Legacy (Goethe)

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , oil painting by Joseph Karl Stieler

Legacy is the title of a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that he wrote in 1829. Since the volumes of poetry in the first-hand edition were completed two years ago, he placed it in volume 22 at the end of the second part of his novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre , with which it is internally connected.

The late work , written in Goethe's 80th year, is regarded as a poetic testament in which he presented the sum of his knowledge and experiences and finally arranged many of the motifs of his older work.

Content and background

The work emerged from Goethe's contradiction to a previous poem. Eckermann wrote on February 12, 1829 that Goethe was annoyed that the last two lines of the poem Eins und Alles, written in 1821, were exhibited in golden letters on the occasion of a congress of Berlin natural scientists : “Because everything has to disintegrate into nothing if it wants to persist in being . "

He wasn't bothered by the older poem itself, but by the striking emphasis and absolutization of the ending, which could have been interpreted in a Mephistophelian way: “I am the spirit that always denies! / And rightly so; because everything that arises / is worth it to perish; ... "

Heraclitus, in the figure of Michelangelo , detailed view from Raphael's The School of Athens (1510–1511), fresco in the Stanza della Segnatura , Vatican

While One and All, in Heraclitus' tone, praises the eternal flow of things and extols the power of change in the sense of the Hegelian dialectic , Goethe now wants to seek the constant. In the first verse, for example, he contradicts the earlier work with an antithetical reference (as a negation of negation ): "No being can disintegrate into nothing!".

In the last-hand edition he placed the classic poem Duration in Alternation , written as early as 1803 , in which the Panta rhei Heraclitus is also addressed, immediately before one and all . A series of beautiful images of transience passes in him, rain of flowers, fruit and love, threatened by storm and rain , age and time - but in the end, in the spirit of the classical ideal, the muse promises constancy and reason inner freedom.

So it is not just a contradiction in the legacy : Goethe presents a different, more advanced perspective and world view and also took up thoughts of Immanuel Kant . If the desire to persist in the earlier poem led to decay, the essence of beings can now be preserved through all change.

The first stanza reads:

No being can disintegrate into nothing!
Ew'ge moves forward in all,
keep you happy in being!
Being is eternal; for laws
keep the living treasures
from which the universe is adorned.

First, Goethe addresses the eternity of being, the truth and the Copernican laws of the solar system and, in the further course of the poem, connects them with the conscience , feeling and social responsibility of the individual who has to turn inward.

Meaning and interpretation

Immanuel Kant

Since Goethe was far from Kant's systematic unconditionality, he formulated no categorical imperatives, but recommendations for life of good behavior.

According to Friedrich Dieckmann , he wanted to protect being from nothingness and thus oppose the faint-heartedness, disgruntlement and social resignation that showed up to him after the Napoleonic Wars . He lacked strength and courage. He told Eckermann that the weak was “a characteristic of our century. I have the hypothesis that in Germany it is a consequence of the effort to get rid of the French ”. The Germans would be helped if they were taught "following the example of the English, less philosophy and more energy, less theory and more practice."

Eckhard Heftrich observes that the introspection and the talk of an independent conscience, which follow the view of the solar system, initially seem like a poetic design by Kant. For him, however, it remains questionable whether the “center” corresponds to the categorical imperative . Goethe accepted philosophy, but he was a poet according to his own will, trusted the senses and made the true dependent on the fertile . The insights as a poet in moments of Cairo therefore remain secrets that are revealed only to the wise . Despite numerous parallels to other writings, Goethe's poetic quintessence is neither an idea nor a thought poem. For him, the magic lies in the rhythm of the lines, which unobtrusively only serves to convey the message.

For Erich Trunz , the contradiction to the Heraclitic poem is only an apparent one. While Goethe deals with the dissolution of the individual there, the legacy is about the whole, in which the individual remains in a changed form. A feeling of happiness fills him when he looks at the general and recognizes the connections of the cosmos.

The idea that nature manages its treasures and lets them work can also be found in his scientific writings. It is the task of humans to research the laws of nature. The fact that the truth “had long been found” is for Trunz an allusion to Copernicus , who was also part of a spiritual tradition, as it was Aristarchus of Samos who, 1800 years earlier, had expressed the heliocentric worldview without having been recognized. After man has recognized the natural law of heaven, he discovers in himself the moral law of conscience. It is precisely here that Kant's influence can be recognized with his sentence from the Critique of Practical Reason : “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe ... The starry sky above me, and the moral law in me . "

Secondary literature

Web links

Wikisource: Legacy  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ So Gero von Wilpert: Legacy. In: ders .: Goethe-Lexikon. Kröner, Stuttgart 1998, p. 1112.
  2. ↑ Friedrich Dieckmann, Imperative of the fulfilled moment, in: Interpretations, poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reclam, Ed. Bernd Witte, Stuttgart 2005, p. 282
  3. ^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poems and Epics I, Goethe's works, Hamburg edition, Volume IX, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 369
  4. ↑ Friedrich Dieckmann, Imperative of the fulfilled moment, in: Interpretations, poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reclam, Ed. Bernd Witte, Stuttgart 2005, p. 284
  5. ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Eine Tragödie, Dramatik Dichtungen I, Goethe's works, Hamburg edition, Volume III, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 47
  6. ↑ Friedrich Dieckmann, Imperative of the fulfilled moment, in: Interpretations, poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reclam, Ed. Bernd Witte, Stuttgart 2005, p. 285
  7. ^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poems and Epics I, Goethe's works, Hamburg edition, Volume IX, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 369
  8. ^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poems and Epics I, Goethe's Works, Hamburg Edition, Volume IX, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 247
  9. ^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Poems and Epics I, Goethe's works, Hamburg edition, Volume IX, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 369
  10. ↑ Friedrich Dieckmann, Imperative of the fulfilled moment, in: Interpretations, poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reclam, Ed. Bernd Witte, Stuttgart 2005, p. 286
  11. ↑ Quoted from: Friedrich Dieckmann, Imperative of the fulfilled moment, in: Interpretations, Gedichte von Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Reclam, Ed. Bernd Witte, Stuttgart 2005, p. 289
  12. ↑ Eckhard Heftrich , in: Marcel Reich-Ranicki (ed.), 1000 German poems and their interpretations, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 1994, p. 503
  13. ↑ Erich Trunz , Legacy. In: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poems and epics I, notes, Goethe's works, Hamburg edition, volume I, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 735
  14. ↑ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Decision, in: Immanuel Kant, Writings on Ethics and Philosophy of Religion, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1998, p. 300