Carsten Rohde, Spiegeln und Schweben: Goethes autobiographisches Schreiben. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006. 444pp

Summary

No great surprises here: Goethe, it seems, was an autobiographical writer from beginning to end. In 444 pages Carsten Rohde makes this point and backs it up with considerable scholarship. However, much of the scholarship, with its exceedingly lengthy footnotes, is placed in the service of one digression or expansion after another that is not altogether necessary for the exploration, or even illumination, of points being made. One has the impression here of an author who is wholly devoted to Goethe, is thoroughly familiar with his works, and aims to encourage others to revel in them also. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the book, while ostensibly seeking new insights and offering the reader a new approach to Goethe's whole oeuvre, as well as uncovering new links among the acknowledged pieces of his autobiographical writing, seems to tend towards covert biography involving excessively detailed description of the various works, rather than towards literary analysis. With this one tends to lose patience, alas! despite the book's breezy tone and eminent readability; despite the fact too that it is clearly a labor of love. Rohde writes well—of that there can be no doubt—but he falls prey to his own liking for well-turned phrases and “interesting” concepts to such an extent that he overuses them, unfortunately inducing an early satiety in the willing reader.

Having learned in the introduction, for example, that Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre belongs to those “stellvertretende Lebensläufe” (12) of the romantic writers, one soon finds oneself longing for a different formulation after encountering multiple repetitions of the phrase. The same is true of many other phrases, sometimes even used to characterize whole segments of Goethe's life and work, when in fact they remain overlaid, unexplained, and at times inappropriate. One such phrase, for example, is the heading of the first part of the book: “Symbolisches Dasein” (29–103), whose source, revealed only much later, is to be found in a letter of 10 December 1777 to Charlotte von Stein, in which Goethe writes: “Sie wissen wie simbolisch mein daseyn ist” (73).