1.
Goethe’s last significant prose fiction was his novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden (Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering or the Renouncers). The book was first published in 1821, when the writer was 72 – he had been working, albeit rather aimlessly, on the book for about 19 years when the novel was first issued in print. A later edition followed, much revised, and was published in 1829 when Goethe was eighty years old. The book represents Goethe’s last phase in his literary development and is important for that reason. The novel, if it can be so named, is maddening, sloppy, alternately risible in its obtuseness and, sometimes, brilliant. The whole is suffused with an eerie autumnal, even crepuscular radiance – a last flaring of Goethe’s remarkable imagination.
Of course, the novel is a sequel to Goethe’s Roman entitled Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) published in 1796. That book was famous throughout Europe and represents the governing prototype for the Bildungsroman – that is, the novel tracing the education of its protagonist. My approach to Goethe’s novels is perverse – I haven’t read the earlier, and, by all accounts, more successful book. My study of the novel begins in media res – that is, in the middle of things. This approach is not inconsistent with Goethe’s own perversity: the second or sequel novel is bizarre and, perhaps, repudiates some of themes in the first, more famous novel. The secondary title, die Entsagenden (meaning “those who renounce” or, more literally, repudiate what they have earlier “said”) applies, I think, to the earlier novel. The Wanderjahre (sometimes translated “Journeyman Years”) seems to renounce or, at least, deviate significantly from the themes of the first volume. This is important: Goethe’s great project, visible in all of his writings, is to show how the human mind is shaped, educated, and how it develops by a process of “outgrowing” or transforming its earlier stages. In this respect, Goethe’s themes parallel Hegel’s thought – the philosopher portrays a “phenomenology” of the spirit that proceeds by dialectical development – a thesis is opposed by an antithesis resulting in a new synthesis of sensibility, in turn, transformed by continuation of these processes. Somewhere Hegel says that the flower is not the opposite or, even, the repudiation of the seed from which the plant germinated, but, rather, its “development.”
2.
The Wanderjahre is too complex and difficult from a narrative perspective to summarize. The best approach to the book is to look closely at certain passages.
Late in the book, a passionate young man named Lenardo writes a diary. The diary is delivered as a package to Wilhelm who opens the parcel with some trepidation and reads it. (A hundred pages earlier, we have seen similar selections from Lenardo’s diary.) Goethe’s book is full of enigmatic packages, sealed boxes, strange coded messages and the like – this is part of the rather Gothic spookiness that prevails in parts of the novel. This spookiness, like everything else in the book, is rococo – that is, more picturesque than really scary or sinister.
Lenardo wronged a girl named Nachodine about three-hundred pages earlier in the book. His offense against her was economic. As a member of a landowning family, he stood by idly when Nachodine was evicted from the small acreage where she lived with her ailing father. (The reader will have forgotten how Lenardo wronged the girl by the time this plot is resumed near the end of the novel – you will have go back and re-read to recall this part of the narrative; very little in the rather wanly written novel is so impressive or effectively narrated to stand out in the reader’s memory. In my case, I had to use the German language Wikipedia entry on the book, which has a detailed summary of the plot, to revive my memory as to why exactly Lenardo thinks he has harmed the girl.) In any event, Lenardo, with the help of Wilhelm Meister about 150 pages earlier, learns where he can locate the woman. Wilhelm has told him that the young woman is engaged to be married and has done well – her life is happy and productive. Nonetheless, Lenardo wants to see her and assure himself that she was not injured by his earlier callousness – as in many of the subplots, there’s something a little creepy about Lenardo’s solicitude: he’s more like a stalker than a benefactor. Nachodine, now rather mysteriously named Susanne, is living in a community where the cottage industry is the production of cotton yarn and textiles. Goethe is obviously fascinated with this spinning, winding, weaving handcraft and devotes about twenty pages to tedious, jargon-laden descriptions of this industry – clearly, he sees the production of yarn and woven fabric as a metaphor for something that deeply interests him, although it’s not clear what this might be. Certainly, the bucolic landscape of rural families working at their hearths to produce something of value fascinates him and invokes a pastoral ideal that will be ravaged, presumably, by the industrial revolution in which Goethe himself has taken part.
After traversing a mountainous region – the Wanderjahre is resolutely vertical: people are always going up and down rocky and steep paths – Lenardo descends to a valley on the edge of a lake, or, possibly, even the Mediterranean sea. In my translation, here is his account of that landscape:
This time the path (down from the mountains) was soon left behind: after a few hours, we gazed upon a serene, level valley, not all that wide, bounded on one side with cliffs against which the waves of the clearest of all seas gently washed and in which were reflected the well-built and handsome houses adorned by gardens growing in the better, carefully cultivated soil in the more sunny places.
This is a characteristically sloppy, loquacious sentence typical of the novel. Several things are worth noticing: first the tone is Homeric in that Goethe praises everything that he sees. All houses or cottages are delightful, well-built, and commodious. People are invariably handsome, beautiful, and physically fit. The lake or sea or whatever it is – the German is ambiguous – possesses not just “clear” water, but the “clearest”. The valley is “serene and level”but also picturesque with seaside cliffs, a bit like one of Brueghel’s fantasy landscapes. The entire book possesses this tone of pastoral praise – everything, even aspects of reality that might seem ominous, is handsome, well-lit, good-looking. The prose is sloppy in some respects because Goethe often just strings together verbal formulae –similar, in fact, to the way that Homeric verse is constructed. It’s not clear to me how waves can reflect anything. To reflect a landscape you need water that is mirror-like, but Goethe enthused by the rush of his long sentences ignores niceties of this kind – here we have “waves” in which reflections are cast. (I’m also unclear as to how the cliffside houses, presumably some distance above the water are reflected in it.) Another feature of this passage that typifies the prose style is the fussy, pedantic, and oddly inexpressive details: note that the valley is “not all that wide” (who cares?) And the gardens are carefully qualified as growing in the “sunnier” areas where the soil (Boden) is “better” and has been “carefully cultivated”.
Here’s how most writers would present this scene:
As we descended from the mountains, we saw a level, serene valley stretching toward a seaside where waves washed against cliffs. Well-built and handsome houses were adorned with pleasant, sunny gardens.
What’s the difference? First, Goethe, who is obsessively interested in optics, puts a reflection onto moving waves, seemingly just because he likes reflections. He’s also interested in botany and so the gardens have to be situated in “the sunnier” locales – it’s not a detail that adds much to the novel, but Goethe insists upon this little (annoying) flourish. (The waters are the “clearest” and the gardens grow where it is “more sunny”). Finally, Goethe, as a good German, appreciates hard work – he doesn’t want you to think that the gardens just sprang from the earth – rather, they are the result of “careful cultivation” (sorgfaltig gepflegte).
The verb in the passage translated that gave me the most trouble is bespuelt – this is what the waves do as they impinge on the cliffs at the shore. Bespuelt is a word ruined by modernity – the term is now used to signify “flushed” as in “flushing” a toilet. Goethe means something like “laved” in poetic diction, a combination of “rinsing’ and “washing”.
3.
Now let’s look at a longer passage. I have translated this passage from the third chapter of Book II. Wilhelm has resolved to become a surgeon (Wundarzt). So he must study anatomy. But this poses a problem – to learn anatomy, Wilhelm will have to dissect cadavers. Goethe feels that this paideia is questionable: cutting apart corpses degrades human dignity. Notice that the book is concerned with education and modes of learning – this is the great theme overarching the novel. Wilhelm studies anatomy with a sculptor who has devised replicas of human anatomy in marble and wax. This raises the question as to whether it is best to learn anatomy from the actual flesh and tissue of corpses or from simulacra. A debate ensues. Lenardo, a baron involved in several important subplots, intervenes in the dispute:
At this point, Lenardo took up the argument and intervened in the little controversy. “I seemed to be absent,” he said, “but only on account that I was more than present. I recall vividly a large cabinet of this kind that I saw during my travels and in which I was interested to the extent that the custodian who was customarily prepared to recite his spiel from memory and, in fact, beginning to speak in that mode, departed from that role and proved to be a most knowledgeable dozent.”
I think Lenardo means that he seemed absent-minded during the debate but this was because he was recalling an encounter from earlier during his travels. In the book, everyone, more or less, is a wanderer. In fact, Wilhelm, as a journeyman, has sworn a vow to spend no more than three days in any one location before moving on – and must move, at least, one mile from is previous lodging. The “cabinet’ is a “cabinet of curiosities” – apparently, anatomical specimens shaped in wax or some other durable substance.
Lenardo continues:
“The remarkable contrast was to see, in the middle of summer in cool chambers with sweltering heat outdoors, those artifacts that you would scarcely want to approach in the most frigid weather. Here all comfortably served the desire for knowledge. With the greatest serenity and most appealing orderliness, he showed me the miracles of the human structure and was pleased to be able to convince me that this sort of set up would be completely sufficient with which to begin study and, later, a tool for the memory; and, yet, each would remain free to turn to nature in the middle of studies and, if the opportunity availed, research particular organs and parts. He asked me to recommend his facility to others because only a few, great, and outstanding museums had developed such a collection. The universities, however, thoroughly resisted this undertaking because masters of this art thought to instruct dissectors but not sculptors.”
“At that time, I believed that this skillful man was the only one in the world (with a collection of models) of this kind. And, now, we hear that another has toiled in the same way; who knows if yet a third and a fourth will come to light. For our part, we should give impetus to these endeavors. This advice must come from outside and, in our new relationship, this useful undertaking will certainly be advanced.”
This curious discourse relates to the role of “images” in education. An “image” can serve as a useful stimulus to understanding – Lenardo regards the “images” as a “beginning.” After the student has mastered the “images” (here sculpted wax simulating internal organs, musculature, and skeletal bone), the pupil may turn to “nature”– presumably, studying cadavers or observing living specimens. This study focuses on parts of the structure. The wax simulacra are, also, available at the end of the pedagogical process as an aid to memory. The notion of learning from images is integral to the book. The first episode in the Wanderjahre involves a miraculous encounter between Meister and the holy family, Joseph, Mary, and the infant Jesus fleeing into Egypt. This strange apparition occurs, as is typical in the book, in a vertical landscape – that is, on a precipitous mountain trail. Later, Meister learns that the family members are people of humble means who dwell in an abandoned chapel. The chapel is decorated with images of the Holy Family and the father, in particular, has modeled himself after Joseph, practicing the trade of a carpenter. Devotional images remain as left behind in a ruined church (the novel takes place in a world in which organized religion seems to have collapsed – toward the end of the book, we see the father of another household conducting a service in his home, but no one seems to be conventionally pious). The people who take up residence in the chapel internalize the ruined images remaining there and become like the holy figures painted on the church wall – living with these images is an education in virtue.
Another theme in the book is visible in this passage: the collapse of the ancien regime and its old verities yields a rich crop of utopias and utopian schemes. Lenardo’s comments represent a proposal for educational action, even idealistic reform. Everyone in the book has some concept of how the world should be re-made and improved. Ultimately, these schemes result in a mass exodus from the Old World – at the end of the book, almost everyone departs for the New World, presumably America. This emigration is so extensive that the mountainous valleys where skilled craftswomen weave yarn and make textiles are depopulated. Machines must be installed so that this industrial production can continue. (Goethe frets over the role of industrial machinery in destroying cottage industries that he values for their charm and as a sort of social glue that holds families and village culture together; but he also recognizes that the arrival of machines is inevitable. So the problem of the machines wrecking the isolated mountain hamlets where the book’s action is staged is solved by exporting most of the people to America and solving the labor shortage with factory production.)
The following Fourth Chapter begins in this way:
The next morning, Friedrich carrying a notebook at that time approached Wilhelm and handing it to him said: “Yesterday evening, in the course of your display of virtues that it would be tedious to recount here, I didn’t have an opportunity to speak about my endeavors which should be praised and which stamp me as a worthy member of this caravan. Look at this notebook and you will see a sample of what I am doing.”
Wilhelm flipped through the pages, glancing at them quickly, and saw that they were written in a legible, handsome, although swiftly inscribed, script and that they recounted the previous day’s discussion about his anatomical studies almost word for word, setting forth what had been said so accurately that he could not conceal his wonderment.
“You know,” he responded, “the fundamental rule of our association: if one wishes to attain membership in our organization, one must demonstrate perfection in some discipline. So I racked my brains as to some skill in which I could show perfection and couldn’t come up with anything until, considering the subject more closely, I recalled that no one excelled me with respect to memory and my swift, easily legible handwriting. These pleasing attributes you will well remember from our theatrical endeavors in which we expended our powder in blasting away at sparrows when a shot, more prudently deployed, would have earned us a rabbit in the pot. How often did anyone have to prompt me as to the script? How often was I able to write out from memory an entire role in just a few hours? That was your custom in those days, you know: it had to be done. I also – and it would not have occurred to me then, how much this would later stand me in good stead. The Abbe first made this discovery: he found that this was grist for his mill – he attempted to make use of me and I was pleased to do that which was very easy for me and, yet, pleasing to that serious fellow. And now I am, when needed, as proficient as an entire chancellery , bringing to these tasks the skills of a bipedal calculating machine and there is no prince, no matter how many his clerks, better equipped than our superiors in this fraternity.”
In the predecessor novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the hero begins his career and adventures as a member of a traveling group of actors. Much of the first part of that book concerns Shakespeare and, particularly, Hamlet, the play that the traveling players attempt to perform. Friedrich, who is speaking in this passage of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, is a member of a shadowy organization called the Turmgesellschaft – that is, the Tower Society. The nature of this secret society is never exactly defined, but its role is dominant in the book – critics have called the “Tower”, a sort of narrative deux ex machina that licenses elaborate coincidences and the oddly claustrophobic cast of characters in these books: everyone seems to be related to everyone else. Whether the Society of the Tower was originally conceived as the scaffolding on which the plot is erected is not entirely clear – the contrivance may have occurred to Goethe relatively late in the composition of the Apprenticeship. It’s not until the seventh of the eight books comprising the Apprenticeship that Meister learns that his destiny is controlled by the Tower and that its members have, in fact, acted decisively in shaping his fate. The Tower seems something like a fusion between the Freemasons, the various radical Turner (or gymnast) fraternities that existed in Germany in the 19th century, with some elements derived from medieval trade-guilds – for instance, the division of the tradesman’s education into “apprentice years” (Lehrjahre) and “journeyman years” (Wanderjahre). The Abbe (or abbot) is a mysterious figure who controls the Tower – he never appears in the book, but is often referenced and plays the role of providence or, perhaps, God; events seem somehow to be under his supervision.
Here Friedrich is recalling to Wilhelm Meister, their early days as members of the theatrical troupe. Friedrich is the brother of Natalie, Meister’s wife. Many chapters in the Wanderjahre purport to be letters between Wilhelm Meister and his wife, Natalie. The book continues:
Cheerful discussion about similar activities led to thoughts about other members of the society. “Should we believe,” Friedrich said, “that the most useless creature in the world, as it might appear, my Philine, has become the most useful member in this great chain? If you set a piece of cloth before her, then, present a man, a woman, also right before her eyes, without taking any measures, she will use the whole fabric, and, even, every scrap and corner, to great advantage, and all of this without so much as using a paper pattern. A fortunate and skilled glance teaches her everything – she looks at people and tailors the cloth even after her patron has gone wherever he wants, and creates for him a garment that fits his body as if poured over him. But this would not be possible if she wasn’t accompanied by a woman skilled in needlework, Montan’s wife, Lydie, someone who has become, and remains, completely silent, and, yet, can sew perfectly, like no one else, stitch by stitch, each like a pearl. This shows us what human beings can accomplish: usually, there’s so much that is useless to us crowded around – we’re clad in a ragged garment cobbled together from habit, inclination, confusion, and caprice. What nature desires for us, that which is best and most excellent within ourselves, is, nonetheless, something that we can neither discover nor exercise.”
General observations as to the advantages of this fellowship of comrades and how fortunate they were to have found themselves together provided them with the most beautiful perspectives.
Friedrich’s comment on his wife, Philine, as well as Montan’s spouse, Lydie intimate a major, if somewhat baffling theme, in the latter part of the novel. Toward the end of the book, Lenardo’s diaries will become increasingly devoted to technical details as to the production of yarns and textiles in cottage industry in the foothills of the mountains. The motif of weaving and spinning is central to Goethe’s imagination – we should recall that one of his most famous early poems is Gretchen am Spinnrad (“Gretchen at her Spinning Wheel”), a lyric, that is, part of Faust. The seamstress and weaver are Goethe’s paradigm for productive labor, work that converts raw materials (here cotton fiber) into something that is both useful and beautiful. (The rhythmic action of the spinning wheel also signifies for Goethe the fusion between meaning and meter that characterizes the work of the poet.) Nature desires that we be useful. Within even the least of us, there is a seed of utility to others that nature has planted within us. The excellence of human being is to discover this capacity and, then, exercise it. Goethe’s character observes, however, that the useful doesn’t arise in isolation from society. To the contrary, the secret society, the fellowship of the Tower provides an incentive for the development of these innate capacities to serve the common good. It seems suggested that without the intervention of the Tower, these faculties might remain concealed and, therefore futile. The pedagogy in these passages doesn’t refer primarily to intellectual labor – to the contrary, Goethe seems to require that everyone practice some kind of useful trade.
As Lenardo now joined his comrades, he was encouraged to speak about the conditions of the prior life that he had led and to share this congenial report with Wilhelm and the others.
You will recall, well enough, my best friend,” replied Lenardo, “the wondrous and impassioned state in which you encountered me during the first moments of our acquaintance. I was drowned by, consumed by, the most remarkable desire and an irresistable craving – I could only speak of the very next moments in which I perceived only the heaviest of sorrows, suffering that I zealously made all the more sharp for myself by these thoughts. I wasn’t able to acquaint you with the circumstances of my youth then, something that I now must do, since it is necessary to tell you about the path that has led me here.
Among the earliest of my proficiencies, a capacity developed through habit, there was predominant a certain inclination toward the technical, an inclination nourished every day by the impatience that one felt living out in the country where one’s work, not only with respect to larger structures but, also, particularly renovations, remodeled work, and follies, one building trade after another, had to dispense with craft and, rather, be completed in a clumsy and botched manner – too late to do things with masterful skill. Fortunately, in our region there was a wandering jack-of-all-trades, who, thinking to profit from my labors, supported me in more than a neighborly manner. He installed for me a lathe that he used on each visit, more for his purposes than for my education. At the same time, I acquired carpentry tools and my inclination for that kind of work was both heightened and animated by a conviction that I expressed at that time: no one can fail to meet life’s challenges if he is equipped, to support himself if necessary by the skill of his hands. My zeal was approved by my instructor according to the principles of this order. I can scarcely recall any play at all – all of my leisure was devoted to making and creating things. Yes, if I may praise myself, even as a lad, I worked so skillfully as a blacksmith that I had increasing orders for locks and files and parts for clockmakers.
To achieve all of this, of course, tools must be created and we suffered more than a little from the pathology of those technicians, who confuse means and ends, applying time to preparations and preliminaries that would have better spent in implementing this work. Where, nonetheless, we proved to be practically effective was with respect to the embellishment of park facilities of the sort that no landowner would dare to dispense with. Many bucolic turf-cottages and timber huts, as well as stave foot-bridges and benches attested to our industry – with these structures we demonstrated a primordial kind of architecture in the midst of the more cultivated world.
This industry motivated me, for a number of years, to participate most earnestly in those things that are useful to the world and, in its present circumstances, even indispensable and so accorded to my many journeyman years a particular interest.
Since people generally remain wandering along those paths to which they are accustomed, I found work with machines less satisfying than direct hand-craft in which strength and feeling are exercised in combination. For this reason, I gladly remained within those circles in which this kind of work was customarily at home. These predilections gave each of my associations a particular quality, and imparted to that larger family, a community comprised of many families, its decisive character: one lived in the purest sentiment within a living whole.
This is very close to gibberish. I have omitted dozens of words in the German that don’t contribute anything to text’s meaning, language that seems to be mere “throat-clearing” on the part of the great poet. One might legitimately wonder if my proficiency in German is equal to the task of translating this representative passage. However, I have checked my translation against an 1885 version of the text, probably cribbed from Thomas Carlyle’s work and verified that I have correctly and, even, faithfully represented the meaning of the German prose.
In paraphrase, Lenardo now recalls how he first met Wilhelm. At that time, he was a kind of Byronic wanderer, obsessed with a wrong he had committed against a young woman, Nachodine, and her elderly father. As I have recounted above, these two people were tenants on property owned by Lenardo’s wealthy family. When they fell behind in their rent, Lenardo’s steward evicted them from the land on which they were living. Lenardo did nothing to avert this calamity for the girl and her father and, later, wanders around Mitteleuropa seeking to atone for this wrong. Lenardo is driven to distraction by guilt and repenting of his inaction, he persuades Wilhelm to search for the girl. (I have previously identified his motivations in section Two above.) It suffices to say that Lenardo’s guilt and, even, desperation arising from the tenants’ eviction seems far out of proportion to the causes of these emotions. This is a rococo aspect of Goethe’s novel that is alien to modern readers, the cult of sentiment. Here Lenardo feels compelled to demonstrate refined sentiment – in accord with the genre in which is entrapped, he must shed tears over the fate of another, even though he was only tangential to the harm inflicted. Sentiment and its expression for Goethe is an end in itself and this is what Lenardo’s strange obsession with Nachodine demonstrates.
It’s not at all clear why Lenardo needs to unburden himself of his uninteresting and very poorly expressed autobiography. Obviously, there is certain thematic material intrinsic to Lenardo’s career that interests Goethe – the problem is that this material doesn’t interest any reasonable reader and is purely repetitive of other, better written, parts of the novel. As the book progresses, themes relating to intrusion of machine-industry into the pastoral environs depicted in the novel become increasingly important. Therefore, Lenardo’s inclination to reject machinery in favor of craft and handiwork is consistent with ideas that Goethe expresses later in the novel ad nauseum. Hand-labor and cottage industry are preferable to machine production – this is an important theme and Goethe is prescient about the effect of technology on the pastoral idyll that he wishes to present. But one has the distinct impression that his strong preference for cottage industry relates to the fact that its inefficiencies are picturesque – certainly, cottage piece-work labor could be every bit as dehumanizing (and alienating) as factory work; furthermore, family-based cottage industry is, perhaps, more inhumane and oppressive than wage-labor: you can quit your job at the factory, but how do you quit your family? The themes relating to the economic expansion of factory-driven capitalism are probably important – and Goethe seems to raise these issues at an early phase in the industrial revolution. (Although in this respect, he’s much inferior to Wordsworth’s musings on this subject at about the same time, less interesting than contemporaries John Clare and Robbie Burns on the industrialization of the country, and his vision of a pastoral landscape depopulated by emigration is less poignant than that presented by Oliver Goldsmith more than fifty years earlier in The Deserted Village.)
The difficulty that this passage poses is Lenardo’s grandiloquence devoted to what is, in effect, the manufacture of lawn ornaments. Perhaps, this passage in the novel is supposed to be funny. Maybe, Goethe is making fun of the callow and self-satisfied sentimentalist, Lenardo – it’s notoriously difficult to assess effects such as irony and humor when translating from a foreign language. But I don’t think this is the intent. Lenardo claims tremendous proficiency in the technical arts – although the language is ambiguous, he even seems to assert that he’s some kind of blacksmith. (This is consistent with Goethe’s credo that all young men and women should practice some kind of useful trade – this is an important aspect of his theory of education.) Lenardo begins his curriculum vita by claiming that the building trades are prosecuted generally in a fumbling, inept and rushed manner that does a disservice to them. So he practices to excel at these important crafts. But, having proven himself as a master tradesman, what does he do? He works for rich families that own landscape gardens and equips them with lawn ornaments – that is cute little bridges whittled from timber, rustic benches, and cottages. When you reach this part of the text, you rub your eyes in disbelief – this is the trade of architecture extolled as integral to the well-being of human beings? Lenardo talks as if his craft will save mankind. He claims that it is indispensable. So what do we see him building? Deer-stands and wigwams. There’s no way that this can be understood except as some botched form of humor. But I don’t see any clues that Goethe wants us to laugh at Lenardo’s affectations and presumptuousness. And the convoluted prose-style is both tedious and inexplicably evasive.
4.
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre is a miscellany. Goethe seems to have crammed whatever interested him between 1796 and 1821 into the book. Various short stories and, even, a fifty-page novella are stitched together by interludes in which Wilhelm travels from place to place. Wilhelm is accompanied by his son, Felix, a character who grows up into a young man, during the course of the novel. The narrative involving Wilhelm’s adventures comprises less than half of the book; the other, larger part of the novel involves interpolated material including a copious selection of aphorisms, grouped together at the midpoint in the book and, then, assembled (as the wisdom of the female astronomer, Makarie) at the end of the volume.
As to Wilhelm’s adventures, it suffices to say that he and his cronies are typically portrayed hiking around in the mountains. The closed world of the novel is full of people who harken back to the preceding book, the Apprenticeship – for instance, there is a character named Montan (who sometimes is called Jarno), a geologist and mining engineer with whom Wilhelm debates issues such as whether landforms are created by slow accretion over eons or, suddenly, by floods or other catastrophes. Wilhelm corresponds with his soul-mate, Natalie, a platonic relationship because his vows preclude him from spending any time with her. (This is probably for the best because she seems to be a terrible bore, a virtuous woman who writes in annoying sententia.) There are several narrative strands that run through the account of Wilhelm’s travels. First, Wilhelm and Felix discover a small casket or treasure-box – it is described as ornately decorated and the size of an octavo volume. This enigmatic box is mentioned from time to time and it ends up in the possession of Hersilie. Felix has found the box in a fissure in the wall of a “vast castle”, but the casket wanders around almost as much as the protagonist before Hersilie acquires it. (The equation of the casket to the octavo volume makes it a simile for the novel we are reading containing a secret that we aren’t allowed to extract.) A second motif is Wilhelm’s determination that Felix be properly educated. This leads to long theoretical discussions that take place in something called the “Pedagogical Province”, a sort of Academe in which young people are taught useful trades, something that is an idee fixe to Goethe. His notion of education is that students be taught singing, that they be educated in certain symbolic gestures with which they can communicate, and that each be trained in some sort of craft that must, in fact, be perfected. As an aid to this instruction, the students are encouraged to study various mythological images that they are to assimilate as guides to good behavior. (There is a gallery of images of suffering and torment to which they are afforded access only when some sort of misfortune requires them to scrutinize these pictures.) Felix shows an affinity for horses and, accordingly, he is educated in the equestrian arts. The third plot strand involves Wilhelm’s decision to become a surgeon. An extended and dramatic flashback establishes that as a youth, the hero enjoyed a very close friendship with another boy – this relationship is described in what seem to me to be homosexual terms, although standards of sentiment that govern the book might rationalize the effusive romantic imagery as being merely an idealized form of friendship. With several other children, the boy drowns. Wilhelm sees his lifeless body and is tormented by the idea that there is nothing that he can do to save his best friend. It is this sense of agonized helplessness that motivates Wilhelm to study medicine and becomes a Wundartzt (“wound-doctor” or surgeon).
The most enduring narrative in the chronicles of Wilhelm’s wanderings involves his relationship with Lenardo. The character is introduced in the book’s first fifty pages as a young man who has inexplicably abandoned his family’s castle and spent, at least, three years wandering the world incommunicado. Suddenly, Lenardo begins to write to his sisters announcing his return. (Understandably, they are miffed with him – he hasn’t taken the time to communicate except by sending enigmatic souvenirs of his travels, artifacts from the various places that he has been.) Lenardo is afflicted with guilt over the way that he treated Nachodine and is desperately seeking her to make some kind of recompense for his earlier callousness.
Wilhelm’s peregrinations occur against a background of craggy mountains, deep green valleys, and luminous plains stretching to the sunny sea. Everything is idealized. The characters wander around in a landscape that is something like a painting by Claude Lorrain. Although apparently the story takes place in the present, and involves a mass emigration to America at the end of the book, there is no sense of history or current events in the novel – this is a sunny world, largely without armies and war, a picturesque Europe in which there has never been either a French Revolution or Napoleon. The book’s trappings are those of feudal romance – the characters stumble upon ruined cloisters, remote mountain villages with happy peasants, castles and monasteries. The novel is difficult to read because all of its actors have strangely similar names and none is provided with much in the way of character traits: the men are all handsome and generous; the women are lovely and virtuous. The elderly are frail but wise. Everyone is very smart and garrulous – people make long, dull speeches at the drop of a hat. The various lodges and secret society temples where Wilhelm stays are generally decorated with elaborate images intended to educate those who inhabit them. There is lots of feasting and speechifying.
The stories that comprise the other (more interesting) half of the book are generally seven or eight pages long (although the novella "A Fifty-year old Man" is about four times that length.) The stories are sometimes proffered to Wilhelm as written texts that he is urged to read. Later in the book, several tales are told by story-tellers and recounted as direct quotations from these speakers. The relationship that the stories bear to the novel’s frame narrative is often tenuous, although certain themes re-occur that are roughly correlated to the broader concerns arising in Wilhelm’s wanderings. The first of these stories, identified in the book with their own titles, is exemplary: this is a text presented to Wilhelm by one of his hosts, a tale called "The Wandering Madwoman". In this anecdote, a crazy young woman appears out of nowhere at a castle where an older man lives with his son. All efforts to ascertain the woman’s background fail and she is reticent about where she has been. The father and son both fall in love with her – she described as deshabille but beautiful. Dissension occurs between the two men as they compete for her affection. Then, she vanishes ending the conflict. On its face, the story is unresolved – the enigmas that it poses aren’t answered: we never find out where the woman has come from, why she is mad, or where she goes. German critics equate the madwoman to poetry – writing verse is a sort of madness that comes upon the poet, obsesses him, and, then, departs as capriciously as it arrived. This gloss on the tale makes some sense and seems plausible – but it doesn’t explain why Goethe presents the story to his readers (or, for that matter, why Wilhelm Meister was urged to read it.)
The other stories run the gamut of silly, if amusing fairy tales to three-page jokes that seem to be missing their punch-lines to the elaborate novella about the fifty-year old man. This latter story involves another father and son triangle, a theme that seems to obsess Goethe. Goethe’s son, August seems to have been a disappointment to the Great Man. August’s wife, Ottilie apparently married the poet’s unprepossessing son in order to establish a closer relationship with Goethe – in fact, there’s some sense in which Ottilie appears to have thought of Goethe as her husband while ignoring and disparaging her actual spouse. Therefore, this disturbing triangle comprised of father, son, and a young woman, who is the son’s age, probably had significance for Goethe in the context of his own family.
In “The Man of Fifty”, the novella commences with a sort of romantic chiasmus, a rhetorical figure that Goethe favors and that is here materialized by the characters. A widower, fifty years old, learns that his young ward, a teenage girl, is in love with him. She is infatuated, confesses her love, and the middle-aged man plans to marry her. At the same time, the widower’s son falls in love with a spirited, if capricious, older woman – she is a widow herself and seems to be in her mid-thirties. Thus, we have two parallel cases of young people enamored with lovers considerably older than them. After a turbulent courtship, the widow rejects the young man’s advances. He flees through a tempest to the castle where his father is planning to marry the girl that he has raised as his ward. The young man is love-sick and, possibly, suicidal – his irrational passion makes him brother to Goethe’s most celebrated fictional character, “Young Werther”, who committed suicide when his love for Lotte was thwarted. Of course, the kind young woman betrothed to the boy’s father nurses him back to health with the inevitable consequence that the two fall in love. The man of fifty is called away on business. While he is gone, there is a great flood and, then, with the onset of Winter, the waters freeze. The landscape is swathed in ice and the two young lovers go out at night, skating on the frozen rivers and flooded meadows. The middle-aged man returns while the couple are skating in the moonlight and he pursues them, skating through the night himself. When the older man beholds the couple and senses their happiness, he renounces his relationship with the young woman – he had always felt reservations, although he repressed them, about marrying the teenage girl. The widow appears and there is an intimation that their relationship, based on mutual esteem and, apparently, platonic, may develop into something more passionate. The skating scene is famous in German literature and, indeed, remains impressive. The novella, also, seems to influenced Thomas Mann, particularly with regard to “Death in Venice”. In Mann’s novel, Aschenbach, an elderly man, falls in love with Tadzio, a young Polish boy. Aschenbach paints his face and dyes his hair to make himself seem younger and more attractive to the child – although, in fact, these measures only cause the hero to look like a circus clown. In Goethe’s novella, the widower has a friend who is an actor and, therefore, skilled with respect to disguise and make-up. The actor loans his valet to the man of fifty who uses his arts to rejuvenate the widow and restore his youthful appearance. When the older man renounces his love for the teenage girl, he dismisses the valet and reverts to seeming his actual age. It is, perhaps, the theme of the older man’s renunciation of the quixotic relationship with the young girl that links the novella to the larger topics in the novel – the second title for the novel, of course, is Die Entsagendem, that is, “the Renunciants”. This novella embedded in the larger work – it is sometimes published as short novel set apart from the rest of the book – also inaugurates a curious confusion between the tale and the frame in which it is displayed. Meister and his cronies are fascinated by the story and they decide to seek the spirited widow (and other characters in the tale). As the novel proceeds, the widow, in particular, assumes an important role in the narrative – she is, at once, the protagonist of a novella that the characters in the book read, but, also, a character in the plot, such as it is, involving Wilhelm Meister and his wanderings.
There are several other stories in the book. One is trivial – it involves journeymen who encounters a pretentious fellow at an Inn. While quaffing beer and wine, one of the traveling apprentices bets his cronies that he can take the arrogant nobleman and lead him about by the nose. The waggish apprentice dresses up like a barber and offers his services to the nobleman. In this way, the young man is able to seize the foppish lord by the nose while shaving his chin and throat. The nobleman finds out about the bet and attacks the clever, if unfortunate, apprentice, cutting up his face and disfiguring him. What is this story supposed to mean? Goethe doesn’t make much effort to establish any thematic connection between the anecdote and the surrounding narrative. He simply tells us that he feels compelled to insert the story into the novel at this juncture. Why? Because, as Goethe says, the plot is about to take a serious turn and a humorous tale of this sort won’t fit well within the framework of the more solemn events that the author is about to narrate.
The best story intercalated into the novel is a pastiche of a fairy tale called “The New Melusine.” Melusine is a water sprite, a nixie and, therefore, a literary sister to “little Mermaid” made famous by Hans Christian Andersen and Disney Studios. Goethe seems to cast a sardonic eye on a celebrated novella regarded as defining German Romanticism, Baron Fouque’s Undine, published in 1811. (Fouque’s Undine is a water-sprite who must earn an immortal soul by loving a human being – the story is derived from an anecdote in the writings of the medieval alchemist Paracelsus; in Paracelsus’ text, the water-nixie is called “Melusine”.) Goethe’s Maerchen tells of a selfish and arrogant young man who encounters a beautiful and mysterious maiden. She seems to be alone in the world with neither parents nor siblings and her origins are a secret. After a whirlwind courtship, the girl and the young man are married. The girl keeps a mysterious treasure chest near her bed. The chest, she says, must never be left in the darkness – it is always to be illumined by candles set on each side of the casket. The young woman also tells her new husband that an enigmatic necessity requires that she be absent a couple of days each month. (I have always thought that this genre of stories have something to do with men’s dismay with menstruation.) The young man promises to always protect the treasure chest and, also, to indulge his wife’s need to be absent from their home once a month.
The young man proves to be a drunk and, although all goes well for a few months, things begin to go badly wrong. One night, when his wife is absent, attending to her mysterious business, he forgets to light the candles next to the weird casket. Light streams from the hinge in the box and the young man peeks into the chest. There he sees a miniature version of his wife. It turns out that his spouse is, in fact, a dwarf, and, not just any dwarf – she is the daughter of the King of the Dwarves. This revelation induces marital discord. By this point, the nasty young hero is more interested in the fiscal perquisites of his marriage to the princess of the dwarves – she has a ring that can be used to change her dimensions as well as a purse that is always magically full of gold and silver coins. (Dwarves are great miners and have access to all manner of tellurian wealth.) Goethe has a great deal of fun with this story and tells his tale with zest and wit. The “new Melusine” as the dwarf-princess is called is a shrew and the young man is rapacious, self-centered and an alcoholic. Everything comes to a head a dinner party in which the hero gets drunk. The hero has justified to himself his marriage to the supernatural dwarf:
I looked at her and saw that she was even more lovely than I remembered and so I thought to myself: “Is it that great of a misfortune to possess a wife who turns into a dwarf from time to time so that you can carry her around in a little chest?”
“The little chest” contains, in fact, the dwarf-princess’ miniature castle. At the fateful dinner party, toasts are proposed and people sing ballads and the narrator consumes too much wine.
She noticed that I gulped down one chalice of wine after another. With her right pointer finger, she lovingly admonished me: “Bear in mind that it’s wine your drinking,” she said, not loudly, but so that I could hear her. “Water is what nixies like!” I shouted.
This remark leads to a violent quarrel in which the hero disparages his wife in public as a “dwarf.” Goblets of wine get knocked over and the marriage comes to violent end. The dwarf-wife uses her magic ring to shrink our hero and he finds himself battling aggressive and hungry ants. The story delightful, a kind of petite bourgeois spin on a classical fairy tale. But, even, in this charming tale, Goethe is too lazy to get things right. I’ve quoted the funniest part of the story, the scene in which the hero, enraged at being told to stop drinking, claims that his wife is disparaging wine because, of course, as a “nixie” she much prefers water. But this doesn’t make any sense: the “new” Melusine, unlike her forbears in Paracelsus and Fouque’s Undine is a dwarf – she isn’t a water nixie at all. The joke about the nixie’s strong preference for water is so funny that I laughed out loud while reading – but, on closer analysis, the reference is inapposite. Dwarfs, so far as I know, don’t abhor wine.
“The New Melusine”, a fairy tale that Goethe published separately a few years before the novel was released, bears a genetic or family resemblance to other elements in the book. The enigmatic woman with no family of origin is similar to the “wandering madwoman”. Nachodine also is cast adrift in the world when she and her father are evicted by Lenardo’s family. Of course, the treasure chest that the dwarf princess totes around with her will remind readers of the mysterious casket found by Felix in the giant castle – Melusine’s treasure chest, unlike Felix’s casket, is opened with dire consequences. The motif of a locked box with mysterious content, probably, stands for the book and its design – there is some kind of meaning hidden in the novel, but we don’t have the key necessary to grasp this occult theme.
5.
Roberto Calasso, in his book The Celestial Hunter, has written eloquently on Plotinus. Calasso leads his readers through some of the more labyrinthine aspects of the Greek philosopher’s metaphysics, like most ancient speculations on this subject, a secret psychology and study of the soul. Calasso’s tour starts with the concept that soul encloses all reality – what we experience in the world are aspects of soul. The soul is not inside but, rather, a tissue enclosing everything that we can sense. Beyond the soul, however, there is an immobile something, a mute abiding presence that we can approach through contemplation. This something is the source of all things but it does not participate in them. It remains apart, motionless, and outside of the reality that the soul creates. Plotinus’ idea was that there was an additional something, indescribable except by what it is not, that fountain of all things, but forever outside and beyond those things. This fundamental aspect of reality can be sensed only by renouncing sensory experience, the first motion toward true contemplation. The something is available to those who “renounce” – or, as Goethe would have it: Die Entsagenden.
I have no idea whether Goethe read Plotinus. He seems to have read just about everything else. (After all, he spent some of the last years of his life translating Persian and Arabic poetry.) But, regardless of influence, Plotinus’ metaphysics is relevant to an understanding of the Wanderjahre. The fact is that the book doesn’t cohere and its themes don’t coalesce into any sort of unity. Yet, one senses that the book is unified – if only by Goethe’s sensibility. The reader feels that there must be something beyond the miscellany presented by the Roman that governs the presentation of material that is obviously allegorical or symbolic – although without the “key” we can’t unlock the meaning of the figures and narratives that Goethe assembles. An allegory or a symbolic narrative must be unlocked, as it were, by reference to something outside of the text (or by some other part of the writing). In the Wanderjahre, the reader has the sense that there is a missing “key” that will open the writing to us, but that this “key”can’t be accessed – it’s lost. The book puts the reader in the position of a “renouncer” (or renunciant) – the reader interpreting the text must contemplate it without the hope that he or she will break its code. Reading the Wanderjahre, one has the sense that reader is invited, even required, to renounce the idea of a coherent plot and, rather, engage in contemplation of the individual episodes in order to sense between the stories and essay-like material an evanescent connection somehow beyond the book.
The Wanderjahre presents a number of elements to which allusion is made but which seem formally beyond or outside of the constellation of narratives. First, there is figure of Makarie, the female astronomer, who takes the role of Diotima (Plato’s muse) in the book. Makarie is a visionary and the prose associated with her is feverish with adulation. Although she lurks somewhat furtively behind several passages in the novel, Makarie appears most notably very near the end of the novel (the 15th of the last book’s 18 chapters.) Goethe’s improvisatory approach to the novel requires that he cram a whole series of denouement into the last twenty pages of the book – again, this shows the Great Man’s negligence with respect to the structure of this book. Makarie seems to have been a celestial visionary from her earliest childhood – we are told that she imitated the motion of the heavenly bodies in the solar system when she was just a little girl. She is described as a human “armillary sphere” that somehow embodies in her own flesh and blood the motions of the planets and their moons. Her role in the book is go beyond the terrestrial concerns that motivate the other characters. Makarie is imagined as taking flight and wandering through interplanetary space at least as far as the rings of Saturn. In the context of a description of Makarie’s relationship with the Zodiac, Goethe says that he has reached the limits of what he dares to describe:
But from here, we dare not go farther: because that which is unbelievable loses its value when one approaches it to closely...
With this caveat, Goethe says mysteriously that Makarie perceives the sun as much smaller than it appears during the light of day and that this creates an “unusual relationship” between the visionary astronomer and the signs of the zodiac.
Makarie, here represented as a sort of elderly sibyl, is accompanied by a female amanuensis who records her wise sayings. The book concludes with 182 aphorisms from her “archive” recorded by Makarie’s secretary. These are non-narrative and don’t have any apparently obvious relationship to the content of the book. Accordingly, Makarie is a being that somehow seems to exist outside of the Wanderjahre – she is literally beyond the orbit of the characters in the text with one exception: an important woman in the book, Nachodine (who confusingly goes by several names) renounces the world of human affairs to become part of Makarie’s sphere, the world of “etherial poetry”.
Makarie, whose every word is recorded and doted-upon, certainly represents the famous elderly poet in his astronomical or celestial aspect. (She is also is modeled on an elderly noblewoman, very interested in astronomy, that Goethe knew.) In this way, the transcendent Makarie, who is a surrogate for Goethe, is outside of the book in the way that the author stands apart from his work. (The other terrestrial aspect of Goethe is Montan – also called Jarno – a figure obsessed with geology and mining; he is immanent to Makarie’s transcendence). Makarie’s archive appended at the end of the book is similarly a signpost pointing from the narrative outward into the universe – a figure for the fact that the book is open, even to interplanetary space, and that it aims us toward something outside of the novel.
Unsolved mysteries or enigmas also direct us beyond what is written on the page. Makarie’s wonderful transit of outer space (her status as a living “armillary sphere”) is expansive and exterior and parallels a strange interior (inside) mystery that the book refuses to resolve. Recall that, early in the novel, Felix discovers a strange box, a sort of casket, in a fairy-tale castle. (Felix is Wilhelm Meister’s son). The casket goes through various hands in the novel and ends up with Hersilie. Hersilie is an extremely odd character. She begins life in the book as a character inside of a narrative that is presented as a freestanding novella. However, she is so appealing that Wilhelm Meister and his sidekick, Lenardo, after reading the story, decide to hunt her down in real life. The effect is bizarre – it’s as if someone reading the tale of Red Riding Hood became so enamored with the tale’s title figure as to be driven to seek out the real Red Riding Hood. That is, Hersilie is introduced as a fictional character within a novella presented under its own title and as a literary text separate from the frame narrative. But those who read the novella are intrigued by her, act as if she is real, and, then, lo and behold! she is sought, encountered, and becomes a major, even dispositive, figure in the novel itself. Is Hersilie inside or outside of the book? – at first, she’s inside, then, she moves to the outside – becoming a part of the novel’s plot – and, then, seems to move even farther outside. Although apparently not emigrating to America, we last see Hersilie speculating as to how she will respond when she next encounters Felix, who has announced his love for her – this story, however, is never resolved.
Hersilie has the trunk or casket that Felix found in the castle. She also has a key that will open the enigmatic box. She has told Wilhelm that she doesn’t intend to open the box until he is present. However, the impetuous Felix storms in upon her, seizes the key, and tries to open the casket with it. This assault seems to symbolize something like rape. The key breaks part of the lock but the casket can’t be opened. Hersilie herself resists her own desire to see what is in this box – this is one way in which she is a “renunciant.” The book ends, of course, with the treasure casket unopened. Accordingly, Hersilie, who seems both inside and outside of the book’s story, remains custodian of the treasure chest that has resisted all efforts to open it. In other words, the stubbornly closed casket signifies a mystery that the book poses emphatically but doesn’t resolve. Whatever is in the chest, like Makarie’s archive of aphorisms, is somehow outside of the book.
Finally, the text in which the book was first published ends with one of Goethe’s greatest poems, an elegy that is usually entitled Bei Betrachtung Schillers Schaedel (“On Contemplating Schiller’s Skull”). The poem is not supplied a title on the last page of the novel where it is printed. In a charnel house, the poet beholds stacked bones, sorted and, then, displayed anatomically – skulls are piled with skulls, femurs are arranged as cross-bones, shoulder-blades, hands and feet are all heaped in macabre, ornamental patterns. The poet muses on the activities in which these skeletal remains had engaged when alive – enemies fought with bony arms and fists, shoulders bore heavy weights, deadly foes are now positioned side by side. There’s no rest in the grave – bones have been rooted out and even put on display. It’s moldy and unpleasant, bones like empty shells for which no one could possibly feel any love or affection. But, then, there is a turning signified by the German word “doch” (“nonetheless” or
“but”) – the reversal is at line 15 of the 35 line verse and is the pivot on which the poem turns. Goethe is an “adept” able to read a text written in the bones, a “sacred meaning” not revealed to most people. This concept of the “adept” capable of interpreting the occult meaning of the bones relates to the aspects of the novel involving arcane and secret societies, for instance, the brotherhood of the Tower. Suddenly, a life-giving spring gushes from the skeletal cadavers, not even bodies but the ornamentally arranged fragments of bodies. It is a trope for the resurrection of the flesh or body that is fundamental to Christian belief. One of the skulls has become a font of life, a warm vessel from which floods a host of divine forms. The poet seizes the skull and carries it into the light of day. The skull has become an “oracle” and the “highest treasure”. This experience in the charnel house and, then, the freie Luft (“free air”) and light coalesces into a revelation of Gott-Natur – that is, the fusion of God and Nature. The action of God in Nature and Nature as a theophany is described in these terms:
Wie sie das Feste laesst zu Geist verrinen/ Wie sie das Geisterzeugte fest bewahre – God-Nature lets that which is solid trickle away as spirit / Just as God-nature lets that which is conceived in the spirit persist within the solid.
This fusion is shown by the figure of the chiasmus: fest (solid) / Geist (spirit) crossed with “Geisterzeugte” (spirit-conceived) /fest (solid). The German word “fest” is familiar to us from Luther’s Reformation hymn, A Mighty Fortress is our God, that is, “ein feste Burg”. God-Nature is an endless cycle of the flesh flowing into spirit and spirit invigorating and infusing flesh – the solid and the spiritual are two aspects of single unity. That unity is “God-Nature” – God is that which is enduring and solid; Nature is that which decomposes into death but, then, is reborn. The eloquent skull induces this cosmic vision in the poet.
But the skull, as we learn from the title that Goethe gave to this poem is not just any skull – the artifact retrieved from the moldy and frigid grave is Schiller’s skull. Thus, it is the poet who is the literal vessel – the vision pours out of his skull – for the revelation of divine nature. The elegy is a great poem and inexhaustible in its meanings. Further, the poem is Goethe’s attempt to tell us what lies beyond his book; it’s a sign that the hidden aspect of reality that everyone is seeking is the truth about death. Death, Goethe suggests, is the portal to abundant life – the procession of divine forms in nature, the plants, rocks, animals and people, that all participate in the divine by dissolving away into spirit and, then, from this spirit being reborn. This is the secret that lies on the other side of the book, the message carried within the casket that no one can open. To understand this revelation is to grasp that nothing can be destroyed and that the open narrative of the novel, it’s parade of characters and stories, can’t really end – in the poem as printed in the novel, the last words are (ist fortzusetzen) – that is, “to be continued”.
6.
The great poet and dramatist, Friedrich Schiller died in early 1805. The writer succumbed to tuberculosis and was hastily buried in a cheap pine casket placed in a crypt in Weimar reserved for noteworthy persons who had died without a family plot or mausoleum. In 1826, it was decided to disinter Schiller from the anonymous tomb. The caskets in the crypt had disintegrated and rotting bodies had fallen from them and were heaped on the floor of the tomb. It was an unholy mess and the men who removed the corpses had to smoke strong cigars to keep from vomiting while they worked. Schiller was remembered as being a large man and so the workers retrieved from the decayed cadavers the skull that they accounted to be the largest. The gory object was cleaned and polished and, then, given to Goethe. He kept the skull on a blue velvet cushion underneath a glass bell jar on his desk. The skull was confirmed to be from Schiller on the basis of its size and, further, the fact that it, somehow, resembled a death mask that had been made of the famous poet.
After Goethe’s death, the skull was put in a small casket and placed in the Weimar mausoleum where the author of Faust and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre was buried. Shortly, thereafter, rumors began to circulate that the wrong skull had been extracted from the decomposing corpses in the crypt and that the skull buried with Goethe hadn’t belonged to Schiller. The crypt full of anonymous skeletons all intermingled and disarticulated, was again opened and, on the basis of the death mask, another skull was removed, nominated to be Schiller’s missing head, and installed in the mausoleum where Goethe was buried. During World War II, the Germans feared that the American and English bombers would add to the confusion by vengefully blowing up the Weimar mausoleum. And, so, the skeletal remains of both men were hidden in an underground bunker.
After the war, Weimar ended up in Soviet hands and, later, was part of the East German Workers Republic. In the sixties, Schiller’s skull was again examined by authorities and it was determined not to be the actual head of the poet. But this decision was contested in 2008. By that time, Germany had been reunified and the Soviet science that had declared the skull to be an impostor was discredited. And, so, once again the bony head was disinterred and analyzed. A forensic lab prepared a death mask or facial reconstruction using a facsimile of the skull on which to drape plaster simulating muscle, flesh, and skin. Remarkably, the facial reconstruction produced an image of a man who looked exactly like the figure shown in portraits showing Schiller when he was very much alive. And, so, with great pomp and ceremony (and relief), it was announced that the skull that had been buried with Goethe belonged to Schiller. (This entire exercise turned out to be a remarkable example of “confirmation bias.”)
A little later, the old cemetery at Bonn had to be relocated. This cemetery contained the remains of Schiller’s son and one of his sisters. These bones were exhumed and viable DNA samples were extracted. The DNA from the Bonn skeletons, known to be Schiller’s family members, was compared to DNA drawn from the skull in Weimar. The DNA didn’t match and proved that the Weimar skull was not the remains of Schiller. Panicked, the authorities, then, excavated the mass grave where Schiller had been originally buried and found another six skulls. All of these were tested and none of the results were consistent with Schiller family DNA.
This sad story suggest three alternative explanations: (1) perhaps, Schiller didn’t have a skull – an unlikely anatomical anomaly; or (2) Schiller’s skull simply disintegrated entirely and no longer existed in 2008 when the crypt bones were analyzed; or (3) Goethe had, in fact, possessed and contemplated the skull of Schiller but some time after (or even before) the great poet’s death in 1832, an unknown person opened the crypt and stole Schiller’s head. The latter explanation is the most widely accepted. In the decades after Goethe’s death, phrenology, that is, determining character and personality by examining bumps on the skull, became very fashionable. Several noteworthy phrenologists, who were also known to be head-hunters, passed through Weimar and, it seems likely that one of them, possibly Franz Joseph Gall (the founder of the pseudo-science), snatched Schiller’s skull. In any event, the whereabouts of the artifact are not known.
7.
How does Wilhelm Meister end?
Hersilie writes to Wilhelm and explains that Felix has unsuccessfully tried to open the casket and, then, vanished. She admonishes Wilhelm to find the young man. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Goethe and his surrogate, Wilhelm, pretend to care a great deal about education – yet, they don’t like real children, particularly their own. Rousseau, while writing his treatise on education, Emile, packed-off his own kids to orphanages where presumably they died. Goethe didn’t take much interest in poor August. Similarly, Wilhelm Meister spends very little time with Felix – as soon as possible, he divests himself of the cumbersome child by enrolling the lad in the rigorous discipline of the “Pedagogical Province”.
In the last chapter of narrative (followed by Makarie’s aphorisms), Wilhelm with some cronies floats down a river through an idyllic landscape – the sun is bright and the stream is clear and, in the distance, there are a few picturesque gorges and crags. A fine young man on horseback rides down from the hills and, approaching the river, comes too close to a place where the current has undercut the stream’s banks. The young man and his horse topple into the river. Wilhelm and his friends guide their boat to the drowning man and haul him, unconscious, out of the water. They bring the boat to a sort of sand bar in the middle of the stream and try to resuscitate the lad. Now, Wilhelm gets to prove his mettle. He whips out his lancet, opens a vein, bleeding the insensible youth. (The scene is designed to mirror the earlier episode in which the youthful Wilhelm Meister stood by helplessly as the love of his life died by drowning.) This time, the remedy succeeds and the young man is revived.
Although the narrative doesn’t make this explicit, the youth is obviously Felix. We know that Felix was educated (although apparently not too successfully) in the equestrian arts. Goethe never names the youth, but we are supposed to understand his identity. By the end of the novel, characters have becomes dissolved in their symbolic archetypes – there are no actual brothers; rather, everyone is construed as a brother in the great family of humanity. On this basis, or, perhaps, from sheer ineptitude, Goethe doesn’t really anchor many of his pronouns to the people to whom they refer. We are now in a allegorical zone in which all people are, in effect, anonymous angelic presences. The diction takes on a rather creepy father and son homo-erotic tinge – Felix is described as the “splendid image of God” complete with beautiful locks of hair and radiant, pink cheeks.
We are told:
Life returned again to him; scarcely had the loving surgeon tightened the tourniquet (to stanch the flow of blood let from the boy), then, the spirited youth gazed intently at Wilhelm and cried: “If I am to live, it will be with you.” With these words, he fell onto the breast of his savior who was, at once, recognized and who, also, recognized him, weeping bitterly. So they stood firmly embraced, like brothers, Castor and Pollux encountering one another on path that led from Orcus to the light.
Felix is apparently naked, or nearly so. His wet clothing has been peeled from him and spread to dry on the sand bar. Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, were the twin sons of Zeus by Leda, born from the same egg. By classical Roman times, they were associated with cavalry and equestrian matters – therefore, they are probably an allusion to Felix’s fascination with horses and his training in the Pedagogical Province. The last sentence in which Castor and Pollux are named contains a German word that I couldn’t exactly translate: Wechselwege – this means something like “alternating paths.” As it turns out, the Ancients had trouble understanding the Dioscuri – Homer puts both of them in Hades in the Iliad, an anomaly because the boys are the sons of Zeus and, therefore, should be immortal. Homer solves the problem in the Odyssey by ascribing immortality to one boy and not the other. Because of their intense affection for one another, the boys agreed to alternate their time in the Underworld – after spending one day below ground, the dead boy would ascend to the surface and be replaced in Hades’ kingdom by the other boy who was immortal. In this way, the two would meet one another once a day, one ascending and the other descending on the path from Orcus (Hades) to the light. Upon this meeting, the two divine youths would embrace. This is the exact meaning of the allusion that Goethe has worked into the narrative of Wilhelm’s encounter with his son, Felix. One of them, presumably, the older Wilhelm is on his way in the direction of death; the other, probably Felix, is ascending toward the light, that is, life. But, the rivalry between fathers and sons, mostly erotic, that we have seen in previous parts of the novel now is abolished – both father and son are now brothers. This is characteristic of Goethe’s dissolution of all individuality into a sort of pastel and glowing “brotherhood of man.”
Goethe describes events in this last chapter in vivid detail. The reef in the middle of the river is repeatedly described as made of Kies – that is, gravel. With this detail, Goethe reverts to his lifelong interest in geology, rivers plunging down mountain sides, and boulders being worn away into pebbles. The cobble of the gravel accumulated in the middle of the stream is a metaphor for the novel – all of this stuff has been swept into place by the stream of Goethe’s life. The book consists of fragments of larger aspects of the poet’s sensibility, ground into pebbles, and deposited in the book. But, up to the bitter end of the novel, Goethe remains maddeningly obtuse and sloppy. Felix loves horses. He is trained in the equestrian arts. So what happens to his horse?
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