Gabrielle Bersier, Nancy Boerner, and Peter Boerner. Goethe: Journeys of the Mind. London: Haus, 2019. 220 Pp.

Summary

During his lifetime, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was not a frequent traveler, aside from his famous Italian journeys, but he engaged frequently with reports of faraway places in letters, scientific treatises, statistics, and other media. Especially later in life, Goethe read a variety of accounts of foreign countries from home in order to form his own impressions of these places and people. In Goethe: Journeys of the Mind, Gabrielle Bersier and Nancy Boerner continue the work of the late Peter Boerner (1926–2015), as they cogently interpret Goethe's correspondence and literary work in conversation with a network of travelers’, explorers’, and scientists’ correspondence and writings to contour the limits of his knowledge.

This study is divided into eight chapters, which examine the possibilities of documenting when and under what conditions Goethe engaged with travel literature. Although he never traveled to England, this study emphasizes the fact that England was the non-German speaking country with which Goethe was most familiar, due to his lifelong exposure to English culture through a variety of media that many educated Germans had at their disposal in the late eighteenth century. Through cross-referencing Dichtung und Wahrheit with epistolary correspondence and library records, the authors explore the broad horizons of Goethe's knowledge of England, which extended from drama to political theory.

The authors remark that Goethe admired England in a way similar to his contemporary, Johann Caspar Lavater, who, like Goethe, never traveled to England, but espoused the idea in his 1775 Physiognomische Fragmente that one could make judgments about the English character based on superficial physical attributes. Thus, the authors approximate Goethe's attitude toward English culture as extending to preconceptions of individual personality traits. The authors astutely address England first in the study's sequence in order to articulate the pedagogical impact Goethe saw in learning through armchair travel, not only as a means to rear cosmopolitan subjects, but also for readers to learn about themselves.

In the second chapter, the authors discuss Goethe's West-östlicher Divan and its intimate intertextual engagement with medieval Sufi poetry by Hafez as another example of vicarious travel. Bearing a bilingual title page and chapter headings, Goethe's poetry collection imagines a particular intercultural openness that contrasted with contemporaneous views on Eastern culture.