The Reptonian turn: reassessing landscape design in Goethe's Elective Affinities

摘要

The four protagonists of Goethe's enigmatic novel of 1809, Die Wahlverwandtschajkn [Elective Affinities], occupy themselves by transforming an old Renaissance garden into a landscape park in the new English fashion. There is general agreement that their landscaping, which dominates Part One of the novel, holds the key to an understanding of the novel as a whole and that this work represents the most conspicuous and sophisticated literary monument to the fascination throughout the German lands with 'Landschafts-Gartenkunst' [landscape garden art]. The most widely shared view appears to be that certain landscape features, their conception as well as the final product, reflect Goethe's disillusion with the English style of landscape design on account of its problematic esthetic principles and its economic wastefulness. Furthermore, it is often argued that the inability of the novel's protagonists to heed the economic challenges and master the moral dilemmas confronting them is to be read as indicativeof the collective failure of the landed gentry — a failure that became apparent through the traumatic defeat of the Prussian army by Napoleon in 1806 at Jena and Auerstedt, within earshot of Weimar, where Goethe lived from 1775 to his death in 1832. Inhis hugely influential essay of 1924, even Walter Benjamin, although this is by no means his prime concern, points to economic neglect: 'And never, even when so much is said about the estate, is there a discussion of its crops or of any rural business that serves not ornament but sustenance'.