Goethe Johana Wolfgang

The British Society for the History of Science
Unpacking Goethe's Collections: The Public and the Private in Natural-Historical Collecting Author(s): E. P. Hamm Reviewed work(s): Source: The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 275-300 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The British Society for the History of Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4028099 . Accessed: 17/11/2012 11:48
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BJHS, 2001, 34, 275-300
Unpacking Goethe's collections: the public and the private in natural-historicalcollecting

E. P. HAMM*
in his Abstract. Thispaperarguesthat Goethe's collections, particular mineralogical collections, The publicpurposes werecloselytied to the traditionof had both publicand privatepurposes. mineralogizing exemplified theFreiberg by MiningAcademy. Abraham GottlobWerner provided and technologies standardizing for mineralogical terminology identification, Goethehoped and that these technologies would allow for a vast networkof collectorsand observers who would and His collate their observations developa model of the Earth'sstructure. own cabinet,in his was particular collectionof rocks (Gebirgsarten), to be a representative sample of rock of formations particular in structure history. and locationsthat couldrevealfeatures the Earth's Goethewas alsoresponsible thescientific for collections JenaUniversity. argued if such of He that a collections wereto be usefulfor teaching research, goal he stronglysupported, and they could He no longerbe treatedas the privateproperty professors. recognized of that social relations if within the University would have to be reordered museumswere to fulfil their epistemic In Goethewas on the sideof the modern museum opposedto the world and functions. thisrespect of the privatecollectionandall its idiosyncrasies. had However,his own collections veryprivate andpersonal as purposes. Usingsomeof the ideasof WalterBenjamin a foil, this papertriesto uncoversome of the privatepassionsthat fuelledGoethe'salmostinsatiable collecting.Though of to thesepassionswerepeculiar Goethe,I arguethat historians scienceshouldattendmoreto the passionsand theirplacein the sciences. Collecting things Goethe wrote a lot. His collected poems, literary and scientific works, diaries and letters run to over 130 volumes; that does not include several published volumes of his administrative writings, nor can it include the many letters he destroyed. It is easy to imagine that he scarcely had time for anything else besides writing, but somehow he managed to do more: collecting things, for instance. He arrived in Weimar in 1775 with a few manuscripts and little else of consequence; over the next fifty-seven years he spent about two considerable fortunes to amass over nine thousand prints and illustrations, about 4500 plaster-of-Paris cameos and intaglios, numerous paintings and statues, eight
* Science and Technology Studies Programme, Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies, York University, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada. This article is a revised version of a paper which will appear in German in Sammeln als Wissen (ed. Anke te Heesen and Emma Spary), Gottingen, forthcoming. I would like especially to thank Anke te Heesen and Michael Hagner for their comments and encouragement, and Frank Mobus, for generously sharing of his vast knowledge of Goethe and Weimar. I would also like to thank Frau Gisela Maul of the Goethe National Museum for her gracious assistance during my 1998 visit to the Goethe Haus, John Dawson of York University photographic services and Emma Spary, Joan Steigerwald and two anonymous referees for their comments. An early version of this essay was written for a conference hosted by the ForschungszentrumEuropaische Aufklarung, Potsdam. The research for this paper was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Atkinson Faculty of York University. All translations are my own unless indicated otherwise. When quoting in German I follow the spelling of the edition quoted.
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fingersso that I could learn that which I now know - not only my father's entire fortune, but also my salary and my substantial literary income over more than fifty years.2 His heirs were left with a lot of everything except cash, yet they did better than expected living off his royalty income. All of these collections in one household and most of them tightly squeezed into four rooms: the Majolicazimmer, the grosse Sammlungszimmer, the Deckenzimmer and the Bibliothek; except for the mineralogical collection, which at close to eighteen thousand items needed its own building: the garden pavilion (see Figures 1 and 2). Goethe's collections now occupy his house overlooking the town square known as the Frauenplan
1 Erich Trunz, 'Goethe als Sammler', in Weimarer Goethe-Studien (Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Volume 61), Weimar, 1980, 7-48, 7. 2 Goethe made this remarklate in his life, on 13 February1829, in conversation with Johann PeterEckermann. See Johann Peter Eckermann, Gesprache mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 1823-1832, 3rd edn., Berlin, 1962, 452. According to one estimate, half a million was enough to establish Goethe as a comfortable landed gentleman twice over. See ErnstBeutler, 'Das Goethesche Familienvermogenvon 1687 bis 1885', in Essays um Goethe, 7th edn., Zurich, 1980, 393-403, 402.
Unpacking Goethe's collections
277
Figure2. Goethe's garden pavilion. By the 1820s this was the home of the bulk of his mineralogical collections. With the permission of Stiftung Weimarer Klassik. (Figure 3)3 and the adjoining medium-sized museum (with storage rooms), several rooms in the Weimar palace, and the Goethe-Schiller Archive. All told, these private collections have become a public monument to their time, place and collector ;' but they are not the only monument he left behind, nor are they the most expensive. For decades Goethe was the superintendent of the scientific and artistic institutions and the libraries of Weimar and Jena, a position in which he spent a very large amount of somebody else's money building state collections.' This discussion will focus on one very important part of the collections, especially the private collections, that is easily overlooked: the rocks.
3 Erich Trunz, 'Das Haus am Frauenplan in Goethes Alter' in Weimarer Goethe-Studien (Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Volume 61), Weimar, 1980, 48-76. 4 At present the series Goethes Sammlungen zur Kunst, Literatur und Naturwissenschaft includes the following catalogues: Hans Ruppert, Goethes Bibliothek, Katalog, Weimar, 1958; Corpus der Goethezeichnungen (ed. Gerhard Femmel), 7 vols. in 10, Leipzig, 1958-73; Hans Joachim Schreckenbach, Goethes AutographenSammlung, Katalog, Weimar, 1961; GerhardFemmel and Gerald Heres, Die Gemmen aus Goethes Sammlung, Leipzig, 1977; Hans Prescher, Goethes Sammlungen zur Mineralogie, Geologie und Paldontologie, Katalog, Berlin, 1978; Gerhard Femmel, Die Franzosen, Katalog und Zeugnisse (Goethes Grafiksammlung),Munchen, 1980. See also Christian Schuchardt, Goethes Kunstsammlungen,3 vols., Jena, 1848-9. 5 Goethe told Eckermann he oversaw the expenditure of 'more than one and one-half millions' for various ducal projects with which he was closely involved, Eckermann op. cit. (2), 452. Among these projects were the mines at Ilmenau, the libraries at Jena and Weimar, the Jena museums and the Weimar theatre.
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6 Sometimes what might be consideredtwo or more separatecabinets are placed beside each other and covered with a single glass display case. Should these count as two distinct cabinets or one? Following the convention of Max Semper, who in his manuscript catalogue of 1912 must have counted them as a single cabinet, there are a total of eighteen cabinets. On Semper's catalogue, and those of his predecessors, see Prescher,op. cit. (4), 13-19. 7 Prescher, op. cit. (4), 14, 16.
279
Despite this, one thing that we can be sure about is that Goethe did not collect minerals for their commercial value. He began collecting rocks with a passion in the late 1770s, not long after his arrival in Weimar. To Sophie la Roche he wrote that stones from her region would be 'a feast' for him.8 Later he gleefully told Johann Gottfried Herder that he was returningfrom the Harz dragging along a heavy burden of stones. There were times when he had to keep himself from collecting too many samples. In 1785, after spending a week at the silver-copper mines he administered in Ilmenau, he told his beloved Charlotte von Stein that he had taken an oath not to touch any stones, and at the outset of his great Italian journey he made a similar oath: 'One piece was simply too tempting, but the rock was too solid, and I had sworn not to drag stones with me on this journey.' But he could not restrain himself and soon thereafterhe decided that if he accustomed his eye and his desire to smaller specimens he could collect without over-burdeninghimself.9His enthusiasm for the mineral kingdom infected his circle in Weimar and by 1780 they were all collecting. Years later Herder observed that this period of 'mining genius' was one of the most amusing manifestations of the entire 'era of genius': 'At that time the person was nothing, the stone everything. ... Everybody mineralogized; even the ladies found a higher meaning in the stones and started cabinets of their own'.10 Despite the enthusiasm, not everyone caught the bug. Charlotte von Stein was at times irritated by the collecting: 'So, thanks to him, they have become the spiteful stones and the bleak bones'; at other times it mystified her: 'I believe that Goethe has many delights, solemn delights, which the world cannot grasp.'11The Herders, Johann Gottfried and Karoline, came to detest all talk of stones thanks to Goethe.'2 Not long after his arrival in Weimar (1787) Schiller concluded that Goethe had had a lamentable influence on the Weimar circle, a group that had resigned itself to the five senses, scorned speculation and was excessively interested in collecting herbs and mineralogizing.13Ludwig B6rne, never one to mince words when it came to Goethe,
8 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke, commonly known as the WeimarerAusgabe, 136 vols. in 146, in 4 parts (Part I: Schriften, Part II: naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, part III: Tagebucher, part IV: Briefe), Munich, 1987-90 [reprint of original 1887-1919 edition plus three supplemental volumes: part IV, Volumes 51-3], Part IV, Volume 4, 278, in a letter dated 1 September 1780. All subsequent references to this edition will be abbreviatedas WA followed by part (in capitalized Roman numerals),volume and page number. The date and recipient of letters and the date of diary entries, when not given in the text, will be given in the notes to facilitate reference to the many other editions of Goethe's works. 9 Letter to Herder, 6 September 1784, WA IV, vi, 353-5, 354; letter to von Stein, 7 November 1785, WA IV, vii, 116-18, 117; quotation and remark concerning the Italian journey are from diary, 5 September 1786, WA III, i, 152, and diary, 13 September 1786, WA III, i, 190. 10 Herder's remarks of 6 November 1796 were recorded by Karl August Bottiger, LiterarischeZustdnde und Zeitgenossen: In Schilderungenaus Karl Aug. Bottiger'sHandschriftlichemNachlasse (ed. K. W. Bottiger), 2 vols. in 1, Leipzig, 1838, i, 22, and are reprintedin Goethes Gesprache (ed. Wolfgang Herwig), 5 vols. in 6, Stuttgart, 1967-87, i, 224. 11 Von Stein made these remarksin conversation with Goethe's friend KarlLudwig von Knebel on 1 May 1784 and 24 January 1785, see Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaften, commonly known as the Leopoldina Ausgabe, Part I: Schriften,Part II: Erganzungenund Erlauterungen,Weimar 1947-, Part II, Volume vii, 327, 338. All subsequent referencesto this edition will be abbreviated as LA followed by the part (in capitalized Roman numerals), volume and page number. 12 As reported by Bottiger, 6 Nov. 1796, in Goethes Gesprdche, op. cit. (10), i, 224. 13 In a conversation with Christian Gottfried Korner, 12 May 1787, in Goethes Gesprache,op. cit. (10), i, 397.
280
E. P. Hamm
commented, 'Had he created the world, he would have put all the stones in little drawers, in order to properly schematisethem'.14 This sentiment was not unlike that Goethe himself expressed in 1818 in a poem for his grandson Walter: 'Steinchen um Steinchen verzettelt die Welt,!Wissende haben's zusammengestellt.*5 Taken out of its context a mineralogicalcollection is just rocks in a box, but Goethe was collecting with purpose as well as passion. Unpackinghis mineralogicalcollections requires a consideration of their public purposes as well as their private meaning. To understand the public purposes it is necessary to consider traditions of mineralogizing in Central Europe, as well as what I will call the social-epistemic function of collections. It is also crucial to keep in mind that collecting practices and their significancechanged dramatically between 1770 and 1830. Collections all too easily leave the impression that they are fixed, perhaps because they fix individual items within a larger system; but they are in fact dynamic, growing and changing. Finally, something needs to be said about what the mineral kingdom and stones meant for Goethe. Historians often shy away from talk about the personal, for it smacks of suspect psychologizing, of biography rather than history;16 similarly historians of science have not given much attention to the place of passion in science. It is as though there has been an implicit acceptanceof a sharp dichotomy between the two cultures of reason and passion. Yet it was precisely such dichotomies that the most powerful cultural movement of the Goethezeit, Romanticism, sought to overcome. It would be a pity to talk about Goethe's collecting without talking about Goethe, and it is a pity that there is so much talk about science and, save for exceptions which prove the rule, so little treatment of the passions that drive scientists.17 In 'Unpacking My Library', an ingeniously enchanting essay written in 1931, Walter Benjaminobserved that collecting is, at bottom, a profoundly private matter. The genuine collector, and Benjamincounted himself among these, does not emphasize the functional,
14 Ludwig Borne, 'Aus meinem Tagebuch', 4 May 1830, in idem, Gesammelte Schriften, 8 vols., Hamburg, 1832, viii, 31-7, reprinted in Goethe im Urteil seiner Kritiker, 5 vols., (ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow) Munchen, 1975-84, i, 505. 15 'Wiegenlied dem jungen Mineralogen Walter von Goethe', WA, I, iv, 46-7, 47. A very approximate translation is: 'Stone by stone the world's dissected with scraps of paper, / Initiates have put it back together'. 16 For a defense of biography see Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo, 'Introduction', in Telling Lives in Science: Essays On Scientific Biography (ed. Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo), Cambridge, 1996, 1-44. 17 For a 'history of wonder as a passion', see Lorraine Daston and KatherinePark, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, New York, 1998, quotation on 15; Lorraine Daston, 'The moral economy of science', Osiris (1995), 10, 2-24; idem, 'The factual sensibility', Isis (1988), 79, 45247. See also Thomas Soderqvist, 'Existential projects and existential choice in science: science biography as an edifying genre', in Telling Lives in Science: Essays on ScientificBiography (ed. Michael Shortlandand Richard Yeo), Cambridge, 1996, 45-84, 64 ff. For collecting passions more generally see Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Baltimore, 1984. Collecting has also been subject to ahistorical psychoanalytically inspired treatments, for example Jean Baudrillard,'The system of collecting' in The Cultures of Collecting (ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal), London, 1994, 7-24, and Werner Muensterberger, Collecting, an Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives,Princeton, 1994. For an early discussion of the passion of collecting art see Goethe's epistolary work of 1799, Der Sammlerund die Seinigen, in WA I, xlvii, 119-207, esp. 138-45. Recently it has been argued that this work of Goethe's, which does not readily fit categories such as novella or essay, introduced the collector as a literary figure in world literature. See Carrie Asman, "' Kunstkammer als Kommunikationsspiel": Goethe inszeniert eine Sammlung', in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Der Sammler und die Seinigen (ed. Carrie Asman), Dresden, 1997, 119-77, 143-4.
281
utilitarian value of collections, but is bound to them by a very mysterious (rdtselhaftes) relationship of ownership: The mostprofound is enchantment the collector thelockingof individual for itemswithina magic circlein whichtheyarefixedas the finalthrill,the thrillof acquisition, passesoverthem.... The period, the region,the craftsmanship, formerownership for a true collectorthe whole the is of whose quintessence the fate of his background an item addsup to a magicencyclopaedia how the greatphysiognomists and object.In this circumscribed then,it maybe surmised area, collectors physiognomists theworldof objects turninto interpreters fate.Onehas only are of of to watcha collectorhandlethe objectsin his glasscase.As he holdsthemin his hands,he seems to be seeingthroughtheminto theirdistantpast as thoughinspired."8 The private meaning of Goethe's mineralogical collections run alongside and not contrary to their public purpose. To unpack what these collections meant for him we must first consider how they were part of the larger world.
Public purposes: names and traditions Goethe's fascination with collections and the mineral kingdom aroused a strong reaction in some of his circle in Weimar, but it would be a mistake to conclude from this that his mineralogical pastimes were somehow out of step with the times. Mineralogy had an important place in the cultures of natural history in the eighteenth century, a time when collections specializing in minerals began to appear all over Europe.19 The mineral kingdom also had a place in the polite culture of natural history, though not as prominent a one as did botany.20Mineralogy was particularlysignificant in those regions where there was a strong tradition of mining, such as Central Europe (including the Duchy of SaxeWeimar), Sweden and parts of Italy.21Mines were among the best places for observing strata and developing theories about them, and this was especially true when Goethe began
18 Walter Benjamin, 'Unpacking my library: a talk about book collecting' [1931], in Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn), New York, 1969, 59-67, 60-1. 19 See the discussion in Giuseppe Olmi, 'From the marvellous to the commonplace, notes on natural history museums (16th-18th centuries)' in Non-Verbal Communication in Science Prior to 1900 (ed. Renato G. Mazzolini), Firenze, 1993, 235-78, 263. See also Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists were Historians, 1665-1750, Ithaca, 1997, 251. A prominent mineralogical collection was that in Jena of Johann Ernst Immanuel Walch, a philologist who edited (which involved writing several volumes) one of the most outstanding eighteenth centuryworks on petrifactions, Georg Wolfgang Knorr, Sammlung von Merckwiirdigkeitender Natur und Alterthiimern des Erdbodens, welche petrificierteKorper enthdlt, 4 vols. in 5, Nurnberg, 1755-73, also translated into French (Nurnberg, 1768-75) and Dutch (Amsterdam, 1773). Goethe viewed Walch's cabinet in the autumn of 1778. 20 See KrzysztofPomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800 (tr. Elizabeth Wiles-Porter), Cambridge, 1990, 218. Dorothea Schlozer, perhaps the first woman to receive her doctorate in Germany, took mineralogy as one of her examination fields, see Barbel Kern and Horst Kern, Madame Doctorin Schlozer: Ein Frauenlebenin den Widerspruchender Aufklarung,Munchen, 1988, 118. For a very prominent nineteenth-century example of a woman fossil collector see Hugh Torrens, 'Mary Anning (1799-1847) of Lyme: "The greatest fossilist the world ever knew"', BJHS (1995), 28, 257-84. 21 See Martin Guntau, 'The natural history of the Earth' in The Cultures of Natural History (ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. Spary), Cambridge, 1996, 211-29; Martin Rudwick, 'Minerals, strata and fossils', in ibid., 266-86; Lisbet Koerner, 'Daedalus Hyperboreus: Baltic natural history and mineralogy in the Enlightenment', in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer), Chicago, 1999, 389-422.
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22 r hls mlneraloglzlng. fact, one can scarcely In makeproper senseot nls mlneraloglcal collecting, thespecimens sought without of he out, reference thetradition mineralogy to of exemplified theFreiberg by Mining Academy.
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22 Ezzio Vaccari and Nicoletta Morello, 'Mining and knowledge of the Earth' in Sciences of the Earth (ed. Gregory A. Good), 2 vols., New York, 1998, ii, 589-93; E. P. Hamm, 'Knowledge from underground: Leibniz mines the Enlightenment', Earth Sciences History (1997), 16, 77-99; Claudine Cohen, 'Leibniz's Protogaea: patronage, mining, and evidence for a history of the earth', in Proof and Persuasion: Essays on Authority, Objectivity, and Evidence (ed. Suzanne Marchand and Elizabeth Lunbeck), Turnout, 1996, 124-43; Ezio Vaccari, 'Mining and knowledge of the Earth in eighteenth-centuryItaly', Annals of Science (2000), 57, 163-80; Donata Brianta, 'Education and training in the mining industry, 1750-1860: European models and the Italian case', Annals of Science (2000), 57, 267-300; Theodore M. Porter, 'The promotion of mining and the advancement of science: the chemical revolution of mineralogy', Annals of Science (1981), 38, 543-70. The most detailed discussion of Goethe's administrative and technical work at the Ilmenau mines is Kurt Steenbuck, Silber und Kupfer aus Ilmenau: Ein Bergwerk unter Goethes Leitung; Hintergriinde, Erwartungen, Enttduschungen (Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Volume 65), Weimar, 1995. For the cameral culture of mining in EnlightenmentCentralEurope see R. AndreWakefield, 'The apostles of good police: science, cameralism, and the culture of mining in Central Europe', 1656-1800, 2 vols., Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1999, especially ii, 233-322. See also Myles W. Jackson, 'Natural and artificial budgets: accounting for Goethe's economy of nature', Science in Context (1994), 7, 409-31.
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Throughout his life Goethe made it clear that he was not interested in collecting rare or expensive stones. The individual samples he collected had relatively little monetary value, but this in no way diminished the value he placed upon them. Sometimes the rocks took on a remarkablesignificance.Early on in his collecting career, in 1784 in a letter to Johann Heinrich Merck, he made an extraordinary claim:
Soon I will have from the Harz [Mountains] the most important suite that can possibly exist. Of formations (Gebiirgsarten), of course, for I do not allow myself to yearn for expensive and valuable samples, which, in any case, have little to do with my work.23
Almost half a century later, just days before his death, Goethe told a correspondent that rare specimens were not the object of his collecting.24The most beautiful collections of minerals were not those that appealed to the eye or the pocketbook, but those that were the most instructive.25There are good reasons for taking these remarks at their word. The mineralogical collections as they are now preservedin the house on the Frauenplan represent fairly accurately their state at the end of Goethe's life, both in terms of their
overall arrangement and in their cabinets. The cabinets, intended for storage, not display, are, with one exception, made of simple, painted wood. The glass cases that rest on top of some of the cabinets were a concession to the uninformed curiosity of those who longed for a display of a few lovely samples; the real treasures were inside the cabinets (see Figure 4).26 There are four large categories in these collections: the systematic mineral, the systematic rock and the systematic fossil collections, and the suite collections. The systematic mineral and rock collections and the suite collections were already present by 1783, the date of the first catalogue,27 and all three of these early collections were ordered according to the principles of Wernerian classification. In the terminology of the day, collections of minerals, rocks and fossils all counted as mineralogical collections. Unless otherwise specified the word mineralogical will here be used in its broad sense and mineral will be used as a specific subcategory. Mineral classifications were rampant in the eighteenth century: John Woodward, Linnaeus, Johann Henckel, Torbern Bergman, Axel Frederic Cronstedt and Werner all
23 2 December 1784, WA, I, vi, 400-2, quotation on 401-2. 24 Letter to Carl Bernhard Cotta, 15 March 1832, WA, IV, xlix, 275-7, 276. 25 Letter to August von Goethe, 27 June 1813, WA, IV, xxiii, 389-92, 391. 26 The same holds true for Goethe's library. A small room filled with bookshelves, it is intended for storing books, not for displaying or reading them. The place to read books (and mineralogical specimens) was the study. The exceptional cabinet is made of varnished wood and contains collections of polished rocks. For a discussion of the importance of the cabinet in the history of science see Anke te Heesen, 'Boxes in nature', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (1999), 31, 381-403; idem, Der Weltkasten: Die Geschichte einer Bildenzyklopadieaus dem 18. Jahrhundert,Gottingen, 1997, 141-91. There is a substantial and diverse literature on the spaces, places and architectureof science, for example: The Architectureof Science (ed. Peter Galison and Emily Thompson), Cambridge, MA, 1999; Making Space for Science (ed. Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar), London, 1998; Sophie Forgan, 'The architectureof display: museums, universities and objects in nineteenth-centuryBritain', History of Science (1994), 32, 139-62; Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, 'The place of knowledge: a methodological survey,' Science in Context (1991), 4, 3-21. 27 Goethe himself compiled part of this catalogue, which is known as Katalog A. Katalog B was compiled by Johann Carl Wilhelm Voigt in 1785, by which time the collection had grown to six cabinets. The fossils were first catalogued in 1813 by Goethe's son August, in Katalog C (an exact copy of B with additions) the bulk of which was compiled by Goethe's secretaryJohann August FriedrichJohn. Part of A and all of B and C are in the Goetheund Schiller-Archivin Weimar, see Prescher, op. cit. (4), 14-20.
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developed similar classification systems. Werner divided the minerals into four large groups: earths and stones, salts, inflammablesand metals. These systems were by and large chemical in nature, ordering minerals according to their component parts. The earliest unauthorized version of Werner's mineral classification was published in 1783 (Goethe owned a copy); the first authorized version was published in 1789, and the final revised version appeared in print in 1817.28 We cannot know with certainty all the details of Goethe's mineral collection in 1783, as parts of the earliest catalogue are illegible, but we do know almost precisely how he classified most of it. A comparison of an 1813 copy of the earliest catalogue shows that it is practicallyidentical with the 1783 version of Werner's system. Goethe's collection as it now exists reflects the way it was organized at the time of his death, in 1832. Two of the eighteen cabinets contain his mineral collection and these are largely in accordance with Werner's 1817 classification and terminology.29 Werner's mineral classification was important and very widely known, but more important by far was his introduction of a separate classification system for rocks or, to be more precise, Gebirgsarten. The distinction between minerals and rocks is not so artificialas it might seem. All rocks are made up of minerals, but not all minerals are rocks. The mineral classification was primarily chemical, whereas the classification of Gebirgsartenwas geological. Werner did not publish his famous Short Classification and Description of the Various Rocks until 1786, although he had mentioned the need for such a classification as early as 1778,3? but Goethe was part of a network connected with the Freiberg Mining Academy that knew of its outlines and those of the mineralogical classification years before they came into print. As early as 1780 Johann Carl Wilhelm Voigt, a graduate of Freibergwho had the day-to-day responsibility for running the mine at Ilmenau, was putting Goethe's Gebirgsarteninto some sort of order.31Goethe had two kinds of Gebirgsartencollections: a systematic and a suite collection. Both of these were
28 For an overview of eighteenth-century mineralogical classification schemes see Rachel Laudan, From Mineralogy to Geology: The Foundations of A Science, Chicago, 1987, 20-46. The unauthorized version of Werner is C. F. W. Roth, Das Mineralreich nach dem Wernerischen System, Weimar, 1783 (for Goethe's ownership see LA II, vii, 86); the first authorized version is C. A. S. Hoffmann, 'Mineralsystem der Herrn Journal (1789), 1, 369-98; finally, there InspektorWernersmit dessen Erlaubnisherausgegeben', Bergmdnnisches is Abraham Gottlob Werners letztes Mineral-System: Aus dessen Nachlasse auf oberbergamtlicheAnordnung herausgegeben und mit Erlduterungenversehen, Freyberg, 1817. 29 The 1813 copy of the earliest catalogue of the mineral collection is reprinted, in outline, in Prescher, op. cit. (4), 25-7 and it may be comparedwith Roth, op. cit. (28), which is reprintedin LA II, vii, 67-86. For a detailed catalogue of the current state of Goethe's mineral collection, and a commentary, see Prescher,op. cit. (4), 25-92. 30 Abraham Gottlob Werner, 'Kurze Klassifikation und Beschreibung der verschiedenen Gebirgsarten', in idem, Abhandlungender Bohmischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften,1786, 272-97, reprintedand translated in idem, Short Classificationand Description of the Various Rocks (ed. and tr. Alexander M. Ospovat), New York, 1971. In 1778 Werner proposed five different kinds of mineralogical collections needed for a complete cabinet: 1, of the external characters of minerals; 2, of the minerals according to their classes and species; 3, of Gebirgsartenaccording to a doctrine of Gebirge; 4, a geographical or 'suite collection' of Gebirgsartenand; 5, an 'dkonomische' collection that arranged minerals according to their uses in the home, industry and the arts. Wernerclaimed that he was the only person to have a collection of type 1, that he knew of no collections of types 4 and 5 and that he was assembling a collection of type 3. Abraham Gottlob Werner, 'Von den verschiedenerley Mineraliensammlungenaus denen ein vollstandiges Mineralienkabinetbestehen soll', in idem, Sammlungenzur Physik und Naturgeschichte (1778), 1, 387-420. Only a few years later Goethe was collecting types 2, 3 and 4. 31 See Goethe's diary entry for 5 July 1780, WA, III, i, 121-2.
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organized in keeping with Werner's understandingof Gebirge. The systematic collection was to present the series of Gebirge in general; the suites consisted of Gebirgsartenfound in a particular locale, such as the Harz. To appreciate the importance of Gebirgsartenin these collections it is essential to consider the larger milieu, in particular the centuries-old culture and vocabulary of mining in Saxony and the Harz.32 In modern German Gebirge usually refers to a mountain range, but in the eighteenth century it had a much broader span of meanings. Miners spoke of being in the Gebirge as soon as they were underground,irrespectiveof the surface topography. Once underground they further distinguished kinds of Gebirge according to the methods and tools used to work the rock, the extent of the deposit and its location.33The miners' understanding of Gebirge was, in part, taken up by mineralogists. In 1761 Georg Christian Fuchsel defined a Gebirge as a formation with the same position or bed, constructed of the same matter and with a similar origin.34Wernertook up this definition and made it central in his Short Classification. At first he had four classes of Gebirge: primitive, floetz, volcanic and alluvial; later he added a fifth 'transitional' class between the primitive and the floetz. The closest translation in English for Gebirge is formation, or rock formation. The part of the 1783 catalogue that dealt with Goethe's systematic collection of Gebirgsartenis lost, but the 1783 catalogue of the suite collections is extant and it shows that Goethe was already then following Wernerian principles and terminology. The first of Werner's primitive formations was granite, and Goethe's suites contain extensive collections of granites, particularly slight variations between granites. Gneiss, clay-slate, porphyry, 'primitivelimestone' and, notoriously, basalt, also belonged to Werner's primitive formations. The floetz formations included limestone, sandstone, coal and chalk. All of these, and the other rocks of Werner's classification, are present in Goethe's collections. Eventually Werner moved basalt to the end of the floetz formations, making it the most recent floetz, just before the volcanic formations, which is also where Goethe eventually ended up putting them in his systematic collection of Gebirgsarten.35 Goethe and Wernerhave often been called Neptunists, but that label is not very helpful. Neptunism is a term associated with those who thought the most important formations of the Earth's crust were the product of crystallization, precipitation and sedimentation out of some sort of aqueous solution. It is not so much the name of a particular theory as it is the designation of a set of assumptions about the origin and classifications of rocks, particularly basalts. It is also a relatively recent term. The Oxford English Dictionary
32 For an appreciationof this tradition see Ospovat's introduction, appendices and extensive notes in Werner, Short Classification, op. cit. (30); Guntau, op. cit. (21); Rudwick, op. cit. (21); Vaccari and Morello, op. cit. (22); Hamm, op. cit. (22); Laudan,op. cit. (28); Mott Greene, Geology in the Nineteenth Century, Ithaca, 1982; Martin Guntau, Abraham Gottlob Werner,Leipzig, 1984; idem, Die Genesis der Geologie als Wissenschaft,Berlin, 1984; Gabriel Gohau, Les Sciences de la terre aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sie'cles, Paris, 1990; Bruno von Freyberg, Die geologische Erforschungen Thuiringensin dlterer Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Geologie bis zum Jahre 1843, Berlin, 1932; Walther Fischer, Mineralogie in Sachsen von Agricola bis Werner: Die dltere Geschichte des Staatlichen Museums fur Mineralogie und Geologie in Dresden, Dresden, 1939. 33 Ospovat in Werner, Short Classification, op. cit. (30), 97. 34 Georg Christian Fuchsel, 'Historia terrae et maris ex historia Thuringae, per montium descriptionem eruta', Acta Academiae Electoralis Moguntiae scientarium utilium, Erfurt (1761), 2, 45-208, 5 4. I am grateful to Bert Hansen for making his draft translation of this work available to me. 35 See Prescher, op. cit. (4), 94-117 and 158-207.
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credits Richard Kirwanwith its firstEnglish usage in 1790; the first Germanusage is harder to trace, as Grimm's Worterbuch does not include Fremdworter, words deemed not to be German. To be sure, Goethe did write of 'Neptunists' in 1789,36 but such usage is probably not much older than that. Historians have often contrasted Neptunism with Vulcanism, as though the words representtwo mutually exclusive theories. However, the terms are only exclusive when applied to the origin of specific rocks, such as basalt columns. Both terms develop out of an older terminology describing the two types of chemical analysis used in the eighteenth century, the 'wet' and 'dry' approach, in solution or by combustion. 'Pocket laboratories' made it possible to do wet and dry analysis in the Both Nicolas Desmarest and Deodat de Dolomieu did important work to show that field.37 basalt columns were formed in the dry manner (volcanically), yet both men nonetheless thought that almost the entire surface of the Earth was formed in the wet manner.38The same could be said of many of Dolomieu's mineralogical contemporaries, including Goethe's colleague Voigt, Barthelemy Faujas de St Fond, Jean Etienne Guettard and Johann Jakob Ferber. We should be wary of labels such as Neptunism; it might be more accurate to call Goethe a miner. The German word Bergmann,especially but not only during the period in question, has a broader range of meanings than the English word 'miner'. Two broad distinctions were 'miner of the quill' (Bergmann von der Feder), referring to those who were mining bureaucrats, and 'miner of the leather' (Bergmannvom Leder), referringto a miner with practical training. Some of the finerdistinctions between differentkinds of miners included those who spent most of their time writing (Bergschreiber),those who were overseers (Bergmeister),those who were mining councillors (Bergrat), and those who most of all Strictlyspeakingnone of these titles applied to Goethe and worked, the simple Bergmann.39 at least a couple applied to Werner, but both men did a style of mineralogy that developed out of a centuries-oldtradition of hard-rockmining in CentralEurope and Sweden. For the sake of convenience and accuracy they can be called mineralogists, rather than the more specialized geognost, geologist, mining administratorand so on. Mineralogy was a word widely used in late eighteenth-century German and it encompassed all of the various practices associated with learning about the Earth. Goethe was introduced to mining through his responsibility for reopening the copper-silver mine at Ilmenau,his first official obligation to the Weimar court. Ilmenauput him in contact with a group of mineralogistsassociated with the FreibergMining Academy
36 Goethe, 'Vergleichs Vorschlagedie Vulkanierund Neptunier uber die Entstehungdes Basalts zu vereinigen' [1789], LA I, xi, 37-8. 37 Gustav von Engestrom, 'Description of a mineralogical pocket-laboratory; and especially the use of the blow-pipe in mineralogy', in Axel Fredericvon Cronstedt, An Essay Towards a System of Mineralogy, 2nd edn. (ed. John Hyacinth de Magellan, tr. Gustav von Engestrom), 2 vols., London, 1788, ii, 924-1015. 38 Nicolas Desmarest, 'Me6moire sur l'origine & la nature du basalte 'a grandes colonnes polygones, determinees par l'histoire naturelle de cette pierre, observee en Auvergne', Memoires de l'Acade'mieroyale des sciences pour l'anne'e 1771 (1774), 705-77; Deodat de Dolomieu, 'Sur la question de l'origine du basalte', Observations sur la physique, sur l'histoire naturelle et sur les arts (1790), 37, 193-202, 194; Kenneth L. Taylor, 'Deodat de Dolomieu', DSB, iv, 149-53, 152. 39 See Heinrich Veith, Deutsches Bergworterbuch,Wiesbaden, 1968 [reprint of 1871 edition], and also the editors' discussion of the term Bergmannin Georgius Agricola, De Re Metallica [1556] (ed. and tr. Herbert C. Hoover and Lou H. Hoover), New York, 1950, 77-8, n. 1.
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(founded in 1765), including its first graduate, FriedrichWilhelm Heinrich von Trebra, and Voigt, who studied there with the support of the Duchy of Weimar, presumably as preparation for subsequent work at Ilmenau, and eventually became one of the most distinguished mineralogists in the German-speaking world. The Freiberg mineralogists were part of a tradition, or style, of mineralogy that was very close to the rocks and mines.40Speculative theories of the Earth, such as Thomas Burnet's, were dismissed and grand theories, such as Buffon's, were considered suspect. As one historian of geology remarked, 'facts' rather than 'new ideas' had become the order of the day.4' By 1780 Goethe had taken on some of this mindset, saying that he had a clear 'idea' of how rock formations 'lie on top of one another, without pretending to know how things came to be that way.'42 The descriptive science that Goethe practised was a branch of mineralogy known as geognosy, in contrast to geology, a term associated with speculative theorizing. Facts, of course, are rarely entirely straightforward. Consider mapping, an important part of this tradition; who could be more concerned with locating the position of minerals and formations than miners?A collection of Gebirgsartencould be keyed to a mineralogical map to give a better understanding or, as Goethe might say, a 'visible concept' of a particularsection of the Earth'scrust. Collections of rock formations from particularareas were collections of nature in the small, and Goethe had many such suites from various Interpretingsuch collections locales such as the Harz, Thuringia, Bohemia and elsewhere.43 required all sorts of large-scale inferences, though it did not demand, indeed it eschewed, claims about the origins of the Earth. Rock collections needed to focus on locales simply because a mineral specimen is very different from specimens from the living kingdoms. Leibniz, who spent a great deal of time and energy on the mines in the Harz, understood this problem very clearly a century before Werner: Many people amass cabinetsthat include some minerals,but unless they have some exact havebeentaken... thesecollections more of observations the placefromwhichthe minerals give pleasureto the eye than light to the reason.For a plant or animalis a completewhole, but in minerals usuallyseveredpiecesthat can only be well understood theirentirety.44 are Leibniz envisioned not so much a natural history, but a 'natural geography' of the mineral kingdom that would take account of the location and distribution of minerals, samples of which are kept in cabinets.45If a Gebirge counts as a rock species then a collection of Gebirgsartenis a collection of samples of species. Knowing only the chemical composition of a rock was not enough to understand its place in nature. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg also recognized that there was an important relation between nature in the large and nature in the cabinet, that rocks needed to be studied both chemically and geographically: 'Since the geognostic character of the kinds of rocks cannot be determined solely by constituent
40 Hamm, op. cit. (22). 41 Karl A. von Zittel, Geschichte der Geologie und Palaontologie bis Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Deutschland: Neuere Zeit, Volume 23), Munchen, 1899, 76. 42 Letter to Merck, 11 October 1780, WA, IV, iv, 306-12, quotation on 311. 43 By 1785 he had seventeen such suite collections, see Prescher, op. cit. (4), 15. 44 Letter to Foucher, May 1687, in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Protogaea [1749] (ed. J. M. Barande), Toulouse, 1993, 179-83, quotation on 182. 45 Hamm, op. cit. (22).
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parts, but rather from nature in the large, one should therefore attend more carefully to nature in the large.'46 Considerations of nature in the large were crucial in Goethe's rock collections. The process of collecting in the field was, of course, an important way of learning about nature out of doors. Again I am reminded of Benjamin, who learned not about nature but civilization by collecting books: 'How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!'47 Collections are not just about finding things, they involve naming things and standardizingthose names. Goethe was acutely aware of this and believed standardization was on its way to being resolved thanks to Wernerianmethods emanating from Freiberg. In his On the External Characteristics of Fossils Werner presented a very fine-grained method for describing minerals, which relied upon sight, taste, touch, smell and even hearing (the tone rocks made when they were struck). It was a system, in effect a technology, that relied on carefullydisciplined senses and made the body an instrumentfor identifying minerals in the field.48 Standardized descriptions offered a means of standardizingnames of things. The 'poetic-figurative' language of miners was of interest in its own right, but Goethe found it led to confusions, as it varied from place to place. Goethe believed these difficulties were on their way to being overcome thanks to the nomenclature coming from Freiberg, which Voigt had been teaching him since at least 1780.49In his 1785 essay on granite Goethe pointed to this problem by emphasizing the need for careful distinctions: Italians continued to confuse a lava with fine-grainedgranite; the French call gneiss a flaky granite; even the Germans, who were 'otherwise so conscientious in such matters', had until recently confused the Toteliegende, a conglomerate of quartz and hornstone, and the Harz greywacke, a mixture of quartz and slate, with granite.50 Thus far Goethe's collecting matches the sort of work that was coming out of Freiberg and linked to mining traditions that were close to the rocks. Goethe is often seen as a scientific outsider, a view reinforced by his attacks on Newtonian colour theory; in mineralogy he was, at least in the early and middle stages of his career, very much an insider who was closely tied to the latest work coming from one of the great centres of that science. The importance of collecting and classifying at Freiberg should not lead to the conclusion that this was a science practisedin the comfort of the study. Collectors have for
46 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg,Sudelbucher,J 1498, in idem, Schriftenund Briefe (ed. W. Promies), 4 vols., Munchen, 1966-72, ii, 277, italics in original. 47 Benjamin, op. cit. (18), 63. 48 Abraham Gottlob Werner, Von den duflerlicbenKennzeichender Fossilien, Leipzig, 1774. Werner'ssystem of identifying minerals should not be confused, as it sometimes was and still is, with his system of classifying minerals. 49 Goethe to Duke Ernst II, 27 December 1780, WA, IV, v, 20-8, quotation on 25; see also Goethe to Johann Heinrich Merck, 11 October 1780, WA, IV, iv, 306-13, 310. 50 LA I, xi, 10-14, quotation on 14. This untitled essay is often called 'Uber den Granit', following the name Rudolf Steiner gave it in its first published version in WA, II, ix, 171-7. Wolf von Engelhardt,the editor of LA II, vii, refers to it as 'Granit II'. Although Steiner claimed Goethe dictated 'Granit II' on 18 January 1784, (see WA, II, ix, 312), it was probably written in 1785. For a detailed discussion of Goethe's work on granite and its place in his geology, see ErnstPeter Hamm, 'Goethe on granite', Ph.D. dissertation, Universityof Toronto, 1991, 61-147.
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a very long time built up their collections by swapping and shopping, and Goethe did both to build his mineralogical collections. His correspondencebristles with requests for rocks, minerals and fossils. Most importantly, he collected them himself on his many travels. Sometimes, as in his famous journeys to the Harz, these travels amounted to geognostic excursions. But just as facts are rarely straightforward so also classifications are rarely unproblematic, and Goethe's collecting was not driven simply to fill gaps in classification schemes. In 1784, during his third journey to the Harz mountains, he wrote to Herder that he was looking for those rocks which were the 'cross' of classifiers,those that fell between classes and were most difficultto classify: 'I have carefully sought after and with luck have found those slightest differencesand shadings that bring one kind of rock closer to another and are the cross of classifiers, for they do not know where to put them.'5 This was not a passing thought. Over twenty-eight years later he used the same language, perhaps a subtle pun, writing of a Harz granite that was the 'cross' of mineralogists at the Jena
museum.52
The most important collection of Gebirgsartenthat could exist was a collection that displayed the transitions in the development of the Earth'scrust. During his second journey to the Harz (1783) Goethe took great interest in the discovery of a granite that bordered on, and in fact was almost mingled with (eingewachsen) a dark blue, almost black, very hard clay somewhat like jasper. Trebra remembered the discovery and described it in detail, particularly the antics of his 'foolhardy' friend Goethe and the risks he took climbing part way up a cliff in order to touch the talismanic point where the granite merged into the slate.53Collectors are driven people, and Goethe was driven to find rocks that had subtle differences. The twenty-nine samples of granite he collected on his third Harz journey (Table 1) displayed variations in the relative proportions of the constituents of granite (quartz, mica and feldspar). In some of the samples Goethe noted that the feldspar had eroded, in others he noted that hornblende had taken the place of mica and in still others he noted transitions to other rocks. This fascination with transitions was at least in part a consequence of a chemical understanding of rock formation, for as substances precipitatedand crystallizedout of the chemically laden waters, their chemical composition changed, and so did the rocks which formed out of them. Trebra, Horace Benedict de Saussure and, most importantly, Werner expected evidence of such transitions: into of Several the first,that is the primitive, gradeverygradually floetzrocks.Sincethe various of of modesof formation theserocks,in the vastperiodof timesincethe beginning our earth,in should that suchgradations most casesimperceptibly way one to another,it is impossible gave not occurin the rocksthemselves.54
51 6 September 1784, WA, IV, vi, 353-5, quotation on 354. Finding rocks was one of the best ways to collect them. 'Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.' Benjamin, op. cit. (18), 61. 52 Letter to Christian Gottlob Voigt, 9 November 1812, WA, IV, li, 331-2, 332. 53 See Trebra's recollections in LA, II, vii, 321. Compare the observations recorded in a 1783 manuscript that was probably written by Trebra, in LA, II, vii, 66. On his 1785 journey to the Harz Goethe collected several samples, from the Rehberger Graben, of granite bordering on a greywacke-like rock. See Table 1, nos. 13a-17. 54 Werner, Short Classification, op. cit. (30), 44. Although this was written several years after Goethe was looking for these transitional rocks it is probable that Werner expressed these ideas in lectures that were heard by Voigt, who passed on them to Goethe.
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Table 1. Granite from the Harz formation series, 1785, from LA I, xi, 19-20. The complete series has over 200 items and includes a number of other rocks besides granite. Goethe collected these specimens in 1783 and 1784. Note the slight variations between specimens and the interest in specimens that seem to be a transition between different kinds of rocks, such as no. 22. 'Trebra' and 'T' in numbers 1 and 2 refer to Trebra, op. cit. (65).
Granite 1. 2. 3. 4. 4a. 5. 6. 6a. 7. 7a. 7b. 8. 9. 10. 10a. 11. lla. 12. 13. 13a. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. From the bare rock on the large Brocken; weakened by weathering. V. Trebra, p. 79. Under the the peat on the Brocken. The feldspar on the surface has dissolved into a porcelain clay. V. T. ibid. On the path from the Brocken to the Arendsklintercliffs. The feldspar is flesh-coloured. From the Arendsklintercliffs. The same place, the combination is different. With green and black schorl. At Schierke at the foot of the Brocken. From the Oker Valley. From the Treppenstein in the Oker Valley. One side has a quartz-like coating. From the Rofltrapp. The felsdpar white in the Isabell-coloured [Isabellfarbne]. Schorl (SchwarzerStrahlschorl, [black tourmaline]), which is found in granite veins in the vicinity of the Rof3trapp. Quartz bound to schorl, from an exposed vein behind the Rogtrapp, on the border with the slate. From the Rof3trapp,with yellowish stains, which appear to come from an iron-like weathering. From the same place. The mica is almost intact, the feldspar is somewhat weathered. From the same place. The exposed surface very weathered and deep red. From the same place. The same. Completely red. From the same place. A variation of the granite where hornblende takes the place of mica. From the same place. The same, slightly changed. From the Rehbergertrench not far from Andreasberg. From Adenberge, granite attached to a greywacke-ish rock. From the Rehbergertrench, granite bound to a rock similar to greywacke. From the same place. Very fine-grainedgranite bound to a clayish quartz rock. The same from the same place. From the same place, with two sorts of colours and mixtures. From the same place. Greenish. Behind the Rogtrapp against the border of the slate. Directly adjacent to the slate; has become reddish because of the water. Quartz-ish transition. From the same place. Quartz mixed with slate, from the same place. From the Bude Valley, diagonally opposed to the Suseberg, a noteworthy rock that I cannot with confidence consider either a granite or a porphyry, and for which I propose the name granulite, on account of its spherical quartz grains. It is exceedingly solid.
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A collection was not only a guide to nature in the large, it was a way of reading the history of the Earth. The cabinet, so often assumed to be static and ahistorical, could also serve as one of the bridges between natural history and the history of nature.55 Public purposes: social-epistemic One could be forgiven for thinking that collections have become something of an embarrassmentto science at the onset of the twenty-first century.5"They are considered important enough to keep, though they may gather dust in the basements of university departments, unless they happen to be spectacularly beautiful or otherwise striking and deserving of public display. Benjaminbelieved the heyday of the private collector lay in the past and that public collections, museums and libraries, were regarded as less socially offensive and more scientifically useful than private ones. Lateness in time gave Benjamin the historical vantage point he needed: 'only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended'." Concern for proper naming and classification was an eighteenth-centuryobsession, but it did not end there. What can be called the social-epistemic purpose of Goethe's collecting has its roots in the Enlightenment and looks forward into the era that fascinated Benjamin, the nineteenth century. Naming things and agreeing on those names is something that has to be negotiated. In the nineteenth centurythe great public museums were increasinglybecoming the centres of such debates.58 Eighteenth-centurycollections such as those of Goethe and Wernertended to be private, but not wholly private: they were on their way to becoming museums. Before his house on the Frauenplan became a museum Goethe guarded his work space jealously and his collection rooms fiercely. Only his close friends were allowed in his study (an exception was not made even for the King of Bavaria), and there was a 'Donnerwetter' when Chancellor Friedrich von Muiller, a man who did count as a friend, went into the Majolicazimmer without permission.59 His mineralogical collections, however, were available to serious enquirers.Voigt assured readersof his Mineralogical Journeys through the Duchy of Weimar and Eisenach that a complete set of the rocks he described were in the possession of Goethe, and that the poet would allow any knowledgeable person to view them.60 In the tradition of mineralogizing connected with Freiberg the collection was an indispensable technology for teaching and standardizing terminology. Knowing this,
55 See also George-LouisLeclerc, Comte de Buffon, From Natural History to the History of Nature: Readings from Buffon and his Critics (ed. and tr. John Lyon and Phillip R. Sloan) Notre Dame, 1981; Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte: Wandel kultureller Selbstverstindlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts,Munich, 1976. 56 A recent two-volume historical encyclopedia of the earth sciences does not even have an entry for collections, see Good, op. cit. (22). 57 Benjamin, op. cit. (18), 67. 58 Gordon R. McOuat, 'Species, rules and meanings: the politics of language and the end of definitions in nineteenth-centurynatural history', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (1996), 27, 473-519. 59 Trunz, op. cit. (3), 60 and 69. 60 Johann Carl Wilhelm Voigt, Mineralogische Reisen durch das Herzogthum Weimar und Eisenach, 2 vols., Dessau, 1782-5, i, 151.
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Goethe recognized that private collections, however useful, had their limitations. If a large index or standard were available in the form of a collection, then it might be possible to resolve the confusion created by different names for the same items and compounded by the idiosyncrasies of terminologies in different languages, the very problem Goethe had pointed to in his 1785 essay on granite. The Weimar deacon and mineralogist Johann Samuel Schroter lamented that practically every mineralogical author described stones with different names, employed his own terminology and classification, or simply dispensed with classification altogether.61 Schroter's eight-volume polyglot dictionary (German, Latin, French and Dutch), arranged alphabetically, did not end the confusion. Franz Ambrosius Reuss's dictionary made up for its lack of thoroughness - only one volume for German, Latin, French, Italian, Swedish, Danish, English, Russian and Hungarian terminology - by following Werner's nomenclature and classification.62Such works rarelydeliveredwhat they promised, since what was needed was not just names, but standards for identifying and naming things. What Goethe wanted was not a library of lexicons but a collection of collections by which names could be standardizedand samples calibrated, so that it would be possible to collate observations from around Europe and even the world. Goethe's plans for a collection of mineralogical collections were recorded as early as 1784. In a manuscript of that year Trebra outlined a proposal 'for founding a society of men, which would assemble, at one central location, experiences and observations for a better knowledge of the Earth'.63 The elusive hope of an empirically grounded theory of the Earth demanded some kind of a mapping of the Earth'sformations, a task that was far beyond any individual. Trebra envisioned a centre of calculation, to use the phrase of Bruno Latour, for the collecting and orderingof observations from around the world. Such a centre would work at developing an 'ideal', either in whole or in part, of the inner structure of the Earth, as well as a 'model' that could be 'continually improved, changed and perfected'.64 The plan Trebra described is clearly meant to be of international, if not global, scope. Where might such a centre be? Freibergwould have been the obvious place, but it is Jena or Weimar that are suggested. Trebra might have been looking for a patron in Duke Carl August of Weimar, and so might Goethe, who is credited in the manuscript for coming up with the idea in the firstplace. Later,this time in print, Trebra again credited Goethe (who is not mentioned by name but alluded to as an 'uncompromising friend of the beautiful') for the idea of a mineralogical society.65 The plan was not realized the way Trebra described it, but other plans did come to fruition, thanks in part to Goethe's administrative work. From 1777 to 1785 Goethe's duties in the Weimar Privy Council eventually reached the point where he was responsible
61 Johann Samuel Schroter, Lithologisches Real- und Verballexikon, 8 vols., Frankfurtam Main, 1772-85, i,
p. x.
62 Franz Ambrosius Reuss, Neues mineralogisches Worterbuch, oder Lexicon Mineralogicum, Hof, 1798. 63 Trebra's proposal is published in LA II, vii, 127-30, quotation on 130, italics in original. 64 Trebra, op. cit. (63); Bruno Latour, Science in Action, Cambridge, MA, 1987, especially 215-57. 65 Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich von Trebra, Erfahrungen vom innern der Gebirge, nach Beobachtungen gesammiet, Dessau, 1785, p. x. Perhaps Goethe first described such a plan to Trebra during their journey to the Harz in 1783.
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for much of the Duchy's business. Though he stopped attending regular sittings of the Council in 1785, he remained a member and in 1804 was given the honorary title 'Excellency'. After his return from Italy in 1788 his administrative work was mainly focused on the cultural and scientific institutions. In 1791 he was given the directorship of the Weimar theatre; in 1797 he and Christian Gottlob Voigt were made superintendents of the ducal libraries in Weimar and Jena and in 1804 they became superintendentsof all the natural science museums in Jena - these included the mineralogical and zoological cabinets, the anatomical cabinet, and the physical-chemical collections. Of all his many administrative duties, there was none that Goethe favoured over his work for the Jena museums and collections.66 Despite his attachments to his own collections, Goethe's administration nonetheless showed a preference for public over private collections. Consider the 'Jena Mineralogical Society', founded in 1797 by Johann Georg Lenz. The Society's collection had its start through the inheritance of the collection of Johann Ernst Immanuel Walch of Jena. Lenz, the diligent director of the society, had the wit to draw up honorary diplomas, one of which was given to a Russian prince and diplomat, who was also named the first president of the society. It was a brilliantly successful move, as Prince Gallitzin donated his substantial collection to the society and then died unexpectedly. Goethe took his place as president and Trebra was declared vice-president. The diploma was redesigned and distributed to prospective donors.67In 1817 Goethe arranged to have a diploma sent to the Italian geologist Giovanni Battista Brocchi and asked, of course, for a collection that would help to illuminate Brocchi's latest book. He further justified his request by saying that the Jena museum was actively trying to collect sequences of Gebirge from a number of countries in order to facilitate comparative work.68The aims of the 1784 plan were not forgotten. Requests from colleagues and bequests from dead but once diligent collectors were good ways to grow a collection. These were successful strategies and I suspect Benjamin would have approved, especially of inherited collections: a is Actually,inheritance the soundestway of acquiring collection.For a collector'sattitude stemsfroman owner'sfeelingof responsibility towardhis property. Thus towardhis possessions trait it is, in the highestsense,the attitudeof an heir,and the most distinguished of a collection will alwaysbe its transmissibility.69 Goethe, however, was less elegiac about private collections than would be Benjamin, whose essay has the patina of nostalgia. Goethe lived in the era when private collections
66 Report to Duke Carl August, March 1815, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samtliche Werke, 40 vols., Frankfurtam Main, 1985-99, xxvii, Amtliche SchriftenII, 959-68, 960; the editors of this volume, Irmtrautand Gerhard Schmid, give an overview of Goethe's administrativework in their 'Kommentar' on 1025-77. See also Hans Tummler, Goethe in Staat und Politik, Koln, 1964; idem, Goethe der Kollege: Sein Leben und Wirken mit Christian Gottlob Voigt, Koln, 1970; idem, Das klassische Weimar und das grosse Zeitgeschehen, Koln, 1975. 67 Johanna Salomon, Die Sozietdt fur die gesammte Mineralogie zu Jena unter Goethe und Johann Georg Lenz, Koln, 1990. The society was founded on 8 December 1797; Goethe mistakenly claimed the year was 1798 in 'Mineralogische Gesellschaft' [1805], in LA, I, xi, 53-4. 68 Goethe to Gaetano Cattaneo, 20 December 1817, WA, IV, xxviii, 341-8, esp. 347-8. Cattaneo was to be the intermediary,passing on the diploma to Brocchi and requesting the minerals on Goethe's behalf. The book das in question was Brocchi's Mineralogische Abhandlunguiber Thal von Fassa in Tirol, Dresden, 1817, originally published in Italian in 1811. 69 Benjamin, op. cit. (18), 66.
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were beginning to give way to public ones, and in his public duties he was undoubtedly on the side of the latter. Almost from its inception Goethe sought to have Lenz's society turned into a state society and moved into the Ducal Museums in the Jena palace. This was achieved in 1803, and though Goethe was put in charge of the new 'Ducal Mineralogical Society of Jena', Lenz retained the day-to-day running of the museum. Goethe tried to do the same with the 'Scientific Society' (NaturforschendenGesellschaft),though not quite as successfully. Much of the collections of the Scientific Society was moved into the Jena Museums, and although the Society itself was not dissolved its collection stagnated and was scavenged for other cabinets.70 These moves to consolidate the collections in Jena were part of Goethe's bigger plan to improve Jena University,which had lost a numberof prominentprofessors in 1803. At that time if a professor left a university he took his collections with him, which is what the anatomist Justus Christian Loder did in 1803 when he left Jena. Losing several professors at once could be disastrous. A way to overcome such a problem was to develop independent collections for the purposes of teaching and research. However, it turned out that university ownership of a collection neither guaranteed that the collection would be used nor that the professors would treat the collection as university property. In an 1817 report on the Jena museums Goethe praised the zoological and osteological collections, from which an instructorcould find and borrow what he needed, display it to his students in whatever classification he deemed appropriateand then return it to the storage cabinet according to its original classification,one meant for findingthings. Yet the transition from public to private was gradual and even these well-ordered cabinets were not without difficulties. The problem was those professors who refused to relinquish the keys to the cabinets, making them, in effect, private property. It was a case of professorial propriety infringing on free enquiry.7"Eventually the keys had to be given up, or ways had to be found to circumvent the professors.72 Goethe's interest in collections was not restricted to Jena. In 1814, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, Goethe travelled through the region of the Rhine and Main to examine the state of art collections. He also commented on scientific collections, praising those that were well ordered, such as the mineralogical collection of Carl Caesar von Leonhard, and making suggestions for collections that needed reorganization, such as that of the Foundation of Johann Hartmann Senckenberg. A spirit of utility informed his remarks and he recognized the value of consolidating collections, not only for universities but for hospitals as well, particularlyin large centres such as his home town, Frankfurtam Main.73Collections were not to be mere places of conservation, they were to be used for teaching and for research.Related developmentstook place in Berlin, where already before the Napoleonic invasions Goethe's sometime correspondent Alois Hirt was drawing up
70 Schmid and Schmid in Goethe, op. cit. (66), 1062-9. 71 Goethe, 'Museen zu Jena: Ubersichtdes Bisherigenund Gegenwartigen,nebst Vorschlagen fur die nachste Zeit, Michael 1817', in WA, I, liii, 291-304. 72 When Jena's physicians claimed they could not find the key to a room needed for the expansion of the Jena library, Goethe had a bricklayersmash a hole through the wall that separated the library from the room in the medical faculty. In conversation, 15 March 1830, in Eckermann, op. cit. (2), 543-4. 73 Goethe, 'Kunst und Altherthum am Rhein und Main' [1816], WA I, xxxiv/1, 69-200, 123-41.
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plans for a Royal Museum. In Hirt's plans, the Royal Museum was intended for teaching students of the art academy and to inspire designs for manufactured goods.74 Perhapsthere was some place for giving the general public, as opposed to experts, access to collections in Goethe's schemes, but it was certainly not an important place. As with his private collections, public ones were not to be arranged for display. Goethe could not contain his rage when Lenz argued that a new collection of Gebirgsarten in the Jena Museum should be stored in glass cabinets. Such cabinets, Goethe insisted, wasted space and were much more inconvenient to use than the traditional cabinets with drawers. The only advantage of glass was that it allowed for 'dangling something before the gaping masses'. But it was 'sheer madness' to imagine that such a collection could be comprehended in a moment with 'the body's eye'.7 It was the mind's eye working in concert with that of the body, the careful arrangement and knowledge of rocks, which allowed one to make sense of such a series of Gebirge. The catalogue, not glass, was the way to find things. Goethe's careful attention to the very real problems of storing and accessing a collection was closely tied to his view that the individual specimens of Gebirgsartencould only be understood as part of a carefully arranged series that showed the gradual transitions between specimens and made sense of a larger whole, in this case a part of the Earth's crust. It is noteworthy too that Goethe began his fascination with the careful ordering of Gebirgsartenin the early 1780s, before he began his osteological work and his botanical work, and long before he wrote his well-known epistemological essay of 1792, 'The Experimentas Mediator Between Subjectand Object', in which he argued that a properly arranged sequence of experiments have an overarching unity that reveals the necessary connections between individual phenomena.76Properlyordered collections were serious business, not an amusement.
74 Carmen Stonge, 'Making private collections public, Gustav FriedrichWaagner and the Royal Museum in Berlin', Journal of the History of Collections (1998), 10, 61-74, 62. However, it should be noted that Goethe was strongly opposed to Hirt's views on aesthetics: Der Sammler und die Seinigen (op. cit. (17)) was prompted as a rebuttal to Hirt. See Asman, op. cit. (17), 157. 75 Goethe to ChristianGottlob Voigt, 13 July 1816, WA, IV, xxvii, 87-92, quotations on 88, 90, 91. As a point of comparison, eighteenth-centuryand early nineteenth-centuryusers of Gottingen's university library praised it as much for its holdings as for its catalogue, which arranged books by subjects, not alphabetically by author. It was a catalogue designed for finding things. For a discussion of the Gottingen catalogue and library see William Clark, 'On the bureaucratic plots of the research library', in Books and the Sciences in History (ed. Marina Frasca-Spadaand Nick Jardine), Cambridge, 2000, 190-206, 196-200. 76 'Der Versuch als Vermittlervon Objekt und Subjekt' [1792], LA I, 8, 305-15. To some extent all of Goethe's scientific activities were concerned with problems of morphology, the relation of one form to another. Strictly speaking, though, it would be a little misleading to say that botany, anatomy, zoology, colour theory and geology could all count as morphology. Although Goethe did for a time in the 1790s have the view that all three kingdoms of nature might eventually be made a part of morphology, he eventually drew a Kantian distinction between the sciences of living things, which have an inherent purposiveness, and sciences of inanimate things. This is evident in the two series of scientific Hefte that he began publishing in 1817. The organic sciences were published in the series entitled Zur Morphologie (reprintedin LA I, 9); the inorganic sciences were a part of a separate series, Zur Naturwissenschaft Uberhaupt (reprintedin LA I, 8). See also Wolf von Engelhardt, 'Morphologie im Reich der Steine?', in In der Mitte zwischen Natur und Subjekt:Johann Wolfgang von Goethes Versuchdie Metamorphose der Pflanzezu erkldren,1790-1990 (ed. GunterMann, Dieter Mollenhauer and Stefan Peters),Frankfurtam Main, 1992, 33-51; and Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, Volume 2, Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Oxford, 2000, 459-61, 482-6.
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Collections had an epistemic function both because they were useful for knowledge and because they were a storehouse of useful knowledge. For Goethe knowing something meant knowing how it fitted into a larger picture. A Gebirgsartin a cabinet was a bit of nature in the small. Arranging collections properly, so that things could be found, made collections more useful, both for knowing and for other things. It would go far beyond the bounds of this discussion to determine how well the collections at Jena fulfilled the goals Goethe intended for them, but at least one knowledgeable contemporarythought they were very useful: 'The library is well-ordered and staffed ... The botanical garden is the first in Germany ... The mineralogical cabinet is one of the richest in Germany'. The same reviewer noted that the heart of the university was its professors, who cared for the university no matter how badly it treated them.77 Transforming private collections into public ones could not be achieved without changing the social role of the professor. This is not surprising,for owning something or not owning something changes one's relationship with a thing, and it modifies the relationships between those who own and those who do not own things. Goethe was keenly aware that the scientific, public purposes of the Jena collections could not be achieved without due attention to personal considerations: 'Every business is, in fact, moved by ethical levers, since all are directed by people. '78 The collections could not be transformedwithout changing social relations. Public collections requiredparticularsocial arrangementsif they were to fulfil their epistemic functions. Professors had to be forced to recognize their obligations and give up their keys. The world of the professor as private practitioner was on its way out; similarly, the world of private amateurs, such as Goethe, was giving way to public experts. But there is no need to become elegiac about Goethe, for he was also on the side of the future. The world of the new public collections would be the purview of Goethe the able administrator, not Goethe the passionate collector.79 Private purposes A private collection accumulated over years and decades cannot but have meaning for its collector. Henrich Steffens, the Norwegian-Danish-German Naturphilosoph and geologist, believed 'the scientist's desire to collect things in his old age can almost be seen as
77 Anonymous review of Hermann FriedrichKilian, 'Die Universitaten in Deutschland', Isis (1829), Heft 5, 458-70. See also the reviewer'spraise of Gottingen and its catalogue. The reviewer may well have been the editor of the journal, Lorenz Oken, who quit his job at Jena before Goethe could take steps to have him fired, see Hermann Brauning-Oktavio, Oken und Goethe im Lichte neuer Quellen, Weimar, 1959. 78 Goethe, op. cit. (71), 299. 79 It is still an open question as to whether or not 1800 can be taken as a turning point from the public to the private collection, though there are some good reasons for thinking this was the crucial period. The creation of the Louvre (1793) in the wake of the French Revolution is often taken as representativeof a dramatic shift from private to public museums at the close of the eighteenth century. See Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, Berkeley, 1994, 393-407, 395; the useful remarks,which by no means are restrictedto Goethe, in Trunz, op. cit. (1), 12-13; and Georg Uschmann, Geschichteder Zoologie und der zoologischen Anstalten in Jena, 1779-1919, Jena, 1959, 1-10. Discussions of private cabinets do tend to focus on the period before 1800, as do Olmi, op. cit. (19), Pomian, op. cit. (20); and the essays in Macrocosmos in Microcosmo, die Welt in der Stube: zur Geschichtedes Sammelns, 1450 bis 1800 (ed. Andreas Grote), Opladen, 1994.
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a Specificium for extending life'.80 The peaceful preoccupation with the items collected long ago in more productive times could enliven and illuminate the present of the aged collector. Steffens had Goethe in mind. Through the glass of Eckermann's Conversations (which Steffens mistakenly refers to as a 'diary') he imagined the old sage wandering through his collections, 'the magnificentruins of his meaningful life', as though searching for the lost thoughts and plans of his life.8"Benjaminmade a similar observation: it is not the collector who brings his collections to life, it is not 'that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them'.82 Goethe's fascination with the mineral kingdom did not just reveal itself in his old age. Consider, again, his lyrical essay on granite, in which he writes of his 'passionate inclination' for the granitic formations that are the 'the foundation [Grundfeste] of our Earth': the of I havesuffered continueto suffermuchthrough inconstancy humanopinion,through and that its suddenchangesin me and in others, and I may be grantedthe sublimetranquility of surrounds whenwe standin the solitarymutepresence nature,vast and eloquentwith its us still voice. Let those who have an inklingof this follow me.83 The graceful emotion of his essay moves from the ancient world to the present, from volcanic chaos to the silence of a naked granitic summit, from the mercurial human heart to the inconstancy of names for granite, all in a brief few pages. Beneath its rhapsodic prose lies a dense web of allusions to the Harz journeys, to the most current mineralogical debates and to his collections; it is a confluence of poetry, science and autobiography. Yet it remained unpublished during his lifetime. More than that, it was not included in Goethe's plans for the final edition of his works. It is impossible that this was an oversight - Goethe took great pains to ensure that the content and structure of the posthumous volumes of the Ausgabe letzter Hand were published in accordance with his wishes. Ever since the age of print unpublished works have raised interesting questions. The unpublished should never be taken as a synonym for the unpolished, and the unpolished cannot be equated with the unimportant. Think of Newton's alchemical writings, or Benjamin's Arcades Project. Sometimes delicate things are difficult to write about. In a letter from 1788, in a discussion of crystallization, Goethe remarked, 'These matters are too delicate, and determiningthe words and expressions demands great precision of a sort that is seldom attained in prose and never in letters'.84 In 1815 he sent a friend two 'talismans' of crystallized granite, 'the first form known to us of the world coming into being [die ersten uns bekannten Gebildeder entstehendenWelt] ... Nobody will understand it . In the essay on granite nature speaks softly; in an aphorism probably written decades later, stones have become entirely silent: 'Stones are mute teachers; they make the observer
80 Henrich Steffens, Was ich erlebte: Aus der Erinnerungniedergeschrieben[1840-4], 10 vols. in 5, SuttgartBad Cannstatt, 1995-6, iv, 72. 81 Steffens, op. cit. (80), 73-4. 82 Benjamin, op. cit. (18), 67. 83 LA, I, xi, 11-12. 84 To Philipp Seidel, 9 February 1788, WA, IV, viii, 345-7, quotation on 345-6. 85 Letter to Sulpiz Boisseree, 21 December 1815, WA, IV, xxvi, 193-6, quotation on 194.
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mute, and the best that one learns from them cannot be passed on to others.'86What is to be made of this ongoing theme of silence? Some of these comments come very late in Goethe's life and reflect his contempt for the catastrophic geology of Leopold von Buch and Alexander von Humboldt. Indeed, the context of Goethe's famous remark on the expense of his collections and his lifelong education was a conversation in which he had just attacked Buch's theory of erratic blocks.87The inaccessibility of the distant past made Goethe very sceptical about grand claims for a new science of the earth. But a nature that was not fully accessible was not without its charms. Even as a young boy Serenus Zeitblom, the narrator of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, knew 'that non-human nature is fundamentally illiterate', and it was precisely that which made for nature's 'uncanniness '88 There was something uncanny about granite for Goethe. In 1784, while in the Harz collecting samples of granite, he noted, in a series of letters to Charlotte von Stein, that he was on the verge of finding an 'Ariadnian thread' that would lead him through the labyrinth. The labyrinth in question was the structure of granite, which appeared to be a confusion of fissures and formless heaps. In fact Goethe was convinced he had found a large-scale,orderly, crystallinestructurein the granite of the Brocken. Immediately after his journey he wrote to Charlotte, 'The characters of nature are grand and beautiful, and I claim that they are entirely readable.'89The book of nature was readable, with a lot of work, but what did Goethe learn from it? He had learned to read his way through the apparent confusion of nature and this was solace for the confusion in his life. Goethe had arrived in Weimar in 1775; by 1784, burdened and frustrated by his administrativeobligations, his literary production was at a low ebb. Then there was Charlotte, much loved by him and marriedto someone else. She was his custodian and guide, his ministrant and muse, the anchor that held him fast and the life-vest that kept him afloat. Thousands of letters to her written during his first Weimar decade are a testimony that of all the kinds of love, love unconsummated can be the most consuming. Even while writing to her of the Harz mountains he admits his love for her 'is no longer a passion but a sickness, a sickness more dear [to him] than the most perfect health'.90 Less than a year later he wrote to his friend Carl Ludwig von Knebel that the 'consistency of nature is a consolation for the inconsistency of people', a thought he repeated twenty-two years later in his notes for a geognostic lecture to the ladies of the Weimar court.91The search for an external natural order was tied to inner turmoil, and studying the Bildung of the Earth was part of Goethe's Bildung.
86 LA I, xi, 351. 87 Leopold von Buch, 'Ueber die Ursachen der Verbreitung grosser Alpengeschiebe', Abhandlungen der koniglichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1815, 161-86. 88 Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus: das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkuhn,erzdbltvon einem Freunde, Stockholm, 1947, 30. 89 22 August 1784, WA, IV, vi, 343. For a more figurative interpretation than the one given here see Hans Blumenberg,Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, 2nd edn., Frankfurtam Main, 1983, 214-37. 90 Letterto Charlotte von Stein, 28-31 August 1784, WA, IV, vi, 347-52, quotation on 350. For the 'Ariadnian thread', see letter to idem, 14 August 1784, WA, IV, vi, 336. 91 To Knebel, 2 April 1785, WA, IV, vii, 36-7, quotation on 36, and 'Geognostische Vorlesung 1807', in LA I, xi, 121-3, 123.
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Goethe came to favour public collections over private ones, except in the case of his own collections. They were important, above all, as his own monument, the one he so carefully constructed over the last decades of his life. All of his papers and collections, so carefully ordered, were left to his heirs, who carefully conserved the whole and then passed it on to Weimar, not to be broken up but kept, the substance of the museum that was Goethe's house and now bears his name: a place for display and activity. So his collections were a part of the identity he made for himself, a part of his education. They could also serve as signs for important moments in his life. Goethe's friendship with Schiller is as famous as it is misunderstood. The Olympian mythology of German classicism made this friendshipthe very embodiment of 'the land of
poets and thinkers' in an age of German empire. For all the marvellous literary fruit that it bore, it was a friendship marked more by mutual intellectual respect than genuine warmth. There was no place for the intimacy of the du in this relationship.92 How different was the friendship between Goethe and Trebra. In 1812 Trebra sent Goethe two polished tablets of the rock they had found in the Harz in 1783, the rock which displayed the transition between Gebirgsartenand which was so difficult to classify. In Goethe's moving reply there is a passage reminiscent of the essay on granite: That intended for me will remain a marvellous monument of our love and friendship, of our mutual affection, as constant and enduring as our affection for nature, as the quiet passion for examining her riddles, and the wish to win some of her mysteries through our own mysterious spirit.93 A stone: at once it is both part of a collection and reminder of a friendship and of a passion to marvel at the riddles of nature and the self. Finally, and most important of all, there is the Brocken itself. The site of Walpurgis Night revelry in Faust I, it is the most famous of German mountains. The highest point in the Harz, its granite summit is exemplary of Goethe's gradualist, non-revolutionary understanding, not only of the Earth's crust but also of the social and political world. It is this view that is expressed in the 'High Mountain' scene of Act IV of Faust II. Written in 1831, it was literally the last part of his life's work. But the Brocken makes an important appearance over half a century earlier, long before the Walpurgis Night, in his first and most important Harz journey, a true heart's journey in winter. He took this December 1777 journey to learn about mines, to climb the Brocken and to decide if his future was in Weimar.94
92 For an outstanding brief discussion of this strained friendship see Hans Mayer, Goethe, ein Versuch uber den Erfolg, Leipzig, 1987, 51-9. 93 27 October 1812, WA, IV, xxiii, 119-21, quotation on 119-20. See also Walther Herrmann, Goethe und Trebra: Freundschaftund Austausch zwischen Weimar und Freiberg [FreibergerForschungshefte, D 9], Berlin 1955. 94 For a compelling and complex argument that this journey was primarily Goethe's search for a sign as to whether his future was in Weimar see Albrecht Schone, 'Harzreise im Winter', in Gotterzeichen, Liebeszauber, Satanskult, 3rd edn., Munchen, 1990, 13-52. Wolf von Engelhardt has argued, contra Schone, that the purpose of the journeywas primarilyto learn about mining: 'Goethes Harzreiseim Winter 1777', Goethe Jahrbuch (1988), 104, 192-211. The point I would emphasize is that Goethe's earliest preoccupation with the subterranean and mineralogical world intersects with a search for his vocation.
300
E. P. Hamm
This journey and the mountain ascent is rememberedin 'Harz journey in Winter', one of his most gnomic poems. This excerpt is from the earliest version of the poem, 'In the Harz in December 1777': Withthe glowingtorch You lead him the Through fordsat night, Overthe unfounded paths On desolatelandscapes, Withthe thousand-coloured dawn You laughin his heart, Withthe corrosive storm You carryhim aloft. Winterstreams cascadefromrockyheights In his Psalms, Andthe dreaded peak summit Snow-shrouded Wreathed with rows of spirits Wrathful peoples, the Becomes altarof his most belovedgratitude. You standwith unfathomed entrails manifest Mysteriously Abovethe astounded world, Andgaze fromclouds and Uponits kingdoms majesty Whichyou waterfromthe arteries your of Brothers besideyou. It was on the Brocken that this physiognomist of the Earthdecided his fate was in Weimar, and it was seven years later here in the Harz that he collected the most important suite of formations 'that can possibly exist', a collection displaying variations and transformations of individual items. The complete poem, a variation and transformation of the cited version, is available in the most important of all of Goethe's collections, the summation of the work of a lifetime: his collected works.95
95 However, the early version of 'Harzreiseim Winter' from which I have excerpted and translatedis a product of late twentieth-century philology, Schone, op. cit. (94), 20-2. Not everything can be found in a collection. Benjaminhad his collected works too, if only in manuscript,but his most prized possession was his library. The libraryand the manuscriptswere seized by the Gestapo in Paris - incredibly,both survived the war that Benjamin did not. See Hannah Arendt's remarks in Benjamin, op. cit. (18), 52, n. 7.

Goethe Johana Wolfgang

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The British Society for the History of Science

BJHS, 2001, 34, 275-300

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