Goethe Yearbook

After a couple of decades of studying Goethe (I am a latecomer in this respect), I find that as a person he is still very mysterious to me. There are things about him that puzzle and, indeed, bother me. Why, for instance, after their epistolary exchange while he was a student in Leipzig, did he correspond so infrequently with his sister after her marriage, when she was in Emmendingen and so clearly suffered from depression? Perhaps my interest in Goethe as a person is misplaced, though the range of his oeuvre almost demands a closer look at him as an individual. Generally it seems best to be guided by an attempt to distinguish contemporary notions from what might have been the case in the eighteenth century. So many things have become naturalized since Goethe's time, both in the realm of material life and in ways of viewing the world, that it is impossible to see him as he was. Even certain facts—e.g., his habit of "dropping" people who were the subjects of his early enthusiasms—should not be given much weight. They may simply reflect the general callousness of youth, or they may indicate that friendships among unrelated bourgeois individuals were a new phenomenon in the eighteenth century.

Such hesitations have not deterred Rainer M. Holm-Hadulla, a psychiatrist at the University of Heidelberg who is also a "Kreativitätsforscher." (Besides authoring Kreativität: Konzept und Lebensstil [2007], he also holds the interesting post of director of the "Psychotherapeutische Beratungsstelle des Studentenwerks" in Heidelberg.) It cannot be denied that Goethe himself supplied plenty of justification for looking at his work through the prism of personality, but one's interest in Holm-Hadulla's analysis will depend on one's tolerance for a conceptual approach that freely employs such terms as "Selbstwertgefühl," "Gesundheitsphilosophie," "kreative Bewältingungsbemühungen," "lebenslange Suchbewegung," ad infinitum. The first chapter seemed promising, with its discussion of Goethe's birth woes and his lifetime preoccupation with mothers and children (from the Urfaust to the "Mothers" in Faust II), particularly the nourishing mother who is also destructive. For the early years, however, Holm-Hadulla relies heavily on the account in Dichtung und Wahrheit; he also does not consider that Goethe, in his literary work or his letters, may simply have been trying on poetic personalities rather than attempting to bring "chaotische Erregungen und diffuse mentale Prozesse durch Erzählungen in kohärente Strukturen" (122). Goethe's youthful rejection of parental authority, what the author refers to as" Autonomiebestrebungen," as manifested in the Prometheus fragment, may be less an issue of personal psychology and more representative of the general rejection of traditional norms going on elsewhere and everywhere in the eighteenth century.

Similarly, the emotionally dependent women in Stella and Clavigo may not have been "Beichten und Selbstheilungsversuche" (119) occasioned by his own treatment of women—but may instead be portraits of the real status of women. (Consider Cornelia.) Of more interest is Holm-Hadulla's contention that Goethe had sexual experiences in Weimar, "nicht nur auf flüchtigen Streifzügen mit Carl August, sondern auch über längere Zeit …, möglicherweise mit einer von Carl Augusts Mätressen" (198). He bases this conclusion in part on Marianne's reflections on love in Wilhelm Meisters Sendung, which "ein sexuell vollkommen unerfahrener Autor" could not have written (198). To me the scene (FA 9, 47ff.) [End Page 370] contains little that a young man might not have imagined, with a little help from some literary models. I could go on.

The problem with taking Goethe's own utterances at face value can be seen in the 1993 study by Kurt Eissler, who concluded, on the basis of the letters to Behrisch from Leipzig: that Goethe's "psychic crises" were psychotic episodes; that his close friendships with men show homosexual tendencies; and that his relationship with Cornelia was incestuous. Holm-Hadulla rejects Eissler's analysis (241-50) and draws a much more positive picture, judging Goethe to have suffered from "leichten bis mittelschweren depressiven Schwankungen …, die ihn Antrieb und Inhalt für künstlerische Aktivitäten gaben" (243). Thus, Goethe's case is of interest for what it reveals about the contribution of creativity to mental health. All it takes is natural gifts (linguistic and intellectual); a phenomenal memory enriched by wide, early reading; motivation (inborn curiosity, interest, ambition) as well as certain personality traits (flexibility, originality, self-confidence, persistence, personal authenticity, and other-directedness). Plus, a supportive family network early on and a supportive intellectual network in adulthood. There you have it. From the beginning to the end of his life Goethe was thus able to balance "Angst und Verzweiflung" with "Hoffnung und Versöhnung" (190).

This is the third book I have reviewed in the last five years on Goethe's "Lebenskunst," which certainly indicates some kind of trend. The others were Katharina Mommsen's Goethe's Art of Living and John Armstrong's Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet (Goethe Yearbook, vols. 13 and 15, respectively). Like those authors, Holm-Hadulla says little about "passion," despite this book's title. True each chapter title is followed, in parentheses, by the name of a woman (starting with Goethe's mother, "Catharina Elisabeth," and ending with "Ulrike"), but Goethe's passion, if one can call it that, turns out to concern his own work, which includes his own self-actualizing. Thus, the problem with Lili Schönemann: "Seine Kreativität sowie sein Selbst- und Kohärenzgefühl wähnte Goethe durch Lili ernsthaft bedroht" (104). Indeed, a very contemporary way of looking at things.

To return to my initial objection about reading the present into the past: it is odd that Holm-Hadulla pays no attention to the widespread awareness of mental aberrations in the eighteenth century or, more to the point, to Goethe's own awareness of such phenomena as vapors, spleen, hysteria, hypochondria, melancholy, outright lunacy or madness, and so on. Wilhelm Meister, Holm-Hadulla's test case for Goethe's "kreative Selbstverwirklichung" (193), is one of the dullest major characters in literature. One gets the lesson, but does one identify with him? What they tell us about his own mental condition I am uncertain, but it is the unbalanced, the fragile, the narcissistic characters—Werther, Faust, Eduard, Ottilie, Mignon and the Harper, and so on—for which as readers we must be grateful to Goethe.