Anonymität—Onymität. Autorname und Autorschaft in Wilhelm Meisters "doppelten Wanderjahren." by Nora Ramtke (review)

Abstract

work and world. It is perhaps worth noting that this argument is directed against a notion of autonomy as the strict separation of art from actuality, of ideal from reality. At least to this reviewer, however, it is questionable whether that definition—as opposed, for example, to self-legislation—adequately captures what aesthetic autonomy means. Local differences aside, I find the general tendency of Pirholt’s analysis richly suggestive. His strategy is to excavate the experiential and material conditions that make specific modes of artistic achievement possible. This intention governs the fourth and fifth chapters as well. The fourth chapter introduces the concept of “semitechnical reproducibility” in order to characterize the means through which artworks were made accessible to Goethe and his contemporaries. From his early inspiring visit to Mannheim on, Goethe’s experience of art would have been impossible without reproductive techniques: drawn copies, engravings, lithographs, plaster casts, and so forth. Dresden and Italy were the (staggeringly important) autoptic exceptions, of course, but the grand enterprise of Kunst und Altertum is unthinkable apart from a flourishing industry of imagistic reproduction and publication. Pirholt brings out the significance of this medial configuration with admirable breadth and clarity, documenting inter alia Goethe’s highly developed and, to a degree, theoretically reflected “medientechnologisches Bewusstsein.” In the fifth chapter, Pirholt investigates one of the foundational conceptual structures of the age, the distinction between “ancient” and “modern” art. Approaches to this distinction on the conceptual level are, of course, well-known, but Pirholt’s exploration of the issue—in line with the entire orientation of his study—turns to concrete cases, the prize competitions Goethe and Meier organized and the essay “Polygnots Gemälde,” products from the cusp of the nineteenth century. Two distinct projects, one an effort to fix a set of classicist expectations as a norm for contemporary artistic production, the other the attempted “reconstruction” of lost or destroyed products of ancient works. It is in this chapter that Pirholt develops his own account of one of the central topics of research on Goethe’s thought generally: his concept of Anschauung. Perhaps it is not an altogether inaccurate characterization of these highly compelling pages to say that the goal is to disclose what might be termed the anthropology of Anschauung as it is developed in Goethe’s work. The center of that anthropological interpretation, as brought out in Pirholt’s compelling account, is the “unwiderstehliche Begierde nach unmittelbarem Anschauen.” Professor Pirholt is known to readers of the Goethe Yearbook and to Englishlanguage scholarship on Goethe and his age. (See his Metamimesis: Imitation in Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre” and Early German Romanticism, 2012). His Grenzerfahrungen, the riches of which I could only adumbrate in this review, deserves an engaged response from a North American readership.