Archive of the Poet and Writer

Abstract

Scholars often credit Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as the originator of the idea of “world literature,” but his contribution to another core concept of modern literary studies has received comparably little attention. In the essay translated here for the first time, “Archiv des Dichters und Schriftstellers” (“Archive of the Poet andWriter”), published in 1823, Goethe formulated the concept of the Nachlass, the archival collection of a writer’s posthumous papers. It would be hard to overstate the importance of the Nachlass as a literary practice since the nineteenth century or its relevance to contemporary debates on the relationship among philology and literature, literary archives, and the politics of cultural memory. In this context, Goethe’s essay plays a key role. Its impact reaches far into themodern era of the twentieth century and indeed our present, where contemporary authors’ archives are sold on a global market. In the German context, literary authors’ collection of their own papers for archival purposes became an object of theoretical consideration only around 1800. More than any other writer of his day, Goethe offered a model for the deliberate fashioning of one’s own Nachlass, through his autobiographical writings, the authorized edition of his complete works, the publication of his correspondence, and, above all, through the meticulous organization of his personal archive. In “Archive of the Poet and Writer,” first published in Goethe’s journal Ueber Kunst und Altertum (On Art and Antiquity), Goethe reflected directly on these activities. Here, Goethe reported his satisfaction at the completion of a project: a young man “well acquainted with library and archival work” had managed to bring together all of Goethe’s papers into “perfect order,” “particularly those pertaining to my writing life, in which nothing should be neglected or dismissed as unworthy.” Two points are well to be emphasized, as they proved enduring: Goethe’s explicit connection between work and biography, and his emphasis on the total preservation of documents related to his “writing life.”