The late Goethe: New directions

Goethes Spätwerk/On Late Goethe. Edited by Kai Sina and David Wellbery, De Gruyter. 2020. viii + 275pp. €69,95/$80.99 (hardcover or ebook)

Mittelbarkeit. Essays zum späten Goethe. By Gerhart Pickerodt, Tectum. 2020. 125pp. €26 (paperback or ebook)

Formlose Form. Epistemik und Poetik des Aggregats beim späten Goethe. By Rabea Kleymann, Brill | Fink. 2021. viii + 279pp. €56 (hardcover or ebook)

For many years, the writing that Goethe produced as an older man was poorly understood. The eccentricity of works such as Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and Faust II led many 19th-century critics, starting with Ludwig Tieck, to conclude that Goethe had lost his touch, to put it mildly. The dominant view in that period, as summarized by Erich Trunz, was of Goethe's later work as a time of “bedauerliches Erstarren und Absinken […] Schwäche und Verknöcherung” (“Altersstil” 178). Trunz goes on to explain that, in the first half of the 20th century, the increasing influence of psychology on studies of literary style, together with the changes in taste ushered in by artistic movements such as expressionism, led to a more sympathetic understanding of the idiosyncrasies of Goethe's late work. He also observes that there is an increased tendency toward generalization at this point in Goethe's career, especially by comparison with the “Frühstil, der auf das Einmalige, Individuelle gerichtet ist” (180). Trunz's appraisal of Goethe's “Altersstil” is sensitive and remains an informative contribution. He himself is alive to the fact that the eccentric nature of Goethe's late work is part of its richness, both intellectual and stylistic; but this notion of the work as “verallgemeinernd” has something in common with a trend that became firmly established in the 20th century and that portrayed the later Goethe serenely detached from everyday struggles. This approach is clearly more constructive than the disparaging 19th-century tendency; the problem is that the expectation of harmony and contentment can elide the many moments of struggle, of difficulty, in Goethe's late works. The challenge for interpreters of the older Goethe is to find ways of reconciling the pain of lateness with the potential of lateness and to appreciate the creativity of his late writing without overlooking the elements of suffering that underlie it. I use the plural “ways” advisedly: It is evident that no single approach can be commensurate with the complexity of these works. The studies under consideration here certainly come at the late Goethe from different angles, although, as we shall see, there are many points of resonance between them. Taken together, these three books offer distinct but complementary perspectives on a wealth of material.

A question with which any author writing about the late Goethe must contend is when his “late” period begins. Gehart Pickerodt asserts that the novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften of 1809 “markiert die Wende zu Goethes Spätwerk” (9), while Jan Behrs, in his contribution to the collection of essays edited by Kai Sina and David Wellbery, posits Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–13) as the “Schwellentext” to the late work (45ff.). In the same volume, Eva Geulen even floats the possibility of seeing 1789, when Goethe was just 40, as the start of the late period. The French Revolution changed the course of his writing, for it “trat Goethe widerständig gegenüber und war nach Maßgabe seiner Mittel und Möglichkeiten literarisch nicht zu assimilieren” (21). This is not so much a definitive proposition as a thought experiment on Geulen's part; she debates other possibilities too, and the essay rests on the contention that the late work represents the “Unverfügbarkeit des Unverfügbaren” (23). Rabea Kleymann does not propose a distinct turning point, preferring instead to discern particular tendencies that characterize Goethe's late work: Her study begins in the late 1810s with Zur Naturwissenschaft überhaupt, insbesondere zur Morphologie, published between 1817 and 1824, and the West-östlicher Divan, composed between 1814 and 1819. There is, then, no consensus on the question among scholars, including the authors of these studies. This is as it should be: Historical periods are to an extent artificial and may distort our understanding of the flow of history, exaggerating or downplaying both continuity and change. Having a variety of suggestions as to where to pinpoint the beginning of his late work helps us to keep seeing Goethe's writing anew and to keep refreshing in our minds what we understand by lateness.

Of course, without some definition to the field of study, analysis cannot be focused. The attempt to distill some of the qualities that are characteristic of the writing that Goethe produced as an older man is an important part of each of these studies. In his introduction to Goethes Spätwerk/On Late Goethe, Kai Sina uses Ralph Waldo Emerson's writing on Goethe to identify three “Problembereiche”: first, that Goethe's late work is intimately bound up in his complex feelings about modernity; second, that an irresolvable tension between multiplicity and unity, between heterogeneity and homogeneity, gives life to this phase of Goethe's writing; and third, that the genius of the late Goethe is evident in his particular talent “zur kreativen Appropriation der modernen Welt in ihrer ganzen Vielfalt” (11). Gerhart Pickerodt posits “Mittelbarkeit” or “das Indirekte” as the defining principle of Goethe's “Alterspoetik” (3). The notion is inspired by a letter of 1827, in which Goethe reflects on the inability of direct forms of expression to capture the essence of experience and states his preference for “durch einander gegenübergestellte und sich gleichsam ineinander abspiegelnde Gebilde” (3). An aversion to direct understanding and to easy principles plays a role for Rabea Kleymann, too, although she bases her study on a different principle, namely, “das Aggregat.” The concept of the aggregate appears in Goethe's writings on morphology when the thing under discussion “sich eigentlich ins Unbegreifliche entzieht” (17). It captures the moment when perception cannot yet order a seemingly manifold set of qualities into a fixed and stable form. The point is not that the phenomenon under scrutiny has no form but rather that it has not yet been discerned. Thus, all three of the studies identify unifying principles that accommodate within themselves a resistance to unity. Now for a closer look at each.

The three “Problembereiche” that Kai Sina identifies in his introduction are addressed in various and subtle ways by the contributors. The volume is divided, moreover, into three sections. The first, “Annäherungen/Approaches,” comprises two essays: Eva Geulen's richly complex piece, mentioned above, and an essay on Goethe and the Biedermeier by Jane K. Brown. The second section, “Analysen/Analyses,” is the longest in the book, with contributions on topics ranging from Dichtung und Wahrheit (Jan Behrs) and the Zweiter Römischer Aufenthalt (John T. Hamilton) to the West-östlicher Divan (Carlos Spoerhase), from Goethe's “Inschriften, Denk- und Sendeblätter” (Ernst Osterkamp) to Im ernsten Beinhaus war's (Daniel Carranza) and Ballade (Rüdiger Singer), and, of course, with essays on Faust II and the Wanderjahre (Heinrich Detering, Helmut Müller-Sievers). A variety of important perspectives emerge from the various analyses, and the range of texts is appropriate: The major late works are in focus, but due attention is also paid to Goethe's non-narrative writing. Like the opening, the closing section, “Anschlüsse/Continuations,” consists of two essays. Christiane Holm reflects on Johann Peter Eckermann's Gespräche mit Goethe and on the attention that Eckermann pays to physical situations and to material things, as well as to words. She credits the Gespräche with a significant role in ensuring that Goethe's house and possessions have also been curated as part of the “Dichter-Nachlass” (252). Finally, Tom Kindt sketches the development of the concept of “Spätwerk” in relation to Goethe from the mid-19th to the early 20th century. The closing words of his essay, and therefore of the volume, are a reminder of the importance of semantic precision when dealing with “lateness”: “nicht jedes Alterswerk [ist] ein Spätwerk […] und nicht jedes Spätwerk ein Alterswerk” (267).

It is, of course, impossible to go into each essay here, so I shall focus on just one in detail, namely, “The Biedermeier Goethe. Altersstil and Zeitaltersstil” by Jane K. Brown. The contention of this sovereign piece is that Goethe's late work “is the quintessence of its era; his Altersstil inaugurates the Biedermeier” (28). Brown aligns herself with Friedrich Sengle's more generous term Biedermeierzeit: This allows for a broader conception of a period that also demonstrates liberal tendencies alongside the conservative moments with which it is more commonly associated. She discerns a number of Biedermeier qualities that Goethe's “dramatic and narrative late work shares—even anticipates, pioneers” (29). These are a focus on the bourgeoisie, melancholy and renunciation, the failure to achieve harmonic resolution, a tendency toward idyll and fairy tales, the importance of religion, character allegory from a religious context, and nostalgia for the literary forms of the later 18th century. Nostalgia, Brown emphasizes, “is not longing for return, but ‘the pain of the return.’ It is a form of melancholy that acknowledges the loss of the past” (34). As this quotation makes plain, Brown is frank about failure, pain, and loss as themes of the late Goethe. Each quality is then illustrated by a precise and revealing analysis of moments from Goethe's oeuvre, from Die natürliche Tochter to Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. The piece compresses a wealth of political and cultural context into a relatively brief compass without compromising on clarity. It ends with a reminder of the revolutionary aspect of late style that Theodor Adorno celebrated and the suggestion that we review our understanding of the “cultural work” achieved by the Biedermeier: that we see this epoch as “the more skeptical late Romanticism that set in right after the initial enthusiasm of the 1790s” (42). This is a beautiful chapter, moving in the analysis that it offers and convincing in its contentions about Goethe and the Biedermeier alike. It is also a very thoughtful response to Kai Sina's three “Problembereiche.”

Sina and Wellbery have produced an impressive collection. The contributions are in general of the highest caliber, which will not be a surprise given the authors involved. A collection of essays is a particularly appropriate form for this multifarious, and at times recalcitrant, period of Goethe's output: Each author is at liberty to make a distinct case, and there is no pretense that one approach can explain everything. The reader will find a book teeming with insights, which both reinforce and pull away from one another. The volume is not quite an “aggregate,” to borrow the term that Rabea Kleymann uses in her own study: The structure of the work could not be clearer, and the relationship between its parts is likewise evident. Yet there are elements of the aggregate, as Kleymann defines it, in the respect for open-endedness, which is evinced by the overall conception of the volume. Kai Sina's introduction, with its lucid focus on the notion of “das Inkommensurable,” is highly effective in setting up the possibility of resonance between the chapters without enforcing cohesion. The book has just enough direction, to the credit of editors and contributors alike.

The structure of Gerhart Pickerodt's Mittelbarkeit. Essays zum späten Goethe is also eminently clear, moving through Die Wahlverwandtschaften, autobiographical material, letters, lyric poetry, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, and Faust II. Pickerodt puts “Mittelbarkeit,” the guiding idea of his study, to versatile use. The term suggests different characteristics, depending on the work under discussion. With respect to Die Wahlverwandtschaften, for example, it evokes the novel's highly developed consciousness of itself as a poetic construct: “Die Erzählform hält sich fern von jeglicher Direktheit […] und damit von jeder Wirklichkeitsillusion” (9). Pickerodt also returns to the notion of the “sich gleichsam ineinander abspiegelndes Gebild” mentioned in his introduction to describe the structure and conception of Die Wahlverwandtschaften: No single element of the novel exists for its own sake, but rather, each exists in relation to another, be it as a reflection or a counterimage. A spectrum of Mittelbarkeit can be discerned with respect to the characters, with Charlotte as a pragmatic, “direct” character at one end and Ottilie, who moves further and further into poetic artificiality over the course of the novel, at the other. In a narrative move, which is both cynical and playful, the character “Mittler” is a paradoxical distortion of the notion of Mittelbarkeit, singularly unsuited as he is to the delicate task of mediation. In his chapter on poetry, by contrast, Pickerodt uses Mittelbarkeit to probe Erich Trunz's understanding of Goethe's late lyric as “anschaulich-symbolisch,” that is to say, “dass Anschauung und Begriff, Bild und Bedeutung, unmittelbar im Spätwerk zusammenfallen” (73). On the contrary, Pickerodt argues, in the late poetry, self-consciousness and memory intervene, placing a distance between the perceived object or experience and the poetic “I” so that very little, if anything, is immediate. He is careful to observe that things—above all memories—can still be vivid, and indeed are in these poems, but that the moment made present is “kein unmittelbares, sondern ein mittelbares, eines, das als zurückgeholtes gegenwärtig ist” (90). With this latter observation, we arrive at the meaning and purpose, for Pickerodt, of the poem in Goethe's late period, namely: “es vergegenwärtigt erinnerungsweise, was abzusterben droht” (90).

Mittelbarkeit is also a highly suggestive term for the two monuments of Goethe's late period, namely, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and Faust II. In his chapter on the Wanderjahre, Pickerodt contests the description (in the Münchener Ausgabe of Goethe's works) of the text as a “Novellenkranz.” The Wanderjahre, he rightly argues, has neither the circularity nor the closure of a “Kranz,” and, moreover, is more diverse in formal terms than the focus on the novella would suggest. He demonstrates instead that the text is replete “mit mannigfaltigen Binnenbeziehungen, Gegensätzen, Spiegelungen und Rückbeziehungen auf die Lehrjahre” (105). He also argues, sensibly, that there is little use in trying to ascribe the text to a particular literary-historical epoch: in terms of both form and content, the Wanderjahre is a playful mix of old and new, which both harks back to earlier eras and is disruptively modern. The title of the chapter, “Nachromantische Moderne”, encapsulates this. The chapter on Faust II fills a disciplined 18 pages. Pickerodt takes Faust's line “Im farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben” from the opening scene “Anmutige Gegend” as his cue and pursues the motif of reflection and mirroring throughout the work. It is not, he comments, simply a “Naturphänomen,” as it is for Faust when he utters the line; it is also a poetic “Gestaltungsprinzip,” whereby related images, such as Helena and Gretchen, elucidate and heighten one another in their juxtaposition: “das Bild entzündet sich […] im ‘Abglanz’ des jeweils anderen zu komplexer Fülle, so in der Optik, so in den poetischen Bildern” (121). Pickerodt deals with the problem of Faust's redemption by arguing that the closing scene is “eine Art Abglanz des Abglanzes” (124), “feierlich […] und doch vielfach ironisch gebrochen” (125). Mirroring is thus a constructive force but one that is knowingly driven to its limits by Goethe in this play. These two chapters, on the Wanderjahre and Faust, are perhaps not blindingly new in terms of the insights that they offer, but they are nonetheless impressive. Both appear effortless. The lucid writing, which is one of the major strengths of the study, is particularly fine in Faust. The controlled and focused analysis of the Wanderjahre is also useful because, unlike the novel, it is easy for the reader to assimilate. Approaching the text thus becomes a little less daunting as a result, without its characteristic indirections having been artificially cleaned up.

This is, then, an intriguing and stimulating book. There could have been more justification of the time period—that is, from Die Wahlverwandtschaften onward—that has been designated “late.” Although, as we have already seen, there is no “right” answer to the question of when the late period starts, the study could have debated it more overtly. However, the central notion of Mittelbarkeit is a strong and flexible structuring force in the book, enabling the analysis both to remain consistent and to evolve. Mittelbarkeit is not an easy concept to grasp, but Pickerodt has structured the study like a rondo: moving through distinct works and/or genres a chapter at a time, letting each speak on its own terms, but each time subtly and skillfully bringing the analysis back to the dominant theme. The book weaves its way informatively through Goethe's late writing and is a pleasure to read.

For Rabea Kleymann, the guiding idea is the notion of “das Aggregat.” The term plays an important role in Goethe's morphological writings, and it also has significant “erkenntnistheoretisch” value, as demonstrated by Goethe's use of the cognate “Aggregation” in his 1829 essay “Analyse und Synthese.” Kleymann explains: “Das Aggregat ist ein Beschreibungsbegriff für eine zeitlich begrenzte Wahrnehmung von etwas, das (noch) keine vollkommene bzw. geschlossene Form hat” (16). The appearance of formlessness is generated by “ein ungeordnetes und unverbundenes Mannigfaltiges” (16). With more careful study, however, the impression of formlessness may yield to the discernment of form. The implications for Goethe's late works will be clear. The writing from this period is composed of manifold parts, which sometimes pull away from one another; even when a deep inner connection between parts is discerned, the element of “das Unbegreifliche”—or “das Inkommensurable,” a term that plays an important role for Kleymann as for Sina—cannot be fully overcome and remains a force to be respected.

Kleymann mounts an intricate and extended argument, to which I shall attempt to do justice here. She pursues the key motif through four late works: the series of “Hefte” Zur Naturwissenschaft überhaupt, insbesondere zur Morphologie; the West-östlicher Divan, in particular the Noten und Abhandlungen; Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre; and Faust II. The inclusion of Goethe's scientific writing is a distinct advantage because the analysis thereby takes fuller account of the variety of modes encompassed in his oeuvre. All these works seem at first glance to be a collection of smaller parts, not connected by a single unifying formal principle. Kleymann then separates these works into two subgroups, which work in slightly different ways. In the case of the “Hefte” and the Noten und Abhandlungen, the initial “aggregate” appearance steadily yields to an ordering principle, namely, that of the series (“Reihe”). Form is already anticipated in formlessness, and the transition from the one to the other happens in linear time: “Insbesondere die ersten beiden Hefte sowie die Noten und Abhandlungen präsentieren die Formlosigkeit als ein zeitliches Problem und suggerieren zugleich, dass der Übergang zur Form nur eine Frage der Zeit sei” (234). In the Wanderjahre and Faust II, by contrast, there is no promise of “eine zukünftige abgeschlossene und vollständige Form” (235). Instead, formlessness continues to blur the contours of nascent form. Early on in her analysis of Faust, Kleymann quotes Eckermann's observation that the various acts of the play are “lauter für sich bestehende kleine Weltenkreise, die, in sich abgeschlossen, wohl auf einander wirken, aber doch einander wenig angehen” (180). This seems to me a little blinkered on Eckermann's part. Kleymann does not immediately challenge this assertion because it features in a part of her analysis that focuses on the apparent “Unverbundenheit” of the play, but her later conclusions would appear distinct from his. The play, Kleymann argues, displays internal “Spiegelungen”; these latent connections do not unfold in any causal or teleological way, but they are there. This latter point is just one of a number of moments of consonance with Pickerodt's study, for all their manifest differences.

Overall, placing the concept of “das Aggregat” at the center of the study is a clever decision on Kleymann's part, and it leads to fruitful and convincing perspectives. There are some very interesting analytical moves, such as the focus on the topology of the Mummenschanz and Klassische Walpurgisnacht episodes of Faust, by way of proof that forms which unfold in linear fashion have been displaced by this point: “Der weitläufige Saal verhält sich zur Linearität der Straße konträr, indem er gerade auf eine unbestimmte breite verweist” (188). Kleymann also demonstrates admirable control over the material. The writing on Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, for example, is strikingly assured and manages to make sense of the novel in terms of both form and content without forcing cohesion upon it. That is one of the great advantages of the central notion of the aggregate: It keeps the tendencies to formation and to disjointedness in tension with one another, just as Goethe does in his late works. Moreover, the study is wide-ranging, both in terms of its key corpus and in terms of the range of supporting references that it brings in. Kleymann's ability to draw in quotations from other parts of Goethe's oeuvre, which resonate perfectly with the point under discussion, speaks of an impressive degree of immersion in his work. The analysis could have been executed with greater concision: A lighter touch throughout the study, notwithstanding the complexity of what is being said, would have aided the exposition of the key arguments. Nonetheless, the book offers perceptive insights into, as Kleymann puts it, the “Epistemik und Poetik” (249) of Goethe's late work, and it stimulates the reader to review their own understanding of the works under discussion.

In their different ways, then, these three studies succeed in offering interpretative models that do not impose an expectation of serenity on Goethe's late work and that are equal to the paradoxes, contradictions, and provocations of this period of his life. This is a heartening reflection of the state of the field and augurs well for future studies, not just of the late Goethe, but of late style and aging in general.