16 See the materials included in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die natürliche Tochter: Trauerspiel. Mit den Memoiren der Stéphanie-Louise de Bourbon-Conti und drei Studien von Bernhard Böschenstein (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1990).
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# The Dramaturgy of Demise: On Goethe’s Der Groß-Cophta

Pages 402-419
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Received 21 May 2024, Accepted 22 Jun 2024, Published online: 26 Aug 2024

/doi/full/10.1080/00168890.2024.2372806?needAccess=true

## Abstract

Goethe’s first drama written in the wake of the French Revolution, Der Groß-Cophta, has garnered little favor from audiences and scholars since its first publication. This essay argues that Goethe’s comedy inverts fundamental dramaturgical conventions of tragedy, revealing a social and political world in collapse. It shows that patterns of literary figuration first articulated in Der Groß-Cophta extend across several of Goethe’s literary engagements with revolutionary tumult. Confidence men and narratives of lost innocence emerge as crucial elements in Goethe’s diagnosis of the disintegration of ethical life responsible for the demise of the ancien régime.

Keywords:

## Notes

1 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, 40 vols. ed. Friedmar Apel, Hendrik Birus et al., (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987f.), vol. 29, 360. “I have traces, not to say reports, of a great mass of lies creeping about in the darkness, of which you seem to have no sense. Believe me, our moral and political world is mined with subterranean passages, cellars and cesspits, much as a city tends to be, which no one thinks and reflects on their connections and relations among their inhabitants; they only become much more comprehensible to someone who has some knowledge of them, when there the ground collapses, there smoke rises from a ravine, here strange voices are heard.”

2 Walter Müller-Seidel, Die Geschichtlichkeit der deutschen Klassik: Literatur und Denkformen um 1800 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlerische Buchhandlung, 1983), 46.

3 Hartmut Reinhardt, Vom Schäferspiel zur kritischen Analyse der Moderne: Goethes Dramatisches Werk (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 227. For an inventory of similar assessments of the play, see Michael Jaeger, Fausts Kolonie: Goethes kritische Phänomenologie der Moderne (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004). 274–75.

4 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II/1: Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 717–18.

5 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 39, 532.

6 Nearly every essay or chapter on Der Groß-Cophta refers to it as an aesthetic failure. Its deficient status assumes programmatic importance in Fritz Martini, “Goethes ‘verfehlte’ Lustspiele: “Die Mitschuldigen” und “Der Gross-Cophta.” Lustspiele und das Lustspiel (Stuttgart: Klett, 1974), 105–49. Martini argues not only that Goethe’s ‘aesthetic organization’ of the comedy was faulty, but also that comedy as a genre was inadequate to the ‘social and moral reality’ of the time.

7 Cf. the related overarching argument in Patrick Fortmann, “Goethe’s Comedies Der Groß-Cophta, Die Aufgeregten, and Bürgergeneral,” Monatshefte 105, no. 1 (2013): 1–25. Although there are major differences in my own approach to the text and Fortmann’s, we share a commitment to disclosing the etiological mission of Goethe’s play.

8 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 24, 297.

9 I have learned much from Dieter Borchmeyer, Höfische Gesellschaft und französische Revolution bei Goethe: Adliges und bürgerliches Wertsystem im Urteil der Weimarer Klassik (Kronberg: Athenäum, 1977). Although the following analysis has little overlap with Borchmeyer’s chapter on Der Groß-Cophta, I enthusiastically agree with the claims that critics have failed to appreciate the play’s literary qualities and that Goethe’s etiology of the revolution focuses on courtly corruption.

10 This text has been largely neglected in Goethe scholarship. For the most informative and compelling discussion, see Thomas Saine, Black Bread—White Bread: German Intellectuals and the French Revolution (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1988).

11 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 16, 565–66. “Through this outrageously iniquitous beginning, I saw the dignity of the throne undermined, already destroyed in advance, and all subsequent steps from this time on unfortunately confirmed all too much these terrible premonitions.”

12 For ease of comprehension, I retain the original German names of the dramatis personae.

13 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2/1, 718.

14 Joel B. Lande, “Anomaly and Danger: Politics of the Impure in Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea,” MLN 134, no. 3 (2019): 572–90.

15 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 16, 566.

16 See the materials included in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die natürliche Tochter: Trauerspiel. Mit den Memoiren der Stéphanie-Louise de Bourbon-Conti und drei Studien von Bernhard Böschenstein (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1990).

17 For a valuable analysis of the transformation from opera buffa into a comedy, see Lieselotte Blumenthal, “Goethe’s Grosskophta,” Weimarer Beiträge 1 (1961): 1–26.

18 For a critical assessment of Goethe’s work in the comedic genre that has shaped the reception of the play, see Charles Philip Magill, “ Der Groß-Cophta and the Problem a German Comedy,” in German Studies: Presented to Walter Horace Bruford on his retirement by his pupils, colleagues and friends (London: G.G. Harrap, 1962), 102–11. Magill’s view that Goethe lacked talent in the comedic genre can be found in nearly every essay or editorial remark on Der Groß-Cophta and the other revolutionary comedies.

19 David E. Wellbery, “Romanticism and Modernity: Epistemological Continuities and Discontinuities,” European Romantic Review 21, vol. 3 (2010): 275–89, 276. My inspiration to develop this line of thinking is Wellbery, Goethes Pandora: Dramatisierung einer Urgeschichte der Morderne: Vorgetragen in der Sitzung vom 3. Februar 2012, (Munich: Bayrische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2017), 16–32.

20 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 391.

21 The sense of unresolved conflict is no doubt owed to the fact that the play was originally intended as the first part of a trilogy.

22 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2/1, 712–13.

23 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 16, 565.

24 Ernst Osterkamp, Gewalt und Gestalt: Die Antike im Spätwerk Goethes (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2007), 55.

25 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 8, 278.

26 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 7/1, 116.

27 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 7/1, 249.

Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 103.

29 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 99.

30 For a discussion of Goethe’s notion of the tragic, see David E. Wellbery, Goethes Faust I: Reflexion der tragischen Form (Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2016).

31 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 16, 566.

32 Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (Munich: Beck Verlag, 2014). Hermann Schmitz, “Das Ganz-Andere. Goethe und das Ungeheure,” in Goethe und die Verdeutlichung der Natur, ed. Peter Matussek (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1998), 414–35.

33 Schmitz, “Das Ganz-Andere”, 422. “The monstrous threatens to destroy us by robbing us of the upward and downward orientation necessary to stand upright, by pulling the ground from under our feet and thus thwarting the enormous self-confidence which, according to Kant, is the […] essence of sublimity.”

34 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 16, 566. “For many years I had the occasion to curse with vexation the deceptions of quixotic dreamers and deliberate enthusiasts, and to wonder with disgust at the incomprehensible blindness of excellent men to such impudent impositions. Now the direct and indirect consquences of such folly lay before me as crimes and half-crimes, all together effective enough to shake the most beautiful throne in the world.” There is a close connection here between Goethe’s fascination with such Phantasten and Schwärmer and his abiding sense that the French Revolution was bound up with a proliferation of the fantastical. See Jürgen Söring, “Die Verwirrung und das Wunderbare in Goethes Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 100, no.4 (1981): 544–59.

35 Fortmann “Miniaturizing Revolution” picks up on this issue, though he limits it to the question of imagination. However, a broader problem in Goethe’s poetics is at issue. One must also think of figures like Karl in the Unterhaltungen or the titular figure in Reinecke Fuchs.

36 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 14, 841.

37 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 14, 841.

39 Support for this claim can be found in Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, a text that evinces a fascination with rationally inexplicable, occult phenomena. In his correspondence with Schiller leading up to the composition of the novella “Die Sängerin Antonelli” that he included in the Unterhaltungen, Goethe calls the underlying anecdote a “ gespenstermäßen Mystifikationsgeschichte.” See Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 9, 1514. As mentioned, a valuable discussion of Goethe’s fixation on the occult in the Unterhaltungen can be found in Söring, “Die Verwirrung und das Wunderbare.”

40 Evidence for the assertion of Goethe’s sense of a kinship between trickster figures like Cagliostro and the literary artist can be found in this narrative as well. It is one of the many instances in Goethe’s autobiographical texts, where he highlights his predilection for dissemblance. While visiting Cagliostro’s family, Goethe masks his identity, claiming to be an Englishman. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Neue Schriften, vol. 1 (Berlin: J.F. Unger, 1792), 359.

41 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 24.

42 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 25.

43 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 50.

44 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 72.

45 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 102.

46 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 1: Die Geburt der Tragödie, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I-IV, Nachgelassene Schriften 1870-1873, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 115.

47 Juliane Vogel, Aus dem Grund: Auftrittsprotokolle zwischen Racine und Nietzsche (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2018), 15. “In order to enhance a character’s theatrical effect, a prosthetic or even rhetorical element must come into play that elevates the body above its natural constitution, sanctifying it by means of theatrical accoutrement.” Translation from Vogel, Making an Entrance: Appearing on Stage from Racine to Nietzsche, trans. Michael Thomas Taylor (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2022), 5.

48 Vogel, Aus dem Grund, 14–15 and 46–77.

49 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 73.

50 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 28.

51 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 30.

52 See Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 32, 39, 71, 97, and 105.

53 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 47.

54 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 25. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967). I argue for the relevance of Goffman’s theory of face-to-face interaction in Joel Lande, “Auftritt und Interaktion: Zu Lessings Minna von Barnhelm,” in Auftreten: Wege auf die Bühne, ed. Christopher Wild and Juliane Vogel (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2014), 233–46.

55 E.g. Fortmann, “Miniaturizing the Revolution, “5.

56 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, 129.

57 For a valuable discussion of shame as a kind of affective tribunal of collective norms, see Georg Simmel, “Zur Psychologie der Scham,” Schriften zur Soziologie, ed. Hans-Jürgen Dahme and Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 140–50, 145.

58 I have in mind here the argument of Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1975).

59 Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 4, 113. “To the man of understanding, the human is known as the animal with red cheeks.” Translation from: Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Michael Hulse (Mirefoot, UK: Notting Hill Editions, 2022), 78.

60 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, 94 and 105.

61 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 15, 11.

62 Goethe , Sämtliche Werke, vol. 15, 11.

63 Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 24, 392. “That which is formed is immediately transformed again, and if we wish, to some degree, to attain to an lively beholding of nature, we must ourselves remain mobile and formative, according to the example with which it proceeds with us.”

## Additional information

### Notes on contributors

#### Joel B. Lande

Joel B. Lande is Associate Professor of German at Princeton University. In addition to the study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-German literature, his interests reach into other areas of European culture, especially classical antiquity and its various receptions. He is the author of Persistence of Folly: On the Origins of German Dramatic Literature (Cornell University Press, 2018) and the co-editor with Denis Feeney of How Literatures Begin: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2021).

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