There is a touch of comedy, then, in this encounter between “the world”
and the “Dichterfürst” — but the comedy points to an underlying significance, as any spoilsport would hasten to add. For Goethe’s encounter with his English visitors occurred at a crucial moment in cultural history: at the time of the “grand opening-up of the wide world” (Ulrich Im Hof), that is, of the expansion of geographical and ethnological knowledge to distant continents — an event that brought about a revolution of self-perception in the West. “The proper study of mankind is man” now pointedly includes an awareness of those non-European populations that came into full view in the age of Goethe, the period that John Parry identified as the second age of discovery (distinguishing its anthropological interest from the exploitative motivation of the earlier explorers). As Wieland put it in 1785, knowledge of human nature (“Menschenkenntnis”) is now becoming
“Völkerkunde,” ethnology; Georg Forster agreed: the focus on human nature is now the focus on the “other” in distant parts of the world, or, at the very least, it must include it. This is the defining experience of the time as Felipe Fernández-Armesto has reminded us in his Millennium (1998). (What was the proudest moment in the life of Louis XVI? The day when he dispatched La Pérouse to the South Seas.) The British, as rulers of a vast empire, were more aware of this shift than the continentals (though ethnology did take root in Germany as well at the time, with Blumenbach and, alas, the racist Christoph Meiners). Here is Edmund Burke, writing to William Robertson, the author of a History of America, on 9 June 1777:
We possess at this time very great advantages towards the knowledge of human Nature. We need no longer go to History to trace it in all its stages and periods. History from its comparative youth, is but a poor instructour. […] But now the Great Map of Mankind is unrolld at once; and there is no state or Gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same instant under our View. The very different Civility of Europe and of China; the barbarism of Persia, and Abyssinia […]. The Savage State of North America, and of New Zealand.90
90 The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, III, ed. George H.
Guttridge (Cambridge, 1961), 351. This is the motto of P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of
What is signalled here is a fundamental change in concepts of what it means to be educated: global awareness of the “other,” including the
“savage”, vs. traditional, humanist ideas of human nature derived from history, particularly from classical antiquity. Proper knowledge of human nature now involves worldwide breadth of awareness rather than depth of introspection or historical knowledge. In a sense, this is the clash of what anthropologists call “wide” culture, on the one hand, and “deep” culture on the other — a pair of terms appropriated for cultural history by Hans Ulrich Wehler.91
It is this contrast or historical sea change that played out in Goethe’s encounters with the British. (When Burke, glorifying the new global perspective, said “we,” he meant the British, of course.) And it bears repeating: this is not necessarily a contrast between the globetrotters and the stay-at-homes. It is a matter of awareness: of being open to whatever information was available, first-hand or second-hand, and this is where the British had the edge — simply because of what Goethe called the “bedeutende Welt” in which most educated Britons grew up.
In this sense, then, as Goethe saw it, the British, with their global education or experience, brought the world to Weimar. And it is to Goethe’s credit that — in a land of “unusual ignorance of the world”92 — he opened himself eagerly to it. Indeed, though not a theorist, he even conceptualized the conflicting ideas of education or culture.
Germany (where life was “isoliert” and “armselig” for intellectuals) had humanist inward culture (“innere Cultur”) or at least aspired to it, he said in his notes for a continuation of his autobiography (WA 1, 53: 383).
This was “Bildung” in the sense of self-cultivation (as W. H. Bruford translated the term in his book The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation in 1975). The opposite of such “innere Cultur” Goethe (in these notes) called cosmopolitan (“weltbürgerlich),” and this is what, by and large,
Enlightenment (London, 1982). See also the essay “In the Wake of Captain Cook”
above.
91 Wehler, Die Herausforderung der Kulturgeschichte (München, 1998), 147–48. For additional documentation of statements made in this section, see my book Die Erfindung der Welt: Globalität und Grenzen in der Kulturgeschichte der Literatur (Tübingen, 2005), 197–201.
92 Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, III, ed. Wolfgang Promies (München, 1972), 269, https://archive.org/details/LichtenbergSchriftenUndBriefeBd3: “mit ungewöhnlicher Unbekanntschaft mit der Welt.”
the British represented to him, with their “knowledge of the world” and its populations.
Moreover, this kind of “weltbürgerlich” culture (familiar with New South Wales or Brazil), Goethe seems to have felt, quite rightly, was not just an alternative to conventional humanist education but a culture whose time had come. In his Novelle there is the memorable sentence, addressed to the Duchess, to the effect that to qualify for the honor of her company one would have had to “see the world” (“Wen Ihr beehrt, Eure Gesellschaft unterhalten zu dürfen, der muß die Welt gesehen haben”), namely other “Welttheile,” other continents — a veiled statement about his own ideal choice of company or culture (WA 1, 18, 334–335).
Nevertheless, it still seems to be widely agreed that when the chips were down, the culture that Goethe found most congenial was not global;
it was humanist “innere Cultur”: that worldless “Bildung” focussed on the self, on Europe, its art and history — “deep” rather than “wide,”
the predominant preference of the bespectacled Germans he so disliked.
There is some truth in this view. Just as Iphigenie in Goethe’s play of that title cannot really learn anything from Thoas, the “barbarian,” so everything exotic that, unlike Persian culture, could not be assimilated, remained alien and sometimes even repulsive in Goethe’s eyes: Indian or Egyptian art, for example (as Henry Crabb Robinson reported with proper British dismay [G 1: 946, 948]). Goethe’s Campagne in Frankreich concludes with the sentiment that, however much the “world” and
“faraway lands” may enchant us, we seek our happiness in our own narrow sphere:
Wir wenden uns, wie auch die Welt entzücke, Der Enge zu, die uns allein beglücke. (WA 1, 33: 271)
Why? Because Goethe believed that as a humanist he already had the world within himself, or so he told Eckermann on 26 February 1824 (see also WA 1, 35: 6).
This, then, is the Goethe the British visitors saw when they described their encounters as something straight out of comic opera: the public icon of private “deep” culture — self-cultivation (self-absorbed inwardness) trotted out to be lionised. (Needless to say, inwardness, in Goethe’s case, did not exclude activity; but the “tätig” Goethe, active in a limited sphere, to be sure, rather than, like the English,“nach allen
Weltgegenden,” the visitors did not catch sight of.) As a result, in their perception, majesty changed surreptitiously into pompousness, German self-cultivation into self-importance: a mere poet who had not been anywhere, really, whose journeys, even if ostensibly to Italy, had been (it must often have seemed from the perspective of the visitors) essentially trips into the interior of the self. To these visitors, who knew the world, this was outlandish, even amusing.
This image of Goethe, minus the comedy of it (the man of self-cultivation and humanistic education rather than of global culture, in my terminology) is compatible with that favored by generations of scholars and general readers; it has been most competently analyzed by Gerhard Schulz in his book on Goethe and Exotik der Gefühle — where it is pointed out that there is at least an element of Goethe’s own wisdom in the proverbial “Es wandelt niemand ungestraft unter Palmen”93 (roughly:
nobody will walk under palm trees without coming to regret it). Jochen Schütze, in his engaging Goethe-Reisen, agreed, as did Jörg Aufenanger, with a vengeance, when reported that while Goethe travelled 37,765 km all told, which is once around the globe, he nevertheless had no curiosity about life elsewhere (“die Fremde”).94 Indeed, when in 1792 he was required to set out for France with his Duke’s army — what did he look forward to? To returning and closing the garden gate behind him (letter to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, 18 August 1792). This is the man who, when he wished a young woman bon voyage, advised her: do not look right or left, look into yourself (WA 1, 4: 36).
Such introspective self-cultivation may have been a specifically German aberration at the time, and Goethe no doubt shared it to a certain extent. But it is more correct to say that Goethe himself was sitting on the fence, as this essay has been suggesting all along. He welcomed his English visitors, pumping them for information about the continents brought into full view during the second age of discovery, readily acknowledging how much he had learned about the world from his English contacts. Over many years, after the end of the Continental Blockade, until the last three or so years of his life, he devoured Johann Christian Hüttner’s reports on English books about the far corners of the
93 Schulz, Exotik der Gefühle (München, 1998), 70.
94 Schütze, Goethe-Reisen (Wien, 1998); Aufenanger, Hier war Goethe nicht: Biographische Einzelheiten zu Goethes Abwesenheit (Berlin, 1999), 7, 14, 40.
world; he studied journals such as Le Temps and Le Globe; travelogues were serious reading for him — all of which suggests a kind of balance of the two concepts of culture distinguished here.
Conversely, there is a comparable balance on the part of his visitors:
they left their island not just to see the Sphinx or fabled maharajas but also to see Goethe — respecting, with some effort, the icon of that pecular German inwardness that was the very antithesis of what they had been brought up to value. Remember Burke, with the map of the world unrolled before him.
In retrospect, what we may appreciate about this encounter is the balance of those two concepts of education or culture which were in competition at the time. But as we look at this epoch-making constellation from our own vantage-point, which is post-colonial and post-Holocaust, we are also aware of something else: both concepts of what it means to be educated reveal serious shortcomings when they occur in their “pure state,” that is, when they lack that Goethean balance or complementarity. “Inward culture,” championed by Weimar Classicism, when left to its own devices, is prone to neglect the active, outer-directed, public or civic virtues that make the world bearable: in the face of barbarism (Burke’s word) in social or political life, “innere Cultur” may tend to stand by passively — think of Zeitblom vis-à-vis the Nazis in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Zeitblom is the representative of humanist culture, demonstrating the same lack of civic virtue in the face of evil that American press officer Saul K. Padover found when he interviewed educated Germans in 1945 about their attitude during the previous years. (Rediscovered by Enzensberger, Padover’s book, Lügendetektor, was a big hit in Germany in 1999.)95 On the other hand, we know by now that “Weltkenntnis,” so admired by Goethe, was all too often world domination, and, as such, repressive and exploitative — as Goethe knew very well: he confronted Lord Bristol with that charge in no uncertain terms.
These, then, are the shortcomings, incomparably different ones, of course, that may be associated with the pure state of one or the other of the two concepts of what it means to be educated or cultured, associated,
95 Berlin, 1999. See also Dietrich Schwanitz, Bildung (Frankfurt:1999), 394.
that is to say, with the lack of that balance that in some modest way Goethe at least aspired to, as did his visitors.
Looking back, we may see something rather commendable in Goethe’s outlook. He valued his encounters with the British and American visitors (his preferred “others”) ultimately because they gave him the chance to question his own “Bildung” or values or identity.
How? By thinking about theirs. As he himself summed up the net benefit of his encounters with them: one does not get out of the habit of thinking about them — and about oneself (“kommt man gar nicht aus der Gewohnheit, über sie nachzudenken,” WA 4, 43: 108).