Goethe in Love

The cinematic event of the decade approaches.  Who can fathom the mixed emotions, the excitement, the worry--all evoked by this new film, a new sexy cinematic adaptation of Die Leiden des jungen Goethes.  Run to the movie theater now!  You will be showing this film to your students for years to come.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/younggoetheinlove/

Germany 1772 - the young and tumultuous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Alexander Fehling) aspires to be a poet; but after failing his law exams, he is sent by his father (Henry Huebchen) to a sleepy provincial court to mend his ways. Unsure of his talent and eager to prove himself, Goethe soon wins the praise and friendship of his superior Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu). But then Lotte (Miriam Stein) enters his life and nothing is the same as before. However, the young lovers are unaware that her father has already promised Lotte's hand to another man. Director Phillip Stoelzl returns to the very wellspring of Romanticism - Goethe's loosely autobiographical masterpiece The Sorrows of Young Werther - and conjures up a beguiling and refreshingly innocent period romance.

What Kittler seemed to promise

The death this week of Friedrich Kittler reminded me of just how radical his Aufschreibesysteme seemed when it first appeared.  Discourse Networks, the English translation, continues to reverberate through English departments.  I remember vividly that it was the first book I photocopied in its entirety back in graduate school.  Standing in a copy store in Ithaca, I wondered what mysteries were in the pages that came spewing out the machine, which the intense, high-minded older students, who had driven me to xerox Kittler, already claimed to understand.

The radical potential of Kittler’s Habilitationsschrift was that it seemed to erase literature’s claim to uniqueness.  By setting novels equal to pedagogical manuals, Kittler was extending Foucault’s discourse analysis into art.  Foucault had really written little about literature after all, but Kittler was first and fore mostly, a Germanist—at least back then.

Kittler’s work promised to undo the most sacred tenet of German aesthetics—the autonomy of art.  People had claimed that Derrida and deconstruction would lead in that direction, but Kittler seemed to be one of the very first to thoroughly intermingle literature with other discourses, so that Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was comparable to a book on language acquisition or medicine.  The one thing that Kittler left to literature was the claim that its best works contained more insights about the operation of discourse and power than non-literary texts.   Thus, a great novel might contain more social history than historical texts.

Looking back on the arc of Kittler’s influence, it seems clear that at some point this radical potential to knock literature off its pedestal has succeeded.  Literary studies today are hardly as important to students and colleges as they were in the 1980s.  Though, Kittler surely does not get the credit for the demise of literature.  Infact he probably gets the credit for driving literary scholars to reclaim the autonomy of art,  for there developed in the mid 1990s a backlash within literature departments against the pomo tendency to levelize all forms of writing.


The early works of Kittler presented a wonderful interpenetration between close literary analysis and cultural history relying on Foucault.  The subtle back and forth in his reading of Wilhelm Meister in Dichtung als Sozialisationspiel and Aufschreibeysteme's masterful leaps from a few lines in Faust to the entire Enlightenment held many of us in awe.  But eventually this tension tore apart, and Kittler wrote increasingly about social forces as largely determinate of subjective processes such as literature.  His essay "There is no software" had the same paranoid reductionism of bad old nineteenth-century Marxism, whereby individual expression is really already determined behind the scene by the forces of industrialization, or in Kittler's more updated form, machine language.


The alliance of theory interests which Kittler had forged with his first books fell apart with the technologically determinist work, and critics who had once participated int he project of discourse analysis turned increasingly into a close readings which neglected the social context.


One place we can detect this swing away from Kittler’s approach is in David Wellbery’s The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism.  Wellbery had always been seen as an ally of Kittler; their essays often appeared side-by-side.  Each had students that worked with the other.  Yet in Wellbery’s book on the young Goethe’s poetry, you can sense a decisive move away from the claim that literature is comparable to other discourses.  Wellbery says he's engaged in discourse analysis, but really he performs very little of the broad historical sweep that Kittler displayed.  Instead, Wellbery digs deeply into Goethe’s poems with Lacan-inspired close readings.  Powerful, compelling interpretations of individual poems that run on for dozens of pages—this is what Wellbery produces, so that in the end, he re-establishes once again Goethe’s pivotal place at the origins of modern German literature.  By the end of Wellbery’s book you are presented with overwhelming evidence of Goethe’s singular genius.  The old cult is back—and this is conclusion that Kittler might have held in private, but he would never have written a book establishing this point.

As Kittler’s career moved off into media studies, computer programing languages and the history of technology, Germanistik found new theoretical means to re-establish the primacy of literature, at least for those who understood narratology and Lacan.

In other words, Kittler’s radical potential was broken down into highly specialized disciplines.  If literature lost its claim to autonomy, it was not because of Aufschreibesysteme so much as because of the conservative turn among students, administrators and voters, who increasingly found the esoteric conversations of literary studies impossible to follow.

The Poet's Name

I have learned recently not speculate on the letters that make up a person’s name, that literary musings do not amuse when they are about your proper name. If I imagine some one speculating about my name, it instantly brings back vicious childhood teasing, and why would that be different for anyone else?

Still what a boon for the imagination when in the midst of a noisy Dionysian party a quiet friend slipped me a copy of John Koethe. What’s a German professor to do, but become intrigued? Is there some secret connection that the letters of the poet’s name spell out? An affinity affirmed, a lineage that requires the adjustment of just one letter?

Well, it’s not that simple. John Koethe is his own very serious poet, not someone swiftly tucked into a familiar envelope of literary history. If anything, reading Koethe reminds me of first encountering John Ashbury in the New Yorker, and wondering how to decipher the lines.

Goethe was not often turned around to contemplate memory. In that sense he was Classical –always facing the horizon ahead, anticipating more knowledge, yet unfamiliar treasures on the next island. His moodiness came in youth, so that when he yearned, it was for what he could not now have, as opposed to what was lost in recollection. The opening to Faust 2 was the one connection I could find between Goethe and Koethe.

Really there is more K in Koethe than Goethe.

He writes as an American who has read so much philosophy that his intimate feelings speak as theory. No romantic language of simplicity, no turning the speech of the ordinary farmer into self-revery. His introspection sounds not just like someone who has read Proust, but who has also absorbed the last forty years of Proust criticism. Koethe’s poem seem to have internalized the grammar of literary criticism, so that they speak the voice of a professor recollecting his life.

Falling Water, the poem I was assigned, and the one that produces the most Google hits, has the private voice of an academic. It recounts taking a trip, getting divorced, raising children with self-conscious turns. He moves directly from a personal thought to a general statement, as if abstracting quickly away from himself, a move that a therapist once pointed out to me.

So Koethe is not a poet who speaks from another time and place, he belongs very much to our own. He is the intensely learned middle American university professor, and not the alienated cliché who's grumbling that he should be teaching back East. Koethe seems too Buddhist for such resentment. His poems describe intellectual thought in place, where he now lives, so that the distances he contemplates are temporal, his own life, but not the lures of an island off on a distant shore.

Tough Old Tree

Gingo Biloba

Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten

Meinem Garten anvertraut,

Gibt geheimen Sinn zu kosten,

Wie's den Wissenden erbaut.

Ist es Ein lebendig Wesen,

Das sich in sich selbst getrennt?

Sind es zwei, die sich erlesen,

Dass man sie als eines kennt.

Solche Frage zu erwidern,

Fand ich wohl den rechten Sinn.

Fühlst du nicht in meinen Liedern,

Dass ich Eins und doppelt bin.

from "Buch Suleika" in Goethe's "West-östlicher Divan"

Yes, the Gingko is a well established motif among Goetheverehrer and Bildungsbürger generally. It also has come to represent the paradoxes of Orientalism and European contact with China and Japan.

The first Westerner to note the Ginkgo Biloba tree was the botanist, Engelbert Kaempfer, who served with the Dutch East India Company and was shown the tree in a garden in Nagasaki. Seeds he brought back were planted in Utrecht, where the trees still stand.

The Ginkgo trees are very hardy and have been known to live for well over 1000 years. Six trees survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. They continue to grow there today. You can find pictures of how architecture has been designed around these surviving trees in the rebuilding of Nagasaki, here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~kwanten/hiroshima.htm

Outside my office there is a thick gnarly Gingko. For about a week in Spring, it drops small greenish translucent bulbs, which are often gathered up by Chinese graduate students. Whenever I walk past a cluster of students stashing these bulbs into plastic grocery bags, I want to ask them what they plan to do with them, can they be cooked up into food, or a tea or medicine. But I don't want to seem like the nosy professor, I don't want to sound intimidating, like the native speaker questioning the foreigner, so I usually just keep walking past the tree and the gleaners to the student center food court where I usually get a quick sushi or orange chicken for lunch.