Goethe Lite:
The Fictionalization of German Literati
In the opening and only scene of his very short story “Schwere Stunde”
[Time of Difficulty], Thomas Mann’s Schiller snuffles through his nose with
difficulty in order to get a little air, for he has a cold “wie gewohnlich”
(Erzahlungen 182) [as usual].1 In Lotte in Weimar (1939) Mann’s Goethe, who
makes his first appearance in the final fourth of the novel, although apparently
no longer fat, has a rheumatic arm (261) and distinguishes himself by the
amount of wine he drinks (280). The “Lapsus—oder was es war—” [slip of the
tongue, or whatever it was] when Goethe exclaims “Ach, ich mufl Sie was
erklaren!” (280, my emphasis) [Oh, I have to explain you something], using the
accusative case when he should have used the dative, is attributable to the
prodigious quantity of alcohol he has drunk.
Portraying Schiller with a chronic cold and Goethe bungling the dative
adds at the least a human dimension to German literary genius if it does not
completely deromanticize it, and certainly elicits a chuckle. The Blue Flower,
Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1995 novel about the pre-Novalis Friedrich von
Hardenberg (or Fritz), opens with the annual wash day at the family estate.
Arriving to visit his friend Hardenberg, Jacob Dietmahler is impressed by the
amount of laundry, noting that his own mother “supervised the washing three
times a year, therefore the household had linen and white underwear for four
months only . . . here, at the Hardenberg house in Kloster Gasse, he could tell
from the great dingy snowfalls of sheets, pillowcases, bolster cases, vests,
bodices, drawers, from the upper windows into the courtyard,. . . that they
washed only once a year” (1). The humor obviously lies in the contrast between
Dietmahler’s admiration and the modem reader’s shudder at the idea of
laundering but once a year.
This intimate bit of knowledge about the Hardenberg household
effectively delivers the author of the sublime Hymnen an die Nacht [Hymns to
the Night] and the mysterious and spiritual Heinrich von Ofierdingen into a
more human dimension. Equally effective at personalizing the famous author is
the description of the family breakfast. The reader learns that the family
breakfasts in nightclothes, sucking in the coffee “through pieces broken off from
the white rolls” and that “anyone who had finished turned his or her cup upside
down on the saucer, calling out decisively, ‘Satt!’” (25). This glimpse of the
family’s breakfast habits gives the reader a vivid image of eighteenth-century
country life.
In Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s recent novel Faustinas Kiisse (1998)
[Faustina's Kisses] Goethe’s antics upon arriving in Rome are so amusing that
they cause Beri, a young, Italian ne’er-do-well, to spill his macaroni. Goethe
raises his traveling hat, waves it up and down in the air, all the while turning in