Programme 2025-2026

23 October 2025
5.45pm

Jeremy Adler (London)

A Revolutionary in Weimar.
Goethe’s Social Thought between Locke and Rousseau, Hegel and Marx

Goethe more than once styles himself as the 'Befreier' of Germany in later years in the manner of Simon Bolivar, the 'libertardor' of South America, thus staking his historical claim as a revolutionary. This English Goethe Society Lecture teases out the features of Goethe’s thought that support revolutionary action. It is shown how he stood behind the American Revolution as well as its contagion to France and how – notwithstanding his subsequent horror over the Terror – he maintained this stance until old age. Both revolutions protested against alienation in the original legal sense, still operative in Rousseau, and attacked by Hegel and Marx in existential and economic terms. Social theory from Rousseau to Hegel and Marx sought to overcome such all-pervasive alienation to achieve the state of nature in the modern world. In this, Goethe follows Locke, echoing the dictum 'America is everywhere' in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.

It has been said that Goethe’s writings are defined by happiness – a view based solely on his poetry – but taking account of his oeuvre as a whole, the opposite is true. His writing is typified by anxiety, alienation, and danger: Werther, Faust, Tasso and Wilhelm Meister suffer various forms of ‘Entzweiung’.  On this view, society is a place of danger. Tasso’s ‘ich bin mir selbst entwandt’ represents an archetypical expression of the alienation that typifies modernity. This fretful condition needs to be overcome to enable the good life.  Only by mastering alienation can mankind achieve happiness. This can be seen in a work such as Egmont. The Netherlands are not exactly a happy place. They are defined by political alienation – a deep division between the Dutch bourgeoisie and their Spanish oppressors. But far from being a historical drama, Egmont is in fact a coded drama which tacitly supports the Dutch uprisings of the 1780s and thus shows Goethe’s continuing allegiance to revolution.  The structure of alienation he depicts leads from division as critiqued by Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, to reconciliation. As evidence for this linkage, it is noted that even Goethe’s vocabulary is adopted by Hegel and Marx.

Jeremy Adler is Emeritus Professor of German at King’s College London and poet. His latest publications From the Renaissance to Modernism: Goethe and German Poetry and The Compass of Dignity: Persecution, Literature, and the Law appeared with Legenda in June this year. 

This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.

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

Please register HERE.

4 December 2025
5.45pm

Wilkinson-Willoughby Lecture

Navid Kermani

Goethe und die Religionen

This lecture will be delivered in German.

Goethes religiöse Entwicklung hat viele Wendungen genommen und ihn zu scheinbar oder tatsächlich widersprüchlichen Äußerungen über das Christentum, ja beinah alle Religionen geführt, die seinerzeit überhaupt nur studierbar waren. Und trotzdem weisen die Grundzüge der Goetheschen Religiosität vom ersten bis zum letzten Lebensjahrzehnt eine bemerkenswerte Kontinuität auf: Es ist eine Religiosität der unmittelbaren Anschauung und der allmenschlichen Erfahrung, der präzisen Beobachtung und der naheliegenden, schon dem Kind notwendig erscheinenden Schlüsse. Sie kommt ohne Spekulation und fast ohne Glauben aus, insofern Goethe sie auf einen natürlichen, von Erziehung und Denken allenfalls verschütteten Instinkt des Menschen zurückführt, sich selbst als Geschöpf und die Natur als Schöpfung zu betrachten.

Glaube ist ja überhaupt ein unpassendes Wort für Goethes Religiosität. Subjektiv glaubte Goethe nicht an Gott – er erkannte Ihn, sah, hörte, roch, fühlte, erlebte, atmete und begriff im doppelten Sinne des Wortes, daß es einen einigen Gott geben müsse. Wo andere aus der Religion eine Weltanschauung ableiteten, leitete Goethe umgekehrt aus der Anschauung der Welt religiöse Grundsätze ab – ‘denn das Einfache verbirgt sich im Mannigfaltigen, und da ists, wo bei mir der Glaube eintritt, der nicht der Anfang, sondern das Ende allen Wissens ist’. Goethes Frömmigkeit und seine naturwissenschaftlichen Forschungen widersprechen sich nicht, sind nicht einmal beziehungslos, nein: Glaube und Wissenschaft, Poesie und Naturkunde bedingen und ergänzen einander. Das läßt sich insbesondere am Beispiel  seiner Beschäftigung mit dem Islam zeigen, die ihren glänzenden Ausdruck im West-östlichen Divan gefunden hat.

Navid Kermani ist Schriftsteller, Reporter, und habiliertierter Orientalist. 2015 erhielt er den Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, 2024 den Thomas-Mann-Preis. Unter den neuesten Veröffentlichungen sind Zu Hause ist es am schönsten, sagt die linke Hand und hielt sich an der Heizung fest (Hanser) und Wenn sich unsere Herzen gleich öffnen. Über Politik und Liebe (Beck).

This lecture will be given in person (Bedford Room, G37, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.

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

Please register HERE.

29 January 2026
5.45pm

Katja Haustein (Kent)

Goethe's Tact and Austen's Delicacy, or: Theory as Practice

The lecture will be preceded by the English Goethe Society AGM at 5pm.

In this English Goethe Society lecture, Haustein reflects on tact, understood as a special form of judgement that cannot simply be learned with the help of a book of manners, but rather appears as an ability to react intuitively and appropriately to a concrete situation. As a slight but meaningful deviation from codified forms of behaviour, tact emerged as a key concept around the time of the French Revolution, when traditional hierarchies and social norms were upended, and new modes of communication had to be found. The lecture explores the different articulations of ‘Takt’, frequently translated as ‘delicacy’, in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) and Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). Written in the context of the Napoleonic Wars, both novels feature similar thematic frameworks, including a country house setting, testing virtue in shifting romantic configurations, and the interplay between manners, morality, and landscaping. Both are novels of ideas, unpacking the relationship between individual and society, and the tensions between habit, change, and excess. But the role of ‘Takt’ and ‘delicacy’ in both novels, Haustein wants to argue, is rather different. While Goethe associates ‘Takt’ with the individual’s resistance against  societal norms, Austen integrates ‘delicacy’ into the broader social framework, emphasizing its function within established codes of civility. Taken together, both novels allow us, therefore, to tease out tact’s paradoxical structure, that oscillates between subversion and affirmation, and that, as a ‘fine responsiveness to the concrete’ (Nussbaum), continues to inform theories of human understanding to this day.

Dr Katja Haustein is Honorary Lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Kent and author of Alone with Others: An Essay on Tact in Five Modernist Encounters (CUP 2023). 

This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.

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

Please register HERE.

26 February 2026
5.45pm

The 2026 Prawer Lecture

Timothy Powell (Oxford)

Hans Sachs in Weimar: Goethe’s Recovery of Hans Sachs and its Afterlife in the German Democratic Republic

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) glowing reappraisal of Hans Sachs (1494–1576) radically reshaped Enlightenment writers’ perceptions of Sachs and his writings. Some viewed him as the best of a barren field of German authors before prescriptive poetics; others mocked him as an unlearned fool whose works were offensive to good taste. Drawing on Book 18 of Dichtung und Wahrheit (1833), this lecture shows how Goethe turned the tables on Sachs’ critics, arguing that his ‘didactic realism’ and versification could reinvigorate contemporary German literature. With Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), he celebrated Sachs in the Neuer Teutscher Merkur (April 1776) as a poetic genius – the highest ideal of the Sturm und Drang movement. Surprisingly, Goethe’s engagement with Sachs and his writings provided a crucial interpretative framework for their appropriation for communist cultural ideology in the early German Democratic Republic. 1950s GDR readers channelled the spirit of Goethe’s revival of Sachs to kickstart the revival of his dramas in the GDR. In an astonishing twist on Weimar poetics, Goethe’s observations about Sachs’ ‘didactic realism’ also enabled East German literary historians to appropriate him in the 1960s as a canonical author anticipating Marxist-Leninist literary ideals of 'Socialist Realism' and didactic literature.

Timothy Powell is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford.

This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.

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

Please register HERE.

30 April 2026
5.45pm

Yael Almog (Durham)

In the Shadow of Romanticism: Mendelssohn, Herder, and the Jewish Political Imagination

 

Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783) is a landmark text for claiming political rights for Jewish individuals. In this English Goethe Society lecture Almog argues that Mendelssohn’s vision of toleration draws on a surprising source: Johann Gottfried Herder’s theology-inflected philosophy of world history. Herder’s non-hierarchical account of cultures, which revalorised oral traditions as lasting contributions to humanity, shaped Mendelssohn’s defence of Judaism as a vital, orally grounded tradition. Reading Jerusalem through the lens of Herder’s cultural pluralism resolves a key tension in Mendelssohn’s thought: his simultaneous insistence on Judaism’s singularity and on the equal dignity of all cultures. The second part of the lecture reflects on how this intellectual entanglement reverberated into twentieth-century Jewish political thought, by engaging with Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Ze’ev Sternhell, who each wrestled with Herder as both promise and peril for Jewish emancipation. Revisiting Mendelssohn’s debt to Herder thus unsettles the narrative of Jewish modernity as a simple struggle for integration: it reveals how Jewish thought itself became a testing ground for Europe’s radical ideas of cultural plurality.

Yael Almog is Associate Professor of German at Durham University. Her research encompasses the cultural history of Germany from 1750 to the present, with a focus on theology, particularly the interactions between Jewish and Christian communities and the evolution of German-Jewish thought. Her publications include Secularism and Hermeneutics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

This lecture will be given in person (Room 261, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.

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

Please register HERE.

28 May 2026
5.30 for 6pm

The 2026 Ida Herz Lecture

Susan Bernofsky (Columbia)

On Magicking a Mountain: World-Making in Literary Translation

Susan Bernofsky is Professor of Writing in the Faculty of Arts at Columbia University. She is the author of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale, 2021), and has translated more than twenty books including three novels and four collections of short prose by the Swiss-German author Robert Walser, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Hesse’s Siddhartha. Her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days (2014) won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently working on a new translation of Thomas Mann’s monumental novel The Magic Mountain for W.W. Norton.

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

Please register HERE.