<i>Knigge: Die Biographie</i> (review)
2009; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/gyr.0.0020
ISSN1940-9087
Autores ResumoReviewed by: Knigge: Die Biographie Elizabeth Powers Ingo Hermann, Knigge: Die Biographie. Berlin: Propyläen, 2007. 370 pp. The contemporaries Adolph Freiherrr Knigge (b. 1752) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (b. 1749) provide an interesting contrast. Goethe, for instance, made a career at court that the baron Knigge could only dream of. Though a burgher, Goethe had what it took to insinuate himself into general favor, while Knigge apparently alienated almost everyone during his years at the courts of Kassel and Hanau. In 1776, the year that Carl August awarded Knigge the title of “Kammerherr” in Weimar, without any remuneration, Goethe was named “Geheimer Legationsrat” with a yearly salary of 1,200 talers. The journey to Weimar seemed to bring Goethe’s writing career to a temporary halt, while Knigge, whose family estates were entailed because of the vast debts of his father, became a writer in order to earn a living. It was only in the area of freemasonry that Goethe’s and Knigge’s lives touched, but here, too, alienation reigned, as Knigge was forced out of the Illuminati by Johann Joachim Bode (another burgher who succeeded in courtly circles), whom Knigge had actually recruited to the order. Following the Goethe-Knigge comparison a bit further, one comes across similarities that suggest the way that circumstances led both Goethe and Knigge to discover their vocation. There is the youthful Rousseau enthusiasm, which in Knigge’s case can be seen in his pedagogical endeavors (much like Goethe’s father, he supervised his own child’s education) and his translation of The Confessions into German. Theater and music played important roles in the lives of both, with Knigge also writing plays as well as reviews of plays and, like Goethe, serving as a theater director. Knigge was himself a composer, and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro first appeared on the German stage (in 1789 in Hannover) in a translation by Knigge and his daughter. And then there is the mutual attraction to secret societies and to youthful alchemical experimentation. In no other areas does the eighteenth century seem stranger than when one reads of the organizational labors that consumed Knigge on behalf of the “Strikte Observanz” and the Illuminati or of the struggles for leadership among powdered heads. Ultimately, freemasonry perhaps appealed to men who wished to be “wirksam” in the world, and it was in these orders that Knigge may have perceived an opportunity to influence eighteenth-century discourse. While Goethe used his office in Weimar to undertake reforms for the common weal, the outsider Knigge set down in numerous tracts and baroque-like novels satirical and scathing portraits of the social order, particularly of feudal privilege and other obscurantism. One was tamed by his office, the other grew more passionate, though always in the service of reason. Only six years before his death in 1796 did Knigge obtain an “office,” as Hannoverian Oberhauptman in Bremen. Knigge’s base was among champions of the Enlightenment in its late phase in Germany: e.g., Friedrich Nicolai (for whose Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek he wrote more than 1,200 reviews) and the Reimarus family in Hamburg. It is not surprising that Knigge was a supporter of the French Revolution and continued [End Page 257] to defend it, even after other supporters (including Klopstock, with whom Knigge celebrated the Revolution’s first anniversary in Hamburg) had abandoned their early enthusiasm. (The baron even dropped the “von” from his name in 1790.) It was to be expected that Knigge attracted many enemies among the counter-Enlightenment, especially after the Reign of Terror. The doctor Johann Georg Zimmermann, an acquaintance of the young Goethe (and a burgher who made it to “Ritter” status), called him “Volksaufwiegler Knigge” and continued: “Alle deutschen Demokratennester sind der Wiederhall Kniggischer Grundsätze, und Knigge ist der Wiederhall des amerikanischen Schwärmers Paine und der ganzen deutschen Aufklärer-Propaganda.” That Über den Umgang mit Menschen (published in 1788, the year in which Schiller’s Don Carlos appeared) was not a treatise on how to win friends and influence people is clear from a career in which Knigge seemed destined to cultivate the enmity of men like Zimmermann. This...
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