Part 1: Everybody should hate Goethe
What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his works to the elder statesman ‘on the knees of his heart’—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist’s plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, most of Goethe is a classroom bore.
Susan Sontag, Against interpretation
Susan Sontag
You should take it from Susan Sontag. Why? She is a philosopher, essayist, taught college classes at the most prestigious universities in the US. She is also a woman, queer, a Jew, a mother and yet none of these terms makes her equipped to judge writers except for this one: She excels at writing fiction herself, which if you ask me, is not a given amongst intellectuals who, let´s be honest here, mainly write theoretical texts for university students.
“passage Susan Sontag” in Paris
A note on Susan Sontag
Her novel The Volcano lover is at least in my personal top 5 of best novels of all time. If I would be a less fickle creature, I would say it’s my favorite novel of all time, but I will probably never be able to commit to a title like this. So, since she is more than somebody who is just good at theoretical theorizing, she is very suitable at judging writers. But even if you wrote off Susan as toxic, which she undoubtedly is, I have more candidates for you to back me up by saying that Goethe is nothing but an insufferable arse-licker.
And in case you are wondering why the mighty Susan Rosenblatt is considered toxic, you should be in the know that she treated her long term partner, the amazing photographer Annie Leiboviz, really badly. That included publicly humilitating her because she was “just so dumb, so insanely dumb”. (Yes this is an original quote). She pointed to her in public and told fellow intellectuals that “this one never gets anything”.
Annie did take the high road though, and footed the hospital bills for Susan Sontag´s cancer treatments despite them not being in a romantic relationship by that time. She also paid for everything during their relationship and even bought Susan Sontag a Paris apartment so she had somewhere to write in. Annie Leibovitz is simply a class act.
But even if Susan is canceled, this does not cancel out the fact that Goethe should be canceled.
Annie Lebovitz in front of the picture that made her famous: a pregnant nude Demi Moore carrying Bruce Willis child.
John Lennon with Yoko Ono: Annie L. shot John L- a few hours before he was shot.
*I am fully aware that, many of the “canceled” such as Bill Cosby, Roman Polanski and Woody Allen were never really canceled and continued their schtick for at least a while and would probably still carry on in their same disturbing vein would they have not morphed into catatonic vegetables all by themselves. And noooo, a chick, 40 years your junior hanging on your arm makes you look like a geriatric bafoon who should have evaporated into prehuman dust a long time ago. NOT like an eternal playboy.
Goethe-hate club.
Believe it or not but I first wanted to make this blog a Goethe-hate blog. A place with the sole purpose of collecting citations of artists and intellectuals and their contemptuous remarks about Goethe. I was told that there is nothing more outing as a hater, than dedicating a blog to someone you hate. The new age crowd would tell me to focus on the positive but hey I am angry! I need to get my anger out before I move on! I don´t like that Goethe is treated as this intellectual national hero! Ignoring my angry feelings about this is toxic positivity, spiritual bypassing and most of all this fellow was spoiled to Nirvana in his lifetime isn´t that enough? Can we at least stop after his death? Can we stop torturing highschoolers with this insanely fake clown who punched down whenever he had the chance to?
Stop idolizing buffoons who punch down!
Call me a maniac but I think the idolization of this buffoon, encompasses everything that is wrong with German literature. Actually, it’s much bigger than that. Call me a maniac but to me it encompasses everything that is wrong with not only literature or “art”. I am talking “art” here not art. Huge difference
First of all, he is boring, he is so insanely boring. Susan said it so well, a classroom bore, who only ever provoked high society as much as he could get away with, never jeopardizing an ounce of the privileges he got ever since he was 26 and the duke of Weimar spoiled him rotten because he appealed so much to the royalty. Every “provokation” was 100% calculated. Even Schiller dared more, I am not even going to mention Heinrich Heine, Heinrich von Kleist or Heinrich Mann (Thomas Mann´s talented brother, although if my brother would be that much of a snoozefest, even I would be called talented) Also do you notice a pattern?
What good is an artist whose entire catalogue is targeted to butter up royalty? If you can´t take it from Susan Sontag take it from a certified genius, Ludwig von Beethoven who is quoted to say
“Göthe behagt die Hofluft zu sehr – mehr als es einem Dichter ziemt.“
Its actually insanely painful for me to translate this into English because it’s one of those abrasive punchlines, an 18th century battle rap quote that loses all of its pristine perfection when I try to translate it but hey. And yes, trust me they do exist in German.
“Goethe is a bit too besotted with the court-air, more so than would be healthy for a poet.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Does he not already look like the figurehead of tax-advisers, salesmen for vacuum cleaners, people working for the government?
„Das alte Rindvieh Goethe (der deutsche Humanist mit mediterranem Einschlag, einer der grauenvollsten Schwafler der Weltliteratur).“
I could end this post now, because that’s a good sum up. But I have more quotes! When I recently read the admittedly rather boring book by Houllebecq I got ecstatically happy to read the lines:
Once again: I can´t translate this. Call me an elitist, but I read the book in French and managed to find this German citation. My readers are mostly English speaking and to a lesser degree Germanophiles but if I start remixing French quotes into this-Good night. So here is another miserable tryout for translation.
“That old muttonhead Goethe, this German humanist and his Mediterranean predilection, his whakadoodle train of thoughts, one of the worst ramblers in world literature”
Michel Houellebecq: And yeah I know, he is supposed to be a sexist, islamophobe but I am wondering how many of you actually read “Submission” and subsequently called him islamophobe. I could not detect any islamophobia in there. I do not care much about the casual sexism (also because at this point the bar is so low…) I connect with Houellebecq because I am obviously a cynical and I am past the point of being able to hide it. I d still read him if he would not write the same book again and again.
Laziest Europeans in showbiz: Ze Germans.
100% sure this was actually Houellebecqs opinion´s and not his lyrical me. Say what you want about Houllebecq but he knows a few things about literature. Also, lol@ Mediterranean. Snoozefest-Goethe makes a Cameo in The Volcano lover, staggering off the area around Naples and he does not get Italians at all, but as some lèche-cul (as us Frenchies say) German dickhead he is genetically predestined to worship Italy (Read that how you want!) I doubt that lèche-cul Goethe ever made it to Spain or Portugal. And as a Mediterranean bird myself, I am grateful for that because I ensure you he will be one of those Germans who will buy off all of the beach houses on the Algarve or an entire island in Spain, never spend a dime in that country, complain about the fact that they don´t have any dark bread and pork sausage, still vote for the far right, and claim they are footing the bill for the “lazy” southern Europeans. Btw I have news for you, Germans work the least hours in the EU and stop spreading those rumors about those industrious hardworking German, they are the laziest Europeans and Europeans are already lazy. And btw: I am a huge proponent of idleness, I would not be blogging or reading Houellebecq, but I also never identified as an industrious hardworking bee. I never aspired to be the new R2D2. Read up about Marshalls plan and everything that happened post world war 2 and you will know why Germany recovered quickly after the war. Hint: I hate to break it to you, but the Greeks are right: They did not pay reparations. And nobody in Germany ever paid for what they did. Ok maybe symbolically a few. But its hard to process Nazis, when all the judges are Nazis right? We had this topic when I wrote about Leni Riefenstahl. She took everyone to court when anybody dared mentioning the fact, that she used the Nazis for her career. And btw, Riefenstahl was just as much of a talentless slug as Goethe was. Her entire style was stolen from a Jewish photographer. Sources will follow, I promise.
But I am on tangent again. Or maybe I am not, because to me Goethe is the bonafide archetype of an opportunist talentless slug. I am already so angry; I have to stop and literally punch a wall or something. I have to post now, but will add sources and proofread this dumpsterfire of a blogpost tomorrow. Promised.
Ok its one day later, and ad much as I know that “diary of a middle aged hag with anger issues” style of writing probably does not fly that well with my demogroaphic, I gots to add a few things. I did not start this post just to rant about Goethe. Actually I wanted to talk about Heinrich von Kleist really, who other than Goethe knew about suffering, knew about designing threedimensional characters, knew about the law, literature, journalism but most of all he knew the sickness. And that stood in stark contrast to the writers of the German classic. For Goethe “Die Klassik” was healthy, wholesome writing. He did not understand ETA Hoffmann or Kleist and their obsession with the unhealthy, the depraved, the sick. in that sense Kleist had more to do with the writers of the 19th century such as Thomas Mann, who wrote the foreword to Kleists book when he was first translated for an American publisher. According to Marcel Reich Ranicki, the Karl Lagerfeld of German literature he did so not only because he was broke but also he saw himself in Kleist. The true tragedy of this all is that Kleist was literature´s Van Gogh. With a few exceptions he never saw one of his plays on stage and partly this is Goethe´s fault. Truth be told if Goethe would really be a lover of literature and art he would have adopted Kleist as his protegé, but he knew that he was better than him so he did what he could to sabotage him. Goethe also sabotaged my dear ETA Hoffmann, another musician turned lawyer, turned writer in the times of romanticisim. And as much as I read about Goethe the more I have to say that its literature for duck egg dukes and narrowminded nobility. But let me elaborate on this during the next weeks…
Heinrich von Kleist, presumably by GErhard von Kügelgen 1809
Sources:
Susan Sontag mercilessly bullied lover annie leibovitz.
Pictures:
-Wikimedia
to be followed.
You nailed it, loved the remixes! XXX
I am member of the club. As my professor said “Everything Goethe wrote is about sex.” says something about the man’s complexes.
Anyways, great blog article and so much information that gives us more to explore.