January Meme: Favourite books read in 2019

[selenak]

Zen Cho's "Sorceror to the Crown" and "The True Queen" were certainly among my favourite novels. (My review of them is here. Another novel which I loved but haven't written about is Robert Löhr's Das Erlkönig-Manöver, which uses just about every conspiracy theory ever related to Marie Antoinette's children (see some of them listed here as a MacGuffin to hang a hilarious Dumas-esque plot on, in which various German literati - Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Alexander von Humboldt, Bettina Brentano & her later husband Achim von Arnim - are enlisted, cajoled, wood or blackmailed into a rescue operation (OR IS IT?) for a young man supposedly the long lost Dauphin and about to be killed by Napoleon's men. Half the fun is Löhr's way of including quotes from the works of everyone involved in a completely different context that still works perfectly within the story, where it makes for fantastic banter between a bunch of cranky writers. Also, Kleist's increasing outrage that Goethe still hasn't read his latest manuscript. (In rl tragic, here, just the right kind of fun. Not to mention that Kleist at least gets finally laid, by Alexander von Humboldt, no less, which is a good consolation price.) In between all of this, you have daring undercover missions, masquerades, hair-raising escapes and last minute rescues, in short, all you'd want from a swashbuckler. I'm just not sure how it would translate to an English speaking audience who'd barely able to identify one Schiller or Goethe line and doesn't know who Bettina was, hence no proper review.

Non-fiction: no contest. As described in this earlier post , my non-fiction book of the year is actually three volumes of one, the original publication and then two volumes with addenda, i.e. the cut entries the earlier volume was missing, to wit: the Diaries of one Ernst Ahasverus von Lehndorff, adorkable chamberlain to Frederick the Great's unwanted wife and life long friend-with-benefits of Friedrich's younger brother Heinrich.

The Other Days

Comments

[taelle]

So I've googled Bettina (I've heard about her, but just as "person who corresponded with Goethe") and while the English Wikipedia only has the brief "stopped corresponding with Goethe because of her behavior to his wife" bit, the Russian Wikipedia is being more entertaining. They tell me that Bettina was rude about the works of Goethe's artist friend, for which Mrs Goethe tore spectacles off her, and Bettina called her "crazy sausage". But they don't quote their sources: was it really as cat-fighty as that?

[selenak]

Yes and no. You have to consider the background here. Christiane (Mrs. Goethe) had been relentlessly and mercilessly attacked by Weimar society from the moment she moved in with Goethe and it didn’t go the way upper class/lower class relationships usually went (upper class man has sex with lower class girl, DISCREETLY, then moves on quickly, at the latest when she gets pregnant), but became an open unmarried relationship for two decades. (Then they married, not least because it was the Napoleonic wars, and she had no legal security as a not-wife.) It had really been vicious and non-stop, “low born slut” being the mildest epitath used. And Meyer, the artist in question, had been one of the very few who’d stood by her during that time and treated her like a human being. After her marriage, the viciousness still went on, just not so much out loud. (Johanna Schopenhauer, mother of Arthur the philosopher, was famously the first Weimar society lady to offer Christiane a cup of tea. (“If Goethe can give her his name, I can give her some tea”, quoth she.) )

Now, Christiane and Goethe in their letters to each other occasionally teased each other for “Äugelchen” - making eyes, flirting with someone - in their later years, and you get the impression Christiane in general didn’t really mind Goethe flirting with the occasional other woman; he’s chosen her without any legal obligation for decades. However, Bettina was something else. Not least because she was absolutely relentless, not just as a literary fan (who’d befriended his mother and noted down all the stories said mother had);. (Incidentally, a much younger Goethe also had had a brief crush on Bettina’s mother Maximiliane.) She was a writer - would become, in fact, one of the justly famous and socially engaged writers of the mid 19th century German states long after both Goethe and Christiane were dead -, and she had zilch restraint showing her Goethe the man adoration in addition to Goethe the poet. And of course, she agreed with the rest of Weimar society that Christiane was unworthy of being Mrs. Goethe. (She called her “Goethe’s fatter half”, among other things.)

How far things ever got between Goethe and Bettina is unknown, not least because Bettina’s book about the relationship, “Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde”, uses letters he’d written to other people (and which still exist, so can be counterchecked) and reappropriates them as adressed to herself, which does make it sound more fantasy than fact based. But they did correspond for a while, not least because she had all those notes from conversations with his mother, and he was busy writing his memoirs at the time. Also: she was pretty and clever. And decades younger. So who knows. In any event: to Christiane, Bettina must have been exactly the type of upperclass woman who’d made her life hell for the last twenty years, and who was now making open passes at her husband.

So you can imagine that when Christiane and Bettina found themselves at that gallery and got into an argument, ostensibly about Meyer’s art work, there were a lot of other things going on beneath the surface. And yes, glasses were torn of, and the “crazy sausage” - “wildgewordene Blutwurst” was the original quote, which alludes to Christiane’s weight again - was made. Afterwards, Bettina’s husband demanded an apology from Christiane to his wife, Goethe backed Christiane 100% and broke off all relationships to both Bettina and her husband, and Bettina, whose life long Goethe fangirling never ceased, was crushed. (Not for long; she had an irrespressible vitality and would, as I said, become one of the dominant literary figures of the mid 19th century, and one of the few women to be so. )

[taelle]

Very interesting, thanks! There's apparently a Russian translation of Bettina's bio by Ingeborg Drewitz - do you know it? Is it any good? (I've lately realized that my knowledge of European culture is way too English-tilted)