This 33rd volume of the Goethe Yearbook is our third as coeditors of the journal and, at the midpoint of our editorship, we wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on our experiences and discuss with other editors of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century journals the scholarly trends that they have observed, as well as the challenges and opportunities of editing a pre-twentieth-century journal. The result is the “Editors’ Roundtable” that appears in this volume. We are fortunate to have received contributions from a wide variety of journal editors, truly a multidisciplinary and international group. Among the diverse perspectives represented, there are also agreements about emerging scholarly trends and the importance of scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century topics. Currently, in the United States, where universities are being pressured to capitulate to political demands, where humanistic inquiry is increasingly devalued,and where our democratic institutions are under siege, a reexamination of eighteenth-century literary and philosophical trends, which form the foundation of modern universities and democratic societies, seems evermore crucial. We hope that the contents of the current volume, produced at a challenging moment for us as editors and for the broader scholarly community, will attest to the vivacity and continued relevance of scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century topics.
The first article in this volume, Donald Wehrs’s “Aesthetic Healing of Divisiveness or Evasion of Politics in Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten,” addresses the question of whether the arts can serve as an antidote to political extremism and the social divisions that it engenders. Goethe’s novella, set during the French Revolution and engaging diverse perspectives on that conflict, enables, according to Wehrs, a debate about whether aesthetic education provides a solution to political divisions or simply an escape from such conflicts. Xuxu Song’s “Ancient Greek Idyll Fragments, Translation, and Outline Illustrations: Sympoesie and Symphilosophie in the Athenaeum (1798-1800)” offers another perspective on aesthetics and sociability, as it explores how the journal as a whole creates community across languages, art forms, and eras through aesthetic practices such as collections of classical idylls, translation, and illustrations of poetry. Luke Rylander’s essay “Do Witches Belong in the Kitchen? The Gender Economy of the “Hexenküche” in Goethe’s Faust” explores the intersection of gendered discourses with economic structures in this crucial scene of Goethe’s drama. Rylander concludes that the scene offers alternatives to profit-driven, gender-normative societal constructions by emphasizing pleasure-focused relationships and a play-oriented economy, establishing “a genuine countermodel to patriarchal capitalism.” Jeffrey Jarzomb’s “Fact, Fiction, and Volk: Prescription and Action in Engel Christine Westphalen’s Charlotte Corday,” examines the depiction of the Volk in Westphalen’s drama as an easily misled entity with a potential for violence. Jarzomb shows how this depiction, through a reversal of history, places the blame for the Terror on the Jacobin leader, Jean-Paul Marat, and strips the Volk of any potential for collective action. Taken together, these four articles explore links between aesthetic creativity, collectivity, and sociability that have continuing resonance today.
A further contribution to the scholarship of this period consists of two original manuscripts by E.T.A. Hoffmann, which Dennis Schäfer discovered in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. In an introduction, Schäfer explains the provenance and relevance of these manuscripts from the final section of Hoffmann’s Brief des Kapellmeisters Kreisler an den Baron Wallborn. Schäfer also provides a facsimile of the manuscripts, a transcription, and a translation.
This volume’s Forum section, titled “Inclinations: Männerfreundschaften/Frauenfreundschaften,” emerged from an international fellowship program and subsequent conference organized by Imke Meyer, Heidi Schlipphacke, and Sigrid Nieberle. The contributions by Heidi Schlippacke, Helmut Puff, Sigrid Nieberle, Sophie Salvo, Wolfgang Bunzel, and Imke Meyer explore same-sex male and female friendships and relationships as depicted in literature, letters, music, and philosophical dialogue through the notion of Neigungen (inclinations), a term encompassing homosocial, homoerotic, and homosexual bonds and presenting alternatives to our twentieth- and twenty-first-century categories of friendship and desire.
Taken together, the intellectual offerings of this issue invite us to consider our realities, past and present, as well as possible alternatives—political and aesthetic—for the future.