Hamburg-Klopstock calling Goethe! Come in Goethe!

“If the Duke continues to drink himself to the point of illness then he will succumb to that illness, and will not live long, instead of, as he claims, strengthening his body with the drink ... The Duchess may continue to suppress her current discomfort, due to her very manly way of thinking. But this discomfort will turn into sorrow. And will she be able to suppress that? Luise's [the Duchess's] sorrow! Goethe! -- ... ”

So wrote Hamburg poet Friedrich Klopstock to Goethe in Weimar in 1777. At that time, Klopstock was still seen as the fatherly head of all German language writers. Like Günter Grass today, he had many detractors who enjoyed the sport of mocking him, and yet nevertheless enjoyed a huge status. Goethe, 28 and already a famous writer, was making news with his rugby-player-after-five-pints sort of behaviour together with his patron & close friend the Duke of Weimar, Karl August. They slashed around themselves show-offishly on the market place with big whips, jumped on their horses, and rode through the villages playing sadistic practical jokes on the locals, knowing these people had no means of redress against such actions. Klopstock gets to hear of this in Hamburg and is incensed, it undermines his ideal of the poet as someone who rises on the sublime above all such iniquities. He also feels responsible, seeing Goethe as a promising but errant relative of the family of poets which he presides over. And so the letter continues:

“Goethe! -- no, do not drape yourself in that glory, you do not love her as I do .... Up to know the Germans have been right to complain about their rulers, because these rulers haven't wanted anything to do with you scholars (=writers). Your friendship with the Duke takes him straight away out of that category. But if you continue to dance with the Duke to this old tune, there's no limit to the excuses the other rulers would have to make in their defence, [for not being interested in writers], if it actually one day will have happened, that thing which I fear most?”

Klopstock asks Goethe to show the letter to the Duke too. Whether Goethe did this or not we don't know, but we do know that he only answered two months later, in a tone of clear refusal: “Do spare us such letters in the future”, adding casually that he'd have no time at all for himself if he responded to all such letters and warnings.

Klopstock didn't like this not very veiled insult at all: “And as you even threw my letter into that category of 'such letters' or 'such warnings' – you express yourself as strongly as that ­-- my letter, containing the proof of my gift of friendship, then I declare you not worthy of that gift I gave you.” ⁱ The break between the two of them was final.

Goethe treated many people badly; and his response to Klopstock shows him as a careerist, understanding art as a career-ladder and the necessity of shoving people off the top of that ladder, to make way for himself. Or, as Yeats puts it in his poem, The Fisherman: “The beating down of the wise / And great art beaten down.” If you translated Klopstock's name literally into English you would get Knock-stick. Knocking his stick at Goethe didn't help Klopstock.

For those of you out there who want to get more into the Klopstock feeling, come along to the annual Hamburg "Poetry Slam in a Church" event, to be staged  in what's known as the Klopstock-Kirche - the Christianskirche in Altona - where you can even see Klopstock's tomb. My Writer's Room colleague Hartmut Pospiech is hosting the evening (around the 3rd weekend in June.) My biggest question is whether Hartmut will allow sexually explicit or explicitly political poetry in the church - and how the vicar will respond. The fact that this is my biggest question seems proof of an infantile part of my mind, concerned with scandal & smut, a quality of mind that Goethe hung onto for a long long time, well into his late thirties.

i For the original German version of the quotes from the letters from Klopstock & Goethe, and for the historical background to the above post, please see: Friedenthal, Richard. Goethe. Sein Leben und seine Zeit. Piper, 1996, Munich. p.190 – 191.

Welcome to Goethe's Gonna Getya

          As some of you may have arrived here on Henry Holland's recommendation, I feel at the least obliged to pay him a modicum of respect by introducing myself - and to elucidate how reading my online journal may enlighten and entertain you, the reader. Having struggled all day with this blogging technology, but now, at last, on the verge of communicated speech, I feel a little like Goethe's Faust, waking in a picture book alpine meadow at the start of Faust II, able to deeply forget the psycho terror involved in getting his end away with young Greta in Faust I -  and able to throw himself robustly down new paths of life. Writing to liberate, both the reader and the writer.
          Yet my online journal - as the title suggests - is subject specific; hear here not only an acquaintance's undigested emotionality; read and hear here translations of modern classic & contemporary German poetry; hear the most hair raising stories here, on the politics of this land, Germany, and of this city, Hamburg - and of the chat & the crack between politics, writers & the theatre people. Hear, hear!
        Though hearing Goethe's name in the title & first paragraph will have been enough to have shorn me of a good deal of my audience; in a country where the chasm between high culture and all that other stuff is far greater than back on The Island, most will choose never to cross that chasm, and will rubbish any tidings they hear from the land on the other side of it. Add to that the fact that, after 10 years hearing here, I haven't been able to find a single left-wing leaning German who will admit to liking Goethe, then, well, there was to be no turning back with my choice of title. Goethe's gonna getya - a journal about the power of art to entrance and change you, even amid the most grotty of quotidian cicumstances.
        Naturally, my journal will also be about the subject's inverse - about the many people in Germany who Goethe won't get - who Goethe's works won't help - who wouldn't give a flying fuck for the stuff - and also about those who don't or won't get Goethe. Among the first group I would number many of Germany's prisoners - some of whom I'll be blogging about in the next few days.
            Which only leaves me to give you a welcoming taste of Goethe's Faust in English, in Henry Holland's translation, which he kindly allowed me to use today. Here we find Faust strolling and pontificating about rebirth at Easter, a text that Thalia Theatre's current production of Faust I & II plays up for the rich kitsch possibilities it invites. (The original German text starts "Vom Eise befreit.")


 In there heaven, truly

So turn away now from these heights

to look instead back to the town.

Out of the gate – like a dark, gaping mouth –

is issuing forth a colourful crowd.

Everybody wants to soak up the sun,

and sing the rebirth of The Son,

as they themselves are resurrected:

out of lowly, uncouth houses,

out of the guilds and the bondage of trade,

out of the pressure of gables and slates,

out of streets full of folk packed tight,

out of the churches’ venerable night:

every single one of them is brought into the light.

Look, just look, how speedily the masses

scatter themselves over gardens and fields,

 how the river in its breadth and length,

moves a few jolly boats on the water’s top

til laden right to sinking point

the final barge at last departs.

Even the paths of the far off hills

are flashing to us in their vivid clothes.

I hear the milling throng already,

here are the people in their heaven, truly,

proclaiming, satisfied, large and tiny:
here I am human and here I may be.