What do you think?
Rate this book
Mythos Weimar. Zwischen Geist und Macht.
Rare Book
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
2 people are currently reading
28 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Read
November 23, 2016Merseburger's theme is the role of Weimar and it's cultural life in the performance, creation and recreation of ideas of German cultural life and national identity. For Merseburger there has always been an inter play between Geist which we may understand as the purely spiritual or aesthetic and Macht: power and authority .
Merseburger begins his cultural history with Martin Luther who by first declaring the Priesthood of all believers and by translating the Bible - first the New Testament just up the road from Weimar in the Wartburg allows every literate person the possibility of making up their own mind on issues of Christian faith, later back tracks and establishes a system of Church discipline replacing the original opportunity for freedom of opinion with freedom only for his own opinion. The connection to Weimar is a little tenuous to start - Luther had preached there but was based in Wittenburg. Luther in exemplifies the book's thesis in that in being an awkward figure, since from a national or a cultural perspective he could be celebrated for his role in establishing a modern literary language and for bonus points resisting foreign domination, on the other hand he was the founding father of the confessional split amongst Germans and so could not be completely successful for alter generations to present as a unifying national figure.
After a brief cantata and set of variations from J.S.Bach in passing we get to the meat of the argument with Goethe and Schiller (and to a much lesser extent Herder and Wieland). These gentlemen first became problematic in the era of the war which raged from 1813 against Napoleon as others looked for national heroes they suddenly became problematic. Schiller had happily accepted French Citizenship in the days of the First Republic, while Goethe remained a fan of Napoleon (although meeting, as one does Metternich at Karlsbad on year while taking the waters, he was converted by the latter to support the Russian led 'Holy Alliance' which liked to stamp on anybody critical of the divine right of rulers to do as they please and wear enormous slashes) and was not keen on democracy - although he has been rehabilitated post 1945 because he was not a martial figure and unkeen on military affairs. In the period after 1815 men in particular who had served as volunteers with the aim of achieving a unified democraticish state where at a loss, standing as though on the edge of an abyss over looking a sea of fog and mist before them, Germany's literary heroes offered little comfort unless one was creative - so what if Schiller had written no epic calling for a unified national German state - one could just pick and chose the appropriate bits of his oeuvre (well not his oeuvre because that'd be too French and at this stage German nationalism was anti-French) Schiller himself could be Der Jungfrau von Orleans -the innocent young woman from the countryside who spoke truth to power, specifically urging them to get off their backsides and throw out the foreigners(or foreign influence or French corsets which ever), Wallenstein a potential 'German' leader, the oath from Wilhelm Tell an example for Germans, Die Rauber one could just ignore, just as one could ignore Goethe's irony and take Faust II at face value, a prophecy of development, even industrialisation.
This marked just the beginning as each subsequent political era sought to find in the Weimar heritage their own reflection, ironically there wasn't much of a difference between Nazi, Communist or even second Empire (1871-1919) interpretations, the spirit of Potsdam (order, duty, obedience to authority) was something they could all share despite all their other differences. Another thread in this book is how Weimar could function as a counter pole to Potsdam by representing the disorder, disobedience and freedom of artistic invention - hence Bauhaus (which only later was to move to Dessau), but also small town values in opposition to the big city so there is aesthetic opposition to Wilhelm II's purposive use of art, or Nazi opposition to 'cultural Bolshevism' or americanisation, Weimar could the 'authentic' - the 'real' Germany, so towards the close of the book Weimar has an evil twin - Buchenwald. It was also counter- cultural for Merseburger in continuing to be a venue for certain aristocratic behaviours so the Abbé Liszt's romantic career parallels Goethe's. The town turns out to be at the centre of Germany's colonisation project as the Duke of Weimar married a wealthy Princess of the house of Orange whose commercial operations in Indonesia were apparently inspirational although not strictly imitated in the German colonies.
Plainly this is an ambitious rollicking book like a drunken conversation with Ben Johnson it spins off endlessly, towards the political left and right from the demotic to the aristocratic from people dressed up as triangles or the spirit of the colour blue at a Bauhaus party to the sad story of Schiller's bones and the ongoing argument over whether the right ones were found or not. It is a lesson in how cultural figures can 't get to be themselves after their deaths but lead these strange after lives sometimes so different from their own existences that as in the case of Neitzsche they have to become a non-person and are exiled from the cultural pantheon. It is an engaging look at perhaps Germany's biggest cultural knot a place where many lives where tied together.
Merseburger begins his cultural history with Martin Luther who by first declaring the Priesthood of all believers and by translating the Bible - first the New Testament just up the road from Weimar in the Wartburg allows every literate person the possibility of making up their own mind on issues of Christian faith, later back tracks and establishes a system of Church discipline replacing the original opportunity for freedom of opinion with freedom only for his own opinion. The connection to Weimar is a little tenuous to start - Luther had preached there but was based in Wittenburg. Luther in exemplifies the book's thesis in that in being an awkward figure, since from a national or a cultural perspective he could be celebrated for his role in establishing a modern literary language and for bonus points resisting foreign domination, on the other hand he was the founding father of the confessional split amongst Germans and so could not be completely successful for alter generations to present as a unifying national figure.
After a brief cantata and set of variations from J.S.Bach in passing we get to the meat of the argument with Goethe and Schiller (and to a much lesser extent Herder and Wieland). These gentlemen first became problematic in the era of the war which raged from 1813 against Napoleon as others looked for national heroes they suddenly became problematic. Schiller had happily accepted French Citizenship in the days of the First Republic, while Goethe remained a fan of Napoleon (although meeting, as one does Metternich at Karlsbad on year while taking the waters, he was converted by the latter to support the Russian led 'Holy Alliance' which liked to stamp on anybody critical of the divine right of rulers to do as they please and wear enormous slashes) and was not keen on democracy - although he has been rehabilitated post 1945 because he was not a martial figure and unkeen on military affairs. In the period after 1815 men in particular who had served as volunteers with the aim of achieving a unified democraticish state where at a loss, standing as though on the edge of an abyss over looking a sea of fog and mist before them, Germany's literary heroes offered little comfort unless one was creative - so what if Schiller had written no epic calling for a unified national German state - one could just pick and chose the appropriate bits of his oeuvre (well not his oeuvre because that'd be too French and at this stage German nationalism was anti-French) Schiller himself could be Der Jungfrau von Orleans -the innocent young woman from the countryside who spoke truth to power, specifically urging them to get off their backsides and throw out the foreigners(or foreign influence or French corsets which ever), Wallenstein a potential 'German' leader, the oath from Wilhelm Tell an example for Germans, Die Rauber one could just ignore, just as one could ignore Goethe's irony and take Faust II at face value, a prophecy of development, even industrialisation.
This marked just the beginning as each subsequent political era sought to find in the Weimar heritage their own reflection, ironically there wasn't much of a difference between Nazi, Communist or even second Empire (1871-1919) interpretations, the spirit of Potsdam (order, duty, obedience to authority) was something they could all share despite all their other differences. Another thread in this book is how Weimar could function as a counter pole to Potsdam by representing the disorder, disobedience and freedom of artistic invention - hence Bauhaus (which only later was to move to Dessau), but also small town values in opposition to the big city so there is aesthetic opposition to Wilhelm II's purposive use of art, or Nazi opposition to 'cultural Bolshevism' or americanisation, Weimar could the 'authentic' - the 'real' Germany, so towards the close of the book Weimar has an evil twin - Buchenwald. It was also counter- cultural for Merseburger in continuing to be a venue for certain aristocratic behaviours so the Abbé Liszt's romantic career parallels Goethe's. The town turns out to be at the centre of Germany's colonisation project as the Duke of Weimar married a wealthy Princess of the house of Orange whose commercial operations in Indonesia were apparently inspirational although not strictly imitated in the German colonies.
Plainly this is an ambitious rollicking book like a drunken conversation with Ben Johnson it spins off endlessly, towards the political left and right from the demotic to the aristocratic from people dressed up as triangles or the spirit of the colour blue at a Bauhaus party to the sad story of Schiller's bones and the ongoing argument over whether the right ones were found or not. It is a lesson in how cultural figures can 't get to be themselves after their deaths but lead these strange after lives sometimes so different from their own existences that as in the case of Neitzsche they have to become a non-person and are exiled from the cultural pantheon. It is an engaging look at perhaps Germany's biggest cultural knot a place where many lives where tied together.
December 27, 2020
Ein sehr informatives Buch über die Gesichter der Stadt Weimar über mehrerer Jahrhunderte hinweg. Ich fand es interessant und tatsächlich auch spannend zu lesen, obwohl sich manche Stellen sehr in die Länge gezogen haben.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews