Blood and flames

Goethe’s Faust does not go to hell but to heaven. It is all the more striking, then, that the text has recently been removed from so many curriculums in Germany – not for ideological objections, but out of sheer indifference. It has been left to the far right to reinterpret older traditions of Goethe worship. The AfD’s latest party programme places the Goethe-Schiller monument in Weimar in the context of nationalist and chauvinist memorials, opting for the patronage of the obscure Nazi poet Franz Langheinrich (1864–1945), who praised Germany while agitating against “degenerate subhumanity under Semitic leadership”. Finding Goethe in such bad company, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar recently installed a banner with an extract from his notes to the West-Eastern Divan (1819): “A country that does not protect foreigners will soon perish”.

Can we be so sure, though, that Goethe is a reliable champion of cultural diversity? Immanuel Kant’s tercentenary has seen much debate around use of racist stereotypes, and the question might equally be posed of his contemporary. In Goethe und die Juden (Goethe and the Jews), the American scholar W. Daniel Wilson, author of the compelling Der faustische Pakt (2018; The Faustian Pact), attempts a nuanced assessment of the evidence. Instead of either denouncing or excusing Goethe’s prejudices, he argues against political instrumentalization.

Having reconstructed the inglorious history of the Goethe Society, which bowed to Nazi propaganda and forced out its Jewish members, Wilson goes back to eighteenth-century Frankfurt, to the archives in Weimar and Jena. Drawing on private letters, political notes and court records, he succeeds in recreating an ambiguous story, arguing that Goethe’s relationship with Jewish contemporaries was characterized neither by impartial friendship nor by tolerant coexistence (as the conjunction “and” in his title might suggest). Instead of speculating about his subject’s psychological disposition or motivation, Wilson brings out the difference between public and private communication. In his autobiographical texts Goethe seeks to establish a well-balanced picture. Thus we see the adolescent who is simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the Jewish ghetto in his home town, Frankfurt, interested in learning more from experience than from books. Privately, however, he used offensive language about the emancipation of the Jews, even while making public statements about the “chosen people”.

Wilson’s evaluation of Goethe’s literary oeuvre and theatrical performances is particularly complex. He shows how Nazi propaganda decontextualized loaded quotations to protect the “national poet” against the accusation of cosmopolitanism. It is not Goethe, for instance, but a fictional character in the satirical play Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern (The Plundersweilern Fair) who excessively defames the “people called the Jews”. Nonetheless, the verse “I already see blood and flames” becomes intolerable when we consider how Jews were denied fundamental rights in Saxe-Weimar. The play was first staged in 1778 at the castle in Ettersburg; Buchenwald was built just a short distance away in 1937.

In the first production Goethe took on three roles at once: as the market crier, as Haman (the enemy of the Jews) and as the Jew Mordecai. He also took on different roles in his political and personal comments, from the pre-revolutionary period to the post-Napoleonic era. Yet it would be naive to claim that he was merely reflecting the “discourse of his time”, whatever that discourse might have been between Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s lucid play Die Juden, written in 1749, the year when Goethe was born, and Achim von Arnim’s antisemitic speech at the “German Tischgesellschaft” in 1811.

When analysing controversial and ambivalent statements, many studies overlook those who are affected. Wilson lets the Jewish authors of the time speak for themselves: the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn; his grandson, the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy; the philanthropist and political pioneer Israel Jacobson; the writer Rahel Varnhagen. Did Goethe, who witnessed the “Hep-Hep” riots in 1819, oppose open hostilities against Jews more for formal reasons of decorum than for the universalist convictions with which he is often associated? Why, after all, did he make derogatory comments about Jews behind closed doors?

Literature had to wait until the twentieth century to invent the speech that Goethe never gave. In August 1946 Thomas Mann received a query from the British embassy in Washington. During the Nuremberg trials, the British prosecutor had quoted Goethe from Mann’s novel Lotte in Weimar (1939), but the sentences could not be found in any of the great man’s works. Where had Goethe foreseen that the Germans would “submit to any mad scoundrel who appeals to their lowest instincts, who confirms them in their vices and teaches them to conceive nationality as isolation and brutality”? Mann said that he had written these sentences in the mode of possibility. Goethe, unfortunately, never said anything as clear.

Marcel Lepper is Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Leipzig and Director of the Rilke Foundation in Switzerland. He is a co-editor of the volume Goethe in/and America, 2024

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