Tim Blanning's Augustus the Strong

"...Augustus bobbed about helplessly like a plastic duck, often submerged but never quite sunk."

-p.2 

Augustus II the Strong was the hereditary Elector of Saxony. Born in 1670 he had a brother older by a year and a half who is Elector before him, but John George IV had always been sickly and smallpox carried him off after two and a half years in office. So Augustus becomes Elector at the age of 24. 

He's young, healthy, ambitious; he's strong not because of his rule, but because he breaks horseshoes with his bare hands. He does the European grand tour, including an interview with King Louis the Sun King at Versailles, who and which impressed him mightily; he goes to war because he can, not because he has to, fighting first in Flanders, then becoming a general of the Hapsburg forces defending Vienna against the Turks. And in 1697 he decides to get himself elected king of Poland.

Poland was a declining power at the time, though maybe that wasn't yet obvious. The electors were limited to Polish nobility, who were happy to vote for whoever showed up with the most in bribes. Not exactly a free and fair election. There was a poor Polish candidate whom nobody liked, a French count supported by Louis the XIVth who wasn't issued enough money, and Augustus, supported by the Hapsburgs, but also willing to spend (and spend and spend) his own money. But Saxony was rich (says Blanning) with mineral wealth and a decent manufacturing base for the time.

War still seemed to Augustus like the way to fame, so as king of Poland he ginned up a war against Sweden, allying himself with Frederick the IVth of Denmark, and Peter the Great of Russia. This became the Great Northern War of 1700-1721, and seemed like a good idea, except Charles the XIIth had just inherited the Swedish throne, and he turned out to be one of the great military tactical geniuses of all time. (Though maybe not so good at the larger picture.) Charles knocked the Danes out of the war in the first year, defeated Peter the Great at Narva, so much so Peter ran away in terror, and then concentrated on Augustus, for whom Charles had a particular hatred. Was this because Charles was a staunch Lutheran, and Augustus had converted to Catholicism to acquire the Polish throne? (Augustus wasn't particularly religious and, maybe, Warsaw was worth a mass...) Or was it, Blanning speculates, because Augustus and Charles were first cousins on their mothers' side, and Charles felt he had something to prove vis-a-vis his older cousin? Augustus was willing to make peace, Charles would not relent until he'd taken Dresden and forced Augustus to abdicate the Polish crown, during which time Peter the Great recouped and learned how to fight a war.  Augustus ended up on the winning side eventually, but that was no fault of his own.

"Yet, for all his apparent failures, Augustus did qualify to be ranked among the great European rulers, not by the successful application of hard power, but by his transformation of Dresden and its region into one of the finest cultural complexes in Europe."

-p. 63 

Most of the book was about the war in Poland--well, all across the Baltic region--Peter the Great and Charles the XIIth are especially large figures, but there was enough about Dresden to satisfy me. Augustus was interested in art and architecture: the great Dresden art museum is based on Augustus' collection, and he took a particular interest in building; drawing proposals by Augustus still survive. There's the Zwinger:

as well as Augustus' hunting lodge at Moritzburg (near Dresden): 

both of which, according to Blanning, Augustus was deeply involved with, not just as the customer, but also in design work.

He's also responsible for the introduction of the Meissen pottery works:

I think there will be plenty to see... 

Tim Blanning was a professor at the University of Cambridge until his retirement in 2009. This book came out last year. The biography was pretty fascinating and engagingly written.

 

Goethe

"...he is, surely, among all the truly great writers of this world, the least read in the English-speaking world."

-A. N. Wilson, Goethe: His Faustian Life

 

The owl stands tall.

Is that true? It might be! But I've been trying to do my part.

 

Biography 

 

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (not yet von Goethe) was born to a upper middle class family in Frankfurt in 1749; he went to Weimar in 1775 for what was supposed to be a visit to the duke, Karl August; it became his permanent residence until he died.

 

Karl August invited him because at 26 Goethe was already celebrated. His first play, Götz von Berlichingen, was a hit in Germany, but his novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther of 1774, made him famous across Europe. Napoleon, in the middle of his wars, stopped to meet Goethe, and claimed to have read Werther six times.

 

When Goethe shows up in Weimar, Karl August has just turned eighteen and taken over after his mother's regency. He's still a bit of a wild child, and Goethe's first role in Weimar is to provide amusements for the young duke. The most innocent of these is Goethe teaching Karl August how to ice skate; how un-innocent these get is still argued about, but Karl August was pretty much the whole of his life a notorious womanizer. Nevertheless, Karl August's formerly reigning mother, Anna Amalia, is also fond of Goethe, so much so that it was sometimes rumored that Goethe had an affair with Anna Amalia, though neither of those biographies shown above believed it true.

 

In time both Goethe and Karl August steady down, and Goethe becomes a useful privy councillor to the Weimar duchy. The finances there are appalling--Goethe improves them: he regularizes taxation and reforms (shrinks) the army; his attempts to revive an abandoned silver mine in the territory are less successful. He serves on a commission to improve the roads, which is supposed to help the economy as well.

 

But of course he's Goethe, and anyway Anna Amalia was interested in making the duchy a cultural center. Goethe takes over the official court theater, writing plays, directing, acting, but also bringing in other talent, mostly notably Friedrich Schiller in 1787. Goethe and Schiller, though not immediately, become great friends, deeply influential on each others' work, until Schiller's death from tuberculosis in 1805.

There had long been a university at Jena, fifteen or so miles from Weimar, but still in the duchy. It's Goethe who brings in the scholars that make it one of the great German universities. Not just Schiller, but also Fichte, Schlegel, Hegel. I read a book about that a couple of years ago.

 

Goethe travels--but not much really. Switzerland, back home to Frankfurt (though not often). Most famously to Italy, twice: it's the first trip (1786-1788) that is the most important; he spends a long period in Rome, living somewhat incognito, though he also gets to Naples, where he meets William and Emma Hamilton.  He goes a second time to Venice to escort Anna Amalia back to Weimar after her own Grand Tour.

 

After his first trip to Rome he meets Christiane Vulpius, the daughter of impoverished pastor who comes to him seeking help for her brother. She's not the sort of woman somebody like Goethe should marry, but they start living together. She bears him several children, though only the eldest, named August in honor of the duke, survives to adulthood. The court is horrified (well, not the duke himself, who only suggests Goethe keep Christiane out of sight) but not, as it turns out, Goethe's mother, who though she scarcely meets Christiane, likes her. After the battle between Napoleon and Prussia on the outskirts of Jena in 1806, Christiane famously defends Goethe's house from the victorious marauding French troops, and Goethe decides, propriety be damned, I'm marrying that woman. And does.

 

He writes, you know, some famous works. Not just Werther and Faust, both of which I've read, though not recently, but also The Roman Elegies, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which is his autobiography until his move to Weimar,  and a collection of poetry, West-Eastern Divan.

 

Goethe is ennobled, becoming von Goethe, and dies in 1832 at the good age of 82. But this is after his duke, his great friend Schiller, his wife, and his son August, the only child of his to survive until adulthood have all died. (His daughter-in-law and his grandchildren were alive at his death.)

 

Biographies

OK, you may not really need to read three biographies of Goethe, but that's what I did. The first one I finished was by A. N. Wilson, Goethe: His Faustian Life. Wilson is British, a prolific man of letters, who admirably makes his way by writing--with panache--serious books for adults. This was a good biography of Goethe. Wilson was occasionally perverse. Was Goethe a drunk? Hmm, possibly. No doubt he drank more than was good for him. Was Goethe bisexual? Nobody else seems to think so, and the one poem from the Venetian Epigrams which Wilson quotes and might suggest it, is pretty clearly written in imitation of ancient models. The amusing thing about Wilson's biography is the emphasis he puts on how Goethe would have been a nobody had he not wrapped everything up at the end of of his life. Maybe not entirely true? There was already Werther and the first part of Faust. It is true the second part of Faust, Dichtung und Wahrheit, and the ending of Wilhelm Meister were only completed in the last years of his life, but this did feel a bit like Wilson (now 74) writing more about himself than Goethe.

 

Still, I'd cheerfully recommend this biography of Wilson's--it's recent, 2024, it's punchy, it's got the facts--except there's a better choice. So unless you're reading three...

 

The second one I finished was Goethe's autobiography. I've been calling it by its German title, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which is usually translated as Poetry and Truth, but I read it in a 1897 translation by John Oxenford which titled it Truth and Fiction. (You can find it on Project Gutenberg.) It covers the years from Goethe's birth until his move to Weimar at age 26. It's pretty fascinating. Goethe is interested in education--Rousseau was in the air, as weird as he is, Julie and Emile, and gets a discussion in Dichtung und Wahrheit--and the book is about Goethe's education, not just in schools, but in life. Was he going to be a lawyer? Or was he going to be a poet? I thought Oxenford's translation of the prose was good; when Goethe was trying to convey something that depended on a particular German word, Oxenford handled it with particular sensitivity. But Goethe is also a poet, and has a habit of embedding poetry in his prose narratives, and, let us just say, it may have been as well Oxenford did not use the word Poetry in his title of the book. A fascinating work, covering a bit over a quarter of Goethe's life, but I would hope there's a better translation out there.

 

The last one I finished is the great one. Rüdiger Safranski's Goethe: Life as a Work of Art was celebrated when it came out in Germany in 2013, and was translated into English by David Dollenmeyer in 2017. Dollenmeyer's translation strikes me as superb and he has no need to avoid the word Poetry: 

Wanderer's Night-Song

Peace lies over

All the peaks.

In all the trees

You sense

Hardly a breath;

The little forest birds fall silent.

Wait, and soon

You too will rest.

 

-Goethe (tr. David Dollenmeyer)

 

I featured this in a couple of other translations a few weeks ago after finishing Wilson's biography. I now think I like Dollenmeyer's version best. 

 

Safranski, too, has a thesis; it's suggested by his subtitle, Life as a Work of Art. He writes, "Goethe returns from Italy with the idea of being a sovereign human being," as if what made Goethe important was his self-actualization, reaching the top of the Maslow pyramid. He probably did reach the top of the pyramid. Still I more think what makes Goethe interesting is that he wrote a bunch of great books. (See above.)

One amusing thing I learned is that Goethe thought the portrait of him by Angelica Kaufmann was too flattering and didn't really look like him. Too bad. I speculated in my post on Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship that Wilhelm's adventures were helped because he looked the Goethe of this portrait. Maybe even Goethe didn't look like the Goethe of this portrait...

 

Anyhoo... Safranski's is the biography of Goethe to read at the moment as far as I can tell, and in Dollenmeyer's translation for those of us who aren't up to reading it in German.

 

This post is now in serious tl;dr territory and I didn't even get to those two books of poetry. Maybe I'll come back to Roman Elegies at some point. So why all this Goethe?  (And the other German things on the blog this year: Heinrich Heine, Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig.) We've got a trip planned to Germany at the end of September--Yay!--and we're concentrating on the southeast, Weimar, Leipzig, Dresden. 

 

Do you like immerse yourself in a place in advance by reading? 

Fragment of a Greek Tragedy

Fragment of a Greek Tragedy

from the lost Alcmaeon of Aeschylus

CHORUS 

 

O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots

Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom

Whence by what way how purposed are thou come

To this well-nightingaled vicinity?

My object in inquiring is to know.

But if you happen to be deaf and dumb

And do not understand a word I say,

Then wave your hand, to signify as much.

 

ALCMAEON

 

I journeyed hither a Boeotian road.

 

CHO.

 

Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?
 

ALC.

 

Plying with speed my partnership of legs.

 

CHO.

 

Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?

 

ALC.

 

Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.

 

CHO.

 

To learn your name would not displease me much.

 

ALC.

 

Not all that men desire do they obtain.

 

CHO.

 

Might I then hear at what your presence shoots?

 

ALC.

 

A shepherd's questioned mouth informed me that--

 

CHO.

 

What? for I know not yet what you will say.

 

 ALC.

 

Nor will you ever if you interrupt.

 

CHO.

 

Proceed, and I will hold my speechless tongue.

 

ALC.

 

---This house was Eriphyla's, no one's else.

 

CHO.

 

Nor did he shame his throat with hateful lies.

 

ALC.

 

May I then enter, passing through the door?

 

CHO.

 

Go, chase into the house a lucky foot.

And, O my son, be, on the on hand, good,

And do not, on the other hand, be bad;

For that is very much the safest plan.

 

ALC.

 

I go into the house with heels and speed.

 

CHO. [strophe]

 

  In speculation

I would not willingly acquire a name

  For ill-digested thought;

  But after pondering much

To this conclusion I at last have come:

  Life is uncertain.

  This truth I have written deep

  In my reflective midriff

  On tablets not of wax,

Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there

For many reasons: Life, I say, is not

  A stranger to uncertainty.

Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls

  This fact did I discover,

Nor did the Delphic tripod bark it out

  Nor yet Dodona.

Its native ingenuity sufficed

  My self-taught diaphragm.

 

[Antistrophe]

 

  Why should I mention

The  Inachaean daughter, loved of Zeus?
  Her whom of old the gods,

  More provident than kind,

Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail

  A gift not asked for,

  And sent her forth to learn

  The unfamiliar science

  Of how to chew the cud.

She therefore all about the Argive fields

Went cropping pale green grass and nettle-tops,

  Nor did they disagree with her.

But yet, how'er nutritious, such repasts

  I do not hanker after:

Never may Cypris for her seat select

  My dappled liver!

Why should I mention Io? Why indeed?

  I have no notion why.

 

But now does my boding heart,

Unhired, unaccompanied, sing

A strain not meet for the dance,

Yea even the palace appears

To my yoke of circular eyes

(The right, nor omit I the left)

Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak

Garnished with wooly deaths

And many shipwrecks of cows.

 

I therefore in a Cissian strain lament

  And to the rapid,

Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest

  Resounds in concert

The battering of my unlucky head.

 

ERIPHYLA [within]:
 

O, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw;

And that in deed and not in word alone.

 

CHO.

 

I thought I heard a sound with the house

Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.

 

ERI.

 

He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,

Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.

 

CHO.

 

I would not be reputed rash, but yet

I doubt if all be gay within the house.

 

ERI.

 

O! O!  another stroke! That makes the third,

He stabs me to the heart against my wish.

 

CHO.

 

If that be so, thy state of health is poor;

But thine arithmetic is quite correct.

 

-A. E. Housman

 

Well, I did have The Shropshire Lad off the shelf the other day, and in it was folded this photocopy of 'Fragment of a Greek Tragedy'. I was laughing out loud, and the Other Reader said, what? So I had to hand over my copy.

 

It's not so hard to find this on the Internet these days, but once upon a time it was passed around like samizdat among classicists. Apparently while Housman didn't mind it circulating, he did feel it was not something to be profited from, and it's not generally included with his poetry. There are several versions, the first one written when he was 24 which appeared in his former high school's literary magazine. This is a later version. One semester I was reading Aeschylus' Agamemnon with my favorite undergraduate teacher, and she asked, did I know this? I did not. This photocopy was ready for me at our next class.

 

There really was an Alcmaeon by Aeschylus, which is lost. Alcmaeon was the son of one of the Seven Against Thebes, and his mother Eriphyla encouraged his father Amphiaraus to join that assault even though everybody knew perfectly well it was going to fail and Amphiaraus was going to die. In this Alcmaeon returns to kill his mother, which will lead to the usual Greek tragedy sort of outcome. Aeschylus was considered a bit of a windbag even by the ancients: see Aristophanes' Frogs.

 

Housman does it all properly, too: the dialog is in iambics, as it would be in the original, and he uses a choral meter for strophe and antistrophe. The ancient Greeks located thought and feelings differently. While we might have our hearts broken or feel something in our gut, for the ancient Greeks thought occurred in the diaphragm and the liver was where you felt the deeper emotions. Hence Cypris--a cult title for Aphrodite--should stay away from the speaker's liver.