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To establish life science on a systematic basis required an integrating principle for the specific conception of organic form and its integration further into a general system of nature. The key ideas found their fullest articulation respectively in Goethe’s conception of developmental morphology as the principle of a science of life forms and in Schelling’s conception of Naturphilosophie, that is, nature as a whole conceived as a developmental, living organism. Both Goethe and Schelling self-consciously embarked on the “daring adventure of reason” against which Kant had warned. This chapter explores their respective theoretical constructions in terms of the intellectual development of their progenitors. Goethe conceived his ideas of developmental morphology in the mid-1790s. His encounter and collaboration with Schelling in 1798 brought about a dramatic fusion of their two trajectories in a conception of Polarität [polarity] and Steigerung [intensification] constituting the self-organization of nature. That energized the synthesis of life science under the new rubric of “biology” in the first years of the nineteenth century.

This chapter examines the intersection of gender discourses and concepts of authorship in Germany. It asks three questions. First, how were definitions of femininity used in the criticism of women authors? Second, to what extent was the discourse internally consistent? Third, to what extent was it challenged? The intellectual context in which women wrote influenced both their self-image, and their professional practices. Male writers and reviewers have been regarded by feminist scholarship as exerting a kind of ‘gender censorship’ through the construction of models of authorship, excluding women a priori. However, these restrictions were undermined by a continuing ambiguity in the debate about women writers, and by the increasing numbers of women who entered the literary market despite these prohibitions — not infrequently with the help of precisely those men keen to keep them out. The chapter also looks at the aesthetic objections of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller to female authorship.

This chapter examines the life and career of Margaret Fuller during the period from 1833 to 1835. When Fuller returned home her family relocated to Groton, which she resented because of the almost isolated location of the house and because she had to work in the farm. However, she later accepted her situation and made the farmhouse her place of study and reflection. Her favorite author was Romantic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had a significant influence on her later career.

The resurgence of asexualism in Germany in the nineteenth century coincided with the Naturphilosophie movement associated with Romanticism which arose in reaction to mechanical models of the universe, among them Baron d’Holbach’s. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a Kant disciple, claimed that the “absolute ego” creates it’s own reality, which we mistake for the “real world”. Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, the “philosopher king” of the Romantics, attempted a balance between Fichte’s subjective idealism and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (relative) objectivism. In general, nature philosophers granted equal weight to reason and to the imagination, and adopted a pantheistic theology, influenced by Baruch Spinoza. Franz Joseph Schelver believed the production of seeds was a vegetative process. August Henschell dismissed Koelreuter’s hybrids as artifacts resulting from experimental damage. He thought the release of pollen freed the spiritual essence of the plant from base matter. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also challenged the sexual theory of plants.

The concept of the demonic influence had figured prominently in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's works, especially in the closing sections of his autobiographical Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), where the poet wrestled with an irresistible, demonic Wesen (presence), inherently neither good nor evil, that had profound impact on human behavior. Goethe found the demonic in world events—the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the reigns of Frederick II and Napoleon Bonaparte, and the sweeping revolutionary forces that had fundamentally transfigured Europe during his long life. For Fanny Hensel, the demonic affected her private, musical world; like some poeticus furor, it evidently came over her when, following her brother's advice, she composed piano instead of choral music. To her mind, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was the source of this power, and the sibling bond could not be severed.

This chapter examines British scholarship with respect to German studies during the twentieth century. It explains that until 1925 the only work of modern German literature studied for the Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos at Cambridge was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust. It also highlights the danger that medieval German studies may face an increasingly bleak future in British universities, where not only the larger subject of German studies itself has changed but consumerist philosophies and appeals to modernity have undermined traditional values.

This chapter traces an articulation of a broader family concept through nostalgia and mourning. The dynastic dimension of the family functioned in many texts of the era as something superannuated and quaint. In F. W. J. Schelling's philosophy of the 1810s, Mary Shelley's The Last Man, and the second part of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust tragedy, the dynastic family functions as something altogether different: it allowed these three writers to explore the ways in which Romanticism was unable, or not allowed, to transmit itself organically. All three writers suggested that something about Romanticism, its reception and transmission, seemed to break with the "natural" order by which thought had been transmitted previously. By putting their protagonists into dialogue with spectral families, with an ever-growing dynasty of mourning, these writers preserved the extended family, but only as a non-presence.

This chapter examines Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's presentation of “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and contrasts it with his Poetry and Truth. The primary focus is on Goethe's autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit and how it provides a sustained reflection on what it takes to become a creative artist both from a historical perspective and in terms of an individual's talents. For authorship in Dichtung und Wahrheit is considered not primarily as the making public of one's own text or composition, but rather as involving an intervention in an entire cultural domain. More specifically, the chapter explores how Goethe arrives at a concept of his own artistic talent by focusing on various aspects of his relationship to religion, both natural religion and revealed or positive religion, to the figure of the prophet, as one eminent model of a radical cultural innovator. Finally, it considers Goethe's reflections on the role of religion in articulating both his position on the function of art he envisages as appropriate for his historical era and the future to come.

Religion was a major restriction of freedom of thought, hence a prime object of Enlightenment criticism. Speaking out still carried risks—to career, status, even one—s life. Gradually the pressure eased as writers and thinkers gained a sense of solidarity. Goethe, Kant, Lichtenberg, Lessing (only he concerned to rescue what Christian substance he could) moved independently of one another in a common direction: away from dogmatic belief and the intolerance it entailed and towards a secular ethics which reversed an ancient order. It became clear that true morality was not something merely prescribed by a god, and that the idea of god itself grew out of human moral aspiration.

By composing music for the first scene (H-U 389), Fanny effectively brought Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's verses out of the private library into the realm of “public” music making. To that end, she sent a copy to Franz Hauser and asked him to consider performing her setting with his Singverein in Vienna, so that she might join his “league”. Fanny Hensel confessed that she had envisioned the work with orchestral accompaniment but, limited by her own “dilettantism”, had not orchestrated the piano part: “Actually the piece should be set with orchestra; it was so conceived, but there again you have the joys of dilettantism: first of all, I write very poorly for orchestra, and second, even if it were a masterpiece, I would always have to perform it from the piano-vocal version, and so I spared myself the effort, and the score belongs to many of my deeds that will remain unfinished”.

This chapter offers a reading of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1809 novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities) to elucidate its depiction of the Tausch-Rausch (frenzy of exchange) within the context of late eighteenth-century political economy. It also examines luxury and human needs in the novel in order to grasp the profundity of Goethe's engagement with the expansion of consumer culture during the period. The chapter recasts Die Wahlverwandtschaften's articulation of the disintegrative forces of modernity as a meditation on the emancipation of the ornamental and its consequences for the integrity of self and society. In terms of both its highly nuanced representation of consumer culture and its narrative structure, the chapter argues that the novel has rather surprising implications for thinking about how one might reembed the decorative within the essential, and the role that literature can play in this undertaking.

This chapter examines Theodor Adorno's arguments regarding the role of the concept of classicism in German literary history by focusing on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It considers Adorno's essay “On the Classicism of Goethe's Iphigenia,” delivered as a public lecture at the Free University in Berlin in 1967, in which he articulated his position in the complex postwar discussion about the function and value of the German literary tradition. It argues that Adorno's essay on Goethe's play Iphigenia in Tauris is anything but a polemic. It also explains how Adorno opens up a dimension of meaning that calls into question the notion of cultural superiority commonly associated with the concept of German classicism without dismissing it as pure ideology. Finally, the chapter discusses Adorno's critical assessment of the concept of realism through his two short essays on Honoré de Balzac, in which he explores the link between representation and social reality.

Undermining religion’s message did not entail gloom. The world when secularised still inspires wonder and delight, life deserves celebration. It duly receives it from the most powerful lyrical genius Germany has seen. Goethe’s tireless poetic productivity shows a way of seeing and being in which the ideals of the Enlightenment—the independent mind of the individual, the life of the senses and the emotions, freedom from outside direction, fulfilment in earthly activity—are lived out in exemplary fashion. Those ideals would hardly count if they were not capable of such realisation. And beyond all philosophical claims, the writing of this outstanding artist (dramatist and novelist too, but above all lyrical poet) has an unequalled richness and formal perfection. The account of the Enlightenment ends on a literary high.

The ageing Goethe was fascinated with Byron whom he called the greatest poetic talent. Though suspicious of Byron’s Philhellenism, Goethe found in Byron an openness to encounter non-English cultures, an attentiveness to national histories and in interest in the relationship of the individual to social life. Byron’s self-contextualising, self-historicising narrative poems constitute a parallel to Goethe’s own literary campaigns for cross-cultural engagement in the 1810s and 1820s and, despite Byron’s alienation from England, offer hope for the prospects of what Goethe was to call “world literature”.

This chapter reviews the film Faust (2011). Faust, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, is a free adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's eponymous book. The film, financed in great part with Russian government funds and under the auspices of Vladimir Putin, was meant by its backers to promote the rapprochement and dialogue between German and Russian cultures. Such a grand project, rife with nationalistic and political implications, also closes Sokurov's tetralogy of power, ironically highly entwined with the historical echoes of this “dialogue” between the two cultures. With Faust, Sokurov not only crowns the tetralogy and its exploration of the nature of power and the price of the human soul, but also his career itself.

This chapter and the next focus on Goethe’s periodicals On Morphology for their paradigmatically neo-Lucretian treatment of biological life and its poetic documentation. In the morphology project, living beings are composite, equivocally generated forms whose vitality is coextensive with their transience; each “seeming individual”—not least the morphologist—is a fractious and plural “Being-Complex” whose incessant metamorphoses the science attempts to match with every available generic and figurative resource. This chapter argues that Goethe’s late work on metamorphosis shifts biology’s question from the problem of embryogenesis that drove its emergence as a science, toward neglected, late-life processes of senescence and decomposition. What might life look like, Goethe’s asks, from the perspective of the non-reproductive, but communicative, effluvia that mediate between beings in their transience? What arts of discomposure would be adequate to this view? Focusing on an experiment in which a mushroom draws its own image in spores, this chapter argues for the Romantic period credibility of nonhuman and non-verbal acts of semiosis and representation: “natural simulacra” that Goethe discovers in the botany of decay.

This chapter departs from confessional interpretations of Felix Mendelssohn’s musical and religious outlook, encouraged by an empathetic reading of his own statements within the context of wider philosophies of art and religion, which combined into what became known as art-religion. In Mendelssohn’s writings, Kunstreligion was both a form of religion that was associated with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theology and a means of finding his true self as a composer, as intended by his father, Abraham. His identification with nineteenth-century sacralized aesthetics of feelings never gave way to the unworldly nostalgia that critics and scholars have so often associated negatively with aesthetic religion. For Mendelssohn, Kunstreligion had practical implications and clear boundaries. His leaning towards religious theories of art inspired him to compose musical works for the spiritual enhancement of his audiences but found its limits whenever musico-religious rhetoric ran counter to his own moral consciousness, innermost beliefs, and sense of tolerance.