Hermann und Dorothea in the Context of Kant and Voß:
A Question of Peace and Patriarchy
The year 1795 saw the publication of two texts by two eminent figures of the day, Immanuel Kant and Johann Heinrich Voß. One of the texts, Voß's narrative poem, Luise: Ein ländliches Gedicht in drei Idyllen, has long been recognized as part of the context of Hermann und Dorothea, written in 1796/97. But, as Friedrich Sengle argued in 1981, Goethe scholarship has severely neglected the role of the Vossian model, limiting the view to parodic aspects of its idyllic character.1 The other text, Kant's short treatise, Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf, has not been addressed in Hermann und Dorothea criticism. Yet, no matter how we evaluate the controversial final speech of Goethe's titular hero, Hermann, "Frieden" is literally the last word of the poem.2 Syntax and context place this last word under questioning, at the focus of a hypothesis in the subjunctive mode. The question is after the conditions which might make peace possible, where peace means not just a cessation of hostilities, but the enduring basis of happiness ("erfreuten") for all, particularly including, of course, a happy future for the just betrothed couple:
Und gedächte jeder wie ich, so stünde die Macht auf Gegen die Macht, und wir erfreuten uns alle des Friedens. (IX.317f.)3
Peter Morgan has raised the strongest objection to Hermann's solution of achieving peace through war, calling it "perverse."4 Readers of Kant's treatise would have to judge it patently absurd, flying in the face of what Kant castigates as the most pernicious factor in the seemingly eternal life of wars: the single-minded focus on power ("Macht") of the European governments.5 Goethe most certainly was one of these readers, and in Hermann und Dorothea we can hear him playing with and on Kant's text just as he plays with a host of other pre-texts. Waltraud Wiethölter, in her comments of the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag edition of 1994, has displayed Goethe's rich allusory game with past and present literature, myth, legend, and history. The point of it all, Wiethölter concludes, is, precisely, playing the game: at a moment in history when radical, revolutionary changes are on the horizon, Goethe offers a textual exercice to practise change.6 In line with her formalist approach Wiethölter does not specify the kind of change envisioned.
This reading will pursue an aspect of change which Kant's treatise might have inspired. It is a question paralleling Kant's transcendental inquiry after the conditions of existence of peace, namely: how the world as we know it needs to change in order to enable peace, in order to make possible, in a wonderfully poetic Iphigenian definition, mankind's divinely intended enjoyment of life.7 A first step will look at relevant features of Kant's treatise. A second step will consider the picture of "the world as we know it" presented in Voß's Luise. The third part of the article will explore Hermann und Dorothea 's strategy of changing this world.
Context can be expected to play a more significant role in a work composed in a short time than in texts hatched and revised over years and decades, which was typical for Goethe's major works. Goethe produced Hermann und Dorothea with amazing speed, amazing Schiller for one who witnessed the first weeks of writing and wrote to Körner: "Die Ausführung . . . ist mit einer mir unbegreiflichen Leichtigkeit und Schnelligkeit vor sich gegangen, so daß er neun Tage hintereinander jeden Tag über anderthalb hundert Hexameter niederschrieb." (28 October 1796) Fed with creative energy left over from the arduous completion of Wilhelm Meister in summer 1796, Hermann und Dorothea was substantially finished in six months. The starting date of 11 September, 1796, at Jena could not but highlight thoughts of war and peace. After anxious months of worries over the French invasion of Frankfurt, where Goethe's mother still lived, the diary records a coincidence of text and event: "Nachricht daß Franckf. am 8ten von den Franzosen verlassen sey. Wieland ging durch Jena Anfang die Idylle zu versificiren."8 This coincidence brings into view yet a third context: the letters Goethe's mother wrote from Frankfurt during the critical summer months.9
Kant's treatise Zum ewigen Frieden was a noteworthy success. His original Königsberg publisher brought out a second, expanded edition the very next year (1796); three pirate editions (Nachdrucke) appeared in the same year at Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Grätz; two more pirates the following year at Frankfurt and Leipzig. It was so successful that Kant could play on the title in a polemical essay he published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift of December 1796, "Verkündigung des nahen Abschlusses eines Traktats zum ewigen Frieden in der Philosophie." Goethe would have immediately noted the literary elements in Kant's text, highly unusual for this writer's infamously abstract and labored style. The treatise opens with a jolt: a sophisticated joke that plays explicitly on satire in the pursuit of a deadly serious intention.
Zum ewigen Frieden.
Ob diese satirische Überschrift auf dem Schilde jenes holländischen Gastwirts, worauf ein Kirchhof gemalt war, die Menschen überhaupt, oder besonders die Staatsoberhäupter, die des Krieges nie satt werden können, oder wohl gar nur die Philosophen gelte, die jenen süßen Traum träumen, mag dahingestellt sein. (427)
After this healthy dose of the philosopher's self-irony, joined to a direct hit on belligerent rulers among whom Goethe would have to count his own duke, Kant turns to people in Goethe's position of "praktische Politiker," who together with their arrogance toward mere "Schulweisen" such as himself will have to assume responsibility for perpetuating war instead of peace.
As the philosopher pursues his "sweet dream" through an elaborate structure of six Preliminary Articles, three Definitive Articles, two Additions, and a long, two-part Appendix, the graveyard image functions as leitmotif bearing an increasingly ominous message. The first return occurs in the last of the six Präliminarartikel, which state the prerequisites for the possibility of peace by outlawing specific uses and abuses of government, such as standing armies, war credits, the acquisition of other states (Kant is thinking of the Polish division), intervention by force in another nation's government (the monarchic Allies' French Campaign of 1792). On the sixth return of the incantatory "kein" preceding each prohibition in the manner of a theme with variations, the image of the graveyard reappears but filled with horrifying real potential. Unethical conduct in war (Kant does not yet speak of atrocities) will lead to wars of annihilation, "[die] den ewigen Frieden nur auf dem großen Kirchhofe der Menschengattung stattfinden lassen würde[n]." (431)
The leitmotif returns next in the second section concerning the three Definitivartikel, which outline necessary changes of a positive, progressive nature in the structure of government within and between nations. Kant decrees (1) a republican form of government (not to be mistaken for democracy, however) for individual states, (2) a formally federated league of nations across the world ("Völkerbund" 439), and (3) an end to imperialism and colonialism ("Weltbürgerrecht" 443). In his crusade for a new relationship among nations he redefines Völkerrecht against the currently prevailing understanding as the right to wage war. The graveyard leitmotif serves in a sarcastic reductio ad absurdum of the established definition:
Bei dem Begriffe des Völkerrechts, als eines Rechts zum Kriege, läßt sich eigentlich gar nichts denken . . . , es müßte denn darunter verstanden werden, daß Menschen, die so gesinnt sind, ganz recht geschieht, wenn sie sich untereinander aufreiben und also den ewigen Frieden in dem weiten Grabe finden, das alle Gräuel der Gewalttätigkeit samt ihren Urhebern bedeckt. (442)
The original paradox of the inscripted graveyard emblem here is first introduced by a pun on the word Recht/recht (geschieht) and then exfoliates into an imaginative denunciation of warmongers and -makers. The power of poetic language heightens the impact of rational argument.
On its last return the leitmotif shows a significant variation. It occurs near the end of the third major segment, in the Zusatz delivering an anthropologico-teleological proof of the inevitability of peace, even if in the very long run. And the leitmotif has turned literally literary: into a metaphor wrapped in a parenthesis. No longer the apocalyptic vision of the death of mankind, this is a warning of universal despotism and the death of liberty "(auf dem Kirchhofe der Freiheit)." (454) The slide of the leitmotif onto a new signified indicates the development of a different agenda within Kant's treatise from the one announced in the emblematic title. The latter was the prevention of humankind's self-annihilation. The course of the argument makes this goal dependent on the establishment of political liberty. Civil liberty, "republikanische Freiheit," is Kant's single most important condition, the sine qua non for any possibility of lasting peace. And here is where Goethe would part company with Kant, for, given European political reality, the "praktische Politiker" would have to consider such a requirement utopian, truly a philosopher's "süßen Traum." (Kant 427)
Kant's closing thought would confirm the skeptical reaction of the realist. The road "zum ewigen Frieden" is very long indeed, for it is measured in centuries of human history:
Der ewige Friede . . . [ist] keine leere Idee, sondern eine Aufgabe, die, nach und nach aufgelöst, ihrem Ziele (weil die Zeiten, in denen gleiche Fortschritte geschehen, hoffentlich immer kürzer werden) beständig näher kommt. (474)
Based on supposition and hope ("hoffentlich") for a distant future, this sounded like cold comfort for those now living, who would, in historical fact, see twenty more years of war in the Napoleonic aftermath of the French Revolution.
Goethe's solution of the "Aufgabe" proceeds from the bottom up, not from the top down like Kant's. The problem cannot be solved ("aufgelöst") by governments; what Hermann und Dorothea proposes instead is new thinking, perestroika, a change of mentality. If the direction is similar to Schiller's in the Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung (published in 1795) Goethe's approach yet is different in that he does not locate the origin of change at the individual, but at the social level. Goethe's experimental field for a change of mentality in Hermann und Dorothea is the patriarchal order. Patriarchy involves social relations and structures beginning at the nuclear level of gender, family, and generation, expanding to community, society, polity and beyond, to those outside the borders (of the Vaterland and the Vätererbe of cultural tradition): strangers and refugees, the uprooted and unsettled, progressive idealists and adventurers, eventually even foreigners, and thus finally reaching toward the cosmopolity.
1 Friedrich Sengle, "'Luise' von Voß und Goethes 'Hermann und Dorothea'," Europäische Lehrdichtung: Festschrift für Walter Naumann, ed. Hans Gerd Rötzer and Herbert Walz (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), pp. 209-23.--Peter Morgan, in the only book-length study of Hermann und Dorothea in modern times, takes this approach in the subchapter "Excursus: Parody of Voss's 'Luise'," The Critical Idyll: Traditional Values and the French Revolution in Goethe's 'Hermann und Dorothea'(Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1990), pp. 36-40.
2 Reiner Wild, in the commentary of the Münchener Ausgabe, documents the significance Goethe attributed to this last word in a letter of 1814: "Ist aber das große Werk (der Sieg über Napoleon) vollendet, können wir mit Sicherheit ein Gedicht mit Friede! schließen, so wäre freilich der betrachtenden und darstellenden Dichtkunst ein großes Feld eröffnet." (To Eichstädt, 27 January) Goethe. Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Vol. 4.1 (München: Hanser, 1988), p. 1075.
3 Hermann und Dorothea quotations refer to the Hamburger Ausgabe of Goethes Werke, Vol. 2 (1962).
4 Morgan, p. 120.
5 "Wenn aber nach aufgeklärten Begriffen der Staatsklugheit in beständiger Vergrößerung der Macht, durch welche Mittel es auch sei, die wahre Ehre des Staats gesetzt wird, . . . " Immanuel Kants Werke, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Vol. 6 (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1925), p. 428. References to Kant will be to volume 6 of this edition.
6 Goethe. Sämtliche Werke, Frankfurter Ausgabe, I Abt. Vol. 8, p. 1169.
7 Iphigenie auf Tauris, 554-560.
8 Quoted in Hermann und Dorothea: Erläuterungen und Dokumente, ed. Josef Schmidt (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970), p. 77.
9 The mother's letters make fascinating reading as they tell of masses of bedraggled refugees from the advancing French troops moving through Frankfurt; of her own flight in a borrowed "Küschgen"; of the bombardment and catastrophic fire downtown, reducing Goethe's grandfather's estate to rubble.