TRAVEL DIARIES: GOETHE ON THE BROCKEN. PART I

THE BROCKEN IN THE HARZ MOUNTAINS
























"Here Goethe sojourned on December 10, 1777"

























INTRODUCTION: My visit to the Brocken.

On July 16, 2010, I traveled up to the Brocken, or Blocksberg, the most prominent of a series of forested peaks along the Harz chain of mountains in Central Germany. It was a hot day in the plains of northern Germany, but the temperature decreases pleasantly as one makes the gradual ascent into the forests of the Harz. At Torfhaus I had the first clear view of the summit of the Brocken, now crowned by a series of buildings, including a TV Tower with adjoining antennae and a Radar dome, which totally deform and deface the rounded summit of the hill. It is an effort to picture it in the way it was, in the way of German legend and literary tradition.

























View of the summit of the Brocken from Torfhaus.




There are several hiking trails to the summit, but the way I arrived there was by train, a train powered by a steam engine locomotive. The Brockennahn narrow-gauge railway runs up to the summit of the mountain by-passing two or three stations. I boarded the train at Schierke, which is the setting off place for Mephistopheles and Faust in the Walpurgisnacht scene, in the first part of the Faust.




















Schierke’s "Witches’ Mountain Inn”






























Passenger train climbing the Brocken on July 16, 2010



The train was replete with German tourists taking advantage of a beautiful summer’s day to go to the top of the famous mountain. At the summit there are restaurants, shops, nature walks and gardens, and a large domed building that houses an exhibition of the “history” of the mountain, its literary history in effect, as well as of its mythological association with witches and witchcraft, its military uses during the DDR period, its geological foundations and natural habitat. The entire complex is run by the administration of the Hochharz National Park of the State of Sachsen-Anhalt.



I. The Brocken and Goethe's existential quest in 1777

I had long anticipated this visit. On December 10, 1777, Goethe climbed up to the top, in what turned out to be a very productive day for him. In his marvelous biography of Goethe, Nicholas Boyle describes the preliminaries to the event:

“On 10 December he was guided up through the snow to Torfhaus, a hamlet with a forester’s station a thousand feet below the great domed summit of the Brocken. Now it is a marshalling yard for cross-country skiers, but in 1777 there were no paths and in thirteen years the forester had never climbed the mountain in winter. The night of the ninth had been very cold and the following morning the hills were hidden in mist. Over his breakfast the forester told Goethe that in these conditions the Brocken was unclimbable.

So I sat there with a heavy heart and half a mind on going back . . . I was still, and prayed the gods to change the heart of this man and the weather, and was still. And so he says to me, ‘Now you can see the Brocken’. I went to the window and it lay before me as clear as my face in the mirror, then my heart opened and I cried: ‘And shall I not go up there! Have you no servant? nobody?’ –And he said, ‘I will go with you.’[Goethes Briefe, I, 247]

At quarter past ten they left; the snow was a yard deep but with the hard frost it was strong enough to carry them. ‘At a quarter past one on the top’, Goethe noted in his diary, ‘bright, magnificent moment, the whole world in clouds and mist, and on top everything bright. What is man that thou art mindful of him?’”[Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1: The Poetry of Desire, (Oxford, 1992) p. 298].
























Goethe’s drawing of the Brocken by moonlight, December 1777




The reference to Psalm 8:4, - “What is man that thou art mindful of him, the son of man, that you care for him?” [Was ist der Mensch, daß du seiner gedenkst, und des Menschenkind, daß du sich seiner annimmst?] – attests, according to Boyle, that the ascent to the Brocken had a religious significance for Goethe. His self-identification with the ‘son of man’ is revealed both in the letter to Charlotte von Stein that he wrote on the way down from the mountain as well as in the poem which he wrote, simultaneously, now known as “Harzreise im Winter.” (Winter Journey in the Harz). To Charlotte he writes:

“I have said: I have a wish for the full moon! – Now, dearest, I can go out of the door and there lies the Brocken before me above the firs in the noble magnificent moonlight, and I was up there today, and on the Devil’s Altar I offered the dearest thanks to my God.”































Devil’s Altar on the summit of the Brocken







Goethe’s ambiguity between a self-identification with Jesus or with the Devil, is also present in the poem, in its last stanza:


"Du stehst
mit unerforschtem Busen
Geheimnisvoll – offenbar
Über der erstaunten Welt
Und schaust aus Wolken
Auf ihre Reiche und Herrlichkeit."


[You stand with unfathomed bosom, mysteriously manifest, above the astounded world and look down from clouds on its kingdoms and glory. (Nicholas Boyle translation, op.cit.)]



The reference is to Satan offering kingdoms and glory to Jesus: “Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me.” (Matthew 4: 8-9). And the self-identification with the “son of man,” -again I rely on Boyle -, points to the symbolic understanding and interpretation within which Goethe fashioned the occurrences and events of his life and work, at a time in his life when his poetry was essentially autobiographical. His ascent to the Brocken was undertaken at a time when Goethe was uncertain and frustrated in Weimar. He had served at the court of Karl August in various capacities since 1775. He had abandoned his world-renowned career as a public author, publishing his works to a nation-wide class of educated middle-class readers, the Bildungsbürgertum, and exchanged it for the confined and aristocratic audience of the ducal court and for the ear of his beloved Charlotte von Stein, in the privacy of her boudoir. He had written little since his arrival in Weimar. He chose to climb the Brocken to see if there, in this symbolic summit, he would receive a sign from Fate that would point him towards a future of some kind.

The poem ‘Harzreise im Winter’ reveals these preoccupations:

"Denn ein Gott hat
Jedem seine Bahn
Vorgezeichnet,
Die der Glückliche 
Rasch zum freudigen 
Ziele rennt: Wem aber Unglück
Das Herz zusammenzog,
Er sträubt vergebens 
Sich gegen die Schranken
Des ehernen Fadens,
Den die doch bittre Schere 
Nur einmal löst."

[For a God hath
Unto each prescribed
His path,
Which the happy one
Runs over swiftly
To his glad goal:
He whose heart cruel
Fate hath contracted,
Struggles but vainly
Against all the barriers
The brazen thread raises,
But which the harsh shears
Must one day sever.]


Both the poem and the ascent to the summit of the Brocken raise for Goethe the question of his personal destiny. The Satanism of the imagery in the poem points further to another element of significance in the symbolism of the Brocken, namely, the traditional association of the mountain with witchery and the devil: the mountain clouded over in mist where orgiastic carnivals took place on the night of Walpurgis. Goethe would return there in the Walpurgisnacht scene of the Faust, Part I, composed in 1801, but which first made its appearance in the completed Faust I of 1808. (ll. 3835-4222). According to the legend, devils, witches and other evil spirits congregated on the Blocksberg, - known as Brocken in the modern period -, on Walpurgis Night, the night of April 30-May 1. Goethe inserted this scene directly after the scene where Gretchen, praying in the Cathedral (Dom), is confronted by the Evil Spirit (Böser Geist) and accused of various foul crimes for which she is only partially guilty, and Faust complicit. The scene on the Brocken marks an abrupt change in mood and circumstance. To remove Faust from Gretchen, to dampen his ardor, assuage his guilt and withdraw him from the location of his crime against Gretchen and the mess he has made, Mephistopheles takes Faust to the Brocken for the Witches Sabbath on Walpurgis Night.


[CONTINUED IN PART II]

THE KERKOPES

The Kerkopes, or Cercopes: Genealogy of a Greek Myth

 

 

The Dorian Hero, Herakles, carrying the Kerkopes over his shoulder.
Doric entablature from Selinus
Temple of Apollo, Temple C
National Archeological Museum of Palermo







“On the acropolis of fever-ridden Selinus, two young English architects, Angell and Harris, excavating at their own expense in 1822-23, were rewarded by the discovery of some of the finest archaic metopes ever unearthed. The Bourbon government of the Kingdom of Naples interrupted the work, and Harris soon died of fever, but Angell lived to publish his finds. One of the finest, in the Palermo Museum, from Apollo’s Temple C, portrays Heracles carrying on his shoulders, trussed like game to a pole, two Cercopes, imps who had annoyed him by changing themselves into blue-bottle flies and troubling his sleep.” Paul Lachlan MacKendrick, The Greek Stones Speak: The Story of Archaeology in Greek Lands (1962).

According to myth, the Kerkopes were two monkey-men, named Passalus and Akmon (Acmon), who plagued the land of Lydia in western Anatolia. Their name derives from the Ancient Greek word "kerkos," meaning 'tail,' which may explain their description as 'monkey-men.' Their capture is the third labor of Herakles assigned to him by the Lydian Queen Omphale, during Herakles' long enslavement to her as penalty for the 'inadvertent' murder of Iphitus. Upon the command of the Delphic Oracle, Herakles was forced to serve one year in bondage to this Queen. It was shameful for him to be thus treated, and to have to serve an Oriental woman in this fashion, yet there are many late Hellenistic and Roman references in texts and art to Herakles being forced to do women's work and wear women's clothing and hold a basket of wool while Omphale and her maidens did their spinning. Omphale is said to have worn the skin of the Nemean Lion and carried Herakles' olive-wood club.

Johann Heinrich Tischbein, the ElderHerakles und Omphale

The capture of the Kerkopes occurred in this fashion: As Herakles was sleeping under a tree, the two mischievous characters stole his bow; Herakles caught the barbaric looking brothers and tied them upside-down to a pole which he carried over his shoulder; the Kerkopes were not only unrepentant but highly amused by their plight and, as they dangled behind Herakles, they began making disparaging comments about Herakles’ hairy black butt (melampygos). Herakles, who was accustomed to sorrow and brutality, couldn’t resist the infectious good humor of the Kerkopes and set them free.

Herakles’ encounter with the Kerkopes was a popular artistic theme beginning in the early sixth century BCE and continuing well into the fourth century. The story was popular from mainland Greece to the island of Sicily. It is one of the fragmentary remains of the Epic Cycle. For the complete translations of the Epic Cycle, Loeb Classical Library, volume 57, ISBN 0674990633 is always recommended.

Ovid tells of the disfigurement of their faces in the Metamorphoses, at 14. 89 ff (trans. Melville) (Roman epic C1st BCE to C1st A.D.): "Pithecusae [island off the coast of Italy] placed on a bare hill, named from its denizens [from pithekos, Ancient Greek word meaning 'monkey']. For once the Genitor Deum (Father of the Gods), who loathed the fraud and falsehood of the Cercopes and all their crafty crimes, transformed the men into misshapen animals that seemed both like and unlike humans, shriveling their limbs, tilting and flattening their noses, ploughing their cheeks with wrinkles of old age. Then, swathed all over in a tawny pelt, he sent them to dwell here, but first removed the means of speech and use of tongues designed for shocking perjury, and left them but screeches and screams for protest and complaint."

Herakles depicted in
the Niobid krater

In the Homerica, from Suidas, (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th to 7th BCE), yet another version of their capture: "Kerkopes: These were two brothers living upon the earth who practiced every kind of knavery. They were called Kerkopes [Monkey-men] because of their cunning doings: one of them was named Passalos and the other Akmon. Their mother, a daughter of Memnon, seeing their tricks, told them to keep clear of "Black-bottom," that is, of Herakles. These Kerkopes were sons of Theia and Okeanos, and are said to have been turned to stone for trying to deceive Zeus. ‘Liars and cheats, skilled in deeds irremediable, accomplished knaves. Far over the world they roamed deceiving men as they wandered continually.’"

What are we to make of this myth? Herakles, long-suffering hero of the Dorians, whose principal characteristic is his strength, is deceived and taunted by these playful ruffians in the course of their capture, and because they make him laugh, he spares their lives as an act of kindness. Their skittish, manic behavior; their playfulness in the face of death; their irremediable nature, lively, capricious and variable; their bothersome pranks, make these characters into imps. They are of the sort of Max und Moritz, the cartoon characters of Wilhelm Busch, or the big playful lout and impudent trickster, Till Eulenspiegel, in the German folkloric tradition of Middle Lower German (Niederdeutsch) literature.

Till Eulenspiegel
Sculpture in Moelln













The scatological import in the Kerkopes’ story is also evident in the case of Eulenspiegel's. In one story he rolls his feces into little balls and sells them to Jews in Frankfurt am Main as "prophet's berries"; in another he covers the contents of his chamber pot with a layer of coins and invites a priest to reach into his money-jar and take as much charity as he can grasp.

Herakles and the Kerkopes
Attic black-figure Amphora 530-500 BCE

When Herakles turns the Kerkopes upside down, to hang them from his staff for conveyance, they laugh at his hairy black butt. The hero laughs too, forgives them their pranks, and saves their lives. But the perverse liveliness and bothersome nature of the brothers, they were after all liars, cheats and knaves, accounts for a further metamorphosis for which the scatology of the melampygos (black butt) provides a genealogical clue. From men to monkeys, . . . to coprophilic insects. In the alternate version of the myth, the Kerkopes change themselves into blue-bottle flies to trouble Herakles in his sleep. (The Greek Stones Speak, op.cit.). The blue-bottle fly or bottlebee (Calliphora vomitoria) lays her eggs where she feeds, usually in decaying meat, garbage, . . . or feces.

Calliphora vomitoria

THE "VITA ACTIVA"

WORK


Illustration from Frank Tashlin's, The Bear That Wasn't (1946)

Frank Tashlin (born Francis Fredrick von Taschlein) (February 19, 1913 – May 5, 1972)

NIETZSCHE: ON THE VITA ACTIVA

George Grosz, Ameisen (Ants), 1920



From Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, 1878 (trans. H. Zimmerman), 283:

Principal deficiency of active men. - Active men are generally wanting in the higher activity: I mean that of the individual. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is to say as generic creatures, but not as distinct individual and unique human beings; in this regard they are lazy. - It is the misfortune of the active that their activity is always a little irrational. One ought not to ask the cash-amassing banker, for example, what the purpose of his restless activity is: it is irrational. The active roll as the stone rolls, in obedience to the stupidity of the laws of mechanics. - As at all times, so now too, men are divided into the slaves and the free; for he who does not have two-thirds of his day to himself is a slave, let him be what he may otherwise: statesman, businessman, official, scholar.

Grosz, Metropolis, 1916-1917

The sufferings inflicted by the contemplatives

Friederich Nietzsche, MORGENRÖTE: Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurteile

(1873)

[DAYBREAK: Thoughts on the prejudices of morality]

Section 41

Nietzsche in 1876

"Section 41. Towards an evaluation of the vita contemplativa. – Let us, as men of the vita contemplativa, not forget what kind of evil and ill-fortune has come upon the man of the vita activa through the after-effects of contemplation – in short, what counter-reckoning the vita activa has in store for us if we boast too proudly before it of our good deeds.

First: the so-called religious natures, whose numbers preponderate among the contemplative and who consequently constitute their commonest species, have at all times had the effect of making life hard for practical men and, where possible, intolerable to them: to darken the heavens, to blot out the sun, to cast suspicion on joy, to deprive hope of its value, to paralyze the active hand – this is what they have known how to do, just as much as they have had their consolations, alms, helping hand and benedictions for wretched feelings and times of misery.

Dürer, St. Jerome in his study, 1514

Secondly: the artists, somewhat rarer than the religious yet still a not uncommon kind of man of the vita contemplativa, have as individuals usually been unbearable, capricious, envious, violent and unpeaceable: this effect has to be set against the cheering and exalting effects of their works.

Thirdly: the philosophers, a species in which religious and artistic powers exist together but in such a fashion that a third thing, dialectics, love of demonstrating, has a place beside them, have been the author of evils in the manner of the religious and the artists and have in addition through their inclination for dialectics brought boredom to many people; but their number has always been very small.

Fourthly: the thinkers and the workers in science; they have rarely aimed at producing effects but have dug away quietly under their mole-hills. They have thus caused little annoyance or discomfort, and often, as objects of mockery and laughter, have without desiring it even alleviated the life of the men of the vita activa. Science has, moreover, become something very useful to everyone: if on account of this utility very many predestined for the vita activa now, in the sweat of their brow and not without brain-racking and imprecations, beat out for themselves a path to science, this distress is not the fault of the host of thinkers and workers in science; it is “self-inflicted pain.”"

Dürer, Melancolia, 1514

DE LA BREVEDAD ENGAÑOSA DE LA VIDA

DE LA BREVEDAD ENGAÑOSA DE LA VIDA

Soneto

(English translation below, by Alix Ingber, 1995)

LUIS DE GÓNGORA Y ARGOTE (Córdoba, 11 July 1561 – Córdoba, 24 May 1627)

Menos solicitó veloz saeta
destinada señal, que mordió aguda;
agonal carro por la arena muda
no coronó con más silencio meta,

que presurosa corre, que secreta,
a su fin nuestra edad. A quien lo duda,
fiera que sea de razón desnuda,
cada Sol repetido es un cometa.

¿Confiésalo Cartago, y tú lo ignoras?
Peligro corres, Licio, si porfías
en seguir sombras y abrazar engaños.

Mal te perdonarán a ti las horas:
las horas que limando están los días,
los días que royendo están los años.


Sonnet:
Concerning the deceptive brevity of life

Less swiftly did the arrow seek
its destined mark, which it so sharply pierced;
the racing chariot on voiceless sand
did not a column with more silence round,

than swiftly runs, and surreptitiously
to its end our life. For him who doubts,
even if it's a brute of reason stripped,
every new sun a comet's warning sounds.

Carthage confesses this, yet you don't see?
You are in danger, Lycius, if you persist
in chasing shadows, grasping at a straw.

You will not soon be pardoned by the hours:
hours that erode the fabric of our days,
days that our years inevitably gnaw.

(©Alix Ingber, 1995)

 
PLINY THE YOUNGER
LETTER TO FUSCUS
(Spanish translation below)
















Pliny the Younger Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius Caecilius or Gaius Caecilius Cilo (61 AD – ca. 112 AD)
















Model of Pliny's Villa at Laurentium







 

[ABAJO, EN CASTELLANO]




LETTER CVIII



To Fuscus:


You want to know how I portion out my day, in my summer villa at Tuscum? I get up just when I please; generally about sunrise, often earlier, but seldom later than this. I keep the shutters closed, as darkness and silence wonderfully promote meditation.


Thus free and abstracted from those outward objects which dissipate attention, I am left to my own thoughts; nor suffer my mind to wander with my eyes, but keep my eyes in subjection to my mind, which, when they are not distracted by a multiplicity of external objects, see nothing but what the imagination represents to them. If I have any work in hand, this is the time I choose for thinking it out, word for word, even to the minutest accuracy of expression. In this way I compose more or less, according as the subject is more or less difficult, and I find myself able to retain it. I then call my secretary, and, opening the shutters, dictate to him what I have put into shape, after which I dismiss him, then call him in again, and again dismiss him. About ten or eleven o'clock (for I do not observe one fixed hour), according to the weather, I either walk upon my terrace or in the covered portico, and there I continue to meditate or dictate what remains upon the subject in which I am engaged.



























This completed, I get into my chariot, where I employ myself as before, when I was walking, or in my study; and find this change of scene refreshes and keeps up my attention. On my return home, I take a little nap, then a walk, and after that repeat out loud and distinctly some Greek or Latin speech, not so much for the sake of strengthening my voice as my digestion; though indeed the voice at the same time is strengthened by this practice. I then take another walk, am anointed, do my exercises, and go into the bath. At supper, if I have only my wife or a few friends with me, some author is read to us; and after supper we are entertained either with music or an interlude. When that is finished, I take my walk with my family, among whom I am not without some scholars. Thus we pass our evenings in varied conversation; and the day, even when at the longest, steals imperceptibly away. Upon some occasions I change the order in certain of the articles above - mentioned. For instance, if I have studied longer or walked more than usual, after my second sleep, and reading a speech or two aloud, instead of using my chariot I get on horseback; by which means I ensure as much exercise and lose less time.



The visits of my friends from the neighboring villages claim some part of the day; and sometimes, by an agreeable interruption, they come in very seasonably to relieve me when I am feeling tired. I now and then amuse myself with hunting, but always take my tablets into the field, that, if I should meet with no game, I may at least bring home something. Part of my time too (though not so much as they desire) is allotted to my tenants; whose rustic complaints, along with these city occupations, make my literary studies still more delightful to me.



 Farewell.























Ruins of Pliny's Villa at Tifernum











Carta de Plinio el Joven a Fusco:Me preguntas cómo paso la jornada de verano en mi casa de Tuscum, en Etruria. Me despierto cuando quiero, habitualmente a las seis, con frequencia antes, rara vez mas tarde. . . . Reflexiono sobre el trabajo que estoy haciendo y lo hago con gran cuidado, como si lo escribiera palabra por palabra y lo corrigiera . . . Después llamo a mi secretario, le hago abrir las ventanas y le dicto lo que he elaborado en la mente . . . Hacia las diez o las once –no subdivido las horas de manera rígida, precisa, sino según aconseje el tiempo -, voy a la terraza o al atrio, sigo reflexionando, y dicto lo que he pensado. Después, subo a la carroza y también en ella continúo haciendo lo que hago, caminando o acostado. La tensión mental permanence, revigorizada por el cambio. A continuación, me echo una siesta y doy otro paseo; al final leo algún discurso griego o latino, en voz alta y clara, más para el beneficio del estómago que para el entrenamiento de la voz; aunque, de todos modos, esto sirve también para fortalecer la voz. Doy un nuevo paseo, vienen después los masajes, la gimnasia y el baño. A la mesa, cuando está mi mujer o un par de amigos, hago leer algún libro; tras la cena, la comedia o el sonido del laúd; doy a continuación, un paseo con mi gente, que incluye también a hombres cultos. De este modo transcurre la velada en discursos varios y agradables, y hasta el día más largo pasa como un soplo . . . . A veces voy a cazar, aunque nunca sin mi mesita de escribir, que gracias a ella, aunque no cace nada, siempre llevo a casa algo de valor . . . También dedico algún tiempo a mis arrendatarios (coloni), aunque, según ellos, nunca es suficiente; sus quejas labriegas despiertan en mí el deseo de pensar en nuestras ciencias y en las actividades y asuntos politicos de la ciudad.
Me despido.