German Freedom and the Greek Ideal

The Cultural Legacy from Goethe to Mann

W. McGrath, C. Applegate, S. Frontz, S. Marchand, C. Applegate, S. Frontz, S. Marchand

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137369482
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book traces this German idea of freedom from the late Enlightenment through the early twentieth century. McGrath shows how German intellectual and artists invoked the ancient Greeks in order to inspire Germans to cultural renewal and to enrich their understanding of freedom as something deeper and more urgent that political life could offer.

1

Freedom and Authority: Goethe’s Faust and the Greek War of Independence

Having experienced the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had become a firm opponent of revolution by the time the Greeks began their struggle to throw off Turkish domination in 1821. In that year, when the Greeks joined a wave of rebellions sweeping across southern Europe, Metternich and the Holy Alliance opposed them, and, in general, Goethe sympathized with Metternich’s conservative policies. In the case of Greece, however, fear of violent disorder contended with a deep love of classical Greek culture to pull Goethe in different directions. The efforts of the Greeks to reclaim their independence and their ancient cultural tradition appealed to Goethe’s imagination, and eventually he espoused their cause and wove it into his greatest work. In 1825, the death of Lord Byron while fighting for the Greeks at Missolonghi inspired Goethe to resume work on Faust Part Two, which he had begun but then put aside in fragmentary form many years before. This new impetus eventually brought the work to completion, and it also produced significant changes in the original conception. According to Eckermann, Goethe observed that “Earlier I had in mind a quite different conclusion; I had conceptualized it in various ways and once quite well . . . Then the times brought me this with Lord Byron and Missolonghi, and I gladly let all the rest go.”¹ These events strongly influenced the writing of Faust Part Two, particularly the “Helena” section in which Faust returns to ancient Greece, marries Helen of Troy and becomes the father of Euphorion.

That Goethe based his description of Euphorion on elements of Byron’s personality has long been recognized, but its significance has not been fully appreciated. Goethe’s decision to weave allusions to this dynamic contemporary figure into his continuation of the Faust story involved much more than an expression of admiration for the recently deceased poet; Byron served as a focal point for Goethe’s broader interest in the issues underlying the Greek struggle. His poetic allusions to this struggle allowed him to take a position on a matter of great political importance to his time, a position that advanced his own peculiarly German idea of freedom in opposition to the more radical views put forth by such thinkers as Jeremy Bentham. The Greek War of Independence, which to Goethe illustrated the correctness of his conservative conception of freedom, gave him the key to completing his poem in a way that expressed this view, and the great popularity of Goethe’s Faust over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries insured that this idea of freedom would gain wide dissemination, in the cultural life of central Europe.

I

Wilhelm Mommsen has aptly described Goethe’s political views during his later years as those of an enlightened conservative.² Although Goethe could say of the Holy Alliance that “never had anything greater and more beneficial for mankind been created,”³ he was far from being a doctrinaire reactionary. Of those holding such views he observed, “I completely agree with them in upholding the existing order and forcing revolutionaries to comply, but not with the means employed to that end. Namely, they call on stupidity and darkness for help; I call on understanding and light.”⁴ Yet Goethe supported the 1823 suppression of the republican revolution in Spain. He viewed the French intervention as a success not only because it defeated the Spanish “who were commanded by many” but also because it solidified the control of the Bourbons over their own military forces, thereby showing “what sort of difference there was in obeying one or many.”⁵ Goethe firmly believed in the traditional command structure.

With respect to the Greek revolution, however, Goethe’s attitude gradually moved from skepticism to sympathy. Mommsen oversimplifies and misunderstands Goethe’s views regarding the “struggle for freedom of the Greeks” in saying that he “was in no way friendly toward it and calls Philhellenism a ‘disguise for another political party.’”⁶ Nor is Mommsen correct in arguing that the sinking of the Turkish fleet at Navarino, the key event in the eventual Greek victory, was “regretted as much by Goethe as by Metternich.”⁷ In fact, Goethe had by then become a friend of the Greek cause, even though he remained ambivalent about its politics.

Goethe’s early comments on the Greek War of Independence show that his initial opposition grew out of a geopolitical concern that a Greek victory might ultimately increase the power of Russia. According to Friedrich von Müller, a sharp disagreement about “the events in Greece” emerged in his May 22, 1822, conversation with Goethe. In contrast to Müller’s sympathetic attitude, Goethe believed that “the war would only contribute to the destruction of individual Christians in Turkey, and that, without Constantinople being destroyed, it could not be given over to any of the great powers without the danger of thereby establishing their dominance of the world. But if one wished to establish a less powerful state or a republic, then the great powers would continually be working to increase their influence there.”⁸ This hostile view of the Greek rebellion soon gave way to a deepening interest fed by Lord Byron’s involvement in the Greek cause. Eckermann reports spending the afternoon of October 19, 1823, with Goethe, during which time “he looked now and again at the newspapers and reported some passages to us, particularly regarding the progress of the Greeks. It was then brought up that I should learn English, which Goethe urgently advised, particularly because of Lord Byron whose personality was of such eminence.”⁹ The religious dimension of the struggle also fostered Goethe’s growing but still ambivalent sympathy for the Greeks. Müller reports an October 11, 1824, conversation in which Goethe said that “he regards the current fighting in Greece as an analogue and surrogate for the crusades—like these it is also, on the whole, highly beneficial to the weakening of the power of the Ottomans.”¹⁰ In this view, Goethe departed from the position of the Holy Alliance which put geopolitical concerns above the defense of Christianity in Greece.

By the middle of the next year (1825), Müller noted a further shift in Goethe’s outlook—observing that he had “much greater sympathy for the Greeks than before,”¹¹ and by then, Goethe had resumed work on the new conception of Faust Two inspired by Byron’s death in the Greek conflict. Goethe learned of Byron’s death at Missolonghi (April 19, 1824) in May 1824, and in the following months, he expressed his admiration by writing an essay on Byron. As Otto Pniower observes of his diary notes and conversations, “In short, the whole year shows him filled with interest for this poet of genius.”¹² Early in 1825, Goethe resumed work on Faust Two after an interruption of almost 25 years, and over the next year and a half, he completed the “Helena” section.

Goethe’s diaries show that he took up the writing of Faust on February 26, and a conversation with Eckermann two days earlier shows the importance of Byron to the final development of the “Helena”—the birth and early death of Euphorion. On this occasion Goethe said of Byron, “His disposition always to strive for the unbounded . . . nonetheless stands in a good relationship to the restriction which he imposed on himself through observation of the three unities. If he had only known how to limit himself similarly in the moral sphere!” Goethe believed this inability “was his ruin, and it can very probably be said that he was destroyed by his lack of restraint . . . He always lived passionately for the moment and neither knew nor considered what he did.”¹³ Goethe saw a fundamental contrast between Byron’s passionate belief in freedom as an ideal and the lack of freedom in his personal activities. In Faust Two, Euphorion exhibits the same paradoxical loss of freedom in the unbounded striving for freedom. Understanding this apparent paradox illuminates a key concept underlying Goethe’s political outlook during his final years.

After resuming work on Faust Two in late February 1825, Goethe worked intensely on it until early April, and in addition to completing the first third of the “Helena,” he also worked on the conclusion of the drama, writing parts of the “Burial,” “Midnight,” and “Great Forecourt of the Palace” scenes of Act V. In April, he broke off his writing for about a year, and then from the following April through June 1826, resumed work and finished the “Helena.”¹⁴ Even before the beginning of the year-long interruption, Goethe started to do extensive reading about Greece, and from late May through August 1825, he immersed himself as fully as possible in the contemporary accounts of the Greek revolution as well as in detailed physical descriptions of Greece. As Hans Gräf observes, during these weeks various comments in his diaries “show Goethe’s lively interest in the Greek struggle for freedom (particularly Lord Byron’s fate), and connected with it his close study of the topography of Greece . . . which prepared and enriched the later continuation of the Helen Act.”¹⁵ Goethe seems to have been determined to enrich his story of Faust’s journey to Greece with as much historical meaning and geographical detail as possible.

II

Among the many works on Greece, which Goethe read at this time, some of the more important were William Gell’s Narrative of a Journey in the Morea,¹⁶ Edward Blaquière’s Die Griechische Revolution,¹⁷ Colonel Leicester Stanhope’s Greece in 1823 and 1824,¹⁸ and William Parry’s The Last Days of Lord Byron.¹⁹ These works represented the widest range of opinions about the Greek cause from Gell’s pro-Turkish point of view to the enthusiastically pro-Greek accounts of Parry, Blaquière, and Stanhope. All were written by people very much engaged in recent events; Blaquière had close ties to the London Greek Committee, the Benthamite organization which coordinated the lion’s share of European assistance to the Greeks; Stanhope was the Committee’s primary agent in Greece. Even among those authors who favored the Greek side, however, there were important disagreements about the right way to help restore Greek freedom.

For Bentham and his enthusiastic followers among the London Greek Committee, freedom was, as much as anything else, a political slogan which could be used as a weapon against the conservative system established by the Holy Alliance. As he set out on his first trip to Greece in 1823, Leicester Stanhope had occasion to explain the aims of the Committee to various sympathetic groups and individuals he contacted along the way, and his accounts of these meetings reveal the ideological character of his mission. When he met with the Zurich Greek Committee, he told them that the London group included “some of the most . . . virtuous men in England. I mentioned the names of Bentham, Erskine, Mackintosh, Hume, Hobhouse, and the Russells. I said that the grand object of the Committee was to give freedom and knowledge to Greece.” Stanhope went on to say that “To communicate knowledge to the Greeks was an object the Committee had near at heart. From this source spring order, morality, freedom, and power. The venerable Bentham . . . had employed his days and his nights in contemplating and writing on the constitution of Greece, and in framing for her a body of rational laws, the most useful of human offerings.”²⁰ Stanhope next traveled to Bern where he met with Count Capo d’Istria, who later became the leader of the new Greek state, and in this conversation he discussed the complex international context of the struggle: “The Count thought our end should be to enlighten Greece and to act upon utilitarian principles. Yes, said I, Count, but do you think that the Sainte Alliance will allow Greece to establish a virtuous republic. His Excellency . . . then said that it was not in the nature of things that monarchs should encourage republics.”²¹ The Benthamite program for bringing freedom to the Greeks was revolutionary above all in its insistence that the liberated Greeks shou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Freedom and Authority: Goethe’s Faust and the Greek War of Independence
• 2 Freedom in Architecture: Gottfried Semper and the Greek Ideal
• 3 From Political Freedom to Self-Denial: Wagner’s Ring and the Revolutions of 1848
• 4 Nietzsche and the Freedom of Self-Overcoming
• 5 From Self-Denial to Political Freedom: The Odyssey of Thomas Mann
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index