One of the first literary celebrities was Goethe, who burst on to the European scene at the age of 25 with his novel The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774). Werthermania ensued, but according to Nicholas Saul, Senior Lecturer in German and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, it was based on a misunderstanding. In turning from his stultifying, bourgeois surroundings to the more poetic alternative he finds in works of literature that the hero “misuses literature wilfully to transform reality into whatever fantasy happens to suit his fundamentally escapist subjectivism, whilst changing nothing”. This figure of protest is middle‐class to the end; Goethe really meant to attack his “middle‐class German readers”. Saul’s essay on “Aesthetic Humanism (1790‐1830)” is one of nine that make up The Cambridge History of German Literature, which ranges in time from 750 to 1990. Susan Watson has done a superb job on the dust‐jacket, which reproduces a fine portrait of a lady by Friedrich Heinrich Fuger (1751‐1818). A select bibliography at the back covers 75 pages. All titles and quotations appear in German and English. The editor begins her preface by remarking that “The only word in the title of this book which is uncontentious is the word ‘Cambridge’’’.
In “The German Enlightenment (1720‐1790)” Ruth‐Ellen B. Joeres examines the assumptions about gender and class that were implicit in Enlightenment thought; in her discussion of Werther she mentions “the resulting suicides of many young men”, a story I understand to be largely unsubstantiated. At the beginning of “From Naturalism to National Socialism (1890‐1945)” Ritchie Robertson accepts the late J.P. Stern’s judgement that the artistic and intellectual achievements of modern Germany are traceable to the same “imaginative matrix” that produced Nazism, though towards the end he observes that the “sympathy of major writers for Fascism is a European phenomenon, illustrated by Pound, Yeats, Celine, Marinetti and Hamsun”. When Heinrich Himmler praised members of the SS for their ability to endure “the sight of innumerable corpses” he was allegedly following a Nietzschean ethic of “authenticity achieved through strenuousness”. Karl Kraus had an unfortunate tendency to come up with aphorisms like “Woman’s sensuality is the primal source where man’s spirituality finds renewal”.
In the early nineteenth century the bestseller was Rinaldo Rinaldini, Robber Captain by Christian August Vulpius (1762‐1827); Saul attributes its appeal partly to to the way that its hero “combines revolutionary ideals with final rejection of revolution and religious piety with a sense that all religion is a fraud”. Heinrich von Kleist’s The Marchioness of O‐(1807) “deconstructs sexual morality with a Goethe‐parody”, demonstrating “the foundationlessness of human convictions”. Karl Gutzkhow (1811‐78) got a month’s imprisonment for writing Wally the Sceptic (1835), which is about a crisis of religious faith and female sexuality (“Revolution, resignation, realism (1830‐1890)”).
I came across only a couple of fleeting references to two masters of the aphorism, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Arthur Schopenhauer; but I found this an exciting book. A century‐and‐a‐half on the influence of the young Goethe is evidently noticeable in passages of Joseph Goebbels’s confessional novel Michael (1929), in which the hero’s “love for a blonde female student ends when he finds her too bourgeois, and he transfers his devotion to Hitler”. He should have stuck with the blonde.
