The Portrait of Lenz in Dichtung und Wahrheit: a Literary Perspective

Abstract

In the two hundred years since his death, revivals of interest in Lenz, both as a writer and as a person, have tended to go hand in hand with the emergence of a number of other tendencies. In terms of content these have included the exploration of the individual experience of social compulsion, and in aesthetic terms an anti-classical concept of literature as experimental and realistic.¹ Values such as these are antithetical to the ideological constructions that have been dominant in Germany for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and until recently they have only intermittently been able to assert themselves against the grand narrative favoured by German literary historiography. They are also antithetical to the value-system embedded in the first coherent account of eighteenth-century German literature, Goethe’s autobiography Dichtung and Wahrheit, and it has become clear how a tradition that runs from Gervinus and Hettner via Korff to Newald has adopted in a rather unreflected way Goethe’s judgement of Lenz, and in particular the moralising formulation at the beginning of Book 14 of Dichtung and Wahrheit.² Alternative accounts which attempt to reevaluate Lenz have therefore tended also to seek to challenge Goethe’s judgement, with the result that it is now Goethe who is accused of betrayal at both the personal and literary-political level.³ There are important ethical and political issues at stake here, but the discussion of them has been rather foreshortened by taking Goethe’s judgement at face value and insufficiently examining the functions that it has within Dichtung and Wahrheit.