THE NEOLOGISM irrlichtelieren can be defined as: “An innovative and eccentric line of thought, … a lexical innovation … that configures the ‘improper’ imperative of Goethean thought … to displace the ‘proper’ way of doing philosophy (including logic, rationalist metaphysics, and transcendental idealism) by repurposing its traditional instruments of torture.” Goethe invented the word and used it only once, in the student scene of Faust I. Derived from the noun Irrlicht (will-o’-the-wisp, or ignis fatuus), it initially identifies the confused thinking of the student who has yet to learn logic,

However, the use of will-o’-the-wisp in Faust transforms this apparent praise of logic into its opposite, so that “will-o’-the-wisping back and forth” comes to represent the epistemology actually promoted not only in Faust but also in Goethe's essays on scientific methodology and optics from the 1790s and in his massive Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) of 1810. Derived from irren (erring), the central theme of Faust, where the Lord says “Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt” (317; man errs as long as he strives) and Licht (light), used consistently as an image for knowledge or truth in Goethe, as so often in the period, irrlichtelieren becomes a useful term for Goethe's process of learning truth by trial and error. It engages a series of epistemological issues typical of the period: thinking outside the box, subject/object, the relation of nature and truth, the role of representation in knowledge, and the epistemology of community formation. Irrlichtelieren not only exemplifies Goethe's tendency to heuristic rather than systematic thought (unlike that of his Romantic colleagues), but indeed embodies its own meaning— for will-o’-the-wisps and similar figures appear as characters in his (arguably) most characteristic works: Faust and the Märchen (Fairy Tale) of 1795.

THEODOR FONTANE HAD GOOD REASON to like the word “deplaciert.” He was a descendant of French Huguenot immigrants to Berlin and, after returning from a temporary residence in London, did not always feel fully comfortable with his political surroundings. I invoke him here because all Americans—and especially American Germanists—are in a certain sense “deplaciert.” Americans are, after all, all immigrants to North America, whether we came ourselves, whether our ancestors came a century ago, or three centuries ago, or even millennia ago across the Bering land bridge. Indeed, in terms of what we know about human evolution, almost all humans are probably immigrants of some sort, wherever we live today. Goethe got it right in Lenardo's “Wanderrede” in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre: moving from one place to another is essential to being human. Germanists in America are more specifically “deplaciert.” Even those of us not immigrants or refugees nevertheless tend to seem campus oddities, whether for our unusual linguistic skills, for the reputation of foreign-language departments as “zoos,” for the unfortunate macabre reputation that still adheres to things German in some quarters of the internet, or simply for the fact that we study a culture on the far side of the Atlantic.

Many of us are doubtless accustomed to the question that I, even in retirement, am still asked all the time, “Why would an American become a Germanist?” It is always immediately followed by the question, “Is your family German?,” to which a “no” results in an abrupt change of topic. As a student in Germany in 1965 I encountered the identical questions. There I quickly learned not to say, “I am studying Germanistik because I love Goethe”—that did not fly among my Kommilitonen. Germans inevitably also asked what I as an American thought I had to offer Germans (or anyone else) about their own culture. Preferring not to point out that German culture was still in need of advocates twenty years after World War II, I argued instead that I might be able to see things from a different point of view, to see German literature from another, perhaps enriching, perspective.

As Franz-Josef Deiters's title signals, his book offers a sophisticated reading of theater carefully located between theater history, media theory, Michel Foucault's “classical episteme,” and Walter Benjamin's “Entweltlichung.” Not clear from the title, but equally important, are its exceptionally thoughtful readings of five representative dramatic texts of the first half of the Goethezeit. Both the theory and the readings are presented with a clarity and concreteness that belie the abstraction of the title, yet also precisely illuminate the insights to be gained from the major epistemological shifts delineated by media theory and intellectual history of the last several decades. This structure already emerges in the table of contents, where all the chapter titles are quotations from the work at hand, and, in the crucial historical second chapter, most of the sub-section titles as well.

Die Entweltlichung der Bühne makes a double argument: first, theater is a medium in the sense of media theory, and not exclusively performance, and second, as such, it is an important symptom of the shift identified in Foucault's Order of Things from an analogical world-view to the “classical” regime of signs. Deiters lays out the general argument in his “Medienkritische Vorrede,” more accessibly than its title might suggest. Here he politely debunks Erika Fischer- Lichte's influential view that performativity is the essence of theater, using Foucault to relocate the theater into the context of media theory and identifying the shift from analogy to the primacy of signs as “Entweltlichung,” a process of abstraction whose formulation owes, I suspect, something to Deiters's previous engagement with Benjamin on allegory in drama (Drama im Augenblick seines Sturzes: Zur Allegorisierung des Dramas in der Moderne. Versuche zu einer Konstitutionstheorie, 1999).

The second chapter reviews pronouncements about the theater from Gottsched to Schiller and the Romantics. Thankfully, Deiters does not proceed chronologically by summarizing the usual suspects. Instead, he surveys categories that demonstrate exactly how leading thinkers wrote about Entweltlichung and semiotics. Deiters considers here changes in the meaning of truth in philosophy; the new priority of the printed text over performance; the shifts in the triad of communication between author, actors, and audience (the depersonalization of the actor, the silencing of the spectator, the withdrawal of the author behind the curtain);

IN MY FIRST COURSE WITH STUART ATKINS, German Romanticism it was, the first text on the syllabus was Goethe's “Das Märchen” (The Fairy Tale) and the last was his Novelle (Novella). This essay begins to address what I learned from those choices. It also addresses another experience I had with an equally eminent scholar who shall, however, remain nameless here. That person asked me what my favorite Goethe text was, apart from Faust. Floored, I finally said, “the Märchen.” “Wrong!” came the answer, “Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities).” What was I thinking? I was identifying what seemed to me the most paradigmatic, the most Goethean, of Goethe's works, while my interlocutor was identifying the work that spoke most directly to the turn of the millennium. Today I want to see what might be learned from my answer and to show how Goethe's fairy tale illuminates some of his less paradigmatic works. In fact, I want to claim that fairy tale is Goethe's basic modus operandi, even though he wrote only three of them (“Das Märchen,” “Die neue Melusine,” and “Der neue Paris”). I made a comparable argument once for “Hexenküche” (Witch's Kitchen) as the paradigm for Goethe's new conception of Faust when he returned to the work in Italy. I now think that this scene with its talking animals and witch comes from the realm of fairy tale; furthermore, I will argue shortly that the “Märchen,” like “Hexenküche,” also evokes Goethe's Italian experiences. I will begin with a reading of it and then discuss another of Goethe's fairy tales, “Die neue Melusine” from the Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years), to show not only the centrality of the genre for Goethe but also what it means that he took this arch-Romantic genre so seriously.

Goethe's contemporaries were both baffled and delighted by the “Märchen,” published in 1795 as the end of Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Refugees). Two things seem fairly obvious to scholarly readers now: first, that it can be interpreted less in terms of its symbols than of its general structure and, second, that it responds to the French Revolution, the central political event for the Romantic generation and subject of the Unterhaltungen. Goethe describes how to purify monarchy rather than abolish it and how to control the mayhem of the Revolution.

The Enlightenment took enormous interest in a wide variety of religious topics: the existence of God, the problem of evil, the meaning of revelation, ecclesiastical authority, the status of scripture, religious tolerance, and immortality. This last issue is particularly important as one of the essential components, along with the existence of a moral God, of a “natural” theology that could be fully derived or endorsed by reason. Furthermore, reflection on immortality plays directly into the urgent discussions in the eighteenth century about autonomy, freedom, and progress; the way one envisions a hereafter profoundly reflects and legitimates the way one envisions life in the present. This fluidity between an understanding of the here and the hereafter is perfectly captured in Johann Joachim Spalding's extremely influential Bestimmung des Menschen (1748; The Vocation of Man), which envisions immortality as a process of ever increasing rational pleasure and self-perfection—goals not at all unfamiliar to the mortals of the Enlightenment.

Johann Gottfried Herder is a central and in some ways transitional voice in this public discussion of man's immortal Bestimmung. In the early 1769 letters to Mendelssohn he espoused a model of nonprogressive palingenesis, in which the soul is endlessly reborn within the same class of being without undergoing any overarching development. There is, in short, no personal, angelic afterlife. Compared to the essentially Christian afterlife of the rationalist Popularphilosophen of Herder's day, this position was quite austere.

“Classicism” and “secular humanism” seems an obvious combination: Goethe, the great pagan, substituted a generalized ethic of humanity (taken in its broadest possible religio-ethical and aesthetic sense) as the social glue that replaced the function of sectarian religion in post-Enlightenment secularized Europe. He offered a heightened version of Enlightenment culture and reason that obviated the need for religion. Through World War I his name alone evoked an entire system of ethics, aesthetics, and even epistemology among writers as disparate as Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Fontane, Hugo von Hofmannsthal; and scholars such as the psychoanalytic generation, Hannah Arendt, Norbert Elias, Oswald Spengler; and philosophers such as Benedetto Croce and José Ortega y Gasset. My subtitle reveals the underlying schism— “sanctification” is a religious term; Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), a hangover of the particularly secular and disrespectful Enlightenment associated with the French Revolution; and the “Novelle,” a charming, respectable, Biedermeier idyll. The Goethe cult that substituted German classicism for religion was, for better or worse, not interested in the Goethe of the 1820s, except for his conversations with Eckermann; “the late Goethe,” or, as I would have it, “the Biedermeier Goethe,” offers, however, a more mature, richer classicism, indeed a sanctified classicism.

The Revolutionary Rhizome

All eyes, it would seem, are on Spinoza at the moment. Much of the credit for this remarkable renaissance is due to Gilles Deleuze, who wrote two books on Spinoza, and then went even further in his best-selling manifesto What Is Philosophy?, anointing Spinoza both the “prince” and the “Christ” of philosophy. And Deleuze is hardly alone in his attentions. Spinoza now looms large in our understanding of the entire Age of Goethe. The controversy over Spinoza still figures as a minor flap in Lewis White Beck's classic history, Early German Philosophy; but it has become the defining intellectual controversy of the whole age since the publication of Frederick Beiser's influential study The Fate of Reason in 1987. Further, over the past decade, the intellectual historian Jonathan Israel has published three massive tomes asserting that, basically, every significant thinker of the Enlightenment was a closet Spinozist. Skepticism may be in order: on Wall Street, this latest development would be read as a “contrary indicator,” signaling a market top. But the centrality of the Spinozastreit (Spinoza controversy) clearly means that we have to understand both the extent and the import of Spinoza's influence on the Age of Goethe. And the centrality of Spinoza to contemporary discourse is beyond doubt; somehow, he figures in everyone's equations.

When it comes to religion, Goethe's reputation is anything but spotless. Heinrich Heine famously referred to Goethe as “der große Heide” (the great heathen). August Wilhelm Schlegel took this one step further when he called Goethe “einen zum Islam bekehrten Heiden” (a heathen who converted to Islam). Wolfgang Frühwald points out that in an altar painting by Konrad Eberhard for the St. Clara Hospital in Basel, Goethe is grouped with the heathens who cannot be converted by St. Paul. Similarly, Prince Metternich opposed the creation of a Goethe monument because of Goethe's spotty record on religion, declaring that we should not “dem Andenken eines Mannes zu große Ehre … erweisen, der ersichtlich seines religiösen Bekenntnisses nicht ohne Anstoß gewesen sei” (pay too much tribute to the memory of a man whose religious creed was not inoffensive). Finally, Romano Guardini, in a letter to Ernst Beutler, summed it up when he declared that Goethe had done more harm to Christianity than even Nietzsche (Perels 28).

Though these claims are surely inflated, they are not wholly unfounded. In the following, I will provide a brief overview over Goethe's stance on religion. I then contrast Goethe's views with those introduced in Kant's “Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft” (1793; Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). Here, I pay particular attention to the role both thinkers assign to the concepts of sensuality and the body.

By 1788, Friedrich schiller (1759-1805) could look back on nearly a decade of blasphemous production regarding prophets, priests, and organized religion. In 1789, after several years of assaulting the negative social and political functions of Jesus Christ and Christianity, Schiller, then a professor of history, turned his attention to the Hebrew prophet Moses in the lecture “Die Sendung Moses” (The Mission of Moses or The Legation of Moses), delivered at the University of Jena in the summer of 1789 and published in Schiller's journal Thalia in 1790. In light of recent charges of blasphemy (and—in an insightless or disingenuous smear attempt—polytheism) inspired by his poem “Die Götter Griechenlandes” (The Gods of Ancient Greece) in 1788, Schiller's Moses essay comprises both a response to the charges and an articulation of his earlier criticisms of religion. In the Moses essay, Schiller moves beyond the concerns of the political misuses of and intellectual detours posed by Christianity in contemporary European states to an explanation of the original paradigmatic political purposes of religion and the initial civilizing effect of monotheism as a step toward a constitution based on reason for all humankind.

In chapter 10 of The Romantic Imperative, “Religion and Politics in Frühromantik,” Frederick Beiser argues for the significance of Herder in the crucial process of reinterpreting Spinoza at the end of the eighteenth century in Germany. Specifically, Herder's 1787 Gott: Einige Gespräche (God: Some Dialogues) introduced a “vitalistic” reading of Spinoza and “self-consciously fuse[d] him with his great metaphysical contemporary: Leibniz.” However, besides another brief mention of Herder's belief in “combining Spinoza's monism and naturalism with Leibniz's vitalism” (182), Leibniz falls out of Beiser's story. In Beiser's earlier Fate of Reason Leibniz suffers the same fate, disappearing in the excellent and gripping tale of the so-called Pantheism controversy around Spinoza. Given the weight of Beiser's account, this essay undertakes what many a novel has done with, say, Jane Austen or Gone with the Wind, namely, a shift in focus onto a minor or at least somewhat neglected character in order to let Leibniz emerge from the immense shadow cast by Spinoza.