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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The days have passed when the question “Who reads Goethe?” elicited, on the part of most educated Germans, the equivalent of a disdainful “Why, everybody who's anybody, of course!” Familiarity with Goethe is no longer claimed by many Germans whose fathers were brought up on Götz and Faust. Others again, individuals and entire social groups, have recently come in contact with Goethe for the first time. Changes in the modern image of Goethe have been followed—in some cases anticipated—by changes in the composition of the reading public. Until the Gallup Poll in the fullness of time takes an interest in German literature, any answer to the question posed above must remain incomplete. This does not mean that we should refrain from giving a partial answer, any more than anthropologists should forego speculation about the Neanderthal man merely because no complete specimen has ever been found. So much has been written about Goethe himself that his public has been largely ignored—as if the fact that we still read Goethe were not partly due to the efforts of previous generations of readers in publishing and explaining his works, and handing them down to us intact and accessible. Our prototype, the composite Goethe reader of the past seventy years, can be partially reconstructed by examining the history and membership of an organization which has done much to change our concept of Goethe, and to modify the literary tastes of a substantial portion of Germany's reading public: the German Goethe Society.
1 The Goethe-Jahrbuch, a compendium of essays, papers, and news items about Goethe and Goethe scholarship, was founded by Ludwig Geiger in 1880. The Goethe Society took it over as its official organ in 1885, with Geiger continuing in the editor's chair. It appeared annually until 1914, when the Society established its own Jahrbuch der Goethe-Gesellschaft. This in turn was discontinued in 1935 to make way for the quarterly Goethe, which in 1938 was changed into a publication issued 3 times yearly. Since the war, it has for all practical purposes reverted to the form of a yearbook.
2 Queen Victoria's oldest daughter, Wilhelm II's mother, who after her consort's death in 1888 took the title of Königin Friedrich.
3 Jahresbericht der Goethe-Gesellschaft (in Goethe-Jahrbuch, ix, 1890), pp. 18-19.
4 A list of the Society's stillborn predecessors may be found in Wolfgang Goetz's Fünfzig Jahre Goethe-Gesellschaft, Schriften der G. -G., Vol. xlic (Weimar, 1936).
5 Most recently perhaps by Reinhard Buchwald in Goethezeit und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1949).
6 P. 11, first Jahresbericht der G. -G. (in Goethe-Jahrbuch vii, 1886). Similar sentiments motivated the Grand Duchess in launching the Sophienausgabe side by side with the Goethe Society. At that time she wrote to her friend Wanda von Puttkamer: “The German nation shall possess its greatest poet in his entirety, in a definitive edition, and shall not be inferior in this respect to the English, French, etc. Therefore it is a patriotic deed and task to help in realizing this aim. I appeal to the feelings of German patriotism… .” (quoted by Goetz, p. 17).
7 During World War I, the undercurrent of nationalism assumed torrential proportions. The Jahrbuch's editor declared that Germany's will to victory was symbolized by 2 famous statues: Lederer's Bismarck monument with its “granite seaward glance, facing the enemy” and Rietschel's Goethe-Schiller monument in Weimar, and that Germany was fighting for “the nobility of Man, freedom of the spirit, German greatness as possessed and practiced by Schiller, Kultur in Goethe's sense” (Jahrbuch der G. -G., Vol. ii [1915], vi-vii). Or, as Peter Rosegger put it more succinctly:
8 Those by Meyer, Heinemann, Bielschowsky, Witkowski, Chamberlain, Simmel, and Gundolf—to name but a few.
9 In 1938, the appellation Ortsgruppe had to be changed to Ortsvereinigung because the former term had already been preempted by the Nazi party for its local units.
10 For the membership of 1886, see Goethe-J ahrbuch vii, pp. 18-51 of appendix; for that of 1906, Goethe-J ahrbuch xxvii, pp. 18-68 of appendix. The list for 1926 was printed separately, as supplement to Vol. xii of the Jahrbuch der G.-G. (Weimar, 1926).
11 Members are listed a) according to location (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, other countries; in 1926, Austria is listed as part of Germany) and b) within a given locality, alphabetically by name. The profession, if given, follows the name and initial(s).
12 It is not always easy to determine, especially in the Wilhelmian period, whether a German title (other than one of nobility) has been conferred on its holder on a basis of professional excellence or by way of social distinction. A Hofrat or Geheimrat may be a Privy Counselor in some branch of the government, or else a prominent professional man with a purely honorary title. The same problem arises in the evaluation of titles like Konsul or Kommerzienrat. For the purposes of this study, some arbitrary adjustments had to be made on the basis of probability. Cases thus adjusted do not exceed 2% of the total.
No profession listed: Roughly one out of every three members either had no profession or did not list one. The vast majority of these members were, of course, non-working women (e.g., “Miss,” “Mrs. —–,” “Baroness”). Only a small percentage of the men gave no profession (name only; “retired”).
Business includes Kommerzienräte.
Medicine: Pharmacists, dentists, medical students, and all holders of the Dr.med. degree.
Law: Most holders of a medical degree are practicing doctors; men or women with a Dr.jur. or Dr.phil., on the other hand, are not necessarily lawyers or teachers. Only members clearly designated as professional jurists are here listed.
Government: Municipal administration, civil and diplomatic services.
Court Officials: e.g., “Grandducal Saxon Chamberlain,” “lady-in-waiting.”
Military includes Police Officers and medical services.
Education: All students, teachers, and professors (except medicine); Privatdozenten, but not Privatgelehrte.
The Arts: Writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, actors. Also museum and theatrical management.
Libraries, Organizations, Clubs: e.g., “City of Frankfurt a.M.,” Deutsche Gesellschaft von Pennsylvanien.
13 Learned societies as such are not necessarily middle-class institutions; the Sprachgesellschaften of the German Baroque had an entirely different composition, as has the present Académie Française. The remarkable feature of the Goethe Society is not so much its middle-class foundation as its ubiquitousness within that class. Its American counterpart is not the American Philosophical Society or the Modern Language Association of America, but a hypothetical “Emerson Society” numbering among recent members Benjamin Fairless, Frank Lloyd Wright, Theodore Dreiser, Admiral Halsey, John Foster Dulles, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and the Mayor of Chicago—rough equivalents of the Goethe-Society's membership which in 1926 included, among others, G. Krupp v. Bohlen-Halbach, Hugo Gropius, Thomas Mann, Admiral Scheer, Gustav Stresemann, Theodor Wolff, and the Mayor of Hamburg.
14 The banks represented by at least one director each in the membership list for 1926 were the leading banks of Germany (Deutsche Bank, Dresdener Bank, Bayrische Handelsbank, Reichsbank, Preussische Staatsbank, Böhmische Sparkasse, Darmstädter- und Nationalbank, etc.). Germany's leading newspapers were similarly represented by their editors (Berliner Tageblatt, Illustrierte Welt, and some 20 other dailies and weeklies with a nation-wide circulation). Among the cities represented by their mayors were Dresden, Leipzig, Hamburg, Nürnberg, Bremen, and Kiel.