Goethe and Judaism: The Troubled Inheritance of Modern Literature. By Karin Schutjer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. xiii + 245 pages + 5 b/w illustrations. 99.95hardcover,99.95 hardcover, 99.95hardcover,34.95 paperback (original) (raw)

Monatshefte, 2016

Abstract

suicide as a solution to “Neigungen” gone awry in Werther, and in Faust perhaps he is reassuring us that it doesn’t always work out badly if you sell your soul to the devil. The book does not shrink back from other quite wide interpretations of Goethe’s intentions on matters of love: “For parents adopting children who might still wonder if they can love an adopted child as much as a biological one, Goethe’s literary texts provide an answer: yes” (188). Reassuring, but rather an odd source for this wisdom. Odder still, even though Gustafson does not attempt to identify any relationships in Goethe’s work as actually gay or lesbian, she does think he allays any “contemporary doubts about gay or lesbian families” because “Goethe’s texts foreground repeatedly the [ . . . ] loving elective affinities that draw same-sex couples together and that form the foundation for their loving families” (188). There are numerous details that cause one to lose confidence in this book. For example, when Eduard refers to his wife as his “A und O,” in a conversation in which the possible relationships among the four residents on the estate are designated by the letters a, b, c, and d, Gustafson wonders who “O” might be, and one can’t quite tell whether this is simply because she has missed the reference to the Book of Revelations, or because she is attempting to work on an obscure or accidental expansion of possible meanings. The details, nonetheless, are less important than the overall approach to what Goethe does and does not write. This raises a fundamental question about what is and what is not admissible as literary criticism. T.S. Eliot remarked in his essay “The Function of the Critic” that a respect for facts was the pinnacle of civilization. One might be inclined to scoff at such a rigid view until one appeared on trial or perhaps went through a political campaign. A fiction does not have to represent facts, but it remains, nonetheless, a fact whether it contains one motif or another. One is therefore guilty of a misrepresentation if one claims that a text contains language that it does not. The reader who feels a civilized responsibility either towards the law and politics of personal relationships, or towards the integrity of a work of art, needs to preserve a respectful skepticism toward what he or she will find in this volume. It seems to derive its image of vagueness and impermanence in human relationships from a time when same-sex attractions were expected to follow that disorderly pattern and were deemed unworthy of legal recognition. The implication that we can find a support for this view in a great classical author must be quite hurtful to those who struggled so long to bring about a sense of facts in our laws.

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