, im Frühtod

schwindelnd. Aber ihr Schaun,
hinter dem Pschent-Rand hervor, scheucht es die Eule. Und
sie,
streifend im langsamen Abstrich die Wange entlang,
85 jene der reifesten Rundung,
zeichnet weich in das neue
Totengehör, über ein doppelt
aufgeschlagenes Blatt, den unbeschreiblichen Umriß.

His gaze cannot grasp it, so early dead,

unsteady. But their beholding,
over the top of the diadem, scares out the owl. It,
slow in its flying, barely touching the cheek,
85 where it rounds at its fullest,
softly it draws into the new

26 
DE, I, 322.
 16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten: In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90 331

dead’s hearing, on both halves of the paper,

folded in two, the outline that hand cannot trace.

The boy, newly dead, cannot take in the awesomeness of this monument.
But ‘ihr Schaun’ (her looking, or their looking — it could be both, l. 82)
brings out from behind the ‘Pschent’ — a grandly exotic word for the
crown of Upper and Lower Egypt — an owl. Rilke in 1911, lying in the
moonlight in front of the sphinx, had seen just this.27 The newly dead
— and by implication we who mourn the young dead — need some
idea of the dimension of this state, through ‘Schaun’. The owl flies along
the cheek of the sphinx, the finest contour (‘die reifeste Rundung’) into
which the human face has been formed; it traces in the ear of the dead
that contour, records it acoustically ‘über ein doppelt aufgeschlagenes
Blatt’ (l. 87). As if taking a sheet of paper and folding it double to
indicate the two sides, the owl, non-articulate, but tracing with its wing,
and the ear, receiving the written character with the new ‘Totengehör’
(l. 87), make clear that our senses in death extend beyond any earthly
physical capacity.

Und höher, die Sterne. Neue. Die Sterne des Leidlands.

90 Langsam nennt sie die Klage: — Hier,
siehe: den Reiter, den Stab, und das vollere Sternbild
nennen sie: Fruchtkranz. Dann, weiter, dem Pol zu:
Wiege; Weg; Das Brennende Buch; Puppe; Fenster.
Aber im südlichen Himmel, rein wie im Innern
95 einer gesegneten Hand, das klar erglänzende “M”,
das die Mütter bedeutet…… —

Doch der Tote muß fort, und schweigend bringt ihn die älltere
Klage bis an die Talschlucht,
wo es schimmert im Mondschein:
100 die Quelle der Freude. In Ehrfurcht
nennt sie sie, sagt: — Bei den Menschen
ist sie ein tragender Strom. —

And higher, the stars. New ones. The stars of the Land of
Suffering.
90 The Lament names them slowly: — Here,

27 
DE, I, 97.
332 From Goethe to Gundolf

behold: the Rider, the Staff, and the cluster of stars

they call Garland of Fruits. Then further on, nearer the Pole:
Cradle; Path; The Burning Book; Puppet,· Window.
But in the southern skies, pure like the palm of a
95 hand that is blessed, ‘M’ burning clearly and brightly,
standing for Mothers…… —

But the dead boy must depart, and in silence the older
Lament brings him as far as the gorge of the valley,
where there gleams in the moonlight
100 the spring of joy. In hushed tone
she names it and says: — Among men
it is a mighty river. —

And so the Lament now shows the boy the constellations in the
heavens. They are all to be taken as symbols of different processes of
transition (‘Wiege’, ‘Weg’, ‘Stab’, ‘Reiter’) or of fruition and achievement
(‘Fruchtkranz’), of vision beyond oneself (‘Fenster’), of hope and
renewal (‘Puppe’, both in the sense of Elegy Four and in the meaning
of chrysalis). Horses and riders in the stars fascinated him in other
contexts (‘Heißt kein Stembild “Reiter?”’, ‘Is there no star called Rider?’
ask the Sonette an Orpheus I, xi, and a late poem of 1924 likens falling
stars to horses).28 The burning book might seem to be the poetic icon, in
the German one letter away from the burning bush (‘not consumed’),
giving light and being incandescent in itself. Rilke is, of course, playing
on existing names of constellations, like ‘Puppis’, or stars, like ‘Vega’
(‘Wega’ in German), adding a few of his own, equally concrete and exotic.
They culminate in that ‘M’, lighting up the whole of the southern sky
(Job’s ‘chambers of the south’, 9:9; the ‘W’ of Cassiopeia upside down), a
good luck sign in palmistry, but reminding us that mothers, in the terms
of these elegies (especially Elegy Six), are also destined to lose what
they have borne. Speech now has no further function — ‘schweigend’ l.
96 — as the Lament brings the boy through the last stages of his journey
towards silence. She has imparted her wisdom to him — and in a sense
the poet, through the poetic act, is imparting it to those who mourn the
young dead. The mourning learn that the dead have the ‘sense’ of their
dying explained to them in the wisdom of the ‘Klagekulturen’ that are

28 
SW, I, 737
 16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten: In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90 333

unfolded before them (not, we note, through a theogony that makes of

death a mystery or a terror). The ‘Quelle der Freude’ (l. 99) suggests
perhaps that there is an inner link between grief and joy; it is that which
may spring up again in those who are left behind ‘bei den Menschen’ (l.
100) in mourning.

Stehn am Fuß des Gebirgs.

Und da umarmt sie ihn, weinend.
105 Einsam steigt er dahin, in die Berge des Ur-Leids.
Und nicht einmal sein Schritt klingt aus dem tonlosen Los.
*

They halt at the foot of the mountains.

And there she embraces him, weeping.
105 Alone he makes his way up into the mountains of
Once-Suffering.
Not even the ring of his steps is heard, his lot is silence.
*

The poetry becomes more laconic and poignant as the language of

lament gives way to silence: ‘stehn am Fuß des Gebirgs’ (l. 103), ’da
umarmt sie ihn’ (l. 104), ‘Einsam steigt er dahin’ (l. 105). We learn
nothing of the nature of the ‘Ur-Leid’ (l. 105); only he will experience
that in the loneliness of death. He is no longer accessible to lament or
even language. When laments are silent, when the ‘Klage’ is no longer
with the young dead, he is dead in the sense that he belongs to those
whose loss we can now bear, or to those who we know are in the land of
silence and forgetfulness (‘das tonlose Los’, l. 105).

Aber erweckten sie uns, die unendlich Toten, ein Gleichnis,

siehe, sie zeigten vielleicht auf die Kätzchen der leeren
Hasel, die hängenden, oder
110 meinten den Regen, der fällt auf dunkles Erdreich im
Frühjahr. —

Und wir, die an steigendes Glück

denken, empfänden die Rührung,
die uns beinah bestürzt,
wenn ein Glückliches fällt.
334 From Goethe to Gundolf

But were they to waken for us, the endlessly dead, a symbol,
behold, they would point to the catkins on the bare
hazel, hanging downwards, or
110 have us believe in the rain that falls on the dark soil in
springtime. —

And we, who think of happiness

rising, our hearts would be moved
more than perhaps we could bear,
when a happy thing falls.

There Rilke will not leave us, in total silence, with no words, no sound.
We come back to that ‘would that’, ‘would but’ of the elegy’s opening
that told us what, but for our inadequacy, would be the true purpose
and function of the poetic act. They, ‘die unendlich Toten’ (l. 107), are
beyond articulation, but were they able, they would give us this likeness.
It is a double image, one of the hanging catkins on the hazel bush, and
of the spring rain on the ground (‘Erdreich’, l. 110, suggesting perhaps
already dug for cultivation). Rilke was not always secure in his botany,
despite the many flower and plant images in his poetry, not least in
this cycle. The conceit of the fig tree in Elegy Six is not encouraging.
In fact, Rilke originally wanted the willow catkin to express the image
of hanging and falling,29 but, as anyone knows, it does not hang down.
The alteration is significant, not just for getting the facts right, but for
assuring the integrity of the text, for the ‘Ding’ must be congruent if it
is also to be charged with meaning. Botany aside, and Rilke’s intention
with the image aside, we note that he has chanced on an image that
may go beyond his original first association: the hanging catkins of the
male flower. But then it is unlikely that he ’chanced’ on anything. These
flowers are in themselves not fertile, they cannot produce fruit on their
own, but they are the promise of it. Similarly, the rain is not the fertility
itself, but it brings about the process of fruition and plenitude. Was
he thinking of the hazel’s other associations, as one of the first of the
bushes of the hedgerows to show blossom? It is a magic plant,30 revered
in many religions, but notably the Germanic, and for that reason it is
the twig used for the water-diviner’s rod. The German for that rod is

29 
DE, I, 269.
30 
Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, III, 1527–42.
 16. Rilke: Duino Elegy Ten: In memoriam Leslie Seiffert, 1934–90 335

‘Wünschelrute’, itself the title of one of the shortest, but most telling
poems in the language, informing of the power of poetry to open up
the secrets of the things around us, ‘die Dinge’. It is Eichendorff’s little
poem:

Schläft ein Lied in allen Dingen,

Die da träumen fort und fort,
Und die Welt hebt an zu singen,
Triffst du nur das Zauberwort.31

There sleeps a song in all the things

Dreaming on and on,
And the world begins its singing
If you touch the magic word.

The catkin and the rain, which fall, are the symbols of this final colophon
of verses. But does not hope spring eternal in the human breast; does not
our heart leap up when we behold; and is this poem not prefaced with
the poet’s action upwards in that verb ‘aufsingen’? No, we experience
‘Rührung’ (l. 113), implying being touched by the emotions — to our
surprise (‘Bestürzung’, l. 114) — when hopes of happiness are dashed,
when, in the terms of the poem, a young life is unfulfilled; but we come
by the same token to the realisation that the so-called unfulfilled life
may have its own happiness. That is perhaps one aspect. The other is
the awareness that the sadness produced by falling is overcome in the
hope of life that emerges from it. Rilke himself claimed that this should
not be taken to imply a cyclical movement, some kind of mere biological
organic process;32 instead, the gesture of falling in itself brings happiness.
We might, however, feel justified in setting his view aside. There is the
evidence of another poem; from the year 1922, with the same imagery,
where rain and earth, respectively, represent the processes of death and
mourning.33 And the Elegies urge us to a resolution by the very fact of

31 Joseph von Eichendorff, Neue Gesamtausgabe der Werke und Schriften, ed. by Gerhard
Baumann and Siegfried Grosse, 4 vols (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1957), I, 112.
32 According to Katharina Kippenberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien. Die Sonette
an Orpheus, Manesse Bibliothek der Weltliteratur (Zurich: Manesse, 1951), 172.
Thus, Rilke would seem to stand in marked contrast to the thinking of Wilhelm
Fliess, with whose views on life and death he was familiar (DE, I, 137f.). Cf. ‘Der
Tod schafft nach einer bewundernswürdigen Ordnung Raum für das erwachende
Leben’. Wilhelm Fliess, Vom Leben und vom Tod. Biologische Vorträge (Jena: Diederichs,
1924), 93.
33 DE, I, 218.
336 From Goethe to Gundolf

their being a cycle, but not to any easy or mundane conclusion, neatly
tied up and of an easy consistency for all readers. Instead, there is the
awareness that poetry mediates, but in an interreaction of language
and symbol that is never direct. We search therefore for indications of
resolution, perhaps in terms of that ‘Quelle der Freude’ (l. 100) that the
Lament mentions in awe (‘in Ehrfurcht’). But it can be no coincidence
that both the poem and the whole cycle end on the word ‘fällt’ (Rilke’s
italics). The elegiac verse can also be read in a way that is different
from the printed image, where the lines tail off into a colophon (and
a colophon was originally the printer’s signature; here it is the poet’s).
Run the third-last and the fourth-last lines together and the last two,
and you will find a couplet that bears some resemblance to the elegiac
distich (it’s actually closer to two pentameters). Any correctly turned
distich will end on a strong beat — it has to — but only the great elegy
will end on a strong beat and a word that sums up the whole of what
has gone before. Hölderlin’s ‘Brod und Wein’, that some might see as the
very greatest elegy in the language, does it with the final word ‘schläft’.
Rilke’s, certainly one of the greatest, achieves it with the word ‘fällt’.
BOOKS
Fig. 27 Bust of Julius Hare by Thomas Woolner (1861). The Wren Library, Trinity
College, Cambridge. Photo by James Kirwan. Courtesy of the Master and
Fellows of Trinity College.
 17. Julius Hare’s German Books
in Trinity College Library,
Cambridge1

I begin this chapter with a personal reminiscence. In the spring of 1973,

Trinity College, Cambridge, anxious to find a lecturer in German, took the
(for Trinity, at least) unusual step of advertising for suitable candidates
and interviewing them, myself included. With time on my hands before
the interview, I decided to examine the German holdings in the College
library. Somewhat awed by my surroundings, I proceeded to scrutinize
the catalogue entries. Beginning with Johann Wolfgang Goethe, I
noted the Ausgabe letzter Hand, not a bad start, but became increasingly
surprised to find items like Kunst und Altertum and various biographical
works or collections of letters, such as Johann Peter Eckermann, Friedrich
Wilhelm Riemer or even Bettina von Arnim’s preposterous Goethes
Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde/Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child — all in

1 This chapter was originally published in Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical

Society 9 (1987), 174–93. Since I wrote this essay, the situation in Cambridge
regarding rare German holdings mainly from the Romantic period has changed
considerably. The Renouf Collection in Newnham College has been catalogued
and made available for scholars. Largely consisting of material relevant to Clemens
Brentano and his family, and far less extensive than Hare’s collection, it nevertheless
has important overlaps with Hare and also some significant extensions. In addition,
the Crewe Collection of rare books and manuscripts, in Trinity College since 2016,
contains a small but important number of German items. Whereas in my original
version of 1987 I checked titles against the British Library Catalogue and the National
Union Catalog, I have now been able to update information on Hare’s collection
from COPAC (which has since been replaced by Jisc Library Hub Discover) and
WorldCat. I have, however, on occasions noted that neither online source has
complete coverage of Hare’s titles. My information on comparative holdings in the
UK and elsewhere does not include electronic resources and is restricted to actual
original printed copies (not reprints).

© 2021 Roger Paulin, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0258.17

340 From Goethe to Gundolf

first edition. Encouraged by this unexpected find, I proceeded to look

up Ludwig Tieck, on whose biography I was then working. Again, a
massive entry, with about one third of his works — in first edition. No
collection in Britain outside the British Library seemed likely to possess
such holdings. I tried other German Romantics — the Schlegel brothers,
Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, E. T. A. Hoffmann — with
similar results. I was informed that most of the books formed part of the
‘Hare collection’. There was no time for more details; my interview was
imminent. Whether the hope some day of being allowed to use the said
Hare collection gave me utterance during the proceedings that followed,
I cannot say. I was appointed, I did use the books extensively, and have
recorded my debt elsewhere.2 It is only now, however, that I come to
substantiate it in a more systematic form.
The name of Julius Charles Hare (1795–1855) is not unknown to
students of English intellectual history of the 1820s, to classical scholars,
to historians of the early Victorian church, and to readers of his nephew
Augustus J. C. Hare’s highly interesting and respectful Memorials of a Quiet
Life and his distinctly iconoclastic The Story of My Life. N. Merrill Distad’s
biography of Hare, Guessing at Truth (1979),3 adapts the title of Hare’s
best-known work, written together with his brother Augustus, Guesses
at Truth (1827). There is a singular appropriateness in this use of title;
for Guesses at Truth, a miscellany of essays and aphorisms, Coleridgean
in sweep yet acknowledging a ‘self-controul’4 that, Hare claimed, the
older man lacked, is a work which displays the very considerable range
of intellectual competence on which Hare could draw.
In one of his many disrespectful asides concerning his stern and
forbidding uncle, Julius, Augustus J. C. Hare claimed that Hare had paid
homage to ‘five popes’:5 William Wordsworth, Barthold Georg Niebuhr,
Karl Josias von Bunsen, Frederick Maurice and Henry Edward Manning.
If this were true, the list displayed a considerable eclecticism, indeed it
might be difficult to reconcile these five several pontifical claims. The
task is less problematic than it may seem: Maurice, Hare’s brother-in-
law, represents the claims of the Broad Church to which Hare adhered,
he never concealing the pain which the Tractarian movement and, most
acutely, Manning’s defection caused him; Wordsworth (one could also
say Samuel Taylor Coleridge) stands for the high moral and intellectual

2 Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), viii.
 17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge
 341

claims of the English Romantics, best displayed in Wordsworth’s

reflective poetry; with Bunsen and Niebuhr, we come closer to our real
object of concern: Germany.
The circle around Baron Bunsen in Rome and London represented
a world of political conservatism, religious tolerance, and theological
liberalism both for the young Hare and for the later archdeacon of Lewes.
It is fair to say that Bunsen, who combined scholarship and piety with
all the advantages of the grand monde, mediated to Hare in person what
a much greater and more influential figure could only pass on through
the printed word: Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher had been
the particular province of Hare’s friend and Trinity contemporary,
Connop Thirlwall, his first translator into English. With Thirlwall, Hare
had translated Niebuhr’s History of Rome. That translation, its first two
volumes appearing in 1828–32, was a token of Hare’s commitment to the
new German school of classical scholarship, indeed it has been claimed
that Hare’s German leanings may well have been the reason for his
having been passed over for the Regius Chair of Greek in Cambridge
in 1825.6
Hare’s love of Germany and its literature and culture was fostered
at an early age. He had been with his parents when they spent some
time in Weimar at Duke Carl August’s court in 1804–05; it was the
year of Friedrich Schiller’s death; they had met Goethe.7 If Julius Hare,
on his return to England, had needed encouragement in the study of
languages and philology, he had only to reflect that his mother’s sister
had been married to none other than Sir William Jones. Yet the Germans
had a place second to none in Hare’s intellectual affections. Coleridge
and Thomas Carlyle made similar claims; but their own creative powers
meant that they drew on things German as and when it suited. Hare, on
the other hand, was indebted to German ‘Wissenschaft’ as a scholarly
principle. It is interesting to note him writing in 1820 of the brothers
August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel as having raised the art of
criticism ‘to the dignity of a scientific art’.8 We perceive Hare’s difficulties
with the German word ‘wissenschaftlich’, which his friend and
contemporary William Whewell was also to render as ‘scientific’. Behind

7 According to Augustus J. C. Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life, 3 vols (London: Smith

Elder, 1884), I, 191.
8 Olliers Literary Miscellany, 4.
342 From Goethe to Gundolf

it all is, however, the sense that German scholarly and critical method
had carried the day. Yet underlying this insight is the awareness that the
Germans have never merely ‘guessed at truth’, but have proceeded from
philosophical universals; they have, in Hare’s own words, ‘made nearer
approaches to speculative truth than any other nation’.9
John Sterling, Hare’s close friend, briefly his curate at Hurstmonceux,
expressed better than most this sense of the Germans’ genius as it
appeared to their British disciples. In the essay, Characteristics of German
Genius of 1842, Sterling saw them in terms of ‘elevation and fulness’,10 as the
nation that most approached the Greeks in their ‘universal importance’.11
Their very plurality, the absence of a capital city that arbitrated over
fashion and taste, the stimulus of their universities as compared with
Oxford and Cambridge, their ‘reflection’,12 ‘Earnestness of heart’13 as a
Protestant culture — all these could be cited in their favour. This is, one
might say, Carlyle without the fulsomeness. But the Edinburgh Review in
1836 had not shrunk from a comparison of modern German literature
with the age of Shakespeare.14 Sterling and his Cambridge friends are,
however, concerned to extend the claims of German universality beyond
the confines of mere belles-lettres, to encompass the ‘three great forms
assumed by the genius of the Germans, — in History, Philosophy, and
Poetry’.15 The list of German notabilities produced by Sterling, while
registering the additional point that all were born Protestant, deserves
attention:

Leibnitz Hegel
Frederick II Schleiermacher
Lessing Eichhorn
Winkelmann Johannes Müller
Klopfstock Jean Paul Richter
Herder 2 Stolbergs

9 Letter to Edmund Venables, September 6, 1844, quoted in Hare, Memorials of a Quiet

Life, III, 250.
10 John Sterling, ‘Characteristics of German Genius’, in Essays and Tales, ed. by Julius
Charles Hare, 2 vols (London: Parker, 1848), II, 383.
11 Ibid., 384.
12 Ibid., 406.
13 Ibid., 409.
14 The Edinburgh Review (Oct. 1836), xcii, 334.
15 Sterling, ‘Characteristics of German Genius’, 417.
 17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge
 343

Hamann 2 Schlegels
Wieland 2 Humboldts
F. H. Jacobi Novalis
Goethe Tieck
Schiller F. A. Wolf
Kant Voss
Fichte Niebuhr
Schelling Savigny.

Add the dramatist Zacharias Werner, a convert to Catholicism,

and discount one or two other conversions (and correct ‘Leibniz’,
‘Winckelmann’ and ‘Klopstock’) and you have a very impressive
list indeed of poets, philosophers, historians and philologists. It is,
interestingly enough, a list that continues the direction given nearly two
generations earlier by Madame de Staël in De l’Allemagne/On Germany.
We need to understand this sense of German achievement — as
seen through English eyes — if we are to appreciate Julius Hare, the
book collector. For in translating not only Niebuhr’s History of Rome but
also a work each by Tieck and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Hare was
showing at the outset of his scholarly and literary career that German
poetry and scholarship went hand in hand as evidence of that ‘reflection’
and universality. Goethe, whom Hare in 1832 on hearing of his death
called the ‘mightiest spirit that this earth has seen, since Shakespeare
left it’,16 would illustrate in one person that range of genius. The German
Romantics, the brothers Schlegel or Tieck in their turn concentrated one’s
line of vision on a higher fraternity of supernal genius that transcends
national and chronological barriers, those ‘archpoets’ that embody the
highest of human endeavour. It was fitting therefore that Augustus J.
C. Hare should commemorate his uncle by quoting a letter containing
the wide sweep of ‘Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Raphael, Phidias’.17
For Hare’s books do in fact take in the range of classical antiquity, the
Romance languages (especially Italian), German and English literature,
the fine arts, and all kinds of antiquarian and historical scholarship.

16 Augustus J. C. Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life, I, 429.

17 Ibid., II, 186.
344 From Goethe to Gundolf

How did Hare come by his books? Already in 1825, Henry Crabb
Robinson, diarist and gossip, noted in the course of a visit to Cambridge
and Hare:

I had great pleasure in looking over his library of German books — the
best collection of modern German books I have ever seen in England.18

If Hare’s rooms in Trinity were ample enough for his collection, then
his archidiaconal quarters at Hurstmonceux seem to have been hardly
adequate for the ever-increasing number of volumes. His nephew,
remembering the house more for chastisements and ‘endless sermons’,19
did concede that the library at Hurstmonceux was a place to be held in
one’s memory:

Inside it was lined with books from top to bottom: not only the living
rooms, but the passages and every available space in the bedrooms were
walled with bookcases from floor to ceiling, containing more than 14,000
works. Most of these were German, but there were many very beautiful
books upon art in all languages..20

A. P. Stanley’s memoir of Hare is more deferential, culminating, perhaps

not merely by chance, in an image of organic growth that would have
pleased Coleridge, emanating from the intellectual and spiritual world
of Johann Gottfried Herder and the German Romantics. We note too the
Baconian image of the tree of knowledge:

It was not merely a house with a good library — the whole house was
a library. The vast nucleus which he brought with him from Cambridge
grew year by year, till not only study, and drawing-room, and dining
­room, but passage, and antechamber, and bedrooms were overrun with
the ever-advancing and crowded bookshelves. At the time of his death
it had reached the number of more than 12,000 volumes; and it must
be further remembered that these volumes were of no ordinary kind.
Of all libraries which it has been our lot to traverse, we never saw any
equal to this in the combined excellence of quantity and quality; none in

18 Henry Crabb Robinson und seine deutschen Freunde. Brücke zwischen England und
Deutschland im Zeitalter der Romantik, ed. by Hertha Marquardt and Kurt Schreinert,
Palaestra, 237, 249 (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1964, 1967), II, 102. On
Hare’s dealings with the London bookseller John Henry Bohte, see Graham
Jefcoate, An Ocean of Literature: John Henry Bohte and the Anglo-German Book Trade in
the Early Nineteenth Century (Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Olms, 2020), esp. 129f.
19 Augustus J. C. Hare, The Story of My Life, I, 109.
20 Ibid., 80f.
 17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge
 345

which there were so few worthless, so many valuable works. Its original
basis was classical and philological; but of later years the historical,
philosophical, and theological elements outgrew all the rest. The
peculiarity which distinguished the collection probably from any other,
private or public, in the kingdom, was the preponderance of German
literature. No work, no pamphlet of any note in the teeming catalogues
of German booksellers escaped his notice; and with his knowledge of the
subjects and of the probable elucidation which they would receive from
this or that quarter, they formed themselves in natural and harmonious
groups round what already existed, so as to give to the library both the
appearance and reality, not of a mere accumulation of parts, but of an
organic and self-multiplying whole. And what perhaps was yet more
remarkable was the manner in which the centre of this whole was himself.
Without a catalogue, without assistance, he knew where every book was
to be found, for what it was valuable, what relation it bore to the rest.
The library was like a magnificent tree which he had himself planted, of
which he had nurtured the growth, which spread its branches far and
wide over his dwelling, and in the shade of which he delighted, even if
he was prevented for the moment from gathering its fruits or pruning its
luxuriant foliage.21

Hare may have incorporated into his own collection, the libraries of
German books handed down from his father and brother. He clearly had
no intention, however, of merely guarding an inheritance. As collections
of German books go, Hare’s was larger than Alexander von Humboldt’s
and began to approach Tieck’s or Johann Joachim Eschenburg’s. As
with so many German collectors, it is likely that Hare’s attitude to his
books was not one of mere connoisseurship but was tempered with
more practical considerations. His nephew claimed that the books were
intended as a ‘provision’,22 that is, an investment, for his wife Esther; his
collection of pictures similarly. We may be grateful that Esther Hare saw
fit to present the best part of the library to Trinity, while remarking that
her generosity may well have exceeded her sense of the prudential. For
the Hares and Maurices were, in nineteenth-century terms, not wealthy
families.
The books themselves are in most cases individually bound in
leather, often with tooled decoration. Very few of the German books
have original bindings, reflecting the habit of the time to have volumes,

21 A. P. Stanley, ‘Archdeacon Hare’, The Quarterly Review 97 (June-Sept. 1855), 1–128
(8f.).
22 Augustus J. C. Hare, The Story of My Life, I, 484.
346 From Goethe to Gundolf

often issued in paper, made up to individual specifications. The Hare

collection, as originally housed in free-standing cases in the main
concourse of the Wren Library, must have presented a fine array of
Victorian bindings. Today, confined to a bookstore, its external merits
are less easily discerned. It remains a consolation, however, that users
of the Wren Library approaching it from its side access, after passing
between the busts of Thirlwall, Whewell and Alfred Tennyson and
before coming to the uncharacteristically décolleté James Frazer, may
pay their respects before Thomas Woolner’s prominently displayed
enigmatic bust of Hare.
The books, although in many cases hardly, if ever, used since their
incorporation into Trinity’s collection, were not intended by Hare as mere
scholarly decoration. Pencil marginalia, especially in periodicals, give
ample evidence of extensive and discriminating use. These marginalia,
on the other hand, are restricted largely to lists of contributors to
periodicals, and cross-references, always in pencil. Many of these I
have found useful — and always accurate. Hare the scholar-bibliophile
did not deface his books: we understand perhaps his refusal to lend
volumes to Coleridge,23 who ‘used’ his books differently. Yet Coleridge’s
range of German reading — from Martin Luther to Schleiermacher, in
all kinds of disciplines and speculative indisciplines — is very similar
to Hare’s. Guesses at Truth, while in no sense really comparable with
Biographia literaria, does make abundantly clear that Hare’s appreciation
of German literature and scholarship went hand in hand with the
particular emphases of his own collection. ‘The very first novel I have
happened to take up since writing the above, Arnim’s Dolores…’, ‘Thus
too Solger, writing about his dialogues to Tieck…’, ‘Niebuhr applied
this…’, ‘ingeniously remarkt by Francis Horn…’,24 are phrases culled
from just a few pages of the work, giving some small indication of Hare’s
acquaintance with German belles-lettres and critical scholarship.
All of Hare’s contemporaries acknowledged that German was the
main foundation of his collection. There is however rich material for the
student of Italian (the sixteenth-century editions of Giordano Bruno, for

23 Cf. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–71), IV, 1019.
24 [A. W. and J. C. Hare], Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers (London, New York:
Macmillan, 1880), 55, 59, 61, 72.
 17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge
 347

instance, that he was unwilling to lend to Coleridge);25 and the historian

of the early Victorian church will find the tract material of the period
very fully represented. Despite confining ourselves to German, we are
not withholding the real substance.
A foretaste of what Hare’s books contain may be gained merely
by taking one single made-up volume of ‘PAMPHLETS’, containing
twelve miscellaneous German items. Number 1, Eduard Eversmann’s
Reise von Orenburg nach Buchara (Berlin, 1823),26 a work of Central Asian
ethnography, with appended Afghan word-list, is listed in five other
libraries in COPAC. Following it, as Number 2, is the German Romantic
magazine Zeitung für Einsiedler (including Tröst Einsamkeit) (Heidelberg,
1808), Achim von Arnim’s contribution to the curious, the bizarre and
the national, in German poetry. It is the finest copy I have ever seen,
with engravings of original freshness, far outstripping the reprint which
many libraries hold. Numbers 3 to 6 are lectures by the Jena speculative
scientist, Lorenz Oken, all given there between 1808 and 1809. The
British Library’s copy of the polemically anti-Newtonian Erste Ideen
zur Theorie des Lichts […] (Jena, 1808) has annotations by Coleridge.
Of the other three, Hare’s copy of Ueber das Universum als Fortsetzung
des Sinnensystems (Jena, 1808) is the sole entry in COPAC. There are
copies in Paris and Harvard, but seemingly nowhere in Germany.
Grundzeichnung des natürlichen Systems der Erze (Jena, 1809) is COPAC’s
but not WorldCat’s only copy. Ueber den Werth der Naturgeschichte (also
Jena 1809) is not even listed in COPAC, while Weimar has Goethe’s copy.
Number 7, Adam Müller’s Von der Idee des Staates und ihren Verhältnissen
zu den populären Staatstheorien, a lecture on political economy (Dresden,
1808), is the separately issued first part of his Die Elemente der Staatskunst
(of which the only other copy in COPAC is in the British Library) and is
the sole entry in COPAC. Number 8, Joseph Görres’s Teutschlands künftige
Verfassung (n.p., 1814) is the reprint of an article in his Rheinischer Merkur,
and as such not listed in COPAC. It may well be unique. Neither 7 nor
8 is listed in WorldCat. Number 9, Bernhard Joseph Docen’s Ueber die
Ursachen der Fortdauer der lateinischen Sprache (Munich, 1815), an academy
lecture, has three hits in COPAC. Two further Munich academy lectures,

25 Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, IV, 1019.

26 NB: Many of the German titles in this chapter are too esoteric to satisfyingly
translate into English, and therefore no translation has been supplied.
348 From Goethe to Gundolf

numbers 10 and 11, by Friedrich Thiersch, Ueber die Epochen der bildenden
Kunst unter den Griechen (Munich, 1816, 1819, 1829) are represented in
COPAC in part by the London Library and the Cambridge Faculty of
Classics, omitting to say that Hare’s is the full set (Harvard University
seems to have the only other). The twelfth item, a work of archaeology
and comparative mythology, Peter von Köppen’s Die dreygestaltete Hekate
und ihre Rolle in den Mysterien (Vienna, 1823), is in Birmingham and
Cambridge, but COPAC does not list Trinity’s copy.
The sheer range of these ‘PAMPHLETS’, not merely their occasional
rarity, gives an accurate impression of Hare’s sweep of interest: religion,
archaeology, science, classical philology, as well as all manifestations of
literature. One volume may thus serve as an introduction to the whole
collection. Pride of place must nevertheless go to Hare’s collection of
Luther, a made-up set of first printings of all the German-language
pamphlets and sermons from 1518 to 1545, described in detail by
Adams. This collection immediately places Trinity in the forefront
among Cambridge Luther holdings, well supplemented, among others,
by the Aldis Wright bequests. Luther is central to Hare’s own position
on German theology and thought, a position easily accommodated to
the more modern thinking of Schleiermacher and one to be defended
against the radical views of a David Friedrich Strauss. Backed up as they
are by an eighteenth-century set of Luther’s works (Sämtliche Schriften/
Complete Works, Halle 1739–50) from the centre of German pietism, the
Luther holdings, we must assume, are a scholar-theologian’s working
collection.
There are among Hare’s German books no other items from this
early period in original editions, Hare clearly seeing no merit in the
accumulation of early theological works as such. His theological
collection does in the main take in what are the salient developments
in German religious thought as seen through the eyes of Coleridge’s
generation. There is, after Luther, a leap in time to the first complete
set of Jacob Böhme’s works (Amsterdam, 1682), doubtless the ‘Behmen’
that he also refused to lend to less-than-reliable Coleridge27 (we note,
in passing, the Spinoza Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of 1674, which has
eight hits in COPAC but which does not list Hare’s copy). The eighteenth

27 Ibid.
 17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge
 349

century is represented by the father of German pietism, Jakob Spener,

and the chiliast Johann Albrecht Bengel. It is only when we come to the
late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth that we see
Hare’s declared interest in German theology taking in the broadest of
spectrums. The Romantic trinity of Luther, Böhme and Schleiermacher
gives way to a seeming heterodoxy of nineteenth-century theological
opinion: the evangelical devotional sermons of Claus Harms or the
sternly Protestant conservatism of Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg on
the one hand, and the up-to-date biblical criticism of Johann August
Ernesti, Ferdinand Christian Baur, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette,
Hermann Olshausen, Heinrich Wilhelm Josias Thiersch and August
Tholuck, on the other. In the centre stands the commanding figure of
Schleiermacher, represented by the first complete edition (Sämmtliche
Werke/Collected Works, Berlin, 1838–64) and various separate items,
also a number of contemporary studies or pamphlets on him. Of
special interest is the first edition of the Vertraute Briefe über Fr. Schlegels
Lucinde (Lübeck, 1800, five hits in COPAC excluding Hare), illustrating
a side of Schleiermacher that might not necessarily appeal to the
severely decorous Hare. He, however, not only possessed this work
of Schleiermacher’s, but also the cause of it, Friedrich Schlegel’s novel
Lucinde (1799), a work of some erotic daring (and some tedium) that
sets out the German Romantics’ views on the equality of the sexes in
matters both of the body and the spirit (COPAC lists British Library and
Hare; the first edition is generally rare). Schleiermacher’s defence of this
novel, coming from the chaplain of the Berlin Charité hospital, was to
say the least controversial. It illustrates the largeness and the broadness
of the Romantic sense of religion, a force which pervades all areas of life
and culture.
It is therefore not surprising that Hare’s library is strong on what
might generally be called ‘religion’ or philosophy of religion. That
would extend from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, David Friedrich
Strauss, to comparative religion and mythology proper. Strauss’s Das
Leben Jesu is there in its first edition (Tübingen, 1835), as are various
other of Strauss’s works and studies on him; an indication that Hare,
while not endorsing the position of George Henry Lewes and George
Eliot, was fully aware of the appeal of this kind of critical theology. For
the same reason, we find at least one early work by Ludwig Feuerbach
350 From Goethe to Gundolf

(Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, Ansbach, 1837). It is typical of Hare’s

thoroughness that, where significant or controversial figures were
involved, he assembled memoirs, pamphlets and ephemera, as say in
connection with Strauss’s Leben Jesu or after Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel’s and Goethe’s deaths. I have it on good authority that the
pamphlet collection on Hegel is extraordinary. Hegelians might also
note the presence of an almost complete set of the rare Jahrbücher für
Theologie und christliche Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main, 1834–36) which
is important for the reception of Hegel.
Similarly, Schelling, the most influential Romantic philosopher, is
present in a wide range of works. We note the first edition of his System
der Naturphilosophie (Jena, 1799), and early editions of Philosophie und
Religion/Philosophy and Religion (Tübingen, 1804) and Weltseele (third
edition, Hamburg, 1809). We recollect that Coleridge annotated his
copy of Philosophie und Religion. The various stages of Schelling’s career,
from Jena to the secretaryship of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences to
the chair at the University of Berlin, from philosophical avant-garde
to academic establishment, are recorded faithfully in Hare’s collection
of over forty-five volumes. Similar espousals of orthodoxy, Catholic
or Protestant, after beginnings in less established spheres, were to be
found in other representatives of German religious life of the period.
The issue in 1820–25 of the Gesammelte Werke of the brothers Friedrich
Leopold and Christian von Stolberg, in the fine edition by Friedrich
Perthes in Hamburg, marked the progress of these two noblemen
from the Storm and Stress (and association with Goethe) to a dynamic
Neoclassicism and to an eventual, and spectacular, conversion to Rome
in 1800. Friedrich Stolberg’s name is inseparable from the welter of
Romantic conversions to Catholicism after that date. Hare’s set of the
Perthes Stolberg is the finest I have seen; but we should not overlook
his Geschichte der Religion Jesu Christi (Vienna, 1817–25), an example of
Stolberg’s later apologetic work.
The Romantic sense of an ‘Allseele’, a divine force inspiriting all
the manifestations of nature and leading even beyond the world of
observed phenomena into the secret and dark and mystical, is well
documented in Hare’s books. One of the first volumes one meets on
his shelves is Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse
eines jungen Physikers (Heidelberg, 1810: the British Library has
the only other copy in COPAC), a good example of such scientific
 17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge
 351

speculation; one finds too the ‘classic’ of this persuasion, Gotthilf

Heinrich Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft
(Dresden, 1808; three hits in COPAC, which omits Hare), based on
the lectures on animal magnetism that so influenced Heinrich von
Kleist and appealed to Coleridge. Another author read by Coleridge,
Heinrich Jung-Stilling, who moved from his epoch-making pietistic
autobiography via spectrology to more conventional Protestant piety,
is well represented in a number of later works. A set of Lorenz Oken’s
Lehrbuch der Naturgeschichte (Leipzig, 1815–16), with its mixture of
religious and scientific teleology, is there as might be expected; I have
already mentioned the other, rare, items by him.
In this context, too, one should mention the large and representative
collection of the works of Henrich Steffens, a Norwegian who wrote in
German, beginning in Schelling’s nature philosophy and moving through
a wide spectrum of writing in the period after 1815. Coleridge clearly
thought Steffens relatively significant, for the British Library holds three
copies of works by him with marginalia; one of these is Die gegenwärtige
Zeit (Berlin, 1817), also in Hare’s collection and possibly another item
not subject to loan — and annotation! Hare contains three rarer items:
Drei Vorlesungen über Herrn D. Gall’s Organenlehre (Halle, 1805) is the only
copy listed in COPAC (not in WorldCat), as is Widerlegung der gegen ihn
von Schulz erhobenen öffentlichen Anklage (Breslau, 1823; rare outside the
UK), whereas Johann Christian Reil (Halle, 1815) is shared with the Royal
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow. Several of his fictional
works are held in first, single editions. Hare’s collection complements
the holdings in Cambridge University Library and together they must
represent the most comprehensive collection of Steffens’s works in the
country. His highly informative autobiography, Was ich erlebte (Breslau,
1840–44), is a fitting accompaniment to the scientific or apologetic works
in Hare’s collection.
Joseph Görres (later ‘von’) is a similar case from the opposite corner
of Germany. Görres’ radical Rhenish conservatism emerges in works
like Teutschland und die Revolution (Coblentz, 18l9), held here, as in
Cambridge University Library’s Acton collection, in the first edition.
His progress from speculation to orthodoxy is recorded, for instance,
by the early Aphorismen über Organonomie (Coblenz, 1803; two hits in
COPAC besides Hare) and the late Die christliche Mystik (Regensburg,
352 From Goethe to Gundolf

1836), while his Rheinischer Merkur (Coblentz, 1813–14), from which the
rare pamphlet Teutschlands künftige Verfassung is reprinted, represents a
response to the political needs of the times.
Of special interest is Görres’ important early work, Die teutschen
Volksbücher (Heidelberg, 1807), which, together with Arnim and
Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn (present in the second edition
1808–19), initiates the wave of scholarly and poetic interest by the
German Romantics in the folk culture of the past. Another of Görres’s
most important works is to be found in a nest of Romantic studies
on comparative mythology. As if anticipating Frazer by a century,
Hare assembled the key works on this subject, one which was to
fascinate equally the nineteenth century and the twentieth. Görres’s
Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt (Heidelberg, 1810) owes in its turn
much to the efforts of the Heidelberg classicist Friedrich Creuzer, whose
Symbolik (here in the second, enlarged edition, Leipzig, 1819–23) lays the
foundation of the subject. We must however not forget the lesser-known
Johann Arnold Kanne, important for his Mythologie der Griechen (Leipzig,
1805; COPAC has four hits), System der indischen Mythe (Leipzig, 1813;
otherwise held by the British Library and Trinity College Dublin) and
Erste Urkunden der Geschichte, oder Allgemeine Mythologie (Bayreuth, 1815;
British Library, London Library, National Library of Scotland besides
Hare). No less than ten works by Kanne or associated with him held in
Hare are listed in COPAC as sole copies or do not even figure at all, and
are generally rare. These are mainly polemical reviews, but two of them
are extremely rare novels, Gianetta (Bayreuth, 1809; Hare’s copy not listed
in WorldCat, where there are eight hits, including Rice University) and
Romane aus der Christenwelt aller Zeiten (Nuremberg, 1817; WorldCat has
eight German holdings, plus University of Pisa and Rice University).
We see interest in mythology spreading out in all directions among the
Romantics: Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel espouse the study
of Sanskrit after their sojourns in Napoleonic Paris. In Hare’s collection,
Friedrich’s Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (Heidelberg, 1808) is
supplemented by August Wilhelm’s edition of the Râmâyana (London,
1823), their friend Tieck having perhaps first given scope to the subject in
Romantic circles by allowing the orientalist Friedrich Majer to publish in
his short-lived periodical, Poetisches Journal (Jena, 1800, held otherwise
by British Library, University College London and Birmingham
 17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge
 353

University). Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie of 1835 turns its interest

northwards and takes its place among the comprehensive set of the
Grimms’ works brought together by Hare. These titles are however only
samples from a total range of books on mythology which extends from
Karl Philipp Moritz’s Götterlehre (edition Berlin, 1804) to Sir George
Grey’s Poems, Traditions, and Chaunts of the Maories (Wellington, 1853)
(see below).
From mythology and its occasionally heady speculations we move to
history proper, one of John Sterling’s ‘three great forms assumed by the
genius of the Germans’. A fine complete set of the works of the Swiss
historian Johannes von Müller (Tübingen, 1810) and the first collected
edition of the patriot and antiquarian Justus Möser (Berlin, 1798) set the
tone. The collection of Niebuhr, as might be expected, is hardly inferior
to the British Library’s. Where Friedrich von Raumer and Leopold von
Ranke are concerned, it would be hard for Hare to compete with the
superb assemblage of Cambridge University Library’s Acton Collection;
Hare does however hold Ranke’s Ueber die Verschwörung gegen Venedig
(Berlin, 1831), not in the British Library, but in the Acton Collection
(Cambridge) and Oxford Taylorian; while Raumer’s Adam Smithian
Das Brittische Besteuerungs-System (Berlin 1810) is in the British Library,
London Library and, not surprisingly, the London School of Economics.
Johann Gustav Droysen, Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann, Friedrich
Christoph Schlosser and other German historians are well represented.
It is appropriate that a collection rich in Hegel, both by him and about
him, should include, as in a rhyming couplet, Friedrich Schlegel, one of
Hegel’s most outspoken opponents, with his Philosophie der Geschichte
(Vienna, 1829).
To examine Hare’s books is above all things to become acquainted
with German literature and poetry from 1800 to 1850. The German
scholar has much to learn from a leisurely shelf-inspection, for
they have here the stuff of German literary culture in a way that few
institutions, even those richer and larger, may display it. It will do only
to point to the main strengths and rarities. The rest can be summarized
more or less as follows. Hare did not collect eighteenth-century
literature systematically or in early editions. Klopstock, Herder, Johann
Heinrich Voss, Johann Joachim Winckelmann even Moritz August von
Thümmel, are represented in standard collected editions mainly from
354 From Goethe to Gundolf

the early nineteenth century. For Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, however,

we have the important biography and remains issued by his brother,
K. G. Lessing (Berlin, 1793–95). Even Goethe is not well represented
in original editions, but then there are his periodicals, Propyläen
(Tübingen, 1798–1800, otherwise only in the British Library) and Kunst
und Alterthum (1818–27; also in the British Library). As if to make up for
this narrowing of interest to Goethe’s aesthetic and scientific writings
(there is, as well, Zur Morphologie of 1817, also in the British Library),
Hare assembled well over twenty-five significant items of Goetheana
from the period 1832–37, including, as already mentioned, Bettina
von Arnim, Carl Friedrich Zelter and Eckermann, but also the earlier
Friedrich Karl Julius Schütz on Goethe und Pustkuchen (Halle 1823; also
in Cambridge University Library but not in the British Library) and
significant works on Goethe reception, like Karl Gutzkow’s Über Goethe
im Wendepunkte zweier Jahrhunderte (Berlin, 1836), Heinrich Döring’s life
of Goethe (Weimar, 1833), and the much rarer Karl Reck, Goethe und
seine Widersacher (Weimar, 1837, British Library and Oxford Taylorian)
that so annoyed the surviving Romantics.
The trio, Jean Paul, Friedrich Hölderlin and Kleist, not properly
assigned to Romanticism, is under the circumstances very fairly
represented. The forlorn Gedichte (Stuttgart, 1843) are evidence of
a Hölderlin yet to be discovered by his fellow-countrymen. Tieck’s
edition of Kleist’s Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1826), pays tribute to
‘unhappy genius’ in the muted generosity of its foreword; while two
further editorial undertakings of Tieck’s, Gesammelte Schriften, Von J.
M. R. Lenz (Berlin, 1828) and Mahler Müllers Werke (Heidelberg, 1811)
commemorate other, in Tieck’s eyes, imperfect talents. The edition of
Novalis produced by Friedrich Schlegel and Tieck, here represented
by the fourth edition (Berlin, 1826) and containing the influential and
hagiographical biography prepared by Tieck for the 1815 edition, brings
us by chance to a great curiosity. In 1926, the great scholar-editor Josef
Körner announced the discovery in the Austrian National Library in
Vienna of a surviving slip of paper produced in 1827 at Friedrich Schlegel’s
behest, disclaiming responsibility for the publication of Novalis’s still
controversial Die Christenheit oder Europa.28 Unbeknown to scholarship,

28 Documentation on this in Novalis, Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed.
by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel et al., 6 vols in 7 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
 17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge
 355

Julius Hare had had the foresight to have this disclaimer tipped into his
own copy of Novalis’s works. By collecting August Wilhelm Schlegel’s
and Tieck’s Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1802 (Tübingen, 1802), Hare
had already secured the first printing of Novalis’s Geistliche Lieder.
Jean Paul, as befits the most-read German novelist of his time and
one much admired in the English-speaking world (while defying
proper translation), has twenty-two works. Only the British Library and
the Brotherton collection in Leeds have comparable holdings; indeed, a
leading Jean Paul scholar has told me that Trinity’s set of first editions is
one of the finest in any public collection. The first edition of his Gothic
novel Titan (Berlin, 1800–03) is not rare, but only Leeds has another copy
of the Clavis Fichteana, originally conceived as an appendix to it (Erfurt,
1800). There are a further nine first editions of Jean Paul. The political
pamphlet Dämmerung für Deutschland (Tübingen, 1809) is COPAC’s sole
listing in this form. A curiosity is Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke (Bamberg,
1819; also in the British Library and the National Library of Scotland),
with its preface by Jean Paul, duly catalogued in Trinity for generations
under the older author. Thus too, the first edition of Hoffmann’s Die
Elixiere des Teufels (Berlin, 1815; otherwise, British Library only) used to
masquerade under ‘Medardus’, the self-effacing author having put the
story’s hero on to the title page. Die Serapionsbrüder (Berlin, 1819), Kater
Murr (Berlin, 1820) and Meister Floh (Frankfurt, 1822) are in Hare’s
shelf-list at least acknowledged as being Hoffmann’s, and all three are
first editions.
The Hoffmann holdings demonstrate that it is with the German
Romantics proper that Hare’s German books enter into their own.29 The
discerning eye of the collector is everywhere evident. Beginning with
periodicals, one of the Romantics’ key fields of disseminatory endeavour,
while regretting the surprising absence of the Schlegel brothers’
Athenaeum, we make do with Friedrich Schlegel’s Europa (Frankfurt,
1803) and Concordia (Vienna, 1823, Acton Collection and British Library);
Tieck’s Poetisches Journal was already noted above, but not the extremely

1960–2006), III, 502.

29 A check against the catalogue of an exhibition of a hundred ‘very rare’ first editions
of German Romantic books established that Hare has a quarter of the titles listed. Cf.
Deutsche Romantiker. Kostbare Bücher in Erstausgaben. Sammlung aus dem Antiquariat
Gunnar A. Koldewey, Düsseldorf (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 1979).
356 From Goethe to Gundolf

rare Kynosarges of his brother-in-law, August Ferdinand Bernhardi

(Berlin, 1802), not otherwise in COPAC and seemingly nowhere else
in printed form. Adam Müller’s and Heinrich von Kleist’s beautiful
Phöbus (Dresden, 1808; COPAC also lists Cambridge University Library,
the British Library and Manchester) is complete but for Ferdinand
Hartmann’s cover engraving of the sun god over the spires of Dresden,
doubtless lost in binding. Scholarly periodicals from the years after
1815, some still with Romantic associations, include the Jahrbücher für
Phiiosophie und Pädagogik (Leipzig, 1826–30), Hermes (Leipzig, 1819–31),
Jahrbücher der Literatur (Vienna, 1818–31), Jahrbücher fur wissenschaftliche
Kritik (Stuttgart, 1827–37) and Friedrich Carl von Savigny’s Zeitschrift
für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft (Berlin, 1815–45).
It is Tieck, to whom Novalis wrote that he ‘partakes of every thing I
do‘, who seems almost omnipresent in this collection. The Tieck scholar
based in either Cambridge or London will find over ninety percent of
this enormous oeuvre spread between Trinity, the University Library
and the British Library. While the British Library, the fortunate recipient
of Tieck’s own association copies, may thank Antonio Panizzi for its
particular collection, Cambridge is largely in Hare’s debt. The only major
item not in the British Library is Tieck’s almanac Novellenkranz (Berlin,
1831–32, 1834), whereas the British Library has an almost complete
set of Urania, of which Hare has the run 1831–35, but few institutions
can have finer copies of his other works. The very early Tieck is largely
unrepresented, perhaps already unobtainable. We begin with that first
outpouring of aesthetic enthusiasm, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s
and Tieck’s Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Berlin,
1797); and the second (and revised) edition of its sequel, Phantasien über
die Kunst (Berlin, 1814). The rare early novel William Lovell is there in
its second, much-revised, edition of 1813–14, the only copy in COPAC
and one of nine in WorldCat, possibly more, but with none in the USA.
His most influential novel, owing much to his dead friend Wackenroder,
Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (Berlin, 1798) is present in the original
version, the one to be found under the pillow of every Nazarene artist
in Rome and hence also the one excoriated by Goethe. The magnificent
Minnelieder aus dem Schwäbischen Zeitalter, with engravings by Philipp
Otto Runge (Berlin, 1803; COPAC lists British Library, London Library
 17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge
 357

Glasgow and Oxford Taylorian), still has a freshness that no reprint can
match.
This is the place to explore other areas so much akin to Tieck’s
Minnelieder. Hare and his generation could quite freely speak of ‘the
Germans’ as a cultural entity, but without a national core or focus;
indeed, Hare lived through the first failed attempt to achieve a German
nation, in 1848. Defeats at Napoleon’s hands had earlier galvanized a
sense of national identity; the rediscovery of the literary heritage of the
Middle Ages could also perform that task in educated and intellectual
circles. Thus, August Wilhelm Schlegel, writing in 1812, deemed
the Nibelungenlied/The Song of the Nibelungs to be a school of national
awareness for the nation’s youth. Tieck had had his part in that process;
the first honour goes however to Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen.
Hagen’s modernized version of the medieval epic, first published in
1807, is not in Hare’s collection, but a number of similar works by him
or by scholar­antiquarians of similar persuasion are. Appropriately, we
find Eschenburg’s Denkmäler altdeutscher Dichtkunst (Bremen, 1799)
representing an older generation that included Lessing and Herder.
From the Romantic generation we have, among others, such titles as
Johann Gustav Büsching’s Das Lied der Nibelungen (Altenburg, 1815)
and Karl Rosenkranz’s later study of it (Halle, 1829), Ludwig Uhland’s
Walther von der Vogelweide (Stuttgart 1820) and Büsching’s edition of
Hans Sachs (Nuremberg, 1816–24), Hagen’s, Büsching’s and Docen’s
Museum für Altdeutsche Literatur und Kunst (Berlin 1809), Hagen’s Der
Helden Buch (Berlin, 1811) and Tieck’s Frauendienst (Tübingen, 1812), all
relatively rare. The Romantic interest in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries is represented by Tieck’s Deutsches Theater (Berlin, 1817), rare
enough in this edition, and Wilhelm Müller’s much less known Bibliothek
deutscher Dichter des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1822–31; British
Library and an incomplete copy at Oxford Taylorian).
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did not approve of the modernized
and, for them, amateurized editions produced by the likes of Hagen
or Büsching. It is almost to be expected that Hare, himself a classical
philologist of note, should collect up to twenty-three of the Grimms’
works. They include however a beautifully crisp copy of the Kinder-und
Hausmärchen of 1819 (not listed in COPAC at all), those famous fairy-
tales standing out as exceptions among the stringent scholarship of
358 From Goethe to Gundolf

so many of the Grimms’ titles, so close as they are to a large section

of grammatical and philological works by names ranging from Karl
Lachmann to Wilhelm von Humboldt to Franz Bopp. It does not come
altogether as a surprise to read of Hare in 1838 proposing to bring Jacob
Grimm over to Cambridge30 after he had been dismissed from Göttingen
by Queen Victoria’ s brutish and philistine uncle, King Ernest Augustus
of Hanover. In the event, Frederick William IV of Prussia pre-empted
any such considerations in 1840.
Neither August Wilhelm nor Friedrich Schlegel would have been
content to regard himself merely as scholar or philologist, although
their Sanskrit studies have already been alluded to. Neither would on
the other hand have considered himself out of place in the company of
classical scholars like Karl August Böttiger, Thiersch, Gustav Parthey,
Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, Karl Otfried Müller or Creuzer (all present
in Hare). Thus it is interesting to find August Wilhelm’s first published
work, of precocious latinity, De geographia Homerica (Hanover 1788; quite
rare, but Trinity College, Cambridge, has two copies), as the beginning
of an offering of twenty titles extending from Charakteristiken und Kritiken
(with his brother Friedrich, Königsberg, 1801; held otherwise by the
British Library, Birmingham University and the Warburg Institute) to the
highly important translations of Calderón (Berlin, 1809; British Library,
Oxford Taylorian and the Warburg Institute) and of Shakespeare, here
admittedly in the edition revised by Tieck (Berlin, 1825–33), which
caused Schlegel such heartache. With Tieck’s Alt-Englisches Theater
(Berlin, 1811) and Shakspeare’s Vorschule (Leipzig, 1823–29), German
Romantic studies in Shakespeare are well represented.
Friedrich Schlegel’s complete works issued in Vienna (1822–25)
are in Trinity College, Cambridge, but not in Hare. The sixteen items
of Hare’s holdings range from late works such as Philosophie des Lebens
(Vienna, 1828) to relative curiosities from his earlier period like the
editions from the Old French, Geschichte der Jungfrau von Orleans (Berlin,
1802; otherwise only in the British Library and the National Library of
Scotland) and Geschichte der Margaretha von Valois (Leipzig, 1803; only
copy in COPAC). The Schlegel brothers’ protege(e)s are also present:
Friedrich’s wife Dorothea, with a rare copy of her novel Florentin
(Lübeck, 1801; also British Library), Tieck’s sister Sophie von Knorring,

30 Augustus J. C. Hare, Memorials of a Quiet Life, III, 232.

 17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge
 359

with her extremely rare Flore und Blanscheflur, prefaced by August

Wilhelm (Berlin 1822; COPAC only lists the British Library’s copy), and
his great hope, Wilhelm von Schütz, whose works are also rare and
only held by the British Library, Lacrimas (Berlin, 1803), Niobe (Berlin,
1807) and Der Graf und die Gräfin von Gleichen (Berlin, 1807); Der Garten
der Liebe (Berlin, 1811) seems only to be in Berlin, Weimar, Göttingen
and Erfurt (WorldCat), while Dramatische Wälder (Leipzig, 1821, not
the British Library) is more widespread. A curiosity is his much later
Catholic apologetic periodical Anticelsus (Mainz and Speyer, 1842–45,
also in the British Library).
The vast oeuvre of Brentano is present in but six samples; they include
his edition of Der Goldfaden (Heidelberg 1809) and his Die Gründung
Prags (Pest, 1815; COPAC, British Library and London Library).
Associated with Brentano and published under his direction, are the
works of the stigmatized (and now beatified) nun, Anna Katharina
Emmerick. A leading Brentano scholar has told me that Trinity College,
Cambridge’s holdings, three volumes bound as one by Hare, are unique
in bringing together Emmerick’s Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu
Christi (Sulzbach, 1833) and its continuation, Das letzte Abendmahl unsers
Herrn Jesu Christi (Sulzbach, 1834), along with the apologetic riposte to
Steffens’s attack on Emmerick, Johann Heinrich Pabst’s Ein Wort über
die Ekstase (Cologne, 1834). The last two are the only copies in COPAC,
whereas the Pabst is otherwise only held by the Diocesan Library in
Cologne.
Brentano’s close friend and collaborator, Achim von Arnim, is
altogether better represented with ten titles, including first editions of
standard works like Gräfin Dolores (Berlin, 1810; COPAC, British Library
and London Library), Halle und Jerusalem (Heidelberg, 1811; British
Library, London Library and National Library of Scotland; COPAC has
not registered Newnham College’s copy), Der Wintergarten (Berlin, 1809;
COPAC, British Library and Manchester Central Library), Isabella von
Aegypten (Berlin 1812, British Library, London Library, Leeds and Belfast)
and Landhausleben (Leipzig, 1826, otherwise in London Library only).
A rarity is the first version of the unfinished novel, Die Kronenwächter,
published as Berthold’s erstes und zweites Leben (Berlin, 1817; otherwise
British Library and Manchester Central Library), and a curiosity is the
drama, Der gestürzte Emporkömmling (Ulm, 1824), attributed by Kayser’s
360 From Goethe to Gundolf

Bücher-Lexicon to Arnim, but in reality by an unidentified, anonymous

author.31 It is the only copy in COPAC, and WorldCat lists only Berlin
(Staatsbibliothek) and Stuttgart (Württembergische Landesbibliothek).
Madame de Staël, in De l’Allemagne/On Germany, had drawn special
attention to the Romantic dramatist Zacharias Werner. It is fair to say
that Werner’s reputation in the first decades of the nineteenth century
shone as brightly as Hoffmann’s or Brentano’s, certainly Kleist’s. Hare’s
collection seems to reflect that esteem, with the result that Trinity has
most likely the finest collection of first or early editions of Werner in
the country, including three items not in the British Library, Wanda
(Tübingen, 1810; other copies in Cambridge University Library, Oxford
Taylorian, London Library, Glasgow and Bristol), Cunegunde (Leipzig,
1815; copies in Cambridge University Library, London Library and
Bristol) and Nachgelassene Predigten (Vienna, 1836; other copy in Bristol).
Some modern scholars of Romanticism might — wrongly — regard
large holdings of Zacharias Werner as a doubtful asset. Three minor
Romantics are however probably more extensively represented than any
of their contemporaries: Ernst Moritz Arndt, Fouqué and the Dane (and
honorary German) Adam Oehlenschläger. There are personal reasons
perhaps for this concentration. According to Crabb Robinson, Arndt
was a friend of Hare’s; more likely, he met Arndt in Bonn during his
visit to August Wilhelm Schlegel in 1832. Ever a controversial figure,
Arndt is covered here at all stages of his career in no fewer than twenty-
five works, a good half of these dating from the time of the Wars of
Liberation (notably Lieder für Teutsche, n.p., 1813; the British Library also
holds this). Eight titles by Arndt are unique to COPAC, and two, E. M.
Arndt’s Urtheil über Friedrich den Grossen (Berlin, 1818) and Prinz Victor
von Neuwied (Deutschland [=Frankfurt], 1821), have only three and six
hits respectively in WorldCat, none outside Germany and not including
Hare.
Hare’s own copy of Olliers Literary Miscellany (London, 1820; the
British Library has the only other set) gives us in part the answer to
Fouqué and Oehlenschläger. For there we have Hare’s own translation
of Fouqué’s The Siege of Ancona. A Romantic Idyll, and a major article on

31 Cf. Arnim-Bibliographie, ed. by Otto Mallon (Berlin 1925, reprint Hildesheim: Olms,
1965), 79.
 17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge
 361

Oehlenschläger.32 Tieck, who was dismissive of Oehlenschläger’s drama

Correggio (Stuttgart, 1816), is in this collection eclipsed in terms of
numbers of works by the Danish writer — a total of over thirty, in both
languages. Even Hare’s stated admiration for Fouqué’s Der Zauberring
and Sintram can hardly account for the astounding forty-three items
by this author, without any doubt the largest set of early editions in
the country and possibly anywhere. They range from the earliest,
published under the pseudonym of Pellegrin (Zwei Schauspiele, Berlin,
1805), to the late novel, Abfall und Buße (Berlin, 1844). COPAC lists a
total of twenty items that are only in Hare. Alexander von Blomberg’s
Hinterlassene poetische Schriften (Berlin, 1820), for which Fouqué’s facile
pen produced the prologue, the 287-page drama Konrad in Deutschland,
leaving Blomberg with a few slender pages of literary remains, is the sole
entry in COPAC, with a mere handful in WorldCat. Fouqué is gradually
staging a comeback; anyone working on him in this country would be
well advised to consult this collection.
Hare did not confine himself to literary works of a Romantic
persuasion but purchased a fair variety of those popularly read in the
period 1815–40. A miscellany of titles will indicate this: the assiduous
Bavarian courtier and indifferent dramatist Eduard von Schenk
(Schauspiele, Stuttgart, 1829–35; British Library, University College
Library and National Trust) and the collected works of his royal master,
King Ludwig I of Bavaria (Gedichte, Munich, 1829). Another royal item
is the Dante translation by Prince (later King) John of Saxony (under
the pseudonym Philalethes) (Dresden and Leipzig, 1839–40; British
Library, University College Library and Manchester), in the rare and
handsome first edition, the draft of which had been scrutinized by
Tieck, Carl Gustav Carus and Wolf von Baudissin. Literary figures once
household names but subject to ephemeral fame are the prose writer
Carl Wilhelm Salice Contessa (Schriften, Berlin 1826; otherwise, Queen’s
College, Oxford, and University College London) and the dramatists
Ernst von Raupach (Dramatische Werke, Hamburg, 1829) and Ernst von
Houwald (Die Seeräuber, Leipzig, 1831, sole hit in COPAC) who between
them initiated a craze for, respectively, historical dramas on medieval
themes and fate dramas. The founding father of the popular fate
drama, Adolph Müllner (Vermischte Schriften, Stuttgart, 1824; sole hit in

32 
Olliers Literary Miscellany, 54–61 (Fouqué) and 90–153 (Oehlenschläger).
362 From Goethe to Gundolf

COPAC) joins this company of what are now rarities. Hare was however
also aware of other talents, this time in the field of prose. A scarce copy
of Carl Friedrich von Rumohr’s Novellen (Munich, 1833; sole hit in
COPAC), setting a significant fashion for the Italianate in prose fiction,
and a collection of early prose by Willibald Alexis, also now hard to find,
are evidence of this. The ever-popular Wilhelm Müller is represented
not only by his agreeable verse, but by the exotic Rom, Römer und
Römerinnen (Berlin, 1820; British Library, Oxford Taylorian and Leeds
University Library). We find on Hare’s shelves also examples from this
period of the plain curious. Rumohr, well displayed as an art historian
and prose writer, features also as a gastronome in his Geist der Kochkunst
(Stuttgart, 1832, under the pseudonym J. König; the only other COPAC
copy is in Aberdeen University Library); whereas Gottfried Immanuel
Wenzel’s Entdeckungen über die Sprache der Thiere (Vienna, 1800; sole
print copy in COPAC) examines the contribution to musicology of dogs
and cats. It would, however, be wrong to seize at random on bizarre or
seemingly nugatory items in Hare’s collection. For they are indeed in
the minority. Next to theology, philosophy and belles-lettres, the critical
and aesthetic literature of the period is the most significant item, bearing
out Hare’s observation that the Germans had made this discipline into
a ‘science’. Thus we find a good sample of names like Karl Rosenkranz,
Franz Horn, Robert Prutz, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense (notably
his Denkwürdigkeiten und Vermischte Schriften, Mannheim, 1837),
Tieck’s friend Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (also much admired by
Coleridge), Adam Müller, Wolfgang Menzel and Arnold Ruge.
It may therefore be appropriate to end this — necessarily
sketchy — introduction to Hare’s German collection by presenting the
text of a letter tipped in to one of his books. A copy of Sir George Grey’s
Poems, Traditions, and Chaunts of the Maories (Wellington, 1853) bears a
dedication to ‘The Venerable Archdeacon Hare with Sir George Greys
regards Septr. 1854’. Apart from his services as colonial governor and
administrator, notably in South Australia and New Zealand, Grey is
chiefly remembered as one of the first scholars of Polynesian mythology,
the preface to his own work of the same name (1854–55) being still a
standard text for the nineteenth century’s understanding of ‘primitive’
cultures. The names of Bopp and Bunsen in Grey’s letter make clear the
extent to which English-language endeavour in the field of grammar
 17. Julius Hare’s German Books in Trinity College Library, Cambridge
 363

and comparative religion was interwoven with the kind of German

scholarship whose eloquent advocate Julius Hare remained all his active
life. The letter reads:

Windmill Hill
Septr 22nd 1854

My dear Sir
I feel very much obliged to you for your kind present of Bopps [sic]
comparative grammar which I shall value highly as coming from you;
it will be very useful to me, as I made a present of my copy of it, the
English translation, to the Chief Justice of New Zealand when I left that
Colony. The fifth part of the Grammar has been published, and I can
peruse it this evening in London.
I take the liberty of begging your acceptance of the copy of a work,
upon the traditional poetry of the New Zealanders which I have recently
published — It will be at least a curiosity in your library, which some of
your friends may like to have access ·to, and I think that the preface will
interest you — will take out a copy of Bunsens [sic] work which you
mention in your note.

Believe me
Truly yours
G Grey.

Postscript 2020
Revisiting my article of 1987, I realise that Julius Hare was probably the
main serious collector in Britain of books on German literature, thought
and history between the years 1820 and 1840. The only really comparable
collection, that in the British Library, was assembled mainly after 1840
under Antonio Panizzi. Other holdings, such as those in the Brotherton
Library in Leeds, the John Rylands Library (now University Library) in
Manchester, the Acton collection in Cambridge University Library, the
Fiedler collection in the Taylorian Institution in Oxford, or the Priebsch
collection, formerly in the old Institute of Germanic Studies and now
in the Senate House Library, University of London, are of much more
364 From Goethe to Gundolf

recent provenance. Hare’s achievement lies not only in the breadth of

his book collecting, but also in its enduring rarity.
 Bibliography

Primary Literature

Arnim, Ludwig Achim von, Achim von Arnim und die ihm nahe standen, ed. by
Reinhold Steig and Herman Grimm, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1894–1913).
––– Arnim-Bibliographie, ed. by Otto Mallon (Berlin: Späth, 1925, repr. Hildesheim:
Olms, 1965).
Arnold, Matthew, ‘Superior or University Instruction in Prussia’, in Schools and
Universities on the Continent, ed. by R. H. Super, The Complete Prose Works
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979).
Askania. Zeitschrift für Leben, Litteratur und Kunst, ed. by Wilhelm Müller (Dessau:
Ackermann, 1820).
Athenaeurn, ed. by August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, 3 vols (Berlin:
Vieweg, 1798, Unger,1799–1800).
Bodmer, Johann Jacob, Der Hunger-Thurn in Pisa. Ein Trauerspiel (Chur und
Lindau: Typographische Gesellschaft, 1769).
Braun, Volker, ‘Der Müggelsee’, in Die sanfte Revolution, ed. by Stefan Heym and
Werner Heiduczek (Leipzig, Weimar: Kiepenheuer, 1990).
Breitinger, Johann Jacob, Critische Dichtkunst, ed. by Wolfgang Bender, Deutsche
Neudrucke. Reihe Texte des 18. Jh., 2 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1966).
Brentano, Clemens, Werke, ed. by Wolfgang Frühwald, Bernhard Gajek and
Friedhelm Kemp, 4 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1963–68).
Carlyle, Thomas, German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors, 4 vols
(Edinburgh and London: Tait, 1827).
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Earl
Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956–71).
Cramer, Carl Friedrich, Klopstock: Er, und über ihn, 5 vols (Hamburg: Schniebes;
Dessau: Gelehrten Buchhandlung; Leipzig and Altona: Kaven, 1780–92).
Dante Alighieri, Dante Alighieri’s Göttliche Comödie, ed. by Philalethes, 3 vols in 2
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1871).
366 From Goethe to Gundolf

Dickinson, Emily, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H.

Johnson (London: Faber & Faber, 1970).
Dingelstedt, Franz, Studien und Copien nach Shakspeare (Pesth: Hartleben, 1858).
Droste-Hülshoff, Annette von, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe: Werke. Briefwechsel, ed.
by Winfried Woesler, 14 vols in 28 parts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971–2000).
Droysen, Johann Gustav, Geschichte Alexander des Grossen (Berlin, Finke, 1833).
Eckermann, Johann Peter, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens,
ed. by Ludwig Geiger (Leipzig: Hesse, n.d. [1902]).
Eichendorff, Joseph von, Neue Gesamtausgabe der Werke und Schriften, ed. by
Gerhard Baumann and Siegfried Grosse, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1957).
Engel. Texte aus der Weltliteratur, ed. by Anne Marie Fröhlich, Manesse Bibliothek
der Weltliteratur (Zurich: Manesse, 1991).
Fontane, Theodor, Werke, Schriften und Briefe, ed. by Walter Keitel and Helmuth
Nürnberger, 20 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1964–1984).
Forster, Georg, Sämtliche Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe, ed. by Deutsche Akademie
der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 18 vols (Berlin: Akademie, 1963– in progress).
Freud, Sigmund, ‘Unser Verhältnis zum Tode’, in Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod,
Studienausgabe, ed. by Alexander Mitscherlich et al., 11 vols (Frankfurt am
Main: Fischer, 1969–79), IX, 49–60.
Friedrich, Caspar David, Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen, ed.
by Sigrid Hinz (Berlin: Henschel, 1984).
Geibel, Emanuel, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Emanuel Geibel und Paul Heyse, ed. by
Erich Petzel (Munich: Lehmann, 1922).
Gellert, Christian Fürchtegott, Sämmtliche Werke, Sammlung der besten deutschen
Prosaschriftsteller, 9 parts (Carlsruhe: Schmieder, 1774).
George, Stefan, Stefan George. Friedrich Gundolf, Briefwechsel, ed. by Robert
Boehringer and Georg Peter Landmann (Munich, Düsseldorf: Küpper, 1962).
Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm von, Ugolino. Eine Tragödie in fünf Aufzügen. Mit
einem Anhang und einer Auswahl aus den theoretischen und kritischen Schriften,
ed. by Christoph Siegrist, Reclams Universal-Bibliothek 141.2 (Stuttgart:
Reclam, 1977).
––– Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der Literatur. Vollständige Neuausgabe mit einer
Biographie des Dichters, ed. by Karl-Maria Guth, Sammlung Hofenberg
(Berlin: Contumax, 2013).
Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, Neuere Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der
Deutschen. Vierter Theil (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1843).
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang,, Ueber Kunst und Alterthum, 6 vols (Stuttgart: Cotta,
1816–27).
 Bibliography  367

––– Tagebücher und Briefe Goethes aus Italien an Frau von Stein und Herder, ed.
by Erich Schmidt, Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft 2 (Weimar: Goethe-
Gesellschaft, 1886).
––– Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen-Weimar,
143 vols (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887–1919).
––– Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. by Erich Trunz et al., 12 vols (Hamburg:
Wegner, 1948–60).
––– Italian Journey, 1786–1788 (translation by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer)
(London: Collins, 1962).
––– Der junge Goethe. Neu bearbeitete Ausgabe in fünf Bänden, ed. by Hanna Fischer-
Lamberg, 5 vols (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1963–74).
––– Der junge Goethe im zeitgenössischen Urteil, ed. by Peter Müller, Deutsche
Bibliothek 2 (Berlin: Akademie, 1969).
––– Sämtliche Werke, 18 vols (Zurich: Artemis, 1977).
––– Goethe in vertraulichen Briefen seiner Zeitgenossen, ed. by Wilhelm Bode, 3 vols
(Berlin: Aufbau, 1979).
––– Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Ein unklassischer Klassiker. Neu herausgegeben
und mit Dokumenten und Materialien, Wertheriana und Wertheriaden, ed. by
Hans Christoph Buch, Wagenbach Taschenbücher 898 (Berlin: Wagenbach,
1982).
––– Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. by Dieter Borchmeyer
and et al., 40 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klasiker Verlag, 1985–98).
––– “Ein Dichter hatte uns alle geweckt”. Goethe und die literarische Romantik, ed.
by Christoph Perels (Frankfurt am Main: Freies Deutsches Hochstift, 1999).
Grimm, Herman, Leben Michelangelo‘s (Hanover: Rümpler, 1860–63).
Grimm, Jacob, Kleinere Schriften, 8 vols (Berlin: Dümmler, 1879–84; Gütersloh:
Bertelsmann, 1890).
Grimm, Wilhelm, Kleinere Schriften, ed. by Gustav Hinrichs, 4 vols (Berlin:
Dümmler, 1881–83, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1887).
Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 3 vols (Göttingen:
Dieterich, 1837, 1855).
Gruber, J. G., C. M . Wielands Leben, 4 vols (Leipzig, 1827–28).
Gutzkow, Karl, Eine Shakspearefeier an der IIm (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1864).
––– Vom Baum der Erkenntnis, Werke, ed. by Reinhold Gensel, 12 parts (Berlin,
Leipzig, Vienna, Stuttgart: Bong, n.d. [1910]), XII.
Hare, Augustus J. C., Memorials of a Quiet Life, 3 vols (London: Smith Elder,
1884).
––– The Story of My Life, 6 vols (London: George Allen, 1896).
368 From Goethe to Gundolf

Hare, Julius, ‘A. W. Schlegel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; with Remarks
upon the Character of German Criticism’, Olliers Literary Miscellany in Prose
and Verse, 1 (1820), 1–39.
Hare, A. W., and J. C. Hare, Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers (London, New York:
Macmillan, 1880).
Hazlitt, William, ‘On Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays’, in The Complete Works of
William Hazlitt, ed. by P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London, Toronto: Dent, 1930–34),
IV, 174–78.
Hebbel, Friedrich, Werke, ed. by Gerhard Fricke, Werner Keller and Karl
Pörnbacher, 5 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1963–67).
Hederich, Benjamin, Gründliches Mythologisches Lexicon […] (Leipzig: Gleditsch,
1770; repr. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft , 1967).
Heine, Heinrich, Säkularausgabe. Werke. Briefwechsel. Lebenszeugnisse, ed. by
the Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen
Literatur in Weimar and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in
Paris, 27 vols (Berlin: Akademie; Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1970–84).
––– Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. by Manfred Windfuhr et al., 16 vols in 23
(Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1973–97).
––– Sämtliche Schriften, ed. by Klaus Briegleb, 6 vols in 7 (Munich: Hanser,
1968–76).
––– Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen, ed. by Volkmar Hansen (Frankfurt am
Main: Insel, 1978).
Herder, Johann Gottfried, Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Bernhard Suphan, 33 vols
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 List of Illustrations

Fig. 1 James Hervey, Meditations and Contemplations (London: J. x

Goodwin, 1812).
Fig. 2 View of the Bay of Naples. Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg, 24
Reise in Deutschland der Schweiz,Italien und Sicilien in den Jahren
1791 bis 1792, in Gesammelte Werke der Brüder Christian und
Friedrich Leopold Grafen zu Stolberg, 20 vols (Hamburg: Perthes
und Besser, 1820–25), VII, plate facing p. 340.
Fig. 3 Wallenstein, from Friedrich Schiller’s drama trilogy Wallenstein, steel 44
engraving after a drawing by Friedrich Pecht, c. 1859. Wikimedia,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wallenstein_aus_
Schillers_Wallenstein.jpg, public domain.
Fig. 4 Laocoon and his Sons, also known as the Laocoon Group. Marble, 58
copy after an Hellenistic original from ca. 200 BC. Found in
the Baths of Trajan, 1506, Wikimedia, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Laocoon_Pio-Clementino_Inv1059-
1064-1067.jpg, public domain.
Fig. 5 Joshua Reynolds, Count Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon 69
(1770–73), National Trust Collection.
Fig. 6 John Flaxman, illustration of Dante, Inferno, Canto 33 (Rome?, 70
1802), showing Ugolino and his sons. Courtesy of the Master
and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Fig. 7 John Flaxman, illustration of Dante, Inferno, Canto 33 (Rome?, 71
1802), showing Ugolino and his sons. Courtesy of the Master
and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Fig. 8 [Karl Gottlieb Hofmann], Pantheon der Deutschen, 3 parts 78
(Chemnitz: Karl Gottlieb Hofmann, 1794–1800), part 2 (1795),
frontispiece and title page.
Fig. 9 Ernest Julian Stern and Heinz Herald, ‘Penthesilea, Reinhardt 94
und seine Bühne, Bilder von der Arbeit des Deutschen
Theaters’, 1919, Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Penthesilea_(Kleist)_-_Amazone.jpg, public
domain.
390 From Goethe to Gundolf

Fig. 10 [Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm], Kinder- und Haus-Märchen, 2nd 122
ed. (Berlin: Reimer, 1819–22), vol. 1 (1819), frontispiece and
title page. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity
College.
Fig. 11 Adrian Ludwig Richter, Genoveva (1820–84), The Metropolitan 146
Museum of Art, public domain.
Fig. 12 Friedrich Gundolf, photograph by Jacob Hilsdorf (1911), 160
University Library Heidelberg, Wikimedia, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Friedrich_Gundolf_
(HeidICON_33461).jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Fig. 13 Wilhelm Müller, engraving by Johann Friedrich Schröter (c. 178
1830), Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Wilhelm_M%C3%BCller_by_Schr%C3%B6ter.jpg, public
domain.
Fig. 14. Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, 206
and Historical. With Fifty Vignette Etchings, second edition
(London: Saunders & Otley, 1833), volume 1, p. 1. The Master
and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Fig. 15 Engraving by Carl Jäger, Erinnerung an die Schillerfeier 1859, 222
“erfunden und radirt von C. Jaeger.”; erschienen im Nürnberger
Künstlervereins-Album; C. H. Zeh’sche Buch & Kunsthandlung
in Nürnberg. Wikimedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Datei:Karl_J%C3%A4ger_Erinnerung_an_die_Schillerfeier_1
859_800x1296pixel.jpg, public domain.
Fig. 16 Theaterplatz in Dresden. Photo by author, CC BY-SA 4.0. 244
Fig. 17 Equestrian statue of King John of Saxony, Dresden 248
Theaterplatz, by Johannes Schilling (1889). Photo by the
Author, CC BY 4.0.
Fig. 18 Equestrian statue of King John of Saxony, detail of plinth. 250
Photo by author, CC BY 4.0.
Fig. 19 Equestrian statue of King John of Saxony, rear of plinth. Photo 250
by author, CC BY 4.0.
Fig. 20 Herms of poets at Charlottenhof, Potsdam. Photo by author, 255
CC BY 4.0.
Fig. 21 Equestrian statue of King Frederick the Great of Prussia, by 257
Christian Daniel Rauch (1851), Unter den Linden, Berlin.
Photo by author, CC BY 4.0.
Fig. 22 Equestrian statue of Frederick the Great, detail of plinth. 262
Photo by author, CC BY 4.0.
 List of Illustrations  391

Fig. 23 Equestrian statue of Frederick William III, Cologne. Wikimedia, 266

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reiterstandbild_
Friedrich_Wilhelm_III_K%C3%B6ln_Heumarkt.jpg, CC
BY-SA 3.0.
Fig. 24 Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, c. 1760. Wikimedia, https:// 270
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Friedrich_Gottlieb_
Klopstock-01.jpg, public domain.
Fig. 25 Johann Joseph Sprick, Portrait of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, 292
1838. Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Droste-H%C3%BClshoff_2.jpg, public domain.
Fig. 26 Leonid Pasternak, Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke, date 312
unknown. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonid_Pasternak_-_Portrait_
painting_of_Rainer_Maria_Rilke.jpg, public domain.
Fig. 27 Bust of Julius Hare by Thomas Woolner (1861). The Wren 338
Library, Trinity College, Cambridge. Photo by James Kirwan.
Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College.
 Index

academic freedom 123–128, 132–133, Arnim, Johannes Freimund von 147–148

135–138, 141, 148 Arnold, Matthew 124–125, 127, 184
Achilles 90–91, 99–101, 103, 105–106, Athenaeum (periodical) 27–29, 149, 171,
108–111, 117–118 215, 355
Acton, Lord 363 Atterbom, Per Daniel Amadeus 193
Adams, H. M. 348 Auden, W. H. 26, 109
Aeschylus 77, 175, 228 autobiography 2, 26, 83, 351
Akenside, Mark 61
Albert, King of Saxony 249 Bach, Johann Sebastian 268
Albert, Prince Consort 249 Bacon, Francis 344
Alewyn, Richard 175 Barry, James (painter) 68
Alexander the Great 80 Bartels, Johann Heinrich 25
Alexis, Willibald 203, 362 Basedow, Adelheid 195
Allen, Philip Schuyler 203 Basedow, Johann Bernhard 195
Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 152 Baudissin, Wolf von 251, 361
Ariosto, Ludovico 84, 154–156, 254–256 Baur, Ferdinand Christian 349
Aristophanes 214–215 Beethoven, Ludwig van 82, 255, 260, 267
Aristotle 59, 214, 278 Befreiungshalle (monument) 249
Arminius 245. See Begas, Reinhold 257
also Hermannsdenkmal Bellotto, Bernardo 246–247
(monument) Benecke, Georg Friedrich 191
Arndt, Ernst Moritz 267, 360 Bengel, Johann Albrecht 349
E. M. Arndt’s Urtheil über Friedrich den Benjamin, Walter 175
Grossen 360 Béranger, Pierre Jean de 183, 199
Prinz Victor von Neuwied 360 Bernhardi, August Ferdinand 356
Arnim, Achim von 114, 140, 148, 151, Bertuch, Friedrich Justin 301
191, 195, 295, 340, 346–347, 359–360 Naturgeschichte 301
Berthold’s erstes und zweites Leben 359 Bible, the 8, 12, 14, 17, 306
Der Wintergarten 359 Biedermeier 179, 181, 185, 187, 190, 195,
Des Knaben Wunderhorn 148, 198, 352 293–294, 298
Gräfin Dolores 359 biography 79–84, 86–88, 91, 185–186,
Halle und Jerusalem 359 212, 224, 230, 263, 340, 354
Isabella von Aegypten 359 Bismarck, Otto von 124–125, 163, 245,
248–249, 257–258
Landhausleben 359
Bläser, Gustav 254, 265
Arnim, Bettina von 141, 147, 293, 295,
339, 354 Blomberg, Alexander von 361
Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde Hinterlassene poetische Schriften 361
339, 354 Blücher, Gebhard Lebercht von 260, 267
Boccaccio, Giovanni 150, 254, 256
394 From Goethe to Gundolf

Böckh, August 188, 190, 192 Byron, Lord 1, 82, 168, 182–185, 187,
Böcklin, Arnold 163 189, 197, 199, 203–205
Bodenstedt, Friedrich von 225, 240 Cain 184
Bodmer, Johann Jacob 11, 64, 190, 273, Manfred 184
279
Böhme, Jacob 114, 149, 348–349 Calandrelli, Alexander 257
Boisserée, Melchior 30, 267 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 118, 155,
175, 212, 252, 358
Boisserée, Sulpiz 30, 267
Camerer, Clemens Christian 275
Bopp, Franz 358, 362
Camões, Luís de 171
Borchardt, Rudolf 317
Campe, Julius 212
Bosch, Hieronymus 157
Canaletto 246
Böttiger, Karl August 358
Carl August, Duke 134–135, 137, 341
Boydell, Josiah 68
Carlsbad Decrees 133, 137–138, 183
Braque, Georges 314
Carlyle, Thomas 80–81, 123, 151, 168,
Braun, Volker 274
171, 209, 341–342
Breitinger, Johann Jacob 11, 279–281
Life of Friedrich Schiller, The 81, 209
Critische Dichtkunst 280
Carmer, Johann Heinrich von 262, 268
Brentano, Clemens 149, 190, 192, 195,
Carus, Carl Gustav 251, 361
210, 352, 359–360
Cassirer, Ernst 104–105
Der Goldfaden 359
catharsis 67
Des Knaben Wunderhorn 148, 189, 295,
Catholicism 29, 33, 124–126, 197, 211,
300, 302, 339–340
231, 267, 295–296, 343, 350, 359
Die Gründung Prags 359
Cervantes, Miguel de 84, 171, 212,
Gockel Hinkel Gackeleia 148 214–215, 251
Brentano, Peter 5 Charlottenhof villa 254–256
Brion, Friederike 4 childhood 19, 73, 88, 106, 147, 357
Brockes, Barthold Heinrich 282 Cicero 264, 278
Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold 182, 196,
De officiis 264
203–204
Classicism 27–29, 31, 33, 37, 42–43, 46,
Brockhaus, Heinrich 196
62, 91, 96–99, 101, 104–105, 126, 187,
Bruford, W. H. 129 191, 195, 211, 228, 233, 237, 254, 256,
Bruno, Giordano 346 278–279, 281, 286, 322, 324, 340–341,
Brydone, Patrick 25 343, 345, 348, 357–358
Büchner, Georg 1, 214, 293–294 Neoclassicism 59, 69, 88, 96, 98, 258,
Büchting, Adolph 239 350
Buff, Charlotte 4 Clauren, Heinrich 196
Bunsen, Karl Josias von 340–341, 362 Cocceji, Samuel von 262
Burckhardt, Jacob 161, 163, 167–168, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 45, 63, 173–
171, 225, 232 174, 209, 236, 340–341, 344, 346–348,
Bürger, Gottfried August 85, 182, 191, 350–351, 362
209 Collins, William 274
Burke, Edmund 277 Colosseum, the 39–40
Büsching, Johann Gustav 357 Columbus, Christopher 85–86, 227
Das Lied der Nibelungen 357 comedy 214–215
 Index  395

Constant, Benjamin 1, 45 Docen, Bernhard Joseph 347, 357

Contessa, Carl Wilhelm Salice 361 Museum für Altdeutsche Literatur und
Cook, James 85–86 Kunst 357
Copernicus, Nicolaus 86 Ueber die Ursachen der Fortdauer der
Corneille, Pierre 175 lateinischen Sprache 347
Correggio, Antonio da 28 Döllinger, Ignaz von 125–126
Cotta, Johann Friedrich 60, 196, 226, Donne, John 317
294–295 Döring, Heinrich 354
Morgenblatt für die gebildeten Stände 196 Dresden 113, 185, 194, 196–197, 202,
Creuzer, Georg Friedrich 104–105, 352, 244–248, 252–253, 255, 259, 262, 265,
358 347, 351, 356
Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker Droste-Hülshoff, Annette von 169,
104, 352 293–296, 299–300
Cysarz, Herbert 170 Das geistliche Jahr 296, 299, 301
‘Der Dichter—Dichters Glück’ 83,
Dach, Simon 198 201, 296, 298–300, 307
Daguerre, Louis 301 Die Judenbuch 296
Dahlmann, Friedrich Christoph 353 Heidebilder 301
Dante Alighieri 60, 63–70, 74–75, 84, ‘Im Grase’ 298, 303
162–163, 171, 203, 249, 251–252, ‘Lebt wohl’ 295, 303
254–255, 260, 326, 343, 361
‘Spätes Erwachen’ 303
Divine Comedy 64, 249
Droysen, Johann Gustav 80–81, 126,
Inferno 60, 64, 66, 70 233, 353
Paradiso 70 Duller, Eduard 259
German reception of 63–67 Die Geschichte des deutschen Volkes 259
Däubler, Theodor 317 Dumas, Alexandre 220
death 1, 12–14, 16, 20–21, 28, 74–75, 103, Dürer, Albrecht 84, 91, 154, 255, 260
108, 116–118, 293, 301, 305, 313–314,
316–318, 320, 325–326, 330–331, 333, Eckermann, Johann Peter 2, 339, 354
335 Eichendorff, Joseph von 188, 210, 335
Delaunay, Robert 314 Eichhorn, Karl Friedrich 124, 342
Dessau 179, 187–188, 194, 196, 202 Eliot, George 349
Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft 212, Eliot, T. S. 109, 319
226, 236 Waste Land, The 314, 324
De Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht Elisabeth Ludovika of Bavaria, Queen
137, 349 of Prussia 254
Dickens, Charles 240 Elze, Karl 236
Dickinson, Emily 307 Emmerick, Anna Katharina 295, 300, 359
Dictys 99 Das bittere Leiden unsers Herrn Jesu
Die Horen (periodical) 60, 64–66 Christi 359
Diepenbrock, Melchior 296 Das letzte Abendmahl unsers Herrn Jesu
Dilthey, Wilhelm 47, 167, 170 Christi 359
Dingelstedt, Franz 225–226, 230 Empfindsamkeit (cult of feeling) 10–14,
Distad, N. Merrill 340 20, 32, 53
Guessing at Truth 340 Enlightenment 263
396 From Goethe to Gundolf

Erinnerungsorte. See places of memory Sintram 361

Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover 133, François, Étienne 245–247, 253
140, 358 Franco-Prussian War 249
Ernesti, Johann August 349 Frazer, James 210, 346, 352
Eschenburg, Johann Joachim 6, 345, 357 Frederick II (the Great), King of Prussia
Denkmäler altdeutscher Dichtkunst 357 87, 188, 245, 247, 249, 253, 256–259,
Euripides 42, 59, 96, 98–101, 104–105, 261–265, 342
111 Frederick William III, King of Prussia
Bacchae 100, 104–105, 111 189, 253, 260, 265–266
Eversmann, Eduard 347 Frederick William II, King of Prussia
Reise von Orenburg nach Buchara 347 128, 268
Frederick William I, King of Prussia 128
fairytale. See Märchen (fairytales) Frederick William IV, King of Prussia
Fauriel, Claude Charles 199 249, 253–258, 260, 265
female writers 293, 296 Freiligrath, Ferdinand 199, 212, 225,
Feuerbach, Ludwig 318, 349 229, 231, 240, 295
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 124, 129–136, French Revolution 48, 130, 265
138–139, 267, 343 Freud, Sigmund 83, 107, 318
Reden an die deutsche Nation 267 Freytag, Gustav 229, 233
Fiedler, H. G. 363 Friedrich, Caspar David 149
Finck von Finckenstein, Carl Wilhelm friendship 13, 42, 88, 90, 181, 187, 190,
261 274–275, 278–279, 284–285, 287, 303,
Flaxman, John 69–70 307
Fleming, Paul 198
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 323
Fohr, Philipp 192–193
Garve, Christian 262, 264
folksong 187, 197
Gellert, Christian Fürchtegott 11, 259,
Fontane, Theodor 171, 212, 226–227,
262, 264
237, 239–243
Praktische Abhandlung von dem guten
Aus England 242
Geschmacke in Briefen 11
Ein Sommer in London 242
Genée, Rudolph 225
Jenseit des Tweed 242
Gentz, Friedrich von 97
Wanderungen durch die Mark
George, Stefan 82, 162–163, 166, 170, 184
Brandenburg 242–243
circle around 162, 170
‘Zum Schillerfest des “Tunnel”’ 238
Der siebente Ring 163
Förster, Friedrich 191, 197
Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm von 65
Die Sängerfahrt 191, 194
Briefe über Merkwürdigkeiten der
Forster, Georg 138, 251
Literatur 65
Förster, Karl 197
Ugolino 65
Foscolo, Ugo 1
Gervinus, Georg Gottfried 173, 229,
Foucault, Michel 83 233, 236, 241, 252, 256
Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte 183, 188,
Neue Geschichte der poetischen Literatur
190, 343, 360–361
der Deutschen 252
Der Zauberring 361
Gesellschafter, Der (periodical) 192
Siege of Ancona. A Romantic Idyll, The Gilbert, Ludwig Wilhelm 114
360
 Index  397

Annalen der Physik 114 Die teutschen Volksbücher 352

Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig 189, Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt
191, 262, 264, 284–285 352
Goeckingk, Günther von 202 Rheinischer Merkur 352
Goedeke, Karl 185, 204 Teutschlands künftige Verfassung 347
Goethe, Johann Caspar 4 Teutschland und die Revolution 351
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 1–16, 18, 22, Gotter, Friedrich Wilhelm 4
25–34, 36–43, 45, 47, 51, 59, 62–64, 72, Gotthelf, Jeremias 293–294
82, 88–91, 96–99, 102–105, 107, 118, Göttingen Seven 133, 139–140
133–139, 141, 150, 154–155, 162–163, Gottschall, Rudolf 226, 233
165–166, 168–169, 171–172, 182, 184,
Gottsched, Johann Christoph 209
187, 191, 193–194, 197–199, 208–209,
Gozzi, Carlo 152
213, 215, 224–225, 227, 230–231, 235,
238–239, 245, 253–256, 260, 263, 275– Grabbe, Christian Dietrich 213, 228
276, 281–282, 286–287, 295, 298–299, Über die Shakespearo-Manie 213, 229
301, 339, 341, 343, 347, 350, 354, 356 Grand Tour 25
Achilleis 98 Graun, Carl Heinrich 262–263
‘Der Fischer’ 299 Graves, Robert 120
‘Der Wandrer’ 37 Gray, Thomas 274
Dichtung und Wahrheit 2, 7, 18, 26 Grey, George 353, 362
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers 1–5, Poems, Traditions, and Chaunts of the
7–10, 12–22, 32, 43, 286 Maories 353, 362
Die Wahlverwandtschaften 29 Grillparzer, Franz 169, 172, 226, 233,
Faust 15, 99, 103, 245 293–294, 298
Götz von Berlichingen 3 ‘Abschied von Gastein’ 298
Iphigenie auf Tauris 41–43, 96–99, 103, Grimm, Herman 80, 163
105, 107 Grimm, Jacob 124, 128, 133, 139–141,
Italienische Reise 25–27, 29–30, 32, 37, 147, 191, 225, 232, 239, 295, 353,
357–358
40, 43, 182, 193–194
Kinder- und Hausmärchen 141, 147, 357
Pandora 97, 103, 105
Grimm, Ludwig Emil 148
[Roman in Briefen] 3–4
Grimm, Wilhelm 124, 133, 139, 141, 147,
Römische Elegien 64
191, 295, 353, 357–358
Shakespeare und kein Ende! 172, 213, 215
Kinder- und Hausmärchen 141, 147, 357
Skizze zu einer Schilderung
Gruber, Johann Gottfried 87
Winckelmanns 88
Gryphius, Andreas 107, 175, 198
Torquato Tasso 255
Guardini, Romano 323
Ueber Kunst und Alterthum 43, 339, 354
Gubitz, Friedrich Wilhelm 192
Unterhaltungen deutscher
Guizot, François 214, 246
Ausgewanderten 64
Gundolf, Friedrich 82, 161–164, 166–176,
Wilhelm Meister 72
210, 227
Zum Schäkespear’s Tag 3
Romantiker 169, 210
Görres, Joseph 104, 157, 347–348,
Romantiker-Briefe 161–164, 167, 169
351–352
Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk 168,
Aphorismen über Organonomie 351
173–175
Die christliche Mystik 351
398 From Goethe to Gundolf

Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist 162, Heidegger, Martin 131

165–166, 169–170, 172–173, 227 Heine, Heinrich 167–168, 180–186,
Günther, Johann Christian 198 189–190, 199, 202, 207–220, 267, 293
Gutenberg, Johannes 255, 260 Buch der Lieder 189
Gutzkow, Karl 217, 224–226, 354 Reise von München nach Genua 182
Über Goethe im Wendepunkte zweier Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen
Jahrhunderte 354 207–208, 212, 215–220
Zur Geschichte der Religion und
Hackert, Jakob Philipp 36–37 Philosophie in Deutschland 214
Hagedorn, Friedrich von 181, 284–285 Heinrich, Prince of Prussia 258
Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich von der 191, Heinse, Wilhelm 10, 102, 283
357
Hellingrath, Norbert von 162, 316
Der Helden Buch 357
Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm 349
hagiography 28, 42, 83–84, 86, 88, 90, 183
Hensel, Luise 189
Haller, Albrecht von 273–274, 285
Hensel, Wilhelm 189–190, 195
Hamann, Johann Georg 342
Henze, Hans Werner 109
Hamilton, Antoine, Count 155
Heraclitus 164
Handel, George Frederick 242
Herder, Johann Gottfried 62, 65–66, 74,
Hardenberg, Friedrich von. See Novalis 129, 166, 172, 197, 210, 213, 215, 241,
(Friedrich von Hardenberg) 254, 256, 342, 344, 353, 357
Hardenberg, Karl August von, Prince Hermannsdenkmal (monument) 249
191, 267
Hermes (periodical) 182, 196, 199, 356
Hare, Augustus 340
Herwegh, Georg 199, 212, 225, 231, 240
Guesses at Truth 340, 346
Hettner, Hermann 229, 233, 263
Hare, Augustus J. C. 340, 343–344
Heym, Georg 324
Memorials of a Quiet Life 340
Heyne, Christian Gottlob 129, 141
Story of My Life, The 340
Heyse, Paul 203, 225–226, 233
Hare, Esther 345
Heywood, Thomas 214
Hare, Julius 123, 188, 338–364
Hirzel, Georg 284
Guesses at Truth 340, 346 Hirzel, Johann Kaspar 280
Harms, Claus 349 historical drama 47–48, 54, 213, 218–219,
Hartmann, Ferdinand 356 234
Hatfield, James Taft 203 historicism 81, 167, 169
Hauff, Wilhelm 92, 182, 185, 196 historiography 80, 167, 228, 237, 263
Haym, Rudolf 165, 167, 210, 231, 267 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 151, 162, 207, 340,
Die romantische Schule 210–211 355, 360
Hazlitt, William 211, 213–214 Die Elixiere des Teufels 355
Hebbel, Friedrich 218, 226, 233, 293 Die Serapionsbrüder 355
Hebel, Johann Peter 260 Kater Murr 355
Hederich, Benjamin 98–100, 105, 112 Meister Floh 355
Gründliches mythologisches Lexicon Hoffmann von Fallersleben, August
98–99 Heinrich 230
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 45, Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 172, 184
124, 130, 132–133, 168, 171, 215, 219,
228–229, 267, 342, 350, 353
 Index  399

Hölderlin, Friedrich 102, 162, 164, 169, Jones, William 341

275–276, 282–283, 285, 287–288, Jordan, Charles-Étienne 262, 264
316–317, 319, 336, 354 Joseph II (Holy Roman Emperor) 4, 87
‘Brod und Wein’ 283, 316, 336 Jung-Stilling, Heinrich 114, 351
‘Der Rhein’ 287 Theorie der Geisterkunde 114
‘Mein Vorsaz’ 275
‘Patmos’ 287 Kafka, Franz 141
Holy Roman Empire 4 Kalckreuth, Friedrich von 183, 190, 197
Homer 84, 100, 105, 191, 227, 231, 326, Kannegiesser, Karl Ludwig Friedrich
343 251
Horace 275, 281 Kanne, Johann Arnold 103, 110, 352
Horn, Franz 212, 217, 346, 362 Erste Urkunden der Geschichte, oder
Houwald, Ernst von 361 Allgemeine Mythologie 352
Huch, Ricarda 167 Gianetta 352
Hugo, Victor 168, 214, 220, 246 Mythologie der Griechen 103, 110, 352
Humboldt, Alexander von 132, 137, Romane aus der Christenwelt aller Zeiten
191, 258–259, 267, 343 352
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 45, 90, 129–133, System der indischen Mythe 352
136, 138–139, 267, 343, 358 Kant, Immanuel 46–47, 112, 124, 129–
Hyginus 99 130, 166, 260–264, 268, 343
Der Streit der Fakultäten 130
iconography 34, 42, 91, 141, 147, 149, Karsch, Anna Louisa 265
246, 249, 251, 253, 300 Kayser, Christian Gottlob 359
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 124, 343 Keble, John 302
Jäger, Oskar 232 Keller, Gottfried 96, 184, 225, 233, 239
Jahn, Friedrich 183, 190 Kerner, Justinus 182, 186–187, 197,
202–204
Jahrbücher der Literatur (periodical) 356
Kersting, Georg Friedrich 188
Jahrbücher für Phiiosophie und Pädagogik
(periodical) 356 Kestner, Johann Christian 4–9, 13
Jahrbücher fur wissenschaftliche Kritik Kinkel, Gottfried 231
(periodical) 356 Klages, Ludwig 170
Jameson, Anna 206, 214, 217, 219 Kleist, Ewald von 264, 280, 284–285
Jean Paul 1, 169, 208, 260, 342, 354–355 Kleist, Heinrich von 31, 92, 95–106,
Clavis Fichteana 355 110, 112–114, 118, 120, 169, 351, 354,
356, 360
Dämmerung für Deutschland 355
Amphitryon 95
Titan 355
Das Erdbeben in Chili 101
Jena 87, 129, 134–138, 152, 347, 350, 352
Das Käthchen von Heilbronn 100, 113
Jenkins, Roy 124
‘Der Schrecken im Bade’ 100
Jerome, King of Westphalia 139
Der zerbrochne Krug 101
Jerusalem, Johann Friedrich Wilhelm
7–8 Die Hermannsschlacht 95
Jerusalem, Karl Wilhelm 4–8, 13–14 Die Verlobung in St. Domingo 101
John, King of Saxony 247–253, 255, Marionettentheater 118
260, 262, 361 Penthesilea 94–108, 110–114, 116–120
Johnson, Samuel 13, 73, 211, 213–214 Prinz Friedrich von Homburg 95, 118
400 From Goethe to Gundolf

Kleist, Marie von 113 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 343

Klemperer, Victor 246 Leipzig 5, 8, 85, 194, 196–197, 230,
Klingemann, Ernst August Friedrich 1 234–235, 259, 352, 357–358
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 12, 14, Leistner, Bernd 204–205
18, 20, 33, 39, 84–88, 90, 92, 95, 102, Leistner, Maria-Verena 204–205
108, 182, 238–239, 259, 273–288, 305, Lenau, Nikolaus 293–294
343, 353 Lenné, Peter Joseph 254
‘An Bodmer’ 274 Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold 12, 31,
‘An Gott’ 283 62–63, 71, 284, 354
‘Auf meine Freunde’ 102, 279, 281 Das Hochburger Schloss 61
‘Das Wiedersehn’ 305 Leopold, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau 188
Der Messias 84–86, 280 Lessing, Gothold Ephraim 6, 53, 62, 65,
‘Der Zürchersee’ 274–278, 282, 68, 80–81, 85–88, 90, 92, 209, 227–228,
286–288 230, 256, 260, 262–264, 283, 342, 354,
Kniep, Christoph Heinrich 36, 38 357
Knobelsdorff, Georg Wenzeslas von Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts
262, 264 264
Knorring, Sophie von 358 Emilia Galotti 6, 264
Flore und Blanscheflur 359 Laokoon 65, 68
Koberstein, August 229 Literaturbriefe 228
Kopisch, August 251 Nathan der Weise 53, 264
Köppen, C. F. 259 Lessing, Karl 86
Friedrich der Große und seine Widersacher. Lewes, George Henry 349
Eine Jubelschrift 259 Liebermann, Max 314
Köppen, Peter von 348 lieux de mémoire. See places of memory
Die dreygestaltete Hekate und ihre Rolle Lindau, Paul 226
in den Mysterien 348 literary canon 83–84, 86, 92, 171, 175,
Körner, Josef 354 204, 215, 224, 226, 233, 245, 255–256,
Körner, Theodor 188, 267 265, 267
Kotzebue, August von 137 literary criticism 176, 198, 209
Kreyssig, F. A. 236 literary history 183, 210, 259, 263, 294
Kugler, Franz 259, 264 literature
Geschichte Friedrichs des Großen 259 national 61, 83, 92, 171, 186, 208, 213,
Kürenberger, the 190 229, 239, 252, 255, 263
Kurz, Hermann 203, 230 travel 25, 182
Kynosarges (periodical) 356 world 63, 197, 208–209
Lives of the Poets. See biography
Lachmann, Karl 191, 358 loci memoriae. See places of memory
Lamartine, Alphonse de 168 Loeben, Otto Heinrich, von 197
Lange, Samuel Gotthold 279 Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von 175
Laocoon 60, 62–63, 68–69, 71, 77 Lohre, Heinrich 203
La Roche, Maximiliane von 5 Louis Philippe, King 219
La Roche, Sophie von 5 Ludwig, Emil 82
Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim 5 Ludwig I, King of Bavaria 248–249, 361
Lassberg, Joseph von 295 Ludwig, Maximilian 238
 Index  401

Ludwig, Otto 46, 173, 226, 233 Minor, Jacob 167

Luther, Martin 8, 84, 124, 260, 263, 273, Möbius, Paul 234–235
317, 346, 348–349 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 95, 214
Mombert, Alfred 317
Majer, Friedrich 352
Mommsen, Theodor 125–126, 163, 168,
Malsburg, Ernst von der 197
191, 233, 246
Mann, Golo 83
Monet, Claude 314
Wallenstein 83
Montagu, Elizabeth 61
Mann, Thomas 1, 55, 141, 161
Montaigne, Michel de 278
Manning, Henry Edward 340
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat,
Märchen (fairytales) 142, 150–153, Baron de 13
155–156, 158
Lettres Persanes 13
Marggraff, Hermann 225
monument 86, 245, 246, 248, 249, 252,
Marlowe, Christopher 175, 191, 195, 253, 255, 257, 258, 259, 260, 263,
199, 214 265, 267, 330, 331. See also places
Mason, Eudo 174 of memory
Massow, Julius Eberhard von 129 Moore, Thomas 199–200
materialism 49, 163, 169 Mörike, Eduard 169, 293–295
Maupertuis, Pierre Louis 262, 264 Moritz, Karl Philipp 36, 98, 103–104, 353
Maurice, F. D. 123, 340 Götterlehre oder mythologische
Maurois, André 82 Dichtungen der Alten 98, 103, 353
Meidner, Ludwig 324 Möser, Justus 353
Meinecke, Friedrich 126–127 Müller, Adam 97, 118, 181, 347, 356, 362
Meinhard, Johann Nicolaus 66 Die Elemente der Staatskunst 347
memory. See places of memory Von der Idee des Staates und ihren
Mendelssohn, Fanny 295 Verhältnissen zu den populären
Mendelssohn, Felix 254, 296 Staatstheorien 347
Mendelssohn, Moses 86, 265 Müller, Johannes von 124, 342, 353
Menzel, Adolph 259, 264–265 Müller, Karl Otfried 358
Menzel, Wolfgang 362 Müller, Max 184, 186, 203
metamorphosis 95–96, 99–100, 109–110, Müller, Wilhelm 92, 179–180, 182–193,
112–113, 116, 118, 120, 319 195–199, 201, 203–205, 208, 357, 362
metre (poetry) 42, 97, 249, 281–282, Askania 195
298, 300, 304, 317, 321, 336 Bibliothek deutscher Dichter des
Metternich, Prince Klemens von 137, 186 siebzehnten Jahrhunderts 198, 357
Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand 171, 184, Blumenlese aus den Minnesingern 190
223–224 Bundesblüthen 189–190
Meyer, Heinrich 28, 30, 163 Debora 181, 189, 196, 203
Michelangelo 80, 84, 163, 227 Die schöne Müllerin 179–181, 200–201
Michelet, Jules 219–220, 246 ‘Die verpestete Freiheit’ 200
Mickiewicz, Adam 168 Die Winterreise 179–180, 188, 201–202
Middle Ages, the 30, 43, 152, 162, 171, Homerische Vorschule 195, 197
175, 357
Lieder der Griechen 189, 192, 199
Mill, John Stuart 123
Lyrische Reisen und epigrammatische
Milton, John 61
Spaziergänge 202
402 From Goethe to Gundolf

Neugriechische Volkslieder 199 Grundzeichnung des natürlichen Systems

Rom, Römer und Römerinnen 182, der Erze 347
193–194, 197, 203, 362 Isis (periodical) 137
Sieben und siebzig Gedichte aus den Lehrbuch der Naturgeschichte 351
hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Ueber das Universum als Fortsetzung
Waldhornisten 181, 193, 200 des Sinnensystem 347
Müllner, Adolph 361 Ueber den Werth der Naturgeschichte,
Musäus, Johann Carl August 152, 155 besonders fur die Bildung der Deutschen
Volksmärchen der Deutschen 152 136, 347
Musset, Alfred de 214 Olivier, Ferdinand 188
mysticism 17, 114 Olliers Literary Miscellany (periodical)
mythology 35, 60, 75, 96, 98–99, 104–106, 360
108, 194, 255, 286, 313, 317, 319, Olshausen, Hermann 349
348–349, 352–353, 362 Opie, John 68
Opitz, Martin 175, 198, 204, 273
Napoleon, Emperor of France 2, 4, 87,
Ossian 20–21, 61, 84
188, 219, 357
Ovid 99–101, 108–109
National Socialism 126, 131, 141
Metamorphoses 100, 109, 111
Nazarenes, the 27, 29–30, 154, 192–194,
356 Pabst, Johann Heinrich 359
Nibelungenlied 357 Ein Wort über die Ekstase 359
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg 124, 191, 267, Pange, Comtesse Jean de 82
340–341, 343, 346, 353 Panizzi, Antonio 363
History of Rome 341, 343 Panthéon (Paris) 245
Nienstädt, Wilhelm 119 Pantheon, the 39–40, 42, 85–86
Nietzsche, Friedrich 81, 102, 161–164, Parthey, Gustav 358
168, 171
Perrault, Charles 151, 154
Nipperdey, Thomas 80, 249, 258
Perry, Walter C. 125, 127–128
Nora, Pierre 245
German University Education, or the
Les Lieux de mémoire 245 Professors and Students of Germany
Northcote, James 68 125
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) 31, Persius, Ludwig 254
33, 91, 114, 149, 155–156, 158, 162, Perthes, Friedrich Christoph 350
168, 343, 354–356
Pesne, Antoine 262, 264
Die Christenheit oder Europa 354
Phidias 343
Geistliche Lieder 355
Philalethes 249, 251, 252, 255, 256, 361.
Heinrich von Ofterdingen 158 See also John, King of Saxony
Novellenkranz 356 philology 73, 81, 139, 167, 170, 172, 176,
191, 211, 341, 345, 348, 357–358
Odeonsplatz (Munich) 248
Phöbus (periodical) 97, 100, 113,
Oechelhäuser, Wilhelm 236
118–119, 356
Oehlenschläger, Adam 360–361
Picasso, Pablo 314
Correggio 361
Pindar 275, 279, 316
Oken, Lorenz 135–139, 301, 347, 351
places of memory 245–247, 252–253,
Erste Ideen zur Theorie des Lichts 347
256–257
 Index  403

Platen, August von 198, 293–294 Rilke, Rainer Maria 109, 313–314, 316–
Plato 33, 164 319, 321, 323–327, 330–332, 334–336
Plautus 95 ‘Alkestis’ 326
Plutarch 102 Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien)
Pope, Alexander 61–62, 101 I 316, 327
positivism 79, 81, 169 IV 315
Potsdam 246, 253, 255–256 V 313, 315, 323
Pound, Ezra 95, 109, 319 VI 313, 332, 334
Prawer, S. S. 210 VII 313
Preußische Jahrbücher (periodical) 167 IX 313, 324
Priebsch, Robert 363 X 313–336
Propyläen (periodical) 27–28, 43, 354 Malte Laurids Brigge 314
Prutz, Robert 362 Neue Gedichte 314
Prynne, William 216 ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes’ 326
Histriomastix 216 Requiem. Für eine Freundin 327
Ritter, Johann Wilhelm 114, 152, 350
Raabe, Wilhelm 225
Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines
Rabelais, François 157
jungen Physikers 350
Racine, Jean 254
Robeck, Johannes 13
Athalie 254
De morte voluntaria 13
Ramler, Karl Wilhelm 262, 264
Robert, Ludwig 97
Ranke, Leopold von 80–81, 163, 167,
Robinson, Henry Crabb 344, 360
191, 233, 246, 353
Roethe, Gustav 169
Ueber die Verschwörung gegen Venedig
Romanticism 32, 91, 148, 161–163,
353
166–170, 176, 179, 181, 191, 212,
Raphael 27, 30, 33, 41–43, 84, 89, 91,
328, 354, 360
227, 343
German 91, 148, 162, 169, 176, 328
cult of 27, 33, 41–43
Rome 25–30, 39–41, 62, 89, 98, 192, 194,
Rauch, Christian Daniel 256–257, 268
265, 341, 343, 350, 356
Raumer, Friedrich von 353
Rosenkranz, Karl 167, 357, 362
Das Brittische Besteuerungs-System 353
Rossetti, Christina 306
Raupach, Ernst von 361
‘A Birthday’ 306
Reck, Karl 354
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 184
Renaissance, the 40, 43, 85, 87, 154, 171,
Rötscher, Heinrich Theodor 229
175, 208, 211, 216, 220, 247, 286
Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste 274
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 314
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3, 8, 15, 101
Reynolds, Joshua 62, 68–69
La Nouvelle Héloïse 15
Rheims 245
Rückert, Friedrich 188, 198, 203, 267
Richardson, Samuel 3
Ruge, Arnold 362
Richter, Ludwig 259
Ruhl, August Sigismund 193
Riedesel, Johann Hermann von 25
Rühs, Friedrich 188, 190
Riemer, Friedrich Wilhelm 339
ruins 34, 37–39, 154, 247, 328
Riepenhausen, Franz 148
Rümelin, Johann Christoph Benjamin
Riepenhausen, Johannes 148
275
Rietschel, Ernst 231
404 From Goethe to Gundolf

Rumohr, Carl Friedrich von 192, 362 Über naïve und sentimentalische
Geist der Kochkunst 362 Dichtung 64, 256
Novellen 362 Wallenstein 45–56, 59
Runge, Philipp Otto 147–149, 156, 356 Wilhelm Tell 245
Schilling, Johannes 247
Sachs, Hans 357 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 254, 257
Sack, Albert von 192 Schlabrendorff, Ernst Wilhelm von 261
Sand, Karl 137 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 27–29, 59–60,
Sandrart, Joachim von 84 63–66, 69, 71–72, 74–77, 82, 98, 105,
Savigny, Friedrich Carl von 124, 343, 356 112, 124, 132, 168, 170–171, 173, 180,
Z e i t s c h r i f t f ü r ge s c h i c h t l i c h e 191, 209, 211, 213, 215, 218, 228, 252,
Rechtswissenschaft 356 267, 340–342, 352, 355, 357–360
Schanze, Helmut 233 De geographia Homerica 358
Scharnhorst, Gerhard von 267 Die Gemählde 28
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Ion 98
104–105, 114, 124, 130–131, 133, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und
135–136, 139, 233, 343, 349–351 Literatur 63, 72, 76, 82, 173, 209, 212
Philosophie der Kunst 233 ‘Zueignung des Trauerspiels Romeo
Philosophie und Religion 350 und Julia’ 75
System der Naturphilosophie 350 Schlegel, Dorothea 358
Weltseele 350 Florentin 358
Schenk, Eduard von 361 Schlegel, Friedrich 27, 29–30, 32–33,
Schenkendorf, Max von 188, 267 41–43, 63, 88, 92, 97, 105, 124, 149,
Scherenberg, Christian Friedrich 239 152–154, 156–157, 163, 168–171, 191,
Scherer, Wilhelm 126, 167, 233 209, 211, 215, 219, 340–342, 349,
Schiller, Friedrich 33, 45–49, 52–55, 352–355, 358
59–60, 62, 64–65, 67, 72, 74, 77, Alarcos 97
80–81, 85, 87, 90, 92, 97, 118, 124, Concordia 29, 355
141, 171–173, 182, 185, 209, 223–232, Europa 355
234–235, 238–241, 245, 253–256, 260, Geschichte der Jungfrau von Orleans 358
263, 282, 284, 295, 300, 341, 343 Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und
Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Römer 105
Menschen 64 Gespräch uber die Poesie 149
centenary of 223 Lucinde 161, 349
cult of 238 Philosophie der Geschichte 353
Demetrius 226 Philosophie des Lebens 358
‘Der Taucher’ 300 Über das Studium der Griechischen
Die Braut von Messina 96–97 Poesie 105
Die Räuber 46, 238 Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der
Don Carlos 46 Indier 352
Fiesco 46 Ueber Lessing 88
Geschichte des dreissigjährigen Krieges Schleiermacher, Friedrich 124, 130–131,
47–48 133, 136, 138–139, 267, 341–342, 346,
Maria Stuart 59 348–349
 Index  405

Vertraute Briefe über Fr. Schlegels Lucinde Shakespeare, William 3, 31, 46, 52–54,
349 59–67, 71–76, 82, 84, 92, 97, 111–112,
Schleswig-Holstein crisis 227, 237, 241 118, 154–155, 162, 165–166, 168–175,
Schlosser, Friedrich Christoph 353 196, 207–220, 225–230, 233–238,
Schlüter, Andreas 257 240–243, 251–252, 342–343, 358
Schmidt, Erich 80–81, 101, 167, 169, 263 As You Like It 72
Schmidt, Fanny 283 German reception of 59–61, 63, 65,
Schmidt, Georg Philipp (von Lübeck) 209, 212, 214, 217, 220, 240, 242, 252
187, 198, 201 Hamlet 54, 71–73, 76, 112, 213, 229,
Schmidt, Julian 223, 229, 233, 236, 241 240–241
Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Julius 192, 195 Henry IV 46, 174, 219
Schopenhauer, Adele 295 Henry V 174
Schopenhauer, Arthur 233 Henry VI 67–68, 72, 175, 219
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung 233 Henry VIII 72
Schubert, Franz 180, 183–184, 201 Julius Caesar 66, 72
Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich 113–114 King John 67, 72, 249–250, 253, 260, 262
Ansichten von der Nachtseite der King Lear 62–63, 68, 71–72, 77, 241
Naturwissenschaft 113–114, 351 Love’s Labour’s Lost 175
Schücking, Levin 295 Macbeth 46, 48, 51–55, 59, 72, 74, 77,
Schüddekopf, Carl 167 213
Schulze, Hagen 245–247, 253 Merchant of Venice, The 72, 215–217
Schumann, Clara (née Wieck) 296 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 63, 72,
Schumann, Robert 295–296 173, 240, 254
Schütz, Friedrich Karl Julius 354 Othello 54, 72, 76, 241
Goethe und Pustkuchen 354 Richard II 219
Schütz, Wilhelm von 97, 359 Richard III 46, 67, 72
Anticelsus 359 Romeo and Juliet 46, 59–60, 66, 68,
Der Garten der Liebe 359 71–73, 75–77, 241
Der Graf und die Gräfin von Gleichen Tempest, The 66, 72
359 translation of 64, 66, 71–72, 170, 172,
Dramatische Wälder 359 210–212, 230, 236, 240
Lacrimas 359 Troilus and Cressida 217
Niobe 359 Twelfth Night 72
Schwab, Gustav 80, 90, 92, 183–186, 189, Winter’s Tale, The 208
202, 224, 230 Sicily 25–26, 37, 39
Schwerin, Kurd Christoph von 268 Siegesallee 257–258, 268
Scott, Walter 200, 240–241 Sinclair, Isaak von 283
Semper, Gottfried 247, 253 Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand 105,
Seneca, L. Annaeus 98 188, 193, 346, 362
Sengle, Friedrich 83, 185 solitude 8–9, 12, 22
Wieland 83 Sophocles 46, 76–77, 97–98, 105, 118,
Seven Years’ War 247 228, 254
Severini, Gino 314 Antigone 77, 175, 254
Seydlitz, Friedrich Wilhelm von 261 Oedipus at Colonus 76
Oedipus Rex 76, 96
406 From Goethe to Gundolf

Spener, Jakob 349 Thirlwall, Connop 188, 341, 346

Spinoza, Baruch 17, 348 Thirty Years’ War 47–48
Spitzweg, Carl 194 Tholuck, August 349
Spranger, Eduard 126 Thomasius, Christian 129
Staël, Madame de 82, 217, 343, 360 Thorwaldsen, Bertel 230
De l’Allemagne 343, 360 Thümmel, Moritz August von 353
Stägemann, August von 191–192 Thurn und Taxis, Princess Marie von
Stägemann, Elisabeth von 191 315
Stanley, A. P. 344 Tieck, Dorothea 295
Steffens, Henrik 114, 130–131, 351, 359 Tieck, Ludwig 27–32, 41–43, 46, 73, 85,
Die gegenwärtige Zeit 351 91–92, 97, 105, 113, 118, 148–158,
Was ich erlebte 351 161, 168–169, 171–175, 181, 191,
193, 196–197, 200–201, 211–215, 228,
Steig, Reinhold 98, 140, 158, 167
230, 240, 251, 254, 256, 295, 340, 343,
Stein, Friedrich Karl, Freiherr vom 267
345–346, 352, 354–358, 361–362
Sterling, John 123, 141, 342, 353
Alt-Englisches Theater 358
Stifter, Adalbert 294
Buch über Shakespeare 174
Stolberg, Christian von 350
Deutsches Theater 357
Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold von 24–27,
Dichterleben 214
32–34, 36–43, 342, 350
Dramaturgische Blätter 213
Geschichte der Religion Jesu Christi 350
Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen 149–150,
Reise durch Deutschland, die Schweiz,
201, 356
Italien und Sicilien in den Jahren
1791–92 26, 32–33, 37, 42 Frauendienst 357
Storm, Theodor 182, 184 Genoveva 97, 146, 148, 152
Strasbourg 3–4, 30, 245 Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden
Stratford 241–242 Klosterbruders 85, 150, 356
Strauss, David Friedrich 348–350 Minnelieder aus dem Schwäbischen
Zeitalter 148, 356
Das Leben Jesu 349–350
Phantasus 31, 150–153, 155–156
Streckfuss, Karl 251
Poetisches Journal 352
Streicher, Andreas 230
Sturm und Drang 1, 15, 61, 65, 85, 97, 215 Shakspeare’s Vorschule 358
sublime, the 59, 277–278, 283 William Lovell 356
Süvern, Johann Wilhelm 188 Tischbein, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm 36
Swinburne, Algernon Charles 184 Tolstoy, Leo 318
Death of Ivan Ilyich, The 318
Tacitus 95 Tomlinson, Charles 319
Tasso, Torquato 84, 157, 197, 203–204, Treitschke, Heinrich von 126, 233
254, 256 Tropus, Karl 240
Tennyson, Alfred 184, 346
Teutoburger Wald 246, 249 Ugolino della Gherardesca 60, 64–71,
Thierry, Augustin 246 74, 77
Thiersch, Friedrich 348, 358 Uhland, Ludwig 182, 186, 197, 202–204,
295, 357
Ueber die Epochen der bildenden Kunst
unter den Griechen 348 Walther von der Vogelweide 357
Thiersch, Heinrich Wilhelm Josias 349 Ulrici, Hermann 229, 236
 Index  407

universities 123–129, 131–132, 134, Weber, Carl Maria von 196, 201
140–141, 342 Weber, Max 127, 133
Urania (periodical) 196, 202, 356 Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb 358
Weltschmerz (melancholy) 1, 190, 201,
Valéry, Paul 109
202, 294, 317
Vanvitelli, Luigi 40
Wendt, Amadeus 195
Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August 362
Taschenbuch zum geselligen Vergnügen
Vasari, Giorgio 85 195
Veit, Johannes 29, 198 Wenzel, Gottfried Immanuel 362
Veit, Philipp 29, 188 Werner, Anton von 248
Velde, Carl Franz van der Velde 196 Werner, Zacharias 97, 118, 360
Versailles 248, 253 Cunegunde 360
Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom
Nachgelassene Predigten 360
140, 358
Wanda 360
Vigny, Alfred de 214
Westminster Abbey 246
Vilmar, August Friedrich 229
Wetzlar 4, 5, 8, 14, 232
Virchow, Rudolf 125, 132
Weygand, Christian Friedrich 5
Virgil 36, 66, 255, 326
Whewell, William 188, 341, 346
Aeneid 99
Wieland, Christoph Martin 33, 83, 87, 98,
Georgics 36 124, 150, 154, 155, 254, 255, 256, 343
Vischer, Friedrich Theodor 225, 229
Alceste 98
Volkmann, Johann Jacob 25, 36
Oberon 154
Volney, Constantin de 39
Wildenbruch, Ernst von 226
Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les
William I, German Emperor 257, 258
Révolutions 39
William II, German Emperor 253, 257,
Volpato, Giovanni 40 268
Voltaire, François Arouet de 61–62, William IV, King of Great Britain and
265, 278 Hanover 140
Voss, Johann Heinrich 124, 191, 211, Wilson, Richard 40
343, 353
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 28, 29,
Wachler, Ludwig 252 41, 42, 43, 62, 88, 89, 90, 91, 105, 262,
Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich 28, 31, 265, 343, 353
41–43, 85, 91, 150, 161, 356 Wissenschaft (science) 35, 80, 81, 98,
Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden 127, 130, 131, 132, 168, 267, 341
Klosterbruders 85, 150, 356 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 318
Wagner, Richard 82, 99, 162, 241 Wolff, Christian 128, 138, 262, 264
Waldberg, Max von 175 Wolf, Friedrich August 124, 157, 188,
Walhalla (memorial) 246, 249, 260 191, 192, 197, 343
Wallraf, Ferdinand Franz 267 Wolfskehl, Karl 162, 163, 170
Walzel, Oskar 166 Wöllner, Johann Christoph von 268
Wars of Liberation 183, 188, 266, 267, 360 Wolzogen, Caroline von 87
Wartburg 137, 246 Woolner, Thomas 338, 346
Warton, Thomas 7 Wordsworth, William 276, 340, 341
‘The Suicide’ 7 World War Two 258
Wright, Aldis 348
408 From Goethe to Gundolf

Yeats, W. B. 319 Zieten, Hans Joachim von 261

Young, Edward 12, 33, 61, 85, 217, 229 Zimmermann, Johann Georg 13
Night Thoughts 12, 33 Von der Einsamkeit 13
youth. See childhood Zweig, Stefan 82

Zeitung für Einsiedler (periodical) 347

Zelter, Carl Friedrich 2, 354
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