Classical and Romanticism – Goethe vs. Friedrich: Those orbiting the moon

This 250th birthday was celebrated in a big way. Now Weimar also has its exhibition on Caspar David Friedrich. It is manageable and fits into the Schiller Museum. But the reference here is not to the idealist Friedrich Schiller, far from nature, but to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. One of the premises of this exhibition is that what connects the painter and the Weimar poet prince is romanticism.

Goethe a secret romantic? One would like to reflexively respond with Goethe’s verdict about romanticism: “I call the classical the healthy, and the romantic the sick.” But to stop there would actually be too short-sighted. For where, if not in the “Sufferings of Young Werther” (1774), does art’s self-empowerment culminate more than in this work by the young striker and pusher? Even the old Goethe is not as far away from romanticism as one might think: he increasingly no longer sees himself among the healthy, but among the sick. He feels isolated, laughed at and despised by the boys who do many things other than read him. The old Goethe suffers, despite his high ministerial standard of living supported by the Weimar court. He reads the boys’ books, all of them romantic, and he even likes some of them.

When the poet Johann Peter Eckermann, who admires him, comes to him from an extremely poor background, Goethe is happy – and immediately gives the young family friend a huge task: He should please look through all of his magazine articles from the last decades and from the perspective of the new ones Generation suggest what should be included in the edition of the work that is currently being created. An honorable but unfortunately unpaid job. When the eager Eckermann receives a well-paid offer from an English literary magazine to regularly report on new German-language publications, Goethe firmly advises against it – it only distracts from the actual task he has set him.

No, Eckermann, who will always remain hard-working and poor until his death, doesn’t hate him for that. Others do, because Goethe’s vampire nature has of course gotten around. But to Eckermann, who had become, if not rich, at least immortal through his “Conversations with Goethe” (1836), Goethe said something in 1830 that made Romanticism plausible as a bridge from Goethe to Caspar David Friedrich: “The concept of classical and romantic poetry, which is now spreading all over the world and causing so much strife and division, originally came from me and Schiller… It proved to me that I myself was romantic despite myself be…” The Schlegel brothers then, Goethe continued, pushed forward his unintentional romanticism without reservation and turned it into an art program that was not in his spirit.

Of course, every young poet or painter, whether he actually admires Goethe or secretly hates him, hopes for a recommendation from him. Because such a thing was a “career engine,” as Florian Illies put it in his pointed speech at the opening of the exhibition. Caspar David Friedrich, who was fascinated by “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” which was published in the year he was born, also sought contact with Goethe in Weimar and sent him two drawings from the same year in 1805: “Pilgrimage at Sunset” and “Autumn Evening at the Lake.” . Goethe liked them and ensured that the 30-year-old Friedrich received first prize in the “Weimar Prize Tasks,” but only half the first prize because the drawings had nothing to do with the topic. But given Goethe’s enthusiasm, no one really wants to be bothered by that. Goethe himself justifies his decision with, among other things, proven “cleanliness” and “hard work” – which leads Illies to remark that it sounds as if he was talking about his cleaning help.

Yes, Goethe’s condescending manner always gives us reason to hate him. And that despite the fact that his color theory, his appreciation of the Gothic, his discovery of the premaxilla (with which he snubbed an entire research guild), and his geological passions completely sidelined him: the old poet prince stands as a radical outsider. He won’t show his “Faust II” (1832) to anyone except Eckermann; he’s no longer interested in the expected reactions.

But that doesn’t stop him from being demanding. In 1816, Goethe, who was also a passionate climate researcher, read the book by the Englishman Luke Howard about the formation of different cloud shapes. And he immediately asks Caspar David Friedrich to draw him the three different basic shapes – Cirrus, Stratus and Cumulus. He reacts with consternation, downright insult. Should he paint educational pictures for Goethe? If it hadn’t been about the clouds, which for him have a very special dimension, like shadows in the sky, he might have done it. But he brusquely refuses. Goethe is angry and draws his own clouds. Fetishist for order that he is, he depicts six different types of clouds. Goethe’s small, rather clumsy drawings could easily be overlooked in the exhibition – without the story that goes with them.

But Caspar David Friedrich’s oil paintings, some of which are shown here alongside many drawings, cannot be overlooked. They create an almost sacred space around themselves. Friedrich thus cultivates his very own kind of romanticism. This is completely free of irony and is permeated with the expectation of redemption. In addition to the petty bickering over favors between Goethe and Caspar David Friedrich, it is probably this increasingly apparent tendency in Friedrich’s pictures that alienates Goethe and even increasingly repels him. Churches (even as ruins) and large crosses are not motifs that could inspire Goethe. And the light – in Friedrich’s case, isn’t it a semblance of transcendence, so to speak divine?

For Goethe, who always believed that everyone could choose their own religion (or leave it as it is) and was a radical thinker of this world and not of the hereafter, the latent Christian element in Friedrich was not something that could appeal to him. And this despite the fact that there are always connecting passions between them: for example, the moon as the nighttime sun. This is the case in the oil painting Friedrich’s “Moon over the Giant Mountains” (1810/11), which is only half a meter high but 1.50 meters wide and is shown in the exhibition. Goethe had not only written his famous poem “To the Moon” in 1778, but he also drew him repeatedly.

The fact that the Weimar court purchased many of Caspar David Friedrich’s works, which are now in the possession of the Weimar Classical Foundation, was originally due to Goethe’s intercession. But it is doubtful that he liked the painting “Hutten’s Grave” (1823/24) shown here. Because it seems to be made entirely of atmosphere, a kind of impressionism with a transcendent mission.

This Weimar exhibition not only strives to present works by Caspar David Friedrich, but also presents romantic references to Weimar classicism beyond him. This can be seen as an advantage. Here, works by Philipp Otto Runge and Carl Gustav Carus stand alongside those by Friedrich. In addition to similarities, they also show the limitations of a more conventional romanticism in relation to the works of Caspar David Friedrich, which exploded the concept of realism of his time.

The Weimar women of society, “networkers” around Johanna Schopenhauer, Louise Seidler and Caroline Bardua, continued to advertise Caspar David Friedrich even after Goethe had long distanced himself from him. From 1820 onwards there is an uneasy silence between them. For Goethe, Friedrich now stands on the other side, that of those romantics who, in his eyes, are all misguided.

The fact that the exhibition is dedicated to Caspar David Friedrich’s Weimar chapter with all quiet devotion to detail makes it a gem worth seeing.

“Caspar David Friedrich, Goethe and Romanticism in Weimar”, until March 2, 2025, Schiller Museum, Weimar