At the close of his stimulating article entitled “Ruine oder Monument? Goethes Lebenswerk im Spiegel seiner Gotik-Studien,” Peter-Henning Haischer cites a statement by Goethe as recorded by Frédéric Soret on 17 February 1832: “mein Lebenswerk ist das eines Kollektivwesens, und dies Werk trägt den Namen Goethe” (229). The Goethe-Jahrbuch 2005 documents a particularly productive year for the “Dombauhütte Goethe.” In addition to four longer and eight shorter essays and/or documentary accounts, thirty-one informative and well-arranged book reviews, extensive reports on memorable events for the International Goethe Society in 2005 as well as listings of the previous year's activities within local and national Goethe Societies (including the GSNA), and an extensive Goethe bibliography and name index for 2004, the first two hundred pages of this yearbook record the proceedings of the May 19–20, 2005 conference in Weimar that commemorated the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Schiller. For purposes of providing some “classical” unity to what otherwise could easily become a enumeration of “Go(e)thic” incidentals, the remainder of this review will focus on the fifteen essays dealing with the conference theme, namely Goethes Schillers—Schillers Goethe.

The opening talk by Rainer Safranski provides an overview of the development of a friendship and working partnership in the years between Goethe's return from Italy in 1788 and Schiller's death in 1805. In “‘eine Annäherung, die nicht erfolgte’? Die schwierigen Anfänge eines Dichterbundes,” Gesa von Essen makes effective use of Erwing Goffmann's and Pierre Bourdieu's respective categories of role-playing and literary field in order to analyze the social framework that led not only to the initial tension between Goethe and Schiller, but also to their first meaningful conversations and letters in the summer of 1794, as the two writers became aware of deficiencies in their own life and creativity that the other could help to fill. This talk, in turn provides a fine supplement to Andreas Beyer's account of the reassignment of Christian Daniel Rauch's projected Goethe-Schiller monument to his prize pupil Ernst Rietschel; Beyer emphasizes the significance of Rietschel's decision to cloak his subjects in modern dress rather than the togas originally envisioned by Rauch, while also noting that this monument contributed to the nationalistic evocation of a “German” classicism in the years after its installation in 1859.