German Epic/Jewish Epic: Goethe's Exodus Narrative in Hermann und Dorothea and “Israel in der Wüste”

In 1797 while he was completing his verse epic Hermann und Dorothea,1 Goethe began work on an essay of biblical criticism concerning the Exodus story.2 Based on textual evidence, Goethe argues, the Israelite journey through the wilderness could not have lasted forty years. He eventually set the essay aside, unfinished, for nearly 15 years, picking it up to add a new opening in 1812.3 It appeared finally in 1819 under the title "Israel in der Wuste" in Goethe's disparate companion to the West-ostlicher Divan "Noten und Abhandlungen zum besseren Verstandnis," where it lies sandwiched between a catalog of ideas for a future divan and a compendium of famous journeys to the East. In this location, the essay's detailed textual analysis can seem arcane, even quaint. Goethe himself suggests that the interest of the piece lies largely in its testimony to his earlier preoccupation with the Books of Moses (FA 1.3.1:229). But "Israel in der Wuste" is anything but narrowly philological in its concerns. It embodies a broad and disconcerting cultural agenda, which only becomes fully legible when re-situated in its primary compositional context in the late 1790s. In this decade after the French Revolution, a focus of great tension in Goethe's thinking is the idea of nation, embodied so formidably by the invading Revolutionary army of the French. But for Goethe it is not only the new French nation-state that has disturbing implications for the future of German lands and German culture. A fraught analogy also links Germany to a paradigmatic Kulturnation-the Jews, a people united not through a state but through what Goethe views as a great literary landmark, the Old Testament.4 In articulating both his anxieties and his hopes concerning German national culture, Goethe is driven to address his Jewish model. The literary genre that accommodates Goethe's exploration of national identity at this j uncture is the epic. Indeed I argue that his conception of a national epic is the key connection between the essay "Israel in der Wuste" and the work it coincided with compositionally in 1797, Hermann und Dorothea. Both "Israel in der Wuste" and Hermann und Dorothea take the biblical Exodus from Egypt as the original model of a founding cultural narrative or national epic.5 And yet the works appropriate this biblical material in the service of very different visions of nation. Hermann und Dorothea employs its Exodus analogy to suggest the possibility of an integrative, adaptive modern German cultural consciousness, while "Israel in der Wuste" reads out of the Exodus story a highly negative prefiguration of a volatile modern Judaism. Indeed I show that this essay of biblical criticism amounts to a barely concealed polemic against Jewish emancipation. The submerged, inverted connection between these two works suggests the peculiar dynamic of rej ection and dependence at work in Goethe's relationship to Judaism more generally.6 But before turning to the two works at hand, we need to elucidate Goethe's underlying conception of a national epic by looking at the circumstances and lines of thought that shaped it. Events in 1796 sharply accentuated the tensions in Goethe's thinking about Germany and Germanness. Certainly, renewed French incursions on German territory lent urgency to the question of a transregional German identity. In July 1796 Frankfurt, still home to Goethe's mother, was bombarded and then occupied by the French. In their correspondence, Schiller and Goethe concern themselves not only with the fate of Frankfurt and Schiller's S wabian homeland but also with the possibility of a future French advance on Saxony and Thuringia (FA II.4:216)7 In early September 1796, just days after the French were successfully expelled from Frankfurt, Goethe beganHermann und Dorothea, the epic German love story about a young man and woman who, in the shadow of French aggression, surmount regional differences.8 Yet even the advance of the French could not erode Goethe's deep-rooted skepticism towards the German people. …