BY Martin Puchner
Detail from Goethe, dictating to his scribe (1831) by Johann Joseph Schmeller PHOTO/Wikipedia
How markets, Marx, and provincial elites created world literature to fight both empire and nationalism
On the afternoon of 31 January 1827, a new vision of literature was born. On that day, Johann Peter Eckermann, faithful secretary to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, went over to his master’s house, as he had done hundreds of times in the past three and a half years. Goethe reported that he had been reading Chinese Courtship (1824), a Chinese novel. ‘Really? That must have been rather strange!’ Eckermann exclaimed. ‘No, much less so than one thinks,’ Goethe replied.
A surprised Eckermann ventured that this Chinese novel must be exceptional. Wrong again. The master’s voice was stern: ‘Nothing could be further from the truth. The Chinese have thousands of them, and had them when our ancestors were still living in the trees.’ Then Goethe reached for the term that stunned his secretary: ‘The era of world literature is at hand, and everyone must contribute to accelerating it.’ World literature – the idea of world literature – was born out of this conversation in Weimar, a provincial German town of 7,000 people.
Like the rest of Europe, Weimar fell under the cultural shadow of Paris. The city exported its metropolitan culture, making Europeans read French novels, recite French poetry and watch French plays. Many German artists and intellectuals responded to Paris’s cultural domination with a nationalist initiative. They collected folk tales and other components of popular and peasant pastime, valorising an entity called German culture. Indeed, they helped to make the essentially German idea of culture – as opposed to the Anglo ‘society’ or the French ‘civilisation’ – the foundation for a future nation state.
Goethe himself had been educated in the French manner. He agreed with German nationalists that cultural dependence on France must end. But he disagreed with their search for native German culture and folk traditions. Goethe searched for an alternative to both metropolitan culture and German nationalism. First, he turned to England, especially William Shakespeare, but soon realised that Anglo cultural dominance was no improvement. He needed something not just different, but bigger and better. The solution was world literature.
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