Ernst Osterkamps on Goethe's late work

“The more incommensurable and incomprehensible a poetic production is to the understanding, the better,” a sentence from the old Goethe into the ears of the interpreters! But what is incommensurable is not only the individual work of this, according to Wieland, “a brilliant author who despises the audience too much”, but also the truly incomprehensible breadth of his work, from the natural sciences to poetry, but also within the literary works themselves.

Ernst Osterkamp, ​​Professor Emeritus at the Humboldt University in Berlin, illustrates this in his “Readings on Goethe's Late Work” with the thought experiment of whether, without knowing the name of the author, one can understand the “elective affinities”, the “West-Eastern Divan”. , “Wilhelm Meister’s Wandering Years” would easily guess one and the same author. Hardly likely. And so he consistently places the question of unity in the diversity of this unheard-of cosmos at the center of a presentation that captivates from beginning to end.

First, however, one will disagree with Osterkamp: “A biographer of Goethe can easily get rid of this problem by transforming it into a biographical narrative: into the history of a sequence of works. But this narratively eliminates a productive irritation that always arises when reading Goethe's late work: the one caused by the simultaneity of the great works of his age, which suggests the concept of the cosmos in the first place.” A biographer who deserved this name has That's exactly what the task is: not simply listing everything that is chronologically the case anyway, but rather penetrating the intellectual figure of an author as a whole, despite all the disturbing diversity.

The tension between the scientific “color theory” and the symbolic “Faust”, between the synthesis of life “Poetry and Truth” and the artfully fragmented “Wanderjahre” cannot be understood either through chronology or simply through intertextual comparison, but ultimately only through understanding an intellectual figure whose subjectivity was able to produce something so unique.

Strategies of a lonely man

In fact, Osterkamp does nothing else. Its fifteen chapters revolve around this late work in repeated reflections: here concentrating on an autobiographical-fictional work like the “Marienbad Elegy” or a character like Faust's Helena, there on a truly detective search for clues for particularly eloquent Goethe's typically strange words. What Osterkamp reads out of the rare and beautiful verb “gruneln” is nothing less than the living core of Goethe's natural philosophy, and he proves that even counting can teach us new things poetically using the strange inflation of the adjective “wonderful” in the first , rarely read version of the “Wanderjahre”. The ninety magnificent pages of “War and Verse in Goethe’s Work 1806-1814” are a whole book in themselves!

The individual studies are held firmly together by the first and last chapters – two extremely engaging portraits of the artist as an old man, worthy of any biography: “Loneliness and Awareness of Age” forms the narrowing that makes the chapters of the work even more understandable; “The Last Year – The Arts in the Life of a Man Who Did Not Statute Death” depicts a lonely man who meets the growing awareness of the approaching end with two things: with the self-imposed task of completing his life's work, and in the increased preoccupation with the arts “in order to anchor himself in life as intensively as possible – and that means: as if death did not exist – through a sum of presence experiences that art alone could give him.” It couldn't be said more beautiful and intense.

The decisive date for the late, final revision of his life's work is the conclusion of “Faust – The Tragedy, Second Part”. After a two-decade interruption, this work, which is still incommensurable today, was completed in the summer of 1831. But now Goethe makes the most radical decision: he puts the sealed manuscript in the closet and leaves it unpublished until his death.

The present became foreign to him

In the perspective of this singular decision, Osterkamp once again sharpens his interpretation in a very insightful way. When do we actually start talking about the late Goethe? Osterkamp defines him in terms of his life history through his relationship, or better: his non-relationship, with the audience, through the growing process of isolation in a present that is becoming alien. Goethe refuses to publish the second “Faust” because he does not want to experience the “serious jokes” of this lifelong masterpiece once again, the misunderstanding and incomprehension that had already affected almost all of his later works, the “Elective Affinities,” the “Wanderjahre.” , the “Divan”.

This creates the image of an age-radical writer who now consistently ignores every expectation of the market, readership and criticism, following nothing other than the logic of his life, his work and his poetry. Are we not familiar with this question? In the end, Ernst Osterkamp's great book proves once again that any serious engagement with historical literature inevitably opens up a perspective that has something to say about the current one. Rarely enough do the products of academic German studies bring profit to the literary reader; This is such a stroke of luck.

Ernst Osterkamp: “Stars in increasingly quiet nights”. Readings on Goethe's late work.
Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2023. 476 pages, hardcover, €79.