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interests or signal that he was about to address new tasks, or take
them up with renewed energy. Vanden Heuvel is clearly most interested
in Görres’s public face. The private life receives so little attention
that the reader sometimes wants to know more. �or example,
was Katharina Görres just a home-maker who followed her husband
around of necessity, or was she an intellectual companion who
accompanied him from inclination?
His concentration on the political in the widest sense also prevents
Vanden Heuvel from adequately presenting some of the qualities
and inclinations that typified Görres. ‘Görres was an ardent student
of natural science, and his tendency to draw metaphors and
analogies between the worlds of politics and physics or chemistry
would be a trademark of his writing style for his entire life.’ This by
no means insignificant sentence is, remarkably, found not in the main
account, but in footnote 64 on p. 58, interpreting a passage of Görres
which is quoted. If Görres, despite all the changes in his life, displayed
invariants in his thinking, it would surely be important to
explore such ‘trademarks’ systematically, as they might reveal not
just commonplace expressions, but conditions governing his intellectual
world. Nor is Görres’s peculiar rhetoric, which accounts for
much of the fascination exerted by his work, discussed in detail anywhere.
This underlying political approach means that different sections
of the biography work better than others. One of the best is the
account of Görres’s republican youth in Koblenz as a friend of revolution.
This episode in the life has not been described so convincingly
and precisely anywhere else (and this section draws most heavily
on Vanden Heuvel’s archival researches). All the others, including
the concluding chapter, ‘Confessional Politics’, which describes the
last years of Görres’s life from the Kölner Ereignis (1837) on, also provide
reliable and often detailed information.
By comparison with the political events, the analysis of Görres’s
theoretical positions takes a back seat. While it is not lacking altogether,
just as Schelling’s influence on Görres is discussed, it could be
asked whether these issues deserve more space and attention, and
whether the important works should have been probed more deeply.
It is also characteristic of the line taken by Vanden Heuvel that the
most important recent German work on Görres, Wacker’s attempt to
understand Görres’s late work as political theology, is mentioned in
passing (p. 345), but is not discussed as a possible approach to
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Joseph Görres