Goethe Lite
27
servants complains, “Oh, how the old guy is always smoking. And what guests
he is always dragging in. Imagine. The man has come from America. He is
supposed to be an important man. I can’t believe that at all. He stumbles through
the mud and squints up at iron rods on the roofs.”8 There follow descriptions of
encounters with key literary figures of the Enlightenment, the early Romantic
movement, and of course Goethe. “When Goethe comes, tea is made. The
windows must shine. For he will definitely report on it if they are dull.”9 Again
the reader is treated to the quirks and foibles of great minds.
When in 1796 she marries August Wilhelm Schlegel, an important
philosopher of the early Romantic movement in Germany, Caroline is excited at
the prospect of a normal bourgeois existence. “Wilhelm shows Caroline the
way. He has arranged for housing—she will see. A pretty, small house right next
to Fichte. The countryside practically in their own back yard. A five-minute
walk to the university. They can afford a cook.”10 Later in the novel, after her
divorce from Schlegel and marriage to Schelling, another leading philosopher of
the Romantic movement, the reader is privy to a fit of giggles—“He wants to
repeat himself so badly, but his laughter prevents him from speaking.”11 The
famous philosophers August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling are seen
in a more domestic light. The one arranging housing for his bride, the other
laughing so hard with his wife that he cannot speak. Hannes Krauss notes that
Struzyk has succeeded in awakening well known figures of literary history to
life “auf ungespreizt-natiirliche, manchmal fast freche Weise” (47) [in an
unaffected and natural, sometimes even impudent manner].
As Fitzgerald does for Novalis in The Blue Flower and Ortheil’s
document-inspired fictional narrative does for Goethe, Struzyk effectively
delivers a group of literary luminaries from the turn of the eighteenth into the
twentieth—and now even twenty-first—century. Although very different in their
individual use of contemporary materials, all three authors have brought their
literary subjects to life using a montage of contemporary documents, wellresearched local color, and fiction. Fitzgerald’s clever portrayal of the oddities
(from our perspective) of country life in eighteenth-century Saxony, Ortheil’s
depiction of Goethe’s sexual awakening in Rome as filtered by Beri, and
Struzyk’s description of Friedrich Schlegel squirming on his chair are even
intriguing to readers who have never read works of Novalis, Goethe, or the
Schlegel brothers.
Although they clearly identify themselves as novels, these literary
works treat readily iden F