Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) - Duke University

J. W. v. Goethe Page 12 4/4/2008
Goethe worked steadily in the five years following
Schiller's death to complete his vast Zur Farbenlehre
(1810; translated as Goethe's Theory of Colours, 1840),
which he sometimes called his single most
important work. It consists of three parts: an
exposition of Goethe's own theory of color, a
polemic against the Newtonian theory that white
light is a mixture of colors, and a collection of
materials on the history of color theory from
antiquity to Goethe's own time. While Goethe's
theory has never been accepted by physicists, his
insights on the perception of color have been
influential, as has his recognition that scientific
ideas are conditioned by their historical contexts.
As in art, Goethe's tastes in literature remained
open to Romantic influence; to his continuing
interest in Shakespeare and Calderón he added the
medieval German epic the Nibelungenlied. He also
followed the work of the new generation of poets,
inside and outside of Germany, with great interest.
In the theater he produced a series of plays by
Calderón, stimulating thereby a lasting revival of
his works; in addition, he produced plays by
younger Romantic dramatists, such as Heinrich von
Kleist and Zacharias Werner. He continued writing
court masques, but only one major dramatic work,
the operatic fragment Pandora: Ein Taschenbuch für
das Jahr 1810 (1810). He wrote poems steadily,
experimenting with new forms in his first group of
sonnets and trying out Persian attitudes and forms
in the West-östlicher Divan (1819; translated as
"West-Eastern Divan," 1874), a book of poems
composed in response to the German translation of
Hafiz. Like the "Römische Elegien," these poems,
many of them masterpieces, are arranged into a
sketchy plot that articulates the poet's encounter
with Hafiz and the culture he represents. The
collection embodies better than any of his work
except Faust the aging poet's passionate concern for
"Weltliteratur" (world literature), by which term
Goethe summarized his belief in a literary tradition
that transcended national boundaries. The Westöstlicher
Divan also contains "Noten und
Abhandlungen" (Notes and Treatises), brief essays
on the history of Persian life and letters. As in his
autobiographical and scientific writings,
historical context had become indispensable to
Goethe.
Before Schiller's death Goethe had begun
planning a sequel to Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre:
Ein Roman that was, however, to be a cycle of
novellas rather than a novel. Several of these
novellas were written in the succeeding decade,
but one of them so absorbed Goethe's interest
that it developed into a novel in its own right:
Die Wahlverwandtschaften: Ein Roman (1809;
translated as "Elective Affinities," 1854). The title
refers metaphorically to the capacity of certain
elements to displace others during chemical
reactions. A young girl, Ottilie, and an unnamed
captain arrive at the estate of Eduard and
Charlotte, and a double displacement ensues:
Eduard and Ottilie are attracted to each other, as
are Charlotte and the captain. When Charlotte
gives birth to her and Eduard's child, it bears,
paradoxically, the features of Ottilie and the
captain, with whom the spouses have
committed adultery only in spirit. The situation
is resolved only when Ottilie forbids Eduard to
divorce Charlotte and then starves herself to
death. The novel retraces the concerns of Die
Leiden des jungen Werthers, but in a more abstract
and symbolic fashion, as a third-person
narrative with only inserted, impersonal diary
passages and a full-scale inserted novella.
Eduard is a middle-aged Werther who has
survived the loss of his beloved Charlotte to
marry her on the rebound from her first
marriage. Confronting his selfishness and
subjectivity is an inscrutable moral law
embodied in a powerful natural environment
and in the equally inscrutable Ottilie. The novel
subtly leaves open to question the extent to
which this law is not inherent in nature, but
projected by the characters themselves. With its
paradoxical double adultery, its frank treatment
of divorce, its suicide, and its apparent
apotheosis, the novel scandalized most of its
readers; despite its undeniable and significant
influence in the nineteenth century, especially in
England and America, it only became a