ABSTRACT
The persistent inhumanity of the Turk in Goethe’s work supplies a jarring refrain to the otherwise idealizing melodies Goethe composed for Islam throughout his long life. The sincerity and passion with which the poet devoted his genius to the careful cultivation of a particular Islambildsublimity, eloquence, mystical resignation, spiritual contemplation-stands somewhat awkwardly alongside what Goethe had to say about his nearest Muslim neighbours. If Goethe the poet was happy to ‘twin’ himself with Hafi z, describe the Koran as a text which awakens “astonishment” and “veneration”, and Mohammed as a man “seized and inspired by God”2, Goethe the political commentator would always fi nd it diffi cult to repress a contempt for “the common foe of Europe and Asia”.3 If Benjamin, in his famous essay, could quote with approval Soret’s remark on the poet’s political schizophrenia (“Goethe is liberal in an abstract sense, but in practice he inclines towards the . . . reactionary”4), one wonders whether Goethe’s oftvaunted Islamophilia might not also be included in such a maxim. Indeed, Goethe’s delight at the Russians’ destruction of the Turkish fl eet at Cesme, his absorbed and detailed prose descriptions of Hackert’s painting of the event, his hopes for the reconquest of Constantinople and sadness at the Ottoman successes in the Balkans, not to mention his sympathetic remarks concerning Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and, perhaps more alarmingly, the half justifi cation he makes for Bonaparte’s execution of several hundred Ottoman prisoners in the campaign . . . the overwhelming negativity of such references, lying in the margins of Goethe’s Werke, bring to light a nearcomplete compartmentalization of Islam in Goethe’s rich and sophisticated responses to the Muslim Orient. In this respect, our chapter on Goethe will try to analyse some of the strategies and vocabularies Goethe had to employ in order to prevent his political misgivings concerning the Muslim world from interfering with the poetical and spiritual energy he was continually investing in it. This analysis, inevitably, will also have something to contribute to the more familiar debates concerning the essence of Goethe’s
conservatism, the nature of his own Christian faith and his relationship to the whole question of colonialism.
