Programme 2024-2025

17 October 2024 
5.45pm

JOHANNES SALTZWEDEL
(Hamburg)

Werther’s World – Events and Characters of the Year 1774

The publication of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers by the 25-year-old Goethe has long been identified as a seminal event in German and European literary history. But in what contexts did his novel appear? What what was the reading world discussing in 1774? What was happening in Europe and in the world at large? These circumstances, socio-political, intellectual, artistic and scientific, are here presented as a tour d’horizon, from new literary genres to opera triumphs in Paris, from achievements in chemistry to Captain Cook's expeditions in the South Seas and the bold frauds of a false tsarina. Sectarians and blackmailers appear on stage, the social role of spas and the conditions of mobility get a mention; we hear of the first recycled paper and the first electric telegraph. There are also quite a few signs of a brooding revolutionary spirit - but for the moment, an important engagement rounds off the picture.

This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.

Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!

Please register HERE.

16 January 2025
5.45pm

KATRIN KOHL (Oxford)

Dialogue beyond Death: Epic Endings in Klopstock’s Der Messias, Goethe’s Faust and Rilke’s Duineser Elegien

(preceded by the Annual General Meeting, at 5pm, Senate House)

The talk will explore how Klopstock, Goethe and Rilke exploit the finality of an epic ending to depict both death and a journey beyond it. Der Messias, Faust and the Duineser Elegien differ markedly in terms of genre, yet Goethe competes with his predecessor’s epic by creating a tragedy of epic length and cosmic reach while the elegiac speaker in Rilke’s most ambitious work responds to the voice and hexameter rhythms in Klopstock’s epic.

By contrast with the great classical epics of antiquity, which end with the deaths of the heroes’ antagonists, the endings of these three works extend beyond the finality of death. Like Klopstock, Goethe takes his protagonist up a vertical cosmic trajectory accompanied by the celebrations of celestial choruses. Rilke by contrast depicts the journey of an unnamed youth through a mythical landscape imbued with symbols of death into which the youth eventually merges in silence. The ending of Klopstock’s religious epic marks the culmination of God’s redemptive act while Goethe and Rilke conclude their more secular works with brief poetic codas that articulate timeless maxims touching respectively on themes of gender and ecology: Goethe extols the elevating force of ‘das Ewig-Weibliche’; Rilke poignantly celebrates the modest fertility of the falling catkin.

The paper will argue that the differences between the three projects are as important as the correspondences in shaping a distinctive tradition that draws energy from its dialogic complexity.

This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.

Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!

Please register HERE.

6 March 2025
5.45pm

Prawer Lecture

MARTIN LINDNER (Oxford)

Aesthetics of Sameness and the Ethics of Narrative Representation: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) in the Context of the German-Czech National Conflict in Late Austria-Hungary

It has been a dominant historiographic narrative that nationalist and colonialist thinking in late nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary overwhelmingly pervaded cultural and political life, conceptualizing its diverse population as being divided along binary, and growingly exclusive, categories of identity and difference. This not least characterized Germanophone discourse in Central Europe, propagating ideas about cultural superiority, for example over the empire’s Slavic-language speakers, in a way that often merged tropes of inner-European difference and exoticist imagery of European colonialism overseas.

Inspired by recent revisions in Habsburg historiography, however, this lecture will discuss the often formally creative ways in which some German-language writers in Austria-Hungary challenged the divisive rhetoric of their times, by creating alternative narrative languages that foregrounded sameness and commonality. Taking the prose fiction of Moravian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) as primary example for exploring these so far neglected ‘aesthetics of sameness’, it will demonstrate how the writer challenged nationalist ideas of separation by formally rendering ambiguous markers of national, ethnic, and linguistic belonging.

Methodologically, the lecture has two aims: to demonstrate the value of a distinctively narratological approach for investigating colonialist and ethno-national identity discourses and counter-discourses as constructed cultural narratives, and secondly, to show how thinking about similarity and sameness in the complex context of multiethnic Austria-Hungary can help overcome binary identity-alterity conceptions that still characterize narrative postcolonial research in other fields of study.

This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.

Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!

Please register HERE.

10 April 2025
5.45pm

POLLY DICKSON (Durham)

Adelbert von Chamisso’s Bounding Lines

Adelbert von Chamisso was a consummate draughtsman as well as a writer, poet and botanist. His notebooks attest to a finely tuned ability to capture, with deft precision, some natural form or human likeness. But Chamisso was also a doodler, and within the extensive collection of materials in his archive are a number of dazzling and bizarre line drawings that have no obvious representational or diagrammatic content. These drawings will form the impetus for the talk. Spirographic and dreamy, tangled and immense, these whimsical designs — for which there is no precise clue as to their function or provenance — are best understood, it will be argued, as experiments in form. Chamisso’s doodles and other graphic experiments will be traced across and beyond his poetry notebooks and draft manuscripts, paying attention to how his doodling practice interweaves with, and interrupts, his forays in verse writing. Doodling emerges as a method of coping with and working through the complexities and pressures of constructing precise metrical forms. By paying close attention to Chamisso’s notebook practice, and exploring cross-medial considerations of his notational ‘style’, the paper will unfold the interplay of pleasure, compulsion, and frustration in the compositional process and make a broader case for doodles and notebook drawings as an ‘other’ writing, as writing’s shadow self. At the centre of these considerations is the intermedial form of the line — the line of verse, on the one hand, and the graphic line, on the other — measured and constrictive, yet trembling with life.

This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.

Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!

Please register HERE.

8 May 2025
5.45pm
Venue: German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WCIA 2NJ

Wilkinson-Willoughby Lecture

STEFAN MATUSCHEK (Jena)

Um Goethe betrogen. Über die anhaltende Wirkung des kulturpatriotischen Klassik-Begriffs

 

Im Gegensatz zu den europäischen Nachbarn, die Goethe als den führenden Romantiker verstanden haben, hat ihn die deutsche Germanistik aus diesem Epochenzusammenhang herausgelöst und als Klassiker gegen die Romantik profiliert. Das hatte keine wissenschaftlichen, sondern patriotische Gründe. Denn der germanistische Klassik-Begriff bezeichnet nur vorgeblich eine Epoche; tatsächlich drückt sich in ihm ein Ethos aus, mit dem man Goethe über alle zeitgenössische Literatur zum spezifisch deutschen Kulturgipfel erheben wollte. Ideologiegeschichtlich ist das vielfach aufgearbeitet worden. Was man bislang weniger sieht, ist die Verwirrung, die dieser patriotische Klassik-Begriff bis heute stiftet. Auch wenn seine politische Intention Vergangenheit ist, verstellt er weiterhin das Goethe-Verständnis.

This lecture will be given in person (German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, WC1A 2NJ) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.

Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!

Please register HERE.

22 May 2025
5.45pm

PAUL KERRY (University of Texas at Austin / Brigham Young University)

George Bancroft’s Goethe

This paper explores George Bancroft’s evolving view of Goethe and his writings. Bancroft, son of a Massachusetts clergyman, was a model Harvard student and came across German thought there. He then pursued doctoral studies at the University of Göttingen, heard lectures in Heidelberg and Berlin, and travelled in Europe (1818-22). He is often remembered for his History of the United States, a multi-volume project he worked on for decades that would grow into ten volumes and many editions, as well as for his ambassadorial roles in Great Britain and Germany. Opposed to slavery and a strong supporter of the Union, he helped to ensure the preservation President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Bancroft was invited by both houses of Congress to eulogize Lincoln after the latter’s assassination.  

Scholars have suggested that Bancroft’s conservative New England background kept his intellectual interests narrow during his time studying in Germany. He was, for example, under a strict charge from his Harvard mentors to avoid German theology. He is strategic in what he conveys in his letters to his Harvard supporters who have provided him with the funds to make this extraordinary opportunity available to him. Yet, his journal entries provide a different story. Bancroft begins to make his own assessments and exercises his agency to listen to the lectures he chooses to hear, including in German theology. This paper seeks to use archival research to better situate Bancroft’s personal experience of visiting with Goethe in Weimar, as well as his subsequent assessments of Goethe’s writings in prominent American periodicals of the day, in the context of Bancroft’s broader experience in Göttingen, as well as Bancroft’s changing interests, expanding public and professional roles, and his own published writings. These help to shed light on the nuance and complexities of intercultural transfer and of transatlantic intellectual influence and reception.

Please register HERE.