W. Daniel Wilson, Goethe Männer Knaben: Ansichten zur “Homosexualität.” Trans. Angela Steidele. Berlin: Insel, 2012. 503 pp., 41 Ills.

Summary

W. Daniel Wilson's engaging, thorough, and original analysis of the role of male-male love and sexual desire in Goethe's writings makes significant advances in our understanding of Greek love in the age of Goethe, as well as of Goethe's contributions to the representation of same-sex desire in the West. Published in German, the text reads smoothly and elegantly despite its highly scholarly and even technical nature—no doubt in part thanks to Angela Steidele's translation. While most of Wilson's conclusions about Goethe's writings are convincing, his framing of and approach to Goethe's texts and the study of sexuality provide an opportunity for stimulating discussions about the international study of sexuality and textuality.

Wilson's study begins with a stunning interpretation of Goethe's poem “Ganymed” (1774). The poem, concluding with its beautiful harmonization of active and passive in the phrase “umfangend umfangen,” sets about to do nothing less than provide “a radical reinterpretation of Greek love,” by unsettling the dynamics between the classical Greek erastes and eromenos, the lover and the beloved (60; all translations are my own). The beloved Greek shepherd, long portrayed as the passive object of the attentions of the lover Zeus, finds in Goethe's poem, “for the first time in 2,500 years of literary history, a voice” (69).

For Wilson, “Ganymed” stands in opposition to “Der Erlkönig” (1782), in that the former tells the story of a sexually mature youth who desires the attentions of the lover, while the latter represents the feelings of a boy who is the unwilling object of an older man's advances. Wilson argues that Mignon, from the Wilhelm Meister novels, is similar to the boy in the “Erlkönig”—that is, the victim of sexual violence. He concludes with the tantalizing suggestion that Mignon might in fact have been castrated, which would certainly shed revelatory light on the following line in the poem “Mignon” (aka “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?”): “Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan?” (2:4).

In his chapter on Goethe's experiences in Italy, where—as Goethe reported in 1787 in a letter written to Duke Carl August—he came upon many instances of the “love of men amongst themselves,” Wilson demonstrates his virtuosic hermeneutic gifts, with an especially compelling and comprehensive interpretation of the Venetian Epigrams.