The Reality of Battle: Realism in the Context of Goethe's War Experience

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