Observing and examining books is Eva Geulen’s profession. The literary scholar is director of the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. She recently published a study on Goethe’s morphology, “From the Life of Form”.
SZ: Ms. Geulen, what to read You just?
Eva Geulen: Henry David Thoreau, “Walden, or, Life in the Woods” from 1845. It was already clear to me before I left for the east coast of the USA that after a week of summer school in New Haven, a contrasting program to writing and reading scenes (from Quintilian to hip-hop) would be due, the book was in the luggage as a precaution. Walden Pond is also on the way to Deer Isle, Maine for a week’s family vacation after summer school. So the visit to the legendary site preceded the reading. There was no genius loci, but the reading keeps what I had promised: Thoreau’s information about his time in the forest by the lake is not a romantic escapism into “wild nature”: “I am not a hermit”. The author instead puts to the test whether a life of “simplicity” is possible in modern conditions, within earshot of the railroad and only a few miles from urban Concorde, Massachussetts. In my reading biography, this text forms a link between Goethe’s natural research and Stifter’s prose that has been neglected for far too long. Much can be found in Thoreau, but the range of his pitches is greater. Neither Stifter nor Goethe have a sense of humor that goes to the point of cynicism.
Bedtime reading is often an over-the-counter sleep aid. What book has kept you awake lately??
Patricia Highsmith’s recent journals: a big chunk, but very manageable due to the dating. The daily journals of a budding lesbian writer in 1940’s New York are an odd mixture of coolness and intimacy.
What was the last thing you learned from a book that you didn’t know before?
Under the title “The breath of the world” Stefan Bollmann recently presented a Goethe biography that tells of Goethe’s life almost exclusively on the basis of his natural research, in comparison with the state of research at that time on the one hand and current considerations on the other. There I learned a lot about geology and electricity, but also that Goethe liked to borrow devices or books that he either didn’t return at all or only returned very late.
Have you ever at odds (or almost) with someone over a book and which one?
In the spring, a colleague from Geneva invited to a conference on questions in literature. My subject was Peter Handke’s 1989 play “The Game of Questions or the Journey to the Sonorous Land”. Two friends criticized my decision. They did not know the text, but found it impossible to deal with this author in these times. Before the argument got too heated, I stopped the discussion and wrote the presentation.
An unread classic?
Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”. I knew individual episodes and passages, but I never read the whole thing in one go. There is a reading group at the ZfL that for a long time has only dealt with texts that are not so easy to master, such as Foster Wallace’s novel “Infinite Jest”, which I would never have read to the end on my own. Since the summer semester, the annual theme of the ZfL has been “Other Worlds”, and in this context the group has thankfully decided on Cervantes’ novel. You quickly learn how difficult it is with the alternative worlds and how many there seem to be.
Can you explain to us in two or three short sentences: What is the connection between Goethe and, say, a hamster?
Goethe had a split relationship to the plant or animal species that he described as “licentious”, in which the relationship between species and subspecies is particularly diffuse and the species is particularly diverse. The fascination was that they challenged older classification systems. The irritation consisted in the fact that the ‘type’ that, according to Goethe, contained all metamorphoses seemed to be missing. The fact that the “bulky beaver in the bank swamp” and the graceful “squirrel in the airy heights” should belong to the same group of rodents could not be adequately explained either with the current specialist knowledge or with one’s own metamorphosis theory, especially since the relevant characteristic of the incisors in the upper jaw that gave the name was by no means the same expected functionality. The rodent’s “continued, almost spasmodically passionate, intentionally destructive crunching” gave Goethe a hard time. He commented on this in a review of D’Alton’s 1823 and 1824 comparative study of rodent skeletons. I made this text the starting point for my reading of Goethe’s “Heften zur Morphologie”..
You also taught German in America for a long time. What is the biggest difference between German studies there and here?
You read and write differently. As early as the BA course, students in the USA are practiced reading passages (mainly using classics such as the Homeric epics or the Bible) and thus not only develop good techniques for observing texts, but also a fluent writing style. The fact that canonical texts in particular have a very long history of reception and research is largely ignored. In Germany, however, science begins with the “state of research” (or, more recently, the theory) and the method, and unfortunately often ends with it. This is of course a bit crude, but one specialist culture has what the other lacks.
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