Popular Culture Review Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 2006 | Page 31

Goethe Lite 27 servants complains, “Oh, how the old guy is always smoking. And what guests he is always dragging in. Imagine. The man has come from America. He is supposed to be an important man. I can’t believe that at all. He stumbles through the mud and squints up at iron rods on the roofs.”8 There follow descriptions of encounters with key literary figures of the Enlightenment, the early Romantic movement, and of course Goethe. “When Goethe comes, tea is made. The windows must shine. For he will definitely report on it if they are dull.”9 Again the reader is treated to the quirks and foibles of great minds. When in 1796 she marries August Wilhelm Schlegel, an important philosopher of the early Romantic movement in Germany, Caroline is excited at the prospect of a normal bourgeois existence. “Wilhelm shows Caroline the way. He has arranged for housing—she will see. A pretty, small house right next to Fichte. The countryside practically in their own back yard. A five-minute walk to the university. They can afford a cook.”10 Later in the novel, after her divorce from Schlegel and marriage to Schelling, another leading philosopher of the Romantic movement, the reader is privy to a fit of giggles—“He wants to repeat himself so badly, but his laughter prevents him from speaking.”11 The famous philosophers August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schelling are seen in a more domestic light. The one arranging housing for his bride, the other laughing so hard with his wife that he cannot speak. Hannes Krauss notes that Struzyk has succeeded in awakening well known figures of literary history to life “auf ungespreizt-natiirliche, manchmal fast freche Weise” (47) [in an unaffected and natural, sometimes even impudent manner]. As Fitzgerald does for Novalis in The Blue Flower and Ortheil’s document-inspired fictional narrative does for Goethe, Struzyk effectively delivers a group of literary luminaries from the turn of the eighteenth into the twentieth—and now even twenty-first—century. Although very different in their individual use of contemporary materials, all three authors have brought their literary subjects to life using a montage of contemporary documents, wellresearched local color, and fiction. Fitzgerald’s clever portrayal of the oddities (from our perspective) of country life in eighteenth-century Saxony, Ortheil’s depiction of Goethe’s sexual awakening in Rome as filtered by Beri, and Struzyk’s description of Friedrich Schlegel squirming on his chair are even intriguing to readers who have never read works of Novalis, Goethe, or the Schlegel brothers. Although they clearly identify themselves as novels, these literary works treat readily iden F