World Literature and Defeat

Abstract

This essay underscores the importance of seeking refuge in literary aesthetics by arguing that Goethe’s concept of world literature was formulated in compensation for the shock of military defeat, political collapse, and foreign occupation. The refugee became a figure of identification in Goethe’s writing in the 1790s and his Orientalist Nachdichtungen. The Goethean mode of reading distant literatures entails identifying with other writers who are often already marginalized within their own cultures. This manner of engaging with non-European texts refuses to establish a pantheon of great works precisely because it relies on a writerly interest in rediscovering one’s own identity by reading foreign literature from a position of insecurity and weakness. The goal of reading is always the reconstruction of the self through a strange text. With its eagerness to establish a monumental cultural figure, the nineteenth and early twentieth-century canon marginalized precisely those unGerman texts in which Goethe most effectively dismantled his own authorial status. Only with the demise of colonial empires and the defeat of Nazi Germany did a more modest, anti-hegemonic mode of reading remerge.

Key Words:

• World Literature
• Goethe
• Canon Formation
• West-östlicher Divan
• Refugee

Notes

1 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. Christoph Michel and Hans Grüters (Berlin: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2011), 225 (January 31, 1827); Hendrik Birus, “Goethes Idee der Weltliteratur, Eine historische Vergengwärtigung,” in Weltliteratur Heute, ed. Manfred Schmeling (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995), 1–28; Ritchie Robertson, “Weltliteratur from Voltaire to Goethe,” Comparative Critical Studies 12.2 (2015): 163–81.

2 David Damrosch, “Goethe Coins a Phrase,” What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1–36.

3 I offer a genealogy of such reading practices in Chinese Sympathies: Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021).

4 For a thorough history of German canon formation, see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany 1830-1870, trans. Renate Baron Franciscono (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

5 Franz Eppert, Der politische und religiöse Flüchtling in seiner sprachlichen Beziehung im Deutschen: Beiträge zur Wortgeschichte eine Begriffsfeldes (Dissertation, University of Cologne, 1963), 77. For an overview of recent scholarship, see Alexander Schunka, “Konfession, Staaten und Migration in der Frühen Neuzeit,” Handbuch Staat und Migration seit dem 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Jochen Oltmer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 117–70.

6 “Refugies, also nennt man anietzo in besonderem Verstande die Reformirten Frantzosen, welche der Religion wegen aus Franckreich entweder oeffentlich vertrieben, oder heimlich entwichen sind, und sich in grosser Anzahl in den Chur-Brandenburgischen Landen niedergelassen haben”. Johann Heinrich Zedlers, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon 1741, volume 30, column 1697. For English, see also, Encyclopedia Britannica fourth edition (1810) vol. 17.2: 684–85.

7 Andreas Gailus provides a finely nuanced account of trauma erupting during the French Revolutionary wars and Goethe’s poetic attempts at its containment in Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten in his “Poetics of Containment: Goethe’s Conversations of German Refugees and the Crisis of Representation,” Modern Philology 100.3 (2003): 436–74.

8 For an overview motivated by Syrian refugees, see Reinhard Mehring, “Goethes Flüchtlinge: Poetisierung des Dramas,” Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 68.4 (2016): 313–33.

9 Hermann’s awkward marriage proposal to Dorothea was famously drawn from an earlier pamphlet about Protestant refugees. Das Liebthätige Gera gegen die Salzburgischen Emigranten (Frankfurt, 1732) see especially 27–29.

10 Hendrik Birus’ commentary to Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, vol. 2 (Berlin: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2010), 1716–17.

11 B. Venkat Mani, “Languages of Refuge: In Defiance of Monolingualism,” PMLA 137.5 (2022): 909–17.

12 Adolf Muschg, “Goethe als Emigrant. Zum West-östlichen Divan,” Goethe als Emigrant (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 91.

13 Ibid., 90.

14 Ibid., 91.

15 Daniel L. Purdy, Chinese Sympathies: Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021).

16 Pheng Cheah, “World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature,” New Literary History 45.3 (Summer 2014): 303–29.

17 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert C. Tucker, ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 477.

18 Cheah, “World against Globe,” 304.

19 Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 225 (January 31, 1827).

20 B. Venkat Mani, Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 109–12.

21 Two scholars who track this shift: Andrew Patten, “A Portrait of the Artist as a World Author: Framing Authorship in Johannes Scherr’s Bildersaal der Weltliteratur,” Seminar 51.2 (2015): 115–31 and Kristin Dickinson, DisOrientations. German-Turkish Cultural Contact in Translation, 1811-1946 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021), 67–69. Dina Gusejnova extends the history of world literature’s imperialist appropriation with her study of World War One propaganda aimed at troops and prisoners of war in “Embedded Cosmpolitanism: Tolstoyian and Goethean Ideas of World Literature during the Two World Wars,” Negative Cosmopolitanism: Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization, eds., Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University press, 2017), 217–40.

22 Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 225 (January 31, 1827)

23 John Noyes, “The World Map and the World of Goethe’s Weltliteratur,” Acta Germanica 36 (2010): 128–45, here 130.

24 Das goldene Buch der Weltliteratur (Berlin: Spemann, 1912), preface.

25 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2004), 16–17.

26 Goethes Werke (Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 1904) I, 42: 187–88.

27 Goethe’s attention to this sphere was drawn in part by the number of new translations of his own works that were being published in Western Europe.

28 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 16–17.

29 Hendrik Birus makes clear that Goethe’s reading practices moved far outside Europe in “Goethes Idee der Weltliteratur, Eine historische Vergengwärtigung,” Weltliteratur Heute, ed., Manfred Schmeling (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995), 1–28.

30 Fawzi Boubin shows how translation becomes Goethe’s means of mediating the strangeness of foreign languages. Fawzi Boubin, “Goethes Theorie der Alterität und die Idee der Weltliteratur. Ein Beitrag zur neueren Kulturdebatte,” Gegenwart als kulturelles Erbe: Ein Beitrag der Germanistik zur Kulturwissenschaft deutschsprachiger Länder (Munich: iudicum, 1985), 269–302.

31 For a history of Goethe’s revival after 1945, see Karl Robert Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989) 2: 135–52.

32 Fritz Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Bern: Francke, 1946), 169.

33 Elizabeth Powers, “Fritz Strich and the Dilemmas of World Literature Today,” Goethe Yearbook 26 (2019): 233–50, here 238.

34 Galin Tihanov, “Whose Cosmopolitanism? Genealogies of Cosmopolitanism,” Whose Cosmopolitanism: Critical Perspectives, Relationalities and Discontents, ed. Nina Glick Schiller and and Andrew Irving (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 29.

35 Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 18.

36 Eddy Kent and Terri Tomsky, eds., “Introduction,” Negative Cosmpolitanism: Cultures and Politics of World Citizenship after Globalization (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University press, 2017), 11–12.

37 For the consumer aesthetics implicit in Goethe’s pose as an Oriental merchant, see Daniel Purdy, “West-östlicher Divan and the ‘Abduction/Seduction of Europe’—World Literature and the Circulation of Culture,” Goethe Yearbook 22 (2015): 203–26.

38 Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, ed. Hendrik Birus (Berlin: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2010), 1: 12.

39 Goethe, “Serbische Lieder,” Kunsttheoretische Schriften und Übersetzungen, ed., Siegfried Seidel (Berlin: Aufbau, 1984) 18: 283.

40 Goethe, Goethes Werke (Sophien Ausgabe), IV. Abtheilung: Goethes Briefe, eds. Bernhard Suphan and Carl Alt (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1901), 24: 28.

41 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Tag- und Jahres-Hefte als Ergänzung meiner sonstigen Bekenntnisse [1807-1822],” Goethes Werke (Sophien Ausgabe), eds. Karl Redlich and Woldemar Freiherr von Biedermann (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1893) vol. 36, 85.

42 Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, 180.

43 Wolfgang Burgdorf, Ein Weltbild verliert seine Welt. Der Untergang des Alten Reiches und die Generation 1806, second edition (Munich: Oldenburg, 2009), 196.

44 A.H.L. Heeren, Handbuch der Geschichte des Europäischen Staatensystem und seiner Colonien (Göttingen: Röwer, 1809), xii.

45 Taschenbuch für Damen auf das Jahr 1802 (Tübingen: Cotta, 1802), 167.

46 Friedrich Schiller, Gedichte, ed. Georg Kurscheidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008), 189–90.

47 Schiller, Gedichte, 190.

48 On Menzel’s ideology as a critic, see Hohendahl, National Literature, 148–51.

49 Wolfgang Menzel, Die deutsche Literatur (Stuttgart: Halberger, 1836), 84

50 Wolfgang Menzel, German Literature, trans C.C. Felton (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, & Co., 1840), 69.

51 For a thorough survey of scholarship on gendered choirs and German nationalism, see Josephine Hoegaerts, “Healthy Throats, German Sounds: Women’s Vocal Development and Expertise in German Soundscapes of the Long Nineteenth Century,” A Companion to German-Language Sound Studies, ed., Rolf J. Goebel (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2023), 53–67.

52 Menzel, Literatur, 81.

53 Wolfgang Menzel, German Literature, 67.

54 Goethe, “Wie David königlich zur Harfe sang,” Werke (Weimer: Herrmann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1891) I.4: 133.

55 Victor Klemperer, “Weltliteratur und europäische Literatur,” Vor 33/nach 45. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1956), 30.

56 Anil Bhatti, “Der Orient als Experimentierfeld. Goethes Divan und der Aneignungsprozess kolonialen Wissens,” From Popular Goethe to Global Pop, eds., Ines Detmers and Birte Heidemann (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 21–39, here 22. For additional commentary, see Anne Bohnenkamp-Renken, “Goethe und das Hohe Lied,” Goethe und die Bibel. Tagungsband zum Symposium: Goethe und die Bibel, Luzern, 22./23. 4. 2005, eds., Johannes Anderegg and Edith Anna Kunz (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft: 2005), 89–110. Katharina Mommsen places the poem as mediation between the Divan and Faust II, “Als Meisterin erkennst du Scherazaden. Über Goethes Inspirationen aus 1001 Nacht zum zweiten Teil der Faust Tragödie,” unpublished paper, 17–18, available on http://www.goethezeitportal.de/fileadmin/PDF/db/wiss/goethe/mommsen_meisterin.pdf (accessed May 1, 2023).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Purdy

Daniel Purdy is Professor of German at the Pennsylvania State University. He has served as President of the North American Goethe Society and as editor for the North American Goethe Yearbook. His most recent study, Chinese Sympathies: Media, Missionaries, and World Literature from Marco Polo to Goethe, was published in 2021 with Cornell University Press.