70 years of the Goethe-Institut: Rammstein and Heideröslein – culture


There was a ghastly magic in the beginning. After the “German catastrophe”, the historian Friedrich Meinecke wanted healing through poetry and therefore through Goethe. “In every German city and larger town, we would like to see a community of like-minded friends of culture that I would like to call the ‘Goethe community’.”

Meinecke wanted to bring “the most vivid testimonies of the great German spirit to the heart of the listeners through the sound of the voice”. “Profound thought poems of the kind of Goethean and Schiller’s are perhaps the most German of German in all of our literature. Whoever immerses himself completely in them becomes something indestructible, a German, in all the misery of our fatherland and in the midst of the destruction character indelebilis Feel it. “A nice, a program in line with the times immediately after the lost war: instead of destruction, immersion and a lot of profundity against the misfortune of the deliberate catastrophe, the causes of which were then rather kept silent.

1949 was the 200th anniversary of Goethe’s birthday, which led to extreme repentance and penance exercises even while galloping up. In order to prevent a restoration of the old conditions, Walter Dirks demanded that the bombed Goethe birthplace in Frankfurt not be rebuilt in the first place. “Buchenwald lies between us and Weimar,” warned German scholar Richard Alewyn. There was an infinite whisper of reflection, renewal, repentance, responsibility and contemplation. Thomas Mann was celebrated in the anniversary year in Weimar and Frankfurt as the revenant of the poet prince. In the east, the state poet Johannes R. Becher named Goethe a “liberator” and wanted to lead the GDR into an empire “called Goethe”. The philosopher Karl Jaspers, after all, angered the world-reconciling Goethe community by quoting Goethe: “My things cannot become popular (…). They are not written for the masses – but only for individual people who want something similar and Looking for.”

Originally only German teachers were to be trained

It was certainly only good people who came together in August seventy years ago to found an institute that still exists today in the name of Goethe. The original aim was to train foreign German teachers in the Federal Republic of Germany. It was not until the end of the 1960s that it became a comprehensive cultural company with branches in most countries around the world. The sun no longer sets in Goethe’s empire.

Language students in front of the Goethe-Institut in what was then Bombay (now Mumbai), 1973.

(Photo: Michael Friedel / Goethe-Institut)

Fortunately, the local Goethe congregations didn’t work out, not even with prayer corners, singing circles and reading circles, which are in Goethe’s name in Nueva Germania in the Elisabeth-Förster-Nietzsche state of Paraguay, in Fredericksburg in Texas or on a beach in the former Bismarck -Archipelago gathered. What should those in need of consolation have read when they stopped at the father of the house, Goethe? That he hated nothing more than Christ? “Few of them are as repugnant to me as poison and snake; / Fours: smoke of tobacco, bedbugs and garlic and †” (“Venetian Epigrams”, 66). Or that he rhymed “Christian”, if he did not cover it with the sign of the cross, to that ineffable “Iste”, his very best and closest friend, whom he loved so much that he wrote a poem for him even after an acute case of impotence could dedicate. Not to mention this ominous “Heidenröslein”, which is actually sung all over the world right into the heart of Kyrgyzstan, but still avant le dirty word is about nothing but the worst abuse, as any introductory course in psychoanalysis can teach. The export hit Faust, thoughtful and lacking in action, as it should be for a German, is uninterruptedly chasing after the feminine in every form, regardless of whether it is a bourgeois Gretel or a mythological Helena, and goes in his midlife crisis effortlessly over corpses. A horror.

Again: fortunately it has Goethe Institute nothing to do with this Goethe. As a German tourist in Lisbon, however, it can easily happen that locals without warning give you three quarters of an hour’s song of praise to the films by Rudolf Thome, which the newly acquired Portuguese friend saw in a series of works at the Goethe-Institut in the Coimbra branch Has. (It was just incidentally for the literary historian, that branch in Lisbon that the translator Curt Meyer-Clason was head of at the time, when the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard read there with great success in 1976, while at the same time he spoke to the Austrian ambassador who took the reading as a matter of course stayed away when “destructive, terrible fellow” was denounced. Bernhard replied with a compliment for the host nation: “The bill for the impossibility, not to say stupidity and meanness of the Austrians, had turned into the laughter of the Germans, like so often.”)

You can learn our language all over the world – or watch the film “Bierkampf”

As modest as the audience figures for German films in German cinemas are, they have had a worldwide impact since the 1970s when they go on tour to Brazil, India and the Philippines. With a world population of more than seven billion, a more thorough knowledge of German should now be in the micro-percent range, and a few less will be at least passively proficient in Bavarian, but the faked excess lust that Herbert Achternbusch, Josef Bierbichler and Heinz Braun in the film “Bierkampf” unfold, will also communicate with ethnic groups who only know the Oktoberfest from a beer advertisement.

Achternbusch also met in San Francisco on his tour Wim Wenders, who has just been enslaved by Francis Ford Coppola with “Hammett”, but Wenders has also become world-famous through Goethe, with whom he at least has in common that he attempted a kind of film adaptation of “Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship years” based on a script by Peter Handke.

Countless poets, writers, painters, musicians of both sexes have been sent on a journey and have met – this is the wonderful thing about this applied Goethe cult – in seven decades with a constantly curious audience, the German culture such as jelly and spiritual food all rolled into one took himself. Occasional mistakes were inevitable, such as the fact that Hans Egon Holthusen, who in 1949 still showed himself to be an enemy of Thomas Mann, became program director of the Goethe House in New York and invited exiles there, despite his previous membership in the SS, which he at times boasted who had fled Germany because of their own kind.

The new library of the Goethe-Institut Athens, 2020

Nice and cool: the new library of the Goethe Institute in Athens.

(Photo: Thalia Galanopoulou / Goethe-Institut)

The golden days when an American professor of German studies recommended his students to learn German so that they could understand the “Latter Days of Mankind” by Karl Kraus and HC Artmann’s early poems “med ana schwoazzn dintn” are unfortunately over. The interest in German culture has by no means died out.

“Rammstein” and the Heidenröslein

It is only to be welcomed if a few people in the world are still learning German at the expense of the German taxpayers, although it is hardly possible to make cuts. Given the worldwide impact, the few euros that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs makes available for this educational program are a considerably better investment than any prestige project of the Ministry of Development. The ministry has not been called that for a long time, of course, because development aid for Germany is provided by the Goethe-Institut.

Goethe hated German nationalism like hardly anyone else and was the first to speak of world literature. In the strangest way his wish has come true. All the language courses, all the trips abroad, this concentrated cultural export is having an effect in unexpected places. When at a concert by Rammstein In Mexico City ten thousand Mexicans sing along in the choir and especially in German, what the demolition contractor Till Lindemann carries into their hearts from the stage through the sound of his voice, then even Friedrich Meinecke would have to cry, and not only because of the pyrotechnics Eyes rise. “Can hearts sing? Can a heart burst? Can hearts be pure? Can a heart be made of stone?” That is the “Goethe community” in its purest form, and the little Heidenröslein, ashamed, pulls its leaves together.

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