Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,and the United States
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832), who had never visited the United States, played host to numerous visitors from the United States beginning in 1810. Among the many American visitors were the mineralogist Joseph Green Cogswell, the historian George Bancroft, and the classical philologist Edward Everett.
Conversations with these individuals, as well as reading pertinent books they recommended and presented to him, became the major sources for Goethe’s extensive knowledge on the scientific, geographical, ethnographical, economic, and social aspects of American life. Goethe, furthermore, liked the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and Washington Irving’s Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819-1820) and the History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828). Goethe’s friendship with Alexander von Humboldt provided him with essential news about the South American continent as well.Goethe was fascinated by the New World and considered North America to be the future of mankind after he had been disillusioned by events in central Europe. The French Revolution, which gave birth to Napoleon’s dictatorial rule and European-wide wars, as well as the reconstruction of Europe after Napoleon was defeated by Europe’s great powers, caused Goethe to doubt that Europe would have a future. The United States with its lack of a feudal past seemed to Goethe the perfect place for the development of a free bourgeois society. In his poem “Den Vereinigten Staaten” (“To the United States,” 1827) Goethe wrote “Amerika, du hast es besser, hast keine Basalte, keine Schlosser” (America, yours is a better lot, you have no basalt rocks nor castles) because the country had no longing to return to a romantic period and no intellectual debates. In his often quoted conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann on February 21, 1827, Goethe predicted the construction of the Panama Canal and characterized the United States as an expanding world power oriented toward the future.
The United States occupied an important symbolic place in Goethe’s writing. In his great Wilhelm Meister (Wilhelm Master) novels, in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1795) and in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, first version 1821, second version 1829), the United States is the place where Goethe’s heroes accomplish parts of their social and political visions. In his Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Lothario, the noble estate owner, returns to his home in Germany after fighting in the American Revolution in order to abolish feudal structures on his estates and to establish a free society. Here the United States is seen as a model for social reforms. Furthermore, it is discussed as a preferable countermodel (evolutionary change) to the destructive and bloody French Revolution. Lothario declares at the end that “Hier und nirgend ist Amerika!” (Here and nowhere else is America!) In Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, the estate of the uncle, whose grandfather had joined William Penn in his American endeavor while still longing for European culture, represents the attempt to form an American European synthesis in which welfare capitalism is united with religious tolerance and a desire to work and share in the communal good.
In the same novels, the United States appears as the desired place for emigration. The Turmgesellschaft (Castle Society) in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre propagated emigration to North America. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Goethe already discussed emigration as an option to flee revolution and social upheaval. While working on his Wilhelm Meisters Wander- jahre, Goethe read the travel journal of [Carl] Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar- Eisenach, who had traveled the United States from 1825 to 1826. The author was the son of Duke Carl August von Sachsen- Weimar-Eisenach, who was Goethe’s patron. This book provided Goethe with all the information he used in his description of the utopian Turmgesellschaft, with their social relations and their emigration project.
[Carl] Bernhard visited Robert Owen’s colony “New Harmony” and Georg Rapp’s colony “Economy” and described both utopian-Communist settlement projects in detail. Fascinated by these accounts, Goethe integrated several characteristics of New Harmony and Economy into the description of his own ideal utopian society. Religious tolerance, the system of justice, the idea of a comprehensive pedagogy, and the ban on taverns all go back to [Carl] Bernhard’s travel account. However, Goethe did not share Owen’s and Rapp’s Communist ideas about common property and democratic participatory administration of the settlements. Furthermore, he rejected industrialization and its new technologies, such as the spinning jenny and the mechanical loom. In fact, the emigrants fled a society dominated by machines. Emigration thus became the escape from an Old World and the arrival in a New World in whichone could start over from the beginning. For Goethe, the United States represented a society free from history and social burden. Leaving Europe became the attempt to travel back in time to a precivilized stage.
Klaus F Gille
See also Bancroft, George; Everett, Edward;
Harmony Society; Humboldt, Alexander von; Literature (German), the United States in; Panama; Pennsylvania; Travel Literature, German-U.S.
References and Further Reading
Bahr, Ehrhard. “Amerika.” Goethe Handbuch. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998, 4/1:30—33.
Beutler, Ernst. “Von der Ilm zum Susquehanna: Goethe und Amerika in ihren Wechselbeziehungen.” Essays um Goethe. Ed. Ernst B. Beutler. Auflage, Wiesbaden: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1946, 1/3:462-520.
Gille, Klaus F “‘Amerika, du hast es besser’— Goethe und die Neue Welt.” Weimarer Beitrage, no. 2 (2005).
Kriegleder, Wynfried. “Wilhelm Meisters Amerika: Das Bild der Vereinigten Staaten in den Wanderjahren” Jahrbuch des Wiener Goethevereins 95, 1991, 15-31.
Lange, Victor. “Goethes Amerikabild: Wirklichkeit und Vision.” Amerika in der deutschen Literatur. Eds. Sigrid Bauschinger, Horst Denkler, and Wilfried Malsch. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975, 63-74.