Autorizzazione del Tribunale di Roma n. 96/2020 del 25 ottobre 2020
978-88-5754-627-8
1720-514X
Biannual
Cultura e Letteratura Tedesca
Peer Review
La rivista attualmente è presente nell'elenco delle riviste di classe A per l'area 10 dell'Agenzia Nazionale di Valutazione del Sistema Universitario e della Ricerca (ANVUR) ai fini dell'Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale
Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa
As a young man, Goethe was called “Wanderer” because of his love for travels, especially on foot. This enthusiasm never left him and deeply influenced his whole production, both narrative and poems. The travel, as a symbol of the human destiny, is the most conspicuous metaphor for the authentic meaning of his poetry. It surfaces in many of his works, both in verses and prose, since his Sturm und Drang debut and up to the Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1829), where the fundamental experience of travel is evident already in the title.
This essay aims to understand and to investigate the role of the sea in Goethe’s personal life and by what means the voyages affected his conception of the world. By analyzing how the Italian maritime experience shapes itself in Goethe, we will see, in particular, how the contact with Naples and Palermo can be considered as essential in order to create an epistemic awareness of the sea dimension.
The great event of Johann Caspar Goethe’s life was his journey to Italy in 1740, concerning which he wrote his own “Italian Journey” in Italian. The Viaggio per l’Italia, in forty-two fictitious travel letters, was first written down some thirty years later on the basis of notes, memory, printed guides and letters to fictive receivers («Vossignoria» and Giuseppa Merati), but it remained in manuscript until 1932. His Italian experience exercised a profound influence on Goethe since his childhood and youth.
Charlotte von Schardt was the eldest daughter of Weimar’s master of court ceremonies. At the age of sixteen she became lady-in-waiting to the duchess Anna Amalia, mother of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar Carl August, and later married Friedrich, Freiherr von Stein. Goethe, who arrived in Weimar in 1775, was soon captivated by the charm of this lady, and their subsequent spiritual union deeply influenced his life and work. For eleven years Charlotte von Stein was Goethe’s constant companion, and the letters the poet sent her represent one of the most interesting volumes of his correspondence. This article aims to illustrate – through Goethe’s letters and poems – their intimate friendship and the poet’s sentimental education. After Goethe’s return from Italy (1788), his relationship with Christiane Vulpius, whom he later married, caused a break in the friendship. In the long run Stein and Goethe achieved some reconciliation, but Charlotte was no more his muse.
Aim of the paper is to investigate Goethe’s dramatic work Torquato Tasso (1789), in order to highlight the echo of Weimar Grand duchy’s atmosphere in the literary reconstruction of Belriguardo’s court. The same character of Tasso represents not only Goethe’s attitudes and intimate contrasts, but also a confrontation with J.M.R. Lenz, i.e. with the emblematic author of the “Sturm und Drang”.
In the metaphorical journey undertaken by Kleist’s drama Penthesilea from Dresden to Weimar and in the following conflict betweenGoethe and Kleist it is more at stake than just the contrast between Classicism and Romantics. The problem emerging from this study is the different way to reflect about actuality and politics, the opposite conception of literature with regard to the French Revolution and particularly to Napoleon’s usurpation and the political opposition lead by Queen Louise, who appears under the Greek drapery as the real hero of Kleist’s drama.
In the 18th century - when ancient art history was becoming consolidated as a discipline, moving in a jumble of metaphysical theories inherited from Counter-Reformation moralistic spirituality – the bases for a more correct critical-artistic methodology were laid particularly by Lessing, Winckelmann and Goethe. Their common denominator was direct experience, autopsy, i.e. looking at the works with their own eyes. Indeed, what seems to be methodologically more lasting and valuable in their teaching can be summed up in the Winckelmann’s simple exhortation: “Go and look!”.
Between 1769 and 1773 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his father Leopold made three Italian journeys. Aim oft the paper is to show their four busy weeks in Naples, including their visit at the Teatro di San Carlo.
In the autumn of 1780, the Swiss Johann Georg Müller, who at that time was a student of theology in Göttingen, “as in ancient times some traveled to India or Egypt to listen to the sages”, took a trip to Weimar to get acquainted with Herder, who soon became his mentor. Later on, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Müller published the first critical edition of Herder’s work. Of this Wanderung to Weimar Müller wrote in a journal, published in 1881 by the Swiss Professorm of German literature Jakob Baechtold. While the Reisebericht was mainly taken into account by German criticism in order to reconstruct biographical aspects of Herder’s intellectual life, this essay aims to analyze Müller’s travel experience – an Erlebnis which involved his body and spirit – in the light of Herder’s philosophical-theological anthropology. This is reflected, from a formal point of view, also in the way of experiencing and describing nature and landscape in the journal, which seems to be depicted by Müller through an Herderian sensibility.
This article deals with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s experience as an Ambassador of Prussia in Rome between 1802 and 1808 by mainly focusing on his correspondences with J.W. Goethe and F. Schiller. The letters sent by Humboldt to Weimar during his Italian stay, on the one hand, tell about Humboldt’s faith in the aesthetic principles of the Weimarer Klassik and, on the other hand, discuss the topics of the «ganzer Mensch» and «Totalität». Following Goethe’s footsteps in Italy and his interrogating gaze on reality, Humboldt too tried to find a possible solution to the “static” condition of German literature of the period subsequent to the establishment of the Frühromantik as a «school». In order to shade light and discuss these issues, the article highlights Humboldt’s position towards German Classicism and Romaticism and shows how the Prussian Ambassador eventually ended up in Italy to support a peculiar synergy between these two aesthetic and cultural trends, able to bridge the gap between the guardians of classical antiquity (Goethe and Schiller) and those of romantic modernity (A.W. Schlegel, F. Schlegel, and Novalis).
Adele Schopenhauer, the philosopher’s sister and daughter of the successful novelist Johanna, was a writer and an artist as well, but he production in both fields remains little known, partly because she often used pseudonyms. This essay wants to take a closer and in many cases first look at parts of her work from the 1820s on. Adele Schopenhauer grew up in Weimar and was very close to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who became a sort of father figure for her. She was an active participant in the German culture between Classicism and Romanticism, as well as an important example of woman artist and writer: this is why her work deserves to be rediscovered.
