Aesthetic Healing of Divisiveness or Evasion of Politics in Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten

In 1795, three years after the outbreak of war between revolutionary France and conservative-reactionary European powers, Goethe composed Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten , a cycle of heterogeneous stories embedded within a frame narrative resembling that of Boccaccio’s Decameron . His work differs crucially from its predecessor, however, by replacing Boccaccio’s plague with the political upheaval of the French Revolution as the cause of a small group seeking refuge in the country and engaging in diverting literary discourse. What Boccaccio presents as a natural calamity, Goethe transforms into a human-made “plague.” Its cause, he suggests, is an uncritical embrace of political extremism. Because an addictive or seductive edge adheres to extremist political rhetoric, it primes escalations of verbal and conceptual violence inimical to the liberality of mind that the arts speak to and, at their best, cultivate. Habituation to coarsened thought and feeling gives license to and normalizes political violence. The wager underlying Goethe’s collection is that the best therapy against the debilitating conceptual, moral, and practical effects of political extremism is not an alternative political discourse but rather the indirection of literary art. Aesthetic broadening of imagination and sympathies is likely to do more reformative and corrective work by the back door than by front-door political confrontation.