Goethe's Historical Particularism and the “Right Hand” of History: Early Modern State Building, Nobility, and the Feud in Götz von Berlichingen

Summary

In what sense can we say that Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen is an historical drama? How do the historical and poetic dimensions of the play fit together? Until recently, questions of this sort found less than satisfactory answers in scholarship on Goethe's 1773 play. For much of the twentieth century, critics viewed Goethe's treatment of history in the play as secondary, anachronistic, or even false. To the extent that history came into focus, it was seen as a backdrop for the Charakterdrama that pitted a natural, authentic hero against an inauthentic courtly culture. However, once critics began to develop a more nuanced understanding of the play's hero, revealing that the idealized image of Götz foundered on his “verstümmelte” subjectivity, it was no longer possible to read the play in such straightforward terms. Yet critics who spearheaded this revaluation of Götz continued to approach history in the play as either secondary to the Charakterdrama or as a reflection of Goethe's eighteenth-century class concerns. Only in the mid-1980s did scholars begin to undertake a serious revaluation of history as a dimension of the play itself, showing how the dramatic conflict and the hero's downfall are rooted in the historical transformations of the period the play depicts. In two of the most notable interpretations to date, Mariane Willems and Horst Lange have argued that Götz depicts the tragedy of a character who clings to a premodern feudal order that is being displaced by the modern state.