The Intimate Book: World Literature, Poetic Rejuvenation, and the Art of Arrangement in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Divan Essay and Buch der Freunde

Abstract

ABSTRACT When Hugo von Hofmannsthal published his aphoristic collection, Buch der Freunde (1922), he borrowed the title from Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan. A mix of original maxims and excerpted quotations, it departs from his famous poems, plays and essays. Reading it alongside Hofmannsthal’s Divan essay, I analyse it as a response to a creative crisis that re-enacts world literature in the spirit of the Divan poet. The lesser-known book intimately unveils Hofmannsthal’s process of regenerative compilation. Yet in paying tribute to late Goethean poetics, Buch der Freunde paradoxically retreats into the modernist private collection and the world-literary past.