The prevailing view still sees Goethe’s development in terms of the cliché of a maturation process. After the Sturm und Drang period, according to this schema, the poet learned self-discipline. His experience with classical antiquity had fostered a process of self-clarification in him and helped him to take the so-called standpoint of the pure and unalloyed work of art—all this proceeding in accordance with the line from Faust, “No matter how absurdly the must acts, in the end we do get a wine.” Goethe himself contributed assiduously to this view of his classicism; in turn, it paved the way for his establishment as a classical author. It is not only its trivialness that makes this construction suspect, not only the fact that it confuses a stylistic principle—if indeed that was what was involved—with the authenticity of the aesthetic achievement, which is precisely what the concept of the classical is intended to mean insofar as it expresses something more than the accumulation of success. Above and beyond this, the schema of a clarification or decantation process does Goethe an injustice in suggesting that his work repudiated the experience of darkness, the experience of the force of negativity, and simulated a harmony that was impossible in the era of an emancipated subjectivity opposed to any and every pre-existing social order. Not the least of the merits of Artur Henkel’s essay on the “devilishly humane Iphigenie” is to have demolished that convention and emphasized the power of the mythic in the very drama that, until Tasso and Die natürliche Tochter, had most definitively established Goethean classicism as a type. Henkel does not conform to the sloppy practice of speaking about myth as a figure for something supratemporal or transcendental: rather, as Benjamin does in the tractatus on Goethe’e Elective Affinities, he speaks of it as the web of guilt in which the living are entangled, as fate. Myth in this sense, a present-day prehistorical world, is present throughout the whole of Goethe’s oeuvre. One could easily conceive the whole of his work as a process of dealing with the mythic stratum. For him this stratum is not a symbol for ideas but bodily entanglement in nature. Blind, quasi-natural conditions live on, even in the society of the age of enlightenment. In this form they make their way into Goethe’s work. His work gets its dignity from the weight it accords the mythic moment; the truth content of his work can be defined as humane only in dialectical relationship to that moment, not as something preached in the absence of a context. This differentiates it not only from Schiller’s classicism, which celebrates the Kantian world of ideas, but also from the sphere of plaster of Paris statuary to which Goethe’s taste was by no means immune. Even with artists of the highest rank one must take into account the artist’s distance from the materials through and about which he expresses himself. Goethe’s relationship to the plastic arts is by no means beyond question. This extends to the fable convenue that Goethe was what is called a visual person, an “Augenmensch.” The force of Goethe’s language so drowns out the visible that despite his celebrated visual precision the language flows over into music. Goethe’s reservations about music, in contrast, correspond more to a gesture of fending off the mythic stratum, a gesture to which Goethe was impelled by the latter’s menacing power, than to his own poetic fiber. Anyone who as a child witnessed a classicistic production of Iphigenie with Hedwig Bleibtreu will remember how the whole thing seemed to move by virtually invisibly, how far from any kind of material sensuousness it was, so that one’s senses seemed to slip away in watching it.
One could hardly imagine a stronger argument against characterizing Goethe in his middle period as a classicist. The drama Iphigenie seems to tower above the sphere of culture in which the word classicism has its niche and to be incommensurable with that sphere; the Greeks and Scythians in the drama are not representatives of an invariant humanness removed from the empirical world but clearly belong to historically determined stages of humanity. It has often been noted, most recently by Henkel, that in this process psychic conflicts within individual personalities have taken the place of a cosmos spanning both inner and outer domains, the cosmos that the classicistic view of the Greeks, Hegel’s included, assumes. Henkel leaves no doubt that in Goethe the assimilation and transformation of mythic material is inseparable from sedimented Christianity. Nevertheless, certain foolish ideas persist, such as the one held by the commentator in the Jubiläum edition, who asks in all seriousness “whether we have in Iphigenie more of a German or a Greek tragedy” and, on the same level, announces that this “eternal work of art” developed from the prose writing during and after Goethe’s Italian journey. That the work of art lives on is due to the very moments that are suppressed when it is elevated to the Pantheon. The historico-philosophical accent placed on the interaction between myth and the subject gives the text its unfading modern quality, at least when one looks at it without letting oneself be impressed or irritated by the authority of current literary history.
The aspect of historical movement that entered into Iphigenie dates back to the protest raised by the young Goethe and his friends against the guilt-laden aspect of civilization, which was glaringly evident in the final phase of absolutism. Nature was to be emancipated from what had been established through usurpation, and uninhibited impulse was no longer to be clipped; what went by the name of genius in those days, including the intentional crudeness that the young Goethe immediately restrained, directed its critical attacks as much to those ends as against an artistic form developed on the model of the French grand siècle and rigidly imitated in Germany. The civilizing moment, however, is a moment within art itself, in that art is something made, something that emerges from the state of nature. The notion that art must become nature again, a notion that reverberates on into German Idealism, contains equal measures of truth and untruth. Truth, because it reminds art to speak for what is suppressed by domination of any kind, including rational domination; untruth, because such speech cannot be imagined other than as a language rational in turn, a language mediated by the totality of culture. By divesting myth of its literalness and transposing it into the world of images, art involves itself in enlightenment; like Rousseau’s philosophy, it is a stage of civilization and its corrective at one and the same time. Insofar as the voice of a mature bourgeoisie made itself heard in what was then contemporary art, its historical relevance lay in its antimythological moment; it was the enemy of illegitimate legitimacy and unlawful law. But art could not be conceived as the polemical adversary of civilization for more than a polemical instant; its very existence gives the lie to the inflated, barbaric, and provincial quality of tirades like Schiller’s on the “ink-splattering seculum.” Especially in Germany, where the anti-civilizing impulse in art was clogged with economic backwardness, in comparison to the bourgeois civilization of the West, spirit had to work hard at civilization if it did not want to either cut the ground out from under its own feet or pursue empty victories. The Weimar Goethe, who had sought out a link with high society and thereby with an international level of awareness, acted as an agent of the deprovincialization of the German spirit. Nietzsche touched on that when, a hundred years later, he praised him as having been the last German to be a European event. Although this kind of deprovincialization took the revolutionary teeth out of the political movement of his contemporaries, and while Goethe came back in line and suspended radical innovations in form that ultimately went beyond him and could not be stopped, still, on the other hand, measuring himself in terms of civilization and renouncing the contrived tones of genius, Goethe took a stance that was more modern than that of the Hainbündler, the Sturm und Drang, and the early Romantics. He saw that anyone who honors the contract that every work of art sets before him commits himself to the work’s immanent law, that of its objectivation. When he acts as though he were beyond all this, the poet usually proves impotent in his own production. The lack of power in the literature of the Sturm und Drang period could not be attributed to a deficiency of talent in such highly gifted authors as Lenz. Goethe had to see in it the futility of the gesture of immediacy in a state of affairs characterized by universal mediation. Goethe’s classicism does not imitate the archaic. The specific element of classical antiquity in Iphigenie, which the aging Goethe may have overestimated in retrospect, reveals one potential of his literary genius more than it reflects his having drawn on a fund of materials as Schiller did. If one were not intimidated by paradox one could no doubt defend the thesis that the actual element of classical antiquity in the classicistic Goethe, the mythic element, is none other than the chaotic element of his youth. Through its objectivation it is resettled, so to speak, in the world of prehistory and not dressed up as the façade of an eternal present. Precisely because Goethe does not imitate the archaic, his work acquires an archaic element. There are good reasons why he puts his Greek drama in an older, extraterritorial setting rather than in an Attic-classical one. The pragmatic premise of Iphigenie is barbarism. As a zone of trouble or disaster, it is in harmony with mythic fate. As Iphigenie says at the beginning of the play, “an alien curse [is taking hold] of me” (line 84). The world in which she has found refuge, and from which she would like to flee, is forcibly closed in on itself in every word, and even more in the melody of its words. If one hopes to mean more by Goethe’s classicism than that he restored the Aristotelian unities and used iambs—and what amazing iambs!—one will have to start with the fact that civilization, from which literature cannot escape, despite the fact that it tries to break through it, is made thematic in his work. Iphigenie and Tasso are dramas of civilization. They reflect the defining power of reality to which the Sturm und Drang movement closed its eyes. In this regard they are more realistic than the Sturm und Drang movement and more adequate in their historico-philosophical consciousness.
This distinguishes Goethe’s classicism emphatically from all formalistic classicism, from the polish of Thorwaldsen and Canova. Contrary to the accepted view and to the unconsidered use of the word “form,” Goethean classicism is to be deduced from his content. Invoking Goethe’s own words and the contemporaneous ones of Schiller, it is customary to call that content Humanität or das Humane,* in accordance with the unmistakable intention of elevating respect for human freedom, for the self-determination of every individual, to the status of a universal standing above particularistic customs and nationalistic narrow-mindedness. As unequivocally as Iphigenie opts for the humane, however, its substance is not exhausted in that plaidoyer; humanity is the content of the play rather than its substance. Nietzsche once said that the difference between Schiller and Shakespeare was that Shakespeare’s aphorisms contained genuine ideas while those of Schiller were commonplaces; by the same criterion the Goethe of Iphigenie should be placed alongside Shakespeare, although the play is by no means lacking in quotable lines. It is the difference between preaching an ideal and giving artistic form to the historical tension inherent in it. In Iphigenie, Humanität is dealt with through the experience of its antinomy. Once emancipated, the subject, which did not emancipate itself in the civilizing process so much as emerge from it, comes into conflict with civilization and its rules. The element in classicism which can justly be called stylization, and which is heteronomous in the gruesome sense that the style clothes the figures like drapery, is not classical but rather an expression of that lack of consonance, a residue of unfused objectivity, something not reconciled with the subject and in contradiction to the claims of civilization. By virtue of this contradiction, Goethe’s historical standpoint as well as his technique are very close to the Hegel whom the philosophical schema holds to be so unlike him. Paul Tillich noted this connection more than thirty years ago. The conflict between the civilized subject, nourished on civilization and weakened by it, and civilization is the conflict of Tasso. Tasso’s tragic end—Goethe wisely avoided the word tragedy and spoke once again of Schauspiel, drama—reveals that the emancipated subject cannot live freely in the bourgeois society that dangles freedom before it. The subject’s right is confirmed only in its demise. In Iphigenie this antinomy is not yet so obvious. It is displaced onto the clash of two peoples from two different epochs. Civilization, the stage of the mature subject, outstrips mythic immaturity, thereby becoming guilty toward it and entangled in the mythic web of guilt. It comes into its own and attains reconciliation only by negating itself through the confession the shrewd Greek makes to the humane barbarian king. That confession offers up in sacrifice the spirit of self-preservation of her companions in civilization. It is because of this dialectic as well that Iphigenie’s humaneness is devilish; she becomes humane only at the moment in which Humanität no longer insists on itself and its higher law.
In that dialectic, form moves to the center: both as construction of the whole and the parts and in linguistic heights wholly new to German literature. The style of the work is the all-penetrating ether of its language. The primacy of form brings the civilizing moment, the thematic material, into the substance of the work. The progressive refinement and ultimate disappearance of what is crude are not the aim of the heroine alone. The form of every sentence is accomplished with a well-considered and crafted µεσότης [just proportion] of formulation. It is oddly coupled with a warm, encompassing streaming. Even extreme and frightening states of affairs participate in the streaming, without being weakened thereby. When, antithetically, the Scythian king is silent or uses few words, his terseness no longer seems that of someone who is not fully able to express himself; his silence works toward civilization in its own right, negotiated down from a raging outburst. Thoas’ laconic interjections in the final lines, the transition from the pragmatic “So geht”—“Go, then”—(line 2151) to his celebrated “Lebt wohl” (line 2174)—“Fare thee well”—the conventionality of which contains, in that context, an unprecedented weight of substance, owe their irresistible charm to this hidden abundance. The autonomy of form in Iphigenie is fundamentally different from French classicism, where language aids the civilizing element separately from and prior to any poetic process. Goethe’s language has to emerge along with the substance of the drama; this is what gives it the freshness of forest and hollow. Goethe had to deal with the problem peculiar to a literature thrown back on subjective experience: that of objectifying itself without participating in any objectivity that would serve as its foundation. In language he found the possibility of a balance, as though in spite of everything language were somehow still prior to the subject in a subjectivistic age, and capable of receiving every subjective impulse and accommodating to it. With Iphigenie begins language’s development into an objectifying moment, a development that culminates in Flaubert and Baudelaire. The reconciliation of the subject with something that evades it, a reconciliation with which language is burdened, the substitution of form for a content antagonistic to the subject, is already fully visible in Iphigenie. It was able to succeed because the tensions in the content are precipitated in something that is aesthetic in the strict sense, that is, in the autonomy of form. Language becomes the representative of order, and at the same time produces order out of freedom, out of subjectivity, in a manner not so very different from that envisioned by the Idealist philosophy Goethe could not stand. Stylization, the element that nevertheless remains a pseudomorphosis to classical antiquity, was produced by the irreconcilability of what genius was supposed to reconcile. A classicistic mentality or Weltanschauung is irrelevant there; in its fragmentary quality, Goethe’s classicism proves its worth as correct consciousness, as a figure of something that cannot be arbitrated but which its idea consists of arbitrating.
Goethe’s classicism is not the resolute countermovement of a chastened man to his early work but rather the dialectical consequence of that early work. Here a reference to artistic nominalism is necessary, the supremacy of the particular and individual over the universal and the concept. This nominalism is the implicit presupposition of Goethe’s production. It is not so much put out of action as it is spellbound by the parti pris of the late and even the middle Goethe in favor of the universal. It is urbourgeois; neither Goethe nor any other bourgeois artist could escape it. It forbids the imparting of meaning to the work of art from above. The renunciation of plot in the traditional sense, the conception of an open drama fed inductively, by experience, and the admixture of the epic element after the middle of the eighteenth century were all explicit signs of nominalism. That nominalism drove the young Goethe as well. His pathos, like that of the other Sturm und Drang writers, was incompatible with it. That pathos had taken shape under the sign of Shakespeare, a revolt of the subject and its deluded hope of breathing into the work of art the meaningfulness it had forfeited with the irrevocable loss of ontology; and of doing so through the pure display of its original force. The antinomy that was to be kept at its most pointed in that ephemeral activity and which is a far more accurate characterization of classicism than the idea of something atemporal, enduring, and unassailable—that antinomy is the antinomy of nominalism, which continues its forceful advance in art as in thought, keeping step with the progress of bourgeoisification. It requires the forgoing of any unity that would be established prior to the parts and would hold them together; unity is to crystallize out of the individual parts. But the individual details thereby lose the function that would serve as the basis for that crystallization: not only do they not retain the certainty of their meaning within the whole but they lose even the orienting constants through which the details move forward and rise above their particular existence. Classicism is the fragile response to this; its practice of keeping to a precarious mean and distancing itself from the extremes is concretized through its avoidance of aprioristic constructions and their echo in the discourse of pathos on the one hand and its avoidance on the other hand of aconceptual detail that threatens to sink from the aesthetic continuum down into preaesthetic empirical reality. But the classicist solution is fragile because it is in fact prohibited by the nominalist antinomy, and it balances where no reconciliation is possible. It becomes something achieved by means of tact. Through the semblance of naturalness, it conceals the hand that does the staging, the hand that gives meaning; through careful polishing it smooths off the unruliness of the now outlying details. In that act of hiding, or staging, the a priori of form, which though dismantled by nominalism does not yield to it, is nevertheless preserved. This gives classicism its insubstantial quality. That insubstantiality in turn shines back upon classicism as the gleam of the ephemeral, and at the same time predestines classicism to ideology, to the secret preservation of something that no longer exists. The unparalleled linguistic sensitivity of Goethe the lyric poet led him to realize that nominalist pathos is empty. The work of art, delivered over unreservedly to mediation through the subject, cannot achieve in unmediated subjective self-expression what that self-expression is protesting against. The protest gives the lie to the coherence of the content. The content is forced to exaggerate if it is to believe itself.
What Goethe was forced to by his artistic work was natural speech. The generation of his youth, and he along with it, had been seduced by naturalness, but since then naturnalness, as the abstract negation of unnaturalness, had become as unnatural as the “ha’s” that echo through Schiller’s work Die Räuber, among others. Through its own concept, natural speech becomes tempered speech, nonviolent speech. Hence it converges with Humanität as the state of nonviolence. It spreads across the cosmos of the work. What must have fascinated Goethe in classical antiquity, because it corresponded to what was needed at the time, was this kind of naturalness. It was this the style of Iphigenie was aimed at, not stylization; stylization is the scar it bears. In the Goethe of the middle period, for the first time in German literature, the poetic ideal is that of complete lack of constraint, désinvolture. The nature-dominating gesture relaxes, and language loses its cramped quality. Language now finds its autonomy not in self-assertion but through renunciation in favor of the subject matter, to which it clings fervently. The nature poetry of the young Goethe was the highest model of this, although Goethe also owes Wieland a great deal in the transition of Germany literary language to a civilized naturalness.
Goethe’s désinvolture, however, which held not only for the poetic subject but also for the relations among the dramatis personae, had its societal index. If Goethe could no longer tolerate protest, this was partly due to the critique of the bourgeois spirit, a spirit in which he himself had participated intimately. He was disgusted by the bourgeois who sets himself up as a hero; he had a sense of the dark secret of a revolution and an allegedly emancipated consciousness that, as in France around 1789, has to present itself through declamation because it is not completely true, because in it Humanität becomes repression and interferes with full humanness. In the Germany of the time this aspect of the revolution was still obscured. This is why Goethe deserted for an aristocratic society; he feared the barbarian in the bourgeois and hoped to find humanness in the object of the bourgeois spirit’s resentment. Good manners, considerateness, and a renunciation of the aggressiveness of what calls itself the unvarnished truth are among the ingredients of a need for humanness. The fact that this unsatisfied need flowed backwards shows not sympathy for a romanticism from which Goethe kept his distance so much as the dilemma of a situation in which humanness emerged and was cut off in the same moment. On the basis of his work, this is how Goethe’s move to Weimar must be interpreted. Then, in Tasso, with a candor equal to his artistic powers, Goethe exposed the illusory moment in that societal shift, to the point of annihilating himself in effigy. But his désinvolture needed the detachment that the humaneness of Iphigenie quietly maintains in every sentence. Tasso perishes for lack of detachment. Detachment is the stylistic principle without which henceforth no great work of art can succeed; yet, as social privilege, it restricts the humaneness for the sake of which the artist practices it.
From this point of view the moment of sociability in Goethe’s writing—which so easily appears to be a concession to external life circumstances and incompatible with the distantiating stylistic principle—becomes more understandable. In Iphigenie, and especially in Tasso, it handles the communication of solitary individuals with one another. The comforts of culture govern these relationships; the depiction of cultured dramatis personae as such is for its part a piece of realism, something new in Goethe’s writing. The moment of sociability turns into everyday language. The passage in Iphigenie where everyday language, spoken without pretense or posing, slips almost imperceptibly out of the distantiating style provide deep insight into the drama and the fragility of its style. It is as though the bourgeois whose speech cannot quite match that of the aristocrat is speaking. Pylades has some lines that read, “So haben die, die dich erhielten, / Für mich gesorgt: denn was ich worden wäre, / Wenn du nicht lebtest, kann ich mir nicht denken” (lines 638–40) [“Thus those who saved your live / Cared for me: for I cannot think / What I would have become if you had not lived”]; the ellipsis “worden” for “geworden” [become] belongs to the linguistic sphere of Gretchen rather than Mycenae, just as the premises underlying the linguistic gesture “was aus mir geworden wäre” [what would have become of me] are not those of a life governed by familial relationships. Pylades sounds bourgeois. Perhaps for the sake of contrast with the hero, Goethe makes Pylades sound more bourgeois than the cousin with whom he was brought up. An example is this Antonio-like turn of phrase: “Ich halte nichts von dem, der von sich denkt, / Wie ihn das Volk vielleicht erheben möchte” (lines 697–98) [“I do not think much of the man who thinks of his own accord about how the people might want to elevate him”]. The rational and individualistically oriented distinction between what a person thinks of himself and how he is regarded by others, a distinction to which Schopenhauer later attached great importance, belongs to a society in which human nature and human function diverge from one another under the law of exchange, and “von jemand etwas halten” [to think something of someone] implies a liberal freedom of opinion, with the overtones of someone surveying human beings to see how he can convert them to profit. In Iphigenie Goethe reserved such linguistic figures for the second violins; the royal messenger Arkas too borders on the prosaic in the lines: “O wiederholtest du in deiner Seele, / Wie edel er sich gegen dich betrug / Von deiner Ankunft an bis diesem Tag!” (lines 1500–92) [“Oh, if you could review in your soul / How nobly he has behaved toward you / From your arrival up to today!”]. In modern speech Betragen [conduct] is the word for a form of behavior that is no longer unquestionable in the way it must have been for the archaic feudal lords who populated the stage of Iphigenie. It involves an accommodation to something externally established, even if it be an ideal and even if the word Betragen may not have been as debased two hundred years ago as it has become of late. The reason why such passages are slightly discordant with the tenor of the whole is that the sociable tone is to be incorporated into the whole but is not to approach communicative speech, speech which would in any way relax the objectivity of the linguistic form. In Iphigenie the objectivity of language in itself is not maintained in a clear and unmuddied form because that objectivity postulates an essence that establishes meaning a priori, and by the criterion of naturalness it is precisely such an essence that should not be postulated. In classicism’s sore spots pure expressive language slides off into communicative language. Artful arrangements are not adequate to restrain divergence.
The antinomian structure, however, extends even to Humanität as the intention of the drama. The social coefficient of language, that of a cultured upper stratum, is an index of the particular, exclusive quality of Humanität. This moment characterizes all its representatives from the era of German classicism and Idealism, Kant and Schiller not excepted. The mature Goethe’s phrase about “die verteufelt humane Iphigenie,” from a letter to Schiller of 1802, the phrase that gave Henkel’s monograph its title, can be interpreted as Goethe’s awareness of this. In that phrase fidelity to Goethe’s youth is protesting the price of his progress. The Humanität of expression that silently opposes the crudeness of vulgar language has something spellbinding about it, something of the same quality as the myth the drama forswears, and analogously the content of that Humanität is based on privilege. This is not adequately understood as a class-conscious partisan position; it would be anachronistic to assume that. Within the social totality Goethe is subject to a fatality that poetic language cannot escape if it does not want to complacently shake off the burden of its subject matter, which its truth content needs. The victims of the civilizing process, those whom it oppresses and who pay its bills, are deprived of its fruits, imprisoned in a precivilized condition. Civilization, which, historically, leads out of barbarism, has also promoted barbarism, and continues to promote it by virtue of the repressive force exerted by the principle of civilization, the domination of nature. As long as this dialectical relationship could not yet be understood, the spokesperson for Humanität was forced to temper its civilizing moment with injustice. The latter, the residue of barbarism in the resistance to barbarism, is the surrogate for the reconciliation with nature that sheer opposition to myth did not succeed in bringing about. In Iphigenie injustice is done to those who are literally, in the Greek use of the term, barbarians [βάϱβαϱοι, or non-Greeks]. The barbarian nature of the non-Greeks is made crassly concrete in the custom, which Iphigenie suspends but does not abolish, of sacrificing a foreigner to the goddess. Goethe, who hopes through humane measures on the part of government to handle the class relationships that were becoming visible even in his little state, displaces their explosively antagonistic nature into the exotic sphere, in analogy to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “This inner dialectic of civil society thus drives it—or at any rate drives a specific civil society—to push beyond its own limits and seek markets, and so its necessary means of subsistence, in other lands which are either deficient in the goods it has over-produced, or else generally backward in industry, &c.”1 The imperialism of the later nineteenth century, which transposed the class struggle into a struggle between nations or blocs, down to the current opposition between highly industrialized and undeveloped peoples, making it invisible, is vaguely anticipated here, especially by Thoas. There is no counterevidence that can fully allay the spontaneous reaction to Iphigenie that perceives Thoas as being dealt with in an ugly way. One can argue rationalistically that if Iphigenie were to voluntarily remain with the aging king, who desires her in marriage because he wants an heir, her own autonomy, her Kantian right with respect to herself, and thereby Humanität as well, would be violated. What remains hard to accept here follows the norms of a bourgeois class that Iphigenie’s Humanität, as evidenced in traits like insistence on freedom and equality, accepts as binding. Iphigenie’s lack of justice can be determined through immanent criticism. Freedom is the basis on which Iphigenie acts and the object of her desires. Its incompatibility with national privilege is thematized in her first dialogue with Thoas in the fifth act. To Iphigenie’s “Ruin us—if you may,” the king responds, “Do you believe that the crude Scythian, / The barbarian, will hear the voice / of truth and humanity that Atreus, / The Greek, did not?” She counters his irony gravely: “Everyone, / Born under every sky, / In whose breast life’s source flows pure / And unhindered hears it” (lines 1936–42). Humanness requires that the law of an eye for an eye, a quid pro quo, be brought to an end; that the infamous exchange of equivalents, in which age-old myth is recapitulated in rational economics, cease. The process, however, has its dialectical crux in the requirement that what rises above exchange not fall back behind it; that the suspension of exchange not once again cost human beings, as the objects of order, the full fruits of their labor. The abolition of the exchange of equivalents would be its fulfillment; as long as equality reigns as law, the individual is cheated of equality. Goethe’s celebrated realism notwithstanding, the stylistic principle of Iphigenie forbids such down-to-earth categories access to the work of art. Despite all sublimation, the reflected light of those categories falls on a construction that knows itself to be one of pure humanity and at the same time mistakes itself for such in a historical moment when pure humanity is already being repressed by the functional interlocking of a society that is being extended to form a totality. The sense of an injustice being done, which is damaging to the drama because the drama claims, objectively, in its idea, that justice will be realized along with Humanität, stems from the fact that Thoas, the barbarian, gives more than the Greeks, who, in complicity with the drama itself, consider themselves humanly superior to him. Goethe, who must have pushed the work in this direction at the time of the writing of the final version, used all his skill to protect the work from that criticism; in its later acts the course of the drama is Humanität’s apology for its immanent inhumanity. Goethe took a great risk for the sake of this defense. Out of freedom and autonomy, Iphigenie, obedient to the categorical imperative of the as yet unwritten Critique of Practical Reason, disavows her own interest, which would require deception and thereby recapitulate mythic entanglement in guilt. Like the heroes of the Magic Flute, she respects the command of truth and betrays her people as she does herself, and they are saved only thanks to the Humanität of the barbarian king. Then, with a tact modeled on the social version, the great concluding scene with Thoas attempts to weaken what happens and make it unrecognizable through the ritual of hospitality—namely, that the Scythian king, who in reality behaves far more nobly than his noble guests, is left alone and abandoned. There is little likelihood that he will act on the invitation given him. To use one of Goethe’s turns of phrase, he is not permitted to participate in the highest Humanität but is condemned to remain its object, while in fact he acts as its subject. The inadequacy of the resolution, which achieves only a fraudulent reconciliation, manifests itself aesthetically. The poet’s desperate efforts are excessive; the wires become visible and violate the rules of naturalness the drama sets for itself. One notices the intention and becomes irritated. The masterpiece creaks, and by doing so indicts the concept of a masterpiece. Goethe’s sensitivity to this fell silent in Iphigenie when it came to what Benjamin perspicaciously called the limits and possibilities of Humanität. At the moment of the bourgeois revolution, humanness shines out far beyond the particular interests of the bourgeois class, and at the same instant is mutilated by particular interests; at that stage in the development of spirit, humanness was denied the transcendence of its limitations.
But it becomes aware of those limitations: in Iphigenie’s centerpiece, the monologue of Orestes’ madness. That monologue gives rise to an image of unrestricted reconciliation beyond the conception of Humanität, a middle way between the unconditioned and blind enthrallment to nature. Here, truly, Goethe leaves classicism as far behind him as his meter, in a reprise of the free verse of his early period, leaves iambs. “All of us here have been freed of enmity” (line 1288). The pacification of myth in the underworld, Orestes’ vision, transcends anything that could have been imagined in Greek terms. The Tantalides, archenemies, are reconciled—Atreus and Thyestes, Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra; even Clytaemnestra and Orestes, with the Christian allusion “Behold your son” (line 1294), in which humanism is elevated to a blasphemous mysticism. The chiliastic element that bursts the confines of classical antiquity here is as alien to official Western Christianity as it is to a mediocre Humanität. We hear echoes of the doctrine of the apocatastasis: of the redemption of even radical evil, utter sinfulness. Paradoxically, and certainly without Goethe’s knowledge, the central religious conception of the Russians, a conception expressed in their own literature only much later, is put into the mouth of this Greek man cast into Russian territory. It is, however, this vision that demolishes the special preserve Goethe had elsewhere, for the sake of Iphigenie’s Humanität, established for culture. At this, the most advanced point in his drama, Goethe serves Humanität as a whole by violating the taboos of a half-hearted domesticated Humanität that cannot do without eternal punishment in Hell. In the drama as a whole, to be sure, the latter has the upper hand. As Henkel recognized, the one to whom the work entrusts the voice of utopia is also the one it denigrates as insane. Utopia is charged with its impossibility wherever it stirs; anyone who glimpses it must be of unsound mind. And further: the law of the indispensability of revenge is deeply embedded even in a utopian situation free of justice and injustice, and the unbounded is revoked. The curse on Tantalus, the companion of the gods who literally elevated himself to the absolute, remains in force. The shades Orestes asks about his ancestor turn away at his question, condemning the visionary to despair once again. Orestes’ monologue, which transforms the eternal invariance of myth into something new and different, is swallowed up by myth. This would provide the theme for a metaphysical critique of Iphigenie. Orestes, who, in his fall in the vision scene, strikes against the rock of myth and seems to be dashed to pieces on it, holds an antimythological position both harsher and more reflected than that of his sister. His stance is that of the work itself. As early as the beginning of the second act, the core of that position, the difference between rational unequivocalness and amorphous ambiguity, is given an almost theoretical summary by Pylades: “The words of the gods are not ambiguous / As the troubled man in his ill humor imagines them to be” (lines 613–14). Perhaps in a reminiscence of Euripides, Orestes’ protest against myth becomes focused in an accusation directed toward the Olympic divinities: “They have selected me as a butcher, / The murderer of the mother I honored, / And, avenging a disgraceful deed in a disgraceful way, / They have put their mark on me and destroyed me. / Believe me, this is directed against the house of Tantalus, / And I, the last of that house, am not to perish in innocence / And with honor” (lines 707–13). This provokes Pylades’ counterargument, which distinguishes the gods from myth: “The gods do not avenge / The crime of the fathers on the son; / Each, good or evil, receives / His reward with his deed. / It is the parents’ blessing that is inherited, not their curse” (lines 713–17). This is the historico-philosophical position that Goethe in fact assigns to Orestes. If—and this was Freud’s insight—myths are archetypes of the neuroses, then the poet of the bourgeois age internalizes the mythic cures in the form of a neurotic conflict. He abducts Orestes to a post-mythological era, in accordance with the enlightenment topos of the critique of projection, a topos Iphigenie cites explicitly: “The one who imagines the gods / To be bloodthirsty misunderstands them: / He is merely attributing his own gruesome desires to them” (lines 523–25). Goethe may not have been as averse to Voltaire, whom he translated, as his commentators like to think. The mythic hero is mute and finds his voice on the tragic stage, as Benjamin tells us in his book on the Baroque Trauerspiel. Like the other Greeks in the play, Orestes comes to the stage as a mature person. When he feels himself under a spell, shortly before his great outburst, he reflects on his own encapsulation, virtually sublating it: “Like Hercules, I, an unworthy man, / Want to die a disgraceful death, enclosed within myself “ (lines 1178–79). His relationship to myth is not one of belonging, like the heroes of antiquity, but rather a forced return, which is then put into words in the mad scene. He says to his sister, “And be advised, do not / Be too fond of the sun and the stars: / Come, follow me down into the realm of darkness” (lines 1232–34)—lines should suffice to cut the ground out from under any trivial conceptions of Goethe’s classicism once and for all. With these lines a romantic element enters the drama, whose dialectic it both negates and conserves. The inward-turned movement of this pathos-filled melancholiac is depicted by Goethe, with an expertise that seeks out its like, as a movement of regression. The deep dialectic of the drama, however, should be sought in the fact that through his harsh antithesis to myth Orestes threatens to fall prey to myth. Iphigenie prophesies enlightenment’s transformation into myth. By condemning myth as something he is distant from, if not something he has fled from, Orestes identifies himself with the principle of domination through which, in and through enlightenment, the mythic doom is prolonged. Enlightenment that flees from itself, that does not preserve in self-reflection the natural context from which it separates itself through freedom, turns into guilt toward nature and becomes a piece of mythic entanglement in nature. This flashes out from a very hidden passage in the work. Thoas, the one taken advantage of, the one with whom the work secretly sympathizes, uses the argument about savages who are the better human beings against the civilized Greeks. In the last scene he says, “The Greek often turns his covetous eye / To the distant treasures of the barbarians, / The golden fleece, horses, beautiful daughters, / But violence and cunning did not always / Bring them safely home with the goods they had won” (lines 2102–6). The imago of the beautiful daughters of the barbarians, envied by the ladies of the Roman Empire, recalls the injustice of Humanität as the supremacy of the human over the animal element that, as Baudelaire saw it in a much later phase, is the ferment of beauty itself. It was Humanität only when it opened itself and went beyond its own idea, that of the human being. Reconciliation is not the simple antithesis of myth; rather, it includes justice toward myth. Iphigenie permits only an indistinct echo of that justice to sound above the justice that is convicted of its injustice by the mature subjects of the play.
The way in which Iphigenie’s Humanität escapes myth is shown less by her pronouncements than by an approach to an interpretation of history. In her monologue in the fourth act, the heroine meditates on the hope that the curse will not hold forever: “Shall / This race never rise up / With a new blessing? Everything wanes! / The greatest happiness, life’s finest capacities / Finally become exhausted: why not the curse?” (lines 1694–98). These words could be regarded as episodic and peripheral if Goethe had not written, twenty years later, the Märchen of the new Melusina, an idea he had had in his youth. During the periods when she withdraws from her impetuous and virtually barbaric lover, Melusina disappears into a kingdom within a little chest. It is a phantasmagoria of blissful smallness, which the beloved, who is received there in friendly fashion, cannot tolerate and causes to be destroyed by violence so that he can return to the earth. The little chest in the Melusina story, one of the most enigmatic works Goethe produced, is the counterauthority to myth; it does not attack myth but rather undercuts it through nonviolence. In these terms it would be hope, one of Goethe’s Orphic ur-words and one of the watchwords of Iphigenie: the hope that the element of violence contained in progress, the point where enlightenment mimics myth, would fade away; that it would diminish, or, in the words of the line from Iphigenie, “become exhausted.” Hope is humaneness’ having escaped the curse, the pacification of nature as opposed to the sullen domination of nature that perpetuates fate. In Iphigenie hope appears, as it does at a decisive point in Goethe’s Elective Affinities, not as a human emotion but as a constellation that becomes visible to humankind: “Be quiet, dear heart, / And let us steer cheerfully and sensibly / Toward the star of hope that beckons to us” (lines 923–29). Hope orders a halt to the making and producing without which it does not exist. Hence it is invoked only desultorily in the work. Its locus in the art of that era is great music, Beethoven’s Leonore aria and moments in a number of adagio movements like the one in the first Razumovsky quartet, eloquent beyond words. It is not the optical, objective Goethe, an accomplice in the domination of nature up to the very end of Faust, who stands beyond myth, but a passive Goethe who is no longer willing to engage in the deed that was supposed to have been there in the beginning, as what came first rather than what comes last. It is only this Goethe who embodies the protest against classicism which, as though it should not exist, ultimately takes the side of myth nevertheless. At its highest peak, Goethe’s work attains the null point between enlightenment and a heterodox theology in which enlightenment reflects upon itself, a theology which is rescued by vanishing within enlightenment. Iphigenie’s metaphor of exhaustion is learned from nature. It refers to a gesture that yields instead of insisting on its rights, but without self-denial. Goethe’s drama was finished in the same year as Figaro, and Goethe’s text is a continuation of the text of the Magic Flute. In the objectless and conceptless language of Mozart a lucidity that is clearly completely enlightened is combined with a sacred element that is completely secularized, an element concealed within the murmuring of Goethe’s objective and conceptual language.