Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development. Vanessa Pupavac
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Goethe wanted ordered social change (Constantine 2009: xxxv). The keen geologist Goethe contested the vulcanists and the seismic violence of the French Revolution. He sided with the ancient philosopher Thales and the Neptunists, who eulogised life engendering and unifying waters (Goethe 1832 Act II ‘On the Upper Peneus’ in Constantine 2009: 110–1; Feldman 1945: 5). Thales is one of the heroic figures of reason ushering in a new humanity, observing the world and itself, and thinking how human relations might be rationally improved (Husserl 1965 [1935]: 173). Thales proposed a political federation of sea-bound city states under the protection of the sea-god Poseidon against the imperial Persia (Feldman 1945: 5). The ideals of individual and political self-determination where ‘Each is immortal on his patch of earth’ are shown to be precious and precarious (Goethe 1832 Act III ‘The Inner Courtyard’ in Constantine 2009: 168). His Thales endorsed humans as flawed creatures, trying to create their place in the world (Goethe 1832 Act II ‘Rocky Coves’ in Constantine 2009: 127).
George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy characterised Goethe’s Faust as melodrama for supplanting a tragic ending and saving Faust’s soul (Steiner 1961: 133–5). Its narrative presented an ‘enlightening’ struggle less concerned about individual morality and more interested in constituting better institutions and conditions that might accommodate human failings (Eckermann 1930 [8 May 1827]: 205). The poem mythologised modern engineering projects where his Faust discarded feudal martial glory for redemptive heroic industrial deeds, thereby sacralising industrialisation (Lukacs 1968 [1947]: 215–7; Piper 2010: 98–101). Goethe eagerly anticipated the industrial developments of canals and railways expanding human communication:
Let people serve Him who gives to the best his fodder, and to man meat and drink as much as he can enjoy. But I worship Him who has infused into the world such a power of production, that, when only the millionth part of it comes out into life, the world swarms with creatures to such a degree that war, pestilence, fire and water cannot prevail against them. That is my God! (Eckermann 1930 [20 February 1831]: 389)
People would gain more individual freedom and independence through ensuring each had a ‘wealth of land’, and collectively protecting each other and engineering the future (Goethe 1832 Act III ‘The Inner Courtyard’ in Constantine 2009: 167). Too often independence was only partially won or won through the exploitation or dispossession of others. But humanising the world and securing more fertile land free from natural disaster through collective human endeavour established more favourable conditions conducive to greater human flourishing. New human endeavours inevitably made errors: ‘For man must strive, and striving he must err’ (Goethe 1808 ‘Prologue’ in Wayne 1949: 41). To eradicate the possibility of error would deny us the possibility of acting freely. Negation was part of human advancement, as Goethe’s contemporary Hegel elaborated in his dialectical philosophy of history (Lukacs 1968 [1947]: 13). Harnessing our active creative powers involved destructive demonic elements. Napoleonic power was a demonic invading force yet drove through social reforms and emancipated the serfs. Human advancement was contradictory and marked by evils. The contradictions and flawed life of Goethe’s Faust were resolved through heavenly intervention (Eckermann 1930 [6 June 1831]: 413; Lukacs 1968 [1947]: 228–33). Nevertheless the principle of free human agency runs through the work, whereby we redeem ourselves through activity. Conversely Mephistopheles’ negative cynicism and the inner despair represented by the figure Care were sinful. In summary, there is salvation in striving, damnation in nihilism.
Goethe’s theatre and politics
Goethe helped establish German national culture, and his times became known as the ‘Age of Goethe’ (Lukacs 1968 [1947]). He cared about material progress and developing a country, where people’s homes and land were protected from disaster. As Carlyle’s essay on Goethe outlined, he believed in ‘the progress of the species’ (Carlyle 1893 [1832]: 243). He sympathised with the suffering of ordinary people and deplored oppressive rule:
To this stithy I liken the land, the hammer its ruler,
And the people that plate, beaten between them that writhes:
Woe to the plate, when nothing but wilful bruises
Hit it at random; and made, cometh no Kettle to view!
(Goethe in Carlyle 1893 [1832]: 243)
Art should reflect life and represent people’s immiseration. His earlier 1774 novel Werther or 1787 drama Egmont about the Dutch national struggle seemed to put him on the side of liberty. However, his subsequent politics put him on the side of the existing order and reaction (Goethe 1974 Vol. II Book 17: 352–3; Goethe 1989 [1774]). He was ‘No Apostle-of-Liberty’ rousing the masses when confronting the question of ‘what is to be done?’ (Carlyle 1893 [1832]: 243). His idea of government was removed from the people. He mistrusted democracy and people’s capacity to make or elect good leaders (Carlyle 1893 [1832]: 219). There should be enlightened administration over the people. A ruler’s progressive deeds would avert political revolution and substitute for democratic political freedom. Goethe was quiescent over the political repression in the years after the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna and measures such as the Carlsbad decrees, which expanded censorship and sought to purge the universities of political radicals (Piper 2010: 88). Unsurprisingly his patrician attitude alienated the younger generation restless under political oppression. The writer Thomas Mann, in his novel Lotte in Weimar, wrote ‘at the bottom of his heart he was opposed to the War of Liberation altogether, and to the agitation it brought in its wake’ (Mann 1968 [1939]: 108–9, 146).
Indicative of his political elitism was Goethe’s approach to the theatre as the classic public-political artistic form (Tocqueville 2003 [1835–1840]: 567–72). ‘Plays’, the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville observed, ‘represent, even among aristocratic nations, the most democratic element of their literature’ (Tocqueville 2003 [1835–1840]: 567). The theatre had to have broader popular appeal, and made the upper classes mix with other classes where there was the need to fill its seats. Accordingly, ‘The pit has often made laws for the boxes’ (Tocqueville 2003 [1840]: 568). When an aristocratic ethos ruled the theatre, its character showed the aristocratic control of society (Tocqueville 2003 [1835–1840]: 569). Tocqueville could be outlining Goethe’s directorship of the Weimar theatre and his political outlook as described by his Victorian biographer G. H. Lewes (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 434–50).
Yet Goethe’s Faust recognised the danger of a cultured elite holding the people in contempt (Goethe 1808 ‘Prelude’ in Wayne 1949: 31–37). The ‘spur of truth’ should draw from human drama and should not be cut off from life. Likewise philosophical methods of governance, drafted remotely and imposed remotely onto societies, excluded a living human spirit. ‘How shall our counsel serve to lead mankind?’ Faust’s assistant Wagner asked, if conceived ‘through a glass, remote and ill-defined’ (Goethe 1808 ‘Night’ in Wayne 1949: 49). Even in the theatre, Goethe was accused of being remote from the public and showing an aristocratic ‘contempt for the masses’ (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 442). Goethe was ‘no dramatist’, his Victorian biographer Lewes contended. His plays were either dramatic verse or dramatic novels rather than theatre drama, while his selection of stage productions represented ‘poetic works and antique restorations’ appealing to the ‘cultivated few’ (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 310, 435). He did not succeed in developing a popular national theatre. For that depended on drama, and drama required a popular rebellious element and a public audience acting as a jury on the work. Conversely his audience was chilled by the ‘pernicious’ courtly influence on the theatre and its acting—not least Goethe personally silencing lively students attending his plays (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 335, 338). As such, his Faust Prelude represented the tensions Goethe felt between his poetic ideals and the demands of the public. He made ‘the error of supposing a magnificent dome could be erected without a basis on our common earth’ (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 436). The final straw ending Goethe’s theatre directorship was his fallout with Weimar’s Duke Karl August over demands for a performing poodle on stage (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 448–50). That the demonic should fatally enter Faust’s dwelling in the form of a poodle was therefore apt!
Goethe’s later reactionary political views contrasted with those of