The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 337 The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience Christine Lehleiter University of Toronto Abstract: This article examines Goethe’s accounting of his war experience in Campagne in Frankreich and Belagerung von Mainz in order to gain a better understanding of his conceptualization of realism� Scholars such as Gisela Horn have noted that the texts under discussion limit sentimental-subjective moments in favor of a report of the external world. The reference to Goethe’s realistic turn in this context evokes the idea that the very occurrence of a world which we can perceive with our senses guarantees an unmediated access to its reality. However, as Thomas P. Saine and Elizabeth Krimmer have already observed, if there is any impression of immediacy in the war texts, it is a carefully crafted aesthetic construct. In this article, I argue that it is precisely the possibility of the access to reality and the possibility of its adequate representation that Goethe questions in his war reporting. Confronted with an unprecedented brutality of battle, made possible by new artillery power, Goethe’s account is deeply indebted to the iconography of battle depictions and highly aware of the mediatisation of war. The reference to this iconography and mediatisation proves that Goethe’s war texts are indeed an unsentimental and highly aestheticized, but also an ethically engaged and eventually even emotionally charged comment on the war. Keywords: Goethe, coalition wars, realism, media and war, iconography of war, delightful terror, landscape painting, psychology of aesthetics, memory and mind In secondary literature, it has often been claimed that - when writing about his war experience in the Campagne in Frankreich and Belagerung von Mainz - Goethe was less interested in providing a war report, but rather in delivering his autobiography. If Goethe’s war reporting received attention, it was 338 Christine Lehleiter observed that the text distances itself from any discussion of emotions or sentimental attachments. Referencing Goethe’s own statements about this time and its conceptual significance for his work, critics have highlighted the author’s turn to a new “realism” (cf. Müller 907). Gisela Horn remarks “[a]n Stelle der empfindsam-subjektiven Form des Denkens und Gestaltens tritt ein ‘strenger Realismus’” (239). This realism is understood as an unsentimental “Bindung an die äußere Welt” (239). Drawing on nineteenth-century epistemology (cf. Daston and Galison), such claims evoke the idea that the very occurrence of an “external world,” which we can perceive with our senses, guarantees an unmediated access to its reality. However, critics have also observed that the text, despite its turn to the external world, is shaped by a high level of aesthetization (cf. Krimmer, Saine, and also Horn). Elisabeth Krimmer notes “[a]lthough Campagne creates an impression of immediacy, it is the product of intensive study and careful aesthetic design” (“Portrait of War” 50). So much so that Goethe’s account of the war was often “condemned for its failure to represent war truthfully” and that “numerous critics have blamed Goethe for his failure to convey a realistic image of the horrors of 1792” (“Portrait of War” 46, 50). Realism and its relationship to subjectivity and truth have long been at the centre of the discussion on Goethe’s war reporting within the broader context of a project aptly titled Dichtung und Wahrheit � In this article, I argue that it is precisely the possibility of the access to reality and the possibility of its adequate representation that Goethe questions in his war reporting. In the Campagne , he notes about the battle at Valmy: “nun begann die Kanonade von der man viel erzählt, deren augenblickliche Gewaltsamkeit jedoch man nicht beschreiben, nicht einmal in der Einbildungskraft zurückrufen kann” (FA 16: 431). Confronted with an unprecedented brutality of war, made possible by new artillery power, 1 Goethe attests the inability to depict and relate the event mimetically� Even more, Goethe observes that imagination completely fails to recall the event’s immediate (“augenblickliche”) violence. My aim here is to demonstrate that Goethe’s war reporting in light of this crisis of representation is deeply indebted to the iconography of battle depictions, and that the reference to this iconography proves that Goethe’s war texts are indeed an unsentimental and highly aestheticized but also an ethically engaged and eventually even emotionally charged comment on the war. Goethe’s realism is indeed devoted to what we can perceive with the senses but he also makes clear that both the perception of this sensual information and its representation is shaped in significant ways by aesthetic traditions, which Goethe employs in his search for an adequate linguistic and visual language for the war and in order to explore whether there is a place outside mediation. Only against the backdrop of the iconographic The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 339 tradition is it possible for us to understand the reality of war that Goethe mediates to us� Goethe’s texts on the wars of 1792/ 93 are characterized by a deep familiarity with the iconography of war representation, its political exploitation, and its aesthetic ramifications. One of the places where this becomes most obvious is an explicit reference to the work of Adam van der Meulen, the painter of battle scenes at the court of Louis XIV and an important contributor to the king’s media wars propagating his absolutist power. For the days of mid-September 1792 - only a few days after the horrific massacres in Paris which had followed the manifest of the duke of Braunschweig - Goethe remembers his encounter with the duke and the royal entourage. He remarks about the scene: Diese Reitermassen machten zu der angenehmen Landschaft eine reiche Staffage, man hätte einen van der Meulen gewünscht um solchen Zug zu verewigen; alles war heiter, munter, voller Zuversicht und heldenhaft. Einige Dörfer brannten zwar vor uns auf, allein der Rauch tut in einem Kriegsbilde auch nicht übel. Man hatte, so hieß es, aus den Häusern auf den Vortrab geschossen und dieser, nach Kriegsrecht, sogleich die Selbstrache geübt. Es ward getadelt, war aber nicht zu ändern. (FA 16: 423) By referencing van der Meulen, the narrator suggests that a painting could have captured the scene better than the textual representation allows. The reference to the image relates to a philosophical tradition - uniting thinkers across wide historical time spans such as Leonardo da Vinci and Ernst Gombrich and photographic practices in war reporting from WWI to today - which considers the text-image relationship and generally attributes greater naturalness and veracity to visual representation when compared to the word (cf. Mitchell 79—94). In her seminal essay on war representation Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag has questioned this conceptualization by highlighting the image’s instant recall effect which provides little space for understanding that - this is Sontag’s hope and conviction - only narrative can provide. Indeed, Goethe carefully considers the interplay of text and image and their role in relating the war experience. The narrator’s textual comment on the van der Meulen-like scene carefully undermines the hope of authenticity and immediacy� The battle scene is presented in a decidedly painterly fashion. The term “Staffage” connects directly to vocabulary used in the description of landscape painting, where it refers to human or animal figures which have a decorative purpose and do not represent the centre of the action. By using the term staffage, Goethe does not only deindividualize the warriors, but he also reduces the masses of horsemen to their aesthetic function within a particular genre tradition. The narrator refers explicitly to an aesthetic mode of perception and implicitly to the epistemolog- 340 Christine Lehleiter ical question of how, or whether, an access to reality outside mediation is possible. In a hyperbole of ekphratic writing, the narrator does not provide a textual description of an image but reality itself turns into an image which then finds its description in the text� The image does not merely capture the moment, instead, reality is here perceived as an image. The narrator makes a conscious reference to his inability to see the scene outside visual traditions and the reference to van der Meulen situates the description within the iconography of battle depictions. A characteristic of Goethe’s engagement with modes of representation in his war reporting is his repeated play in juxtaposing visual and narrative elements. In this particular instance, the visual heroism of the scene, which asks for identification with the conqueror, is undermined by the narrator’s distancing and ironic comment� The narrative comment is characterized by a tendency to depersonify. Repeatedly, the narrator relies on the neutral “man” to describe the subject position and turns to the passive (“es ward getadelt”) or formulations of disambiguation (“so hieß es”) in order to excuse himself from engaged involvement. Even where the status of the direct eyewitness is referenced, it is dissolved in an ambiguous first-person plural (“brannten zwar vor uns auf ”). 2 Goethe’s comment describes the lighthearted heroism of the scene, but also points to the discrepancy between the experience of the conquering party and the one who is conquered. He underlines this discrepancy by pointing to the difference between the great visual effect which the observer experiences and the bitter reality that the smoke represents for the victims of war. 3 When he narrates the story of which the smoke is a visual trace, Goethe does not only refer to an aesthetic tradition of battle depictions, but he inscribes himself into a media history which allows the description of pain but not its (visual) depiction. Such media distinction had been theorized already by Lessing’s Laokoon (1766), and it would shape war reporting well into the nineteenth century. While written war reports told about death and mutilation, the image preserved for the most part a sanitized version of the event which only the war photography of the twentieth century would leave behind (Becker 73). 4 The question of whether aesthetic pleasure is possible, or ethically admissible, in light of human suffering had occupied significant parts of mid eighteenth-century discussions on aesthetics� 5 The discussion around such pleasure was not new: eighteenth-century sources returned again and again to Lucretius’ account of a shipwreck that onlookers view with delight from a safe distance (cf. Zelle 39—40). It gained new urgency within the context of an aesthetics that was no longer bound to mimesis and a canon of rules and instead asked for the viewer’s, or reader’s, affective response. In the German context, decisive theoretical clarifications were provided by Mendelssohn’s concept of mixed feelings, which he developed in correspondence with Lessing and Nicolai, and The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 341 the conceptualization’s ultimately subjective turn received important impulses from Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of Sublime and Beautiful (1757). By the time Goethe joined his duke on the campaign in France and even more so by the time Goethe published his account of the war, aesthetic debates had been concluded in favor of an aesthetic justification of “delightful terror” (cf. Zelle XXIV), but the underlying questions still formed the backdrop of Goethe’s considerations at the intersection of aesthetics, psychology, and ethics� In the Rhapsodie, oder Zusätze zu den Briefen über die Empfindungen (1761), Mendelssohn had come to the conclusion that pleasure when seeing horrific events, or their representation, is possible (and ethically permissible), if the represented event lays in the past and the observers have neither caused the event nor have they the ability to change it. Mendelssohn writes: Wir mißbilligen das geschehene Böse, wir wünschen, daß es nicht geschehen sei, oder daß es in unserer Macht stünde, es wieder gut zu machen. Ist aber das Übel einmal geschehen, ist es ohne unser Verschulden geschehen, und ohne daß wir es verhindern können; so hat die Vorstellung davon vielmehr einen starken Reiz für uns, und wir sehnen uns dieselbe zu erlangen. (Mendelssohn 142) In Mendelssohn’s assessment here, aesthetic and ethical demands are not at odds when the event is so distanced that we cannot interact with it any longer. As a consequence, we can experience its representation (“Vorstellung”) as pleasurable. (Whether this representation exists only in the mind or takes the form of art is of minor significance for Mendelssohn’s assessment of its aesthetic effectiveness and ethical permissibility). In Mendelssohn’s conceptualization of aesthetic pleasure in light of suffering, we can discern the wish to hold on to the unity of the good and beautiful, or of moral and aesthetic categories� 6 By introducing what one could call a temporal “filter” between event and the experience of pleasure, Mendelssohn can account for pleasure even in light of gruesome scenes� To illustrate his claims, he refers explicitly to battle scenes: Nach dem Blutbade bei *** eilten alle unsere Bürger auf das mit Leichen besäete Schlachtfeld. Der Weise selbst, der mit Vergnügen durch seinen Tod dieses Übel verhindert haben würde, watete, nach geschehener Tat, durch Menschenblut, und empfand ein schauervolles Ergötzen bei Betrachtung dieser schrecklichen Stätte. (Mendelssohn 143) Mendelssohn performs an interesting move: from the observation that pleasurable experience occurs, he tries to explain why it is morally permissible. He needs to make this move because his approach is based on the premise that the 342 Christine Lehleiter experience of pleasure coincides with an experience of greater perfection of the human nature� Instead of raising doubts about humanity’s moral integrity (cf. Zelle 352—353), or, instead of separating the good and beautiful conceptually, Mendelssohn limits here the human’s moral responsibility to his ability to interact with the event under discussion. For him, the imagination or representation of the event has no implications which are morally, or psychologically, problematic� 7 Experiences of war and destruction are an important part of Mendelssohn’s considerations. Of interest in this context is the vocabulary with which Mendelssohn describes the pleasure experienced by the sage who wades through the carnage after the battle. By using the formulation “schauervolles Ergötzen,” Mendelssohn evokes vocabulary that would come to its climax only some decades later in gothic aesthetics (Walpole’s genre-defining novel The Castle of Otranto was published three years after the first edition of Rhapsodie )� Hence, Mendelssohn refers to an aesthetics and a genre that was characterized by its production of pleasure by means of titillating the imagination and appealing to the fantasy of the reader in narrating events and appearances which cannot be explained with reference to natural phenomena (cf. Wilpert 819). One could say that it is a genre which lives from the narration of phenomena which in day-today life cannot be experienced with the senses and at the same time aims to have significant impact on sensual, and more broadly corporeal, reactions (sweating, trembling, palpitation of the heart). Such flights of fantasy ultimately did not only lead to an aesthetics which allows for the pleasure in light of a horrible past event, but eventually developed - certainly far from what Mendelssohn had intended - into a genre which could, as Gero von Wilpert observes, indulge in cruelties, violence, and perversity (see for example the Satanism in Byron, Shelly, and Keats, and similar approaches in German literature in works by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Kleist; cf. Wilpert 809). 8 In Regarding the Pain of Others , Sontag has thought extensively about war reporting and the question of whether our observation of suffering is morally justifiable. If Mendelssohn allows for spectatorship vis-à-vis pain under the condition that the spectator can neither change the situation nor help the victim, Sontag similarly makes the permissibility of viewing a function of our leverage to intervene. However, Sontag articulates a stronger rejection of looking at the pain of others, something which she considers dangerously voyeuristic. Speaking of the destructed faces of WWI soldiers, she notes: “Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it […] or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be” (51). Where intervention is not possible, so Sontag says, compassion vanishes too (100). In a statement that The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 343 sounds as if it were directed explicitly against the increasing independence of aesthetics which crystallizes in the course of the eighteenth century, Sontag concludes: “[I]t is not necessarily better to be moved. Sentimentality, notoriously, is entirely compatible with a taste for brutality and worse” (129—30). In pointing out this aesthetic trajectory, the aim here is not to judge or condemn an aesthetics that focuses on affective response and self-affirmation in the cognition process. Rather, the intention is to delineate why it might have become difficult to hold on to the notion of a unity of good and beautiful in this context, or, differently put, why Goethe could not embrace it against the backdrop of his war experience. While Goethe references Mendelssohn’s conceptual approach by explicitly mentioning the observer’s temporal distance to the battle and his inability to change the course of events (“war aber nicht zu ändern”), his report remains decidedly distanced, and even where it acknowledges aesthetic pleasure, it is ironically disrupted by means of the litotes (“in einem Kriegsbilde auch nicht übel”). It is tempting to read such distancing as the posture of an egomaniac author who was primarily interested in working out his color theory, or the reactionary move of a royalist sympathiser, but the - at times obsessive - distancing in Goethe’s war report needs also to be read, I want to suggest, as motivated by ethical considerations� 9 While Mendelssohn, when confronted with the catastrophe of the battle, suggests that distance renders the event aesthetically pleasurable and frees it from ethical implications, Goethe comes to the conclusion that temporal and aesthetic distance might not help and even might have the opposite effect, in particular where personal memory is involved. Imagination - as organ of aesthetization - can produce its own ghosts which emerge from the trauma and repeat it in a way that is difficult to ban. Even thirty years after the war experience, Goethe writes in a letter to Carl Friedrich von Reinhard (10 July 1822): Es wird mir manchmal wirklich schwindlich, indem ich das Einzelne jener Tage und Stunden in der Einbildungskraft wieder hervorrief und dabei die Gespenster, die sich dreißig Jahre her dazwischen bewegt, nicht wegbannen konnte; sie liefen ein- und das anderemal wie ein böser Einschlag über jenen garstigen Zettel. (FA 16: 914) Goethe describes here a direct corporeal reaction (“schwindlich”) although, or precisely because, the events happened several decades ago, and they are mediated by means of the imagination� Already in his account of Valmy, Goethe had stated that imagination was unable to recall the violence of the war (see the first passage quoted here). In the letter to Reinhard, it becomes clear that the aesthetic recall does not only fail to represent mimetically but it also develops its own dynamics. The products of this imaginative process are ghosts (“Gespenster”). In contrast to the images which remain concrete even though 344 Christine Lehleiter they represent reality only partially (cf. Weber 102), the ghosts are characterised by their shapeshifting nature� In order to describe the effects of the ghost-like images from the past which haunt the present, Goethe draws on the language of weavers. According to the Deutsches Wörterbuch , “einschlag” means in the technical language of the weavers “der in den aufzug eingeschossene, eingeworfene faden” which is worked into the “zettel,” the basis of the textile (3: 272). There is no doubt, however, that the artillery resonances of the “Einschlag” (projectile impact) was not lost on Goethe� In Goethe’s use of the image, both the textile’s ground and the thread which is woven into it are of bad quality, and they are inseparable so that they only form the textile together. There seems no hope that the war experience can be reported independently from its ghost-like aftereffect or woven into a beautiful textile or text� Goethe expresses explicitly that the ghostly images have a traumatic effect and elicit the wish to ban them (“wegbannen”). 10 A distinction between objective (horror) and subjective (self-affirmation) reaction to the event, which ultimately helped Mendelssohn to legitimize delightful terror, is not an option for Goethe in light of his war experience. 11 Finding a method to ban them seems to offer the only hope to come to terms with the ghosts. But how can they be banned? Goethe sets his hopes on an aesthetics that helps to mediate sensual impressions instead of exciting them, and which draws on a history of mediatisation in order to come to terms with its own moment in time. In his post-revolutionary collection of novellas Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (1795), Goethe had already explored literary avenues which rely on irony and playfulness to ban the horrors of the war (cf. Trunz 614). In the Campagne , aesthetics is for Goethe a banning tool too, but here it remains deeply indebted to the image� While the image cannot tell the entire truth (including violence), it is a medium of realism for two important reasons: a) the image promises to stay close to that which is experienced by the senses by means of verisimilitude, it is concrete, 12 and b) it exposes its partiality and its indebtedness to a tradition of representation, therefore, providing an extra layer of distancing and cultural contextualization against the shock-like “Einschlag” of war and revolution. Goethe’s war experience leads him to the conclusion that the pleasures experienced in viewing the representations of war are ethically not justifiable. They might still be aesthetically effective and legitimate, but their psychological burden is too high and, therefore, need more mediation than the temporal distance. Despite the differences, Goethe continues here a thought for which Mendelssohn already lays the groundwork. In his consideration of pleasure, Mendelssohn does not strictly distinguish between pleasure derived from immediate experience and pleasure derived from mediated experience, as for example The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 345 in an artwork. Both of them ultimately work in his view via a representation (“Vorstellung”) in the mind (142 and 146). However, he concedes the greater mediating power of art when considering the effect of horrific events on particularly sensitive individuals: Ein andres Mittel die schrecklichsten Begebenheiten zärtlichen Gemütern angenehm zu machen, ist die Nachahmung durch Kunst, auf der Bühne, auf Leinwand, im Marmor, da ein heimliches Bewußtsein, daß wir eine Nachahmung, und keine Wahrheit vor Augen haben, die Stärke der objektiven Abscheu mildert, und das Subjektive der Vorstellung gleichsam hebt. (150) While Mendelssohn’s approach allowed for a flight of imagination in the perceiving subject (and his hesitation originates in the fear that pleasure might be limited in the case of too great horror), Goethe is wary of imagination’s dynamics and its liberation from social contexts and aims to formulate an aesthetics of the war which is indebted to the concrete and the culturally mediated. In the next section, we will turn to Goethe’s use of the mediating power of the image and the iconography to which it is indebted. It is not clear which of van der Meulen’s paintings Goethe had in mind when he wished to see the battle scene painted by the artist, but we can consider here one example which might illustrate what Goethe found attractive in this context. In van der Meulen’s The Crossing of the Rhine on 12 June 1672 , we see a scene from the French-Dutch war (1672-78), namely the crossing of the Rhine in which Louis XIV actually did not participate but which he observed from a distance. 13 We see the agile movement of the cavalry units to which Goethe seems to allude in his comparison and a heroic Louis XIV who is mounted on a white horse which he controls - a sign of his ruling qualities - with great skill. As Thomas Kirchner has pointed out, Louis’ commanding gesture pretends to be necessary for the battle formation, but he actually looks at us, the observers for whom he has mustered the troops� 14 While the king is already in a heightened position, the observers stand on even higher grounds from which they can assess and appreciate the full meaning of the situation and its historic significance. Van der Meulen’s work is part of an expansive media machinery which Louis XIV employed in order to establish and cement his position as heroic leader of the state. Some scenes of van der Meulen were transferred on tapestry and others were reproduced as large-scale paintings in places such as the dining halls for soldiers in the Hôtel des Invalides. However, while the mastery of the depiction of classic battle scenes was considered the climax of artistic achievement (it required mastery of the representation of the human body, its entanglement with other bodies, and knowledge of scene composition), contemporary battle 346 Christine Lehleiter scenes had no place in the art theory of the time (in André Félibien’s comprehensive and influential text from 1667 for example, there was no category in which these scenes would fit). Contemporary battle representations were considered rather within the tradition of materials with documentary quality. Van der Meulen certainly tried to break out of this tradition, but it still shaped his work and the perception of it. In the context of Goethe’s reference to van der Meulen and his war reporting, it is worthwhile to have a look at this aesthetic genealogy and the genealogy of battle scene depictions� In contrast to classic battle scenes which highlight the human body and the achievement of the single warrior, the representation of contemporary battle scenes is shaped by the focus on the topography of the contested, or conquered, territory� We can see an example in the seventeenth-century depiction of the Recapture of Corbie 1636 (unknown artist). 15 Visually, we have a small strip of landscape in the foreground of this picture where we can discern some figures which might be involved in a battle formation. As observers, we look at these figures from a slightly tilted angle from above. Behind the strip of battle landscape, we have an extended topography which we observe from a yet steeper angle and which, therefore, appears as if it were folded up (raised). The image is less a depiction of the battle than a document and proof of the newly gained territory� The basic structure of this kind of battle depiction became so established that, as Kirchner observes, the raised landscape alone with the conquered (or to be conquered) city at the horizon often signalizes already a battle (115). In the seventeenth-century copper engraving Norlinghen by Nicolas Regnesson (after Francois Chauveau) which illustrates Jean Puget de La Serre’s Eloge historique (1647), we barely see any signs of war, just a few halberd-like poles in the foreground, a vast plane, and a city at the horizon, but the contemporary viewer was in the know that this is the scene of a battle. 16 The tradition depicted here becomes important not only because of Goethe’s direct reference to van der Meulen, but also because Goethe inscribes himself into this tradition and implicitly comments on it. We still have a drawing of Verdun by Goethe produced during the Campagne � 17 We see a wide landscape overlooked by a single observer in the foreground. Otherwise, there are no people, everything is calm if not idyllic and the image certainly lends itself to support the claim that Goethe refused to acknowledge the reality of battle and the cruelty of war, focusing instead on the development of the Farbenlehre which seems to be referenced in the rainbow colors of the light which appears from the left� This is precisely the kind of criticism that Alexander Roob formulates when discussing the image in his detailed study of the drawings that Goethe produced The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 347 in the context of his war reporting ( Auch ich in Verdun 2008)� Roob observes that Goethe’s Verdun image is characterized by a “provozierende Ruhe und Gelassenheit” (1: 6) 18 that betrays a reactionary understanding of social structures� Roob interprets the figure in the picture’s foreground as a soldier but notes the soldier’s calm demeanor which he reads as the expression of aristocratic paternalism: “Die Haltung, die er einnimmt, gibt allerdings beredten Aufschluss über das Selbstverständnis, mit dem die aristokratischen Aggressoren in das sich im Aufruhr befindende Land einfielen. In der Pose des Schäfers bewacht und beschützt er die Stadt” (1: 6). The political stance observed here coincides, according to Roob, with specific stylistic preferences and with new aesthetic directions in Goethe’s oeuvre after the Italienische Reise . While Goethe had initially preferred what Roob calls a “wirklichkeitsnahen Blick auf Alltagssituationen” in the tradition of Dutch late-baroque graphic arts, he now turned, so Roob claims, to a “monumentalisierten Auffassung, die sich an die idealisierenden Landschafsdarstellungen etwa von Poussin und Lorrain anlehnt” (1: 8). Roob concludes that not only the Verdun image but all drawings that Goethe produced during the Campagne in 1792 follow an ideal of the heroic contemplative landscape “cleansed” (“gereinigt”) of all ordinary life (1: 9). Roob’s analysis of Goethe’s war reporting and his drawings is embedded in a broader criticism of Goethe’s position vis-à-vis the French Revolution and his role as an important administrator at the Weimar court� Highlighting Goethe’s hesitation in light of the revolutionary project, Roob argues that Goethe accompanied the war effort not only as artist and cultural ambassador, but as an important political advisor with an avid interest in strategic questions (1: 2—3). Roob even goes so far as to imply - drawing on Ludwig Börne’s assessment - that Goethe was a co-author of the Manifest of the duke of Braunschweig and, therefore, partly to be blamed for the terror in Paris (1: 4). It is probably true that Wolfgang Rothe’s characterization of Goethe as pacifist is misleading (Rothe 1998), but Roob’s insistence on Goethe’s complicity and his assessment that Goethe’s real idols were after all not “Shakespeare oder Klopstock, sondern Eroberungskrieger wie Friedrich de[r] Große[.] und Napoleon I” (1: 3) overlooks not only the irony with which Goethe’s report comments the heroic and imperial gesture displayed in images such as that of van der Meulen, but it also equates the decision not to depict the war’s brutality with a lack of authenticity. Roob juxtaposes Goethe’s distanced account with the war report that Friedrich Christian Laukhard 19 provided in his autobiography published in the years immediately following the failed campaign: 348 Christine Lehleiter Die Härten des Krieges waren ihm [Goethe] dabei immer nur wenige kurzatmige Aufzählungen am Rande wert, die in den meisten Fälle den äußerst lebendigen und anschaulichen Kriegsberichten des pfälzischen Schriftstellers Friedrich Christian Laukhard entnommen sind. Dieser hatte den gleichen Feldzug erlebt, allerdings von unten, aus der Perspektive eines einfachen Soldaten. (Roob 2: 20) 20 Laukhard’s report is praised here for its liveliness and graphicness. The criticism of a lack of authenticity is connected to a criticism of social class and it is not astonishing that Roob lauds Laukhard’s war report for its perspective “from below.” The causal relationship that is established here between class, authenticity, and the crudeness of reality is not new, but the ease with which it remains unquestioned and the way in which it is equated with a political argument is somewhat surprising. At the same time, Roob’s analysis raises important questions: What does authenticity mean in the context of war reporting? What is the kind of work that we expect authenticity in war reporting to do? What are the implications of innovations in war and media technology on war experience and reporting? In Regarding the Pain of Others , Sontag reflects extensively on war reporting and the question of authenticity� Discussing Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas (1938) in which Woolf expresses the belief that seeing the horrors of the war can only lead to the wish to end it, Sontag embarks upon a wide-ranging contemplation on the representation of war and suffering, and its ethical implications. Sontag observes the kind of expectations with which media consumers often come to war reports with which they are confronted in the daily news. They want, Sontag says: the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance. Pictures of hellish events seem more authentic when they don’t have the look that comes from being ‘properly’ lighted and composed, because the photographer either is an amateur or - just as serviceable - has adopted one of several familiar anti-art styles. (Sontag 32) Sontag questions both the possibility of an authentic image and the hope that seeing the war’s horrors will make the audience more engaged in the stance against war. Delineating a long history from Plato to Burke and Bataille, she analyzes the feelings (including excitement) which we might experience when looking at the horror, and she observes the lethargy and lack of compassion that originates in our inability to change the situation (Sontag 129). War photographs, Sontag notes, “reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus” out of a “hypothetical shared experience” which presumably leads to the sentiment that horrors of war are inacceptable and need to be The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 349 stopped (5). Sontag spends a good part of the essay dismantling this illusion. There is a real danger - she suggests - that all that remains is voyeuristic pleasure. Sontag comes away from these considerations with a deep suspicion visà-vis the image and its instant and haunting recall mechanism (26—27), but she holds out some hope that “[n]arratives can make us understand” (113). Sontag’s meditation on war representation is useful when considering Goethe’s decision against the depiction of the cruelty of war not as a misrepresentation of the war - or merely the expression of a reactionary position - but as an acknowledgment that authenticity is not an option and that displaying cruelty follows a logic of the spectacle bare of any ethical wake-up function. The aim here is not to launch into an apology of Goethe’s position towards the war and its revolutionary cause - there can be little doubt that he had his hesitations and his behind-the-scene activities against popular upheavals back in Weimar are well documented (see Wilson 1999 and 2004) - but I would like to suggest that the focus of the attack on his political position makes it impossible to consider the kind of questions around representation that Goethe contemplates in wake of his war experience. Let us consider the Verdun image once again. While we might regret at first sight the suppression of the actual battle scene, a closer look at the drawing puts the scene firmly in the tradition of battle depictions. We have a small strip of landscape in the foreground which offers us some details, such as the vineyard to the left and possibly a weapon in the hands of the sitting figure. There is no transition between the hill in the foreground and the landscape which extends to the horizon. The horizon is shaped by the city which is supposed to be conquered and its battle readiness is highlighted by its Vauban fortification structures� As in the van der Meulen battle depictions, the observer outside the picture has a slightly elevated position compared to the observer in the picture and is privileged in its ability to assess the situation and, possibly, its historical significance. There is no mimetic representation of battle activity, but in the context of the iconographic tradition, we can see that this is the topography of a battle scene� Considering the image’s focus on topography and the battle’s target in the distanced background, we can read the figure in the foreground as a soldier, but we can also consider the figure as an observer of a war fought with a technology that allows acting from the distance. We can read the figure’s tool as neither gun nor shepherd stick (Roob), but as one of the telescopes which Goethe mentions when reporting on the scene and which brought the distant action, and its cruelty, so close to him� There are indications that the problem of perception that Goethe considers in this context is deeply connected both to war depictions in general and to the new challenges which appear as a result of the fact 350 Christine Lehleiter that the war is fought at great distance and that the observation of the battle and the suffering that it brings is now possible in temporal immediacy despite the geographic distance. Goethe highlights the problem in the way in which he shapes the vast plane that extends between observer and fortification. He artfully extends this vastness by one element which can only be seen in the colored reproduction, namely the fact that the extended landscape is colored in a blue tint� Goethe applies the Verblauungseffekt , which is usually reserved for the horizon, right behind the hilly landscape strip in the foreground� In using the blue color, Goethe puts extra stress on the difference between foreground and landscape which the battle scene tradition demanded, and thereby the distance between the observer and that which is about to be conquered (we will return to the discussion of color and telescope below). In depictions of classical battles, the fight between two warriors is often put front and centre� The victor’s heroism is derived from his corporeal presence and superiority which ultimately determines the outcome of the battle. One reason why such forms of representation were not possible any longer for contemporary battle scenes was technological advancement. Artillery had largely replaced corporeal power and the outcome of the battle was decisively shaped by technological superiority� The distance established by the topographic conquest documentation was also a reflection on a changed war technology. Military successes were increasingly indebted in crucial ways to improvements in artillery. These technological advancements had significant impact on the understanding of heroism and extended the distance between perpetrator and victim. Goethe reflects on these changes. Goethe foils the statement of heroic battle and conquest not only by extending the distance between adversaries but also in his narrative account of the battle of Verdun. He does so by introducing the medium of the “Fernglas” (telescope) into the narrative. If it is difficult to ascertain whether the object next to the observer that appears in the visual representation should indeed be read as a telescope, the narrative mentions the instrument explicitly. The view through the telescope which the narrator provides - employing a kind of teichoscopic report for the viewer of the image - radically undermines both the picture’s idyllic pretense and its allusion to gestures of heroic conquest� Instead, and in parallel to the burning villages described in the van der Meulen reference quoted above, Goethe shifts the focus away from the historic overview to the detail of human beings struggling for their survival� In the entry for 31 August 1792, he notes about the preparations for the bombardment: Mit guten Ferngläsern beschauten wir indessen die Stadt und konnten ganz genau erkennen was auf dem gegen uns gekehrten Wall vorging, mancherlei Volk das The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 351 sich hin und her bewegte und besonders an einem Fleck sehr tätig zu sein schien. (FA 16: 405) And then, during the bombardment, Goethe notes: Um Mitternacht fing das Bombardement an, sowohl von der Batterie auf unserem rechten Ufer, als von einer andern auf dem linken, welche näher gelegen und mit Brandraketen spielend, die stärkste Wirkung hervorbrachte. Diese geschwänzten Feuermeteore mußte man denn ganz gelassen durch die Luft fahren und bald darauf ein Stadtquartier in Flammen sehen. Unsere Ferngläser, dorthin gerichtet, gestatteten uns auch dieses Unheil im Einzelnen zu betrachten; wir konnten die Menschen erkennen, die sich oben auf den Mauern dem Brande Einhalt zu tun eifrig bemühten, wir konnten die freistehenden, zusammenstürzenden Gesparre bemerken und unterscheiden […]. Ich war in eine Batterie getreten, die eben gewaltsam arbeitete, allein der fürchterlich dröhnende Klang abgefeuerter Haubitzen fiel meinem friedlichen Ohr unerträglich, ich mußte mich bald entfernen. (FA 16: 405) Contrary to the previous scene under the spell of van der Meulen, this one reflects ongoing preparation for bombardment and action. Interestingly, Goethe observes that the greater access to detail (“ganz genau erkennen”) allows for a better assessment of the damage but does not increase a wish or ability to identify (“mußte man denn ganz gelassen durch die Luft fahren […] sehen”); instead, the narrator Goethe eventually turns away. Goethe first averts his sight, but when he cannot isolate himself from the noise of artillery, he leaves the observer position altogether� 21 Much as a modern “Fern-seher” who witnesses an attack on a faraway city, Goethe is in the dilemma of witnessing the war in real time without being able to engage in the action. Narrating the event, he also stages for the reader to be a witness of action in the distance. While Mendelssohn can accept pleasure in light of tragedy because he can theorize our inability to help, Goethe, confronted with a new technology of warfare and the use of a relatively new medium of the telescope, needs to step away. His stepping aside to discuss the theory of color with Duke Reuß, I want to suggest, is not an unwillingness to confront, witness and document the cruelty of war, but an expression of an ethics in light of a new possibility of murderous action at a distance and its real-time witnessing. Such ethics concludes that for those who cannot help or change the course of action, it is unethical to continue to watch and it is impossible to relate the events in mimetic ways. 22 While the telescope brought the distant event closer to the observer Goethe, Goethe’s visual representation of the scene in the Verdun aquarelle enlarges the visual distance to the embattled city by drawing on the Verblauungseffekt � However, there is a way in which Goethe’s use of the color blue also has the 352 Christine Lehleiter potential to bring the event closer� Goethe’s reference to the Farbenlehre in this context provides further clues about the kind of visualization that Goethe might have had in mind when he grappled with the difficulty to represent the violence. In the Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre , Goethe relates an anecdote which speaks to the Verblauungseffekt in landscape painting: Ich hatte die Ohnmacht des Blauen sehr deutlich empfunden, und seine unmittelbare Verwandtschaft mit dem Schwarzen bemerkt; nun gefiel es mir, zu behaupten: das Blaue sei keine Farbe! und ich freute mich eines allgemeinen Widerspruchs. […] Indessen versäumte ich nicht, die Herrlichkeit der atmosphärischen Farben zu betrachten, wobei sich die entschiedenste Stufenfolge der Luftperspektive, die Bläue der Ferne so wie naher Schatten, auffallend bemerken ließ. (FA 23.1: 972—73) Goethe occupies himself here with the phenomenon of the color blue in comprehensive ways. He considers a number of phenomena which belong to optical categories (such as perspective) and tools and conventions of landscape painting (such as the creation of distance). However, Goethe also makes remarkable comments on the psychological quality of color� In the Farbenlehre , Goethe devotes a comprehensive section to “sinnlich-sittliche Wirkung der Farbe” in which he discusses the effects of colors on the mind (“Gemüt”) (FA 23.1: 247). When Goethe discusses these effects, he concludes “daß die einzelnen Farbeindrücke nicht verwechselt werden können, daß sie spezifisch wirken, und entschieden spezifische Zustände in dem lebendigen Organ hervorbringen müssen. […] Eben auch so indem Gemüt” (FA 23.1: 248). It is important for him to highlight that such color effect on the mind is comparable or parallel to the effect on the organ, the eye, and as such these effects are specific and unexchangeable and even come with necessity (“müssen”). Goethe considers these effects to be of psychological but universal quality so that he can state: “Die Erfahrung lehrt uns, daß die einzelnen Farben besondere Gemütsstimmungen geben” (FA 23.1: 248). By using the color blue so generously in his depiction of Verdun, Goethe not only stresses and enlarges the visual distance between the observer and the observed (the perpetrators and the victims), but he also represents, or rather re-creates, an emotional experience which is very close to his experience as witness. By attributing to the color blue a feeling of swoon and powerlessness, Goethe evokes precisely those feelings which he also names in the already quoted letter to Reinhard thirty years later� In the context of a study of realism in light of war experience, Goethe’s considerations and use of color are of great interest. Throughout his war reporting, Goethe reflects on how the event is represented and how the war experience can be best related. In the reference to van der Meulen, he highlights how both perception and presentation of the event is mediated by an iconographic tradition The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 353 which helps to grasp what has happened but also uses the narrative to set both observer (of the result of a past violent action) and reader into (ironic) distance to the event. This distance becomes even more important when the narrator has become an eyewitness of people struggling for life. In light of the cruelty of the bombardment, mimetic representation becomes impossible� Goethe’s Verdun picture does not only exclude the violence and turns to the representation of a seemingly peaceful scene, but it frees color from its mimetic function (and its conventional or iconographic use) and draws on its psychological qualities. It is precisely in this moment that color obtains its greatest veracity, or realism� This realism is ultimately no longer based on visual verisimilitude but on a physiological-psychological (yet not subjective) phenomenon which both eyewitness and viewer of the image experience. The point here is not to advocate or reject the effectiveness of this technique but to highlight Goethe’s intensive engagement with the question of how best to relate the battle experience. In his attempts to find an adequate linguistic and visual language, Goethe is highly aware of the constant aesthetization (and of its necessity) and explores, at the same time, possibilities of relating the events in a less mediated way. Goethe is deeply engaged not only in the tradition and iconography of a specific topic but also in the psychology of aesthetics. The question of how aesthetic features relate to states of the mind had been at the centre of eighteenth-century considerations on the sublime and beautiful. For Burke, feelings of terror are intimately connected to the sublime to which he associates the jagged, interrupted line of ruin and destruction (cf. Boulton lvi). Consequently, the sublime has often been considered the fitting registry for the representation of war and its experience and for eliciting particular audience responses. Considering the power of the mortars that were shot at Verdun and the destruction that they caused, it is indeed noteworthy that Goethe makes a conscious effort to stay clear of the sublime (cf. Krimmer, “Portrait of War”). In fact, the particular attention the Verdun drawing pays to the meandering river stresses the importance that Goethe attributes to the plane in the overall conceptualization of the image and its psycho-physiological force. If Burke had connected the sublime to terror, he also had correlated the beautiful with the smooth line creating pleasure and delight in the audience’s mind. Following a similar line of thought, the English painter William Hogarth had stated in his Analysis of Beauty (1753): The eye hath this sort of enjoyment in winding walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts of objects, whose forms […] are composed principally of what, I call, the waving and serpentine lines […] and from the pleasure that it gives the mind, intitles it to the name of beautiful. (qtd. in Boulton lxxi) 354 Christine Lehleiter It is this formal language that is referenced in the meandering river in the long stretch between observer and city in Goethe’s Verdun image. 23 Goethe then combines here an experience of distance and swoon with an overall feeling of beauty. Such combination might astonish at first sight, but in his extensive writings on landscape painting, where Goethe had thought about the place of ruins and the remnants of former life in representation, we can find an explanation. In Ruisdael als Dichter (1813), Goethe describes the Dutch painter’s Das Kloster with particular attention to viewer response: Schon steht veraltet eine herrliche Buche da, entblättert, entästet, mit geborstener Rinde. Damit sie uns aber durch ihren herrlich dargestellten Schaft nicht betrübe, sondern erfreue, so sind ihr andere, noch volllebendige Bäume zugesellt, die den kahlen Stamme durch den Reichtum ihrer Äste und Zweige zu Hülfe kommen. (FA 19: 634) Read against the backdrop of Goethe’s considerations of the ruin in landscape painting, the Verdun image speaks of Goethe’s attempt to incorporate the war experience within an ultimately harmonious total which does not ignore the horror but aims to lead the observer into a state that can overcome it� Goethe’s consideration of an ultimately harmonious totality references a debate about theodicy that formed an important backdrop of the discussions on the ethics and aesthetics of delightful terror in eighteenth-century German texts. If in this context we accept Roob’s suggestion to read the observer in the Verdun image as a shepherd, an alternative to Roob’s interpretation of the image as an expression of aristocratic paternalism becomes possible� Before leaving for Rome in 1786, Karl Philipp Moritz had written Fragmente aus dem Tagebuche eines Geistersehers, which were published in 1793 as Die Unschuldswelt � In this text, Moritz argues that an idyllic reality does not provide material for aesthetic production (cf. Zelle 413—15). Moritz does not shy away from expressing this conclusion drastically: Aber freilich, wenn alle Menschen Schafe gehütet hätten, so wären sie zwar an sich wohl glücklich gewesen. Aber […] [w]o hätte dann der Stoff zu einer Iliade , zu einer Aeneide herkommen sollen? Armselige Welt, die dann geblieben wäre, / Ohne Schwert und Helm, / Ohne Schlachten, / Ohne Kriegsrüstung, / Ohne Blutvergießen, / Ohne Trauerspiele, / Ohne Geschütz und Bomben, / Ohne Schanz’ und Bollwerk […] / Wenn Tausende an einem Tage vor dem Schwertstreich fallen, das ist doch etwas Großes. Und das Große wollen wir ja; unsre Seele will ja erweitert sein, unsre Einbildungskraft will viel umspannen. (qtd. in Zelle 415) For Moritz, the horror of reality is aesthetically justified. Goethe references Moritz’s imaginary space between shepherd’s idyll and blood shedding in his account of siege and bombardment of Verdun. In light of the war experience, The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 355 Goethe opts very consciously against an aesthetic justification of terror and for a register of the beautiful idyll which is referenced in shepherd and meandering river. This is not the paternalistic stance of aristocracy who does not know the sorrows of the people. Instead, it is a conscious decision against an aesthetization of the horrific experience of these people (“Volk”; FA 16: 405), which are acknowledged as humans (“Menschen”; FA 16: 405). In the following section, I will provide one more instance of Goethe’s experiments with the possibilities of representation and realism in the war context. In June 1793, Goethe witnessed another siege and bombardment, namely that of Mainz� In the entry for June 11, Goethe provides a general picture of the troops’ positions and their preparation of the bombardment� He gushes about the landscape, its charm and aesthetics� The description of the preparation of the ground for camp and battle culminates in the declaration of the scene as a smaller version of the most beautiful park of the world. There is little missing to declare the scene a paradise: Das leicht zu behandelnde Erdreich bot sich den Händen geschickter Gärtner dar, welche die gefälligste Parkanlage mit wenig Bemühung bildeten: die abhängige Seite ward geböscht und mit Rasen belegt, Lauben gebaut, auf- und absteigende Kommunikationsgänge gegraben, Flächen planiert, wo das Militär in seiner ganzen Pracht und Zierlichkeit sich zeigen konnte, anstoßende Wäldchen und Büsche mit in den Plan gezogen, so daß man bei der köstlichsten Ansicht nichts mehr wünschen konnte als diese sämtlichen Räume eben so bearbeitet zu sehen, um des herrlichsten Parks von der Welt zu genießen. Unser Krause zeichnete sorgfältig die Aussicht mit allen ihren gegenwärtigen Eigentümlichkeiten. (FA 16: 582) The passage is characterized by formulations of minimization and might seem a hyperbole of trivialization: the soil is easy to work on, the workers are talented gardeners, the camp is a pleasant park, and the military is dainty. Such miniaturization turns what were after all preparations for the heavy bombardment of Mainz into child’s play� The description is accompanied by a reference to an illustration prepared by Georg Melchior Kraus in which Goethe highlights the care to detail and particularities with which Kraus had treated the subject matter (582). Indeed, Kraus’ illustration is characterized by a panoramic view and the quality of a model landscape in which pewter figures seem to be staged to reenact the scene� Kraus, who was the director of the Zeichenschule in Weimar, had studied in Paris and would have been familiar with the French battle scene tradition to which van der Meulen belonged. 24 In fact, his illustration shares important features with this tradition, such as the extended landscape and a horizon 356 Christine Lehleiter apparently marked by the city to be conquered. However, a closer look also reveals important differences. For example, the landscape between foreground and horizon forms a continuum and provides space for a number of local scenes� We see some military to the right in formation and tents which suggest the siege� It also seems that the observers in the foreground do not focus on the city to be conquered but on an unknown sight to the left. They look outside the picture but leave the observers - here again located above them - in the dark about their object of interest and make it difficult for them to assess the situation. Here, the picture’s viewer knows less, or at least something else, than the observers in the picture� The picture tells many little stories but it refuses to offer a grand narrative. It exposes the fragmentized perception of the eye-witness in the picture, while at the same time also refusing any possibility of an allegorical or even historical reading for the viewer outside the picture. Battle scene iconography might be one way to approach Kraus’s landscape but yet another media history opens up if we consider how Kraus likely produced the image. Throughout the war, Kraus travelled with the businessman and artist Charles Gore and was involved in the latter’s work with the camera obscura� Goethe reports of this cooperation in the entry for 15 July 1793: [Gore] zeichnete sehr glücklich in der Camera obscura und hatte, Land und See bereisend, sich auf diese Weise die schönsten Erinnerungen gesammelt. Nun konnte er, in Weimar wohnhaft, angewohnter Beweglichkeit nicht entsagen, blieb immer geneigt kleine Reisen vorzunehmen, wobei ihn denn gewöhnlich Rat Krause zu begleiten pflegte, der mit leichter, glücklicher Fassungsgabe die vorstehenden Landschaften zu Papier brachte, schattierte, färbte, und so arbeiteten beide um die Wette. Die Belagerung von Maynz, als ein seltener wichtiger Fall, wo das Unglück selbst malerisch zu werden versprach, lockte die beiden Freunde gleichfalls nach dem Rhein, wo sie sich keinen Augenblick müßig verhielten. (FA 16: 593) Both Goethe’s description of the landscape at Marienborn and Kraus’s illustration of it are decidedly nonthreatening, emotionally unengaged, and share an attempt to remove the subject from the observer position. Considering Kraus’s work with Gore and considering that the camera obscura was frequently used as a tool in landscape painting, it is likely that the view that we see in Kraus’s illustration of the Belagerung is actually the view of a camera. 25 There is another image of the bombardment by Kraus that likely was produced with help of the camera obscura, namely an image of the ruin of the Liebfrauenkirche in Mainz, which had been destroyed in the bombardment (Roob 2: 12). This “photographic” depiction of the ruin promises to correspond to a realistic and less aestheticized rendering of the war. However, its subject is not only indebted to an iconography of the disrupted and terrifying formal language The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 357 of the sublime, but its promise of immediacy is also immediately undermined by its indebtedness to another image of a church ruin, Bernardo Bellotto’s depiction of the Dresden Kreuzkirche (1765), an image which depicts the destruction created by Prussian bombardment during the Seven Years War (Roob 2: 13—14). Bellotto, a cousin of Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), had been trained in Italy and it is likely that he himself worked with the camera obscura which had been introduced already in the seventeenth century as a tool in the production of urban landscape painting. It is not clear whether Goethe knew Bellotto’s rendering of the ruin, but he had seen the destruction of the city himself when he visited in 1768 (cf. Sommerfeldt) and the ruin of the Kreuzkirche stood out in this memory (cf. Roob 2: 15). In Dichtung und Wahrheit , Goethe notes about his Dresden visit: Diese köstlichen, Geist und Sinn zur wahren Kunst vorbereitenden Erfahrungen wurden jedoch durch einen der traurigsten Anblicke unterbrochen und gedämpft, durch den zerstörten und verödeten Zustand so mancher Straße Dresdens, durch die ich meinen Weg nahm. Die Mohrenstraße im Schutt, sowie die Kreuzkirche mit ihrem geborstenen Turm drückten sich mir tief ein und stehen noch wie ein dunkler Fleck in meiner Einbildungskraft. (FA 14: 354) The stay in Dresden became for Goethe an important moment of reflection on how images shape our perception of the world. In his account of the visit in Dichtung und Wahrheit , Goethe reports twice about his tendency and ability to see reality as image. One of the accounts depicts the situation when returning to his accommodation at a cobbler’s house: Als ich bei meinem Schuster wieder eintrat, um das Mittagsmahl zu genießen, trauete ich meinen Augen kaum: denn ich glaubte ein Bild von Ostade vor mir zu sehen, so vollkommen, daß man es nur auf die Galerie hätte hängen dürfen. Stellung der Gegenstände, Licht, Schatten, bräunlicher Teint des Ganzen, magische Haltung, alles, was man in jenen Bildern bewundert, sah ich hier in der Wirklichkeit. Es war das erste Mal, daß ich auf einen so hohen Grad die Gabe gewahr wurde, die ich nachher mit mehrerem Bewußtsein übte, die Natur nämlich mit den Augen dieses oder jenes Künstlers zu sehen, dessen Werken ich soeben eine besondere Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet hatte. (FA 14: 350—51) 26 Against the backdrop of Bellotto’s ruin painting and against the backdrop of Goethe’s experience in Dresden, Kraus’s pictures of the siege and destruction of Mainz are no longer distanced and objective “photographs” of reality. Instead, they are inscribed into an iconographic tradition and saturated with personal memory� Much as its heir, photography, the camera obscura image had promised to be a medium that provides objectivity and an unmediated access to the world. 358 Christine Lehleiter It is with this hope for immediacy that the camera obscura appears in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften where Gore seems to make a cameo as the English Lord who visits the estate of Eduard and Charlotte where he is busy to picture the estate’s landscape (cf. Hörisch 51—55). While in Wahlverwandtschaften the English Lord and his machine hold much promise precisely because neither of them seem to comment, judge or otherwise engage with the protagonists’ emotional confusions and to offer a “technisches Jenseits der Sprache” und “Vorstellungen” (Hörisch 51 and 54), 27 the reference to Kraus’s image has a different effect in Goethe’s war reporting which undermines the image’s promise of immediacy. While Goethe might have hoped that Kraus’s image could help to illustrate his report of the siege in unmediated ways for his readers, the image becomes an occasion to remember Kraus. Its importance lays, I would like to suggest, less in its representative function than its value as a monument to Kraus’s memory. This camera obscura landscape turns for Goethe, much as the images that Gore produces, in one of the “Erinnerungen” of the war. As such, it has for him a much higher emotional charge than it conveys to the reader� While Kraus was familiar with battle scene iconography and the practice of camera obscura landscape painting, he was aesthetically much closer to genre painting. During his time in Paris, he had gotten to know the oeuvre of Jean-Baptiste Greuze - painter of works that are characterized by both their emotional saturation and allegorical depth such as Young girl weeping for the dead bird - and was known in Weimar not only as a teacher of Goethe and many others from the circle but also for his contributions to Bertuch’s Journal der Moden and the Bilderbuch für Kinder . When Goethe writes about Kraus’s depiction of the siege of Mainz thirty years later, Kraus had already died. He had been wounded when French soldiers looted Weimar in 1806 after Napoleon’s victories in Jena and Auerstedt and died only a few weeks later. For Goethe, the picture must have signalized not only a memory of the war but a memory of Kraus and his life and death against the backdrop of the post-revolutionary wars. This landscape does not depict the war in a heroic or even merely historical way, but Goethe’s report maintains a memory of the picture, the moment of its production, and a memory of Kraus. In particular in the context of the sentimentally charged genre paintings for which Kraus was known, the image becomes a site of memory and mourning which remembers the sentimental gesture without having access to it any longer and within a medium whose advent had promised technical precision (cf. Hörisch 51). Indeed, in the following decades the tradition of visual battle depictions would undergo significant changes. While photography slowly took over many of the image’s traditional functions, as the function of documenting and of representation in the name of the state, war painting was freed from its im- The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 359 mediate relationship to the events on the ground and could become a space of reflection. While it still quoted the features which we have described here - and in some cases brought representative heroism to its climax (as in Anton von Werner’s work) - battle depiction could now be replaced by an evocation of the battle’s memory. In 1817, even before Goethe started to take concrete steps to write down the Campagne experiences, William Turner visited the battlefield of Waterloo. Detailed topographical studies led to a painting, probably finished a year after Goethe’s death, which quotes the French tradition of a wide-open landscape with a marked strip of foreground, but no horses and warriors are to be seen. However, there are traces, as Monika Wagner has demonstrated, that evoke the memory of the battle: there are sheep who follow the soldiers’ trajectory and a skeleton in the foreground reminds of the death that has taken place here. The sky is lit by lightning which illuminates the scene in a ghostly manner and evokes the glare of artillery. In Turner’s Waterloo , the battle is not depicted but references to the battle are abundant. However, attempts to provide audiences at home with the frontline experience of artillery would shape war representation in the nineteenth century and newest developments in media technology were intrinsically linked to this attempt. Goethe’s war report considers the options. In light of the inability to express the experience of the bombardment in words, Goethe sets some hope in one last medium, a “transparent” visual representation. 28 He reports of Gore’s and Kraus’s attempts to capture the artillery power and its effects on Mainz in what Goethe calls “Brandstudien”: Herr Gore und Rat Krause behandelten den Vorfall künstlerisch und machten so viele Brandstudien, daß ihnen später gelang ein durchscheinendes Nachtstück zu verfertigen, welches noch vorhanden ist und, wohl erleuchtet, mehr als irgend eine Wortbeschreibung die Vorstellung einer unselig glühenden Hautpstadt des Vaterlandes zu überliefern im Stande sein möchte. (FA 16: 585—86) Roob connects the interest in the Brandstudien to the genre of depictions of nightly volcano eruptions which were popular in Italy since the sixteenth century (2: 21). In the comment to the Frankfurt Goethe edition, Klaus-Detlef Müller notes that a painting by the Frankfurt artist C.G. Schütz that depicts the nightly bombardment of Mainz on 29 June 1793 is among the Weimar collection, but he regrets that there is no evidence of a painting by Gore and Kraus (FA 16: 996). Both Müller and Roob provide important references to the iconography of nightly fires and volcanic eruptions, but it is misleading to look for a painting by Kraus and Gore. Goethe’s choice of words from “durchscheinenden Nachtstück” (transparent night piece) to the condition of “wohl erleuchtet” (well lit) suggests instead that he was thinking of yet another technical invention in 360 Christine Lehleiter media history, the magic lantern� The magic lantern, built on the same principle as the camera obscura, uses transparent plates and a light source to project an image on a screen� The lantern gained popularity in the eighteenth century throughout Europe and its function was greatly improved by the invention in the 1790s of the Argand lamp which considerably improved light quality (and to which Goethe possibly refers when stressing the importance of a good light source)� 29 Early on images that were chosen for projection with the magic lantern focused on ghostly figures. One early drawing for the machine produced by Christiaan Huygens shows death taking off his head, another by the German polymath Athanasius Kircher depicts a person in purgatory or hellfire. Such images combined entertainment with moral-educational purposes. Magic lantern projections were regularly used in phantasmagoria productions which confronted eager audiences from the late eighteenth century onwards with ghostly experiences, but phantasmagoric shows really took off in the 1790s. They gained particular urgency in post-revolutionary France where their popularity was closely tied to their lifelike impressions. In fact, in Paris “the show [of Etienne Gaspard Robertson] was temporarily halted by the police because it was thought that Robertson could bring Louis XVI back to life” (on the magic lantern see Barber, here 74)� In his war report, Goethe employs a number of media technologies in order to observe and represent the event. From the word and the image to the camera obscura and the magic lantern, the represented event gains greater and greater realism to the perceiving audience. Interestingly though, while the magic lantern brings the viewer closest to “reality,” it also produces the most eerie apparitions of ghosts. Goethe had thought about the relationship between reality, representation, and ghost-like phenomena in one of the maxims, which considers the question of how the human mind relates to reality and whether humans have the capacity to gain insight into it� It is in this epistemological context that he expresses both the conviction that the human being has access to reality and the acknowledgment that mediatisation is necessary in the process of cognition: Der Mensch ist als wirklich in die Mitte einer wirklichen Welt gesetzt und mit solchen Organen begabt, daß er das Wirkliche und nebenbey das Mögliche erkennen und hervorbringen kann. Alle gesunden Menschen haben die Ueberzeugung ihres Daseyns und eines Daseyenden um sie her. Indessen giebt es auch einen hohlen Fleck im Gehirn, d.h. eine Stelle wo sich kein Gegenstand abspiegelt, wie denn auch im Auge selbst ein Fleckchen ist das nicht sieht. Wird der Mensch auf diese Stelle besonders aufmerksam, vertieft er sich darin, so verfällt er in eine Geisteskrankheit, ahnet hier Dinge aus einer andern Welt , die aber eigentlich Undinge sind und weder Gestalt noch The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 361 Begränzung haben, sondern als leere Nacht-Räumlichkeiten ängstigen und den der sich nicht losreißt mehr als gespensterhaft verfolgen. (FA 13: 363) Reiterating the word segment “wirklich” three times, Goethe affirms both the positive existence of the world and the possibility of its recognition by the human mind. At the same time, Goethe acknowledges the existence of a blind spot where cognition fails. Interestingly, Goethe implicitly formulates here a model of the mind that functions like an optical apparatus. Not only is there a direct reference to the analogous working of the eye, but the mind is understood as relating to the world like a mirror. 30 In this theory of the mind, it is a mediated image which allows humans to recognize the world. Considering Goethe’s insistence on the real in the first sentence quoted here, we would expect that the place where mediatisation ends is the place where we are closest to reality. This might well be, but Goethe makes also clear that this place remains for the most part inaccessible for us. Even more, our occupation with the blind spot can generate ghosts whose haunting presence might drive one into madness. Goethe stresses that the concentration on this spot outside mediation does not bring humans closer to reality but pulls them into an abyss of haunting ghosts� A “healthy” mind, by implication, will acknowledge the blind spot but will focus on the mediation precisely as the method to stay grounded in reality� It is not surprising then that the one time Goethe experiments with staying away from mediatisation in his war report - when he plays with the physio-psychological effect of color - is a moment of swoon. As with the “Gespenster” that Goethe mentions in the letter to Carl Friedrich von Reinhard from July 1822 and the “dunkle Fleck” which the sight of the destructed Kreuzkirche burns into Goethe’s memory, the violence and destruction of the war ultimately remain unmediated spaces in the mind which conjure ghosts that better stay undisturbed. To stick with the possibilities of mediatisation is both an epistemological and psychological necessity in Goethe’s war report. We have used here four battle scene depictions which Goethe references or presents in the context of his war reporting in order to propose an answer to the question of how Goethe relates the reality of war and how his realism might be defined in light of the unprecedented violence that he witnessed. Confronted with a fundamental inability to recall and relate the actual experience - as he admits to his friend von Reinhard - Goethe draws on the aid of visual representations, partial but concrete media which are indebted to reality as verisimilitude. At the same time, the narrator Goethe makes use of the interaction between image and text in order to highlight how the image is indebted to aesthetic traditions which facilitate the mediation of the event but cannot 362 Christine Lehleiter relate the full truth of the experience� In the comment on the van der Meulen image, the heroism of the scene is undermined by Goethe’s ironic remark which stresses the difference between aesthetic and ethical categories and the different experiences of perpetrator and victim. When Goethe is confronted with a close and simultaneous look at the targets and victims of the bombardment in Verdun made possible by the telescope, he distances himself from the event by turning away to converse with Duke Reuß about optical observations which he had made earlier that day� His visual depiction of Verdun highlights this attempt of distancing by means of the Verblauungseffekt . The observations which Goethe discussed with Reuß centered on phenomena of refraction in which colors can become independent of concrete objects and in which the refraction phenomenon depends on the position of the observer. Here, Goethe is interested in what happens between the object and the eye that perceives the object. Goethe takes one more step on the line which we might imagine connecting object, eye, and mind, when he relies on the effect of the color blue. Drawing on the psychological but universal effect of blue, Goethe makes a rare attempt to relate the “Ohnmacht” of the experience independent of mimetic means and conventions. In Kraus’s camera obscura depictions of the siege of Mainz, the image reaches a high level of verisimilitude but is still indebted to an iconographic tradition and its significance ultimately derives not from its subject matter. Instead, it derives from its quality as a souvenir of a situation and a person who was a victim of the Napoleonic Wars and whom Goethe knew personally. Realism here is neither in verisimilitude nor in physiological processes but in the individual connection between experience and mind which it can conjure. As such, the meaning of this latter representation remains to a large extent personal and hermetic to a larger audience� 31 Finally, in our last example, the transparent night piece, the image arguably reaches its highest veracity, surpassing - according to Goethe’s own assessment - any verbal rendering. At the same time, it is inscribed into a media event in which the greatest proximity to life is at the same time a ghostly spectre� Referencing Goethe’s realistic turn , Gisela Horn has stressed that Goethe in his war reporting avoids political statements so that the events can speak for themselves (235). It is certainly true that Goethe withholds political judgment, however, the claim that the events speak for themselves has only limited validity. Instead, Goethe aims to make visible to what extent his war reporting is indebted to iconographic and aesthetic traditions, optical, physiological, and ultimately psychological phenomena. Goethe’s realism is deeply aware of these conditions of seeing and reporting, which he reexamines in light of the unprecedented violence that he has experienced and for which he seeks to find a language. Against the iconography of battle scenes, we realize that much like The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 363 Louis XIV, who commissioned van der Meulen to document his successes across a number of media, Goethe too tests a number of media in order to relate the event and experience of war. However, while Louis XIV’s propagandistic use of the image relies on an audience who is blind to the machinery of this media war, Goethe juxtaposes image and narration in order to make the toolbox visible and in the hope that his readers can dissect the apparatus to see the many realities of battle� Ultimately, the Campagne and Belagerung attest to the necessity and limitations of media in representing the reality of war. Acknowledgment: I thank the participants of the Realism in the Age of Goethe panel series at the GSA 2019 for engaging discussions� In particular, I would like to thank the organizers and editors Christian P. Weber and Jan Jost- Fritz for their careful reading and excellent comments and suggestions� My research is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council� Notes 1 The brutality of previous wars had been immense and the memory of the Thirty Years War was still very present in the eighteenth century. What was new with the kind of warfare that started in the last third of the eighteenth century was what one could call violence at a distance which came with increased artillery power and allowed the attackers to stay distanced from their victims (cf. Haythornthwaite). Even before Napoleon assumed power French artillery was known for its superiority, which was confirmed at Valmy. It is not surprising that Goethe, speaking of Valmy, focused on the experience of the “Kanonade.” Bodiner and Childs report that “[e]ngagement usually commenced with a mutual cannonade, which might last for several hours, which was intended to dismount and damage the opposing artillery” (44). 2 Horn notes Goethe’s use of “Passiv- und Pluralformen” and reads them as a sign of the submission of the individual to the group and of a focus on the event instead of individual emotions (237). 3 There are other places in the report where Goethe highlights the discrepancy between observer and observed victim. In the context of the bombardment of Mainz, he reports how peasants on Sunday observed the artillery from a relatively safe distance as a kind of entertainment after church. The description of the curious and amused onlookers quotes Lucretius’ depiction of entertained onlookers of a shipwreck, which figured large in eighteenth-century aesthetic discussions (Zelle 39—40). Goethe’s implicit refer- 364 Christine Lehleiter ence illustrates the degree to which the author embeds his report within the aesthetic tradition of delightful terror� 4 Important exceptions are the haunting visual representations of war atrocities during the Thirty Years War, most notably Jacques Callot’s The Miseries and Misfortunes of War (1633) (cf. Sontag 52—53). 5 For a comprehensive discussion of the aesthetics of delightful terror in the German context see Carsten Zelle’s seminal “Angenehmes Grauen”: Literaturhistorische Beiträge zur Ästhetik des Schrecklichen im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (1987), to which the following section is indebted. 6 Zelle argues that the problematization of delightful terror was “der innere Motor” of the process that lead to the differentiation of the spheres of ethics and aesthetics (Zelle XXIII). 7 Mendelssohn’s thinking on delightful terror is complex and develops over the span of a decade� Zelle argues convincingly that Mendelssohn’s latest considerations on the topic in the second version of the Rhapsodie from 1771 arrive at the differentiation of the moral and aesthetic spheres (see Zelle 315—58, in particular 354)� 8 In the context of realism, it is noteworthy that bourgeois realism maintains a productive relationship to the gothic. Texts with realist characteristics such as Fontane’s Effi Briest , Gotthelf ’s Schwarze Spinne , and Storm’s Schimmelreiter all maintain gothic elements which drive important parts of the plot� 9 Krimmer has demonstrated that German representations of the war are deeply entangled with notions of the Sublime ( Representation of War )� In her work on Goethe, she points out that the author is an exception in that he was “radically opposed to the concept of war as a sublime experience” (“Portrait of War” 46). She notes “Goethe may scan the war that was forced on him for its aesthetic possibilities, but he does not court war as a venue that offers privileged access to the sublime” (“Portrait of War” 53). 10 Goethe’s reference to the textile resonates in interesting ways not only with the tapestry cycle Histoire du Roy that Louis XIV had ordered to glorify his power - the question of realism had been at the core of the discussion around its conceptualization (cf. Brassat) -, but also with a text that Friedrich Schlegel had written upon seeing Albrecht Altdorfer’s Alexanderschlacht (1528/ 29) (published in Europa 1804)� Implicitly referencing the aesthetic program of Lessing’s Laokoon (1766), he observes: “Nirgends ist Blut und Ekel oder hin und wieder geworfne Glieder und Verzerrungen; nur im äußersten Vorgrunde, wenn man ihn sehr genau betrachtet, erblickt man unter den Füßen der von beiden Seiten grade auf einander einrennenden Ritterscharen, und den Hufen ihrer Streitrosse, mehrere Reihen von Leichen The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe’s War Experience 365 dicht zusammenliegen, wie in einem Gewebe ; gleichsam der Grundteppich zu dieser Welt von Krieg und Waffen, von glänzendem Eisen und noch hellerem Ruhm und Rittertum” (Schlegel 118—19; emphasis mine). While Goethe bemoans that the ghostly apparitions of the war cannot be banned, Schlegel manages to limit the war’s ugly reality to the fringes while at the same time justifying and elevating it as the necessary foundation on which glory and knighthood can be erected. 11 “Manche Vorstellung kann als Bestimmung der Seele etwas Angenehmes haben, ob sie gleich, als Bild des Gegenstandes von Mißbilligung und Widerwillen begleitet wird. Wir müssen uns also wohl hüten, diese beiden Beziehungen, die objektive und die subjektiv, nicht zu vermengen, oder mit einander zu verwechseln” (Mendelssohn 143). 12 For a concise account of the relationship between image, imagination, and verisimilitude in Goethe’s oeuvre see Weber, in particular 102� 13 Van der Meulen’s The Crossing of the Rhine on 12 June 1672 can be found online at en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Adam_Frans_van_der_Meulen#/ media/ File: Adam_Frans_van_der_Meulen_-_The_crossing_of_the_Rhine_on_12_ June_1672.jpg (accessed 22 June 2021). 14 In this section, I follow closely and summarize Thomas Kirchner’s work on battle scene iconography and van der Meulen� 15 The image can be found online at fr.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Si%C3%A8ge_de_ Corbie#/ media/ Fichier: Reprise_de_Corbie,_14_novembre_1636.jpg (accessed 22 June 2021)� 16 The image can be found online at commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/ File: Regnesson_nicolas_Norlinghen_bmr_116.jpg (accessed 22 June 2021). 17 The image can be found online at commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/ File: - Goethe_Festung_Verdun_1792.jpg (accessed 22 June 2021). 18 http: / / www.meltonpriorinstitut.org/ pages/ textarchive.php5? view=text&ID=85&language= Deutsch (accessed 30 June 2021; quoted as Roob I). 19 For a discussion of Goethe and Laukhard see Krimmer’s excellent observations in “Portrait of War” (2008). 20 http: / / www.meltonpriorinstitut.org/ pages/ textarchive.php5? view=text&ID=86&language= Deutsch (accessed 30 June 2021; quoted as Roob II). 21 The noise produced by artillery was considered already in Napoleonic times a tactical asset and served psychological warfare (cf. Haythornthwaite 67). See also the observations in Sontag on the different degrees to which eye and ear allow the observer to distance herself from the event (152). 22 Sontag notes on a similar point: “morally alert photographers and ideologues of photography have become increasingly concerned with the issues 366 Christine Lehleiter of exploitation of sentiment (pity, compassion, indignation) in war photography and of rote ways of provoking feeling” (100). 23 Goethe was familiar with Hogarth’s work and comments explicitly on it in his morphological studies of the ox fossil (1822) (FA 24: 558). 24 For a brief account of Kraus’s biography see Donop. 25 Roob also draws the connection to the camera obscura and provides further historical details on its use in landscape painting (2: 11—12). 26 In the Italienische Reise , Goethe makes similar remarks on the phenomenon in an entry from 8 October 1786� From his observation of a personal ability, he arrives at a more general statement which acknowledges how seeing is shaped by biographical-historical conditions (FA 15.1: 93). 27 Already in the Wahlverwandtschaften , the English Lord figure is not as unproblematic as it might seem, and the neutral quality of the camera obscura image is put into question� The Lord’s comments on traveling and home, and later his companion’s telling of the novella, touch Charlotte and Ottilie - whose precarious situation the visitors don’t know yet - deeply: “Der Lord ahnete nicht, wie tief durch seine Betrachtungen die Freundinnen [Charlotte und Ottilie] getroffen wurden” (FA 8: 468). 28 Haythornwthwaite describes the technology behind such siege bombing: “Mortar-bombs resembled howitzer-shells - iron spheres filled with powder and sealed by tapered wooden fuze […]. The effect of mortar-bombs falling almost vertically from their high trajectory could produce startling results […]. For illumination-flares, ‘light balls’ were used, fired from a cannon and comprising an oral iron framework covered with painted cloth” (87). 29 See also Goethe’s essay “Transparent-Gemälde” from April 1820 (FA 20: 524—28). In the early 1820, Louis Daguerre - who soon would invent photography - was also using translucent canvas to create illusions of reality in his diorama theatres (cf. Gernsheim, in particular 14—47). 30 Already Plato describes the mind as a mirror and Locke, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding , uses the image of the camera obscura (cf. 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