Demonic History

Wetters, Kirk

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Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
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 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

Published by Northwestern University Press

Wetters, Kirk.
Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
1 ed. Northwestern University Press, 2014.
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Demonic History
Demonic History
From Goethe to the Present

Kirk Wetters

northwestern university press

evanston, illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Copyright © 2014 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2014.

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wetters, Kirk, author.

   Demonic history : from Goethe to the present / Kirk Wetters.
   pages cm
   Includes bibliographical references and index.
   ISBN 978-0-8101-2976-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
   1. Demonology in literature. 2. German literature—19th century—History
and criticism. 3. German literature—20th century—History and criticism.
4. Devil in literature. I. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832. Urworte
orphisch. II. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832. Urworte orphisch.
English. III. Title. [DNLM: 1. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832—
Criticism and interpretation.]
  PT134.D456W48 2014
 830.937—dc23
2014012468

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
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Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
To write the history of a thought is sometimes to write the
history of a series of misinterpretations.
—Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis

The Future is wholly a Stygian Darkness, spectre-bearing.

—Diogenes Teufelsdröckh in Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

Published by Northwestern University Press

Wetters, Kirk.
Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
1 ed. Northwestern University Press, 2014.
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 Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

List of Abbreviations xv

Introduction 3

Chapter One
Urworte Goethisch: Demonic Primal Words 21

Chapter Two
Demons of Morphology 39

Chapter Three
Biographical Demons (Goethe’s Poetry and Truth) 59

Chapter Four
The Unhappy Endings of Morphology: Oswald Spengler’s
Demonic History 87

Chapter Five
Demonic Ambivalences: Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 111

Chapter Six
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 135

Chapter Seven
Demonic Inheritances: Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 161

Conclusion
Transformations of the Demonic 193

Appendix: German Text and English Translation of Goethe’s

“Urworte Orphisch” (with Commentary) 201

Notes 209

Bibliography 239

Index 249
 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

Published by Northwestern University Press

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Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
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 Preface and Acknowledgments

In the context of intellectual or conceptual history, “the demonic” may seem

relatively peripheral—and perhaps it is. It undoubtedly covers, however, an
extremely varied field spanning numerous intellectual traditions without at
any point landing in a single discipline or arriving at a clear consensus or
even at an extensive pre-sorting of the relevant semantics. This is not to say
that the demonic is absent from lexica and scholarship, but use and usage
of it in the main period of the present study—roughly 1800 to 1950—is
anything but uniform. Rather than producing reliable conceptual or theo-
retical differentiations, the demonic, starting with Goethe and following his
example, is often reinvented by every author who employs it. The demonic
as I understand it is thus not a concept with a single definition (or even a set
of definitions) but primarily an operative term and a vehicle of various kinds
of rationalization.
The specificity of this construction is most easily demonstrated in the
word itself: A “demon” can be understood as a substantialized or personified
force, including the possibility that it may unify a collection of heterogeneous
forces. If this substantialization is not taken literally as an actually existing or
imaginary entity with a given appearance, specific attributes and motivations,
then it can only be understood as a substantialization or rationalization or
collectivization of another force (or forces). The essence of all demons is
displacement and dislocation: whether as a daemon or a genius or an evil
demon, demons are always proxies that make it possible to imagine the oper-
ation of other unidentified forces. The specific form or figure of the demon
is a placeholder for invisible and unknown activities and motives which, like
computer programs, mostly run silently in the background of a given operat-
ing system. Such systems can be made manifest, visible, and nameable; their
specific conditions and codes can be brought to light; as specific functions,
they may be made predictable and controllable. Normally they are aspects of
an unquestioned functionality, but in moments of crisis, when the function
becomes problematic, a plurality of unknown causes manifest themselves as a
“demonic” singularity. From the point of view of the subject who experiences
it, the unknown sources of a system-crisis are singularized and metaphorized
as “demons.”
The prevalence of the adjective “demonic” relative to the noun “demon”
(which typically belongs to fantasy, myth, religion, and imagination) offers
further illustration. One may not believe in actual demons, but many

ix
x Preface and Acknowledgments

nouns—objects, persons, behaviors, situations, ideas—may act as if they

were possessed by demons. Virtually anything is capable of acting as if it
were under the control of an unknown force. Thus the word “demon,” which
strives to substantialize unknown and insubstantial agencies, is adjectivally
de-substantialized into an ambiguous intentionality that can be attributed
to almost anything. This act of attribution itself corresponds to the verb “to
demonize,” which suggests that the supposedly demonic object, person, or
situation is not really possessed by such a force but has only been made to
appear that way by a specific and unambiguous agency.
It may be that the German language’s propensity for substantialization is
partly to blame for the adjectival noun, “the demonic” (das Dämonische),
which re-substantializes the adjectival de-substantialization of the noun’s
originally unwarranted substantial positing. Emerging from the move-
ments of this—inevitably ironic—play of de- and re-substantialization, the
demonic, starting from Goethe, served as a vehicle of variable thoughts and
intention. Rather than presenting a dialogically structured field of “argu-
ment” and “counter-argument,” the conceptual history of the demonic after
Goethe developed “mimetically” along parallel and semi-independent fault
lines. The demonic delineated itself in the interplay of unknown forces and
the rhetorically articulated desires associated with these forces. More con-
cretely, however, the term was often linked to the uncertainties surrounding
determining drives imagined as the source of individual biography and col-
lective history. With maximum vagueness, the demonic is the master term for
whatever needs to be explained—but cannot be explained—by known causal
factors. The mimetic aspect thus lies in the demonic’s limitless availability for
reconfiguring underlying factors according to the needs of the moment. A
purely rational theory of causation has no need of the attribute “demonic.”
The intensity of the desire to compensate for the unknown or inexplicable
through an ironic rhetoric of super-rationality led many to miss the irony and
misunderstand the demonic as referring to a real force or substance that is
only waiting to be properly defined. The rhetorical side of the demonic and
its consequent underlying lack of a solid conceptual or definitional founda-
tion can be observed in the multiple sources of the demonic in Goethe. These
sources are above all: (1) the five stanzas of the “Urworte Orphisch” (“Orphic
Primal Words”), (2) Goethe’s autobiography, Poetry and Truth (Dichtung
und Wahrheit), (3) his morphological writings and, to a lesser degree, (4) his
conversations with Eckermann. Despite numerous similarities and analogies,
the divergences among these four models lead me not to assume that these
conceptions are mutually compatible. The morphological writings establish
paradigms or “cells” that can be traced through Goethe’s work, while, at the
same time, the demonic may be at stake “analogically” in texts where it is not
referred to by name. The demonic, furthermore, as a result of the extensive
architecture of analogy within and between Goethe’s works, cannot be lim-
ited a priori to any particular corpus or canon.
Preface and Acknowledgments xi

The reduction of this structural indefiniteness to a single understanding

produces an arbitrary and appropriative privileging. This kind of univocal
approach has mostly defined the reception of Goethe’s term (and to a lesser
degree his work in general). Following Goethe’s example, the history of the
term even in its most appropriative and emulative moments tends toward
variation and divergence more than toward reduction and simplification. The
variety of the appropriations reflects the variant possibilities intrinsic to and
dormant within Goethe’s conception. My approach is thus to describe and
defend the complexity of the actions and interactions that have taken place
in the field of the demonic. This complexity is, on the one hand, specific to
the material presented by the demonic itself and, on the other hand, essential
to my approach, which is governed by a relatively high tolerance of unre-
solved complexity—which may itself have contributed to my choice of this
particular topic. In the interest of complexity-reduction, however, I chose to
focus primarily on Goethe’s “Orphic Primal Words” in order to isolate the
individual moments of the demonic against which variant and divergent con-
ceptions can be coherently developed.
In the reception as far as I reconstruct it, the most powerful moment of
complexity-reduction occurred in the early twentieth century. Oswald Spen-
gler and Friedrich Gundolf especially set the tone. Their understandings
remain influential today in ways that often go unrecognized. At the same time,
starting with Georg Lukács, the literary potential of the demonic for the form
of the novel emerged as a dominant motif. In the 1920s, both Walter Ben-
jamin and Heimito von Doderer developed understandings of the demonic
not as a rigid conceptual schema, fixed formula, or a purely thematic element
but as a variable system of transformations. My study is oriented toward
this latter context: from the very beginning, Goethe’s concept was at once
proto-literary and proto-theoretical, contributing both to the novels and the
philosophical thought of the nineteenth century. Only in the twentieth cen-
tury did it take on a decisively pseudo-philosophical and pseudo-scientific
character in the works of Gundolf and Spengler. At the same time, this shift
toward theory seems to have tipped the balance back toward the novel with
its more free-form rereading of the underlying theoretical questions.
This is a speculative account of the narrative to follow. It is speculative,
in part, because there was arguably never a complete split between the the-
oretical and literary potentials of the demonic. The extensive treatment of
Goethe’s conception in Hans Blumenberg’s 1979 Work on Myth attests to
this. Also, whatever crystallized around the idea of the demonic after 1910 did
not do so in isolation: it was mediated and subjected to extreme turbulence
by everything else that was transpiring at the same time. For example, the
first decade of the twentieth century saw major works of Wundt, Freud, and
Weber, as well as a blockbuster German translation of Dostoyevsky’s Bésy
as Die Dämonen (The Demons), all of which were unpredictably absorbed
into later ideas about the demonic. Such complex fabrics lead to complex
xii Preface and Acknowledgments

questions: Is it possible that Dostoyevsky knew something about the demonic

in Goethe? How did Goethe’s idea of the demonic make its way into the Eng-
lish language and its literature—and back to Germany—through Carlyle and
Melville? To what degree were later theory-traditions—especially the Frank-
furt School—indebted to habits of thought associated with the demonic?
How do twentieth-century appropriations of the idea of the demonic interact
with the legacy of German Idealist philosophy and the philosophy of history?
Given such far-reaching questions, I do not attempt to give final answers;
I find it more productive to pose these questions so that I (or others) can
continue to work on them to develop more precise answers. I have no doubt
that there is more to be uncovered and that a different selection of materials
would produce different results. Thus much may remain to be corrected or
added, but I hope that my work will at least provide a stable platform from
which to conduct future research. By showing the “roughness” of the terrain
while making readers aware of its very existence, perhaps this foray will con-
tribute to the clarification of related problems (as sketched in the conclusion).
The near total neglect of the twentieth-century rhetorics and systemat-
ics of the demonic seems to be a result of the tendency of those who do not
directly participate in it at the “operative” level to view it as merely orna-
mental or rhetorical, as an uninteresting language of crisis or amplification
without any theoretical underpinnings or a specific history. This assessment is
certainly partly correct, but I would argue that not all terms and concepts are
created equal, and thus not all conceptual histories can be written in the same
way. The prejudice toward semantic uniformity within the apparently self-
evident horizons of present understandings presupposes coherent historical
developments and risks imposing uniformity on heterogeneity. On the other
hand, if a lack of uniformity is presupposed, then each case must be handled
in detail, for itself, and not just as an example of a linear development, a
general understanding, or a supposedly prevalent usage. The demonic there-
fore—perhaps more so than any other word—is whatever it turns out to be.

In the course of a project that has been underway for more than a decade,
more thanks are owed than can be easily conveyed. First of all, I would thank
Eva Geulen, who helped me to discover—and, I think, hold onto—my own
voice and to navigate the labyrinth of contemporary academia. Starting
from the earliest phase of this project, I would also like to thank the advi-
sors and sponsors of my 2000–2001 German Academic Exchange (DAAD)
year in Frankfurt am Main (who must have conspired to introduce me to
Heimito von Doderer): Werner Hamacher and Thomas Schestag. At New
York University, Eva Geulen (my dissertation advisor), Anselm Haverkamp,
Paul Fleming, and Rüdiger Campe (at NYU as a visitor) have remained con-
stant sources of inspiration and support. Rüdiger Campe especially, now my
colleague at Yale, has guided and encouraged my work since its first stages.
I also thank my many past and current colleagues at Yale, whose personal
Preface and Acknowledgments xiii

generosity, conversation, and critical feedback pushed my work forward:

above all Carol Jacobs, as well as Rainer Nägele, Henry Sussman, Brigitte
Peucker, Paul North, Howard Stern, Adam Tooze, Hindy Najman, Elke Siegel
(now at Cornell), the late Cyrus Hamlin (whose conversation I greatly missed
in the last years), Pat McCreless, Bentley Layton, and countless others; also,
at Northwestern University, Peter Fenves and Jörg Kreienbrock. I also thank
Henry Carrigan at Northwestern University Press for his unflagging sup-
port; and finally—most recently—I am grateful to Josh Alvizu, Jason Kavett,
and Andrew Kirwin for helping me to complete the manuscript under tight
deadlines.
I am also grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the
fellowship at the University of Bonn in 2010–2011. There I benefited from
the company, hospitality, and brilliance of Eva Geulen, Jürgen Fohrmann,
Jürgen Brokoff, Lars Friedrich, Stephan Kraft, Christian Meierhofer, Eva
Axer, Michael Auer, Christoph Brecht, Joachim Harst, Oliver Baron—and
all of the participants in the July 2011 conference on the demonic. My work
on the demonic in Heimito von Doderer also brought me into contact with
the Heimito von Doderer Society and many remarkable “Heimitisten”: Ger-
ald Sommer, Rudolf Helmstetter, and Vincent Kling. I am also grateful to
the Bonn Oberseminar which—at the instigation of Eva Geulen—spent two
semesters reading Doderer.
Finally, my profound thanks go to Amy Ulrich, for her patience and per-
spective; also to my brother, Brent Wetters, whose musical and technological
support are only the most nameable of his contributions; and above all to my
parents, Carol Wetters and Richard Wetters, for their endless support.
 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

Published by Northwestern University Press

Wetters, Kirk.
Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
1 ed. Northwestern University Press, 2014.
Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/33934.

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 List of Abbreviations

AaM Blumenberg, Hans. Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp, 1979.
DD Doderer, Heimito von. Die Dämonen. Munich: Biederstein, 1956.
FA Goethe, J. W. von. Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher,
Gespräche. 39 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1999.
GS Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf
Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991.
HA Goethe, J. W. von. Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe. 14 vols. Edited by
Erich Trunz. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998.
HÄs Lukács, Georg. Heidelberger Ästhetik 1916–1918. In Werke
17. Edited by György Márkus and Frank Benseler. Darmstadt:
Luchterhand, 1974.
MA Goethe, J. W. von. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Karl Richter et al.
Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1985–1998.
R Doderer, Heimito von. Repertorium: Ein Begreifbuch von höheren
und niederen Lebens-Sachen. Edited by Dietrich Weber. Munich:
Beck, 1996.
TB Doderer, Heimito von. Tagebücher 1920–1939. Edited by
Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Martin Loew-Cadonna & Gerald
Sommer. Munich: Beck, 1996.
TdR Lukács, Georg. Die Theorie des Romans: Ein
geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen
Epik. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971.
UdA Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer
Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. Munich: DTV, 2006.
UO Buck, Theo. Goethes “Urworte. Orphisch.” Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang, 1996.
WdD Doderer, Heimito von. Die Wiederkehr der Drachen: Aufsätze,
Traktate, Reden. Edited by Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler. Munich:
Beck, 1996.

xv
Demonic History
 Demonic History
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Published by Northwestern University Press

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Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
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 Introduction

Dasein ist Besessensein. (Being is being-possessed.)

—Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist
(Gnosticism and the Spirit of Late Antiquity)

The Story of a “Something” (Background and Methods)

In keeping with Goethe’s famous presentation in book 20 of Poetry and Truth

(Dichtung und Wahrheit), the first thing that must be said about the demonic
(das Dämonische) is what it is not. According to Goethe’s autobiographi-
cal narrative, the demonic was in the first place a “something” (an “etwas”)
that “manifested itself in contradictions and therefore could not be captured
under any concept, much less in a word” (HA 10:175).1 He proceeds to give a
series of negative definitions: “It was not divine, because it seemed to lack rea-
son, not human, because it had no understanding, not devilish, because it was
benevolent, not angelic, because it frequently betrayed Schadenfreude” (HA
10:175). This sentence is followed by a series of tentative positive definitions,
but they tend toward paradox and self-contradiction. These various “defi-
nitions” are further clouded by their reliance on a language of appearance
and resemblance: “It resembled coincidence [Zufall], because it displayed no
consequence; it looked like Providence, because it gave indications of coher-
ence. Everything that limits us seemed permeable to it; it seemed to arbitrarily
control the necessary elements of our existence; it gathered time together
and made space expand. Only in the impossible did it seem to be at home,
whereas it treated the possible with disdain” (HA 10:175). The riddle posed
by these lines has been often cited, but never solved—probably because,
taken on its own terms, it is insoluble.
According to Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth, these enigmatic para-
graphs about the demonic have been a perennial source and object of
“interpretive desire” (Deutungslust).2 In the following pages and chapters,
I do not intend to give in to this desire. For now, I merely observe the delib-
erately enigmatic quality of Goethe’s definitions, which is the precise source
of unfulfillable interpretive desires. The demonic as Goethe configures it is
designed to tantalize, and to the extent that the reader assumes the role of
Tantalus, all that emerges is a mythic punishment, the repetition and limitless

3
4 Introduction

extension of a futile and essentially self-serving desire. In a further tanta-

lizing concession to the apparent insolubility of the riddle, Goethe gives a
name to this “something” and thus—in a way—solves it. This name has often
been thought to provide the decisive clue to what Goethe meant, but I will
argue that this onomasiological naming only makes matters worse:3 “This
entity, which appeared to emerge between all the others in order to sepa-
rate and connect them, is what I called ‘demonic’ (following the example of
the ancients and of everyone else who had perceived something similar)”
(HA 10:175–76). This appellation still does not take the form of a positive
identification but continues to develop within the framework of a logic of
similarity. The title “demonic” does not definitively name the indefinite “some-
thing” it refers to. The referent remains a sheer etwas, which has been only
nominally and provisionally dubbed—for the lack of a better word—“the
demonic.” It has not been properly named, identified, defined, determined,
clarified, contained, controlled, banished, or exorcised. Instead, “the
demonic,” a substantialized adjective, performs a representation by substitu-
tion, producing a shorthand and a stopgap, at once a proxy and a powerful
personification.4
Goethe’s introduction of the demonic thus ends: “I attempted to save
myself from this terrifying being by fleeing behind an image, as is my habit”
(HA 10:176). The “image” in question looks ahead to the next paragraph,
in which Goethe introduces his work on the play Egmont as a flight into
imagination and an early attempt to hide from the demonic within a liter-
ary configuration. The sentence may equally refer, however, to the “image”
created in the decision to transform an indefinite and fearful etwas into “a
being” and “an entity” (ein Wesen). The imagination of “a demonic some-
thing,” even in the awareness of the inadequacy and illegitimacy of this
conception, is itself a flight from the unimaginable, unintelligible uncertainty
that gave rise to it.
This brings me back to what the demonic is and is not. It may be many
things—many contradictory things—at the same time, as Goethe’s further
presentation shows. It may be, for example, “benevolent” (wohltätig) yet
“monstrous” (ungeheuer), “inconceivable” (unfassbar), and “terrifying”
(furchtbar) (HA 10:175–76). Two of these adjectives appear as nouns, “the
monstrous,” “the inconceivable,” which can be read, based on the general
tendency toward the substantialization of adjectives, as partially synonymous
or at least analogous with the demonic. The word furchtbar in particular
seems to be of special importance because it reappears in the later paragraph
on demonic characters: “The demonic appears most terrifying [am furcht-
barsten] when it predominates in an individual human being [in irgend einem
Menschen]” (HA 10:177). The repeated emphasis on the fearful and terrify-
ing that punctuate Goethe’s presentation leads me to believe—as the word
“demonic” may also imply—that das Dämonische is not entirely or even
primarily benevolent. However, the paradoxical juxtaposition of opposites,
Introduction 5

together with Goethe’s remark that the demonic tends “to be in play on both
sides” of conflicts and oppositions (HA 10:176), might also lead one to see
the demonic as a being of contradiction. This hypothesis in turn would have
to be reconciled with the demonic’s interstitial status—its being between—
and its role as an “entity” that supposedly intervenes within and binds all
things together.
It would be possible to work through such considerations at great
length—and perhaps thereby give in to “the interpretive urge” (Deutungs­
lust). Without going so far here, I hope to have preliminarily demonstrated
that the interpreter of the passages on the demonic must decide to prioritize
certain characterizations of the demonic in order to give coherence to the
whole—or else allow the individual moments of the presentation to exist
simultaneously, paratactically, each with its own implications, none defini-
tively reducible to the others. I will typically follow the second approach,
but either way one reads it, it is abundantly clear that the demonic is neither
a classical “daemon” or “daimon” nor a “demon” or “evil spirit.” It also
is not a Mephistophelian “spirit that constantly negates” (Faust, v. 1338;
HA 3:47)—even if it might be possible to find in Mephisto a further per-
sonification of the ungraspable forces that Goethe brings together under the
label “demonic.”5 Thus, though it would be an oversimplification to equate
Goethe’s “demonic” with demons or with the idea of evil, the considerations
of the various half-definitions of the demonic (for example, the reference to
Providence) make it clear that residual elements of theology and theodicy are
an important part of the picture.
Primarily for this reason, as well as for others that I will develop later on,
I cannot follow Angus Nicholls’s 2006 Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic:
After the Ancients in its decision to read “the demonic” as “the daemonic.”
Nicholls’s study is groundbreaking in that it represents the first systematic
intellectual-historical and philological study on Goethe’s das Dämonische.
Nicholls focuses on the genesis of the conception in a trajectory stretching
back to the Socratic daimonion and the Aristotelian idea of entelechy, and
up to Leibniz, Hamann, and Herder, who lie behind Goethe’s Sturm und
Drang poetics of genius; the latter anticipated the development of the idea
of the demonic in Goethe’s middle and late period. This account is entirely
convincing, and my own work largely presupposes it. And even though I do
not follow Nicholls’s orthography, I do not mean to deny his wider thesis that
Goethe often articulated the demonic in a way that brought it into proxim-
ity with discourses on genius, including the Socratic daimonion (which is
central in Nicholls’s account). On this point, Hans Blumenberg’s 1979 Work
on Myth observes: “In the first instance [zunächst], in my view, the discourse
on the demonic is only an attempt to avoid the relatively thoughtless way in
which the youth of the Sturm und Drang applied the attribute of the ‘divine’
[das Göttliche]” (AaM 519).6 The heroizing and highly influential tradition
epitomized by Friedrich Gundolf’s 1916 Goethe also emphatically reads the
6 Introduction

demonic in relation to Goethe’s own genius. For this reason alone, the con-
nection between the two can hardly be undone—but I approach precisely this
tradition with a high degree of skepticism.
What is valid “in the first instance” (zunächst) is not always valid through-
out. Goethe’s words on the demonic from Poetry and Truth hardly encourage
the identification of this particular “something” with some already known
entity or definite idea (such as genius). On the other hand, at a certain point
one may want to attribute the contradictory details of Goethe’s presenta-
tion to deliberate evasiveness. The value of Nicholls’s study thus lies in its
attempt to pin Goethe down by tracing the genesis of the conception together
with the name that Goethe gave to it. But my position is that the apparent
imprecision of Goethe’s definitions is not incidental or contingent, but rather
systematic and essential. Goethe’s claim that he named the demonic “after
the example of the ancients and others who thought something similar” (HA
10:175–76, my emphasis) promises sources that are never named. Which
“ancients” and which “others” does Goethe mean? His Orphic primal words
(Urworte) begin with a stanza called “demon” (Daimon), but the poem itself
may equally imply the Aristotelian idea of entelechy, as Nicholls argues
(Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic 66–77). Jochen Schmidt’s 2006 essay
on Goethe’s Urworte supposes Heraclitean sources (Goethes Altersgedicht
Urworte 17).7 Nicholls’s approach leads him to summarize and generalize the
demonic as the product of a certain “lineage” or “classical heritage” (230),
which is further taken as a norm with respect to which Goethe can be “incor-
rect” (256). Such a synthetic-genetic reading, for all its value, is clearly a
retrospective construct, the product of countless secondary elaborations.8 To
be sure, such constructions are often unavoidable. It is a question of the
degree to which it is possible to locate the demonic within the horizons of
eighteenth-century literary and conceptual history and the degree to which
it represents an entirely new intellectual gambit. It may be both at once,
but whereas Nicholls seeks to uncover the foundations of Goethe’s concep-
tion in a comprehensive intellectual history, my work will largely pursue the
demonic as something new.
In addition to Nicholls, the other relatively recent figure who has addressed
the demonic at length is the great postwar philosopher Hans Blumenberg in
his 1979 Work on Myth. Blumenberg’s work is similar to Nicholls’s in the
sense that he also tends to trace the problem back to ancient origins—specifi-
cally to the idea of myth. The story of Work on Myth, however, only partly
overlaps with Nicholls’s account, because Blumenberg reads the demonic
within the context of his own theory of “self-assertion” (Selbstbehauptung)
and the legitimacy of the modern age. For Blumenberg, the impetus behind
the demonic is radically anti-traditional and anti-classical. Also, in compari-
son to Nicholls, Blumenberg bases his reading on different lines from Poetry
and Truth, leading him to identify the demonic with problems of biographi-
cal and historical representation:
Introduction 7

In the last book of Poetry and Truth, published after Goethe’s death,
he said that the word [the demonic] encapsulated the sum of every-
thing that could have been seen “at length in the course of this
biographical presentation.” It referred to the unresolved remainder
[der ungelöste Rest] of his experience, to which he gave the title of the
demonic. But this title and the interpretive desire [Deutungslust] it
has awakened are not the main thing. What is crucial is this “remain-
der” itself. (AaM 437)

This biographical understanding of the demonic informs an approach that

is on the verge of problematic biographism: Blumenberg reads the idea of
the demonic through the lens of Goethe’s shifting identifications with the
figure of Prometheus.9 However, outside of the chapters on Goethe (which
frequently rely on biographical reconstructions), a systematic reconstruction
of Goethe’s idea of the demonic can be discerned in Blumenberg’s overall
theory of myth. The implicit point of his treatment of the demonic is to avoid
“interpreting” it (and thereby giving in to Deutungslust). Instead he tries to
go back to square one, in order to completely retheorize what Goethe must
have had in mind. The result of this speculative approach is that Blumenberg
effectively replaces Goethe’s confusing non-concept (and the history of its
misunderstandings) with his own extensive theory. In contrast to Nicholls,
whose identification of the demonic with a known and knowable lineage
represents an effort of containment, Blumenberg pursues a strategy of super-
saturation: he is interested in the metaphysical and anthropological questions
implicit in the demonic, but he strives to develop them on his own terms.10
While producing a demystification with respect to Deutungslust, the
resulting theory of myth—which may not be a theory in a strict sense at all—
corresponds to only one aspect of Goethe’s conception: for Blumenberg, the
demonic is an attempt to name and personify the fragility of human existence
in the world. This sense of a demonic contingency is reflected in an indefi-
nite “something” which myth, religion, science, politics, social systems, and
individual subjects have perennially tried to explain and master.11 With clear
reference to the function of myth and to the implications of his own meta-
phorological method, Blumenberg invokes Goethe’s idea of “fleeing [from
the demonic] behind an image” (Flucht hinter ein Bild, AaM 437).12 Thus
myth, metaphor, and narrative, including religion, philosophy, and literature,
collectively accomplish the same escapist and taming function that Goethe
adopted as his own life strategy.
If Nicholls’s book recently reopened the question of the demonic in
Goethe, Blumenberg’s implicit intent in 1979 was to close it by translating
it into considerations that would allow it to be conceptually circumvented.
In the denunciation of Deutungslust and the contextualization of the
demonic in a work on myth, Blumenberg seeks to get beyond the confusions
Goethe bequeathed to the tradition. According to Blumenberg, the demonic
8 Introduction

“encompasses or perhaps only names unresolved historical potency [Potenz]

without explaining it” (AaM 559). He continues:

This may be the fault of the weak judgment of a single fascinated indi-
vidual [i.e., Goethe]. But a whole century of analytical and descriptive
attempts to resolve the phenomenon [of Napoleon] through histori-
ography (which cannot tolerate the mythic) has left something in its
wake, in the form of a resistance to theorization, which is akin to that
to which the poet [Goethe] at least gave a name. (AM 559)13

Blumenberg argues that the demonic is an improper name for “a resistance

to theory”14—for the untheorizable remnant left over by all theories. The
demonic designates the inaccessibility of first causes, especially when it comes
to historical and biographical knowledge.
Angus Nicholls attempts to reconcile Blumenberg’s conception with his
own approach and various others (Nicholls 268–69), but I would rather see
differences and even contradictions. Blumenberg’s reading of the demonic as
a limit of certainty and theorizability implies that the sources of genius (and
of evil and earth-shattering historical events) are unknowable. While Nich-
olls acknowledges this, he risks overlooking the methodological implications
that this “resistance” may have for intellectual history itself. Blumenberg’s
idea of a limit of theorizability impacts the achievability of what Nicholls
calls his “central purpose,” “to show that this term [the demonic] . . . springs
from a rich heritage of ancient Greek philosophy, most notably embodied in
the writings of Plato and especially in Plato’s representation of the Socratic
daimonion” (268). Nicholls’s reading thus conflicts with Blumenberg’s in a
rather ironic way: Nicholls shows the historical sources of a term which, for
Blumenberg, refers to the unknowability of historical sources and causes.
For me, Blumenberg’s connection of das Dämonische to history and his-
toriography are of decisive methodological importance. “Demonic history”
is that which remains when all facts and causes, all motivations and respon-
sibilities, lineages and descendancies, are exhausted and moot. A demonic
history is a history that cannot be positively explained, and the history of the
idea of the demonic is itself an example of the limits of historical explicabil-
ity.15 Thus, following Blumenberg—but beyond what is explicit in Work on
Myth—my work is guided by the questions: What if the demonic is not one
thing, but only a “something,” an etwas called das Dämonische? What if it is
not a term or a concept but only a metaphor, an image, a stand-in for vari-
able unknowns and, by extension and personification, for the unknown? This
approach leads me to focus not primarily on the word “demonic,” but on
the thing in its demonstrated variability, through transformations that have
revealed it as a potent but problematic existential metaphor.
But, since the demonic is no thing but only a “something,” it can only be
pursued through what it hides behind—and what hides behind it. The demonic
Introduction 9

in this sense is a paradigmatic case for Blumenberg’s method of metapho-

rology and non-conceptuality. His characteristic question is: what happens
when a metaphor stands in for an object that cannot be (fully) known? With
respect to this question, das Dämonische, the name that Goethe devised for
the unknowable and incalculable, represents a limit case. The demonic, as
a metaphor of the unknown, is a meta-metaphor corresponding to the lack
of perfect knowledge and conceptual precision that necessitate metaphor in
the first place. For this reason, I do not look for sources of “the demonic”
but try to trace its possible referents and applications, overtones and under-
tones, uses and abuses. This means that, though I often work philologically,
I do not understand philology as a search for origins. The demonic in Georg
Lukács clearly “comes from” Goethe—at least in part—but it does not do so
in an obvious and direct way. The reception of the demonic always involves
divergences and uncertain intermediary figures, which makes a pure or linear
derivation impossible. For example, it is not the case that every writer who
“receives” the term das Dämonische from Goethe receives the same thing
and adds one specific thing to it. Thus I do not presume that later appropria-
tions conform to earlier ones—or to Goethe’s understandings. My view of
Goethe is constantly modulated and motivated by the specific imperatives
and questions that emerge from the reception. The point for me is not to fig-
ure out “what Goethe meant” in an absolute way, but only relative to others’
understandings. As a consequence, I do not treat “Goethe” as a substantial
unity. He is undoubtedly a “primal father” (Urvater) in the sense of Freud’s
Moses and Monotheism, but I deliberately try not to approach him as an
exemplar or object of identification.16
For this reason, the present study is not a “Goethe book” in the sense that
it primarily wants to say something about Goethe. Rather than presupposing
a single conception or unified paradigm of the demonic, my findings lead me
to conclude that Goethe’s thought was organized in a way that produced var-
ied and divergent—but frequently inter-relatable—conceptions. The readings
that follow will show that a unified concept of the demonic cannot be taken
for granted in Goethe or among his readers. This reception is not organized
in a linear way, and I do not claim to cover it exhaustively. For every figure I
deal with extensively, there are certainly others who might have led in other
directions. As I see it, the urge to “cover” everything “relevant” is based on
the presumption of a linear reception that always occurs in essentially the
same way. The linear approach is of course practical, in that it allows for
reductions that permit simple direct comparisons. But this certainly does not
work very well for the demonic. My work shows that every “reception” con-
tains its own story; the attempt to work out these narratives in detail is of
more value, I believe, than an encyclopedic or doxographic approach.17
This does not mean, however, that my text selections are arbitrary. The
focal point of the reception—or rather its point of refraction—falls toward the
end of the 1910s. Within this period, Friedrich Gundolf and the metahistorian
10 Introduction

Oswald Spengler are responsible for popularizing the idea and giving it a
burning sense of contemporariness. It is through these two figures that the
underlying problems posed by the demonic reemerge with urgency. Subse-
quently, still in the 1910s and early 1920s, I find a “next wave” reception
in Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács, whose work proved to have a very
different historical—and political—reach than that of Gundolf and Spengler.
However, all of these authors included the demonic in works that shaped the
later traditions that are often simply called “theory.” In the run-up to long-
term structurations of multiple discourse-frames leading up to the present,
my work uncovers a dense and active field of discussion on the demonic in
the century following Goethe’s death. Such discussions sometimes occurred
without direct explicit reference to Goethe, but, given the esteem in which he
was widely held at the time in the German-speaking world, his ideas certainly
catalyzed the sedimentation of the ancient idea of the demonic in a variety
of interlocking discourses. As Nicholls shows, the roots of this can be traced
back to much older sources—but it is Goethe’s conception that reactivated
them and made them current.
Multiple crystallizations resulted from Goethe’s perception of something
demonic. The relevance of this material to countless figures within the period
in question is surprising enough that scholars of various backgrounds will
have to confirm for themselves whether the idea of the demonic has, as I claim,
an unexpected theoretical and systematic consistency.18 One would expect
such a consistency to be more evident in the German-speaking world, but
the international reach of the demonic is surprisingly vast. It may not always
have been directly associated with Goethe, but parallel conceptions and inter-
mediary figures helped the idea to spread anonymously. Important examples
of such figures are Thomas Carlyle, Herman Melville, Søren Kierkegaard,
Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Carl Schmitt. What is most surprising, at
least from my own perspective, is that this web of connections has been rarely
noticed and never extensively studied. Given this situation, I have tried to
note possible interrelations as they present themselves, in order to mark the
horizons of future research and provide a basis for the critical identification
of figures of thought associated with the demonic. My aim is not to produce
conceptual or systematic consistency as much as to produce a sensitivity to
the varied concerns that have been brought together under the title of the
demonic. This is important because of the many instances when Goethe’s idea
of the demonic has covered over—or been covered by—or been ambiguously
superimposed upon other paradigms. Such duplications allowed the specific
sense of Goethe’s idea of the “demonic” to all but disappear in the last fifty
years. This outcome can be observed in Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, which
quite systematically superimposes the demonic upon a philosophy of history
that is widely held to be Hegelian. Precisely this strategy apparently did not
lead many to conclude that the demonic might be an important independent
category (or even a theme) for understanding the form of the novel.
Introduction 11

And yet the demonic never entirely disappeared, even if readers in the later
twentieth century increasingly lost the awareness of precisely which tradi-
tion was being invoked—and even that a tradition was being invoked. The
word “demonic” is easy to overlook as the mere symptom of an affect, and
though this reading is frequently right (or partly right), my work shows that
precisely in the most affectively and politically charged contexts (Spengler,
Gundolf, Lukács, Benjamin), systematic aspects of Goethe’s conception are
implicitly or marginally retained. As a result, the relatively common word
“demonic” was able to become a dominant subtext, inextricably implicated
in the defining discourses of modernity as well as in the overlapping philolo-
gies of literature and theory. It at once refers to and characterizes, in Goethe
and many others, massively prevalent conceptions (for example, the inter-
connectedness of “fate and character”). Precisely these aspects are often not
very well understood, even in frequently read and taught “classics” of early
twentieth-century theory. The demonic is thus important at least to the extent
that these theories remain important, even if it is also clear that we are talk-
ing about a dated usage. To the extent that the demonic refers to things that
could also be called otherwise, it will never be completely decidable what is
gained or lost in the label “demonic.” At the limit, it may include ideas that
were conceived without the slightest awareness of it, as well as ideas that
were conceived with reference to it but went on to lose the label. Thus the
awareness of this odd topos may cause one to discover it where it is not,
but also, more importantly, may facilitate discursively productive connec-
tions across a wide spectrum—including the whole political spectrum—of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors.
Thus my general historical thesis is that Goethe’s metaphor of the demonic
was available, for about a hundred years, to the most diverse (and often
implicit) forms of appropriation and re-articulation.19 Moreover, this con-
tinuum, which proceeds with reference to underlying problems and implicit
metaphysical questions, illustrates the interdependence of literature and the-
ory and reveals the disadvantages of strictly differentiating them.

“Demons” or “Daemons”?

In a fragmentary chapter of André Gide’s 1925 novel The Counterfeiters (Les

faux-monnayeurs), entitled “Identification of the Demon” (“Identification du
démon”), a character says: “Do you know what Goethe said? That a man’s
strength [puissance] and his force of predestination [sa force de prédestina-
tion] were recognizable by the demoniacal element he has in him [à ce qu’il
portait en lui de démoniaque]” (The Counterfeiters 467). It may be that Gide
“got it wrong” in presenting the demonic as a demoniacal force of character
or “prédestination.” But because this question is voiced in the context of
a dialogue in a novel, it would be premature to attribute this conception
12 Introduction

to Gide. If anything, the question—“Do you know what Goethe said?”—

reduces the “something” called the demonic to “something Goethe said”
and thereby introduces the mechanics of reception, which tend to overlook,
condense, and elide whatever is received, in order to redeploy it for its own
purposes and in its own sense.
And, despite the word “démoniaque,” this reading does not conjure up
any literal demons. What is, after all, a “literal” demon? Gide’s title, “the
identification of the demon,” poses this question in a way that contrasts with
the staged naïveté of the question about “what Goethe said.” The stated
answer, that the demonic is a category of predestination, implicitly expresses
doubt as to the origins and ends of the supposed predestination: A “demonic”
predestination is clearly not identical with the divine one that the word
“predestination” typically implies. According to this idea of the demonic,
attributed to Goethe, the inherited idea of an external (divine) “predestina-
tion” is internalized within the “demonic” individual, who is not ruled by
an external fate or providence but by an unidentified force—distinct from
free will—which then supposedly manifests itself as personal “strength” or
“power” (puissance).
There are no literal, physical demons here, and also no devils. The choice
of the word “demonic,” attributed to Goethe, only makes sense as a meta-
phor of demonic possession. Whether this understanding accurately reflects
what Goethe “said” is not of primary importance, because Gide’s presenta-
tion assumes an implicit differentiation between what Goethe actually said
(which is never stated) and an attempted paraphrase. Goethe’s demonic is
one thing, and what it is belatedly held and claimed to be is something else.
Gide’s dialogue shows that whatever the demonic may or may not have been,
it lends itself to misunderstanding and appropriation. This susceptibility to
(intentional) misunderstanding becomes especially pivotal—a demonic ambi-
guity in more ways than one—precisely if one supposes that the demonic
has nothing to do with devils. Gide’s reliance on an implicit metaphorics
of demonic possession illustrates that the exorcism of “demons” out of the
demonic only works at a high level of abstraction—or to the extent that one
is willing to posit that the demonic is directly and exclusively linked with the
Socratic daimonion.20
I do not assume such a linkage, but rather read Goethe’s das Dämonische
as a conscious telescoping of unnamed traditions. This is explicitly the case
insofar as Goethe chose the name “based on the example of the ancients and
others who thought something similar” (HA 10:175–76). This reference is
completely open. Gnostic or early Christian overtones, for example, may be
audible. Goethe set no limits on what might be “similar” to the demonic, and
later receptions—such as Jonas’s Gnosticism and the Spirit of Late Antiquity,
Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, and Blumenberg’s debates with Schmitt21—
have often focused theological problems that begin with the end of antiquity.
In this context, to a greater degree than is the case in Goethe, the demonic is a
Introduction 13

specifically modern problem. If reflections on the demonic from Kierkegaard

and Dostoyevsky to Lukács, Spengler, Benjamin, Jonas, and Blumenberg are
identified as the main line of the reception—which it certainly is, at least in
retrospect—then the demonic is evidently coextensive with the problem of
modernity.
If Goethe’s das Dämonische was understood in this way, the decision
to render it in English as “the demonic” runs the risk of overemphasizing
the idea of evil. The orthography “daemonic,” on the other hand, preserves
ambiguity with respect to evil and avoids the implication that modernity is
merely being denounced as a “demonic age.” But what are the consequences,
whether with respect to antiquity or to modernity, of supposing that dae-
moniacal forces are at work on the stage of history? Nietzsche’s Birth of
Tragedy, which Gide’s dialogue may have also had in mind, conceives his-
tory as emerging from precisely such forces. On the historical stage, it may
be hard to tell whether the historical force exerted by figures like Moses or
Socrates or Goethe or Napoleon is demonic or daemonic, because the essence
of this force is expressed in historical effects and retrospective recognitions
and valuations. What makes historical individuals demonic (or daemonic)
is the semi-autonomous and suprapersonal dissemination of their daemon.
This daemon may, however, also be understood as demonic insofar as it is
imagined to be capable of “possessing” countless individuals across great
spans of time and space. It is in this sense that Nietzsche speaks of “the Dio-
nysiac daemon” and “the daemonic Socrates.”22
Given the relative ease with which the demonic and the daemonic can be
pushed to the point of ambiguity, the terminological decision is by no means
easy. But to the extent that theorists like Spengler and Lukács radicalize the
problematic status of modernity developed by eighteenth-century thinkers
such as Winckelmann and Schiller, the recourse to the demonic in the early
twentieth century is directly connected with a sense of decline and a desire
for renewal. The main difference with the eighteenth century—especially evi-
dent in Lukács—is that the break with a classicistic aesthetics of imitation
becomes so extreme that the aesthetic itself begins to be called into question.
For the young Lukács, the aesthetic no longer represents the royal road to
the political but is only the siren song of an unrecoverable “Greece.” In such
a “fallen” modernity, the demonic can easily become a vehicle for the expres-
sion of a godforsaken state.
In Goethe, by contrast, the demonic condition is not purely negative, and
this seems to have been a fact that was fairly well known in the early twenti-
eth century. A powerful illustration of the “summary” of Goethe’s conception
as a reflex of early twentieth-century concerns is the theologian Paul Tillich’s
1926 Das Dämonische: Ein Beitrag zur Sinndeutung der Geschichte (The
Demonic: A Contribution to the Question of Meaning in History). As far as
I know, this essay still represents the most important systematic theological
study—with or without Goethe—on the demonic.23 For Tillich, the demonic
14 Introduction

refers to the endless opposition of form and formlessness, meaning and mean-
inglessness, which can be traced in the history of all religions, including the
Enlightenment’s efforts of rationalization and secularization (Tillich 24–31).
At the limit, this conception touches on wider topics of myth and theodicy,
but, more narrowly, Tillich very clearly had “literal” demons in mind, both
in his analyses of their cross-cultural representations—as distortions of the
human form—and in the difference between the demonic and the divine.
Moreover, he supposes that a deposed god—a demon—never completely dis-
appears from the historical stage. This understanding imposes an additional
limit to the possibilities of enlightenment and secularization: vanquished
gods “never entirely lose their demonic power and always stand ready to
step into the foreground in the event that the ruling forms of divinity should
experience a crisis” (25, my translation). In conceptions like this one—indi-
rectly traceable to Goethe by way of Rudolf Otto’s 1917 Das Heilige (The
Sacred)24—the demonic may still play its Socratic role as “an intermediary
or hybrid entity” (Zwischenwesen, 25), but it does so precisely as a demon,
as an uncertain, ambiguous, and potentially antagonistic force outside of the
direct control of the subject. Here and in Gide, the difference between a pos-
sibly benevolent daemon and a supposedly evil demon can only be resolved
in view of a historical-theological horizon of ultimate ends.
The self-evident presupposition of the origins and ends of the world—and
the correlated means—was profoundly called into question and constantly
reasserted since the beginning of the Christian era. Demons, Dämonen, in
German as in ancient Greek can work for good or evil. Thus the German
word cannot entirely banish its ambiguous co-invocation of evil spirits,
whereas the English “demon” presents a tenuous claim to know the differ-
ence between good and evil. The inescapability of these ambiguities is not a
mere semantic problem but inheres in the very idea of a demon: what once
appears as a benevolent daimonion may later—or from a different perspec-
tive—appear as a demonic persecution. There is a plausible explanation for
the historical transformation that tilted this fundamental ambivalence in
the direction of malevolence. According to David Brakke’s Demons and the
Making of the Monk, the meaning of the word daimon in the ancient world
changed decisively and irreversibly as a result of Christianity:

Likewise, in this same period [fourth- and early fifth-century Christian

Egypt], even non-Christian philosophers, such as Iamblichus, began
to accept an idea that their predecessors had rejected: the daimon was
not merely an intermediary divine being, filling in the gap between
human beings and the distant gods, but could be an evil power that
caused harm to human beings. Scholars who study ancient under-
standings of the daimon often rightly use the more neutral English
“daemon” to signal that the daimon is not always a negative force.
For the Christian monk, the daimon became a fearsome enemy, an
Introduction 15

agent of evil that could appear as a human being, a wild animal, or

even an angel. The opponent of the monk was the unambiguously
evil demon. (5)

Goethe’s conception does not present the demonic as “unambiguously evil,”

but neither does it belong exclusively to a pre-Christian or non-Christian
understanding.25 This impasse, together with the fact that the threatening
and irrational aspects are most relevant for modernity, may have motivated
Giorgio Agamben and his translator to use “the demonic” even in the con-
text of pre- and non-Christian antiquity.26 Following Agamben, I will mostly
use the word “demon” unless the context clearly refers to a “daemon” à la
Socrates. Even in Goethe’s “Orphic Primal Words” (“Urworte Orphisch”), in
which the Greek daimon is glossed as “character” and “individuality,” I see
no immediate reason why this may not be interpreted as a kind of posses-
sion. According to the fifth line of the daemon-stanza of the “Urworte”: “You
cannot flee yourself” (dir kannst du nicht entfliehen). In this sense, the indi-
vidual’s daemon may be simultaneously a persecuting demon.27 This holds, I
would argue, for all instances of “demonic” self-relation, which can either be
conceived, at one extreme, as a split within the subject or as a relation to an
alterity (a daemon) or, at the other extreme, as a form of possession (with the
self under the control of a demon). The shades of difference within this spec-
trum are not easy to differentiate in any given case. Socrates’s fate shows how
easily the suspicion of evil motives may arise when a daemon is in play. And
even if it is not obviously “evil,” the daemonic self-relation remains extremely
suspect in the modern (Christian) world. The daemon’s lack of rational basis,
of logical transparency and hierarchy, of clear responsibility and account-
ability, mean that it can always turn out to be a demon. The post-Goethean
conception, on the other hand, clearly goes beyond good and evil in that it
belongs to a world in which the difference between demons and daemons is
not necessarily immediately recognizable or even important. The daemon or
daimonion is a latent demon, a demon waiting for future transvaluations;
and the demon for its part is a latent god, waiting for its day.
The demonic is beyond good and evil, but as a general category of the
inexplicable it is prone to mystification. Regardless of the degree to which
inexplicability may be generalized into a threat or a state, the demonic in
Goethe is an essentially empirical and experiential category of inexplicability,
which cannot be said to occupy a specific existential or theological position
(because the experience of inexplicability itself can be an aspect of numer-
ous systems). A contemporary discourse on the demonic, a hundred years
after its heyday, thus only makes sense if the term is viewed at a certain dis-
tance and from the standpoint of disillusionment with respect to whatever
it may still promise in terms of “predestination.” Which is to say: I do not
approach the demonic as a philosophical system (except perhaps as a kind
of post-metaphysical self-help) or theologically (as a term that corresponds
16 Introduction

to a specific religious idea or worldview). But to the extent that problems

and fallacies associated with the demonic remain current (for example, in the
discourses surrounding the idea of “political theology”), a critical archaeology
may usefully show how the demonic came to represent a point of ambiguity
between the attitudes of dystopian-atheistic-secular resignation and utopian-
revolutionary-Gnostic hope. Rather than taking the demonic seriously as a
term that conceptualizes (or theologizes) something that is genuinely charac-
teristic of modern reality, I frequently take it as the symptom of an affect, as
a metaphorical expression used to characterize a supposedly “secular” world
that remains ironically haunted by “demonic” remainders. And as it turns
out, I think Goethe lends himself better to this approach than to the emphatic
reclamation of the demonic as a category of post- or pseudo-religious exis-
tential analysis.

Goethe’s “Orphic Primal Words” as a Vehicle

for the Reception of the Demonic

In comparison to Goethe’s “Urworte Orphisch” (“Orphic Primal Words”),

the central passage on the demonic from book 20 of Poetry and Truth has
been the object of a more overt reception. Both Lukács and Benjamin, for
example, prominently cite the key sentences from Goethe’s autobiography
in texts that are still canonical. Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affini-
ties also spends a page contesting Gundolf’s reading of Goethe’s “Urworte,”
but the point of this is easily lost: first, because it does not pertain directly to
the Elective Affinities; and second, and more importantly, because it cannot
easily be followed unless one is familiar with both Goethe’s poem and Gun-
dolf’s book. Comparably, as I will show, Lukács’s architecture of the novel
corresponds to the schematics of Goethe’s “Urworte”—but this connection is
almost entirely implicit.
These examples illustrate how the Dämon of the primal words,28 though
apparently well known by major thinkers of the early twentieth century, was
never transmitted in an integral and coherent way. Goethe’s “Urworte” (writ-
ten in 1817, first published in 1820)29 have been most often quoted without
regard for their context in Goethe, for the sake of their powerful formulations;
some lines became so well known that they became “winged words,” cited
without quotation marks or an indication of their source. This is especially
true of the final line of the Dämon-stanza (often incorrectly identified with
das Dämonische itself),30 which has been deployed by diverse readers in vari-
ous contexts as a compact expressive-conceptual formula: geprägte Form, die
lebend sich entwickelt (“characteristic form, living, self-developing”).31 Espe-
cially in the absence of interpretive analysis, the powerful formulations of the
“Urworte” made an impression, for example, on and through Friedrich Gun-
dolf and Oswald Spengler (discussed in chapters 3 and 4), who used Goethe’s
Introduction 17

words to amplify and distort ideas from his writings on morphology. Such
reconceptualizations went on to frame later theoretical development in con-
texts that were often quite removed from Goethe scholarship.
The typical reception of the “Urworte” occurred in the absence or refusal
of philological rigor and a full articulation of relevant contexts.32 The primal
words were, in short, more prone to be hijacked than critically interpreted.
In order to begin to unfold precisely this situation, the “Urworte” are a pri-
mary focus throughout the present work. There is a lot to unravel in the
early twentieth century’s tendency to freely mix the “Urworte” with Poetry
and Truth and the morphology. Given this situation, the first chapters seek
to differentiate Goethe’s conceptions as the basis of the last four chapters’
analyses of the “blended” versions. This pragmatic division and the focus on
the “Urworte” led to the following chapter-organization:
In Chapter 1, the “Urworte” are read to develop a model of the demonic
separate from that of Poetry and Truth. The “Urworte,” unlike Poetry and
Truth, present a limited number of positive terms in which the demonic may
be conceived. This alone represents a departure from Poetry and Truth, and
it may be a reason why the “Urworte” were constantly in the background of
discussions of the demonic: the indeterminateness of Poetry and Truth needed
constant supplementation by the more integral and systematic articulation of
the “Urworte.” This does not mean that the “Urworte” are Goethe’s “best”
work on the demonic, only that they lend themselves to paradigmatic and
schematic conceptions. The “Urworte” became central for me for the same
reason: Unlike Poetry and Truth, they do not tend toward dispersion, ineffa-
bility, and fragmentation into seemingly unrelated topics. The terminological
system of the “Urworte,” with its clear developmental structure and implicit
oppositions (such as fate-character, individual-society, nature-culture, etc.),
compactly addresses ideas and problems common to countless theories. And
in addition to the “words” themselves and their poetic paraphrases, Goethe
also wrote a commentary that goes some distance in articulating this “the-
ory.” The “Urworte” thus offer a stable basis of comparison against which
other conceptions can be readily contrasted.
The foundations are thus set in chapter 1, upon which all of the later
chapters are progressively built: chapter 2 reexamines the schematics of the
“Urworte” in the context of Goethe’s writings on morphology. The morpho-
logical writings allow an increasingly rigid formalization of the structural
moments of the “Urworte” while simultaneously extending and generalizing
the underlying developmental parameters in the direction of nature, culture,
and history. These two intersecting models are further articulated in chapter
3, which introduces the autobiographical conception of the demonic from
Poetry and Truth. Written before the “Urworte” (but published later), Poetry
and Truth cannot be read as an “advance” with respect to the “Urworte.”
However, because the autobiographical context exposes the limitations of
purely structural-schematic-categorical approaches, it represents a strong
18 Introduction

contrast to the “Urworte.” Thus, if a unified idea of the demonic is even

desirable, it is only possible to conceive it as an oscillation between these
two models. The demonic is essentially double, divided between a formal or
“positive” moment and its “demonic” insufficiency whenever the attempt is
made to apply it to a given history or historical individual. Formal param-
eters are balanced against the impossibility of their narrative formulation and
final analytic application. Formal-conceptual architectures, though tempting,
cannot be epistemically differentiated in the flow of life and history. In the
context of historical development, concepts and their associated causal rea-
sons constantly produce imponderables. Goethe’s retrospective view of his
life thus undermines the general and systematic definition of the demonic.
The specific puzzle of each individual life thus emerges as a singularity that
always poses itself differently.
In chapter 4, I shift to the twentieth century, in which Oswald Spengler’s
“morphology of world history” introduces the demonic in the context of
fated decline and historical crisis.33 He extends and amplifies Goethe’s idea of
morphological development into a demonic “predestination”—an inescap-
able fate-system that places final limits on individual destinies and collective
historical developments. In chapter 5, I introduce the arguments through
which Walter Benjamin opposed such “demonic” determinisms: in ways that
are similar to Spengler, Gundolf conceives the demonic as a mythic fate in
which Goethe plays the part of the hero. Against this reading, Benjamin inter-
prets the “Urworte” and the Elective Affinities to show that Goethe was able
to transcend the fatalism enthusiastically espoused by Gundolf and Spengler.
Implicit in Benjamin is an alternate reading of Goethe’s morphology based on
the idea of metamorphosis (instead of strict determination). Thus instead of
fate, Benjamin emphasizes the hope and uncertainty that lies in the possibility
of unforeseen future developments.
Thus Spengler, Gundolf, and Benjamin helped to configure a highly prob-
lematic Goethean trace, which worked its way, often anonymously, into
many branches of twentieth-century thought. A further profoundly influen-
tial source from the 1910s is Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (the topic
of chapter 6). Through the form of the novel, the young Lukács questioned
the possibilities of transcendence and revolutionary transformation. He
describes the novel as a uniquely modern genre and as a system for testing the
possibilities of giving meaning to individual lives in a modern world in which
neither life nor world has any inherent meaning of its own. This novelistic
experiment always fails, in the final fruitlessness of protagonists’ “demonic”
characters or in the equivocations produced by narrators’ “demonic” irony.
All of the novel’s attempts to establish the conditions under which meaning-
ful life might be possible thus end up attesting to the disparity, unchecked
subjectivity, and incoherence of the modern world.
In order to mount this argument, Lukács reconfigured the terms of the
demonic as in support of his theorizations. The demonic provides him with
Introduction 19

an infrastructure of analysis that never becomes the object of analysis. To my

knowledge, the only author who may have at least partly perceived the depth
of the connection between Lukács and the demonic was the Austrian novel-
ist Heimito von Doderer (the topic of chapter 7). Doderer was born in 1896
into the generation that came after the decisive figures of German-language
modernism, such as Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and
Hermann Broch. Doderer, like many in the twentieth century, had set his sights
on the novel, and was profoundly influenced by the literary and artistic devel-
opments of the decades of his youth. At the same time, however, he rejected
the works of these authors in order to seek what he imagined as a more fun-
damental and consequent modernism. After reading Lukács’s Theory of the
Novel in the early 1930s, he set out to write a massive meta-novel—a novel
of the theory of the novel—to which he gave a title borrowed from Dos-
toyevsky: The Demons (Die Dämonen, 1956). Doderer’s engagement with
the demonic—and with Lukács—may also have grown, at least in part, out of
his own implicit reconfiguration of the “Urworte” for a 1929 essay. He was
evidently preoccupied with multiple aspects of the demonic, out of which
The Demons emerged as a unique late modernist (post-Lukácsian) attempt
at consciously writing a novel that would be as demonic—as meaningless
in its excess of meanings, as limited in its avenues of transcendence—as the
modern world itself. Thus a new kind of novel began to consolidate itself
out of the problem of the demonic articulated in Goethe’s “Urworte,” Dos-
toyevsky’s Demons, and Lukács’s theory. I hypothetically refer to this as a
“demonic” novel, which formally resembles an epically distended novella.
It may be, however, that there is no great breakthrough here, insofar as the
novel was always the genre of the solitary individual and the absence and
artificiality of transcendence (as Benjamin argues in his essay on the story-
teller). In this case, a novel entitled Demons only represents a more explicit
and self-conscious reflection on a supposed state of the world—the limits of
which always defined the form of the novel.34
 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

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Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
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 Chapter One

Urworte Goethisch
Demonic Primal Words

Goethe’s “Urworte Orphisch” is a cycle of five stanzas—stanzas in the strict

sense of “octave” or “ottava rime”—written in September and October 1817.
In addition to the main title, each stanza has a subtitle corresponding to a
different “primal word.” The occasion for this work was Goethe’s encoun-
ter with speculative works of ancient philology by Johann Gottfried Jakob
Hermann, Georg Friedrich Creuzer, and Georg Zoëga.1 Zoëga is Goethe’s
proximate source for the primal words, but the original source is Macrobius
(fifth century a.d.), who uses four Greek words to name Egyptian divinities—
Daimwn (Daemon), Tuch (Tyche), ErwV (Eros), and Anagkh (Ananke)—that
preside over birth (UO 84). The fifth Urwort, Elpis (Elpis), also comes from
Macrobius, but he does not name her with the other four. For this reason,
Benjamin will see Elpis as supplemental in relation to the other Urworte and
as a transformative intervention with respect to them.
The first 1820 publication of the “Urworte” in Goethe’s morphological
writings only gives Greek titles, but in the second 1820 publication he added
German translations: Dämon is rendered Individualität, Charakter (individual-
ity, character); Tyche is Zufälliges, das Zufällige (chance, the accidental); Eros
is Liebe, Leidenschaft (love, passion); Ananke is Beschränkung, Pflicht, Nöthi-
gung (limitation, duty, necessity, duress); and Elpis is Hoffnung (hope) (UO 27;
see also Schmidt, Goethes Altersgedicht, 6–9). This series means to essential-
ize—“quintessentialize”—“diffuse antiquity.”2 It simultaneously clarifies and
modernizes the core ideas of Greek thought.3 According to a letter to Sulpiz
Boisserée from July 16, 1818, the “Urworte” represent an effort of interpretive
cryogenics, which seeks to revive “dead idioms” (abgestorbene Redensarten)
through the rejuvenating force of “one’s own living experience” (aus eigener
Erfahrungs-Lebendigkeit) (UO 72). Goethe’s implicit claim, contained in the
word “Orphic,” is that these five words represent the earliest and most essential
idea of Greek mythology and religion, abstracted to reveal its modern relevance
while providing a timeless formula for (human) existence in general.
This effort of resuscitation represents an explicit engagement with the
scholarly discourses that posed the question of the status of the Greek origin,

21
22 Urworte Goethisch

its purity and endurance. In pretending to extrapolate and intuit this origin,
Goethe’s stanzas stage the possibility of gaining access to ancient myster-
ies in a way that would not be merely historical but immediately valid and
relevant in the modern world. In order to understand the specific form of
the Orphic “Urworte” and the means by which they establish the basis of a
continuity spanning the depths of antiquity and the furthest horizons of the
present age, it is helpful to know what an Urwort is. According to Grimm’s
dictionary, the word Urwort can be understood as a “primal word,” in the
sense of an “ancient, sacred, primary, creative word” (ein uraltes, altheiliges,
erstes, schöpferisches Wort). These meanings are obviously relevant, but the
additional qualification “Orphic” makes them redundant: an Orphic primal
word is the same as an Orphic word. The word Urwort may, however, be
read in a second sense (also recorded in Grimm) as “a word in an ancient lan-
guage.” For example, the Greek word logos is an Urwort with respect to the
words ratio, reason, and Grund. Urworte in this sense are not “primal” but
rather “originary” with respect to a later conceptual history.4 This definition
is reflected in the construction of Goethe’s Orphic “Urworte”: the “poem” is
in the first instance a series of five Greek words, which are progressively and
repeatedly translated: first into German equivalents, then into stanzas, and
finally into Goethe’s commentary. Goethe’s work thus appears to be less a
“poem” than the performance of a conceptual unfolding—first into German,
then into verse and finally into prose.
Given this structure, it is clear that Goethe does not literally seek to go
back to the Greek origin. Nor does he try to present the “original meanings”
of the five Urworte. They are only “defined” in a foreign language as a reflex
of their progressive unfolding; they are the imaginary origins of an ongoing
process of translation and re-actualization. This conception contrasts starkly
with both Hermann and Creuzer, whose debate inspired Goethe’s conception.
For Creuzer, the proto-Greek origin, prior to written records, can be deduced
but not positively known. He believes that this origin must have taken the
form of a religious doxa, which would have preceded and delimited the more
“literary” myths that came later. For Hermann, this relation is reversed: the
assertion of a religious-institutional-cultic origin-before-the-origin can only
be entirely speculative, and even if such an Ur-dogma and Ur-religion did
exist, it would have necessarily been founded upon the interpretation of an
even earlier myth. Hermann thus privileged the “literary” aspect of myth
over its religious or institutional codification.5 The orthodoxies of doctrine
must be derivative, because they necessarily depend on a preceding totality of
myth—as overarching tradition, institution, or symbol—capable of support-
ing various institutions and practices over long periods of time.
Goethe preferred Hermann to Creuzer, but his approach is distinct from
both. In the “Urworte” themselves and in the 1818 letter to Sulpiz Boisserée
(UO 72), Goethe is not primarily concerned about what the Urworte meant
for the Greeks. Instead, he wants to know what they can be made to mean
Demonic Primal Words 23

for us. The academic dispute challenged Goethe to deduce the basic con-
ceptual forms at the origins of Greek religion—but not as a uniquely Greek
episteme. Instead he expands the five originary concepts in an implicit history
of their translation and transformation, in order to bring their wisdom into
the modern world. They are dense conceptual sketches, works of specula-
tive philosophy, which use verse as a means of clarifying and articulating a
foreign and essentially ineffable subject matter. The “Urworte” are “a series
of Orphic primal words . . . clarified into stanzas” (eine Reihe orphischer
Urworte . . . in Stanzen aufgeklärt), as Goethe wrote in a March 1818 letter
to an unknown recipient (UO 72).
These “stanzas” were first published (perhaps strangely on the face of it,
but with consequences that can hardly be overestimated) in the 1820 edi-
tion of his Zur Morphologie (On Morphology). Only a few months later,
he republished them, with minor changes and accompanied by a commen-
tary, in Über Kunst und Altertum (On Art and Antiquity). The decision to
add a commentary may have been partly a result of the fact that Goethe’s
stanzas, despite their “clarifying” intent, remained cryptic. The first sen-
tences of the commentary give precisely this explanation, but I suspect that
“expandability” and “applicability” are inherent to the stanzas’ design: the
two 1820 publications superimpose strikingly different contexts in which the
“Urworte” may be read, producing a further layering and transformation on
top of the translations represented within the text itself. The aesthetic and
conceptual developments that take place between the two publications may
thus be read as a strategy for progressively increasing the potential complex-
ity of the underlying “words.”
This understanding of the design of the “Urworte” and the relation of the
two publications breaks with a tradition of interpretation that has read the
commentary only as a “prosaic” and superfluous simplification. I believe this
also explains why the commentary was never translated into English. This is
not to say that there are not good reasons to view the commentary as a reduc-
tive crutch. To the reader of poetry, the commentary undermines the authority
of the stanzas by supplementing them with dubious and potentially inflam-
matory “theoretical” claims. Theo Buck and Jochen Schmidt thus treat the
commentaries as secondary, in order to focus on the interpretation of the stan-
zas. Schmidt argues that the commentary is less authoritative than the stanzas
and that readers of the stanzas are not obliged to follow the interpretations
given in Goethe’s commentary (Schmidt, Goethes Altersgedicht 14–15). This
is certainly right, but the case becomes more complex if the commentary is
not simply a case of a literary author trying to “explain” a difficult work. The
commentary, as I read it, is a further transformation and translation of the five
“primal words,” which deserves to be read carefully, not as a superficial and
prosaic explanation, but as a complex text with specific qualities.
Another macro-level interpretive dilemma is whether to read the relation
of the five stanzas as progressive, developmental, and linear—a narrative or
24 Urworte Goethisch

dialectical sequence—or whether they are simultaneous and conceptual in

their relation.6 These two options can be unified in Macrobius’s conception
of “astrological” divinities presiding over both birth and life—but these may
be conceived either as constant presences or as a sequential unfolding of life
and fate. In the latter case, the Dämon presides over birth itself; Tyche over
childhood, education, and socialization; Eros over youth and awakening sex-
uality; Ananke over adulthood and the confining realities of middle age; and
Elpis over the new perspectives of old age. In any reading, the “Urworte” can
be conceived at once as narrative-sequential and as the demonstration of an
analytical system that only establishes general categories of relations. On the
one hand, it is a strict developmental typology; on the other, all five elements
are constantly operative and interacting in all moments and events of every
human life. Thus conceptual (synchronic) and developmental (diachronic)
aspects are represented in the design of the “Urworte.”
A further question, leading to another distinction, pertains to the level
of the generality of this paradigm. More often than not—and not always
wrongly—Goethe’s Dämon-stanza has been read autobiographically as
a further description of the “demonic” entity from Poetry and Truth. This
connection is, however, only of limited validity. It neglects the speculative-
historical and scholarly aspects (coming out of Hermann and Creuzer); it
also conflicts with Goethe’s commentary, which does not rely on anecdote or
subjective accounts, but instead focuses on the stanzas’ universal and objec-
tive meaning; the stanzas themselves support this, for example, in the opening
astrological metaphor. The tone of universality and objectivity is a precise
inversion of the presentation of the demonic in Poetry and Truth. These pas-
sages, written before the “Urworte,” only present general paradigms at the
horizons of Goethe’s own experience. Both texts arguably address the same
underlying problem—the basic form of human life—but the “Urworte” are
more oriented toward an academic, systematic, or even dogmatic conception.
Regarding the dogmatic aspect, it is above all the formulaic intensity of the
“Urworte” that distances them from the particularities of Goethe’s individual
life. “Urworte” may be “religious” in the sense that the stanzas formulate
admonishments, sayings and “words to live by”; fundamental questions of
anthropology, sociology, and psychology are just beneath the surface. Such
questions, which roughly correspond to the “nature vs. nurture” dichotomy,
figure prominently in the commentary. The nature-nurture opposition, how-
ever, only loosely fits Goethe’s conception. Put in these terms, the “Urworte”
are primarily about nature (figured in Dämon and Eros), whereas culture and
society are figured in the secondary and often negative functions of Tyche
and Ananke. Ultimately, the most important shared feature of the “Urworte”
and the nature-nurture opposition is their degree of generality. Both para-
digms are broad enough to theoretically include every outcome. At the limit,
every actually existing and conceivable permutation must be representable as
an interplay between determining elements. In comparison to nature-nurture,
Demonic Primal Words 25

Goethe’s five-part analytic system is decidedly more complex—and aggres-

sively unconventional. The Dämon, for example, is the unique identity of
the individual, but it is scandalously ambivalent about the role of “nature”
in the constitution of this identity. The stanza never makes it clear whether
the Dämon, which the commentary translates as “individuality,” refers to an
“own nature” or to an external force that impresses itself on the individual
from the outside.
The Dämon in question thus cannot be simply reduced to the “genie”
that inspires the genius—or to a Socratic daimonion—or to Goethe’s own
“genius.” In the “Urworte,” Dämon corresponds to the character and individ-
uality of every individual. The astrological metaphor of the first lines spells
out the uniqueness, singularity—and fatality—of the individual destiny (as
the commentary reads it). The second-person singular (Du) further conveys
the universality of the conception:7

Daimwn, Dämon.
Wie an dem Tag der Dich der Welt verliehen
Die Sonne stand zum Gruße der Planeten,
Bist alsobald und fort und fort gediehen,
Nach dem Gesetz wonach Du angetreten.
So mußt Du sein, Dir kannst Du nicht entfliehen,
So sagten schon Sybillen, so Propheten,
Und keine Zeit und keine Macht zerstückelt
Geprägte Form die lebend sich entwickelt.

Daimwn, Demon.
As on the day you were granted to the world,
The sun stood to greet the planets,
You likewise began to thrive, forth and forth,
Following the law that governed your accession.
You must be so, you cannot flee yourself,
Thus sibyls long ago pronounced, thus prophets,
And neither time nor any power can dismember
Characteristic form, living, self-developing.

This first stanza gives priority to the Dämon—its unity, its fatefulness, its
inescapability, indelibility, and ineradicability, but it still may be possible to
overstate these aspects. They are balanced by an equally intense conception
of growth and development that is at odds with strict fatalism. Taken a step
further, the concepts of form and development may appear to be latently
contradictory. “Characteristic form, living, self-developing” (geprägte Form
die lebend sich entwickelt), to the extent that it is taken literally, can easily
become an oxymoron, a paradox, or a metaphor expressing the simultaneity
of synchronic and diachronic moments.8 If this contradiction is to be avoided,
26 Urworte Goethisch

the Dämon must be an intrinsically diachronic and temporal aspect refer-

ring to the form of development itself.9 This principle of the developmental
autonomy and elemental individuality of the Dämon is thereby internalized
and distinguished from the merely external processes of education and social-
ization (Tyche).
In contrast with this purely developmental aspect, however, Goethe’s com-
mentary identifies the Dämon with an interconnection of fate and character
that allows the former to be derived from the latter: “one may . . . concede
that innate energy and individuality [angeborene Kraft und Eigenheit] deter-
mine human fate much more than anything else” (UO 13). The language
used to introduce this sentence (man möchte gestehen) reflects a significant
distance from the stanza’s apodictic claims. The commentary immediately
“concedes” the absolute and unquestioned status of the text it interprets.
The result is a parody of the emphatic hermeneutic commentary: “Thus the
stanza [Strophe] pronounces the invariability of the individual with repeated
assurance [mit wiederholter Beteuerung]” (UO 13). The stanza is the source
of unquestioned claims, to which the commentary self-consciously subordi-
nates itself. Through the commentary’s deference, the stanza itself becomes
a Dämon, a fixed yet developing form: it may be paraphrased and explained
(in the sense of Auslegung), its claims rationalized, but the truth of its formu-
lation is not to be questioned. By imagining the stanzas as genuine Orphic
utterances rather than words of a modern author, the commentary employs
an obvious fiction to interpret the stanza’s words without needing to doubt
their claims.
The stanza, however, because it defines Dämon as purely developmental, is
much less definitive than the commentary on the topic of fate and character:
as the law of a future development—of uncertain duration—the Dämon is
never given, never present, but always only “in development.” Its essential
role or even its existence as a part of a causal chain can never be proven as
long as it is the law of an unfinished unfolding. This “fate” exhausts itself in
the stanza’s “repeated assurances,” which amount to a promise of the individ-
uality described. By reading the stanza as an ancient wisdom directed at every
imaginable “you,” the commentary avoids the question of whether—and
how—this promise is ultimately believable. The acceptance or rejection of
the stanza’s “repeated” premise—the belief in the Dämon—may even impact
the self-development of the “you.” The apparent fatalism of the stanza thus
subtly turns toward the possibility of freedom.
The commentary casts itself in the hermeneutic role, thereby unmasking
the stanza as rhetoric and subtly undermining its claims. Once the commenta-
tor and the reader of the Dämon stanza are thematized, it becomes clear that
individuality is not only intrinsic, but co-defined by acts of interpretation and
articles of faith. The commentary proceeds to push this further, to the point of
superstition. With only minimal basis in the poem, it asserts the indestructibil-
ity and indivisibility of the demon, claiming that it is not just the prime element
Demonic Primal Words 27

of the individual identity, but also defines the transgenerational genetic iden-
tity of peoples and nations: “That which is most decisively individual, insofar
as it is finite, can certainly be destroyed, but, as long as its core remains intact
[so lange sein Kern zusammenhält], it can never become fragmented or torn
apart, even across generations” (UO 13). The latent contradiction between
form and development is thus magnified and extended across historical time:
the Dämon, which seemed to define absolute individuality within the human
life span, is recast as a potentially transferable characteristic (das Charakter-
istische, UO 13). This “characteristic” refers to the utter singularity of the
individual and at the same time introduces a more fluid space of identities that
are communicated beyond the limits of an individual life.
The concept of individual character can be read as a category of singular-
ity and autonomy, but the idea of a supra-individual “characteristic” tends
toward determinism. This collectivization of the individual Dämon is trou-
bling, but it may also be variously interpreted. On the side of the most extreme
generality, the “demon” would be the lowest term of a universal anthropo-
morphology that supposes the possibility of absolute generalization, of an
all-encompassing genetic rule capable of mediating and subsuming every
single particularity that appears in all of time. Under this rule, everything
would have a Dämon that defines what it is and how it develops. The demon
thus mediates general and particular, delimiting the difference between form
and forms. Everything has a demon as the underlying principle of its being
and development; everything—both as an individual and as a species—is pos-
sessed of a “form” (a nature, concept, or essence). The demon defines the
plurality of diachronic forms in their temporal orientation and organization.
In the Aristotelian lingo that underwrites the morphological discourse from
Leibniz to Goethe and Spengler and beyond: the demon is entelechy.10 This
morphological understanding, however, ruins the stanzas’ more narrowly
biographical schematics of the human life span. The commentary’s morpho-
logical extension and generalization breaks the promise of the Dämon, which
“repeatedly assures” the absolute—astrological—singularity of character. In
view of transgenerational and genetic continuities, the stanza’s promise of a
fixed and enduring individuality is dissolved into abstract formal play: Tyche
rules as soon as individuality is viewed as a combinatorics of inherited ele-
ments that are not more than the sum of their parts.
In the terms of Dämon-stanza itself, the question is: where does self-
development (Entwicklung) end and where do dispersion, disintegration
(Zerstückelung), and entropy begin? From the standpoint of form defined
in the fixed individuality of a single life, inevitable mortality contradicts the
stanza’s proclaimed indestructibility of the demon. From the standpoint of dis-
integration, “demonic” form ensures continuity in the transmission of discrete
“characteristics.” But such a limited continuity is still notably at odds with the
indestructible, constantly developing individuality expressed as “imprinted
form” (geprägte Form). Mortality thus limits demonic self-development, and
28 Urworte Goethisch

the inheritability of specific characteristics only (rather conventionally) com-

pensates for it at a different level. The problem is simple: if the Dämon does
not include a doctrine of the immortality of the soul (which would cross the
line from empirical morphology into metaphysics), then there must be limits.
But death is downplayed to the extent that it would conflict with the stanza’s
pronouncement of the empirical endurance of demonically structured forms.
The deliberately overstated assurance of stability and continuity thus reflects
the unacceptability of the alternative. To prove the proclaimed indestructibil-
ity of the demon—despite certain evidence to the contrary—the commentary
introduces this-worldly genetic continuity, which provides the demon with a
means of surviving its mortal vessel. Goethe imagines the long-term survival
of the demon in the bloodlines. But this turns individuality—like the snow-
flake that always crystallizes differently—into a mere effect of an indifferent
structural determination.
If the idea of a “genetic inheritance” is meant to allay doubts about
the indestructibility of the individual demon, then this effort is—perhaps
intentionally—not very successful. The demon, which was supposed to be
indivisible and integral, ends up tragically divided and finally dissolved in
the pantheistic generality of the gene pool. The commentary’s words “as long
as its core remains intact” may be a slip or a deliberate contradiction with
respect to the stanza’s “neither time nor any power can dismember,” but it
in any case reveals the demon as something other than the immortal and
indestructible essence. If the demon were to exist in the form pronounced in
the stanza, it does so only as an aspect of the faith in the words of the stanza
itself; because the commentary, which apparently proselytizes on behalf of
this faith, subtly undermines it.
The question of the destructibility of the Dämon is addressed again in the
Tyche-stanza and its associated commentary. The remarks that introduce this
Urwort proclaim its powerlessness against the perfectly resilient and autono-
mous demon:

Of course [freylich], even this entity [the Dämon], though fixed [fest]
and tough [zäh] and developing only out of itself [dieses nur aus sich
selbst zu entwickelnde Wesen], must enter into many relations that
may impede the effects of its first and original character or hinder it
in its affections. (UO 13)

However, despite the reemphasis of the durability of the demon, the admis-
sion that it “enters into many relations” signals the beginning of a reversal.
At first these relations are only defined negatively, as mere externalities,
which, though they may “impede” and “hinder,” do not decisively impact
the demon’s characteristic form. Tyche is thus a more benign form of what
the fourth stanza will call Ananke. As a sheer impediment, she lacks positive
formative influence on the demonic development.
Demonic Primal Words 29

The Tyche-stanza is concerned with education and socialization, which

are described as mutable and variable, ephemeral and fluid, reflecting the
essential contingency of human social and institutional forms. Tyche’s forms
are extrinsic shells, lifeless structures against and within which the demon
asserts itself, while awaiting Eros, whose spark is anticipated in the stanza’s
final line:

Tuch, das Zufällige.

Die strenge Gränze doch umgeht gefällig
Ein Wandelndes, das mit und um uns wandelt;
Nicht einsam bleibst Du, bildest Dich gesellig,
Und handelt wohl so wie ein anderer handelt.
Im Leben ists bald hin- bald wiederfällig,
Es ist ein Tand und wird so durchgetandelt.
Schon hat sich still der Jahre Kreis geründet,
Die Lampe harrt der Flamme die entzündet.

Tuch, the Accidental.

Yet this strict limit is gently circumscribed
By a fluctuation that flows around and with us;
You are not alone, but shape yourself socially,
And must certainly act just as another acts.
In life things are often due, overdue, redone,
It is a trinket, passed in makeshift thrift.
The circle of the years is already silently closed,
The lamp awaits the flame that will ignite it.

Tyche here is not “chance” or “luck” (German Glück), fortune or Fortuna

(the standard Latin translation), which refer to the hazards and opportunities
that appear in the course of life. In Goethe’s source, Zoëga, Tyche is a moon
goddess akin to Isis; she is to the collective what the Dämon is to the indi-
vidual; she is perhaps the most primal divinity, whose name and concept can
contain all others (UO 83–84). Goethe’s “Urworte” clearly oppose Zoëga:
Tyche is not a kind of Dämon, but subordinate and secondary. The Tyche
stanza never calls her by a feminine pronoun, depersonifying and implicitly
de-potentiating her. In the commentary, the male Dämon is also conceptually
neutered into “the characteristic” (das Charakteristische), but already in the
title of the stanza, female Tyche is translated neutrally as “the accidental”
(das Zufällige). Unlike the demon, which, as the principle of character and
identity, is the very precondition for personification, Tyche is amorphous and
devoid of positive characteristics; in this the Urworte follow Zoëga, who
calls Tyche “a word invented to confuse, not to differentiate and determine”
(UO 83).11 In Goethe’s stanza, she is “something that transforms” (ein Wan-
delndes), which lacks the demon’s formal law of development.
30 Urworte Goethisch

Where the Tyche stanza emphasizes socialization, the commentary often

reads her as the contingency of historical and cultural flux. Despite her sec-
ondariness to Dämon, she motivates the commentary to revise its position
on the demon’s transgenerational, genetic durability: “It is not accidental
that one derives one’s descendence from this or that nation, tribe or family”
(UO 14). Natality, nativity, and nationality are not mere accidents of birth
or attributes of nature but aspects of the continuity of the demon. The com-
mentary’s interpretation here goes against the grain of the stanza, because
it re-naturalizes and nationalizes the contingency of culture by reading it as
a demonic inheritance. This is confirmed in the commentary’s sentence on
Erziehung (education, child rearing), which is governed by Tyche “as long as
it is not public and national” (UO 14). The qualification indicates that educa-
tion may be removed from the maternal private sphere and subjected to the
paternal national-cultural legacy of the demon.
Various arguments are possible when it comes to assessing the real vir-
ulence of this conception, but if it is understood as a spurious racial or
proto-nationalist theory, then it is unfortunate that it appeared under Goethe’s
name.12 The commentary’s reading of the Dämon-Tyche relation comes close
to naturalizing national identity, culture, and character by making them into
a biological inheritance. The prime example of this is the endurance of the
Jewish people (die Judenschaft) across the generations. The Jewish Dämon
particularly stands out, according to the commentary, because the essence
of Jewish national character—Hartnäckigkeit, stubbornness—reflects and
redoubles the “tough” and “resilient” nature of the idea of Dämon itself.13
The commentary contends that not only the Jewish people but also European
nationalities will retain their national characteristics even after centuries of
exile, emigration, or diaspora. Such claims have almost no relation to the
Tyche stanza, which focuses on sociability and inevitable conformity. In the
commentary, Tyche’s “mutable rights” (wandelbare Rechte) come into play
through miscegenation (Vermischung und Durchkreuzung). Such “mixing” or
“crossing”—diluting—of the national “demon” is presented, not as the rule
of procreation, but as an exception to the ongoing paternity of the Dämon.
This is an undoubtedly racist conception: rather than interpreting Tyche as
the lawless law of Dämon’s transgenerational permutations, the commentary
implies that the originary “demon” survives best in endogamous bloodlines.
The patriarchal and patrilineal typology already observed in the ideal
of “national” education stands in opposition to “maternal” Tyche. She is a
negligent mother who leaves the education of the demon up to chance. Bio-
logical mothers are never mentioned in the commentary’s enumeration of
“tychic” influences on the baby demon. Instead, maternal surrogates, such
as wet nurse and nanny (Säugamme und Wärterin), exemplify Tyche. This
strict gender typology only begins to dissolve when paternal figures, such as
“father or guardian,” are identified as agents of Tyche.14 But this is merely
because all “father figures” can only be illegitimate in comparison to the
Demonic Primal Words 31

natural paternity of the demon itself. Just as the child is said to be the father
of the man, in the commentary, the demon is the ultimate Urvater, the “old
Adam” (der alte Adam) and “proper nature” (die eigentliche Natur). It is
absolutely resistant to Tyche’s negative and positive reinforcements. In the
context of “national and public education”—combined with the demon’s
supposed invincibility—the implicit point is that because the demon cannot
be driven out of the child, the maternal Tyche should be replaced by public
education specifically designed for the advancement of the demon.
Against the conformism (or even, at the limit, fascism) of this ideal of
national education, a more promising educational model can be developed out
of the very same premises. The universalization of the nonconformist premise
of Dämon’s individualistic aspect could be the basis of innovative education.
Though still “public and national,” such an educational system would be indi-
vidually tailored to the talents and proclivities of each “demon.” Because the
commentary does not differentiate between the various possibilities, it is diffi-
cult not to imagine the worst—but I would still see it as typical of the tendency
of the “Urworte” to address problems only in terms of a general framework.
Prior to the Eros stanza, the commentary ceases its ambiguous reflections
on education and reasserts the power of Tyche: “But Tyche does not relent . . .
[Allein Tyche läßt nicht nach]” (UO 14). Up to this point, the commentary on
Tyche had remained preoccupied with Dämon; but now she is reread in a way
that fits better with the stanza, as a figure of inauthenticity, as the sum of the
forces that can distract, mislead, divert, or seduce the demon from his proper
nature. Conformism and inauthenticity would seem impossible based on the
Dämon stanza and its commentary, but a decisive line of the Tyche stanza
indicates otherwise: “and acts just like any other acts” (und handelt wohl so
wie ein anderer handelt). The theme becomes increasingly central in the Eros
and Ananke stanzas, which causes the strong initial emphasis of Dämon to
become gradually eclipsed. The power of the demon is progressively over-
shadowed because it proves unable to stay true to itself in the unconditional
way proclaimed by the first stanza. Confronted with a reality that it is not cut
out for, the twilight of the demon gives lie to the proclaimed ineffectuality of
Tyche. The shifting and contradictory claims of the stanzas and commentary
cannot be unequivocally resolved; and no individual sentence or line is valid
in isolation, but only in the context of the whole system. To the extent that
the commentary’s exegesis is a constantly self-modifying disunity, none of its
individual claims can be taken at face value. Even taken as a whole, its abil-
ity to represent a coherent synthesis may be questionable. It certainly cannot
reflect a unified authorial standpoint, because it is self-consciously rhetorical
in its mediation of the stanzas to their imagined reader. Rather than antici-
pating, dictating, defining, or even tracing the conceptual possibilities of the
“Urworte,” the commentary is dependent and reactive in its relation to their
contradictory impulses. At the same time, it drastically departs from the letter
of the stanzas in order to explore speculative possibilities.
32 Urworte Goethisch

Against this equivocal backdrop, Eros’ entry occurs androgynously, in

masculine and feminine nouns and pronouns, breaking the static opposition
of Tyche and Dämon:

ErwV, Liebe.
Die bleibt nicht aus!—Er stürzt vom Himmel nieder,
Wohin er sich aus alter Oede schwang,
Er schwebt heran auf luftigem Gefieder
Um Stirn und Brust den Frühlingstag entlang,
Scheint jetzt zu fliehn, vom Fliehen kehrt er wieder,
Da wird ein Wohl im Weh, so süß und bang.
Gar manches Herz verschwebt im Allgemeinen,
Doch widmet sich das Edelste dem Einen.

ErwV, Love.
And there she is!—He hurtles down from the heaven,
Where he had lifted himself out of ancient chaos,
He soars and surges forward on airy wings
Surrounding brow and breast across the vernal day,
Seems now to flee, but in flight he turns about,
Creating pleasure in the pain, so happy and forlorn.
Many a heart drifts away in generality,
But the noblest devotes itself to the One.

The Eros commentary begins: “Here the individual Dämon and the seducing
Tyche join together” (UO 15). Eros is the spark that ignites two incompatible
elements, Dämon and Tyche. Despite the initially proclaimed indestructibility
of the demon, the collusion of Tyche and Eros proves that it is not infallible.
To the contrary, under the spell of Eros it is virtually defined by errancy.
Love’s intervention seals the rule of Tyche. Within the sphere of Eros, the
individual only seems “to belong to himself, to allow his own desire to reign,
to indulge his own instinct” (UO 15). The objects of a seemingly innate desire
are relegated to the status of “coincidences” (Zufälligkeiten) and “foreign
nature” (Fremdartiges). Even in the most intimate aspects of desire, Tyche
rules: “Errancy has no limit here, because the path itself is error” (UO 15).
The pre-erotic demon had sought to actualize itself, but it can only do so in
the alien and “accidental” medium of Tyche. Eros thus appears as the divinity
of the demon’s renewed self-actualization and simultaneous self-forgetting.
Love activates the demon by giving it a more intensive connection to the
“tychic” world. But because this self-actualization cannot eliminate Tyche,
it is not an event of sheerest authenticity but always co-actualizes something
other than itself. This dynamic of externalization causes innate properties to
be alienated in a foreign element. The commentary does not mince words
about this problem, whereas the stanza resolves it in an idea of monogamy
Demonic Primal Words 33

that implies the demon’s need to devote itself, to focus its Eros on a sin-
gle coherent development instead of floating around in the generality and
promiscuity of Tyche. The stanza’s “One” thus not only represents a sanc-
timonious sermon on morality,15 but also indirectly thematizes the demonic
role of talent, calling, or discipline, which may transcend the repeated disap-
pointments of Tyche and Eros.
The impasse of Dämon and Tyche, made dynamic by the intervention of
Eros, retrospectively rereads Tyche as powerless, as long as she is conceived
as a force of purely normative socialization. Her real power is demonically
exerted through Eros, in each individual’s uniquely auto-affective relation
to the world. Eros then, as is known from other contexts, is at once a nor-
mative force (constrainable within the collective legitimacy of Ananke) and
a counter-normative force that drives individuals away from the collective
law—into the “labyrinths” of the self (UO 15).16 Such errancy itself has nor-
mative effects: as a merely relative or apparent aberrance (under the rule of
Tyche), every Eros has the potential to formalize itself into a “path” (Weg),
which will “dissolve” “the particular and specific . . . within the realm of
generality” (UO 15). Eros’s elective affinities are constantly producing new
norms, new generalities and collectivities. Tyche, whose power is that of
crossing and mixing, reveals herself as not only an occasional obstacle to
the demon: she always “crosses” him, mixes up and confuses him, not by
destroying him, but by diverting him, drawing on his power for her labyrin-
thine ends. Crossing and discontinuity are not exceptional, as they appeared
to be in the Tyche commentary—because Eros cements the confusion of self
and other, while, as it now appears, the demon develops only by “crossing.”
According to the commentary, “frustration” (Verdruß)—the negative
experience of Tyche and Eros, which constantly interrupt the demon’s self-
actualization—causes the demon to feel “that he is not only determined and
stamped by nature” (UO 16). In other words, the individual loses faith in the
claims of the first stanza: he becomes aware of his demon’s limitations, and
seeks a way out of the inauthenticity of the conspiracy of Eros and Tyche. To
make this point, the commentary calls on the authority of the final lines of the
Eros stanza and asserts that they provide a clue to how Eros may be some-
thing other than a fatal and impulsive “grasping” (ergreifen). In the negative
model, Eros generalizes and thereby destroys the particularity of whatever it
grasped. The only alternative, according to the commentary, is a more free
and measured “assimilation” (aneignen) of that which the demon encounters
through Eros. Shifting away from the what—the contingency of object-
choice—the commentary emphasizes the how. This idea of authenticity, as
the possibility of escape from deterministic nature and culture, admonishes
the individual to forego a possessive, proprietary and identificatory mode of
appropriation in favor of a differentiated reflective process.17
By the end of Eros, the stanzas have shifted away from an extremely
negative characterization of Tyche and toward a more positively valued
34 Urworte Goethisch

conception of education (Bildung) that is neither merely instinctual nor

forcefully imposed from the outside. This new conception instead envisions
a reflective and quasi-autonomous process that the demon initiates under the
auspices and inspiration of Eros. The form of this education is self-education.
It is not primarily concerned with “contents” or “objects” (which are essen-
tially contingent), but defines a specific (quasi-Kantian) perceptual form
based on the awareness that all “objects” are also forms, “demons,” entities
whose diachronic nature and inside-outside structure make full comprehen-
sion impossible.
Where Dämon and Tyche emphasize gender difference as a conflict
between essentialized masculine and feminine principles, Eros dissolves this
opposition: first, because the recognition of the other as an “other self,” an
other demon, implies that this model may apply universally—not only inter-
subjectively but also with respect to “inanimate” objects. The sexes are equal
insofar as both are born with an innate identity or “demon.” Also homo-
sexuality—perhaps influenced by the “Orphic” legacy and the weak gender
differentiation of the Dämon paradigm, which, though figured as masculine,
can be read as a birthright of all humans—would not be stigmatized, since
the interaction of nature (Dämon) and object-choice (Tyche) allow for more
than one “way.” The expansiveness of Goethe’s idea of nature in Eros means
that anything is possible. If the idea of monogamy is granted conceptual
preeminence in the end, it is as a model of how the demonically inspired
individual can learn, interdemonically, to “embrace a second being like itself
with eternal, indestructible affection” (UO 16). The ideal of monogamy here
stands for a form of self-reflection that is the precondition for autonomy as
deliberate faithfulness to oneself—as opposed to merely enforced, accidental,
instinctual, or otherwise unreflected conformism.
The commentary does not stop with the “happy ending,” but interprets
its more devotional form of Eros as a relation of Dämon and Tyche that
sublates the latter within the former, “demonically” animating the “tychic”
neutrality of the world. This new configuration, however, recasts each indi-
vidual as a mere demon among demons, giving rise to much more binding
collective forms.18 Ananke—compulsion or necessity—begins as a natural
law originating in the erotic bond between individuals and ends up in the
general forms of collective necessity: positive law, society, and government.
According to the commentary, “freedom is given up through free decision,”
in a seemingly inevitable devil’s bargain. Here the commentary shifts again,
away from the situation of the individual “demon” and toward collective,
societal, and transgenerational considerations, resulting in a mini-theory of
the genesis of civil society: “Family follows family, tribe follows tribe; a peo-
ple has discovered itself and perceives that the individual’s decision is also
proper for the whole, and it makes this verdict irrevocable in law” (UO 16).
Thus monogamy, chosen by the will of the individual and seconded by law
and custom, gives rise to matrimony.
Demonic Primal Words 35

Any desire to read Goethe’s text as a triumph of rationalization or prog-

ress or civilization—or as the affirmation of a categorical imperative in the
style of Kant—or as an “education of mankind”—or as a blossoming of the
private demon into the public good—will be disappointed by the pessimistic
sentence that precedes the Ananke stanza: “And so that everything is resolved
for all of time and eternity, neither state nor church nor tradition will permit
any lack of ceremonies” (UO 16). As the stanza itself gloomily affirms, there
is nothing good about the intersection of individual and collective wills:

Anagkh, Nöthigung.
Da ist’s denn wieder wie die Sterne wollten:
Bedingung und Gesetz und aller Wille
Ist nur ein Wollen, weil wir eben sollten,
Und vor dem Willen schweigt die Willkühr stille;
Das Liebste wird vom Herzen weggescholten,
Dem harten Muß bequemt sich Will und Grille.
So sind wir scheinfrey denn, nach manchen Jahren,
Nur enger dran als wir am Anfang waren.

Anagkh, Necessity.
Now all follows once again the stars’ will:
The terms and laws and the wills of all
Are but a single will, just because we have to,
And before the will all choice is silenced;
The most beloved is exiled from the heart,
Desire and fancy submit to hard compulsion.
Thus apparently then, after many years, we are
Only more tightly bound than in the beginning.

The necessity of self-discipline and ultimately of self-sacrifice—the modes

of renunciation (Entsagung) demanded by collectively and intersubjectively
instituted forms—is not given a positive face, rationalized, or purified of
resentment. The individual—the vehicle of Dämon and Tyche, of will (der
Wille) as well as arbitrary desire (Willkühr, Grille)—is silenced before the
authoritarian and catholic rule of Ananke. Even Eros, “the most loved” (das
Liebste, gender neutral), is banished “from the heart” and “sent away with
harsh words.” The experience is self-explanatory: there is “no one who has
not felt himself painfully compelled when he even so much as recalls such
situations in his memory, and there are even quite a few who would want to
despair, when the present moment holds him captive in this way” (UO 17).
As was also the case in the preceding stanzas, the last two lines of Ananke
point forward, toward the last word, Elpis, which, according to the com-
mentary, needs no commentary. The fateful tone of the Dämon stanza, which
presided over the beginning, is pure freedom in comparison with the social
36 Urworte Goethisch

constraints of Ananke. She allows not even the appearance or simulation of

freedom, causing the many years of growth, development, and maturation
to seem futile. The only freedom that emerges from Ananke is the “freedom
from illusion”—disillusionment of the illusion of freedom—producing the
unerotic affects of realism, conservatism, and pessimism. This leaves “us”
(first-person plural, object-case) more “tightly bound”—enger dran—than
ever, but at the same time “closer,” “nearer” (enger dran) to something else. At
this limit of a different beyond, the uncertain quality of Elpis is reflected in the
cessation of the commentary. Confronted with unyielding Ananke, the reader
is instructed to “rush to the final lines, where every gentle spirit will gladly
take over the task of creating their own ethical and religious commentary”
(UO 17). Elpis thus introduces a moment of hermeneutic freedom—the free-
dom to make one’s own commentary—which extends beyond the last word
of the “Urworte” and beyond the interpretive authority of the commentary:

Elpis, Hoffnung.
Doch solcher Grenze, solcher ehrnen Mauer
Höchst widerwärtge Pforte wird entriegelt,
Sie stehe nur mit alter Felsendauer!
Ein Wesen regt sich leicht und ungezügelt,
Aus Wolkendecke, Nebel, Regenschauer
Erhebt sie uns, mit ihr, durch sie beflügelt,
Ihr kennt sie wohl, sie schwärmt nach allen Zonen;
Ein Flügelschlag! und hinter uns Aeonen.

Elpis, Hope.
But such a limit, such a steely wall,
Its most revolting portal is unlatched,
Though it may stand with a mountain’s age!
A being arises lightly, without reins,
Out of the clouds’ cover, fog and rainfall,
It lifts us up, with her, by her wings,
You know her well, she swarms toward every zone;
A wing flap! and behind us lie the eons.

Hope, characterized by liminality, ubiquity, and a subtly transgressive nature,

rescues the individual from the strictures of Ananke. Theo Buck reads Elpis
as a Pegasus figure (UO 60), invoking the power of the imagination—poetry
and literature—to transcend the determinateness of the worldly here and
now.19 Without being able to destroy constraints, Elpis rises above them, per-
haps momentarily, but constantly, all of the time and everywhere, unfettering
the fixed forms of time and fate.20
The possibility of freedom at the limit of constraint is finally reflected in
the relation of text and commentary. In the end, the fixed authority of the
Demonic Primal Words 37

stanzas, the “demonic” development of originary “Urworte” and the com-

mentary’s dubious pedantic interpretations, relax to admit the possibility that
each demon, every individual reader, will continue the reading in his or her
own way. The “Urworte” thus come full circle in an allegory of reading open-
ing up multiple conflicting truth-claims, which are set into relation without
allowing any to dominate. At first, interpretive freedom emerges from the
space between them and out of their contradictions, and in the end, this free-
dom is itself allegorized in Elpis. Hope can be read as a displaced return to
the demon: she is the demon in a state of alterity and self-forgetting. Hope
reincarnates the self in its freedom from itself, from the “eons” of its own past
and present identity, which now appear as a distant landscape, the frozen
remainders of unfinished diachronic beginnings. Neither synchronic nor dia-
chronic, Elpis is achronic in her ability to leave worldly time with its “ancient
mountain’s age” behind her; she is polychronic in her ability to “rise above
the eons” and view them from a distance, not as a unified and accumulated
tradition, but as if from above, with the subjective selectivity of hindsight.
At the beginning and at the end, the commentary characterizes the
“Urworte” as a semi-religious cognitive model, akin to self-help or astrology.
In between, the “Urworte” are developed in various iterations and transla-
tions, in order to represent a truth—the truth of which remains to be proven
by its effectiveness. The truth of “Urworte” depends on their usefulness for
life, on whether they are believed and how they are implemented. Each indi-
vidual stanza and Urwort is possessed by its own Dämon—indelible imprint
and demonic potential—its own Tyche—historical contingencies of under-
standing—its own Eros—productive and reproductive passion—its own
Ananke—force and dogmatic authority—and its own Elpis—the rereading
and eventual transgression of everything fixed and inescapable. This five-
part rhetorical-hermeneutic model reflects a delicate balance. Within these
parameters, the risk of overemphasizing any of the five moments is clear: the
composite balance and dynamic five-part quintessence will revert to a static
and dogmatic essentialism if any element is allowed to rule over the others.
The possibilities of such reductions can be assessed as (politically and ethi-
cally) desirable or regrettable, but the composition of the “Urworte” as a text
is a deliberate balancing act. It can conceive the lack of balance within its
system of counterweights, but as long as none of the weights are removed,
the balance is preserved.
 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

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Wetters, Kirk.
Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
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Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/33934.

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 Chapter Two

Demons of Morphology

Aber das Erdenleben ist doch ein Prozeß der Umgeburt

(Umgestaltung). Wer ist schuld daran, daß man sich in einen
Teufel umwandelt? [But if life on earth is undoubtedly a
process of transformation through rebirth, whose fault is it if
someone transforms himself into a devil?]
—Stavrogin in Dostoyevsky’s Demons, from an extra
dialogue published in the 1918 German Piper edition

Given the size and importance of Goethe’s natural scientific writings, my

analysis of his theory of morphology will be relatively brief. Impossible to
definitively categorize, Goethe’s work as a natural scientist and his thinking
about nature can be read as philosophical reflections—whether in the direc-
tion of ontology, Kantian critique, or an aesthetic theory—or as a strange
milestone in the history of science, somewhere between Linnaeus and Dar-
win, or as a figural-symbolic system that informs Goethe’s literary work, or
perhaps even as a literary work in its own right. Though these considerations
inform my approach, I will not explore them in detail. Despite their com-
plexity, Goethe’s morphological writings are crucial for the demonic, and not
only because his most schematic conception of it, the Orphic “Urworte,” was
first published in the Morphology. Twentieth-century readings of the demonic
tended to freely mix the demonic with morphology. With these later develop-
ments in mind, the present chapter seeks in a preliminary way to establish
connections and differences between morphology and the demonic. This is
first of all a question of how Goethe’s “Urworte” may be read in the context
of their first 1820 publication in the Morphology. Though Gundolf exploited
it in his Goethe biography, the connection to natural science may be at odds
with strictly autobiographical or anthropological readings of the demonic.
In comparison to the “Urworte” commentary in their second 1820 publi-
cation in On Art and Antiquity, the context of morphology focuses on even
more primal and general forms. In a manuscript from the mid-1790s,1 Goethe

39
40 Demons of Morphology

defined morphology in opposition to the specialized disciplines of “natural

history, natural science, anatomy, chemistry, animal physiology, and psychol-
ogy” as the master-term of the life sciences. Morphology is the “observation
of the organic whole through the consideration of all of the separate aspects
and their connection through the power of the mind” (HA 13:123; FA 364).
According to Dorothea Kuhn, the editor of the Frankfurt edition of the mor-
phology, Goethe was the first to use the term “morphology” in the context of
the natural sciences. He first conceived it, according to Kuhn, as “a doctrine
of forms [Gestaltenlehre] . . . meant to comprise all phenomena of natural
history, the organic as well as the inorganic” (FA 1015). This idea of form
focuses on phenomena as they appear. A fragment titled “Morphology,” per-
haps also from the 1790s, states that morphology “rests on the conviction
that everything that is must also show and indicate itself” (FA 349).
One motivation of this conception, especially in its later and more devel-
oped form, was Goethe’s concern that the sciences were becoming too
analytical and specialized. His 1829 “Analysis and Synthesis” emphasizes that
analyses are only possible on the basis of preexisting syntheses (HA 13:51).
Against science’s expansion into an increasing number of partial disciplines,
morphology is the science of the whole. From this perspective, analytic inter-
ventions can only be meaningful in light of their possible derivation from a
presupposed totality and continuity of being—a “harmonia mundi” as Kuhn
calls it (FA 1013). Morphology in this sense is not a branch of the sciences
but science itself as the science of science—transcendental meta-science—
based on the ontological assumption of the primacy of the whole.2
How does the morphological scientific method work in practice? Somewhat
contrary to what the name “morphology” might suggest, it is not a formalism
(in the sense of a taxonomic approach), but rather a “trans-formalism”:

Form [die Gestalt] is something that moves, develops, passes away [ist
ein bewegliches, ein werdendes, ein vergehendes]. The theory of forms
is a theory of transformation. [Gestaltenlehre ist Verwandlungs­lehre.]
The theory of metamorphosis is the key to all of Nature’s signs.
[Die Lehre der Metamorphose ist der Schlüssel zu allen Zeichen der
Natur]. (FA 349)

This subordination of form to time and transformation breaks with the taxo-
nomic thought of the eighteenth century. Metamorphosis, for example, more
readily includes problems of function as a reason or motive of transforma-
tion.3 Morphology does not view natural forms in static isolation, nor does
it seek to tabulate systems of identity and difference between different forms.
Instead it traces the identity and transformation of forms in time.
The implications of this focus on transformation are clearest in Goethe’s
botanical writings. A note he made in Italy, for example, summarizes ideas
that he later developed more systematically: “Hypothesis. Everything is
Demons of Morphology 41

leaf. and through this simplicity the greatest multiplicity becomes possible
[Hypothese. Alles ist Blat. und durch diese Einfachheit wird die größte Man-
nigfaltigkeit möglich]” (HA 13:582).4 The point of this hypothesis is that the
various parts of a plant are not parts of a whole but transformations of a sin-
gle underlying unit. Goethe calls this unit “leaf.”5 Form here is not defined as
a (Platonic) conceptual unity—as a “tree”—but as the metamorphic continu-
ity of the smallest (visually) identifiable unit. Goethe sees the leaf as the basis
of the visible transformations that define the plant over time throughout its
life cycle. The leaf, isolated in this way, may be, as Goethe realized, only an
arbitrary and nominal unit within a chain or cycle of transformations, but it
can still figure as an allegory or metonymy for morphology’s idea of the con-
tinuity of forms. Form, rather than a static shape or Gestalt, is conceived as a
cycle of cycles, a developing variation capable, at the limit, of encompassing
all living beings.
From the earliest inklings and fragmentary texts of the 1780s to the
published writings on morphology, metamorphosis is the main idea of
morphology. In “History of His Botanical Studies” (“Der Verfasser teilt die
Geschichte seiner botanischen Studien mit”), first published in 1818 in the
Morphology and revised at the end of the 1820s, Goethe reflects on Italy and
the primal plant (Urpflanze):

I pursued all forms [Gestalten] as they presented themselves to

me in their variations and thus achieved complete illumination at
the final stop of my journey, in Sicily, regarding the original iden-
tity [ursprüngliche Identität, emphasis Goethe’s] of all parts of the
plant—and then I sought to pursue and perceive this insight every-
where. (HA 13:164; FA 748).

Implicit in the idea of metamorphosis is the possibility of deriving all (botani-

cal) forms from an ideal primal form, an Ur-type at the base of all visible
forms. Rather than drawing analytic distinctions, metamorphosis makes
them fluid to such a degree that conceptual and terminological differentia-
tions begin to appear arbitrary.
This idea is expressed in paragraph 120 of Goethe’s “On the Metamor-
phosis of Plants” (“Zur Metamorphose der Pflanzen”), which was published
first in 1790 and republished in 1818 in the first volume of the Morphology.
“The leaf” (das Blatt) may appear to be the basic unit of transformation,
but Goethe emphasizes how metonymically inapt it is to name the whole
continuum after it:

It goes without saying that we would need to have a general term [ein
allgemeines Wort] with which to refer to this organ that is metamor-
phosed into such varied forms [dieses in so verschiedene Gestalten
metamorphosierte Organ], in order to compare all of the appearances
42 Demons of Morphology

of its form to one another . . . [We] can just as well say that a sta-
men [Staubwerkzeug] is a contracted petal as that a petal is a stamen
[Staubgefäß] in a state of expansion. (HA 13:101; FA 150–51; MA
12:67)

Goethe’s use of two different words for “stamen” illustrates the general point
that human language is unable to definitively name the “parts” of naturally
occurring wholes. The “basic unit” is always nominal in that it refers neither
to “building blocks” that compose organic beings, nor to an abstract whole.
It only symbolizes a continuum of forms, a cycle of cycles that allows a con-
tinuous “part” to transform itself within itself.
Goethe’s idea of the Urpflanze has become entirely emblematic of this
idea, and his uncertainty as to its empirical or rather ideal status parallels
the contradictions developed in the five “Urworte.” The “primal plant” may
have been conceived in ways that caused it to resemble a Platonic form or
Kantian a priori,6 but in the Italian Journey, before these more philosophi-
cal articulations, Goethe seemed to expect that it might exist in reality. On
June 9, 1787, he wrote to Charlotte von Stein: “The Urpflanze will be the
most amazing creature [das wunderlichste Geschöpf] in the world, for which
Nature herself shall envy me. With this model [Modell] and its key [Schlüs-
sel] one then would be able to invent additional plants into infinity [ins
Unendliche]” (HA 13:579).7 One could discount such a remark, which is
clearly non-scientific and apparently expresses its author’s enthusiasm for
his topic—but with respect to the demonic, the affective investment may be
more significant than objective scientific validity. The superimposition of a
morphological schema with a genetic derivation makes it seem that the origi-
nal ancestor might actually exist, which would exhibit all of the traits of its
offspring. And through this original “model”—real or imaginary—it should
be possible through an act of imagination to prospectively design infinite—
real or imaginary—plants. The process can work in either direction, but in
the letter the perception of an Urpflanze is primarily an act of intuition: the
Urpflanze is above all the possession of a subject—a possession that is the
envy of Nature herself. Because the Urpflanze is supposed to be based on real
forms, its real existence seems like a possibility, either as an ancient origin (an
Urpflanze) or as a speculative end (in the infinity of subjective “inventions” to
which the Urpflanze is the “model” and “key”).
The Urpflanze thus resembles the “old Adam” of the “Urworte.” It is
the primogenitor, Urvater, and Dämon of the botanical world; it is also the
Urmutter Tyche, encompassing every possible combination of the original
material. It is the primal imprint from which both extant forms and possible
forms are derived. As an Urphänomen, it is the variable “key” that permits
the development, metamorphosis, derivation, and interrelation of forms. Like
the Orphic Dämon and the originary “Urworte,” the Urpflanze is defined
by the tension between infinite potentiality and determinate inheritance,
Demons of Morphology 43

between lawless metamorphosis and a natural “law” that dictates develop-

ment. This morphological development may also clarify some apparently
contradictory aspects of the idea of “characteristic form” (geprägte Form die
lebend sich entwickelt) in the “Urworte”. At the limit, these words define the
Dämon’s relation to its own development, which is to say: form’s relation to
metamorphosis—its relation to Tyche.
This question of developmental form and its correlation to organic meta-
morphosis is the main focus of morphology. In a late essay, “Principes de
Philosophie Zoologique” (1830–32), Goethe uses the idea of developmental
transformation to unify the synthetic and analytic approaches of Étienne Geof-
froy Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier. As part of a terminological critique,
Goethe introduces words that he considers fundamentally unsuited to the
natural sciences. The term “composition,” with constructivist implications and
transparently analytic conception, is the object of sharp criticism. The idea of
composition is a misnomer, Goethe argues, in the arts as well as in the sciences:

Composition is yet another infelicitous word that is mechanically

related to the preceding mechanical term [materials]. The French
introduced just such a word into our theories when they began to
think and write about the arts. According to them, the painter com-
poses his paintings, and especially the musician is nothing but a
composer; and yet, if either wishes to earn the true name of the artist,
then they should not compose their works [so setzen sie ihre Werke
nicht zusammen], but instead develop a kind of an indwelling image
[sie entwickeln irgend ein inwohnendes Bild], a higher resonance
[einen höhern Anklang] in accord with the principles of nature and
art [natur- und kunstgemäß].
Just as in art, the idea of composition has a debasing effect when-
ever it is used to speak of nature. Prefabricated organs do not assemble
and compose themselves. They develop themselves from and through
each other to produce a necessary existence that reaches toward the
whole [zu einem notwendigen ins Ganze greifenden Dasein]. In this
context it may be possible to speak of function, form, color, measure,
matter, weight and of other determinations, however they may be
called—because everything is admissible to observation and research.
But through it all, the living organism makes its way undisturbed
[das Lebendige geht ungestört seinen Gang], propagates and repro-
duces itself [pflanzt sich weiter], hovering and fluctuating [schwebt,
schwankt] until it at last achieves its final form [Vollendung]. (HA
13:245–46; FA 838)

The living organism goes its own way. This is a translation of the Dämon
paradigm from the “Urworte”: everything that lives—which truly deserves
the name of life or art—makes its way as if according to its own internal
44 Demons of Morphology

program, undisturbed by outside influences and interventions. It moves and

advances in a kind of perpetual motion that removes it from the sphere of
static composites and human analytic perceptions. In the context of the
opposition between analysis and synthesis, between mechanical and organic
forms, development (Entwicklung) is Goethe’s preferred terminology for liv-
ing forms (das Lebendige), which include not only organic nature, art, and
literature, but also biographical life.8 In light of this morphological premise,
“characteristic form” (geprägte Form die lebend sich entwickelt) is the for-
mula of life as such, the key to the metamorphic destiny of everything lifelike,
and everything that develops.
Without denying the problematic organological basis of this ideal of uni-
versal development, Goethe’s morphological conception of geprägte Form
envisions only a limited determinism and a very flexible idea of nature. The
sheer existence of forms is an ontological given, but they do not automati-
cally constitute a destiny or predetermination. The form of forms can only be
known in their metamorphoses, and, since metamorphosis can only happen
over time, morphology can only be a retrospective science. The past history of
accomplished metamorphoses may be taken as possibly predictive of a “fate”
(as Spengler would say), but morphology’s idea of metamorphosis includes
a plurality of metamorphoses, each of which may be unforeseeable in itself,
and each of which, based on possible interactions and under the ongoing
influence of changing external conditions, may be exposed to unpredictable
shifts in both function and form. This guarantees that, as long as metamor-
phosis is the master-category of morphology, no development can ever be
decisively finished, closed off, or entirely predictable. The organological basis
of morphology is thus not a problem insofar as it is purely descriptive: it
allows nature to be whatever nature does. More troubling issues arise, how-
ever, if descriptive morphology becomes normative morphology. The latter
would propose a future telos on the horizon of past transformations. Such an
implicit teleology is represented in Goethe’s word “Vollendung” (perfection,
culmination). Even provisional or “empirical” teleologies can easily be inter-
preted as symbols that can then replicate themselves in implicit or explicit
analogies. Thus the mere perception of teleologies in the organic life cycle
easily acquires normative or idealizing significance.
In this way, morphology’s forms are able to provide and even impose
their models on art and life. The analogical extension of purely descriptive
morphology allows it to approach natural and human history as one continu-
ous “development.” Spengler’s later conception especially, which envisions
a cyclical “blossoming and fading” of all life, reveals the twofold risk of
morphological symbolic modeling: it either reduces human history and the
history of human creations to natural determinism, or it sees natural and
human history, including art history, as a single process of culmination.9 In
the latter case, which leans toward historical optimism, a series of familiar
ideological fallacies, up to and including eugenics, comes into play; it is a
Demons of Morphology 45

question of the degree to which humans can or should try to supplement the
supposed ends of morphological nature. The former case of historical pes-
simism functions similarly, except that instead of using morphological reason
to further nature’s ends, it is invoked to justify measures intended to prevent,
mitigate, or rationalize an impending end.
Morphology’s conception of nature is inescapably Janus-faced, ambivalent
in its dependence on the human perspective, which focuses either on inevi-
table mortality or infinite fecundity. In the writings on morphology and in
the “Urworte,” the underlying problem of morphology emerges as a specific
polarity, a relation of the individual and the universal in which the former is
finite and determinate, with strict (“demonic”) limits that are offset by the
boundless universal (“tychic”) flow of time and infinity. In comparison to the
“Urworte,” morphology thus arguably places greater emphasis on Tyche and
on the Dämon-Tyche couplet. Their relation is shown to be infinitely modi-
fiable, projectable into other polar oppositions such as individual/totality,
individual/society, part/whole, synthesis/analysis. In the context of morphol-
ogy, the “Urworte” paradigm is capable of encompassing the forms of nature
and history. It is also more than just a conceptual apparatus: it is apparently
motivated to perceive a world that is animated and alive with development.
Behind all vocabularies of life, the “Urworte” represent a medium through
which all terminological systems can be translated back to an original, “natu-
ral” unity.
The “Urworte” raise the meta-science of morphology to the level of a
universal system, which Goethe also expressed in the “pulsing” symbol of
systole and diastole.10 This generalized image of morphology extends the
“demonic” conflict between the discrete Dämon and its world (Tyche) into
a metaphor of universal dualism. From this elevated perspective, no single
terminological grid—analysis/synthesis, Dämon/Tyche/Eros/Ananke/Elpis,
systole/diastole—can be the referent of such a meta-metaphorical polarity.
According to the rules of morphology, this polarity can have no ontological
or linguistic ground that would not be a false metonymy (such as “everything
is leaf”). The falseness of the metonymy means that no language can refer to
“form-in-development”; it can only be represented by metaphors, which are
arbitrary and improper in the sense that the relation in question can always
be expressed otherwise. Such a metaphorical-analogical continuum, unlike a
conceptual or definitional base, allows forms of continuity to be perceived,
which are constantly implicit in empirical forms. But this continuity itself can
only be nominally expressed. Even the “Orphic” terminology is arbitrary in
the same way as the word “leaf”: it can only refer to a single moment of the
continual metamorphosis of a form that is normally—just as arbitrarily—
called a “tree” (or “life” in the case of the “Urworte”).
The extended consequence of morphology’s emphasis on transition and
transformation over identity and identifiability is the complete deconstruc-
tion of the conceptual edifice of science (to the extent that it is dependent on
46 Demons of Morphology

nomenclature) and of language in general (to the extent that a morphologi-

cally conceived universe permits metaphors but not referents).11 “Systole and
diastole” is an emphatic name for something that can also be called “analy-
sis and synthesis,” but which is only knowable in its constant figuration in
life, art, and nature. Constantly reconfigured, but literally unspeakable, the
demonic duality reflects underlying unity. If it did not, it would be not only
unspeakable but unthinkable: metamorphosis, unchecked by a unifying sense
of form, would be only chaos and entropy. Confronted by an inconceivable
referent—“the inconceivable” (das Unfassliche), as Goethe calls it in Poetry
and Truth (HA 10:175)—the only alternative to conceiving nothing is to
impose a temporary stopgap, a word that names the unnameable. Goethe
discusses form in this sense as the precondition of knowledge and reference
in an 1823 essay, which is aptly called “Probleme”:

The idea of metamorphosis is a very noble but at the same time very
dangerous gift from above [eine höchst gefährliche Gabe von oben].
It leads into formlessness [ins Formlose] and destroys knowledge by
dissolving it. It is like the vis centrifuga and would lose itself in infin-
ity [ins Unendliche], if an opposing drive were not granted to it. I am
thinking of the drive toward specification [Spezifikationstrieb], the
tough tendency to persist [das zähe Beharrlichkeitsvermögen] that is
possessed by everything that has once come into reality. It is a vis cen-
tripeta, which at its deepest level [in ihrem tiefsten Grunde] cannot
be touched by anything external [welcher keine Äußerlichkeit etwas
anhaben kann]. (HA 13:35; FA 582–83)

Forms are never static, but the forms of their metamorphoses also cannot
be completely random. The form of forms, however, the condition of the
possibility of knowledge, can only be known through the forms of their
metamorphosis. In the terms of the “Urworte,” the Dämon here is the anchor
of form, defining the boundary of Being and Nothingness. The demon is the
identity and durability—Spezifikationstrieb and Beharrlichkeitsvermögen—
of developmental form, the centripetal force that prevents metamorphic
Tyche from entirely dissolving everything.
Within the horizons of morphology’s diachronic conception of form, the
form of metamorphosis is itself subject to the metamorphoses produced by
metaphorical shifts, which make forms into much broader developmental
models. The Dämon-Tyche opposition, like all of the others, is only an arbi-
trary “key” or nominal reduction within a field of possible metamorphoses
and metaphorical extensions. Because morphology is implicitly a science of
conceptual metamorphosis—of the conceptual acrobatics necessary to name
and describe metamorphoses—it is a meta-metaphorology that finds “the
same” basic forms metaphorized everywhere. But it remains aware of its own
reliance on metaphor, which means that the “forms” thus “identified” only
Demons of Morphology 47

actually exist in a differential state. Underlying and overarching unities can

only be provisionally posited, and their serial “forms”—synthetic/analytic,
systolic/diastolic, centrifugal/centripetal, tropic/entropic, Dämon/Tyche12—
are based on a network of fragile analogies.
The transposition of “Urworte” into alternate terms exposes the insuffi-
ciency of all of these terms. The polarities posited in these words do not refer,
except perhaps subliminally—below the level of what they actually mean—
and this means, in effect, that they risk becoming mere words, arbitrary signs
that fail to name a deeper system of relations (and do not even try to do so).
“Urworte” thus emerge as mere signs, extending, propagating, and unifying
the supposedly “primal” opposition of and between all forms. The nature of
this nature itself can never be uniquely specified, however, because the oppo-
sitional pairs only parallel the Dämon-Tyche relation without ever being
identical with it. Such is the “danger” of metamorphosis, which corresponds
to the negational structure of the demonic from Poetry and Truth: short of
conceptual or referential precision, negation and circumlocution are all that
remain—but these means are only suggestive of an underlying mystery.
In all cases, this suggestion is the source of fascination. Morphology’s sug-
gestiveness lies in its insinuation of overarching unities that apparently prevail
in the analogical interlacing of countless transformational paradigms. In an
essay from 1831, for example, “On the Spiral Tendency of Vegetation” (“Zur
Spiraltendenz der Vegetation”), the development of plants is theorized in an
opposition between “spiral” and “vertical” tendencies or drives. These forces
are clearly legible as a further illustration of the relation of Tyche and Dämon:

In the growth of vegetation, the vertically ascending system effec-

tuates the continually existent aspect [das Bestehende], which is
simultaneously that which tends toward solidity and persistence [das
Solideszierende, Verharrende]; it refers to the fibers in short-lived
plants and to the majority of the wood in long-lived plants.
The spiral system is the constantly expanding, reproducing, and
nourishing part, and as such it is short-lived, which accordingly
isolates it from the vertical system. If it extends its effects too exces-
sively, it very quickly becomes weakened and subject to blight. When
attached to a vertical system, both grow together to produce a lasting
unity [eine dauernde Einheit], either as wood or some other solid.
Neither of the two systems can be conceived on its own. They are
always and eternally [immer und ewig] together, but when they are
in perfect balance [im völligen Gleichgewicht], they produce the most
perfect vegetable growth [das Vollkommenste der Vegetation]. (HA
13:133; FA 787)

In another passage, Goethe describes the spiral tendency (diachronically)

as the “basic law of life” (Grundgesetz des Lebens, HA 13:134; FA 788),
48 Demons of Morphology

whereas the more timeless vertical system is “powerful but simple” (mächtig
aber einfach, HA 13:135; FA 795). The superimposition of the Dämon-Tyche
and these two “tendencies” or “systems” innate to plant life may produce
reciprocal illumination. The two interdependent but inherently conflictual
“tendencies” formalize life as a dualism, not in a Manichean sense, but rather
in the interest of establishing relational limit-parameters of development.
Having observed such an opposition of forces, Goethe pursues even
broader analogical conclusions by expanding the two “tendencies” into much
more general polarities. He tends, therefore, to read the tendencies of plants
as a symbol for the general tendency of tendencies. This exemplifies the mor-
phological temptation to see parallelism everywhere. This is not just my own
interpretive tendency—because I hope to have shown that Goethe himself
thinks this way. It may be difficult, though, to tell what is mine and what is
Goethe’s, because morphology’s perception of ubiquitous analogous forms
makes it unclear when to stop. But without denying the optics of my own
reading—which views morphology through the “Urworte”—I would observe
that morphology, as Goethe himself reads it, produces an open system of
analogies and potentially also symbols. This infinite analogical expanse—
which becomes truly persuasive if one believes that there is something at the
base of it—seeks to compensate for morphology’s epistemic deficiency.
At the end of his notes on the “spiral tendency,” Goethe interprets the ten-
dencies in a way that might seem anthropomorphic, except that the -morphic
here, rigorously understood, excludes prefixes. The two plant tendencies are
construed as masculine and feminine principles, which drastically ties them
to the gendered binary of Dämon and Tyche:

The vertically as well as the spirally striving system [das vertikal- so

wie das spiralstrebende System] are connected in the living plant in
the most intimate way imaginable. If we see the former proving itself
to be decidedly masculine and the latter to be decidedly feminine,
then we can imagine all vegetation [die ganze Vegetation], starting
from its very roots [von der Wurzel auf], to be secretly androgynously
interconnected. Upon which basis, therefore, in the course of the
transformations of growth [in Verfolg der Wandlungen des Wachs­
tums], both systems differentiate themselves into open opposition
[sich im offenbaren Gegesenatz auseinander sondern] and decisively
separate themselves from each other [entschieden gegen einander
überstellen], in order to reunite themselves again in a higher sense
[um sich in einem höhern Sinne wieder zu vereinigen]. (HA 13:148;
FA 805)

One may be amazed or horrified at Goethe’s ability to discover a consis-

tent symbolic system writ large in nature. This passage leaves little doubt
that Goethe’s thinking about synthesis implies the possibility of moving
Demons of Morphology 49

analogically from particular to general in a way that elevates every empirical

detail and every experimental outcome to a symbol of the general relation
of things. The well-known analogy of human chemistry and actual chemical
reactions in the Elective Affinities depends on this kind of thinking, which is
condensed to a formula at the end of Faust II: “Everything transitory is only
a parable” (Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis). Everything transitory—
that is: everything is only an analogy, a metaphor that transcends finite limits
and converts into the universal and general. Everything “empirical”—limited
and temporal—constantly transcends itself symbolically as non-empirical
meaning. The primary and only function of the “real” world—the one that
changes and passes away—is the symbolization of the transcendent. Science
in this conception can never do more than create new allegories of universal
relations, supplementary models of the way of the world.13
Despite the obvious grandeur of Goethe’s symbolic syntheses, points
of concern noted in chapter 1 may be again registered here. For morphol-
ogy, that which is specifically individual, singular, and “transitory,” though
granted a kind of indirect immortality by virtue of its symbolic potential,
can only realize itself by relinquishing its singularity, by its ability to be rep-
resentative with respect to a more primal (or “higher”) totality. As in the
Dämon commentary, morphology reduces unconditional uniqueness to a
definite set of representative and transferable characteristics, which at best
produce highly inclusive formulae. Such a master concept cannot provide a
single general rule or a norm for all life, nor does it appear to offer adequate
support for the individual autonomy (as formulated in the Dämon stanza).
Given these options, morphology’s saving grace lies in its normative weak-
ness: the lack of a truly binding or dogmatic form in the “Urworte” allows
individualized recognitions and interpretations to develop within the matrix
of transforming meanings provided by the grand design of the “Urworte.” In
comparison with morphology’s more dualistic and synthetic model, however,
the five-part “quintessence” of the “Urworte” looks like a more sophisticated
formalization, insofar as its universal symbol contains more internal differ-
entiation and is—one would have thought—less prone to misunderstanding.
Through the lens of the “Urworte,” morphology fluctuates between anthro-
pomorphism (and anthropocentrism) and “morphocentrism.” The latter sees
animating tendencies, drives, and “forms” coursing through animate and
inanimate nature.
Either way, morphology ends up as more religion than science or as
a religion of science. The “Urworte” at least do not hide this aspect, but
overtly address it. Occasionally this is also the case with morphology. The
biographical origins of morpho-ontology and its worldviews are casually
discussed in the essay “The Fate of the Manuscript” (“Schicksal der Hand-
schrift”), in which Goethe reflects upon the genesis of his “Metamorphosis
of Plants.” This autobiographical sketch was first published in 1817 in the
first volume of the Morphology. The text’s very first sentence emphasizes
50 Demons of Morphology

the decisive importance of Italy for Goethe’s plant morphology: “Sent back
from form-filled Italy to formless Germany [Aus Italien dem formreichen
in das gestaltlose Deutschland zurückgewiesen], I was forced to exchange
a bright sky for a gloomy one” (HA 13:102; FA 414). Reflecting the differ-
ence between Italy and Germany in their wealth vs. poverty of forms, Goethe
explains that his perceptions of Italy were the result of a simultaneous study
of Italian nature and Greek art. The latter was especially germinal for his
idea of form:

Little by little, I was able to get an overview of the whole [das Ganze
zu überschauen], so as to prepare myself a pure artistic enjoyment
free of all prejudice. Further, I believed I had noted how nature works
through laws to produce a living image [ein lebendiges Bild] that is
the model [Muster] of everything artistic [alles künstlichen]. The third
thing [das dritte] that occupied me was the customs of the people [die
Sitten der Völker], in order to learn from them how the convergence
of necessity and arbitrariness [Notwendigkeit und Willkür], impulse
and will, motion and resistance, leads to something else [ein Drittes]
that is neither art nor nature but both at once, necessary and acciden-
tal [notwendig und zufällig], intentional and blind. I am speaking of
human society [die menschliche Gesellschaft]. (HA 13:102; FA 415)

Vocabulary associated with the “Urworte” is coupled with familiar (if some-
what displaced) dualities, which give rise to third terms. Here, however, unlike
the other examples from the morphology, the movement is not synthetic in
its tendency toward symbolic “elevation.” Two “third terms” are mentioned
(das dritte, ein Drittes), but in the first case, Goethe implies that human cul-
ture and custom, rather than being a synthesis of art and nature, are neither
art nor nature—or ambiguously both at once. Such an understanding gives
human culture an exceptional and excluded status with respect to the univer-
sal symbols of morphology. Whenever human artificiality and artifice are not
representative of a true second nature that can be perceived (or imagined) as
a transparent analogue of Nature, they fit poorly within the general forms of
morphology. The Greeks alone fulfilled the ideal—but human culture usually
gets lost in Tyche and Ananke.
Within the excluded sphere of “culture,” a series of oppositions describe
conflicted and potentially dualistic forms similar to both the “Urworte”
and morphology. As in the “Urworte,” the conflict is mediated (but much
less systematically) by a synthetic moment, a “third” that is “neither art
nor nature,” but both together, which Goethe calls “human society.” Cor-
responding to the Ananke portions of the “Urworte,” human society exhibits
all of the characteristics of Dämon and Tyche—and perhaps also of Eros:
“necessary and contingent,” “intentional and blind.” Despite the fact that
it may first appear as a synthetic progression, this vision of human society
Demons of Morphology 51

produces a monster: in the difference between diverse “customs” (Sitten)

and an idealized analogy of nature and art, “society” is only an exponen-
tially greater version of culture. It is contingency incarnate, pure non-being,
excluded from the morphological analogia entis.14 Thus, in this limited
philosophy of history that introduces the Morphology, human culture and
society are mostly excluded from the representative syntheses of nature and
art. Morphology traces an analogical stream out of nature into life and art,
producing a standard with which the variable norms of human existence
cannot compete. Ad hoc, non-morphological forms of human existence cor-
respond to the possibility of inauthenticity that first arises in the Tyche stanza
of the “Urworte.” Both not only confirm the likelihood of human errancy,
but conceive it as essential. Humanity has a special status with respect to
morphologically derived norms: only humans are capable of forsaking their
proper and innate self, their Dämon. The “Urworte” make this point from
the perspective of the individual, whereas morphology posits it for human
society. Far from any idealism, the “tychic” quality of human culture leaves
it cut off from any meaningful idea of progress (dialectical or otherwise).
Like the Ananke stanza, this passage of the morphology indicates that it is
absolutely normal for societies to exist in a state of endemic delusion and loss
of self.
The “synthetic” track of nature and the “tychic” variability of society thus
seem to be mutually exclusive—but a final synthesis of the two remains con-
ceivable. This synthesis would raise morphology to the level of a mythology.
Such an ultimate synthesis manifests itself, according to Goethe’s description
in the extended reflection on religion at the end of book 8 of Poetry and
Truth (probably written in 1811 or 1812), as a “pulsation” of being and non-
being, self and non-self, identity and non-identity.
Unlike the 1817 remarks on society, book 8 depicts Goethe’s religious
ideas in their earliest development (at the end of the 1760s). Goethe attri-
butes his later religious ideas (what I am calling “morpho-theology”) to the
study of “Arnold’s history of the Church and of heresy.” This reading led him
to sympathize with many heretical ideas: “The spirit of contradiction and
the enjoyment of paradox exists in all of us” (Der Geist des Widerspruchs
und die Lust zum Paradoxen steckt in uns allen) (HA 9:350; MA 16:376).
Gottfried Arnold’s Pietism (see MA 16:985) may perhaps be traced in a sen-
tence in which Goethe writes that he “had often heard that every man must
have his own religion in the end” (HA 9:350; MA 16:376). According to the
autobiography, this idea inspired him to design his own religion based on
his reading in the history of heresy: “And thus I built for myself a world that
was certainly rather strange in appearance [die seltsam genug aussah]” (HA
9:350; MA 16:379). Such qualifications, as well as the use of the past tense,
allow Goethe to distance himself from this early construction—and his early
“heresy.” But by the time he reaches the end of the chapter, he is making gen-
eral pronouncements in the present tense, one of which indicates the possible
52 Demons of Morphology

breadth of the sources of his idea of the demonic: “The history of all religions
and philosophies teaches us that the great truths that are indispensable to
man have been passed down by diverse nations and in diverse times and in
various ways, indeed in strange fables and images dictated by the limitations
of each” (HA 9:353; MA 16:381).
The demonic in book 20 of Poetry and Truth is similarly introduced in
the context of religion. It is said to have emerged from “the interstices” (die
Zwischenräume, HA 10:175) of religious knowledge and individual experi-
ence. The demonic is also characterized as a religious self-design, conceived
“after the example of the ancients and others who thought something
similar” (HA 10:175–76). Reading book 8 and book 20 together, Goethe’s
mature conception may include pre- and non-Christian layers in addition to
the “heretical” tradition—but this does not mean that he forgot the “Neopla-
tonism,” “Hermeticism,” “Mysticism,” and “Cabbalism” that inspired him in
his youth (HA 10:350; MA 16:376–79).
The homemade religion that Goethe presents at the end of book 8 looks
very much like what book 20 calls the demonic—combined with elements of
morphology. The story begins: “I liked to imagine [vorstellen] for myself a
divinity that produces itself out of eternity [von Ewigkeit her]” (HA 9:351;
MA 16:379). In morphology, nature constantly transcends itself in the sym-
bolic surplus value of metamorphosis. In book 8 as well, the cosmic principle
is self-production through self-transcendence. The “synthetic” trinity here is
an extension and multiplication of an originary self-producing divinity:

But because production cannot be conceived without multiplicity,

this divinity immediately had to appear to itself as a second figure
[ein Zweites], which we recognize under the name of the Son. These
two then also had to continue the act of production [den Akt des
Hervorbringens] and appeared to themselves in turn in the third [im
Dritten], which was now just as existent, living and eternal as the
whole that preceded it [als das Ganze war]. (HA 9:351; MA 16:379)

Continual production of difference within identity, the act and the drive
of production as (apparently) asexual reproduction, leads from a third
to a fourth: to Lucifer, who is a figure of resistance, of the interruption of
harmonious self-production. He, “who already cultivated a contradiction
within him [schon in sich einen Widerspruch hegte],” is the representative
of everything “that does not appear [scheinen] to us to agree with the idea
and the intents of divinity [mit dem Sinne und den Absichten der Gottheit]”
(HA 9:351). This division into different competencies is pragmatic theodicy,
which imagines a separate office for whatever does not fit “our” expectations
about divinity. For readers familiar with the paragraphs about the demonic
in book 20, as well as for readers of Faust, the verb scheinen (“to appear” or
“seems”) stands out: like the demonic, which book 20 presents in terms of
Demons of Morphology 53

“seeming,” and like Mephisto, Lucifer only appears (from “our” perspective)
to be a force of negation, an obstacle to continual self-production. Lucifer is
the moment of non-being that apparently inhabits all being. He blocks the
way back to the origin and primal phenomena; his shadow inhabits every-
thing material, and the Creation is thus a dark (or at least darkened) creation,
because of its obstructed relation to transcendence. Lucifer means that the
world is not a transparent communion with self-producing transcendence,
but instead—in the terms of morphology—the former only symbolizes the
latter. Lucifer is the difference that cannot be eliminated from the analogy.
He does not entirely erase the connection to originary Being, but he makes
Being’s merely analogical continuity into an interrupted filiation, which only
shows signs of derivation from an original unity.
Next Goethe develops a polar (morphological) opposition between
Konzentration (= Lucifer, the power of materialization, determination, and
singularization) and Expansion (= continuity, time, metamorphosis, freedom,
God). This polarity results in a static impasse, favoring static and lifeless “con-
centration,” had the Elohim—like Eros in the “Urworte”—not intervened:

They [the Elohim, the divinity in plural] granted to the infinite Being
the ability to extend itself, to move itself toward them. The proper
pulse of life [der eigentliche Puls des Lebens] was reestablished, and
Lucifer himself could not escape from this intervention [Einwirkung].
This is the epoch when everything emerged that we know as light,
and everything began, which we tend to refer to in the word Creation
[Schöpfung]. (HA 9:352; MA 16:382)15

The ability to constantly find (or invent) the same forms of relation—the
same stories and narratives—shifts morphology from science (as empirical-
analogical modeling) to religion and mythmaking. Based on a morphological
infrastructure reflecting his idea of existence, Goethe retells the story of Cre-
ation with emphasis on the need for a Being that can restore the connection to
divinity. But being continually finds itself under Lucifer’s power, trapped in the
contradictory state of being “at once absolute and limited” (zugleich unbed-
ingt und beschränkt, HA 9:352; MA 16:382). Lucifer’s problem, which man
inherits, is—to use Blumenberg’s word—“self-assertion” (Selbstbehauptung),
self-separation and the forgetting of the Creator. Man, who was supposed
to restore and maintain the connection to divinity, ends up excluded from
it like Lucifer: “Separation from the Benefactor is the real ingratitude, and
thus Lucifer’s fall was for a second time eminent, even though the Creation
itself is nothing but—and never was anything but—a falling away from and a
returning to that which originated it [zum Ursprünglichen]” (HA 9:352–53;
MA 16:380–81). A mythic fall and salvation history is re-internalized, dis-
tributed—perhaps secularized, perhaps remythologized—within the human
condition:
54 Demons of Morphology

It is easy to see how redemption is here not decided from eternity

[von Ewigkeit her], but rather is conceived as eternally necessary. . . .
This recognition alone suffices: that we find ourselves in a condi-
tion [daß wir uns in einem Zustande befinden], which, though it may
appear to draw us downward and to press upon us, nevertheless
gives us the opportunity—and indeed makes it our duty—to raise
ourselves up and to fulfill the intents of the divinity [die Absichten der
Gott­heit], by which we are compelled [genötigt], from one side, to
selfify ourselves [uns zu verselbsten], while, from the other, we do not
neglect [nicht versäumen] to de-selfify ourselves [uns zu entselbstigen]
in regular pulses [in regelmäßigen Pulsen]. (HA 9:353; MA 16:381)

The Luciferian drive to concentration, specification, and individuation is

identical with the self’s inherent drive to become a self. This arrangement,
which separates each self from other selves and turns them against cosmos
and Creator, was instituted in the Creation. But on the other side, in language
reminiscent of the Elpis-stanza of the “Urworte,” the chapter ends with an
image of release from constraint, of a continual redemption from the concen-
trations and specifications of Dämon and Ananke.16 Especially the figure of
rhythmic pulsation—as opposed to a redemption that happens once and for
all—corresponds to the wing beat of Hope. Ananke is the “imprisonment by
the present,” whereas Elpis is a winged being that rises above the present and
“leaves the eons behind it” (UO 17). In the end, the saving demons are forces
of “de-determination,” Tyche and Elpis, which constantly transcend limits
and relativize everything that appears absolute.
On the basis of the end of book 8, it is possible to imagine “human soci-
ety” as Goethe presents it at the beginning of his Morphology in 1817 as
“tychic” in a more positive sense. Human society, culture, and history may
be negative, amorphous, and excluded with respect to nature and morpho-
logical symbolism, but this is precisely in keeping with man’s Luciferian and
contra-divine tendency to self-specify. Humanity tends to reach false (or at
least relative) generalizations and to believe and institute them in ways that
cause human social constructions to fall short of the absolute. Man typically
exists at a distance from the divine norm that morphology can faintly per-
ceive in its symbolic reading of nature. In Poetry and Truth, however, Goethe
does not reach his conclusions by directly contrasting human society and
nature but by attempting to retell the story of Creation in a way that would
adequately explain the situation of man in the world. He wants to reread
and reinterpret material excavated from the history of religion (especially its
heretical strands) in order to imagine how we came to “the state in which
we find ourselves” (der Zustand, in dem wir uns befinden, HA 9:353; MA
16:381).
This story is clearly not meant as the basis for a real religion but is pre-
sented as a theoretical construction of a possible religion, which, at the limit,
Demons of Morphology 55

may have been Goethe’s own. The Creation story at the end of book 8 may
have been Goethe’s religion, at least at a certain moment in his youth, and
perhaps also later in a different way, at the moment when he wrote it down
in his autobiography.17 Though this “religion” is universal in its intents and
could conceivably be believed, it lacks institutional and ritual foundation.
And its content, like that of “morphology”—which may be only another
name for “Goethe’s religion”—is relatively undogmatic. It makes no emphatic
truth- or faith-claims to further its propagation. What Goethe presents in
books 8 and 20 is at best a private religion, designed on the premise that
“everyone may have their own religion in the end” (HA 9:350). The reader is
not enjoined to believe the story except as a literary creation and perhaps as
a parable of the subjectivity of mythmaking and religion-founding. Goethe
presents this “religion” as something he once thought and does not directly
state whether he stills believes something similar. If anything, the point of
telling the story of the genesis of his religious ideas may be to incite others to
conceive and interpret religious ideas more freely. Like the “Urworte,” which
suppose an active collaboration on the part of the reader, book 8’s reworking
of religious ideas remains marked by “demonic” (individual) particularity.
This demonic trace limits and at the same time preserves the universality of
Goethe’s meta-myth. It ensures that this claim to universality is itself mor-
phologically specific—intrinsically perspectival and temporal—and follows
the specific conditions of reading articulated in the “Urworte.”
The universal science-religion of morphology produces an infinity of pri-
vate religions, in which each individual retells inherited myths in the terms
of his or her own singularity and universality. This is a generous reading,
which allows Goethe to find his way out of the mirror-maze of morphology.
He was at least partially able to retrace the patterns of his own private myth-
making, to draw them out of their latency and, at least at the highest levels
of self-reflection, to resist the persuasiveness of his own insights through the
recognition of his own finitude and particularity as the one who uniquely
and subjectively perceived and disseminated a particular symbolic network.
“Enlightenment” here is no longer a strict alternative to “myth.” The for-
mer can consist only in the constant self-reflective articulation of one’s own
symbolic order. This “work on myth” at least has a chance of preventing
the everyday unconscious and often violent self-assertion of such symbols
in uncritical mythologies of the self. As a work of self-analysis, the textual
weaving of symbolic fabrics may be only marginally more disillusioned than
the expression of such symbols in the media of psychology, motivation, or
desire. Such unreflected conceptions require conscious symbolic deciphering.
And the lack of self-woven systems promotes the adoption of the finished sys-
tems of others: the failure to design one’s own religion means dogmatically
ascribing someone else’s. Book 8 is thus implicitly critical of religion in its
public, prescriptive, and collective dimensions. Submission to the collective—
Ananke—is the typical human condition because, without massive efforts
56 Demons of Morphology

of autobiographical analysis, private understandings are never extensively

mediated in their relation to public surrogates.
It may seem somewhat shocking to assimilate Goethe’s scientific thought
to problems of religion and autobiography to the degree that I am propos-
ing, but the only other option would be to take morphology seriously as
a scientific, artistic, or critical method. Though I would not automatically
disparage the attempt to rehabilitate morphology, I observe that morphologi-
cal paradigms can easily become reductively schematic and overgeneralized.
Morphology in this sense is already too widespread. In this regard, I am argu-
ing against taking morphology too seriously: it should be taken in the same
way as the Creation-story sketched at the end of book 8 of Poetry and Truth
and in the same way as Goethe’s Orphic “Urworte,” the point of which is to
create a medium for reflecting on the unknown, a system that can be infinitely
reread, retranslated, and transformed. This is precisely what the best readers
of Goethe often did, even if they did so more in the context of their own
theories than in that of Goethe’s. As Lukács saw it in his Theory of the Novel,
the true tradition of morphology lies not in science but in literature. The
novel is, for Lukács, more scientific than science, due to its ability to coor-
dinate every “truth” with a specific place, time, and perspective. This means,
at the limit, that the tradition—at least a certain tradition—of the novel rep-
resents the methodologically most advanced edge of the “human sciences.”
The novel can think experimentally about the “morphological” signifi-
cance of scientific and other developments without being tempted to believe
unconditionally in insights that always depend on artificial and transitory
formalizations.
Walter Benjamin’s idea of “demonic ambiguity” (dämonische Zweideu-
tigkeit) similarly warns of the limitations of morphology as a true science of
forms. It can never get past its perspectival-temporal (“subjective”) aspect. In
Goethe, it does not even attempt to do so: I can find no claim to strict objec-
tivity. In these terms, it can never produce a truly universal synthesis able to
transcend the limits of language. In other words, it remains subjective. For
Benjamin, morphology becomes “demonic” in the moment when it becomes
convinced that such a synthesis really exists—somewhere beyond the limits
of representability. The presupposition of the priority of the whole over its
(supposedly) infinitely analogous parts does not permit any sub-spheres (such
as nature/culture) to be even minimally differentiated. At this limit, morphol-
ogy’s endless systole and diastole make it impossible to draw distinctions.
Morphology thus may be taken either as a merely “literary” symbolic mode
or as a latently normative hypothesis. The latter, based on the spurious evi-
dence of analogies, may offer support to countless arguments and assertions.
The later reception broke this alternative into a spectrum of possibilities that
(roughly) followed one or the other of these two courses. The more convinc-
ing results, however, as I will show, tended to be based on an at least implicit
retention of the “literary” understanding of morphology.
Demons of Morphology 57

Finally, to avoid confusion: what I am calling “literary” or a “medium of

reflection” does not simply mean “aesthetic.” The problem of the aesthetic is
addressed in chapters 5 and 6, but what I mean by “medium of reflection”
in the present context implies the possibility of something like a discursive
formatting. Contrary to what one might expect of morphology, the visual is
only important here insofar as “images” (in nature, art, or language) stand in
relation to thoughts.18 To illustrate the point, I would invoke the “Urworte,”
which begin with a certain Ur-phenomenon—four Greek words representing
divinities of supposedly Egyptian origin—that are progressively transcribed
into increasingly wider contexts. The difference lies in development over time.
Whether in the arabesques of the “spiral tendency” or the linear striving of
the “vertical system,” the specificity of a given image-form or word-image is
neither purely conceptual nor purely visual. The “proof” of an Urphänomen
does not lie in its truth or supposed universal validity but in its potential seri-
ality, its ongoing shifts and unforeseeable reconfigurations.
 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

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Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
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Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/33934.

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 Chapter Three

Biographical Demons
(Goethe’s Poetry and Truth)

“Orphic Urworte” =/≠ “The Demonic”

In Friedrich Gundolf’s reading of Goethe’s “Urworte,” he rather surprisingly

asserts that the “primal words” represent a simple series rather than a uni-
fied conception: they do not represent a narrative progression nor do they
articulate a system. Where virtually all readers have seen the “Urworte” as
“cyclical” (to use Jochen Schmidt’s term), for Gundolf they represent neither a
process nor a cycle, but are essentially just a list. He only briefly discusses the
“Urworte” in his chapter on Goethe’s late poetry (Alterslyrik). In this passage,
he asserts—casually but convincingly—that each Urwort represents an allegor-
ical power; they are five “demons”—as he less convincingly argues—selected
from a potentially limitless pantheon. This reading ignores the systematic and
narrative coherence of the “Urworte.” One could argue that this was only fully
recognized later, except that Goethe’s own commentary is clearly premised
on the relation of the five words. It seems unlikely that Gundolf would not
have known this, and I cannot imagine that he simply overlooked the obvi-
ous interconnectedness of Goethe’s stanzas. Given that Gundolf emphatically
appropriates—and conflates—the Dämon and the demonic within his own
discourse, it is hard to imagine that he did not carefully study the “Urworte.”
Thus, without speculating on intents, it is difficult to explain his reading except
as an intentional misreading. At the least, he must have been blind to data that
did not fit his preconceptions. Regardless, if he had read the “Urworte” as sys-
tematically balanced powers (as I have argued), this would have invalidated
his interpretation of Goethe’s life as a demonic providence.
One might question whether the refutation of Gundolf’s Goethe is of
pressing importance almost a hundred years after its publication, at a time
when it is infrequently read and would be considered barely reputable.1 My
claim, however, will be that Gundolf still needs to be refuted, at least in his
reading of the demonic. Even if one were to hold that Walter Benjamin had
the last word (which he clearly did), his arguments are much more coherent
if one is familiar with his antagonist. And, more importantly, if Benjamin’s
refutation is not recognized precisely as a refutation of Gundolf’s reading

59
60 Biographical Demons

of the demonic, then the point of Benjamin’s argument is effectively missed.

Goethe’s life was guided, according to Gundolf, by a demonic providence; he
invokes the demonic to support this idea of fate in terms derived from the
Dämon stanza of the “Urworte.” In order for this to work, the Dämon must
be detachable from the “Urworte.” Only on this basis is it possible for Gundolf
to read the demonic as a predestination unchecked by chance (Tyche), love
(Eros), or necessity (Ananke), and without any need of hope (Elpis). Gundolf,
like Spengler, reads the demonic as equivalent to the Orphic Dämon. Regard-
less of whether one sees Gundolf and Spengler as especially influential in this
regard, they are exemplary of this reading and its implications; and to the
extent that the unity of fate and character is still understood as “demonic,”
Gundolf’s reading is still alive. I hope to show that the erroneous conflation
of the “Urworte” and Poetry and Truth made this reading possible, and that
Goethe’s autobiography primarily understands the demonic, not as fate, but
in terms of what the “Urworte” call “the accidental” (Tyche).
It would be wrong, however, to say that Gundolf’s (most likely deliberate)
distortions prevent him from achieving important insights. His short presen-
tation on the “Urworte” is typical in this regard:

The Orphic Urworte treat suprapersonal powers [überpersönliche

Mächte] that determine life; they are cosmic divinities of the human
soul. . . . Dämon, Tyche, Eros, Anangke2 and Elpis are neither pure
ideas [reine Ideen] from Goethe’s philosophy, nor are they pure gods
[reine Götter] taken from his fantasy. They are allegorical demons
[allegorische Dämonen]. . . . Daimon was Goethe’s simple name for
the law of fate [das Schicksalsgesetz] according to which entelechy
exists and develops its essence [west und wird]; it is akin to the Indian
idea of karma, the essence of a man [das Wesen eines Menschen]
that creates and is itself his fate. The sum of the events that are not
given as a part of ourself [nicht mit uns selbst gegeben], which do not
bind and condition us [die uns nicht binden und bedingen], he called
Tyche. And the fateful passion that transcends and goes beyond us
[die über uns selbst hinausreichende schicksalshafte Leidenschaft] he
called Eros. The sum of the external ties that determine our being [die
Summe der äußeren Bindungen die unser Sein bestimmen] he called
Anangke. And the anticipation [Vorwegnahme] of a possible fate,
simultaneously capable of suspending and overcoming the present
moment [zugleich Aufhebung und Überwindung des Gegenwärti-
gen], he called Elpis. He could have added more demonic powers
to this series of five. To them belongs also “Fear” from the carnival
procession in “Faust,” as well as the grey sisters, Lack, Worry, Guilt,
Necessity, and Woe [die grauen Schwestern Mangel, Sorge, Schuld,
Not] as well as their brother, Death himself. (Gundolf, Goethe
675–77)
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 61

Gundolf’s fleeting mention of the allegorical “impurity” of the “Urworte”

deserves special attention: the Orphic “demons” are neither pure divinities
nor purely philosophical ideas. Gundolf does not further illuminate the signif-
icance of this observation, but it directly points to the impurity and hybridity
of the “Urworte,” as well as to their susceptibility to being pushed—puri-
fied—in various directions. Gundolf himself goes too far, for example, when
he declares them to be only “allegories.” Just as they are neither purely con-
ceptual nor literally divine, they also are not arbitrary personifications. Many
allegorical possibilities may be uncovered in a close reading of the “Urworte,”
but the stanzas also present the five demons in a highly formalized and con-
ceptual way. One could not easily say exactly what these divinities look like,
and, with some exceptions—such as the wings of Eros and Elpis—their phys-
ical attributes are unmarked. What makes the five “divinities” into “demons”
is precisely their ambiguity with respect to various ways of being and mean-
ing. They are not concepts, metaphors, allegories, or gods—but they can be
read as any of these; they are a variable medium representing an ensemble of
interconnected forces.
Gundolf’s paraphrases of the individual Urworte are not bad in them-
selves, and they come close to revealing the disavowed systematic coherence
of the stanzas. By reading the “Urworte” as a loose connection of “allego-
ries,” Gundolf destroys their five-part unity. To my knowledge, Gundolf is the
only reader of the “Urworte” to suggest that Goethe could have extended the
series of demons. Without giving reasons, Gundolf declares the five terms of
the “Urworte” to be essentially unrelated, and he further muddies the waters
by naming allegorical figures from other works.3 Rather than reading the
“Urworte” as a constellation of “suprapersonal powers” that may harmonize
or conflict with one another in the course of a given development, Gundolf
believes that they can be extracted from their five-part context and viewed as
independent figurations. Of course, the “Urworte” do not contain Goethe’s
only allegories, but this hardly suffices as evidence that this particular group-
ing is not meant restrictively. In “Pandora,” Elpore, the divinity of Hope,
contrasts herself with unnamed “other demons” (die anderen Dämonen, HA
5:343, 355), which implies a non-restrictive grouping. The “demons” of the
“Urworte” can also be read allegorically, but the relatively conceptual orien-
tation of the stanzas and especially of the commentary make it impossible to
definitively opt for either the allegorical or the conceptual mode.
Gundolf’s reading may have problems, but there is also a shortage of
detailed and reliable evidence regarding the relation of the “Urworte” to the
other allegorical figures introduced by Gundolf.4 Though the connection of
the “Urworte” to the demonic is in some sense evident, Goethe himself never
articulated it. It is clear that there must be a connection, but it is unclear
precisely what the connection is. Goethe’s commentary on the “Urworte,” as
well as the ease with which the poems can be read in terms of morphological
systematics, refutes Gundolf’s reading of the “Urworte” and his conflation of
62 Biographical Demons

Daimon and the demonic. But an alternate theory of the connection of the
“Urworte” to the demonic is still lacking.5
The most helpful source in clarifying this question is a letter Goethe wrote
on March 31, 1818, to an unknown recipient (UO 72). In this letter, the
“Urworte” are presented as an integral conception of the demonic (and not
an open series of allegories). This letter may raise more questions than it
answers, but it clearly refers to the Orphic “Urworte” sequence (and not the
Dämon stanza by itself) as a “concept of the demonic.” According to the let-
ter, however, the Orphic “Urworte” are not the only concept of the demonic,
but only “one more concept of the demonic”:

I especially still want to tell you how much it delighted me that,

through the great Urworte, we are so easily and reasonably able to
rise above the present moment [daß wir durch die großen Urworte
so leicht und leidlich über den Augenblick hinaus kommen]. The
absolute, the moral order of the world, systole and diastole! [Das
Absolute, die moralische Weltordnung, Systole und Diastole!] After
that, not much is necessary to reach an agreement [sich zu verstän-
digen]. The next time we see each other, I have to give you one more
concept of the demonic [noch einen Begriff vom Dämonischen], and
nothing more will be necessary. A series of Orphic Urworte clarified
into stanzas [eine Reihe orphischer Urworte in Stanzen aufgeklärt],
which you will soon receive, are only a supplement and paraphrases
[Zugabe und Umschreibungen]. (UO 72)

Striking at first glance is the fact that Goethe here reads “the great primal
words” (die großen Urworte) under the sign of Elpis, the figure of the tran-
scendence of time, who, in the words of Goethe’s commentary (echoed by
Gundolf in the passage cited above), “allows us to move easily beyond the
present moment.” In the letter, the idea of “rising above the present moment”
seems to refer to the possibility of Urworte to raise the level of conversation.
“Primal words” allow speakers who might otherwise disagree to distance
themselves from their own “momentary”—particular and individual—
understandings; Urworte are concepts of all-encompassing scope that can
contain vast differences in perspective.
This functional-rhetorical understanding—of how to do things with
Urworte—and the comments on the demonic directly following, do not
refer to the “Urworte Orphisch.” “The great Urworte” (die großen Urworte)
named in the first sentence are apparently not the same as the “series of
Orphic Urworte” mentioned at the end. Not only are the “great Urworte”
not qualified as “Orphic.” Rather, the three abstract concepts followed by an
exclamation point seem to be introduced as examples of “great Urworte.”6
The first sentences thus explain the unifying effects of “great Ur-words” like
“the absolute, the moral order of the world, systole and diastole[!].” If these
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 63

three terms are examples of non-Orphic Urworte, then the next sentence
promises the letter’s recipient that, the next time Goethe sees him or her in
person, he will impart “one more concept of the demonic” (noch einen Begriff
vom Dämonischen). This additional conception is also not necessarily the
same as the “Urworte Orphisch.” The latter are being sent, according to the
letter, as a written supplement to past and future conversations (about the
demonic).
The Orphic Urworte are thus far from exclusively equated with the
demonic: they are only “one more” in what is apparently a long onoma-
siological series; the “Urworte Orphisch” are a concept of the demonic, but
they are not the only one. The letter describes them dismissively—as “supple-
ment” (Zugabe) and “circumlocutions” (Umschreibungen)—in comparison
with more effective oral transmissions, but given the widely recognized excel-
lence of the stanzas and the fact that Goethe published them twice in 1820,
this lukewarm characterization hardly seems definitive. The words Zugabe
and Umschreibungen may also be suggestive beyond the immediate context
of the letter: a Zugabe may be an “encore” as well as a supplement; and
“circumlocution” (Umschreibung) describes the relation of stanzas and com-
mentary to the Greek Urworte.
Different Urworte produce different concepts of the demonic. A dif-
ferent demonic is reflected by every Urwort (or system of Urworte); the
specific concept of the demonic depends on specific word choice. The com-
mon “nature-nurture” opposition, for example, may provide a concept of
approximately the same problem as the Orphic “Urworte,” but it expresses
the relation in question differently. Goethe never systematically clarifies
the relation of different sets of Urworte to their correlated concepts of the
demonic: the only way to do so is either endless terminological negotiation or
a definitive decision for a single system. Either option would have required an
extensive philosophical discourse, which is obviously antithetical to Goethe’s
way of thinking. What ultimately matters most for the demonic, however, is
that he never articulated or even imagined the demonic in a single term or
set of terms. Thus there is no “the” concept of the demonic or “Goethe’s”
concept of the demonic.
This peculiar understanding of terminology and system-building finds a
parallel in morphology. Unlike philosophy and science, morphology contests
the possibility of reference, viewing words—including “the demonic”—ono-
masiologically, as essentially inadequate and substitutable terms. This gives
rise to chains of analogies and multiple names for the same unnameable
thing. Morphology relies on metaphors and master-concepts (Urworte) to
provisionally refer to indefinite relations whose essentially temporal and
metamorphic aspect does not allow them to be definitely named. Similarly,
in the 1818 letter, Urworte seem more like private “keywords,” not concepts
in a strict sense, but variable lingo. “The demonic” is apparently also an
Urwort in this sense, perhaps even “the” Urwort, the master category for the
64 Biographical Demons

unnameable “something” behind all Urworte. It is the most general word for
that which other Urworte—across numerous places, times and cultures—
have tried to name. The demonic is not specifiable, because it is infinitely
specifiable. Goethe never directly states what makes some Urworte better
than others in their representation of the demonic, but he does indicate that
some work better than others. Poetry and Truth also has much to say about
Urworte as the basis of private philosophies and religions. Human lives are
governed by specific understandings of the demonic, which is to say: by the
choice of Urworte and what is done with them.

The Demonic as a Theological Limit-Concept

The passage on the demonic in Poetry and Truth could hardly state more
clearly that there is no single definition and no single concept of the demonic.
Goethe explains that he became aware of the demonic through his expe-
rience with various religions—plural—that are peculiarly characterized as
“regions.” The young Goethe “wandered back and forth in the empty spaces
between these regions” (in den Zwischenräumen dieser Regionen hin und
wider wanderte, HA 10:175), where he encountered a force that could not
be localized in any of them. The demonic thus belongs to the no man’s land
between religions; Goethe continues to explain—quite systematically—that
the demonic refers to that which religions have always sought to contain or
banish:

There are countless names for the phenomena that are brought forth
in this way [by wandering between religions]: all philosophies and
religions have tried, prosaically and poetically, to solve the riddle and
finally to get rid of the whole thing [die Sache schließlich abzutun
gesucht], and they remain at liberty to continue to do so [welches
ihnen noch fernerhin unbenommen bleibe]. (HA 10:177)

The demonic is the “problem” that religions and philosophies try to “solve,”
but which they may only repress or temporarily explain away. Given this
definition, it makes sense that Goethe himself does not try to resolve the
enigma (Rätsel), but only speaks of it in riddles.
This first introduction of the demonic is decidedly unenigmatic. It directly
circumscribes a field that could also be called “metaphysics”: the demonic is
the sublime object of all philosophies and religions. It defines them as phi-
losophies and religions and yet essentially exceeds their means. Especially
once they achieve systematic coherence and authority, the result with respect
to the demonic is either an overstated claim (to know the unknowable) or
a myth. Such forms and formalizations may liberate thinkers and believers
from the demonic—but only temporarily, and the demonic itself is excluded
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 65

in the claim to exclusively define it. The tendency of (explanatory) systems

is to cover over the enigma that necessitated their existence in the first place.
Religion and philosophy are singled out as the most extreme attempts to
explain the world—to explain the demonic and come to terms with what
Blumenberg calls “the absolutism of reality.”7
Such containment efforts produce words—including magic words—and
Urworte together with signs, systems, symptoms, and effects. The demonic
names the unnameable “something” at the origin of philosophy, religion,
and science, but it is not identical with the history of its religious forma-
tions, representations, and explanations. The sheer number of such systems is
itself a symptom of the underlying problem—which is especially problematic
from the perspective of definitive codifications, orthodoxies, absolutisms, and
fundamentalisms. No system for banishing “the demonic,” no philosophical
or religious exorcism, can succeed in the long term, because the world, to
the degree that it is a demonic world, will always stretch or exceed—as in
the famous example of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755—the philosophical
and religious parameters (science, law, custom, society, morality, culture, his-
tory, tradition, life, nature, etc.) through which this world is supposed to be
defined.
This demonic world may be monstrous, darkened—but it can never come
to an end as long as the demonic holds sway. The demonic is, as my first two
chapters show, above all a productive power and a power of continuation.
Goethe refers to it as “the monstrous, the incomprehensible” (das Unge-
heuere, das Unfaßliche, HA 10:175) behind all forms of comprehension. This
is especially the case for religious and philosophical comprehensions, which
relate to the demonic as the element of their genesis and the medium of their
inevitable failure—from which something new emerges, which was not a
part of the original calculation. The demonic produces “failures” in this sense
whenever a theory fails to correspond to its practice, whenever a perception
does not correspond to its reality, whenever explanations become threadbare
and unconvincing. The story of Job, which exemplifies religion’s possibility
of testing its own limits, is paradigmatic here. Of course, strictly religious
and other interpretations of the world constantly reassert themselves against
such “failures,” either dogmatically or through a process of qualification and
revision. But from the standpoint of the demonic, this looks like an extension
of the original denial, a misrecognition of the essential inexplicability and
incomprehensibility.
Against such radicality, however, the introduction to the passage on the
demonic pays lip service to the idea of a turn toward the shelter provided
by religion: “he [Goethe’s younger self] came more and more to see that it is
better to turn his thoughts away from the monstrous and incomprehensible”
(HA 10:175). Perhaps this would have been a good idea, but it is contradicted
by extensive reflections on the demonic that immediately follow it. Goethe
may have increasingly recognized the utility of fixed beliefs and institutions
66 Biographical Demons

in comparison to an endless grappling with the incomprehensible, but his

thoughts continued to be dictated by the latter: “I called this entity [Wesen]
. . . demonic [dämonisch], following the example of the ancients and oth-
ers who perceived something similar” (HA 10:175–76). This sentence raises
many questions: When was this “entity” first called “demonic”? And by
whom? Who are the exemplary “ancients,” and who are “the others who per-
ceived something similar”? How can Goethe guarantee the similarity of these
conceptions, if the word bears such a tenuous or over-inclusive connection to
what it names? The casualness of this naming—the mere substantialization
of the adjective “demonic”—could not be more evident. Ultimately, it is only
the specificity of the word itself that suggests that it was chosen for a spe-
cific reason. The fascination that this word choice exerted on readers attests
to its rhetorical success—despite and because of terminological or concep-
tual unclarity. Precisely the ambiguous resonance of the word may have led
Goethe to it—and many others followed him.
The allusion to the origins of the idea only masks the fact that its main
motivation was personal crisis. This applies to Goethe as well as to his
readers. After introducing the demonic in Poetry and Truth, he struggles to
produce a kind of minimal “face value” and keep the rhetorical upper hand
against his own coinage. The term was precisely calculated to send read-
ers looking for sources—for ways of explaining (away) the demonic—and
Goethe himself was not immune to this temptation. Therefore the demonic
may be defined more by its context—by what is not said about it—than by
its enigmatic descriptions. Blumenberg emphasizes that Goethe identified the
demonic with the entire “biographical presentation” of Poetry and Truth,
which means that it should be understandable through the biographical
motivation that led Goethe to it in the first place. Philosophical, religious, or
theoretical conceptions of the demonic produce “paraphrases” (Umschreib­
ungen)—more and more concepts of the demonic. Such concepts may be
convincing in themselves, but they are not concepts of the demonic if they
cannot account for its biographical dimension.
The demonic is introduced in a synoptic moment at the end of an extensive
autobiography. Goethe wants to explain what he understood by the demonic.
This is not the same as defining the demonic or saying what it is. He found
this word for something he encountered in his experience by appropriating
an inherited idea, a relatively common term of mixed or uncertain geneal-
ogy. It refers to something in his life and his narration of it that he could not
otherwise pin down. The choice of the word “demonic” in this sense refers
to an inner experience that is not strictly definable. Goethe admits that he is
not the first to experience “something like this,” thereby indirectly alluding
to the ubiquity of the experience in question. Both the thing and the word are
common: what he calls “demonic” may have been known at other times and
places under other different names, and it is not limited to that which Goethe
(or others) have called demonic.
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 67

The word “demonic” (dämonisch) and that to which it refers are con-
ventional, but the use of the substantialized form, “the demonic” (das
Dämonische), gives Goethe’s conception unprecedented weight. The strategy
of this naming is to keep a shadowy and ubiquitous signified constantly in
play (yet absent and unspecified), while the choice of signifier (“the demonic”)
tends to eclipse its own referent (the indefinite “something” that is Goethe’s
stated focus). Only in view of this referent as it is developed throughout
Poetry and Truth can “the demonic” be more than a semiological ruse. It is
possible, though, to specify what Goethe understood without fixating on the
word he gave to it; the result is something quite different from the numerous
possible “concepts” that Goethe and others have devised.

Urworte as Self-Help in the Individual’s

Confrontation with the Demonic

A question Goethe does not directly ask, but which could have been answered
in Poetry and Truth, is: when and how did he first come to call this “entity”
demonic? It did not occur at the time of the events recounted in book 20,
which tell the story, among other things, of how Goethe came to the court in
Weimar. The long passage on the demonic is a non-chronological interpola-
tion, motived by Goethe’s uncertainty about whether he will have the chance
to address the demonic in its proper place:

And thus I will here again, for the sake of many dear readers, get
ahead of myself [mir selbst vorgreifen]. Because I do not know if I
will be able to soon resume this account [ob ich bald wieder zur Rede
gelange], I shall here pronounce something [etwas aussprechen] of
which I only much later convinced myself [wovon ich mich erst viel
später überzeugte]. (HA 10:177)

This disclaimer, along with the obscurity of the connection between the
demonic and the events of book 20, have led many—starting with Ecker-
mann—to treat the demonic as a separate topic. This is understandable,
because the connections to Goethe’s life story are not systematically devel-
oped in book 20. The passage on the demonic is complex by itself, and it is
not obvious how it relates to the autobiography; though some connections
are drawn, they are mostly associative or motivic. By tracing such patterns,
contexts emerge that allow the demonic to be perceived even when Goethe
does not refer to it by name.
In the 1818 letter on Urworte and the demonic, Goethe implies that,
like the name “demonic” itself, individual “words,” including Urworte, are
always subordinated to a larger (unfinished and unknowable) conception
of the demonic. Urworte, concepts, and names thus are subordinated to a
68 Biographical Demons

master-term, the Ur-Urwort, “the demonic.” Both the letter and the 1820
commentary suggest that primal words, including the word “demonic,”
may have the status of pedagogical rubrics or heuristic devices. Thought-
provoking “words to live by” correspond to diverse concepts of the demonic.
Urworte in this sense define each individual’s private religion: everyone has
their own concept of the demonic, the meaning of which would remain pri-
vate to the extent that it is tied to individual biography and psychology.
This does not mean that such private concepts—which by definition are also
defenses against the demonic—are incommunicable. Precisely the general-
ity and variability of Urworte make it possible to give a voice to one’s own
specific life system.
Insights induced by such keywords tend, Goethe emphasizes, to “tran-
scend the present moment” by placing individual experience in the proverbial
“big picture” (and vice versa). This act of hermeneutic and rhetorical media-
tion renders “a lot of discussion” unnecessary. No longer necessary and no
longer possible: the mediation between the big picture and the individual
situation occurs as a momentary insight, which can either be left as it is or
endlessly reflected. Urworte are thus uniquely able to grant cognitive access
to an imagined totality; they are the beginning and the end of all reflections.
Released from the confines of the self and the present moment, Urworte pull
in opposing directions: as private concepts “of the demonic,” they are highly
nebulous, whereas their clarifying paraphrases (such as those of the “Urworte
Orphisch”) tend toward prosaic conceptualization. Thus to the extent that
the demonic becomes communicable, it becomes general, collective, norma-
tive—and not particularly demonic.
With the exception of Gundolf, most interpreters have agreed that the
“Urworte Orphisch” represent a quasi-conceptual utterance of premises that
Goethe was rarely if ever able to express so compactly. My readings support
this hypothesis, but they do so not with respect to the content of the “Urworte”
but in view of a problem of their form. The specific content is arbitrary, or
at least variable, whereas the form has implications for function. It is a fine
line between consciously experimenting with the formal-functional possibili-
ties of Urworte and getting carried away by them. Especially if a given set of
Urworte is “one’s own,” the ability to perceive their function objectively may
be impaired by their rhetorical operativity (on oneself and others). Thus the
sophistication of Goethe’s reflections do not exclude inconsistencies or even
self-mystifications at the operative level. For example, one may be discom-
forted by Goethe’s enthusiasm for linguistic ephemera like “the demonic” or
“systole and diastole” (with exclamation point!), but such discomfort simply
reflects the possibility of Urworte, as provisional private understandings, to
become vehicles for affect and identification. Especially the rejection of a
merely operative or vehicular use of Urworte—as a “transport” beyond the
present moment—reveals a crucial aspect of their function. Even in Goethe’s
most differentiated understanding of Urworte as a medium of reflection, they
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 69

risk revealing the empty functionality of transforming nothing into nothing.

Any given Urwort-system may reflect a Weltanschauung, but it can only do
so in a tautological and solipsistic way, especially if individuals primarily
relate to it operatively. The challenge of Urworte, therefore, is to get out of
the operative level, to reflect and delineate such words according to their pos-
sible functions and meanings.
Thus, neither in the “Urworte” nor Poetry and Truth is it a matter of artic-
ulating something that Goethe supposedly believed or of saying what the
demonic is; it is rather a question of how one comes to such an idea in the
first place. The demonic “as it appears in the course of this biographical pre-
sentation” is not a definite result or communicable conclusion, but precisely
that which only the autobiography itself can illuminate. Only the life-context
allows the role, function, and limitations of Urworte to be concretely deter-
mined. The point of Poetry and Truth is not to convey “one more idea of the
demonic”; the Urwort “the demonic” is not a vehicle for the propagation of
a private worldview. It stands instead for the impossibility and limits of such
mediations. The pursuit of an Urwort in its biographical genesis, combined
with the opaqueness of the term “demonic” itself, imply that even the media-
tion of the impossibility of mediation still takes place within an individual
life. Thus, compared to the “Urworte Orphisch,” the demonic in Poetry and
Truth is more limited in its collective-normative implications and implicitly
renounces this kind of generalizability. The material of autobiography—the
meanings of an individual’s own experiences—is inherently non-conceptual
and incommunicable. This applies especially to the passages in which the
demonic is explicitly thematized: clues are given, but these clues only make
sense as a reflection of Goethe’s life story. By making his life the only proper
home of the demonic, its presentation in his autobiography touches the limit
of what autobiography can and cannot communicate. This rigor with respect
to the question of communicability sets Poetry and Truth apart from the
more “clarifying” approach of the “Urworte Orphisch” and the 1818 letter’s
assurances of limitless communicability.
In the “Urworte” stanzas, it will never be possible to perfectly separate the
“Orphisch” from the “Goethisch.” These condensed and clarified formula-
tions, for all their power, belong to the traditions of religion and philosophy
that Goethe seeks to precisely sidestep in book 20. Even and especially flaw-
less poetic compositions can only disavow the demonic in their coming to
terms with it. This implies a radical fidelity to a certain idea of prose, but
not in a definitive or exclusive way. The passages on the demonic in Poetry
and Truth were drafted before the “Urworte Orphisch,” but Goethe did not
prepare the last books of Poetry and Truth for publication until the final
years of his life. Goethe never rejected either approach but was able to think
in both ways; “clarification” and “paradox” are not mutually exclusive but
supplemental. The limits of clarification can be tested only in the process of
clarification, or in the attempt to isolate that which cannot be sufficiently
70 Biographical Demons

clarified. Book 20, therefore, for all its opaqueness, is decisive because it tries
to directly confront that which cannot be confronted directly; but, as I will
show, the autobiographical narrative itself contains significantly more direct
illustrations.

Gundolf’s Morphological Misreading of the Demonic

Goethe’s 1818 letter on Urworte connects his “Urworte Orphisch” (whose

first stanza is called Dämon) to the demonic. Without this letter, the connec-
tion would not have existed—but the desire to draw it would have proved
irresistible, as the common conflation of the Dämon and the demonic shows.
No one is more exemplary for this misreading than Friedrich Gundolf, who
uses figures of thought taken from morphology to unite the Dämon and the
demonic. The result is a reading of the demonic as the productive force of
Goethe’s life and genius.
In the 1818 letter, Goethe identifies “the demonic” not with the Dämon
stanza alone but with the entire “series of Orphic Urworte.” One could
argue, though, that the first of the “Urworte,” Dämon, is in fact the master
term in the attempt of the “Urworte” to design a general terminology to
explain an originally private and intuitive conception. Dämon is only the
title of a stanza, but it is echoed in das Dämonische, to which the “Urworte”
as a whole refer. The Orphic demon thus cannot be rigorously distinguished
from the demonic. This tendency toward self-reflexivity can also be seen in
a strange doubling: for Gundolf (following Macrobius), the “Urworte” all
represent “demons”—but the first is actually called “demon.” This suggests
that the first stanza represents a meta-principle: Dämon is the common name
of all five forces that comprise this conception of the demonic; Dämon is the
identity principle that defines all of the demons as intermediaries between
human and divine—as semi-divine forces with distinct forms and functions.
How does this general aspect, the meta-demon that underlies all five of the
Orphic demons, relate to the demonic? For Gundolf, what is common to both
conceptions is their representation of “supra-personal powers” (überpersön­
liche Mächte). This allows him to include numerous forces in the concept of the
demonic. In Goethe, however—in his “Orphic” and “morphic” conceptions—
such forces, drives, or tendencies are consistently bipolar. If the demonic is a
“suprapersonal power,” it is an oscillating, pulsing power of “determination
and indeterminacy,” of “individuation and generalization.” The bidirectional
“and” is crucial in its correspondence to morphological Urworte such as
“systole and diastole.” In Poetry and Truth, however, the demonic (which
“manifests itself in contradictions and oppositions,” HA 10:175) is not an
“impersonal power”—or the quintessence of several—but the product of a
highly personal affect. In other words, rather than being “suprapersonal,”
it is at least partly subjective in origin. This dimension further relates to the
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 71

hermeneutic dilemmas of apparently suprapersonal “forces” that may not

actually exist. Language’s power of substantialization allows things that are
not immediately explicable to be attributed supposed powers: just as one
might ironically attribute bad luck to gremlins, “the demonic” is an implau-
sible name for such a force; it plays with the attribution of causes in a way
that is simultaneously mystifying and demystifying. The Orphic “Urworte,”
on the other hand, start from positive metaphysical premises—a specific set
of names—and tests their possibilities and limitations.
The demonic in this sense is a problem of the animation, personification,
and allegoresis of “powers” that cannot be strictly identified. Unambigu-
ous powers are not demonic; causation by a delimited power like gravity is
not “demonic.” This essential ambiguity can also be seen in the uncertainty
as to whether the demonic pertains to (personified) effects or (unknow-
able) causes—or if it is the result of an inability to differentiate the two.
The ambiguous relation or hypostasized unity of three registers—empirical-
transcendental-allegorical—may thus define the sphere of the demonic. The
relation of religion and philosophy to the demonic—clarification, interpre-
tation, and rationalization—is thus mirrored in the cognitive processes of
individuals. Religion may provide something like a fixed repertoire of expla-
nations (whose effectiveness may vary greatly), but such a function could
never be strictly limited to any particular tradition or genre of discourse.
Goethe’s obvious awareness of a diversity of religious traditions is certainly
a factor, but in any conceivable cultural constellation, the demonic would
by definition push the limits of the system. One could try to imagine a com-
pletely exhaustive and absolutely authoritative practice of confession (or the
totalitarian system of Orwell’s 1984), which would free the individual from
the burden of independent rationalization, but even here there would be limi-
tations of what can be told or explained (from the side of the individual)
and coherently rationalized (by authority). This question is not crucial, how-
ever—because Goethe’s autobiography is not called Confessions but Poetry
and Truth: this title choice clearly indicates that for him it is the individual
who makes sense of his or her own life—or who, failing to do so, perceives
the demonic.
This functional aspect exposes the risks of reading the demonic as real
power or concept. The desire to see it as something more than the subjective
by-product of a rationalization-problem is blatant in the case of Gundolf,
whose reading is implicitly based more on the Orphic “Urworte” than on
Poetry and Truth. He also includes elements from morphology, which help
him to read the demonic as Goethe’s daemon, his genius. The demonic in
this sense is the morphological-developmental force that governed Goethe’s
entire being, his fate, and his life; it is the force that dictated the diachronic
unity and totality called “Goethe.” Like the morphological “leaf,” which is
the lowest term of a plant’s life cycle, the demonic is the total synthetic unity
of life and work:
72 Biographical Demons

Goethe’s fate was governed by that which he himself called the

demonic. Seen or interpreted from God’s view, this is perhaps the
same thing as, from the human perspective, the very secretly forma-
tive power [eben jene heimlich bildende Gewalt] and creative force
[jene Bildnerkraft] that first creates form [Gestalt] as well as the space
and the law of this form: this space and this law of form is for the
greatest of men [die größten Menschen] nothing other than their
fate. Fate is the atmosphere of their nature, and the creative power
of great men [der großen Menschen] does not belong to them alone
and is not enclosed within them, but reaches beyond them [reicht
über sie hinaus]. The feeling that this is so, that he was the center of
a suprapersonal force, that of God or Fate or Nature, and that his
essence [Wesen] was not to have a fate but to be a fate, all of this
Goethe expresses in the ominous [ahnungsvoll] word “the demonic”
(just as Caesar speaks of his Fortune and Napoleon of his star). The
demonic is not a power that intervenes from the outside; it is insepa-
rably bound to the character of man, similar to the related concept
of genius. In this word as well, a kind of grace is expressed, granted
by something suprapersonal. But the demonic appears more to be
an aspect of fate, which is that which one suffers and does; genius
belongs more to nature, to that which one lives and is [dem was er
lebt und ist]. But the higher he stands, the less a man’s fate and his
nature can be separated: fate belongs to character, just as the char-
acter is indeed itself already a fate, the most inescapable of all fates.
(Gundolf, Goethe 3)

Gundolf’s lengthy study contains more nuanced passages than this one, but
as a symptomatic utterance, none are more telling, and, it should be added,
despite the patent falseness of the conception, he shows great facility in
expressing ideas from Goethe’s thought. The passage assembles ideas in a
passionately eloquent way that is almost completely opposed to Goethe’s
ideas.
The differences between Gundolf’s reading and mine hardly need to be fur-
ther underscored at this point, but the stereotypical plausibility of this image
of Goethe is remarkable and indirectly shows Gundolf’s great influence. Thus
a few quick corrections are in order: the suggestion that Goethe believed
that the demonic was the guiding principle of his life is in flat contradiction
with Poetry and Truth. At the end of the excursus on the demonic, Goethe
writes: “I now return from these more elevated considerations [von diesen
höheren Betrachtungen] to my little life, which was also about to experience
some strange events [seltsame Ereignisse], which at least reflected a sheen
of the demonic [wenigstens mit einem dämonischen Schein bekleidet]” (HA
10:177). Goethe here connects the demonic with the narrative of book 20
and at the same time denies that the demonic was the guiding principle of his
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 73

destiny. The language of appearance endemic to Goethe’s idea of the demonic

strikes a further cautionary note; the very question of whether the demonic
was real strongly indicates that it was not (just as “maybe I saw a ghost”
means “probably I did not”). The events in question seemed demonic—but
only as strange events. And when one analyzes the events themselves, there
is nothing obviously supernatural about them. The fact that they occurred
at a decisive juncture in Goethe’s life is what made them seem fateful in ret-
rospect, but the title “demonic” presents them, at the most, as a mystery but
certainly not as fateful.
Gundolf, however, would still have certain arguments at his disposal. He
could claim that the ambiguities of Goethe’s depiction were motivated by
modesty (a virtue he is rarely accused of) or by the desire not to appear super-
stitious (in which case the demonic would have been entirely left out); or
perhaps the various forms of reticence and equivocation are only a sign of the
difficulty of identifying the demonic in one’s own life. In this case, Gundolf
can claim to know better than Goethe, because he is an outsider with retro-
spective historical knowledge. This view is capable of investing past events
with a morphological-developmental and teleological-totalizing form; it can
posit the decisive role of the demonic with confidence. From Gundolf’s per-
spective, Goethe could never have known he was the medium of a destiny.
He could only vaguely sense it, whereas Gundolf, who possesses the com-
plete testament of Goethe’s life and work, is convinced that the demonic was
real. Goethe’s “fate” thus only reveals itself postmortem, with morphology
providing the interpretive model for reading Goethe’s life as evidence of a
formal-developmental law at work in history.8
Goethe largely excludes history and society from morphology; for him
the human world is an exclusion with respect to a morphological state of
nature. Gundolf might see this similarly, except that for him Goethe belongs
to nature. Like ancient Greece for classicism, Goethe’s life and work have a
privileged connection to nature. Gundolf retrospectively reads Goethe—the
man more than the work—as a totality (a “genius” and a “great man”). For
Gundolf, Goethe even more than the Greeks stands as an exception to the
general amorphousness of human development. Goethe is thus the morpho-
logical carrier of the universal destiny of man.9 There would be no end of
good reasons to be suspicious of this claim—but perhaps the most impor-
tant one is its utter triviality. I would recall Goethe’s words “my little life,”
which—false modesty or not—stand in stark contrast to the immodesty of
“the greatest men” (Caesar and Napoleon). Most telling, however—putting
Goethe’s “greatness” aside—is Gundolf’s blindness to the negative moments,
to Tyche and Ananke and the pain of Entsagung (or Trauer, as Benjamin
would say), as well as to everything that one might associate with the Werther
complex.
Perhaps none of these criticisms entirely suffice for those who want to
believe in Goethe’s greatness. My point, however, would be that Gundolf, at
74 Biographical Demons

his worst, is only performing a kind of image management, which, even in

his own time, was widely read as a provocation: to produce a better literary-
critical morphology and a better critical foundation for Goethe’s “greatness.”
Especially for Benjamin, it is not just a matter of refuting Gundolf but of
coming up with a better morphology of the relation of life and work. Much
still depends on paradigms established in and around the Stefan George
school, and thus I do not think Gundolf should be written off too quickly.
He is also capable of powerful insights: even in his introduction, from which
I have mostly cited the most dubious claims, I take seriously his arguments
against purely empirical and positivistic literary scholarship and biography.10
He argues that biographical minutiae are meaningless except with refer-
ence to the life or work that has already been judged (or prejudged) “great.”
And because the traces left by lives—especially “works”—seem to somehow
depend on those who originated them, it does not make sense to treat works
as facts among others. Such an approach overlooks the fact that works are
often the reason why the biography is of interest. It also does not make sense
to view works as purely autonomous relics of intrinsic “greatness”; they
must be “great”—or just meaningful—in relation to something. In relation
to unknown and uncertain origins and ends, literature and art may thus have
a “demonic” character, which may correspond to deficiencies of meaning in
life. Goethe thus describes his Egmont as a “flight” from the demonic, “behind
an image” (hinter ein Bild, HA 10:176). But even as works compensate for
deficiencies in meaning, they reproduce them by extending the uncertainty.
Art and literature may on these grounds be deemed a failure in comparison
with religion’s and philosophy’s anti-demonic programs. Gundolf argues that
the relation of life and work is not merely factual—but he goes too far in the
other direction in his sweeping and obviously rhetorical assertion of Goethe’s
importance. This kind of over-reading of the demonic (of which Gundolf is
an extreme example) seeks to banish deficiency of meaning by the violent
reassertion of utter coherence; Gundolf reverses the demonic, reading it not
as a lack of meaning, but as the ultimate meaning of both life and work.

The Absent Totality of Life

Gundolf’s substitution of a unified “morphological” totality for Goethe’s

“demonic” intransparency and incoherence inverts the demonic into a system
of the utter coherence of life and work. This system, which allows life, work,
and history to feed seamlessly into one another, may have some precedent in
Goethe—for example his March 11, 1828, conversation with Eckermann11—
but in either case it is possible only on the basis of huge presuppositions. In
order to read as Gundolf does, the role of chance (Tyche) must be ruled out a
priori; if life is to become fate, everything must happen for a reason. History
is thus also conceived as the result of an inscrutable morphological decree—a
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 75

form of providence that may be anything but providential. In the terms of

the “Urworte,” Gundolf postulates a Dämon, unchecked and unmodified by
Tyche, Eros, Ananke, and Elpis. The result is a truly “demonic” cosmology
that shares little with Goethe’s. In much the same way as Spengler, Gundolf
postulates a morphological conception that retrospectively views whatever
happened as “fate.” This perspective corresponds more to Ananke (as sheer
necessity) than to the prospectively oriented Dämon of the “Urworte” (which
presides over birth) and eliminates familiar elements of literary narration,
such as chance, unrealized possibilities, unresolved significances, and regrets.
In Poetry and Truth, the demonic is not a fateful power that made Goethe
who he was, but instead refers to the strange indirectness of this path and the
uncertainties he encountered along the way. In this sense, the demonic cor-
responds to a generalized helplessness in the face of life or “fate” and to the
retrospective inconclusiveness of the relation of Dämon, Tyche, Ananke, and
Elpis in any given life. These “Orphic” terms may make it possible to tell a
story, a history, of one’s own life, but such limit-terms also make it impossible
to narrate it in a way that is complete, exhaustive, and unambiguous. The cir-
cumstances of Goethe’s life in the final chapters of Poetry and Truth challenge
both the possibility of a morphological reduction (in Gundolf’s sense) as well
as the possibility of assigning delimited and unambiguous roles to the various
Orphic deities. Life’s inability to be summed up, even in the micro-analysis
of a specific turning point, is the narrative context into which the demonic is
introduced. To establish this context, I will not cover every pertinent detail
of the last five books of Goethe’s autobiography (to say nothing of the first
fifteen).12 What follows is a selective reading intended to sketch an under-
standing of the demonic that is not based on Goethe’s cryptic presentation
of it in book 20.
The demonic names the unreadability of Goethe’s life for Goethe. Given
that it reflects what he himself could not understand about himself, it is
hardly surprising that he portrayed it enigmatically. I will attempt to set the
scene: where does Goethe find himself at the end of the last published install-
ment (books 16 through 20) of Poetry and Truth? The complexity of the
narrative strategies and the segmentation of these last five books mask the
conventionality of the events. In book 20, Goethe’s state of mind is defined
by the indecision caused by the breakup of a romantic relationship (with
Lili). The breakup has been outwardly decided but Goethe cannot internal-
ize it. Confronted with diverging visions of his future, Goethe is unable to
grasp hold of or identify himself with any of them. At the beginning of book
20, he imagines himself as the object of multiple alien wills.13 These for-
eign influences may be very general—like “chance” (Zufall) or “providence”
(Vorsehung, HA 10:175)—but they express themselves through specific
individuals: Goethe’s father wants him to finish writing Egmont and to fol-
low in his footsteps by visiting Italy; he does not want Goethe to accept the
invitations of the various courts, which are, he thinks, only toying with his
76 Biographical Demons

son. Miscommunication, the misinterpretation of ambiguous signals, and a

delayed stagecoach make things worse, and Goethe ends up a virtual prisoner
in his own house. Having already said his goodbyes, he shuts himself in and
works frantically on Egmont (under his father’s watchful eye), while waiting
for a coach that may never come. He goes out only at night, to look in Lili’s
window, tormenting himself with an unrealizable future.
In book 20, Goethe stands ambiguously between past and future, lacking
both an externally dictated fate and the grounds of his own decision. Poetry
and Truth underscores this purgatorial condition. Johann Caspar Lavater’s
sharply outlined but semantically ambiguous silhouettes provide a haunting
background and allude to Goethe’s deficiency as an artist, that he is unable
to bring his drawings to life:

I was lacking the genuine plastic power [die eigentliche plastische

Kraft], the forthright will [das tüchtige Bestreben], that is required
to give body to a shape [dem Umriß Körper zu verleihen]. . . . My
reproductions [Nachbildungen] were more like distant premonitions
[ferne Ahnungen] of an indefinite form [irgend einer Gestalt], and my
figures were like the airy spirits [leichte Luftwesen] of Dante’s Purga-
torio, which, casting no shadows, were horrified by the shadows of
real bodies. (HA 10:173)

The shadowy existence of his figures is evidently a symptom of larger prob-

lems. A few pages later, describing his return from travels that were supposed
to consummate the breakup, he writes: “Now I came back, and just as the
reunion of free and happy lovers is a heaven, the reunion of two persons
who are kept apart only by rational arguments [Vernunftgründe] is an
intolerable purgatory [Fegefeuer], an antechamber of hell [ein Vorhof der
Hölle]” (HA 10:178). This spectral irreality also inflects the description of
what he felt when he peeked at Lili through closed curtains: “she went back
and forth, but in vain I sought to grasp the outline of her dear being [den
Umriß ihres lieblichen Wesens] through the thick fabric [durch das dichte
Gewebe]” (HA 10:182). The imagery is reflected again in troubling visions:
“Lili’s image hovered before me, waking and dreaming, and it mixed itself
together with everything else that might have been able to please or dis-
tract me” (HA 10:185). This motivic network may have little bearing on the
demonic at the conceptual level, but at the technical and emotional level, it
establishes a very troubled state of mind, which is apparently related to the
demonic. In this context, the demonic partly serves to deepen and deflect
a superficial or trivializing reading of Goethe’s love life. He describes his
emotional state in concrete and uncompromising terms; he writes of “the
horrible void” (die fürchterliche Lücke, HA 10:170), “my passionate state”
(mein leidenschaftliche[r] Zustand, HA 10:171), “inner agitation” (innere
Agitation, HA 10:181), “impatience” (Ungeduld, HA 10:181), “uneasiness,
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 77

that was eating me up internally” (Unruhe, von der ich innerlich zerar­beitet
war, HA 10:182), and characterizes himself as “doubting and hesitant”
(zweifelnd und zaudernd, HA 10:182). This condition lends itself to demonic
apparitions and could not be more distant from the triumphant certainty of
self and fate.
The experience of the demonic is related to indecisiveness and the torture
of waiting; at the same time, it is important to underscore what it is not
related to. Goethe does not try to give the impression that he deserved one
fate or another, but, to the contrary, states that the outcome of the events
of book 20 occurred despite his own recalcitrance. Along with this absent
sense of deserving—which one might expect in the autobiography of a “great
man”—strength of character and a sense of narrative inevitability are lack-
ing. In recounting the relation of his character and his fate, Goethe avoids
any sense that the factual outcome was the only one possible. The events are
mostly explained in terms of chance and by Goethe’s inability to manage
the situation. Rather than prioritizing character (Dämon), book 20 presents
Tyche (chance) as the medium of the demonic. She is not identical with it
any more than Dämon is, but “the demonic” aspect of Goethe’s life is most
apparent in (almost) missed chances and (ultimately) fortuitous coincidences.
Of course, in the slippery interpretive grid of “demonic” influence, coinci-
dences may be easily reinterpreted as fate. But Goethe never does so, thereby
leaving his reader to ponder the unspoken interpretive dilemmas.
The entry point of the demonic, the place where all of the uncertainties
began, can perhaps be located in the “planlessness” (Planlosigkeit) of the
young Goethe. His irresoluteness is what allowed him to become the object
of others’ plans. This is seen in his relation not only to his father, but also
to his father’s opponent, Demoiselle Delph, whose scheming nature con-
trasts with Goethe’s indecisiveness. Delph was the matchmaker who made
his engagement to Lili possible in the first place, and he remains caught
between her expectations and his father’s. Neither is blamed for meddling or
directly named as agents of the demonic. Delph relates to the demonic only
as a limit figure of other-determination (as opposed to self-determination).
If Goethe blames anything, it is his own planlessness—which tempts fate by
deliberately placing him at the mercy of chance. He describes this mindset in
detail:

It must be admitted that amazing things transpire [Wunderbare Dinge

müssen freilich entstehn] when a planless Youth, which so easily mis-
leads itself, is also driven down a false path by a passionate error of
Age [of Goethe’s father or Delph]. But that is what makes it Youth and
Life per se [Doch darum ist es Jugend und Leben überhaupt]: we usu-
ally learn to perceive the strategy only after the campaign is over [wir
[lernen] die Strategie gewöhnlich erst einsehen, wenn der Feldzug vor-
bei ist]. In the simple course of things [im reinen Geschäftsgang, i.e.,
78 Biographical Demons

if Goethe had worked to manage his situation], such a coincidence

[ein solches Zufälliges, i.e., the unexplained absence of the coach]
would have been easy to explain [wäre leicht aufzuklären gewesen],
but we conspire far too gladly with Error against that which is natu-
rally true [wir verschwören uns gar zu gern mit dem Irrtum gegen das
Natürlichwahre]. It is the same as with cards that we shuffle before
we deal them, precisely so that chance’s part in the deed should not be
diminished [damit ja dem Zufall sein Anteil an der Tat nicht verküm-
mert werde]. And thus the element comes into being through and
upon which the demonic so gladly operates [und so entsteht gerade
das Element, worin und worauf das Dämonische so gern wirkt]; and
plays with us all the worse, the more we sense its nearness [uns nur
desto schlimmer mitspielt, je mehr wir Ahndung von seiner Nähe
haben]. (HA 10:183)

The more we think we perceive the demonic, the more it seems to toy with
us. Feedback loops and figures of reciprocity characterize the subjective “ele-
ment” within which and upon which the demonic exerts its influence. This
“element” is the individual whose indecisiveness deliberately or accidentally
gives the demonic its space—a space that increases “the more we are aware
of it.” Through a conjuring effect of self-consciousness, the subject becomes
the object of something beyond its control—and loses control of itself in
its apprehension of the demonic. The individual experiences it, falsely, as a
quasi-autonomous rival, an apparently external volition or counterforce that
exceeds that which is willed or intended.14
This interpretation of the demonic, the last one of Poetry and Truth, is
especially noteworthy for its unmistakable demystification of the earlier
passages. From the perspective of old age, the demonic is a youthful van-
ity—which may be a problem not only of youth but of “life per se” (Leben
überhaupt). The errors of age, combined with the residual identification with
the ideals of youth, give the demonic a chance of surviving its own demys-
tification. As little as this aspect has been the object of an overt reception, it
resurfaces—in Lukács—as novelistic irony (as the knowing relation to what
one used to think one knew).
At the very end of the story, Goethe gives the impression that he was able
to break the spell and take the reins of his life. This effect is produced by a
drastically altered tone: “It fell away from me like scales from my eyes” (es
fiel mir wie Schuppen von den Augen, HA 10:186). Goethe is now “decided”
(entschieden), “resolved” (entschlossen), and describes his new state as “pas-
sionate and enthused” (leidenschaftlich und begeistert, HA 10:186–87). This
reversal does not indicate that he was instantly able to permanently exorcise
the demonic and return to his “intended” destiny. He does not break the
spell of the demonic to become Gundolf’s “great man.” The absence of the
demonic may only be a reversal of its current, as fleeting as its presence; and
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 79

the decision that freed Goethe from entanglements only led to new and dif-
ferent ones. This can be seen in the second part of his autobiography, the
Italian Journey, which resumes the narrative approximately a decade later.
The fugitive impulses upon which Poetry and Truth closed are now the moti-
vation of a flight from Weimar.15
As a narrative-biographical device, the demonic represents the confining
and determining forces of life—as well as their limitations and the anguish
they cause. One of its aspects is Ananke, but its other side is Tyche, which
manifests as the indeterminacy in conflicting pressures and possibilities.
Dämon and Eros play a lesser role here because they are subordinated to
the reality principles of Tyche and Ananke. According to Goethe, his actions
and behavior put him at the mercy of the latter forces, and he aggravated
the situation by his misinterpretation of their nature. The result was a con-
flagration—more dramatic for Goethe than anyone else—that illustrates the
demonic, while simultaneously downplaying it in a very everyday story of
“the follies of youth.” At the time of writing, in his old age, he knows that
the demonic was not a real force, but a force of his own making. What he
once called “the demonic” is presented with the ironic awareness that it was
mostly a product of his own blindness. It was his approach to things that
exposed him to determinations and indeterminacies which—if he had known
then what he knows now—he could have subjected to his own will.
Despite this “downplaying,” he makes it clear that the demonic repre-
sented a specific trial and a specific turning point. The demonic in this sense
is a passage, a juncture—representable even as a public architectural fea-
ture like Heimito von Doderer’s “Strudlhof Steps” (Studlhofstiege)—which,
regardless of the numerous internal and external forces in play, apparently
could only turn out as it did. This “fact,” however, is not unambiguously
“proven” by the irrevocability of its outcome. The tenuous strand of every-
thing that could have happened differently—but did not—always remains
demonically inflected, even retrospectively. At the end of a life, even after the
end, the demonic continues to thrive on the sense of the impossibility—“only
in the impossible did it seem to be content” (HA 10:175)—of changing that
which once appeared possible but is now inalterable: what makes it life in the
first place is that we only learn the strategy when the campaign is over. “Stra-
tegic” mastery of the demonic flies in the face of life, whose chances—the
infinite divisions upon which the coherence of individual identity depends—
will always be beyond the individual’s ability, by force of character, strategy,
or cunning, to conquer from the inside out.
The lines from Egmont upon which Poetry and Truth closes—which in
context seem to say that the best one can do in life is to hold onto the reins—
make peace with “fate” through an exaggerated optimism that contradicts
the previous idealization of “effective management” (what Goethe calls der
Geschäftsgang) as a way of avoiding the demonic. The lines from Egmont
are also a citation: the young Goethe quotes them to Delph as a parting shot.
80 Biographical Demons

Thus even in a small moment, multiple voices are audible. The young Goethe
speaks from the past, citing a literary character of his own creation, in the
same words with which old Goethe closes his autobiography. The union and
difference of the two—self and other, then and now, Dämon and Tyche—is
the essence of the demonic. Demonic characters like Egmont, by contrast,
experience their lives only in the now; they achieve self-realization without
remainder or admixture—or at least present the appearance of such undiluted
being. In Doderer’s punctual formulation: “Anyone who only realizes his own
character is demonic” (Jeder Mensch, der nur seinen Charakter realisiert, ist
dämonisch). Demonic characters never experience anything demonic in their
own lives, because they are themselves demonic (in the eyes of others).
The end of Poetry and Truth is Goethe’s confession that he was not—or
at least is no longer—a demonic figure. It may have come to him from the
outside, and he may have harbored it as an ideal on the inside, but his auto-
biography is not capable of unifying the two. This does not mean that it
would be impossible to deliberately produce the appearance of a seamless
demonic identity of fate and character; this is virtually the formula of the
genre of memoir. Fate is ultimately viewed from the outside, thereby giv-
ing the impression that the life in question was an intended whole. Fates,
like demonic characters, can be faked. Perhaps they can only be faked. But
Goethe did not pursue this strategy, at least not in his autobiography, except
perhaps in very indirect and convoluted ways.
It almost goes without saying that Goethe’s autobiography is highly staged
and constructed, but for the reasons outlined above, I see it as essentially
honest. Goethe does not present the self-vindication of his life but tries to
narrate and analyze the mechanics of his development. The aporias of pre-
cisely this approach give rise to the demonic. In a strictly formal sense, the
demonic is a deliberately staged rupture in the fabric of the autobiographical
narrative. This poses a problem, not only for Gundolf, but for biography and
autobiography in general. To what ends does the retrospective rereading of
a life strive to memorialize and totalize something that never presented itself
that way at the time? To avoid the appearance of instrumentalization and
aggrandizement inherent to all biography, the demonic is a strategic refusal
of the heroic supremacy of the whole based on an apparently successful out-
come. Goethe thus works against narrative paradigms that still dominate
biographical prose, to say nothing of historical narratives.

The Story of Jung-Stilling

The limited degree to which Goethe’s autobiography reflects belief in “the

demonic” is evident in Poetry and Truth’s extended analyses, especially in its
final chapters, of the characters of others, who—unlike Goethe—acted sys-
tematically as if their lives were governed by “suprapersonal powers.” Goethe
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 81

is not completely dismissive of such individuals. He does not, for example,

use the word “vanity” (HA 10:89, 91) and move on. To the contrary, figures
like Heinrich Jung-Stilling (in book 16) and especially Johann Caspar Lavater
(in books 18 and 19) are intensely scrutinized. The resulting portraits have
an undeniable affinity with the demonic in book 20, but these versions of it
differ in that they represent it as a specifically religious (and unironic) affect.
Two extremes must be ruled out, in order to make room for the demonic: the
affectation of piety and the individualistic creed, complementary mystifica-
tions that may double for and mask one another. The demonic, outside of the
paradoxical and enigmatic rigor of book 20, can easily revert to a completely
conventional self-mystification. Goethe may have lapsed in his own self-
interpretation—relapsed to aberrant perspectives of his youth—but within
the pages of Poetry and Truth, he clearly does not believe in the demonic as a
suprapersonal force of personal predestination.
For the sake of brevity, I will not analyze both Lavater and Jung-Stilling,
but will focus on the more compact case of Jung-Stilling. The budding phy-
sician Jung (or Stilling), a friend of Goethe’s in the late 1760s and 1770s,
became known for performing cataract operations. Unlike Goethe, Jung
believed that the events of his life were providential in the sense that they
could be directly understood as encouragements or admonishments from
God. Beyond this obvious connection of subject matter, the Jung-Stilling epi-
sode is placed symmetrically in relation to the demonic: the last five books
of Poetry and Truth were published after Goethe’s death as a single install-
ment, and the story of Jung appears at the end of book 16 (HA 10:87–93);
the demonic is introduced in the middle of book 20, thus closing the bracket
opened by the Jung story. In Goethe’s account, Jung is a well-intentioned and
sincere person with questionable ability as an ocular surgeon. Jung’s good
reputation depends at least as much on his personal qualities as on his skills,
but Goethe does not go so far as to say that he is incompetent. The surgeries
work sometimes, but Stilling’s real problem is his reaction to failure, which
leads Goethe to draw conclusions about “this kind of a psychology” (eine
solche Sinnesart, HA 10:88). In this context, Goethe makes a remark relevant
to the demonic:

Often in such cases there is an underlying obscure mentality

modified by individuality [eine dunkle Geistesform . . . durch Individ-
ualität modifiziert]; such persons, accidentally encouraged [zufällig
angeregt], invest great importance in their empirical career [auf ihre
empirische Laufbahn]. Everything is held to be a supernatural pur-
pose [übernatürliche Bestimmung] based on the conviction of God’s
direct intervention. (HA 10:89)

The mention of “an obscure mentality” with “individual modifications”

reframes the demonic as an interpretive dilemma on the border of religion
82 Biographical Demons

and psychology. Goethe extensively criticizes Jung’s worldview and the pit-
falls of his way of rationalizing life: regardless of whether well-laid plans go
awry or whether good luck leads to a positive outcome, Jung’s logic results
in a deficient sense of his role, “a certain irresoluteness when it comes to
his own actions [eine gewisse Unentschlossenheit, selbst zu handeln]” (HA
10:89). If an individual’s assessment of possible courses of action becomes
too dependent on the outcome, he or she becomes indecisive, unstable, and
begins to make bad decisions; if experiences are subjected to retrospective
theological rationalization, the ongoing interpretive recoil erodes the grounds
of subsequent actions, producing extremes of self-doubt and overcompensa-
tory self-justification.
Goethe analyzes Jung’s psychological hygiene as a thoughtless application
of aperçus. Jung takes recourse to knee-jerk formulaic insights that help him
to minimally (and temporarily) maintain mental equilibrium. Using almost
the identical terms to those of his 1818 letter on Urworte, Goethe defines
an aperçu as a principle that “needs no temporal sequence in order to pro-
duce conviction [bedarf keiner Zeitfolge zur Überzeugung]; it emerges totally
and completely in the present moment [es entspringt ganz und vollendet im
Augenblick]” (HA 10:90).16 But here, unlike in the letter, Goethe recognizes
that such insights, though they may work as coping mechanisms, can lead to
error, dogmatism, and interpersonal conflict.
The conclusion of the tale of Jung-Stilling is ambivalent: he emerges as
a pathetic figure, but Goethe’s last words (the last of book 16) are perhaps
inflected by the fact that he did go on to “become someone.” Goethe concedes
that Jung’s natural energy and abilities, “supported by his belief in supernatu-
ral assistance” (gestützt auf den Glauben an übernatürliche Hilfe), prevented
him from becoming “entirely hopeless” (ganz ohne Hoffnung, HA 10:93).
Stilling’s life strategy may not be completely dysfunctional, but it is a far cry
from Goethe’s “worldly attitude” (HA 10:90). And despite Goethe’s attempt
at tolerance, he betrays irritation in his descriptions of Jung. Goethe claims
he has nothing against the pious affect: “Certainly I am happy to let everyone
decide for themselves how to deal with and cultivate [zurechtlegen und aus-
bilden] the riddle of their own days [das Rätsel seiner Tage]” (HA 10:90). But
the explanation of the source of his anger at Stilling—the “Job drama” that
ensued in the wake of a failed operation (HA 10:91)—seems to reflect some
of the original frustration. His anger may well be justified, but its intensity
is seen in the generalization of Stilling’s behavior into a “mentality” (Sin-
nesart). Goethe never completely condemns this mentality, but he clearly had
no patience for Jung’s self-absorbed attempts to discern “a divine pedagogy”
(eine göttliche Pädagogik) in everything (HA 10:90–91). All Goethe could do
against it was to try to lead his friend to “the rational and necessary result”
(das vernünftig-notwendige Resultat), “that God’s decisions are inscrutable”
(daß Gottes Ratschlüsse unerforschlich seien, HA 10:91). This platitudinous
point can be taken in at least two different directions: for Jung it means
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 83

making an exception in a universal order presupposed as comprehensible—

but for Goethe the incomprehensibility of divine providence may be essential,
because at the limit, the incoherence of providence implies a world more
demonic than divine.
Whatever Goethe may have understood as demonic, it was not “God”
or “providence” under a different name. “It resembled Providence” (HA
10:175) because it shows signs of coherence, but such resemblances are only
the raw material of partial intelligibility. I am not arguing that Goethe was
above superstition, but his idea of the demonic is deliberately contrasted
with Jung’s more conventional piety. Jung’s belief in providence represents
a specific coping strategy, which contrasts both with Goethe’s and with the
idea of a “demonic character”: as an outward representation, the supernat-
ural guidance that Stilling incessantly invokes is not convincing to others.
He is unable to convincingly perform his belief in life’s meaningfulness and
thus fails to manifest any demonic force of character. He is blind to the
demonic, because his system of aperçus leaves no room for ambiguity or
interpretive uncertainty. The demonic, unlike Jung’s closed aperçu-system,
emerges between the lines of life’s actual and possible outcomes; the demonic
challenges interpretive-narrative rationalization in ways that erode the dif-
ference between truth (Wahrheit) and fiction (Dichtung). Stilling’s belief in
providence is fictive (for Goethe), but Jung takes it for truth—and its effects
are real. Jung cannot see beyond the necessary applicability of a theological
micro-narrative (or aperçu) to question the rationales of narrativity itself. For
Goethe the demonic is a failure or ambiguity of biographical induction (the
inability to narratively generalize), whereas Stilling’s problem results from a
failure of deduction (of empirical outcomes to conform to self-serving prem-
ises about the way of the world). The result for Jung is psychological crisis,
a compulsive search for interpretations that can bring given outcomes in
line with expectations. “True” demonic characters, however, like Napoleon,
Egmont, or Alba—to the extent that they are conceivable—would neither
deduce nor induce. Demonic characters would not experience the demonic or
related phenomena, because they experience no dissonance between self and
world, premises and experiences. Jung tended to drive himself (and others)
mad, but the demonic character is only conceivable as another kind of mad-
ness: the experience of such a (purely hypothetical) character only reconfirms
what it already believes. No interpretation is necessary: initial premises about
life’s rules never have occasion to be questioned, and processes of rationaliza-
tion are never initiated because there is nothing to rationalize.
Such a character is not just unlikely but impossible: the “demonic char-
acter” can only exist in the eye of the beholder.17 The demonic character is
only as good as its ability to represent itself as such. Such self-representations,
following Goethe’s “monster motto” (der ungeheuere Spruch)—Nemo contra
deum nisi deus ipse (“None but a god may go against a god,” HA 10:177)—
strive compulsively to discover the limits of their own fraudulence. The fraud
84 Biographical Demons

of the demonic character emerges whenever he or she is tripped up by the

demonic as an external force, causing the narrative of “suprapersonal” fate to
collapse. The sheer desire to have or to be a demonic character is not enough.
And if one did have one, the first impulse might be to try to break out of it.
In the end, the apparently demonic character can only be referred back to the
Dämon (in the sense of Anlage or disposition, before and beyond all inten-
tion) or to Tyche (the externalities that allowed pseudo-demons to produce
convincing deceptions such as those of Goethe’s contemporary Cagliostro).
Consciousness and self-consciousness are thus not part of the psychological
profile of—fictional—demonic characters, which are always naive or unself-
conscious. At the extreme, demonic characters would be mere automatons,
entirely without character (for example, Olympia in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
“The Sandman”).18

Elements of the Demonic Novel

The demonic in Poetry and Truth is more than a systematic matrix for fate,
character, and development. It looks behind Orphic and other Urworte for
a system of social-psychological analysis capable of revealing the experien-
tial parameters and limitations of “character.” Poetry and Truth conceives
this system inductively on the basis of Goethe’s life and the lives of oth-
ers in their concrete situations. The result can be read as a repertoire or
scenario-system for the design of novels. Lukács certainly realized this when
he introduced the demonic in his Theory of the Novel. In the early nineteenth
century, when the novel—a genre to which Goethe also contributed—was
entering into its decisive phase, Poetry and Truth formalized the relation of
individual and incident into a system of combinatoric potentials. This proto-
typology allows numerous scenarios, especially those involving coincidences,
to be classified as demonic. Dostoyevsky’s Demons, for example, constantly
shows how expectations and plans (including those of the “villains”) fall
apart due to unforeseen events and accidents. At the beginning of part 3,
chapter 5, for example, the narrator refers to an incident that saved the vil-
lains’ plans (at least for a while) as “a completely unexpected circumstance
to which they did not contribute” (Dostoyevsky, Die Dämonen, 1985, 832,
my translation).
The demonic also manifests itself when a plan or intent fails to unambigu-
ously correspond with its result. Again in Demons, Pyotr Stepanovich tells
Liputin that he will kill Fedka (827–28), but when Fedka is found dead the
next morning, it appears that Pyotr had nothing to do with it (830). The nar-
rator never gives an answer to this puzzle. Such are the devices of demonic
uncertainty, which, multiplied in the course of a long novel, may justify the
title of Demons. Rather than defining the novel, as Lukács did, as an experi-
mental effort to find significance in life, the “demonic” novel overtly reverses
Goethe’s Poetry and Truth 85

this expectation. The demonic novel is based on the expectation of a general

lack of significance, which causes even the smallest correspondences and coin-
cidences to become loaded with meaning. The demonic novel expects to see
only incomprehensible causations without resolution, and this expectation is
not entirely disappointed. Formally, therefore, the demonic novel falls under
Goethe’s definition of the novella as an “unheard-of event” (unerhörtes Ereig-
nis). The difference of scale matters, however: the narrator strives to unify a
complex chain of events and interconnected plotlines into a single event, the
singularity and “unheard-of” quality of which is progressively undermined
and buried—under a mountain of prose. (Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is perhaps
archetypical here.) One unheard-of event is an interesting exception to the
order of things, but the demonic novel views such exceptions as the norm,
which produces, if not a new cosmology of the novel, then at least a spe-
cific approach, which initiates the experimental inquiry into the meaning of
life from a presupposition of meaninglessness. This atheistic presumption of
meaninglessness is a narrative innovation insofar as it endows coincidences
and random correspondences with an enticing (“demonic”) ambiguity, which
is able to simulate the problems caused by such events when they occur in
“real life.”
 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

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Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
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 Chapter Four

The Unhappy Endings of Morphology

Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History

Kyklisches so gut wie eschatologisches Denken kann sich der

großen Parallele bedienen. [Cyclical as well as eschatological
thought can make use of grand parallels.]
—Carl Schmitt, “Drei Möglichkeiten eines christlichen
Geschichtsbildes” (Blumenberg and Schmitt,
Briefwechsel 1971–1978)

The Problem of “Realization-Recoil”

The Austrian novelist Heimito von Doderer used the term “Erfüllungs-
Rückstoß”—“the recoil of fulfillment”—to refer to a wide range of
phenomena associated with the idea of realization in its various senses. The
term appears in Doderer’s diary as a part of the important 1933 “thematic”
list (discussed in chapter 7), which conceives it as a political allegory, specifi-
cally as a mode of reflecting on new problems that inevitably arise when an
idea or plan is realized. The “realization” in question in 1933 was the end
of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi rise to power in Germany. Doderer,
an Austrian, had been a supporter of the Austrian National Socialist move-
ment since before 1933. This context is clear in his diary, according to which
Erfüllungs-Rückstoß defines the situation of artists in the new political land-
scape: “The condition in which a spiritual worker [ein spiritueller Arbeiter]
now finds himself, in the first period after the birth of the new Reich, stands
under the psychological law of Erfüllungs-Rückstoß” (Tagebücher 1920–
1939, 1:651, my translation).1
Doderer’s support of Nazism and his reactionary politics at this time pose
questions that may never be completely answerable.2 Biographical issues
aside, however, the problem of realization and fulfillment undoubtedly
reflects a more general experience. Georg Lukács, for example, may have

87
88 The Unhappy Endings of Morphology

confronted similar uncertainties following the Russian Revolution of 1917. A

more contemporary example of such a “recoil” scenario is the post-1989 fall
of communism, which led to speculation about “the end of history,”3 while
the citizens of affected nations did not experience an immediate realization of
all of their hopes and dreams. On the political stage, the “recoil” of a “real-
ization” includes renewed conflict, disappointment, and despair (which may
undermine the proclaimed “realization”). Doderer’s case is trivial, one might
say, because he mostly seems to understand the problem with respect to his
own chances as a writer. Even this triviality, however, reveals the conception’s
wide applicability to countless large and small events; and this in turn makes
it viable as a literary theme capable of surviving Doderer’s involvement with
fascism.4
The psychological law of “fulfillment recoil” is psychological because it
applies to everyone differently; it would state that once a particular sweeping
change has taken effect—such as a military victory or “the birth of an empire”
or the election of a certain president—this does not mean that every individual
hope (or fear) is automatically realized. To the contrary, Erfüllungs-Rückstoß
is only the first wave of future backlash, the first moment of disillusion-
ment. Thus the Nazis’ rise to power was ironically inauspicious for Doderer,
because his pro-Nazi epic The Demons (begun around 1930) was supposed
to end with a vision of the “new empire.” History got there first, realizing
his hopes before he could programmatically espouse them in writing. This
odd case of timing provided the basis for his postwar literary success: if he
had actually completed and published a pro-Nazi novel (before or after the
Anschluss), it would have been exceedingly difficult for him to convincingly
backtrack his ideological commitments in time to save his reputation.
“Fulfillment recoil” is not one theme among others—for Doderer or in
general. It recurs throughout his work as a figure of the demonic, starting
with early texts predating his turn toward fascist politics.5 This idea—of
“being taken aback by an unexpected realization”—is most compactly and
systematically articulated in Doderer’s diary (May 5, 1933) in a “microscopic
comparison”:

It is this Erfüllungs-Rückstoß which still always takes one’s breath

away [den Atem versetzt]. Allow me a small, even microscopic com-
parison [Vergleich]. If I am thinking of someone as I walk down
the street, and then he is suddenly and “accidentally” [‘zufällig’]
standing in front of me in the flesh: this means that something has
jumped from the inside into the outside [etwas von innen nach aus-
sen gesprungen] and a thought has become flesh [ein Gedanke Fleisch
geworden]. After that, to put it mildly, one is left gasping for air. . . .
The irrational has once again staged one of its great eruptions [Ein-
brüche] into history (and maybe history essentially consists only of
such eruptions). (TB 1:591)
Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History 89

This kind of scenario, in which a thought, fantasy, or desire is unexpect-

edly realized externally—ambiguously as if from the outside—is an ordering
principle in the final published version of Doderer’s The Demons. Chance
encounters are made to coincide with concerns welling up from the inside.
This phenomenon bears an affinity with what Freud called “the uncanny”
(das Unheimliche), and thus it is not without precedent in fiction. The dif-
ficulty of knowing or deciding what to do when something appears to realize
itself can also be conceived as a morphological problem: “Fulfillment recoil”
arises whenever one wants to discern a culmination or declare that a particu-
lar developmental (or historical) cycle is finished and has run its course. But
not all endings are of the same quality, and, depending on one’s perspective,
an end may be a new beginning. A finished cycle may produce a restart—or
an ending may endure in a more or less stable way, giving rise to a new (but
perhaps only apparent) continuity.
Especially in biographical analyses and plot mechanics, the unworkability
of the morphological format becomes apparent. Goethe’s conception of mor-
phology supposes open and potentially endless cycles; but from the perspective
of an individual life, thought and action are often conceived in terms of ends.
Morphology causes limited ends and “realizations” to appear subjective in a
way that blocks their interpretation as the realization of a supposedly objec-
tive morphological providence. The only perspectives from which realizations
can be judged are the intents and the desires of individuals. But, as Doderer
knew, especially unwilled events (or those that are only wished for) are not
fulfillments but demonically charged wish fulfillments, disorienting coinci-
dences that leave one “gasping for air” in the face of an irrational eruption.
Goethe’s mood on the very last page of book 20 of Poetry and Truth can
also be taken as an example of “fulfillment shock.” At first glance, it might
appear that there is no sense of disillusionment here, but readers of the Italian
Journey may still see this euphoria as a partial precondition of a future disap-
pointment. The initial reaction may be shock—a forward-looking emptiness,
in which past cares echo away in the desired outcome—but disappointment
may be the only way forward: what can follow such a profound (but perhaps
partly retrospective) fulfillment? The conflict is resolved, the desired outcome
achieved, but how should things now proceed? Unlike the end of Poetry and
Truth, the treatment of the problem of historical and artistic fulfillment in
Goethe’s conversation with Eckermann on March 11, 1828, is ironically
fatalistic. “Fulfillment” here is not identical with death, but it is related to it:

—The only way out is to keep ruining oneself! [Der Mensch muß
wieder ruiniert werden!]—Every exceptional individual has a certain
mission [Sendung], which he is called [berufen] to bring about. Once
he has accomplished it, he has no purpose on earth in this form [in
dieser Gestalt], and Providence will reuse him for something else.
But because everything down here happens in the course of nature,
90 The Unhappy Endings of Morphology

the demons try to trip him up, over and over until he finally falls.
This is what happened to Napoleon and many others. Mozart died
in his thirty-sixth year, Raphael at almost the same age, and Byron
was only a little older. But all had fulfilled their mission [Mission]
perfectly, and then it was simply time for them to go [es war wohl
Zeit daß sie gingen], so that something is left to do for others in this
world, which was set up to be long-lasting. (Eckermann, Gespräche
mit Goethe, 660)

The morphological point of Erfüllungs-Rückstoß is that once “form”

(Gestalt) has been achieved (as the result of a development or culmination),
there is nowhere to go but down. The productive energies that went into the
blossoming of form cease and become static following their realization, and
death (or at least “ruin”) is the precondition of continued individual contri-
butions to a greater whole.
Goethe’s explanation here differs, at least in part, from his Orphic
“Urworte,” Poetry and Truth, and the morphological writings; to Eckermann
he asserts a comprehensive analogy between human life, history, and the
forms and cycles of nature. Regardless of the cause of such deaths, the “mor-
phological” or “demonic” cause was the fact that these geniuses had fulfilled
their intended purpose. This “mission” was also not exclusively their own but
was facilitated by “demons,” as well as the higher powers of “nature” and
“providence.” The main topic of the conversation is the source of Goethe’s
own creativity, and thus his own long life stands in implicit contrast to Byron,
Mozart, and Raphael. Goethe does not die, and he avoids the demons by
“ruining” and subsequently reinventing himself.
Doderer presents history as essentially consisting of irrational breaks and
false fulfillments. Goethe’s remark to Eckermann, on the other hand, under-
stands history like Gundolf, who allows contingency to be subsumed by
overarching morphological necessity. In book 20 of Poetry and Truth, Goethe
characterizes life more like Doderer as a permanent failure of learning: “we
usually only learn the strategy after the campaign is over” (HA 10:183)—but
he tells Eckermann that the lives of “great men” are overseen by a supraper-
sonal providence. History is a cosmic drama and the exclusive result of the
productive energy of exemplary individuals. This is Gundolf’s thesis, but it
does not conform to the more systematic and less conventional narratives of
the Orphic “Urworte,” Poetry and Truth, and the morphology.
However, the naturalization of the “untimely” deaths of heroes and
geniuses—rationalized so as to make them precisely timely—may be partly
ironical. He tells this story to Eckermann in a rather unserious way (which
Eckermann is likely to take seriously). Goethe ignores empirical-historical
causation, for example, in favor of a legend about the “mission” of geniuses
whom “demons will try to trip up.” His final words offer an especially implau-
sible justification: the productivity of geniuses must come to an end “so that,
Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History 91

in the course of the world, which is conceived on the long term, there’s some-
thing left for the rest of us to do.” Such a witty explanation may work in a
conversation, but there is no reason to think that Goethe actually believed it.
With respect to Goethe’s own longevity, the line about “leaving something
for others to do” implicitly gives voice to younger writers (who may have
wished Goethe had a shorter career). With respect to history, the ironies of
Goethe’s story take the form of latent counter-narratives and myths. They
are ironic because in our time one is supposed to know better. However,
many philosophies of history arguably have a similarly ironic structure.
Goethe’s story of fulfillment dynamics, for all of its unseriousness, betrays
an awareness of epistemological problems common to both morphology and
the philosophy of history. Morphology’s diachronic idea of form can, so to
speak, never decide if it is cyclical or teleological. Form-in-transformation
can only be represented as an arbitrary point on a continuum, and any given
moment of a cycle can only represent the underlying process metonymically.
The metonymic shift from transformation to enduring form (Gestalt) freezes
metamorphosis and hypostasizes morphology’s diachronic-teleological
intent. A “form” in transformation, retrospectively isolated as an apparent
culmination, fruition, or fulfillment, can only be a metaphor, the coloration
of which always reflects value judgment and anthropomorphism. Goethe’s
reading of the lives of geniuses is thus not only a “naturalization” of human
history through the analogy with natural forms: the morphological concep-
tion of nature itself includes the human perspective that makes the analogy
possible in the first place.

Introducing Oswald Spengler

The pitfalls of this kind of philosophy of history are most apparent in

Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes:
Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, 1918 and 1922). This noto-
rious work, more often mentioned on account of its influence than actually
read, is a valuable source for ideas about the demonic, because, like Gundolf,
Spengler tries to fuse the demonic and morphology. Spengler, more drastically
even than Gundolf, places morphology’s method of retrospective analogiza-
tion in the service of a sweeping historical hypothesis. Goethe’s remarks to
Eckermann indicate that an approach like Spengler’s was always a possibility
of morphology, but Goethe himself never pursued it. And he never would
have, because for him morphology was a way of thinking—a medium of
reflection—and not a descriptive or predictive theoretical system.
Many of Spengler’s self-proclaimed “innovations” are easily unmasked as
morphological rejuvenations of the clichés of a quasi-philosophical philoso-
phy of history. In this category is the language of “rise and fall,” “development
and decay,” “blossoming and fading.” If one wanted to see an innovation
92 The Unhappy Endings of Morphology

here, it would lie in the interdependence and ambiguity of opposing terms:

for Spengler, “recoil” is an immanent part of the formal-developmental
structure of “fulfillment,” “culmination” (Vollendung), and cannot be dif-
ferentiated from “decline” (Untergang). “The history of a culture is the
progressive realization of its possibilities [die fortschreitende Verwirklichung
ihres Möglichen]. Culmination is synonymous with the end [Die Vollendung
ist gleichbedeutend mit dem Ende]” (UdA 141).6 These sentences give com-
pact expression to Spengler’s idea that every culture harbors the possibility
of developing its own unique civilization; its “culmination” terminates this
potential and at the same time fully realizes it (to the retrospective viewer).
For Spengler, the telos is only a passing phase, the beginning of the end.
This stands in contrast with a retrospective view of history focusing on
unrealized potentials or felicitous historical correspondences. This is not
Spengler’s approach. For him, each cultural-historical monad has only one
unique realization and its only possible outcomes are success or failure. A
culture may fail to realize its potential for numerous contingent reasons, but
this is irrelevant for the success stories, such as the West, which succeeded but
have already passed their zenith. According to Spengler, cultures blossom into
civilizations, and the latter are, by definition, in a state of decline with respect
to the culture that gave rise to them. To illustrate this conception, Spengler
makes a literary-historical hypothesis: “Goethe could—perhaps—have died
in his younger years, but not his ‘idea.’ Faust and Tasso would not have
been written, but even without this poetic manifestation, in a very mysterious
sense they would nevertheless have ‘been’ ” (UdA 189). What applies here on
the small scale is valid for history itself. All historical events are functionally
“substitutable” (vertretbar) for other historical events within a morphologi-
cally predetermined system of inevitable realization:

The French Revolution could have been substituted [vertreten] by

an event of a different form [von anderer Gestalt] and in a different
place [an anderer Stelle], maybe in England or Germany. Its “idea,”
. . . the transition from culture to civilization, the victory of the anor-
ganic cosmopolis over the organic countryside, . . . was necessary, and
indeed precisely at this moment [in diesem Augenblick]. . . .When an
event is epoch-making, this means: it marks a necessary, fateful turn-
ing point [eine notwendige, schicksalshafte Wendung] in the course
[Ablauf] of a culture. (UdA, 193)

Unlike Doderer’s “fulfillment recoil,” Spengler’s idea of “culmination” (Vol-

lendung), though synonymous with “the end,” pretends indifference toward
the effects and affects of beginnings and endings. In the big picture there is
only one possible outcome, he argues; accidents or coincidences only affect
the specific way in which the end is achieved. Spengler’s philosophy of history
is thus the exact opposite of Doderer’s: the latter sees history as an endless
Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History 93

series of irrational, merely apparent fulfillments. For Doderer, no historical

(or biographical) “culmination” can be the verifiable result of “demonic”
entelechy. In Spengler, on the other hand, a preordained morphological
superstructure provides certainty and stability, which allow contingencies to
be cancelled in the process of culmination.
By positing that there is only one possible end, Spengler’s theory of sub-
stitution (Vertretung) negates the sphere of means. The point of the end itself
is thereby also negated: a Vollendung from which nothing can proceed, from
which nothing begins, is precisely contrary to Goethe’s morphology, which
sought to imagine not only the analogical but the generative interconnection of
all things ad infinitum. Rather than concentrating on forms and their genesis,
Spengler’s morphology focuses on the determination of a discrete, closed, and
repeatable, cyclical form of history. To the extent that history is the predeter-
mined form of all forms, the forms themselves are only the superfluous evidence
of the “morphology of world history.” For Spengler, events and actions are also
morphologically structured, occurring for the sake of an unavoidable but ulti-
mately senseless “culmination,” which is to say: for no reason at all.
This reading of cyclical form in terms of inevitable mortality gives the
impression of an overelaborate nihilism, which may make sense at a cosmic
scale, which makes earthly life seem diminishingly small and insignificant.
But there is little reason to think, as Spengler does, that cyclical forms could
be generalized in a way that would allow for prognostication. He does
not argue that “everything passes away” or “all life is mortal,” but argues
for a universal etiology of rise and fall. He refuses to call this fated cycle
“teleology,” because this conception instrumentalizes and “rationalizes”
heroic-tragic destiny (UdA 157); the idea of inevitable decline explicitly
opposes both eschatological and progressive understandings of history. But
these disclaimers do not mean that his morphology of history is not teleologi-
cal.7 In Goethe’s morphology, the form of the cycle itself must be teleological
in order to be identified as a cycle. In part 2 of Decline of the West, Spengler
seeks to clarify this point by arguing for “local” teleologies (“culminations”)
against a single unifying teleology:

I protest . . . against two assumptions that have corrupted all histori-
cal thought up to the present: against the assumption of an ultimate
goal [Endziel] of all of humanity and against the denial of the exis-
tence of any kind of goals [Endziele]. Life has a purpose [Ziel]. It is
the fulfillment of that which was posited [gesetzt] in its conception
[Zeugung]. (UdA 613)

The beginning always already includes the end and eliminates everything
between.
One could speak in Spengler’s sense of “limited” and “general” tele-
ologies. The larger problem, however, lies in the dubious significance or
94 The Unhappy Endings of Morphology

meaningfulness of the Ziele and Endziele: ultimately, the secularized and

naturalized providence of Spengler’s theory is meaningless insofar as it lacks
an external guarantee or reference. The discernment of “limited” teleological
cycles endows life and history with a purely (but merely) immanent purpose
within the morphological system. A further problem is the way that perceived
cyclical “forms” are immediately identified with real cyclical, iterative, and
developmental cycles; analogies are easily constructed if the points of com-
parison are general enough. The existence and meaning of iterative-cyclical
form is a genuine question, but if it is approached in a very general way (as
“nature”), then everything seems to fit.
Key arguments from the first pages of Spengler’s introduction illustrate the
approach and its drawbacks. One might imagine that he is focused on classic
questions of the philosophy of history, for example, the “old questions” of
Kant’s 1798 “The Conflict of the Faculties”: Does history reflect a general
progress of mankind? Is it possible to conceive of history a priori? Accord-
ing to Kant, only a transcendental a priori would allow the form and ends of
history to be known. Historical or economic trends in the small scale—the
perception of busts and booms, advances and setbacks—are ambiguous with
respect to the question of ultimate ends, and the relevant time scales for
measuring cycles are never completely certain. Only if the condition of the
possibility of history can be established can its direction and telos be guar-
anteed (even if the precise path is unforeseeable).8 Kant treats this question
with strategic irony, whereas Spengler offers a relatively prosaic answer: the
a priori of history can only be perceived empirically, a posteriori. Hindsight
and comparative analysis—after the end of many histories, cultures, and civi-
lizations—make it possible to perceive the general form of history.
Beyond the systematic and theoretical aspects of this question, however,
Spengler is pragmatically motivated. He wants to know how to make history
at the end of history. To act historically, he argues, one must know what history
will do and what outcomes it will favor. Lacking this knowledge, historical
ends are not directly pursued by individual actors but indirectly through the
“cunning of reason.” It has been argued (for example, by Nietzsche and Rein-
hart Koselleck) that it is detrimental to human agency if history is viewed as
a suprapersonal “spirit.” Spengler, however, explicitly rejects human freedom
as a guiding force in history. He claims, in effect, to have discovered the
system of “the cunning of reason.” Those who know the system will have a
competitive advantage over those who do not. This peculiar “freedom” thus
claims competitive advantage, motivation, and rhetorical leverage for those
who pursue it. History, in Spengler’s morphological conception, is a force of
nature to which humans must relate in much the same way as they relate to
death. And since the outcome is the same no matter what, Spengler advocates
an ethics of maximizing self-interest within the preset limits of history.
Spengler, unlike other philosophers of history (and despite his claim to use
a comparative historical method), claims that European modernity offers an
Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History 95

ultimate historical standpoint. But the problem of retrospectivity is a prob-

lem for all philosophies of history. For Kant, for example, the human Anlage
(“predisposition” as a universal-transcendental preset) cannot be known
unless it betrays itself in a historical sign. Such a sign allows the a priori of the
human Anlage to be determined, and on this basis the course of history can be
known (but not predicted in individual cases). Spengler, rather than looking
for a singular sign or event, claims to use a comparative method to discover
the underlying form of human nature in a comprehensive system of analo-
gies between nature and all recorded histories. This approach is conditioned
by his lateness with respect to his own culture and other civilizations—and
by the sheer volume of cross-cultural data available in the early twentieth
century. Spengler’s relativist historicism includes non-European histories and
developing ethnographic ideas,9 but he aims to produce a monolithic idea of
History. By pretending to use the taxonomic and tabulative methods of the
natural sciences, his idea of the human Anlage reflects the natural diversity
of human fauna as reflected in the variety of human history and culture.
He produces parallel analogical currents to show consistent direction and
development—but the story always ends with decline. To the extent one can
speak of a moral to the story, it emerges from a fabric of historical paral-
lels, which are totalized into a supposedly inescapable pattern. The scope
of this systematization is apparent in Spengler’s tabulation of the “simul-
taneous” epochs of art and spirit (UdA 71–72), which break down various
historical cultures according to rubrics such as “Spring, Summer, Fall, and
Winter” and “Prehistory, Culture, Civilization.” Spengler claims that these
analogical patterns, which are presented as evidence of an inescapable cosmic
destiny, are the result of inductive analysis, but his approach is transparently
deductive.
Spengler insists that his non-Eurocentric approach represents a “Coper-
nican” revolution in the concept of history (UdA 24), but his terminology
is conventional. His system is a hyper-historicism that imagines the devel-
opment of man in a multiplicity of possibilities that are inevitably defined
by death and decline. “Culture” blossoms into unique symbolic forms that
define the historical identity of a people, but once these forms are fully articu-
lated, there is (as Goethe said to Eckermann) “nothing left to do,” and “old”
civilizations fall to the vitality of “young” cultures. Histories end in civiliza-
tion, and civilization is defined by empty repetition, expansion, and eventual
self-destruction. Artistically epigonal and politically imperialist, civilizations
assert themselves mechanically until they collapse under the imbalance of
internal and external forces.
The developmental paradigm that Spengler attempts to establish in cross-
cultural and comparative historical analogies is at best debatable and at worst
disingenuous. The length of his book is the result of the overstated ambition
of its central thesis, which is relentlessly recuperated in more than a thousand
pages. This fundamental imbalance between Spengler’s thesis and its proof
96 The Unhappy Endings of Morphology

causes the latter to outweigh the former. This overabundance of material

is only supportable to the extent his specific narratives and interpretations
offer something different from his repetitive metanarratives. Also, because
the theory, though influential, has been the object of decisive refutations,10 I
will now turn my attention to the methodological sections of part 1 of The
Decline of the West, in which the demonic often merely amplifies the pathos
of the conception. At the same time, however, key elements of Goethe’s more
systematic articulations are implicitly retained.

Fate in Spengler’s Morphology of History

The “morphological” basis of Spengler’s fatalistic philosophy of history

grants a specific access to the problem of mortality and finitude. I take this
partly from Adorno, who implies that Spengler was a lesser, more pop-
philosophical Heidegger.11 For Adorno, Spengler was the better Heidegger,
precisely because he was a more transparent historical symptom, and his
motivations were more transparent and taken less seriously by professional
philosophers. The coauthor of The Dialectic of Enlightenment does not treat
Spengler as a taboo figure because he is a symptom of Enlightenment’s regres-
sive possibilities. One might even argue that Spengler, Heidegger, and Adorno
himself tried to historicize the drawbacks of instrumental reason and positiv-
ism in the absence of metaphysics. Thus in Spengler’s sense, all three may be
seen as “substitutable” (vertretbar) at the level of functional equivalence. To
be clear, the point of this substitution is not guilt by association, but rather,
following Adorno, to read Spengler in the context of recognized problems of
modernity.
In this context, Goethe’s idea of morphology gives voice and authority to
Spengler’s prototypically anti-rationalist discourse. Like Gundolf, Spengler
reads Goethe neither as a philologist nor as a critic—not as any kind of
professional—but as a disciple. Spengler presents himself as a mouthpiece,
identifying himself with Goethe so intensely as to eliminate critical distance.
Goethe’s words, which often lack quotation marks or a reference to their
source, only say what Spengler thinks. His use of Goethe is often clearly
deceptive or wrong—but he may be a deceived deceiver. And even if mor-
phology is only a legitimating discourse for ends that are both highly suspect
and completely conventional, Spengler’s ability to ventriloquize Goethe may
also be a precondition for his work’s strange persuasiveness and popular
success.
When it comes to specific differences between Spengler and Goethe, the
question of morphology and “fate” is answered very differently. Spengler,
like Gundolf, would see his difference with Goethe on this account not as a
mistake on his part but as the result of the changed perspectives of the new
century. This historical difference in turn depends on morphology’s inherent
Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History 97

ambiguity with respect to questions of “optimism” or “pessimism.” Goethe’s

morphology does not emphasize decline, mortality, and death but instead
implicitly focuses on birth and rebirth. Spengler, on the other hand, absolu-
tizes mortality in the discrete finitude of cultural monads. This combination
of mortality and relativism may also recall Herder (one of Goethe’s most
important sources).12 Spengler’s morphology might also be taken as a variant
of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, except that Spengler’s exposed “de-”
prefixes (unter prefixes in German) such as de-mise or de-cline conspicuously
replace Nietzsche’s trans- and super- (über-) compounds.
Such comparisons, when articulated, make Spengler’s shortcomings clear.
But without such differentiations, his theory appears close enough to Goethe
and to other philosophies of history to produce borrowed plausibility. Spen-
gler lends authority to assertive theorizations by claiming inspiration from
Goethe, Nietzsche, and others. Nietzsche is a possible source of Spengler’s
thesis that it is characteristic of the West to think historically and imagine
itself upon a historical stage. He claims that the modern Occident is uniquely
possessed of an acute awareness of time and history that is only haphaz-
ardly articulated in other cultures. Spengler’s own system is presented as the
culmination of this awareness. The Decline of the West proclaims itself a
comprehensive and objective science that will allow “the form” of world his-
tory to be “known” (UdA 21).
The analogical deep structure of all known history is supposed to allow
accurate predictions, but this aspect of Spengler’s method is more than a
little contradictory. His conception is split between “future” and “fate.”13 He
claims that his methods are retrospective and inductive—and that the fate he
predicts is unavoidable—but this does not stop him from invoking an ideal of
futurity which, by his argument, should not exist. He wants to do more than
impotently confirm the inevitable; thus he predicts inevitable decline in order
to incite individuals to action—but he avoids the activist model of an “incon-
venient truth” (which invokes a looming “fate” in order to avert it). Spengler
paradoxically combines extreme fatalism with activism: decline is unavoid-
able, but the dominant affect of his book is not resignation but passion. The
latter is expressed above all in the prophetic status he attributes to his own
work. The Decline of the West will give rise to a “philosophy of the future”
(UdA 6), a philosophy that depends on the certainty of decline. The case is
terminal, death is inevitable, but this knowledge is, for Spengler, the basis
for rational action: culture’s fall into civilization (and subsequent collapse)
cannot be avoided, but individuals, including individual nations, can choose
their own roles. The idea of “substitutability” (Vertretbarkeit) means that,
though the big picture cannot be changed, knowledge of it will give a com-
parative advantage in competition with others. In this phase of the argument,
Spengler’s “philosophy of the future” emerges as esoteric opportunism—
hedonism and nationalism—more focused on going down heroically14 than
on resisting the inevitable. Spengler’s relativist method is thus negated by his
98 The Unhappy Endings of Morphology

chauvinist conclusion that, though the fate is unavoidable, the knowledge

of it will help Germany to assume a leading role in the West’s final march
toward the abyss. Thus Spengler—following a critique that can be traced
from Hermann Heller to Adorno and beyond—gives a theoretical alibi to the
practice of domination.
Spengler acts as if acceptance of his oracle necessarily means accepting
his interpretation of it. But it may be, as Adorno implies, that the relation of
the prophecy to Spengler’s politics and ethics is not coherent. The political
message of The Decline of the West can be easily set aside. Without denying
that Spengler’s message may do damage through those who seek the ratio-
nale he provides, his theory’s politics was not essentially more convincing in
the 1910s and 1920s than it is today. He believed that human and historical
possibilities could be rethought on the basis of morphological “knowledge,”
and this idea, combined with his pessimism, certainly resonated in his time,
but it presumably mostly did so in ways that reinforced existing behaviors
and opinions.
Thus I would claim that nothing revolutionary came from Spengler, either
in opposition to his thesis or through attempts to follow it. But much may
have been activated and channeled through his work, and if a systematic
point is to be rescued here, it pertains to the role that Spengler assigned to his
own theoretical claims. The implicit dynamics are similar to those of the “end
of man” thesis from Foucault’s The Order of Things: in claiming the ability to
perceive the approaching end of a specific, deterministically conceived epis-
temic constellation, the episteme in question—ultimately the present one—is
made visible, as if from the outside, and thereby implicitly destabilized. Or,
the other way around, such an “end” is performatively pronounced in the
hope of producing the described epistemic break. The inherent contradiction
between these two options is a productive one: it rests upon the performative
bracketing of epistemic determinants, which, assuming they exist at all, may
continue to do their own thing in spite of every attempt to distance them into
a hypothetical “meta.”15
Such exercises in speculative defamiliarization may have a momentum of
their own, even in a case such as Spengler’s. The perspectives introduced in
the juxtaposition of Spengler and Foucault make it possible to define mor-
phology in a way that is at once more general and more precise: morphology
is the “science,” after the end of philosophy, of accurately reading the clock
of history—or of persuasively claiming to do so. This kind of speculation is
never purely theoretical; there is always an oracular implication. Morphol-
ogy in this sense is the art of timeliness—the pseudoscience of claiming to
know what is auspicious. This function would traditionally fall to artists
and writers, rhetoricians and politicians, but Spengler’s idea is to try to for-
malize it and put his insight at everyone’s disposal. Science is only a veneer,
however—and Spengler in any case denies that morphology is a modern
(positivist) science. The art of morphology can only be informal divinatory
Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History 99

cultural analysis based on intuition, which may produce—with the help of

good luck and eloquence—the appearance of success.
To put it in the terms of the demonic in Goethe’s Poetry and Truth: even
in very small events, the difference between chance and agency often can-
not be resolved, and the final grounds of even one timely occurrence or act
often cannot be recounted in a way that would control for all variables. Thus
by Goethe’s standard, Spengler’s claims for historical morphology are either
mistaken or disingenuous. But the question of the basis and motivation of
action has precedents in the demonic: knowledge and desire influence action,
and can be used to influence them. This much is a commonplace, but the
demonic, for Goethe, exerts itself through impossibility, through the blockage
and obstruction of knowledge and desire, and he posits that this is the typical
situation of historical actors most of the time. Perhaps Spengler understood
this action theory well enough to try to manipulate his readers at the level
of knowledge and desire, despite the fact that the schematics of his theory
can be read as contradicting it. What Spengler appears to believe—what his
theory extensively shows—is that the era of the blossoming of culture and
art is over for the West; the noxious forms of “civilization”—empire and
expansion, money and bureaucracy—will henceforth be the rule. The clock
cannot be turned back. Spengler thus passes himself off as a futurist and not
a conservative, but his “philosophy of the future” remains conservative in its
claim to differentiate the possible from the impossible in order to pick the
morphologically preordained winners. And the assumption that the possible
is intrinsically more desirable than the impossible is psychologically naive
compared with Goethe’s conception.
Inescapability with respect to the spirit of the age is “demonic” for Spengler,
and the capitalist industrialist Cecil Rhodes is the emblem of the possibili-
ties that remain in modernity. But the lure of the demonic impossibility in
Goethe’s sense may also have been cast by this thesis. Spengler overtly politi-
cizes his own theory, but its fatalism can be interpreted differently—against
the spirit of the modern age, which Spengler himself depicts as odious. His
work’s ambivalent “futurism” must have been discarded or modified by all
but the most docile readers, whereas his analysis of history and modernity
could have energized opposition (from right or left) to “modern civiliza-
tion.”16 His bleak outlook on the modern world is ultimately more persuasive
than his political agenda. The “fate” he perceives may be written in stone, but
it remains open to interpretation and the correlated freedom of action. The
provisional acceptance of Spengler’s “fate,” rather than producing fatalism or
resignation, can just as easily produce unexpected forms of inspiration. Wor-
ried that readers will get the wrong message, Spengler emphasizes the futility
of striving against fate. Resistance, he claims, only leads to the repetition of
the exhausted possibilities of past eras. The epigonal strivings of modern
artists are condemned as inauthentic and eclectic, classicist and romantic,
yearning for a state of past wholeness. Ironically, this is what Schiller meant
100 The Unhappy Endings of Morphology

by the word “sentimental” more than a century earlier.17 Spengler’s dismissal

of all attempts to go against the spirit of one’s own age—even though these
efforts are themselves inevitable—raises the question: is Spengler’s idea of
fate adequately paradoxical? The foreknowledge of fate can produce action,
despair, or acceptance. If a fate is truly a fate, then the attempt to thwart
it only helps bring it about. Spengler’s brand of fatalism—of collaborating
with fate—thus exhibits a lack of irony with respect to the possible reac-
tions to “impossibility.” This lack of irony about his work’s utility subjects
Spengler himself to a dramatic irony that makes his work appear primarily
autobiographical. The Decline of the West produces an unintentional self-
caricature: Spengler casts himself as “a prophet of gloom and doom,” and
his performance in this role undoubtedly contributed to his book’s popular-
ity. Later authors of pop philosophy, pseudoscience, and punditry perceived
the marketing strategy. Successful popularization did not completely cancel
out Decline’s specific claims and messages, but it made it into a vehicle of
divergent motivations that cannot be reduced to a single ideology or line of
reception.18

Demons of Warp and Weft (Goethe in Spengler)

I see no reason to doubt the words of the foreword to Decline’s 1922 repub-
lication: “I take my method from Goethe and my questions from Nietzsche”
(UdA IX). “Method” here certainly refers to “morphology,” following
Decline’s subtitle, “Outline of a Morphology of World History.” As I have
shown, Spengler’s morphology drastically departs from Goethe’s—but this
does not mean that it has no basis in Goethe. And, setting aside theoretical
systematics, Goethe’s sheer ubiquity in Spengler is astonishing. The name
undoubtedly occurs with more frequency than any other; citations and allu-
sions also abound. In addition, “the Faustian” (das Faustische, adjective
faustisch) characterizes the modern Occidental epoch; this equation of the
Faustian and the “modern,” though not entirely unprecedented, is extreme in
its scope and systematic intention.19
Goethe’s ubiquity in itself does not mean much. Spengler’s appropriations,
in the language of his own theory, are cases of “pseudomorphosis”—a form
of appropriation that syncretically distorts what it appropriates to fit its own
terms.20 Like Gundolf, who skews Goethe’s morphology toward “fate” by an
overemphasis of the Orphic Dämon, Spengler dismantles Goethe’s architec-
ture and puts the various concepts contained by the demonic to his own uses.
Goethe viewed the demonic as a private (sub-conceptual) and only indirectly
communicable medium of reflection, whereas Spengler makes it a part of his
universal morpho-history. He implicitly recognizes the not fully rationalizable
and communicable aspects, but this does not stop him from schematically
reducing Goethe’s conception. For Goethe, Urworte and aperçus allow
Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History 101

countless individual understandings and half communications, which may

produce illuminating effects in private conversation, but the demonic is not a
fixed system, structure, or terminology. It is a semi-medium for talking about
the ineffable. Spengler was aware of this unsystematic, dialogical aspect,21
but he uses it in the service of his most extravagant claims—for example,
that Goethe was the Socrates of our era, whereas Kant is our Aristotle. This
is typical of Spengler’s use of historical typologies that often prefer place-
ment in a framework over specificity. He sees himself as an inheritor of the
intuitive, uninstitutionalized philosophies of Socrates and Goethe (UdA 68),
but, contradicting this rejection of logic and systematics, his own theory is
hyper-schematic.
In Spengler’s system of historical epistemes, Goethe’s way of writing about
the demonic might be categorized as an example of the “magical” un- or anti-
form of the arabesque, an indefinite spiraling figure that Spengler associates
with the imageless relation of text and script in early Christian and Islamic
culture. For Spengler, however, the demonic corresponds to a “Faustian” idea
of the infinite—of the effortful striving of the individual Dämon against the
limits of time, knowledge, and mortality. This drive manifests itself in the
unachievable will to freeze, close off, grasp, and represent infinite “becom-
ing” (Werden) in a single moment. This conception evokes key lines of Faust
I and Faust II (HA 3:57, 3:348), but Spengler never reflects on the potential
problems of basing his theory of modernity on a character in a literary work,
who is further identified with Goethe’s own beliefs and ideas.22
In Spengler’s typology of cultural styles and characteristics, Goethe may
belong to more than one category, whereas Spengler, despite identifying with
Goethe, strives to be as Faustian as possible in his theorization of the West’s
inevitable end. The words of the Earth-spirit (Erdgeist) to Faust apply to
Spengler’s reading of Goethe: “You are like the spirit that you can grasp, but
not like me” (Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst, nicht mir, HA 3:24).
Spengler sees Goethe as purely “Faustian,” “Western,” and “modern” and
views his own “morphology” as an equally Occidental product. Self-critical
potentials that might have emerged from Goethe are thus repressed in the
interest of Decline’s central dogmas.
Goethe is the avowed source of Spengler’s mythology of the “Faustian,”
but this is relatively unrelated to Spengler’s theory; “Goethe” merely swirls
arabesque-like in the background. A methodological centerpiece can be located,
however, in section 9 of the introduction (Intro. 9) and in the parallel section
(I.ii.19) from the second long chapter of Decline’s first part, entitled “The
Problem of World History”;23 section I.ii.19 is part of this chapter’s second
half, subtitled “The Idea of Fate and the Principle of Causality” (“Schicksals­
idee und Kausalitätsprinzip”). Another signpost unites Intro.9 and I.ii.19: the
Dämon stanza of the Orphic “Urworte” (UdA 35, 206); Intro. 9 only cites
“characteristic form, living and self-developing” (geprägte Form, die lebend
sich entwickelt, UdA 35), whereas I.ii.19 quotes the stanza at greater length.
102 The Unhappy Endings of Morphology

This double invocation of Goethe’s Dämon as the source of Spengler’s

idea of developmental entelechy localizes the demonic in Decline’s method-
ological sections.24 In Intro. 9, Spengler criticizes the causal-narrative and
Euro-anthropocentric biases of nineteenth-century conceptions of history.
He opposes their approach to his own “Copernican” attempt to show the
“natural form” (Gestalt) of “the total happening of the world” (das Weltge-
schehen); the epistemic object of morphology “resid[es] within the depths,”
in deep structures that become “evident to the unprejudiced gaze” (UdA
34). Spengler’s morphology is declaredly “developmental” and diachronic,
but it is not concerned with the “substitutable” epiphenomena of events,
which are contingent in comparison to the “total happening of the world.”
Spengler’s “seasonal” schema for historical development further structures
and organizes time in a way that spatially conceives historical individuals—
including individual cultures—as substitutable elements in a grid. Both the
outcome—the “fate”—and the development that produces it are static and
fixed. History is divided up in analogy with the natural life cycle or the ages
of man: “youth, ascent, blossoming, and decline” (Jugend, Aufstieg, Blütezeit,
Verfall, UdA 36). This sequence reflects temporal progression, which Spen-
gler recognizes as metaphorical, but argues that his concrete application of it
will transform it into a strict terminology (UdA 36). This categorical impulse
conceives time timelessly and maps the form of finite biological individuality
onto history and culture, which are perceived as comparably regular, predict-
able, and finite.
In Spengler, the individuality of geprägte Form is conceived as a state
of endless transfer to and from suprapersonal symbolic forms that delimit
cultural monads in contrast to one another. Individuals realize the devel-
opment of cultural totalities, the individuality of which expresses itself
through individuals. This approach presupposes the morphological iden-
tity of individual and totality without dialectical mediation. The result is an
aesthetization of world history (which is reduced to the history of cultural
formations), and the comparative history of cultural forms is magnified into
universal history.25 The basis and result of this broad synthesis is the pre-
supposition of parallelism in all spheres of a given culture: art, architecture,
custom, society, government, and even the forms of language, math, and sci-
ence all correspond to the same underlying symbolic-archetypal-epistemic
paradigm.26
“I recall Goethe” (UdA 35). This evocative sentence from Intro. 9 does
not lead one to expect a systematic methodology, and what follows is in fact
a whirlwind of paraphrases and allusions. Wilhelm Meister is the only work
referred to by name, but it apparently stands for the idea of the Bildungsro-
man. Spengler claims that Goethe “always, constantly, drew out the life, the
development, of his figures, their becoming and not their being” (UdA 35). This
introduces the opposition between “becoming” (Werden) and “that which
has finished becoming” (das Gewordene), which is a persistent systematic
Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History 103

differentiation in part 1 of the Decline, in which Spengler uses the idea of

developmental Werden as a weapon against positivist historiography’s exclu-
sive focus on facts and causation. Spengler claims that the representation of
becoming—of organic development (Entwicklung) as opposed to “process”
(UdA 203)—is the specific characteristic of Occidental art and of the modern
episteme: whereas the art of antiquity (supposedly) valued the Apollonian
beauty of closed forms, Faustian art autobiographically, self-referentially, and
symbolically depicts the development out of which the work emerged. Like
Goethe in his comments on the debate between Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire,
Spengler prefers organological development to “construction”:

Here [in Goethe] the world as mechanism did not stand in opposition
to the world as organism, nor did he oppose dead and living nature,
nor law [Gesetz] and form [Gestalt]. Every line he wrote as a natural
scientist was meant to illustrate the shape of things in transformation
[sollte die Gestalt des Werdenden vor Augen Stellen], to illuminate
“characteristic form, living, self-developing” [geprägte Form, die leb-
end sich entwickelt]. (UdA 35)

In a quasi-Pauline language, Spengler sets the future above the past, devel-
oping form over fixed law, the living over the dead—but his own theory posits
development in terms of an iron law: Decline tells the story of inevitable rise
and fall in the exhaustion of cultural paradigms and characteristic forms.
Goethe’s geprägte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt, however, makes no such
claims. Insofar as Spengler’s invocation of geprägte Form contradicts both
Goethe and Spengler’s own theory, it would appear to be primarily rhetorical.
There is, however, an additional systematic claim, according to which the mor-
phological “demon” becomes a figure of typology. The type in Spengler’s sense
(das Typische, UdA 36) does not correspond to Dämon (as individuality) but
to Goethe’s fourth Urwort: reductive-generalizing Ananke who overshadows
“life” with the narrative closures that are typically necessary. Spengler intro-
duces this generalizing moment together with his idea of contingency (Tyche)
as “substitutability” (Vertretbarkeit). Tyche with her “fickle fortunes” (wech-
selnden Geschicke, UdA 36) is mere contingency; she is that which could have
happened differently without making an essential difference. Spengler, as he
says, seeks “the necessary in the unruly surplus of the contingent [das Not-
wendige in der unbändigen Fülle des Zufälligen]” (UdA 36).
Thus an idea of development that purportedly comes from Goethe is
made synonymous with Spengler’s idea of fate. The “tychical” surplus that
manifests itself in the time of development only adds aesthetic value and the
appearance of singularity to the typical fate that necessarily befalls all life:

And just as he [Goethe] traced the development of the form of the

plant from the leaf, as well as the rise of the vertebrate type, and
104 The Unhappy Endings of Morphology

the transformations of geological layers—the fate of nature, not

its causality [das Schicksal der Natur, nicht ihre Kausalität]—I will
likewise trace the language of forms in human history [die For-
mensprache der menschlichen Geschichte], their periodic structure,
their organic logic, which develops out of the abundance of sensible
details. (UdA 35)

Spengler wants to “develop” his system in analogy with Goethe’s “devel-

opment” of the forms of nature (so wie . . . soll hier). He thus circularly
supposes the form of development both in his object (human history) and
in his own method (which will proceed by developing). “Just like” Goethe
who hypothesized that “everything is leaf” (Alles ist Blatt), Spengler sees a
universal form underlying all development. Just as the leaf is supposed as
the base unit of the plant, and the plant is “pure leaf” in transformation, so
human development and history are also supposed to display “organic logic”
and cyclical periodicity.
However, as in Goethe’s morphology, differences of scale and time scale
as well as the perspectival variability of historical beginnings and endings
impede the application of this method to human society, culture, and history.
Kant and Nietzsche, Weber and Foucault, Koselleck and Blumenberg, all take
this kind of question seriously: How can a philosophy of history identify with
certainty the singular beginnings of “cycles” or epochs? How can the cycli-
cal vs. developmental forms be unambiguously determined? What motivates
and necessitates historical cycles? How does this conception relate to history
conceived in layers, as a web or fabric? Are these only metaphors, and if
so, can one choose between them? Is the recourse to metaphor an index of
human intents and anthropocentric perspectives? In light of such questions,
Spengler’s shortcomings are evident—but that does not mean that his work
can entirely ignore these considerations.
His preference for thetic overstatement and exaggerated univocality thus
produces rhetorical benefits at the expense of internal coherence. Self-critique
is not Spengler’s style, but this does not stop him from aggressively attacking
ideas he opposes. He argues, for example, that his morpho-developmental
idea of history avoids the misconceptions of words like “process,” “causa-
tion,” and “motivation.” This critique is brought to bear against Marx and
Darwin, who only perceive causation in the lowest terms of sheer material
survival, “hunger and love” (UdA 202–4). Against this, Spengler points to
the varied forms of human culture, which reflect a morpho-anthropological
base comprised of complex form-drives. The mechanisms of these drives
are morphologically determined fates that express themselves through the
“inner certitude” (innere Gewissheit) of individuals (UdA 198). This “feel-
ing” (Gefühl, UdA 201) corresponds to a talent for the forms through which
individual and collective destinies come to fruition. According to this model,
individuals and cultures are possessed by predetermined culminations. The
Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History 105

“inner certitude” of being in touch with one’s self and one’s time is felt in
individual experience and “demonically” dictated in view of collective ends:

Whoever lives in streaming ardor [in strömendem Überschwang]

toward an unknown “something” [einem Etwas] does not need to
know anything about purpose or usefulness [von Zweck und Nut-
zen]. He feels himself as the meaning of that which will happen [als
Sinn dessen, was geschehen wird]. This was the belief in the star,
which never forsook Caesar and Napoleon as little as it did other
doers of great deeds [die großen Täter anderer Art]. (UdA 199)

Ironically, the more the individual experiences itself as an end in itself, the
more it is instrumentalized—the more it falls under the “demonic” control
of “the total happening of the world.” The subjective feeling of demonic
self-certainty is the medium through which morphologically predetermined
forms and cosmic patterns are realized through (not by) geniuses, heroes, and
leaders and dictators.27
The preestablished harmony of morphological reason (which reads all
actions within a given cultural paradigm as symbolic and productive of that
paradigm) combined with Spengler’s refusal of the principle of sufficient rea-
son (which is blind to “the mystery of becoming” [UdA 203]), more than
earns him his reputation as an irrationalist. He is also not alone in this, how-
ever: elements of his “irrationalism” are common to much more reputable
conceptions.28 Pointing this out does not mean rehabilitating Spengler—nor
is it an attempt to discredit others by associating them with him. Rather,
the idea is to establish a fine line between Spengler and the many others
who have offered critiques of instrumental reason. Instead of posing his-
torical causation as a problem, he exploits its fragility through a tendentious
“theory,” whose greatest harm—and asset—may be that it reveals the risks
associated with the critique of reason.
Spengler is, however, occasionally more than just a negative example of
the risks inherent to the twentieth century’s attempts to come to terms with
positivism and rationalization. Other possibilities emerge whenever Spengler
fails to reproduce his main thesis and unintentionally allows “tychic” sur-
pluses to emerge. This occurs, for example, in a passage on Michelangelo,
whom Spengler imagines standing before an unshaped block of marble. This
image, Spengler declares, expresses “the cosmic fear of that which has already
come into being [die Weltangst vor dem Gewordenen], the fear of death
that art seeks to banish [bannen] into a shifting form [durch eine bewegte
Form]” (UdA 354). This echoes Goethe’s “flight behind an image” (Flucht
hinter ein Bild, HA 10:176), and the identification of “that which has already
become” (das Gewordene) with death thus coherently reflects another aspect
of Goethe’s idea of the demonic: the refugee from “what has become (impos-
sible)” flees into what might be and what might have been.
106 The Unhappy Endings of Morphology

Here, in opposition to Spengler’s main thesis, art’s attempt to banish

“what was” is conceived as an allegory of the overcoming of death. Art reani-
mates the dead positivity of an ended historical world. “Morphology” in this
sense differs significantly from Spengler’s official understanding. The latter
urges an attitude of amor fati with respect to decline, whereas the confronta-
tion of artist and raw material is poised between metamorphosis (rebirth)
and finitude (death). This is the demonic uncertainty that provokes a flight
into images. Such a flight may not permanently solve or even stabilize the
underlying crisis, but the uncut stone reflects sheer potentiality and a lack of
predetermination. Spengler here recognizes the ambivalence of the demonic,
which implicitly contradicts his schematic version of morphology. Art’s
transformative drive to sublimate death corresponds to Spengler’s theoretical
instrumentalization of death, but whereas Spengler presents a one-way street,
Michelangelo’s artistic-morphological decision reflects ongoing indetermi-
nateness: the uncut stone stands for each individual’s attempt to symbolically
answer morphology’s life-or-death question of the possibility of future devel-
opments. In Spengler’s theory, the dead facticity of the uncut stone is all that
matters,29 whereas Michelangelo’s “demonic” nature constantly sought to
shape the dead matter of the past (UdA 354). The demonic character in this
sense is not possessed by a morphologically preordained fate or a feeling of
“inner certitude,” but by an inner conflict generated by the attempt to come
to terms with the demonic (in Goethe’s sense) as a placeholder for death
and the unknown—for the questions to which religion and philosophy have
perennially sought answers.
The Michelangelo sentence reflects an accurate understanding that can be
traced to Goethe; it also shows that the appearance of a “demonic charac-
ter” is the by-product of a given character’s confrontation with the demonic
ambiguity of morphology’s lowest terms, which push toward forms of subli-
mation and overcoming that are declared impossible in Spengler’s philosophy
of history. This may be only a small lapse, an instance of evidence that sub-
tly undercuts the argument it is meant to support, but it is not difficult to
find larger systematic contradictions, motivated by the evident obstacles to
interpreting history as pure morpho-demonic fate. In particular, Spengler’s
strict historicism contradicts his meta-history: he is forced to admit that there
is not always a direct connection between the personal and the supraper-
sonal, between the individual Dämon and the demonic force of morphology.
Demonic historicism is thus supplemented by a theory of pseudomorphosis
that supposes the existence of cross-cultural influences capable of obstructing
the pure development of cultural monads; individuals can likewise interfere
with their own development if they strive to produce forms that are not
proper to their own culture and demonically dictated episteme.
“Non-demonic” impersonal, intrapersonal, or trans-historical epistemic
cross-currents may be relegated to the status of contingencies, but they can-
not be completely denied. Thus at the end of I.ii.19, Spengler presents a kind
Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History 107

of secularization thesis based on Goethe’s idea of the demonic from book 20

of Poetry and Truth:

In the [modern] reality [Wirklichkeit] of conscious being [des wachen

Daseins], two worlds are woven together, that of observation [Beobach-
tung = the modern way of distanced seeing] and that of abandonment
[Hingebung = the original experience of life as pure unprecedented
happening], just as in a Brabant tapestry warp and weft come together
to “knit” [wirken] the image. In order to be available [vorhanden] to
understanding in any way, every law must have once been discov-
ered—and that means experienced [erlebt]—within the history of
spirit [Geistesgeschichte] as something that was brought about by fate
[eine Schicksalsfügung]. Every fate appears in a sensible costume—per-
sons, deeds, scenes, gestures—through which natural laws are at work
[am Werke]. The life of primitive man was abandoned to the demonic
unity of fate [die dämonische Einheit des Schicksalhaften], but in the
consciousness of individuals in mature cultures [im Bewußtsein reifer
Kulturmenschen], the contradiction [der Widerspruch] between this
early and their own late image of the world [jenes frühen und dieses
späten Weltbildes] can never be silenced. (UdA 207)

This passage contrasts the modern perspective of retrospectivity, which

includes Spengler’s own morphological vision, with the “demonic” omni-
presence and intensity of reality for pre-cultural man.30 Spengler opposes a
primitive state characterized by “certainty” and “unity” to a developed state
characterized by consciousness and doubt. The self-doubt expresses itself, at
least partly, in modernity’s inability to authentically identify with its fate in
the way that primitive man supposedly did.
In the context of fate, the loom metaphor may seem predictable, but there
are no Norns or Parcae here, only a fixed fabric that presumably bears an
image—of the world. This figure of a world image (Weltbild) defined by
ambivalence implicitly cites Poetry and Truth’s reflections on the demonic.
The wovenness of the image stands for a perpetual effect of perceptual ambi-
guity, defined by the retrospective idealization of primitive life and, on the
other hand, by the realization that the “rational” modern era is ruled by
fates that are already finished. Out of this split between absent primal unity
and the awareness of an established rational world order (to which one is
subjected but with which one cannot identify), a woven image appears; its
unity is composite, artificial, figural, oscillating like a Vexierbild between an
imagined picture of the whole and the partially obstructed imagination of
oneself as a part of this same image.
In Poetry and Truth, the loom image of “warp and weft” (Zettel und Ein-
schlag, Spengler’s Kette und Einschlag) configures the irreducibility of the
demonic in every conceivable world order:
108 The Unhappy Endings of Morphology

Although this demonic [jenes Dämonische] can manifest itself in

everything that is corporeal and incorporeal [in allem Körperlichen
und Unkörperlichen]—and indeed expresses itself most notably in
animals—it nevertheless stands, above all, in the most astonishing
relationship [im wunderbarsten Zusammenhang] with man and
comprises a power [Macht] which, though not opposed [entgegen­
gesetzt] to the moral order of the world [die moralische Weltordnung],
crosses through and cancels it [sie durchkreuzt] in a way that could
allow the one to count as the warp [Zettel] and the other as the weft
[Einschlag]. (HA 10:177)

Unlike Spengler’s loom, Goethe—more like Max Weber’s “iron cage” (stahl-
hartes Gehäuse)—depicts the ongoing relation of idea and realization,
predictability and unpredictability, rationality and irrationality, norm and
exception, in the (modern) world. What holds the extremes together and
brings them into focus is the idea of an interweaving or “crossing” of opposed
yet interlocking views, which join to “knit themselves into an image.” The
tapestry fuses perspectives which, taken separately, would either represent a
totally rationalized causality or a completely unreflected natural order. The
extremes belong to an omniscient God and, on the other hand, to animals.
Such limit-attitudes are inaccessible to Spengler’s “civilized” humans, who
experience this double perspective as a fabricated unity whose illusionary
quality, though perhaps occasionally evident in moments of unraveling, is
habitually overlooked.31 According to the logic of this metaphor, the per-
ception of a morphologically predetermined fate can only be the result of
an artificial synthetic unity. The supposed “demonic” unity experienced by
primitive man, by contrast, only perceives itself as a fate and thereby de-
realizes all other orders for as long as this perspective is intact. In humans,
this is a formula of megalomania: if I am a fate and I know it and I affirm it
(rather than questioning it), then I imagine that I am in no way subject to the
world because it is entirely subject to me.
In Poetry and Truth, the demonic manifests itself as the appearance of
reason in beings (such as animals) or circumstances (such as coincidences)
that are either ambiguously devoid of reason or possessed by unknown rea-
sons. For Goethe as for Spengler, individuals are regularly but unpredictably
confronted with such crossroads that force a decision between the fundamen-
tally retrospective (and often unfulfillable) demands of sufficient reason and
the much more immediate competing claims of highly mobile reasons and
rationalizations. Thus, even if the “moral order of the world” (whether in a
theological or merely sociological sense)32 is in fact an airtight system—of
laws, determination, causes and effects, fates and providences—this is not the
aspect it shows to humans, who are left to interpret it ex post facto. Spengler
clearly prefers the attitude of subjection (Hingebung), of giving one’s self
uncritically to the force of one’s own representations, which are, according
Oswald Spengler’s Demonic History 109

to his theory, never really “one’s own” but are dictated by the morphologi-
cal force of history. Retrospective critical reason, on the other hand, only
impedes us in being and becoming ourselves. Spengler thus envies “the life of
primitive man” for its “demonic unity,” its idealized primal ability, like that of
Napoleon or Caesar, to live its own representations—to just live life—free of
the reason and doubt (Sorge) that cloud the Faustian sense of self.33
This leads me, in conclusion, to suggest that the demonic, and not mor-
phology, is the more essential Goethean inheritance in Spengler’s classic
meta-history. Decline flattens the idea of morphology to such an extent that
it only shares the name with Goethe’s conception. The latter, though avail-
able to a dogmatic reading, was not itself doctrinaire, whereas the demonic
more obviously inflects Spengler’s sub-systematic thinking. Especially Tyche
is that which Spengler most seeks to eliminate or contain. Spengler’s partial
adoption of Goethe’s idea of demonically inspired character also produces an
exemplary mystification that he is unable to theoretically sustain. “Demonic”
heroes like Caesar or Cecil Rhodes are supposed to have a direct connection
with the universe (in keeping with Goethe’s motto Nemo contra deum nisi
deus ipse), but Spengler is forced to interpret them as epigones, as ideals of
pre-modern life. The psychology of the demonic character supposedly corre-
sponds with the prehistoric unity of being, but this contradicts morphology’s
deterministic historicism. The word “demonic” in Spengler thus refers to the
sheer appearance of an undivided being, but, in drawing on Goethe’s concep-
tion, it unintentionally introduces a problem of the optics through which
such “demonic” appearances are produced in the first place. Spengler tries
to suppress this problem, but his reflections on the demonic (and the related
idea of pseudomorphosis) reveal modernity’s divided, layered, historical—
geschichtetes and geschichtliches—consciousness to be demonic (in its lack of
unity) and at the same time productive of the demonic (in idealized unities).
To the extent that Goethe’s idea of the demonic is conceived as open and
endlessly theorizable in religions, philosophies, and individual lives, Spen-
gler’s Decline qualifies as “one more” concept of the demonic, which further
reflects the antinomies and the sense of crisis that always lie behind the
demonic. These contradictions were growing during the nineteenth century,
while the will to harmonize them was diminishing.34 The popular and to
some extent enduring success of Spengler’s work lies not only in its expres-
sion of an underlying crisis and the consolations it offers with respect to this
crisis—it also shows how the formulae, affects, and questions associated with
the demonic in Goethe’s “Urworte” and Poetry and Truth can be simultane-
ously foundational and destabilizing for (pseudo)theoretical discourses. If,
as Blumenberg argues, the demonic marks a limit of theorizability, then it
also reflects the theoretical limitations and questionable sources of theoreti-
cal power.
 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

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Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
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Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/33934.

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 Chapter Five

Demonic Ambivalences
Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology

Demonic Unity, Demonic Ambiguity

One of the most likely places where the contemporary reader may have
encountered the idea of the demonic is the work of Walter Benjamin. Other
candidates would be Kierkegaard or Georg Lukács, who, though certainly
aware of Goethe’s use of the term, do not so directly establish their under-
standings through readings of Goethe. The deliberate lack of clarity about
the demonic and its conceptual origins causes it to be simultaneously exposed
and hidden. This is the case in Benjamin as well, but to a lesser degree, because
he more extensively and philologically articulates the connections to Goethe.
The demonic, however, also appears without reference to Goethe as a part
of Benjamin’s own lexicon. But neither at the systematic nor at the philologi-
cal level has Benjamin’s use of the term been a frequent subject of detailed
explorations.1 In addition to Goethe, whose work Benjamin knew well, he
was certainly familiar with many important later thinkers on the demonic.
Benjamin’s polemic against Gundolf in his 1924 “Goethe’s Elective Affini-
ties” hinges on the details of Goethe’s conceptions of the demonic in the
“Urworte” and Poetry and Truth. Benjamin’s familiarity with Goethe’s mor-
phological writings can be observed in the encyclopedia article “Goethe,”
from the end of the 1920s. Benjamin’s readings from the 1910s and 1920s
also reflect a focus on Goethe (GS 7:437–449).2 Lukács’s Theory of the Novel,
which introduces the demonic in the context of a thesis on modernity, also
occupied Benjamin during this period;3 he probably first read Lukács’s theory
after its 1920 republication (GS 7:448), and his essay “The Storyteller,” from
the late 1930s, still substantially engages with Lukács’s theses.
Regarding Spengler, Benjamin could hardly have missed The Decline of
the West (1918 and 1922), but I find no evidence that he knew the work in
detail.4 However, given the notoriety of Spengler’s work in the late 1910s,
Benjamin must have been familiar with its main theses and its use of mor-
phology. Unlike Adorno, for whom Spengler seems to have been a touchstone
over a long period, Benjamin’s reading of The Decline of the West left almost

111
112 Demonic Ambivalences

no traces. His distaste for Spengler’s work is mostly documented in the fre-
quently adduced “sow-dog” (Sauhund) remark,5 but even lacking an extensive
record, it is plausible to imagine that Benjamin would have identified Spen-
gler, the prophet of decline, with the most dubious ideological currents of
the period. For instance, Spengler’s idea of “fate”—his equation of history,
nature, and destiny—is clearly an instance of what Benjamin calls “mythic”
thought.
One further source that may have contributed to both Spengler’s and Ben-
jamin’s understanding of Goethe’s idea of the demonic is ethnography.6 For
example, Spengler’s idea of the “demonic unity” of primitive man’s reality
may resonate with ethnographic understandings which were apparently able
to coexist and interact with more overtly Goethean conceptions. In the 1920s,
Freud’s Totem and Taboo (originally 1912–13) could also have been a source
for the idea that primitive man’s world is ruled by demons.7 In chapter 2,
“Taboo and the Ambivalence of the Affects,” Freud cites Wilhelm Wundt on
the role of demons for primitive man: “The general commandment . . . that
lies behind the numerous variable and unspoken interdictions of taboo . . . is
originally a single rule: Guard yourself from the wrath of the demons” (Freud,
Totem und Tabu 73, my translation). Freud, of course, does not believe in
demons except as manifestations of the human psyche. Unlike Goethe, Freud
also does not present demons and the demonic in a way that might leave
some doubts about what he meant by them. He explicitly places his hypoth-
esis under the heading of “the omnipotence of thoughts” (die Allmacht der
Gedanken, 136–37). This understanding fits with Spengler’s equation of the
“demonic unity” of the life of primitive man and of the equally atavistic nature
of “great men” in the modern world. Freud, however, unlike Spengler, ques-
tions whether there is an essential difference between modern and primitive
man. Primitive superstitions are the analogues of modern neuroses. Freud’s
“modern man” constantly recidivates to superstition, while in Spengler mod-
ern consciousness is typically unable to achieve the unconscious “unity” of
primitive man or the rational transparency of full consciousness.
Such anthropological and anthropogenic considerations also seem to
sometimes inform Benjamin’s idea of the demonic. According to Scholem, for
example, Benjamin differentiated two ages of human prehistory, “the spectral”
(das Gespenstische) and “the demonic” (das Dämonische) and understood
“myth” (Mythos) and especially tragedy as a polemic directed at prior phases
of human existence (GS 2.3:955).8 It is difficult, however, to entirely accept
Scholem’s explanation, which seems more schematic than what one finds in
Benjamin’s writings. In “Toward the Critique of Violence,” for example, he
calls the police “spectral” (gespenstisch, GS 2:189) and argues that law is a
continuation of “mythic” violence—but does not say that the demonic and
the spectral refer to distinct phases of human development. This claim is
misleading to the extent that Benjamin’s arguments assume a high degree of
continuity between developmental epochs (however they may be called or
Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 113

conceived).9 Nevertheless, Scholem’s clarification is helpful as long as it is not

allowed to obscure the fact that the demonic in Benjamin is associated with
myth and the mythic, and—even more narrowly—with “ambiguity.”10
In the “Critique of Violence,” for example, the compound adjective
dämonisch-zweideutig (“demonically ambiguous”) characterizes the concept
of “equal” rights (GS 2.1:198). Without attempting an extensive interpreta-
tion, the words “demonically ambiguous” can be explained with reference to
the essay’s central argument that positive law represents a continuation of
“the ambiguous sphere of fate” (GS 2.1:197). Law belongs with myth (and
mythic violence), which is opposed to justice (and divine violence). Benjamin
conceives myth as the retrospective rationalization of a primal precedent and
original infraction that gives rise to law as a future preventive. Myth and law
are the system of rationalizing and ultimately of prolonging and repeating the
originary violence that lies at the foundation of all legal systems. Mythic vio-
lence is always law-making and law-maintaining violence that institutes and
upholds a cyclical-retributive system that can never escape from itself. When
Benjamin speaks of the “demonically ambiguous” quality of the idea of equal
rights, it is because legal “equality” (which he sets in quotation marks) is
implicated in a system of violence maintained by and through the rule of law.
The claim of “equality” is only a pretext for preserving an existing system of
rights and privileges. “Equal” rights support systems of privileges, and the
language of “equality” is thus unmasked as an aspect of the self-justificatory
discourse of systems that are per se defined by inequality and solely motivated
by their own continuity and self-preservation. The “mythical ambiguity of
the laws that may not be broken” (GS 2.1:198) inheres in the law’s blindness
to the reasons, histories, and motives that lie behind law-breaking. Benja-
min illustrates this with an idea from Anatole France, who said that the law
equally forbids rich and poor from sleeping under bridges.11 The point of the
example is that human laws only play into (and reinforce) preexisting deter-
minations (in this case: socioeconomic), which, even in the modern world,
appear to the individual as something resembling fate. The law which claims
to be “equal” only maintains preexisting unequal material conditions (in this
case: poverty). In “Fate and Character,” Benjamin establishes a similar idea
by way of Goethe: “You [gods] let the poor one become guilty” (Ihr laßt den
Armen schuldig werden, GS 2.1:175).
Even with this contextualization, “demonic ambiguity” remains open
to divergent readings. The demonic (or “mythic”) state may itself be char-
acterized by ambiguity: following Wundt and Freud, the ambiguity of the
demonic age would lie in the uncertainty as to whether actions will provoke
the anger of demons. From the perspective of individual humans—who can-
not always perceive the apparent or sufficient reasons of the orders that rule
them—demons are unpredictable. If demons are conjured up to manage or
rationalize unpredictability, then their function in the modern world is effec-
tively the same as it always was.12 If the only difference between modern
114 Demonic Ambivalences

and primitive humanity is the distance implied in the word “superstition,”

then demonic ambiguity is not only characteristic of primitive existence but
is the result of a fundamentally unchanged structure. When Benjamin calls
equal rights “demonically ambiguous,” this means that modern laws remain
ambiguous in essentially the same way as transgressions against the demons
were for primitive man.
The equality of the law that forbids everyone from sleeping under bridges
is literally zwei-deutig in that it can be interpreted (gedeutet) in one of two
ways: either it is mythic (which means that fate remains the highest category
and law is only a medium through which modern fates are expressed) or it is
rational and equitable (in which case it always acts justly in response to the
free will of individuals who decide to sleep under bridges). Benjamin clearly
favors the former interpretation, but he also indirectly addresses the seduc-
tive force of the latter’s rationalization. Law’s “ambiguity” is a problem of
appearances, conflicting perspectives, and interpretive claims. The ambiguity
of law and myth may thus refer not only to an ambiguity inherent in myth, but
to the ambiguous superimposition of the “ages” of mankind, of the mythic-
demonic (in which laws only reveal themselves after their transgression) and
the modern (in which laws are man-made but similarly prophylactic in their
function). This means, according to Benjamin, that the mythic era contin-
ues unabated or even intensified under the cover of law. Recalling Goethe’s
loom metaphor of “warp and weft” from chapter 4, this superimposition
can be further interpreted as a split between rational, positive, man-made,
transcendental—“modern”—social orders and the “demonic” cross-currents
of “superstitious” rationales that still interpret these orders in terms of fate.
It all depends on the perspective. “Demonic ambiguity” resides in the uncer-
tainty about whether humanity has fully overcome the “demonic age” and in
the fear that the transformations implied in ideas like enlightenment, secular-
ization, and democracy are a sham.
Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” thus presents a two-tiered system of
ambiguity: the first level is the “primitive” ambiguity of taboo, a mostly
arbitrary code of conduct that constantly confronts individuals with the
uncontrollable risk of transgression and “demonic” retribution. The second
level is produced by a fusion of the spheres of myth and law. As I will show
in more detail, the latter sense of demonic ambiguity is connected to a gen-
eral inability to draw conceptual distinctions and make effective decisions.
In Benjamin, however, such a lack of differentiation between spheres often
expresses itself in the ambiguity of competing interpretive claims: the mythic
thinking of the individual for whom law is only a medium of fate conflicts
with positive law’s claims to equity, equality, rationality, transparency, and
deterrence. Such a contradiction may seem acceptable in the abstract, but it
also ensures that there will never be an end to crime, because the law’s claims
will always be doubtful if I am the one who is violating it. Demonic ambigu-
ity comes into play most tellingly in modern systems, in which all actors (not
Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 115

only the subjects of the law, but also police, lawyers, judges and juries, jour-
nalists and pundits) have interpretations at their disposal that derive from
both spheres. There is no way to conclusively decide between them, even in a
single given case, and the force of law is thus always guaranteed by the vio-
lence through which justice is done—carried out in a sentence that can never
entirely shake the suspicion that it only additionally punishes those who are
already “poor.” The problem of “demonic ambiguity” reveals itself, therefore,
not as an eccentric or novel critique of law, but as the primary reading of law
in literature, in works—to name only a few well-known examples—such as
Kleist’s “The Broken Jug,” Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka’s
The Trial, and Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.
Benjamin would see Spengler’s ideas of primal unity and organic cultural
development as characteristically mythic. Spengler’s desire for “demonic
unity” is only the flip side of “demonic ambiguity.” False epistemic unities,
invariant in every age, are produced by the inability to draw adequate dis-
tinctions and perceive true reasons. The idea of ambiguity, however, demonic
or otherwise, is common to the present era, regardless of whether it is con-
trasted with an idealized past.13 Goethe’s metaphor of the demonic as a
“warp and weft” (Kette und Einschlag) captures this ambiguity in the uncer-
tainty about the status of historical forces in a supposedly rational world.
Spengler, on the other hand, though he invokes Goethe’s loom, overlooks
the ambiguity of the demonic already in its prehistorical form. Benjamin’s
“demonic-ambiguous,” by contrast, turns out to be a pleonasm, because
Goethe’s loom metaphor already includes the idea of historical ambiguity.
Benjamin improves upon the models he inherits, however, by his more deci-
sive rejection of a fundamental difference between the demonic age and our
own. The former continues unabated, redoubled in the doubt introduced by
the rule of law. Our time is more demonic to the extent that law and reason
are an ambiguous overlay to an already ambiguous situation. Spengler saw
the difference between primitive and modern man as a difference of kind,
and Benjamin sees it as a difference of degree, but history’s vector is the same
in both: Spengler differentiates a simple (“demonic”) and a complex (“mod-
ern”) historical situation, whereas Benjamin reads the relation of myth and
law as a movement of increasing ambiguity.

Benjamin’s Anti-Morphology

Like the “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin’s “Fate and Character” will not
be analyzed extensively here. This is because, perhaps even more than in the
later essay, “Fate and Character” is at the center of Benjamin’s concerns in
the late 1910s and early 1920s. In support of this claim, I note that this six-
paragraph essay was included in Benjamin’s Trauerspielbuch14 and that it is
also virtually indispensable to understanding the “Critique of Violence” and
116 Demonic Ambivalences

“Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” Benjamin himself noted the connection to the

latter essay in a 1924 letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the first publisher of
the Goethe essay; this letter characterizes the work as a return to problems
addressed in “Fate and Character.” Benjamin calls his 1919 essay a “fron-
tal assault,” whereas the “Elective Affinities” will be more circumspect. The
context is a justification of his later essay’s general approach, which seeks
to break up terminological encrustations in order to discover the “linguistic
life” (sprachliches Leben) beneath them:

Thus I worked years ago [in 1919] to free the words fate and char-
acter from their terminological servitude [Fron], in order to newly
get a hold of their original life in the spirit of the German language
[im deutschen Sprachgeiste]. It is precisely this attempt that today
betrays to me in the clearest possible way what unmastered difficul-
ties remain as an obstacle to any effort of this kind. At the point
where insight proves itself inadequate to the task of actually penetrat-
ing the frozen conceptual armor, it finds itself tempted—in order to
avoid falling back into the barbarism of formulaic language—to try
to achieve the depth of language and thought that lies in the intention
of such investigations, not so much by excavation [ausschachten] as
by drilling [erbohren]. The forcing of insights [die Forcierung von
Einsichten]—the brute pedantry of which is admittedly preferable to
the sovereign allure of their falsification (which is now the almost
universally widespread practice)—absolutely pertains to the essay in
question, and I beg you to take me seriously when I say that the
reason for certain obscurities in my work should be taken in this
sense. . . . If I were to return to the problem of this earlier essay in the
same way, I would hardly dare attempt a frontal assault [Frontalan-
griff] anymore, but would rather, as in the presentation on “fate” in
the essay on The Elective Affinities, attempt to confront such things
in excurses. (GS 2.3:941–42)

Benjamin here explains and justifies his methods to his editor. Such reflections
rarely appear in a comparably direct way in the works themselves, which
makes this self-analysis helpful despite and because of its defensive tone.
The letter claims that “Fate and Character” represented the leading edge
in Benjamin’s developing self-understanding of his intellectual project, and—
though it is possible to share some of the author’s reservations about pedantry,
on the one hand, and obscurantism on the other—the earlier essay’s “forced
insights” make it relatively easier to establish the common problem that ties
Benjamin’s work together. “Fate and Character” attempts to fundamentally
reconceive the two terms of its title, a double focus which is still reflected in
Benjamin’s later work, even if the terminological considerations themselves
are confined to “excurses.” The letter only mentions the word “fate,” but the
Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 117

essay on the Elective Affinities plausibly stands as a second attempt to get

behind both of the two terms treated in the 1919 essay.
In the 1924 letter, Benjamin defends his approach by polemically oppos-
ing it to the conventional and widespread “barbarism of formulaic language”
(die Barbarei der Formelsprache). Because the “Elective Affinities” contains
an extended attack on Gundolf’s Goethe, Gundolf may be an example of
the “formulaic” approach. The wording of the letter, however, also suggests
that Benjamin has a much wider trend in mind, further characterized by the
“falsification of its insights.” Falsification is the common practice in compari-
son to which Benjamin’s “forcing” of insights is the lesser evil. The idea of
falsification suggests an approach that could also apply to Gundolf. Insights
are “falsified” to become authoritative claims and general conceptualizations.
Benjamin, on the other hand, wants the real complexity of the problems to
which the terms “fate” and “character” refer to be brought into language.
Though Benjamin does not name Spengler, he would certainly be another
example of the trend toward “falsification.” What makes Spengler crucial,
even though he is not named, is the sheer monumentality of his work’s “falsi-
fication” of “fate and character.” In the background of Spengler, as the most
authoritative source for his claims, is Goethe. Thus it is possible to imag-
ine that Benjamin’s attack on Gundolf is also an attack on a more general
trend of Goethe appropriation and an associated style of thought. Goethe’s
“Urworte” themselves, as I have shown, are precisely about the power of
“formulaic” thought, and their topic is also, at least in part, the relation
between fate and character. Thus I would suggest: “formulaic” insights (such
as Goethe’s) are one thing, but adopting them as authoritative support for
authoritative claims is a “falsification.”
Benjamin’s attack on the language in which fate and character have
often been discussed is thus not a wholesale attack on formulaic thought
or on the correlated idea of morphology. In the letter, Benjamin himself uses
semi-morphological metaphorics to argue against the conflation of fate and
character with the developmental form of all individuals and collectivities.
Leading up to the previous quotation, he writes of the

bountiful productivity of an order whose insights powerfully strive

in the direction of completely definite words, the encrusted concep-
tual surfaces of which dissolve magnetically upon contact [with the
insights] and betray the forms of linguistic life that were locked away
inside of them [the concepts]. For the writer . . . this relationship
means the good fortune of language that unfolds before his eyes in a
way that allows it to become the touchstone of his powers of thought.
(GS 2.3:941)

It is clear from this sentence that Benjamin’s approach is not only anti-
formalist and non-conceptual (in the sense of Hans Blumenberg),15 but actually
118 Demonic Ambivalences

anti-conceptual in that it seeks to dissolve the falsified and formulaic rigidity

of inherited terms. The repeated word “Einsichten” (“insights”) propounds a
penetrative stylistic and linguistic ideal. The “encrusted surface of the concept”
is its “formulaic language,” while “terminological socage” (terminologische
Fron) is a metaphor illustrating the ease with which thought can become inden-
tured to conceptual pre-determinations. Insight must penetrate or dissolve “the
frozen conceptual armor” (der erstarrte Begriffspanzer) rather than merely
perpetuate it. This passage’s metaphors of the hollow and frozen inheritances
of tradition correspond to what Spengler calls “that which has already come
into being” (das Gewordene). Benjamin thus denounces the fatal “barbarism”
of self-reproducing and merely received concepts that rely on the authority of
inherited formulae rather than “developing living forms in language.”
This argument shifts the register of morphology: instead of going with the
flow of language, Benjamin uses morphological metaphorics to advocate a
way of thinking and writing that would “develop” (entfalten) the “linguistic
life” (sprachliches Leben) that is pent up (verschlossen) in clearly defined
words (bestimmte Worte, GS 2.3:941). Such “definite terms” would include
both concepts and Urworte (in the sense of keywords or aperçus), but for
Benjamin it is not a question of avoiding conceptual sedimentations and
conventionalized metaphors. The “encrustations” contain “linguistic life,”
waiting to be released. The most intransigent formulae are the most linguisti-
cally productive. According to Benjamin’s metaphorics, the writer must side
with anti-conceptual “life” against the “death” of formal ossification. In con-
text, this means siding with the metamorphosis as expressed in the idea of
“living forms.” Benjamin thus opposes Goethe’s morphological conception
of form as metamorphosis to the schematism of morphology as practiced by
Gundolf (or Spengler).
Instead of focusing on analogy as a system of non-identity, Spenglerian
morphology uses analogies to formulaically reproduce identities within the
wider architectonics of his theory. In a 1919 fragment entitled “Analogy and
Affinity” (“Analogie und Verwandtschaft”), Benjamin also addresses the pos-
sibility of unifying subsumptive-conceptual and ana/morphological thought
(fr. 24, GS 6:43–45). The fragment also introduces a third term, “simili-
tude” (Ähnlichkeit); thus it is a predecessor to Benjamin’s “The Doctrine
of Similitude” (“Die Lehre vom Ähnlichen”) and “The Mimetic Capacity”
(“Das mimetische Vermögen”). The systematic point of the fragment is
sketched in a preliminary note (Vorbemerkung), which can be easily sum-
marized. Similarity is a substantial relation, which as such is meaningless
and incidental unless superficial resemblance is the sign of a deeper (logical)
relation, which might, for example, show that similar things are in fact the
same. Similitude expresses a relation that is “literal” and “unmetaphorical”
(im eigentlichen Sinne [unmetaphorisch]), whereas analogy represents a rela-
tion of “metaphorical similarity,” a relation of the “similarity of relations.”
Analogy is abstract because it is based on a (metaphorical) third term that
Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 119

expresses and interprets the relation. Of the three words under consideration,
however, it is affinity (Verwandtschaft) that is the most ineffable, because
affinities can exist without ever being expressed or signified. Benjamin notes
the “expressionlessness of affinity” (Ausdrucksloses der Verwandtschaft, GS
6:43) and states that affinity can only be “immediately perceived” (unmit-
telbar vernommen) within a sphere beyond both visibility and rationality
(weder in der Anschauung noch in der ratio, GS 6:45). This sphere of affin-
ity is characterized in terms of “feeling” or “emotion” (Gefühl), which is
metaphorically connected (as the verb vernehmen suggests) to audibility and
music: “it is the pure feeling that has an affinity to music” (es ist das reine
Gefühl, welches verwandt der Musik ist, GS 6:44).
Regardless of whether Benjamin had Spengler in mind when he wrote this
fragment, the relevance to Spengler’s method of perceiving analogical “simul-
taneities” between eras and cultures is evident. Benjamin’s harsh critique of
such a method also easily applies to Spengler: “The confusion of analogy
and affinity is a total perversion” (Die Verwechslung von Analogie und Ver-
wandtschaft ist eine totale Perversion, GS 6:44). This is only a more drastic
version of the common criticism that analogical correspondences are forced
if they cannot be justified by deeper connections.16 In light of this common
criticism, it is significant that Benjamin does not condemn analogy or affinity
in general. Their irrationality is a part of their objective being, but it is only
their (subjective) confusion that is “totally perverse.” Affinity, as Spengler
also believes, is primarily a matter of “feeling.” According to Benjamin, such
“sensed” affinities are not purely irrational: they are perceived but not yet
understood; their mode of irrationality makes them the raw material of ratio-
nal analysis. For example, the reasons for music’s affinity with emotion can
be systematically investigated. Spengler, on the other hand, does not pursue
the substantial connections that give rise to the sense of affinity, but confuses
them by using affinity to found an analogical architecture (for example, in his
equation of cultural-historical development with natural forms and cycles).
Benjamin’s analysis of analogy and affinity, combined with the arguments
of his 1924 letter, allow the reconstruction of an anti-Spenglerian morphol-
ogy: against the rigid formalism and uncontrolled analogical identifications
typical of Spengler, Benjamin grants the possibility of sub-rational insights
based on affinities—but he denies that such insights can be translated directly
into the equally sub-rational forms of analogy and resemblance. Morphol-
ogy, as the study of emergent forms and forms in transformation, thus has a
right to exist, but its insights should not be mistaken for other kinds of more
positive and substantial relation. Benjamin further (explicitly) claims that
the concept and the forms of language are also to be read morphologically,
as unfinished, transforming, and “afformative.”17 Whatever transformations
may be occurring in life and history, language may not be able to name or
identify them; it also cannot be presumed exempt from them. Morphology
thus puts language under pressure to raise itself to the level of morphology’s
120 Demonic Ambivalences

key insight (presented in chapter 2) that there are no static forms—and no

fixed referents—only unnameable transformations.
The arguments at the end of Benjamin’s “analogy” fragment, even if they
were not directed at Spengler, pertain directly to the problems of morpho-
logical thought. The penultimate paragraph argues that reading affinities as
analogies (and ultimately as identities) serves authoritarian ends. In support
of this, Benjamin refers to the goals of uniform education (Erziehung) and
the modern idea of familial authority. The latter presupposes the intangible
“affinity” (Verwandtschaft) of “relatives” (Verwandten), which gives rise to
falsified authority based on similarity and analogy. “True authority,” Benja-
min states, comes not from any authoritative claim that one should be like
one’s relatives, but rather from affinity itself, which produces “an immediate
relation at the level of feeling, which does not rediscover its object in the
analogies of behavior, choice of profession, or obedience” (GS 6:45).
The last paragraph of the 1919 fragment speaks of “the type” (der
Typus)—the kind of character—who confuses analogy and affinity. This per-
son is “sentimental”; for him or her affinities only produce the recognition of
already familiar patterns. He or she only sees the familiar (das Anheimelnde)
but cannot navigate the “broad waves of analogy.” What makes this character
sentimental, as Benjamin shows in an example from Schiller’s Wallenstein, is
the refusal to accept the immediacy of affinity without the rhetorical-rational
stabilization of analogy. “The flower is gone from my life,” Wallenstein declares
after Max’s death. The representation of affinity through analogy overcom-
pensates and misrepresents, leaving an arbitrary sign in place of a feeling.
In his later Arcades Project (Passagenwerk), Benjamin looks back at his
work’s development and interprets it in morphological terms. After reading
Simmel on Goethe’s conception of truth, it became clear to him that “my
concept of origin in the Trauerspielbuch is a strict and compelling transpo-
sition of Goethe’s fundamental concept from the realm of nature and into
that of history” (GS 5.1:577). The transposition of nature into history is the
“Copernican” revolution that Spengler claimed for his morphology. Benja-
min continues: “Origin—the concept of the Urphänomen—is imported from
the heathen context of nature into the Jewish context of history.” The point
of such an “importation,” in the Passagenwerk and in general, is not to posit
a causal connection but rather to “allow the emergence” of the Paris arcades
to proceed “in the development proper to them [in ihrer selbsteigenen Ent-
wicklung]—or better put, in their inherent unwrapping [Auswicklung]—like
the leaf from which unfolds the whole wealth of the empirical vegetable
world” (GS 5.1:577). If the paradigms of Goethe’s morphology seem to
be invoked here in a rather vague way, this may be contrasted with closely
related reflections in which Benjamin’s distance from Spengler’s morphol-
ogy is represented as an explicit break with the dualism of progress and
decline. Benjamin argues for a method of “materialist” morphology, which
would not turn parallels and structural analogies into ontological identities,
Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 121

but which focuses on the singularity of individual moments from which the
historical totality constantly emerges anew. I will not go into detail here,
but the idea is familiar: it is the dialectical image,18 which causes far-flung
historical moments to become “simultaneous” in a “flash” of insight. Unlike
Spengler’s systematic architecture of simultaneity (Gleichzeitigkeit) that
connects historical epochs, Benjamin’s is a free-floating and contingent illu-
mination—a lightning strike—that does not resolve itself into a continuum
of endless analogical parallels but instead discovers “the crystalline structure
of the totality of events in the analysis of the smallest individual moment”
(GS 5.1:575). The emphasis on the “autonomous unfolding” (selbsteigene
Ent- bzw. Auswicklung) of manifold forms,19 each with its own integrity as a
moment within a totality, moves decisively away from conceptions based on
the genealogically transmitted identity of original-indelible forms (geprägte
Formen). The genealogical reading of the “primal plant” (Urpflanze), “pri-
mal phenomenon” (Urphänomen), and “primal word” (Urwort) is mistaken
because it makes the fatal error of interpreting the open relation of affinity
(Verwandtschaft) and perpetual circumlocution as an identity produced by
analogically falsified insight. In the natural world, of course, genealogical
continuities may exist. But historical morphology must be conceived differ-
ently, as exempt from “natural” continuities. Manifold relations of affinity do
not produce analogies but dialectical images, which, though they may give
rise to formalizations, are originally expressionless. Benjamin’s morphology
focuses on the emergence of the new—of the new from the old, from within
it and simultaneous to it—instead of on the endless reproduction of the same.
His morphology thus follows Goethe in breaking with the latent Platonism of
the philosophical tradition, which is simultaneously overinvested in a priori
ideas and in their utopian fulfillments.20
When history is interpreted by an analogical schematism like Spengler’s,
Benjamin calls it “vulgar naturalism,” “heathen,” and “mythical.” This is not
only due to the use of a natural analogue to define the form of human his-
tory, but because such mirroring of nature, culture, and history makes them
equivalent. Benjamin makes this point emphatically in the Passagenwerk in
a critique of Nietzsche’s eternal return. In comparison to Nietzsche, how-
ever, Spengler’s attempt to literally trace the “eternal return” (as a fate that
endlessly repeats itself in human history) makes him even more vulnerable
to Benjamin’s argument against Nietzsche: “The ‘eternal return’ is the basic
form of prehistorical, mythic consciousness” (GS 5.1:177); and, even more
drastically: “The essence of mythic happening is return. In it the hidden figure
of futility is inscribed, which inscribes several heroes of the underworld (Tan-
talus, Sisyphus, or the Danaids)” (GS 5.1:178). Though the way of addressing
the problem changed between 1919 and the Passagenwerk, the goal is the
same: Benjamin seeks to establish a historical morphology based on Goethe’s
idea of metamorphosis in order to escape the futile “mythic” repetitions that
otherwise define concepts such as fate, character, and law.
122 Demonic Ambivalences

“Fate and Character”

So far I hope to have shown that the problems surrounding Goethe’s ideas of
the demonic and morphology are central in Benjamin’s work. This does not
mean, however, that his discourse originates in morphology or in the problem
of the “demonic” connection of fate and character. But morphology was at
least compatible with Benjamin’s thought in a way that makes it possible to
draw contrasts with Spengler’s morphology of history without presuming
that Benjamin intentionally developed his thought in opposition to Spen-
gler. The difference with Spengler, however, provides a general framework
for Benjamin’s understanding of the demonic in “Fate and Character” and
“Goethe’s Elective Affinities.”
The difficulty of both essays, addressed in the 1924 letter to Hofmanns­
thal, arguably lies more in their dense and digressive “proofs” than in their
argumentation. The “forced insights” of “Fate and Character” are relatively
schematic, but these insights are supported by Benjamin’s entire thinking on
myth, history, and tragedy. “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” is similar in this
respect, but its much greater length leads Benjamin to develop a dense fab-
ric of motifs and “excurses.” The Goethe essay is made up of “cells,” which
recursively build on material already presented. Formally, there is nothing so
unusual about this, but the essay’s network of internal references is particu-
larly dense and fine. This formal-compositional ambitiousness as well as the
topical connections to “Fate and Character” and the Trauerspielbuch have
led many to see the Goethe essay as a culmination of Benjamin’s early work.21
This does not necessarily mean that his later thinking was drastically dif-
ferent—only that the work of the late 1910s and early 1920s provided an
intellectual platform for what came after.22

The first sentence of “Fate and Character” implicitly neutralizes the “com-
mon” and “traditional” understanding of fate and character by flatly stating
that they are “typically [gemeinhin] taken to be causally connected and that
character is determined as a cause of fate” (GS 2.1:171). This causal rela-
tion, Benjamin observes, can also be inverted. He explains this in the second
paragraph,23 which concludes that “if one has a character,” then it will be
definitive of fate, making the latter “essentially constant” (GS 2.1:173). Ben-
jamin introduces Stoicism as a limit case of an ethical system that seeks to
minimize the variable of fate by holding character constant. The conven-
tional or “inherited” (herkömmlich, GS 2.1:172) connection of fate and
character also (roughly) defines the terrain of the demonic in Goethe’s Orphic
“Urworte” and Poetry and Truth. To be sure, none of Goethe’s versions of
the demonic directly claim a “causal connection,” but all of them (especially
the “Urworte”) operate with inherited conceptions of the problem of fate
and character and thus clearly fall within the tradition to which Benjamin
refers. And the reception of the demonic in the 1910s gives an even stronger
Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 123

impression of a fate-like entity that expresses itself in “demonic characters.”

The Orphic “Urworte” themselves, to the extent that they suggest causation,
imagine Dämon (“character”) as the primary factor; if this primacy is read
as implying causality, this still would not mean that the details of causation
are knowable. And this lack of demonstrable causation makes the claim of
causation itself seem questionable.
Benjamin also dismisses the “inherited” causal connection between fate
and character on epistemic grounds. It is terminologically unsustainable,
because it can only lead to ambiguity: “It is in no case possible to show what
ultimately counts as a function of character and what as a function of fate
in human life” (GS 2.1:173). On the basis of this crux, Benjamin claims that
the goal of his essay is not to show the interconnection or even the dialecti-
cal interrelation of fate and character, but rather to develop them as distinct
concepts. This does not mean that they are necessarily unrelated, only that
a two-way causal connection is incoherent and thus should not be presup-
posed. In the remainder of his essay, Benjamin uses the difference between
tragedy and comedy to show how fate and character can be represented dis-
tinctly and still exhibit specific structural parallels. The result of this analysis
is that tragedy is the genre of the representation of the transcendence of
fate and comedy is the genre of the representation of the transcendence of
character. In themselves, both fate and character are natural; fate is “natural
guilt” and character is “natural innocence.” As natural categories, Benjamin
seeks to free both from their illegitimate encroachment upon the “higher
spheres” of ethics (in the case of character) and religion (in the case of fate)
(GS 2.1:173).
These higher spheres are implicitly contrasted with the lower of myth
and law. Tragedy transcends the “demonic” sphere of mythic fate, whose
ambiguities are captured in the “paradoxical” representations of tragedy;24
comedy does the same for character by showing the natural constraints of
character as a sphere of freedom and not of subjection. Fate and charac-
ter are both “demonic” not only in that they represent an earlier, “mythic”
epoch of unfreedom, but because they display parallel ambiguities: fate,
as a category of law (Recht), becomes ambiguous and potentially unjust
whenever it is viewed as preordained and inescapable. This ambiguity
paradoxically shows that both the retribution and the transgression were
fated and thus that fate’s “legal system” (Ordnung des Rechts, GS 2.1:174)
is an interminable “guilt system” (Schuldzusammenhang, GS 2.1:175).
If everything is fated anyway, the idea of fate cancels itself out: “At base,
man is not the one who has a fate; rather, the subject of fate is indetermi-
nate” (GS 2.1:175). If fate is a “suprapersonal” determination motivating
both transgression and retribution, then the system becomes arbitrary and
passes entirely beyond human ends and means. Tragedy thus represents the
injustice of the gods, even if this conclusion is unspeakable (only indirectly
representable):
124 Demonic Ambivalences

It was not law [Recht] but tragedy in which the head of the genius
first raised itself above the haze of guilt—because in tragedy the
demonic fate is broken . . . Heathen man realizes that he is better
than his gods, but this knowledge deprives him of language and he
remains mute. (GS 2.1:174–75)

This understanding need not deny the existence of suprapersonal forces like
fate or nature, but if such forces are essentially arbitrary and unjust, then
they are ethically and religiously irrelevant. In contrast with Spengler, for
example, who believes that “the laws of nature are the only laws” (UdA
127), Benjamin refuses to engage with the question of nature’s ultimate ends,
the ambiguity of which plagues both Goethe’s and Spengler’s morphology.
Spenglerian morphology perceives individuals as merely relative means to
whichever ends, whereas Benjamin finds the ambiguity of unquestionable yet
supposedly absolute ends to be symptomatic of a “mythic” and “demonic”
system, which is by definition unable to provide individuals with justice or
ethical orientation.
In the case of character, the inherited ambiguity lies in the tendency not to
view it as natural (and hence morally neutral) but to express it in judgmen-
tal or ambivalent terms. Examples of such words “that appear to designate
character-traits that cannot be abstracted from moral valuation” (GS 2.1:177)
are “self-sacrificing,” “deceitful,” “vengeful,” and “envious” (aufopfernd,
tückisch, rachsüchtig, neidisch, GS 2.1:177). To understand what character
is in itself, “abstraction” from morality is “necessary”; Benjamin thus poses
“smart” and “stupid” as examples of character-adjectives whose moral sig-
nificance is either neutral or depends on the individual context and case.
Comedies of character transform protagonists who would be called “scoun-
drels” (Schurken) in real life into objects of identification. Onstage, instead
of seeing morally condemnable behavior, all we see is “character.” Comedy
represents character as the vicarious enjoyment of one’s own nature through
a protagonist who is able to live out his or her character without regard
for moral norms or codes of conduct. “It is incumbent upon morality to
prove that traits [Eigenschaften] can never be morally relevant [erheblich],
only actions [Handlungen]” (GS 2.1:177). While tragedy presents fate as an
arbitrary subjection, character analogously presents the individual’s specific
“genius” (Genius) “as the answer to the individual’s mythic enslavement to
character” (GS 2.1:178). Comedy transforms the inescapable demon of char-
acter from “the determinist’s puppet” into “the light under whose beam the
freedom of action becomes visible” (GS 2.1:178). The Dämon that Benjamin
calls Genius is character viewed from the perspective of “the natural inno-
cence of man.” Character thus is not a form of fate but a representation of
individual nature from the standpoint of freedom. This freedom characterizes
all actions that transcend the sphere of moral consequence—and art “sym-
bolizes” this transcendence.25
Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 125

“Goethe’s Elective Affinities”

The double concept of fate and character figures prominently in Benjamin’s

“Elective Affinities.” The earlier essay’s more schematic presentation provides
an invaluable terminological foundation for the later Goethe essay, which
deals much more extensively with the demonic. And “demonic ambiguities”
are also ubiquitous even where they are not labeled as such. The most promi-
nent example of this is the relation of “material content” (Sachgehalt) and
“truth content” (Wahrheitsgehalt). According to Benjamin, the objective of
criticism (Kritik) is to differentiate them, but all of the metaphors he employs
to illustrate their relation—seal and wax, fire and logs—show them to be
inseparable. Especially when Benjamin uses these terms to characterize insti-
tutions (like matrimony) and non-textual productions (like a life), they are
clearly interdependent. In Benjamin’s refutation of Gundolf’s interpretation,
“truth content” and “material content” are used to argue that the “mythic”
subtexts of the plot are not identical with the work’s truth content (or mean-
ing) but are only a hidden aspect of the material content.26 Critics, content
with only uncovering a layer of mythic meaning in the novel, affirm it as the
meaning of the novel. To counter this reading, Benjamin isolates an anti-
mythic layer ignored by Gundolf. This layer is comprised primarily of the
novella The Strange Neighbor-Children (Die wunderlichen Nachbarskinder)
and the perspective of the semi-omniscient narrator who mourns the fate of
the characters in an image of a “star of hope that shoots above their heads”
(above their heads and out of their view, Benjamin emphasizes). The method-
ological differentiation of commentary and critique thus works in service of
an interpretation meant to show that the uncovering of a mythic dimension
may make the novel appear (partly) as a drama of fate (transgression and ret-
ribution), but that this by itself proves neither that it is completely mythic nor
that it is tragic. Using the distinctions of the Trauerspielbuch, Benjamin reads
the novel as a mourning play, as “sad” (traurig) rather than tragic. The latter
category belongs exclusively to the Greek battle to escape the demonic age.
This historically unique situation was founded on the institution of tragedy,
whereas modernity is ruled by history, which is always explicitly or implicitly
a history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte) whose horizon is redemption (Erlö-
sung). History’s problem is the mythic holdover, its return to a guilt economy
of myth, for example, in the Christian of idea of original sin (GS 2.1:308).
Ideas like “nature,” “law,” “fate,” and “character” reintroduce the demonic
ambiguity of myth in doubly ambiguous forms.
The different subjects of the Goethe essay and the Trauerspielbuch, as
well as the complexity of both works, make it difficult to establish whether
they reflect the same conception. It is safe to say, however, that Benjamin’s
“Elective Affinities” can be more easily followed if one knows the Trauer-
spielbuch, while, on the other hand, the Trauerspielbuch may be clarified by
the Goethe essay’s concrete focus on a single work of modern literature. In the
126 Demonic Ambivalences

Trauerspielbuch, Benjamin argues that modernity and Greek antiquity con-

front the same basic problem (the overcoming of myth), but in modernity the
configuration of problem and solution are incomparably different, not only
in the difference between myth and history, but in the corresponding changes
in the economy of representation. The Trauerspielbuch contends that modern
theater (“from Calderon to Strindberg,” GS 1.1:292) is the result of a Chris-
tological reformatting which replaced the tragic hero’s “defiance” (Trotz, GS
1.1:294) with the exemplary fate of the martyr. Where Greek tragedy was an
act of ritual witnessing and purging that silently raised the question of justice
at the end of fate, “the mourning play” is named after the affect of “sadness,”
which is produced when the desolation of history and infinite injustice are
pushed to the limit of utter hopelessness (Hoffnungsleere, GS 1.1:406). At
this limit, the affect of mourning (Trauer) does not imply mythic ambiguity
anymore, because it is based on a univocal and irreversible historical state,
but the affect of Trauer is subject to a specific “bipolarity” (Umschwung,
GS 1.1:406) in the switch from “death” to “resurrection” (Auferstehung, GS
1.1:406). This is not an eschatological telos, because history per se can only
be represented “sadly,” but is, as Benjamin puts it in the Goethe essay, a “criti-
cal” force within history, whose function is to differentiate ambiguities into
insights. Critical insight puts myth in its place, and history, by this definition,
is not only “sad” but also an unfolding of truth content within material con-
tent. This does not occur in view of a final separation, but in flashes of insight
that only represent a momentary disruption of modernity’s constant recidi-
vism to the pre-ethical world of myth. Even a “modern” world at no point
ceases to be defined by demonic ambiguities, and the continuing existence of
such ambiguities is actually guaranteed by the “demonic” interdependence of
material and truth content, of myth and redemption, within history. As hope-
less as this may sound, the pseudomorphosis of myth in the tragic and the
traurig becomes literally fatal when it overcompensates for the primary affect
of the modern age (Trauer) in order to revel in the pre-tragic idea of fate that
tragedy tried to put an end to.
Benjamin’s “Elective Affinities” presents the idea of “demonic ambiguity”
toward the end of his essay’s first part in direct connection with Goethe’s
conception from Poetry and Truth. For Benjamin, the sheer appearance of
the demonic in Goethe’s autobiography is the symptom of a massive prob-
lem for the worldview attributed to him by Gundolf. Benjamin reads the
demonic as an overt desublimation, an “unpolished monolith” (eine unabge-
schliffener Monolith) towering over the flat landscape of the autobiography
(GS 1.1:149). This dark side of Goethe’s Olympian striving results from his
“idolatry of nature” (GS 1.1:149) and especially from the “ambiguity of his
concept of nature” (Doppelsinn im Naturbegriff, GS 1.1:147). Here Benja-
min refers to his own preceding paragraph, in which Goethe’s susceptibility
to mythic thinking is highlighted; the ambiguity of his idea of nature is that
it “simultaneously refers to . . . the spheres of perceptible phenomena [der
Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 127

wahrnehmbaren Erscheinungen] and to those of intuited primal forms [die

der anschaubaren Urbilder]” (GS 1.1:147). The lack of hierarchy and dis-
tinction between “perceptible appearances” and “intuited primal forms”
produces the undifferentiated Urphänomen as a “chaos of symbols” (Chaos
der Symbole, GS 1.1:147). As an explanation of the biographical sources of
the demonic, this may sound rather obtuse, but the lawless analogizations
of morphology reveal the same tendency to intuit a unifying “primal” order,
which becomes highly unstable and ununified whenever it is hermeneutically
or analytically deployed in life.
Benjamin uses Goethe’s own words to show the risks of such a totalized
idea of nature. Like Spengler’s claim that the only source of law is nature,
Goethe also makes everything—culture, reason, history, or language—a part
of nature:

Just shut your eyes, open your ears and listen: from the most quiet
breath to the wildest noise, from the simplest tone to the most
supreme harmony, from the most keen and passionate cry to the most
tender words of reason—it is only nature that speaks and reveals its
being, its power, its life and its relations. (GS 1.1:148)

When there is nothing that is not nature, the result is a compound—limitless—

ambiguity, in which nature is the “demonic” root cause of all phenomena.
The effect of this, as Benjamin will argue, is the moral muteness of the char-
acters and world of Elective Affinities. The unspoken alternative would be an
individual moral autonomy that allows decisions to be uttered that are not
merely—fatally—governed by nature or which use nature as their excuse.27
In contrast to the more elevated and thorny style in which Benjamin intro-
duces this Goethe quotation, he reacts to it in a more informal way:

If in this most extreme sense “the words of reason” themselves are

made into possessions of nature, what wonder that for Goethe
thought was never able to completely illuminate the realm of the
Urphenomena. He had robbed himself of the possibility of making
distinctions. Without any differentiation whatsoever, being falls to a
conception of nature that grows and extends itself toward monstros-
ity. (GS 1.1:148)

This is not just an isolated terminological ambiguity like that of fate or charac-
ter, and it is also not an individual or historical fate that could be “mourned.”
It represents total ambiguity through the deliberate production of an epis-
temic foundation upon which it is impossible to make distinctions of any
kind. Dimensions of hidden meaning are everywhere. Nothing is itself or what
it seems to be, because everything substitutes symbolically for everything else.
Every boundary is lifted and made fluid. Instead of provoking sadness, this
128 Demonic Ambivalences

conception gives an excuse not to mourn, but it is not a happy pantheism or

“pan-erotism.” Absolute morphological continuity “monstrously” dissolves
all foundations and deprives language of its ability to name.
Benjamin introduces Hölderlin in opposition to the pandemonium of
Goethe’s conception. This non-demonic morphology proceeds on the basis of
the priority of the individual above the whole. This crucial contrast between
Goethe and Hölderlin culminates (GS 1.1:182) in an excursus on “the expres-
sionless” (das Ausdruckslose). As I will show below, “the expressionless”
presents an idea of form as irreducible to formulaic, nominal, or Platonic
conceptions. Benjamin’s version of morphology grants primacy to metamor-
phosis, while Hölderlinian expressionlessness seeks to reconceive artistic form
as the freezing of a material whose natural state is one of motion and flux.
Morphological formalism in the style of Spengler and Gundolf demonically
reduces both life and art to universal schemata, which restrict metamorphosis
to an a priori canon. For the sake of universality, such forms are as general
as possible, and their subsumptive typology strives toward a homogeneous
continuum of always the same predetermined forms. This is the essence of
what Benjamin calls myth. He diagnoses a struggle against this conception
as the definitive “truth content” of Goethe’s life, work, and autobiography.
This reading of the idea of morphology as part of a biographic dynamic lends
it a plausibility that is lacking in Gundolf and Spengler, who only exploit
morphology for the sake of glorification and mythmaking. For Benjamin,
Gundolf’s selective appropriation of morphological mythologemes shows
that he has given up the critical task of using insight to access truth content.
Rather than breaking the hopelessness of the mythic paradigm, Gundolf’s
work mechanically reproduces idealized archetypes.
To show the damage done by such an ideologically motivated reading,
Benjamin focuses on Gundolf’s reading of Goethe’s Orphic “Urworte.”
Benjamin introduces the “Urworte” in response to Gundolf’s hypostasized
unification of the artist’s “life, essence and work” (Leben, Wesen und Werk,
GS 1.1:157).28 Such a unity, which makes the life into a work of art and
the works into direct expressions of the essence of the life, allows limitless
transactions between three spheres. Without actually citing Goethe’s stan-
zas, Benjamin first shows how the model for Gundolf’s style of criticism can
be found in the Orphic terms. The first four Urworte define the life of an
idealized hero, whose exemplary and normative functions connect him to
Benjamin’s concept of myth:

If in the traditional point of view, work, essence and life carelessly

mixed together in an indefinite way, then he [Gundolf] explicitly
understands these three aspects as a unity. He thereby construes them
into the appearance of a mythic hero. Because in the realm of myth,
essence, work and life indeed form the unity that they otherwise only
achieve in the minds of careless literary critics. In myth, the essence
Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 129

is called “demon” [Dämon], life is called “fate” and the work that
only these two express [das nur die beiden ausprägt] is “living form”
[lebende Gestalt]. (GS 1.1:157)

Benjamin here loosely varies the specific terms of Goethe’s Dämon stanza to
characterize Gundolf’s understanding of the Dämon and its “characteristic
form, living and self-developing” (geprägte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt).
Such a unity of existence, Benjamin argues, can only be represented in the
superhuman ideal of the hero, a representative of mankind before the gods
who fails to reflect the “moral uniqueness” (moralische Einzigkeit) of indi-
vidual responsibility (Verantwortung, GS 1.1:158). Gundolf uses this model
of pre-tragic heroes such as Hercules and Orpheus to typify the poet’s life and
vocation. Benjamin passes a harsh sentence on such idolization: “All repre-
sentation by proxy [Stellvertretung] in the sphere of morality is mythical in
nature, from the patriotic ‘one for all’ to the sacrificial death of the Redeemer
[der Opfertod des Erlösers]” (GS 1.1:157). Substitution, including Spengler’s
idea of historical “substitutability” (Vertretbarkeit), mistakes individual life
for a representative form or for a mere function. This representational function
is defined by the ability of the hero’s image to produce exemplary and ideo-
logical effects of cohesion and bonding. But neither individual responsibility
nor individuality itself exists in this sphere of mythic instrumentalization or
in the replaceable aspect of the individual’s part within a larger whole. Such
conceptions abdicate individuality in favor of the representative function of
an idealized heroic proxy who does what we cannot and is what we cannot
be. The “we” who is substituted by the hero is let off the hook and simultane-
ously made into the object of a typological conformism.
The Elective Affinities is not tragic, and Ottilie is no hero. Greek tragedy
alone was able to show that the “heroic” model was not without its redeem-
ing aspects. In this context, Benjamin sketches a highly condensed reading of
the Orphic “Urworte.” His interpretation draws its evidence from Gundolf’s
misreading; by emphasizing hope (Elpis), whom Gundolf ignored, Benjamin
foreshadows his essay’s concluding emphasis on the “star of hope” in the
Elective Affinities:

One of the most powerful sources of this symbolism [the “evident

symbolism” of figures like Orpheus and Hercules who are “clearly
differentiated” from non-heroic humans] flows from the astral
myth: in the superhuman type of the redeemer, the hero stands in for
humanity through his work that grants him a place among the stars.
It is he for whom the Orphic “Urworte” were coined: it is his Dämon
that is like the sun, his Tyche that is changing like the moon, his fate
that is inescapable like the astral Ananke; even Eros does not point
out beyond this star-struck configuration—only Elpis does. When the
author [Goethe] had the idea of including Elpis among them in order
130 Demonic Ambivalences

to bring the first four down to earth, it is no coincidence that she

alone needed no additional explanation, and it is also no coincidence
that she has no part in the schema of Gundolf’s Goethe, which is
entirely defined by the rigid canon of the other four. (GS 1.1:158)

Benjamin’s reading of Goethe’s “Urworte” is risky, especially his interpre-

tation of the contradiction between the stanzas and Goethe’s commentary.
Goethe seemed to understand all five Urworte as a universal (non-heroic)par-
adigm of human development, but for Benjamin, this reading is only made
possible by Elpis (Hope). For Benjamin, the first four figures only represent
a classic mythic-heroic schema governed by an “astral” infrastructure. Like
Gundolf, Benjamin is thus also selective and arguably even reads Goethe dif-
ferently than Goethe reads himself; but unlike Gundolf—and perhaps even
to a greater degree than Goethe does himself—he reads the “Urworte” as an
indissoluble unity: without Elpis, Benjamin argues, the universalizing intent
of Goethe’s commentary would not have been possible; the lack of an Elpis
commentary introduces a change of register to include non-heroic life; the
ascended hero, whose fate was guided by the gods, has no need of hope. Thus
Benjamin’s short reading of the “Urworte” manages to produce a rich inter-
pretation of the poem and Goethe’s commentary.
Whether or not one accepts the claim that Elpis was necessary to “human-
ize” the Orphic conception, her exceptionality is in fact emphasized in the
commentary’s claim that she needs no commentary. In support of Benjamin’s
reading, one might also observe that without Elpis’s closing gesture of open-
ness, the four initial poems would have exhibited a fierce didacticism and
even pedantry, which would have appealed to the “lax literary critics” who
are mostly interested in such qualities. The best evidence of Benjamin’s read-
ing of Elpis’s essential role in transcending the mythic constellation of the
“Urworte” is thus indirectly given by Gundolf’s attempts to exclude her from
the Orphic and “morphic” terminology that he uses to characterize Goethe’s
life and work.29
The fact that Elpis plays a decisive role in Benjamin’s reading of the
Elective Affinities is well known, but to some it may seem exaggerated or
arbitrary to invest so much in a single sentence of the novel: Die Hoffnung
fuhr wie ein Stern, der vom Himmel fällt, über ihre Häupter weg (“Hope flew,
like a star that falls from heaven, above their heads and away”). Based on the
connections to the “Urworte,” however, the centrality of Elpis may become
more convincing, even if her placement and specific interpretation in the
wider contexts of Benjamin’s essay remains challenging; and the closing pas-
sages’ reliance on the Trauerspielbuch—in the words “mystery” (Mysterium),
“the dramatic” (das Dramatische), and “representation” (Darstellung)—pose
many questions. Without claiming to resolve this complexity, I would call
attention to the idea of mourning (Trauer), which allows Benjamin to inter-
pret the novel as a work of mourning—Goethe’s mourning—for his character
Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 131

Ottilie. This authorial affect is inscribed in the novel in the sentence about
the “star of hope,” and the dynamic of Trauer outlined in the relation of
hopelessness and hope corresponds to the “inversion” (Umschwung) char-
acteristic of the Trauerspiel. Crucially different, however, is the identification
of the hope-sentence with Hölderlin’s idea of “caesura” (GS 1.1:199), which
is connected with das Ausdruckslose (“the expressionless,” “the inexpress,”
“the inexpressive”) and finally with the novel’s evanescent truth content.
Given this difficult chain of ideas, each of which may have some ability to
clarify the others, it would be possible to start at any point. The structure of
Benjamin’s essay, like that of Goethe’s “Urworte,” is not linear but cyclical,
making definite conclusions impossible.
I will start with the hope-sentence and work backward to das Ausdruckslose.
The emphasis Benjamin places on the “star of hope” is not exaggerated, because
in the novel it represents an unprecedented intervention of the voice and per-
spective of a narrator who mostly appears to be omniscient. He otherwise only
reveals himself indirectly, for example, in the montage of documentary materi-
als such as Ottilie’s diary. Benjamin’s emphasis on the hope-sentence thus has
a solid narratological foundation, even if he does not argue in these terms. The
reflections das Ausdrucklose and the connections to the Trauerspielbuch have
raised the stakes to a point where the star sentence is not a narrative prob-
lem because it pertains to representation and art in general (Kunst schlecht­hin,
GS 1.1:181). Despite this broadness and the difficulties it poses, Benjamin
still manages to include the arguments necessary to establish the more limited
importance of the sentence: particularly his claim that the hope cannot be that
of the characters (for themselves), but only that of the narrator for the charac-
ters (and particularly for Ottilie) is borne out by the sentence’s simile (“hope
flew like a star”), which indicates that the passing of hope (the fall from hope
into hopelessness) occurs beyond the vision and awareness of the protagonists
(“behind their heads”). There is no star in the diegesis of the scene, because it
only appears in a simile representing the viewpoint of a narrator who knows
the final outcome. When Benjamin speaks of the sentence as a dramatic con-
figuration, this may refer to a fictionalized dramatic irony with respect to the
action. The dramatic configuration gives itself away in the narrator’s affect of
Trauer. He feels it as the affective side of hope in the moment when hope is
gone and includes a sign of it in the narration itself.
Benjamin could have presented this insight more clearly, but instead
he pushes it to the breaking point in his decision to identify it with das
Ausdruckslose. If the “caesura” or “transport” or “counter-rhythmic inter-
ruption” (GS 1.1:181) takes the form of the inscription of an affective and
narratorial standpoint, then the caesura, rather than being “expressionless,”
to the contrary, would seem to cause the work to “express” both feeling and
perspective. This is not wrong, but in Benjamin’s conception what makes
the work “express” is not itself “expressive”—because it is a merely tech-
nical aspect of the representation. In the essay’s first part, he writes that
132 Demonic Ambivalences

“technique” (Technik) is what allows the novelist to “hide” the “mythic

meaning” as an “open secret” within the material content (GS 1.1:145–46).
The truth content, on the other hand, lies within the mythic content and has
no existence outside of it. Though the novelist has technical command of
the material content, he has no privileged access to the ultimate meaning or
truth content of the work. And even criticism, which by definition specializes
in truth content, is mostly a negative function: the critic cannot give positive
and definite meaning to truth content but can only block those who reduce
truth content to an aspect of material content. Das Ausdrucklose is another
name for the “critical force” (kritische Gewalt) at work in the work and in
history, “which cannot separate appearance and essence within the work, but
which prevents their confusion” (GS 1.1:181).
Elpis from the “Urworte” and hope in the Elective Affinities conceptually
represent the interruption of a stagnant and pre-ethical world of myth, whereas
das Ausdruckslose shifts this conception toward a theory of art. “The expres-
sionless” refers to a technique—both deliberate and accidental—of inscribing
an ambiguous transcendence into a work in a way that gives rise to its truth
content by destroying its systematic unity and the unequivocal coherence of
its meaning. This technique of “the expressionless” is nothing other than the
literary device as such and par excellence. It is the moment of ambiguous self-
transcendence within a work, which only seems to place its meaning under
the control of a narrator or author. It is not possible, Benjamin indicates, to
name the expressionless, its “counter-rhythm,” more precisely than as “some-
thing beyond the author that cuts his work off in mid-sentence” (etwas, [daß]
jenseits des Dichters der Dichtung ins Wort fällt, GS 1.1:182). The constant
emphasis of the idea of an interruption coming from the outside, the loss of
control in and through the perfection of technical mastery, makes the finished
work a fragment, but a fragment of the true world (ein Fragment der wahren
Welt, GS 1.1:181). The work is not a lie, a fiction, or a deception, nor is
“appearance” (Schein, GS 1.1:181), “conjuration,” or illusion (Beschwörung,
GS 1.1:180)—nor is it an immediate manifestation of beauty (das Schöne, GS
1.1:180). Ruined by the interruption of the expressionless, the work takes
on affinity with the world in its lack of coherent closure, its openness to the
historical horizons of meaning, redemption, and critical force. In narratologi-
cal terms, the expressionless would be both extra-diegetic, as its connection
to the narrator of the Elective Affinities suggests, and extra-authorial: it is a
part of the formal precondition of the “work-ness” of the work, that which
makes it a work in the first place (and not a hallucination or an accumulation
of raw material or a sheer manifestation of beauty or harmony). The expres-
sionless is that which cuts off the work’s “excuses” (Ausflüchte) and freezes
them (bannen, einhalten, erstarren) into a constellation analogous to a facial
expression. The expressionless cannot make the work speak the truth, nor is
it in any way equivalent to the author’s truth, but it is that which causes the
work to betray its own truth as an unspoken and unspeakable revelation.
Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Morphology 133

Instead of the star in the Elective Affinities, Benjamin could have mod-
eled das Ausdruckslose on the excurses on the demonic from Poetry and
Truth, as a comparable moment in which ambiguity is pushed to the point of
producing a loss of authorial control. A sentence from the Trauerspielbuch
most succinctly covers all such strategies: “The tragic is to the demonic as a
paradox is to ambiguity [Das Tragische verhält sich zum Dämonischen wie
das Paradoxon zur Zweideutigkeit]” (GS 1.1:288). The paradox stands in a
special relation to the demonic in that it is uniquely able to bind demonic
ambiguities by giving them a specific form without permanently banishing
or resolving them. The “idea that it is impossible to lift the veil [of appear-
ance in works]” (die Idee der Unenthüllbarkeit) is “the idea of art criticism”
(GS 1.1:195). This idea of Unenthüllbarkeit, the inability to separate appear-
ance from essence, corresponds to the undecidability and unresolvability of
demonic ambiguities. Despite the “critical violence” of das Ausdrucklose, the
demonic persists, and will continue to persist, in the primal “mythic” forms
that dwell in the encrusted concepts of a mystified “modernity.” Thus Ben-
jamin does not hope for a utopian solution to the “problem” of demonic
ambiguities. There is nothing that can permanently banish them from the
forms of life and society in which they inhere. Works of art, however, have
a special status as works of paradox that represent a tendency ad absurdum
in their depiction of and relation to these ambiguities. Rather than a con-
tinuation of mythic violence with different means, art’s representations are
discontinuous with the regime of the demonic. This moment of discontinu-
ity is, however, as Benjamin’s name for it clearly indicates, “not express,”
“inexpressible,” but, like the seal in wax, is inscribed on top of or within the
demonic continuum of history. This point is evident in one of many “unex-
pressed” moments in Benjamin’s own essay, his description of the “evening
star,” Venus, in the final paragraph: “This most paradoxical and fleeting hope
finally surfaces from the semblance of reconciliation, just as, at twilight, as
the sun is extinguished, the evening star arises in the dusk [im Dämmer]
and outlasts the night. Its shine, of course, is that of Venus” (GS 1.1:200).
The image is Benjamin’s; it cannot be equated with the “falling star” from
Goethe’s novel. Throughout the essay, he associates sundown and twilight
(Dämmerung, GS 1.1:147) with the shady hybridity of “demonic ambigu-
ity” in contrast with the sunlight (Sonnenlicht, GS 1.1:132) that only shines
in The Strange Neighbor-Children. The pairing of Hope and Love (as Eros,
not Pauline Agape) is thus made to stand outside of history and the philoso-
phy of history. The “evening star” offsets and is superimposed against the
“twilight” of its background. It represents an unambiguous constant that
lasts through the night, a moral fidelity in the face of the ambiguities of fate,
character, myth, and law. Twilight as such is always ambiguous: depending
where it appears, it may usher in the night or prefigure a coming dawn. By
contrast, Benjamin’s “philosophy of history”—if one wants to call it that—
occurs against the backdrop of perpetual twilight.
 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

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Wetters, Kirk.
Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
1 ed. Northwestern University Press, 2014.
Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/33934.

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 Chapter Six

Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

The Demonic as a Template for the Novel

The difficulty of giving closure to a biographical narrative may have led

Goethe to introduce “the demonic” in a series of interconnected excurses at
the end of Poetry and Truth. This underlying formal difficulty as well as the
substance of the excurses on the demonic are both directly relevant to the
genre of the novel. The developmental-biographical paradigms of the Orphic
“Urworte” may also be taken as a framework for the “novel of education”
(Bildungs- or Entwicklungsroman). Poetry and Truth, as a biographical nar-
rative, could be read as an application of a developmental paradigm such
as that of the “Urworte.” In this reading, the demonic emerges at the end of
Poetry and Truth as a symptom of the difficulties of fitting life’s events into
the phases and stages of a systematic conceptual framework. The formal-
ization of life into a system of heterogeneous factors unavoidably relies on
memory to reconstruct their relations and causations. The demonic emerges
from such an attempt as a by-product of the confrontation between merely
subjective recollections and an intended synthesis of life into a coherent
causal narrative.
In the “Urworte,” the problem of the demonic originates in the unified
force of an individual’s personality, talents, and drives—in the innate, unique
productivity of the Dämon, which may produce geniuses like Mozart as well
as more pathological “demons” like his protagonist, Don Giovanni.1 In either
case, the demonic drive sets the driven individual at odds with society by plac-
ing him (or her)2 above, below, or outside of it. Without constructing a canon
of demonic heroes and antiheroes, the examples of which would be endless,
one might postulate that especially when protagonists are depicted as excep-
tional—whenever characters are characters with qualities—the demonic is
in play. The “Urworte” thus pertains to the formation of protagonists and
“characters,” while Poetry and Truth’s encounter with the limited represent-
ability of such formations exemplifies the ironic relation of narrators to their
own lack of omniscience.
These two aspects of the demonic may not evidently apply to all novels
or “life stories.” Kafka, for example, might represent a limit at which the

135
136 Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

protagonist-narrator polarity dissolves into something more like a dream or

a pure scenario, driven not by the dynamics of character and limitations
in the narrator’s perspective but by demonic plot elements related to other
forms of uncertainty, chance, expectation, and mediation.3 Given the vast
range of possibilities within these approaches, it may be that the paradigm
of the demonic can include every possible novel—but it can only do so in the
way that all paradigms relate to exceptions and limit cases. It is not my intent
to pursue such a paradigmatic-taxonomic project, but, broadly, one might
surmise that the traditional novel, at least up to Thomas Mann, fits easily into
the framework of Goethe’s conceptions of the demonic.
This coherence is reflected in Lukács’s 1916 Theory of the Novel, which
represents a broadly synthetic and retrospective formalization of the
nineteenth-century novel. Using the methods of the philosophy of history,4
Lukács seeks to perceive the basic form of the genre’s underlying conflicts
and define the transcendental status of the novel as the latest epic form. He
treats the novel as a form that has reached its end, tested all of its limits and
exhausted its possibilities. In order to establish the parameters of the genre
in such a way as to permit this kind of historicization, he relies implicitly
and explicitly on Goethe’s idea of the demonic. Lukács’s citation of the most
enigmatic passage of book 20 of Poetry and Truth gives Goethe’s conception
striking prominence—but the demonic never emerged as a correspondingly
central conception in the reception of Lukács’s theory. The reason for this
is obvious: the demonic was taken primarily for a pathos formula without
an evident systematic function; The Theory of the Novel barely indicates
how the demonic fits into the theory, and insofar as it is subordinated to a
philosophy of history, it can be ignored as a superfluous difficulty. Especially
if the complexity of Goethe’s concept is not recognized, or if Lukács is not
credited with a solid grasp of it, the citation from Poetry and Truth looks like
an afterthought.
Setting aside Lukács’s direct engagements with the demonic, his familiarity
with it is suggested by the similarity between Goethe’s analytic parameters
and those of Lukács’s theory. The “Urworte” outline a universal model of
character development and socialization, whereas Poetry and Truth pres-
ents the demonic as the inability of retrospective knowledge to give univocal
meaning to a biographical-developmental narrative. These two aspects pre-
cisely reflect Lukács’s focus on protagonists (on the one hand) and the ironic
perspective of narrators (on the other).
This schematic reduction of the two sides of the demonic to a protagonist-
narrator opposition allows the notoriously convoluted paths of Lukács’s text
to be circumvented. Complexity-reduction is not an end in itself, however, and
this formal derivation leaves Lukács’s conception of the demonic essentially
unclarified. Nevertheless, new perspectives may be opened up by hypotheti-
cally imagining the demonic without Lukács as representing an independent
framework for theorizing the novel. From this perspective, Lukács appears to
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 137

have been surprisingly successful at synthesizing Goethe’s conception into his

overall theory. Perhaps this comes as no surprise considering his proximity
to Goethe biographers like Simmel and Gundolf, but what remains striking
is the synthetic understanding that allowed him to incorporate the demonic
into an infrastructure that might otherwise appear Hegelian.
Lukacs’s way of combining the demonic with other conceptions does
not allow it to be easily differentiated analytically. Goethe himself did not
produce a theory of the demonic to which one might directly refer, while,
between Goethe and Lukács, overtly theoretical conceptions such as those of
Wundt and Freud had begun to explore the demonic’s systematic potential.
The young Lukács also subjects Goethe’s understanding of the demonic to
an intense systematization and, like his older contemporaries Spengler and
Gundolf, he often opposed the demonic (as a figure of modernity) to an idea
of originary authenticity reminiscent of the Dämon of Goethe’s “Urworte”:
“The way of the soul [der Weg der Seele] is: To strip everything from oneself
that does not really belong to it [was nicht ihr eigen ist]; to form the soul to
true individuality [das Formen der Seele zur wirklichen Individualität].”5
Rather than presenting a critical, analytical, or philological engagement
with the paradigmatic potential of the demonic, Lukács wants to realize the
Dämon in order to overcome the demonic. In his Theory of the Novel, he
explicitly hopes that the determinant-system of Goethe’s “Urworte” can be
resolved in favor of the unity and heroic authenticity of Dämon, whose oppo-
nent, Tyche, defines the arbitrariness of social conventions and institutions.
In the form of the novel, the victorious hero cannot resolve the contradiction
of individual and society without violating the reality principle and commit-
ting the aesthetic transgression of idealization or romanticization. Merely
fictional resolutions ring false in comparison to real contradictions, to an
external reality that does not allow the Dämon—or “the soul” (die Seele)6—
to fully actualize itself. This situation defines the relation between the modern
world, its art, and its epic forms:

But this transformation [Wandlung, the overcoming of the duality

of nature and culture] can never be accomplished from the side of
art alone [niemals von der Kunst aus]: the form of the great epic [for
Lukács: from Homer to the novel] is bound to the factual reality
[Empirie] of the historical moment [des geschichtlichen Augenblicks],
and every attempt to depict utopia as if it were real [die Utopie
als seiend zu gestalten] can only result in a destruction of forms,
not in a creation of reality [endet nur formzerstörend, aber nicht
wirklichkeitschaffend].7

Lukács believes that soul and forms, nature and culture, Dämon and Tyche,
must be unified in reality before they can be unified in representation. The
peculiarity of this construction is its toleration of idealism in life and in art
138 Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

that is rejected in the novel. In comparison to Goethe’s idea of the demonic as

historically variable but irreducibly given, Lukács’s idea of “transformation”
(Wandel) means the historical overcoming of the nature-culture opposition,
leading to a reunification of the epic and the aesthetic in life.8

The Idea of “the Luciferian” in Lukács’s

Heidelberg Aesthetics (1916–1918)

Goethe’s importance for the young Lukács is not widely recognized, despite
the fact that the Lukács scholarship often finds it difficult to get away from
questions of influence. Goethe should at least be added to the long list, which
includes Hegel, Schlegel, Kierkegaard, and Dilthey (all of whom Lukács him-
self names in the 1962 preface to The Theory of the Novel).9 In contrast to
the short 1916 preface, in which Dostoyevsky is the “prophet of a new man
[Künder eines neuen Menschen], the shaper of a new world [Gestalter einer
neuen Welt], discoverer and rediscoverer of a new-old form [Finder und Wie-
derfinder einer neu-alten Form],”10 in the 1962 preface, Lukács enumerates
influences in a way that diminishes his early work.11
The unfinished Heidelberger Ästhetik, a habilitation draft, written between
1916 and 1918, focuses extensively on Goethe,12 but unlike the more essay-
istic Theory of the Novel, the aesthetics follows the conventions of a formal
academic treatise. The difference of approach between the two roughly
contemporaneous works is illuminating. The aesthetics, despite being more
formal, contains Schlegelian stylistic breaks13 that show Lukács to be more
interested in speculative consequences than in systematic theorizing. In The
Theory of the Novel, on the other hand, an overtly essayistic approach is
complicated by the latency of its systematics. When writing essayistically,
Lukács uses implicitly systematized premises as the springboard for meta-
reflections, while in the Heidelberg Aesthetics the essayistic lapses seem to
reflect discomfort with the systematic construction. The Heidelberg Aesthet-
ics often gives the impression of a seamless theorization, but the moments
when Lukács “brackets” and “transcends” his systematic positions therefore
feel all the more exposed. Such essayistic course-corrections produce pro-
found shifts in the apparent argument, giving the impression that Lukács is
either unable to commit to his own theorization or that he was not primarily
interested in producing a descriptive aesthetic theory.14
Before giving an example of this, I will quickly sketch the central claims of
Lukács’s aesthetics: he develops an idea of “aesthetic positing” (ästhetische
Setzung) which advocates for works of art on the basis of their immanence,
singularity, self-sufficiency, and internal coherence. The autonomy of each
aesthetic positing, its intrinsic claim to be its own “reality,” causes it to
exclude and negate the everyday reality from which it emerges.15 Lukács
understands this negativity of the work of art as a radicalization of Husserl’s
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 139

idea of bracketing.16 The work of art, for Lukács, is constituted out of the
same material as “everyday reality” (Erlebniswirklichkeit), and for this rea-
son the two can only be in competition. The real world does not stand a
chance, however, because in every cultural formation yet known, with the
exception of the ancient Greeks, “real” reality is essentially contingent and
thus inferior to the work of art: “Everyday lived experience is therefore far
from being something original [etwas Ursprüngliches] in a systematic sense;
it is impossible to think of a more artificial and contrived arrangement of
objects [das gekünstelteste Objektsgefüge].”17 A successful aesthetic positing,
which is always possessed of its own intensive reality, provides a coherence
of experience that is lacking in the real world.
In short, virtual realities are more real than reality—but this power of the
work of art is highly unstable, prone to being “transcended” from one of
two directions: (1) the “soul,” as Lukács would say, cannot be truly at home
in the work of art, because the latter has the status of a Kantian Ding an
sich, isolated both from its creator and its recipient. The soul always remains
homeless: it may temporarily and partially enter the world of the work, but it
can never permanently reside there. It must always return to the incoherence
of the “empirical” world. (2) The work may be transcended by philosophical-
conceptual abstraction. In thinking about and justifying art, the “everyday
reality” of works is constantly counter-bracketed by their “idea.” The expe-
riential immanence of the work as “aesthetic positing” leads Lukács to
reject the canonical conceptions of beauty from Plato through Kant, Hegel,
Schelling, and Goethe.
Such are the apparent claims of Lukács’s aesthetics. I now turn to a pas-
sage (at the very end of the chapter entitled “Subject-Object-Relation”)
which represents the most extreme case of Lukács’s tendency toward essay-
istic reframing:

It however also cannot be left unsaid [kann nicht verschwiegen

werden] that the will to produce a system [der Wille zum System]
with its necessary will to produce a harmony of values [die Harmonie
der Werte], almost always strives from the outset to produce, through
a process of synchronization [Abstimmung], the harmony it presup-
poses. This kind of systematic approach attempts to veil and diminish
[verschleiern und vermildern] the essence of the aesthetic [das Wesen
der Ästhetik], which strives to go beyond the level of the other values
[aus der Ebene der anderen Werte hinausstrebt]. Here, however, an
appeal will be made in the name of the simple understanding of the
aesthetic sphere [im Namen der einfachen Erkenntnis der ästhetischen
Sphäre], which leads me also to emphasize that the metaphysical
“enemies” of art—such as Plato, Kierkegaard or Tolstoy—have rec-
ognized its normative essence [ihr normatives Wesen] as well as its
metaphysical significance [ihre metaphysiche Bedeutung] with much
140 Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

greater clarity than its harmonizing defenders. Thus, if someone

were tempted, on the basis of the present purely value-theoretical
analysis, to think that the Luciferian [das Luciferische] is the proper
metaphysical “location” [der metaphysische “Ort”] of the aesthetic,
I would not be able to contradict him (nor would I wish to do so).
(HÄs 131–32)

At the beginning of the passage, Lukács argues that because philosophical

aesthetics itself has the goal of producing systematic harmony and coherence,
philosophy obscures the oppositional—negating, contrary—character of art.
This will to harmoniousness contrasts with the chaos of everyday reality in
the same way that art does, thereby revealing philosophy’s complicity with
the aesthetic. That which “cannot be left unsaid” (nicht verschwiegen werden
kann) is philosophy’s own aesthetic tendency.
Once a philosophical system is bracketed in this way, its meaning is no
longer stable. Lukács calls his own system into question in an exposed
self-contradiction. With false modesty, he stresses that his work is only an
“immanent value-theoretical analysis,” thereby calling attention to the limi-
tations of such an analysis. This does not mean that he retracts his theory of
aesthetic positing; but what counts here is not the theory’s internal coherence
or descriptive accuracy, but the horizons of its possible meanings. In view of
such horizons, Lukács displays obvious ambivalence toward his own concep-
tion of art. He is unsure whether to side with the metaphysical “enemies”
of art or with its “defenders.” He concedes that the enemies would be right
to conclude that the “metaphysical location” of the aesthetic is “the Lucife-
rian,”18 but the “somebody” (jemand) who plays the devil’s advocate here is,
however, Lukács himself. The radical defender of the autonomy of art unex-
pectedly changes sides and raises doubts about his defense. The traditional
defenses were based on art’s double tendency toward transcendence—either
toward life and “reality” or toward norms of beauty, ethics, and moral-
ity—but in Lukács’s conception, these rationalizations and justifications are
disallowed. The oppositional character of art in the Heidelberg Aesthetics
makes it Luciferian in its essential tendency to replace the world with a plu-
rality of seductive, short-lived, and ultimately unlivable counter-worlds. In
the terms of Maurice Blanchot: Luciferian art is a siren’s song that calls away
from the world.19
Lukács’s idea of the immanence and autonomy of art is blocked by an idea
of reality that prevents him from affirming his defense of art. With respect
to a singular reality, art tends to produce virtual realities. The “better” a
work, the more Luciferian it is. On the flip side, the philosophical-conceptual
rationalization of art—toward the beautiful, the sublime, the ethical, or the
political—neutralizes its Luciferian aspect, but does so in a way that makes art
itself irrelevant. Thus, according to consequences Lukács does not explicitly
draw: art is utterly otherworldly—but this is precisely what causes it to be of
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 141

the utmost consequence for the “real world.” Its “Luciferian” aspect, which
its “enemies” perceived, is that if it does not lead upward—if it cannot be
instrumentalized—then it must lead downward. If it is not self-transcending,
then it is hostile to every system that seeks to stabilize its meaning.
Art is an unsublatable, “Luciferian” principle of opposition, and its seduc-
tions are even more seductive and uncontrollable when their normative
instrumentalization is revealed as the defense mechanism of a beleaguered
reality. Given this setup, it is still not easy to say what side Lukács takes.
Precisely the harmoniousness of art’s siren song makes it dissonant and
false with respect to reality. This might mean that, instead of working on
works, artists should work on reality itself. Lukács cannot go in this direc-
tion without turning his habilitation into a manifesto, and thus the degree of
his sympathy with the enemies of art remains ambiguous. If he were to fully
side with them, his “defense” of “aesthetic positing” would become the pre-
text for its condemnation. This reading cannot be ruled out, but it overlooks
Lukács’s obvious fascination with the unstable and destabilizing functions
of art. The idea of the Luciferian suggests its author’s susceptibility to it; he
may have found its anarchist “negation” of a deficient reality more salutary
than this reality’s attempts to rationalize and harmonize art as propaganda or
“aesthetic education.” Without trying to resolve this point, I find it plausible
to imagine that Lukács identified with art’s Luciferian aspect—not because it
represents a revolutionary potential, but because it represents a this-worldly
beyond, a normative inversion with respect to the world and the polarities
of its conceptualization (good/evil, idealism/realism, state/society, progress/
decline, etc.).20
There is no evidence that Lukács takes his idea of the Luciferian from
Goethe, but because The Theory of the Novel cites the demonic from book
20 of Poetry and Truth, it seems reasonable to read the Luciferian in connec-
tion with book 8’s “pulsing” conception of man’s simultaneous participation
in the Luciferian and the divine. Lukács’s and Goethe’s versions of the
Luciferian are roughly compatible in their reading of the impulse toward
individualization and specification (in the form of “aesthetic positing”) in
terms of an opposition or distance from the divine. Goethe’s opposition of
the Luciferian and the divine in the figure of systole and diastole, however,
differs greatly from Lukács’s more schismatic understanding. Goethe allows
the individual to have a double home, whereas for Lukács this doubleness
is the essence of homelessness. For Lukács, perfect specification is only pos-
sible through “aesthetic positing,” whereas “real life”—including the life of
the artist—is defined by alien contingencies. In comparison to Goethe, the
most difficult question posed by Lukács is whether the ideal of “specifica-
tion” might be realizable in life—outside of the artificial closure of aesthetic
positing. The choice of the word “Luciferian” itself seems to be premised on
the idea that the lure of the aesthetic always breaks its utopian promise.21 In
a naive way, one might wonder if Lukács is not asking too much of art. He
142 Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

wants works to be concrete utopias in themselves and simultaneously to pro-

mote concrete utopia in the world. These imperatives are contradictory—and
the second is explicitly forbidden in Lukács’s theory’s rejection of the politi-
cal or ethical transcendence of the immediacy of aesthetic positing. As long
as this transcendence is disallowed, art’s production of short-lived virtual and
subjective utopias will constantly divert energy from the real utopian project
of creating a more just world. Thus Lukács suspects—against the prevail-
ing assumptions of aesthetic theory and practice—that art is a source of a
breakdown in the historical dialectic whose ultimate ends were supposed to
be reason and progress.
A somewhat unexpected consequence of this is that the unified life ideal
of the Greek epic22 invoked in the opening of The Theory of the Novel—
“Selig sind die Zeiten” (“blessed were the days,” TdR 21)—cannot be taken
as an ideal of artistic perfection. When Greek life, reflected in Greek art, is
the ideal toward which modern art strives, modern art becomes Luciferian.
Greece is the ideal for Lukács, but this ideal is profoundly misunderstood
if it is taken only as a model for artistic imitation. It is Greek life—which
produced the “art”—that must become the model for the transformation of
the world. “Art” as aesthetic positing is a phenomenon of modernity that
stands in contrast to Greek culture.23 In the role of the “metaphysical enemy”
of art, Lukács believes that this original unity can be re-achieved. The epic
unity of subject and object, of inside and outside—“the world is wide and
yet like one’s own home” (die Welt ist weit und doch wie das eigene Haus,
TdR 21)—cannot be achieved “through art” (von der Kunst aus, TdR 137).24
The turn from aesthetics to culture—and to politics—marks the point,
one might say (contra Lukács), where it gets really Luciferian. A divided or
alienated existence may not be the worst thing imaginable. In comparison,
the possibilities of inauthenticity and self-alienation presented in Goethe’s
Orphic “Urworte” represent resigned realism. For Lukács, on the other hand,
in keeping with his aesthetics’ general basis in an idea of “spheres”—the
transcendental equivalent of fields, disciplines, or genres—the historical ten-
dency of art’s autonomy and “virtuality” is increasing mutual exclusivity and
pluralization. At the limit, each individual—each work—will define its own
sphere, and the overwhelming proliferation of such works would cause art
to fail even in its negative function of casting critical light on a deficient real-
ity. Aesthetic positing thus ultimately posits the disparateness of aesthetic
spheres in an equally disparate experiential reality.

Goethe and Lucifer in the Heidelberg Aesthetics

There is no need to introduce Goethe into Lukács’s aesthetic theory, because

it contains a full (and surprisingly approving) section on him (HÄs 183–92);
only in the next subsection does the tone become more critical (HÄs 193).
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 143

The question Lukács pursues in Goethe, after having dismantled Hegel,25

is whether Goethe’s conception of organic-developmental form might not
allow an idea of beauty—above all of artistic beauty—to be conceived, which
would be simultaneously concrete, immanent, and empirical throughout all
of its moments and stages. Hegel’s dialectical system reports an error when it
comes to explaining the concrete developmental manifestations of aesthetic
objects. Hegel was, according to Lukács, unable to conceive the (Luciferian)
particularity of singular aesthetic objects in their self-sufficient “spheres.” In
comparison with Hegel, Goethe’s morphology (which Lukács never refers to
by this name) is an advance, because it stands a better chance of producing
an idea of the aesthetic that is at once immanent and developmental. In light
of Hegel’s failure to vanquish Kant, Goethe’s “way of observing nature” (Art
der Naturbetrachtung) is an intervention “in the development of specula-
tive philosophy” (in die Entwicklung der spekulativen Philosophie), which
Lukács characterizes as “fatefully decisive” (schicksalhaft-entscheidend, HÄs
183). To support this, he draws on a variety of mostly later works of Goethe,
including the “Maxims and Reflections,” The Theory of Colors, Faust, and
Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years. Famous lines of Plotinus from The
Theory of Colors—“If the eye were not like the sun / How could we behold
the light?” (Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft, / Wie könnten wir das Licht
erblicken? HÄs 186)—set up an opposition between Faust and Makarie
(from Wilhelm Meister), in which the latter represents the “utopian-real
cosmic completion” (utopisch-real kosmische Vollendung) of Faust’s human
inadequacies. Makarie is “the highest realization of this form of life [die
höchste Verwirklichung dieser Lebensform], . . . in which the solar system has
become truly alive, who is the solar system and lives it immediately [die das
Sonnensystem ist und es unmittelbar lebt]” (HÄs 187). These lines illustrate
Lukács’s idea of the “spherical” life and “rounded” existence that is impos-
sible in the fragmentary reality of modernity. The young Faust, on the other
hand, exemplifies the modern predicament in solipsistic limitations defined
by the earth-spirit (Erdgeist): “you are like the spirit that you conceive, but
not like me” (du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst, / Nicht mir, HÄs 187).
Lukács is more convinced by this “tragic” figure of Faust than by the pos-
sibility of a development leading to perfection (Vollendung) or redemption
(Erlösung). Faust’s encounter with the earth-spirit represents a struggle with
the Luciferian in which “reality” triumphs, even before there is a wager that
can be lost. Lukács sees the definitive and inescapable reality in Faust’s rest-
less striving, and on this basis he rejects the later harmonizing moments as
ideals—or as ironic-critical abstractions. Yet Goethe’s organological aesthet-
ics is nevertheless emphatically affirmed:

The doubly guiding role [die doppel-leitende Stellung] of the organic

in the system is that which is ultimately determinant [als letztlich
Bestimmendes] for both the construction and nature of the object
144 Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

[Aufbau und Wesensart des Objekts] as well as for the constitution

and level of the subject [Beschaffenheit und Niveau des Subjekts].
This resolves the anthropological aporias of Platonism [hebt die
anthropologischen Aporien des Platonismus auf] . . . [and] makes
possible a philosophically affirmative and positively valued relation
to art [ein philosophisch bejahendes und positiv bewertendes Ver-
halten zur Kunst]. (HÄs 189, 191)

In Goethe’s conception, Lukács continues, “in diametric opposition to

Platonism,”

it is no longer the mathematically well proportioned [das mathe-

matisch Wohl-Proportionierte], the crystalline [das Krystallinische],
which is the real carrier of the idea of beauty, but rather that which
is enigmatically perfected in itself [das rätselhaft in sich Vollendete],
that which lives and is full of spirit [das Lebendige, Seelenerfüllte],
which radiates this fulfillment in its very appearance [diese Erfülltheit
in seiner Erscheinungsform Ausstrahllende]. And this is why also in
art [as well as nature], the adequate objectivation of beauty is that
which transcends all rules [das allen Regeln Entrückte], that which
has apparently grown out of itself [das scheinbar von selbst Gewach-
sene]. (HÄs 192)

This ideal of both art and nature corresponds with Lukács’s characterization
of modern works of art as microcosms. The experience of worlds in works
defines modern art: works are more alive than life, and life lives only through
art.
Ultimately, the Makarie ideal itself is Luciferian in its relation to modern
reality. Lukács rejects the idealization of sense perception and apperception as
a means of unifying subject and object over time on the grounds that even—
and especially—at its most ideal, aesthetic perception is governed by a form
of solipsism that is essentially equivalent to its non-idealized form (Faust’s
encounter with the earth spirit). The risk of solipsism is in fact greater when
less resistance comes from the side of the “object” (when the Erdgeist does
not intervene and call attention to the limitations of the subject-position).
Thus the most Luciferian figure for Lukács is Makarie, and thus the most
Luciferian art, next to that of ancient Greece, is Goethe’s in its ability to ideal-
ize and transfigure the solipsism of all perception and promote the confusion
of perception and reality. Lukács’s interpretation of Wilhelm Meister in The
Theory of the Novel (TdR 117–28) similarly argues that, while appearing
to present a prosaic depiction, Goethe romanticizes reality in a way that
bears false witness to the achievability of the ideals represented. Lukács thus
sides more with the Tower Society of Wilhelm Meister than with Makarie—
but not because he supports its model of concrete management: the ideal
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 145

Makarie represents must be realized, not by isolated individuals and not only
aesthetically, but socially and intersubjectively.
Read in this way, it is uncertain whether Lukács is the one who diagnoses the
problem of the Luciferian—or if he is its victim. One could argue, for example,
that he is unable to read the aesthetic aesthetically; he only perceives art in view
of the unrealizability—nicht von der Kunst aus—of the ideals it merely repre-
sents. Even after distancing himself from the morphological idea of nature, the
(Luciferian) harmony of which seductively leads away from reality’s contradic-
tions, he still implicitly subscribes to this ideal. He sees aesthetic positing as the
main obstacle to the realization of that which only it can promise:

The grandeur, however, with which it [Goethe’s “cosmic” conception

of the unified subject] was able to realize both [the theoretical and
the aesthetic] in his creative praxis [in der gestaltenden Praxis] with
respect to art and nature, as well as in the conduct of his own life,
is very well suited [ist sehr geeignet] to covering over [zu verdecken]
the insoluble problems that are hidden within it [die darin verborgen
sind] and to awakening the appearance [den Anschein zu erwecken]
of a well-shaped unity of life [eine gestaltete Lebenseinheit], as if such
an apparent unity would be able to simultaneously guarantee the sys-
tematic unifiability of its actual elements. (HÄs 193)

Lukács rejects the “apparent unity” of the necessarily disparate elements

of Goethe’s life and art. Life and art can at best produce the appearance of
organic unity, which hides the fact that these apparent unities are actually
artificial composites. As mere appearances, aesthetic unities seek only to put
a good face on a deficient reality.

The Demonic Infrastructure of The Theory of the Novel

Lukács was looking for something in Goethe that Goethe never claimed to
provide. This is striking in the first pages of The Theory of the Novel, which
begin with the Luciferian spell of Greek antiquity. The Plotinus quote from
the Theory of Colors (“If the eye were not like the sun / How could we
behold the light?”), which Lukács cites in the Heidelberg Aesthetics (HÄs
186), is paraphrased and ornamented, not to define a certain possibility of
aesthetic perception, but to hypostasize the real possibility of a complete sen-
suous unity of inside and outside, subject and object: “the fire, which burns in
the soul, is of the same essence [Wesensart] as the stars . . . because fire is the
soul of every light and every fire clothes itself in light” (TdR 21). This unity,
which Lukács attributes to the Greeks, conforms to his reading of Goethe.
When Lukács contrasts “our” Kantian understanding of the stars with that
of the Greeks, Makarie’s internalization of the heavens provides the implicit
146 Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

model: “Blessed are the times . . . whose paths [Wege] are lit by the light of
the stars” (TdR 21). The motif is again repeated and developed:

Even if threatening and incomprehensible powers [drohende und

unverständliche Mächte] make themselves felt from beyond the circle
[jenseits des Kreises] that the constellations of present meaning [die
Sternenbilder des gegenwärtigen Sinnes] draw around a cosmos that
is meant to be experienced and shaped by man [der erlebbare und
zu formende Kosmos], such forces are still never able to suppress the
presence of meaning [die Gegenwart des Sinnes]. (TdR 25)

And finally comes the explicit contrast with Kant: “Kant’s starry sky [Stern-
enhimmel] now shines only in the dark night of pure knowledge [in der
dunklen Nacht der reinen Erkenntnis] and no longer lights . . . the lonely
wanderer’s paths” (TdR 28).
In the course of this sidereal exposition, the word Luciferian makes one
of its two occurrences in The Theory of the Novel; here it is the result of the
modern uprooting of art from the immediate sensuous totality of its Greek
origin. In modernity, the totality can no longer be found in the “rounded”
unity of life but only in “autonomous” works:

The visionary reality [visionäre Wirklichkeit] of a world made to our

measure [uns angemessen], art, has become . . . independent [selbstän-
dig]; . . . it is an artificial totality [eine erschaffene Totalität], because
the natural unity of the metaphysical spheres has been permanently
ripped apart [für immer zerrissen]. (TdR 29)

In modernity, art becomes artificial, a merely manufactured formal perfection

without correspondence to a larger and equally organic reality. Modernity
misunderstands the Greek “totality of being” as mere art and turns the
ancient light-bearer into a

seductive power [verführerische Kraft] that still lay dormant even in

dead Greek culture [noch im toten Griechentum lag], the blinding
Luciferian reflection [luciferisch blendender Glanz] of which made
it possible to forget the world’s unsealable fissures [die unheilbaren
Risse der Welt], while constantly allowing new unities [Einheiten]
to be dreamed up [erträumen ließ], which however always contra-
dicted the new essence of the world [dem neuen Wesen der Welt
widersprachen] and therefore always fell apart again [immer wieder
zerfielen]. (TdR 29)

The anti-artistic undertone, which appears in the Heidelberg Aesthetics in the

form of the ironic devil’s advocacy, is more emphatic in The Theory of the
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 147

Novel. The “blinding reflection” (blendender Glanz)26 of the Greek world,

carried across the ages in art, makes modernity oblivious to the fragmentari-
ness and artificiality of its own world. A world of constantly dreamt-up new
creations—which dissolve again like dreams—is a world of superstructures
that exist only in the denial of their base. Art perpetually re-creates “Greece”
at the level of mere appearances.
In the Heidelberg Aesthetics, this interpretation of art as an endless Lucife-
rian falling away from being—as a sentimental consolation in the absence
of true being—reactivates Plato’s suspicions about art. Such metaphysical
doubts about the Luciferian spell of antiquity may explain Lukács’s focus
on the novel. The post-Homeric epic, because it has no hope of living up to
Homer’s perfect unification of art and life on the basis of an underlying unity
of existence (TdR 46), has no choice but to reflect the fragmentariness and
disunity of reality. Homer was able to produce a unified totality, not primar-
ily because of the unifying power of his “genius,” but because the world he
lived in was a unified one. By contrast, all efforts to epically reflect the real-
ity of modernity can only produce works that are fragmentary, incomplete,
inconsistent, inadequate, abstractly normative-imperative, or subjectively
moral-ethical in relation to a world for which there is no coherent meton-
ymy to represent its entirety. In the terms of the Heidelberg Aesthetics, the
novel is not an “aesthetic positing” because it does not create an autonomous
“world” in opposition to the real one. According to The Theory of the Novel,
epic form “is never the making [das Schaffen] of a new reality [einer neuen
Realität], but only always a subjective mirroring [ein subjektives Spiegeln] of
the reality that already exists [der bereits daseienden]” (TdR 39–40).
It is precisely aesthetic deficiency and heterogeneity that allow the novel to
avoid the Luciferian. Its lack of autonomy and its dependency on empirical
reality define the novel’s historicity and set it apart from the other modern
arts. Epic narration in modernity is always a partial reflection of historical
reality, a fragment of objectivized subjectivity—or subjectivized objectivity:
“it is always his subjectivity [that of the narrator] that manages to wrench
one piece out of the measureless infinity of everything that happens in the
world [aus der maßlosen Unendlichkeit des Weltgeschehens ein Stück her-
ausreißt]” (TdR 41). The epic narrator, according to Lukács, is responsible
for the selection and the meaning of what is narrated; the latter stands for
the meaning of life itself. Unlike dramas, which systematically focus on an
abstract problem, the novel is engaged in an existential analytic with respect
to historical reality. Even if the novel’s search for meaning always remains
projected toward an uncertain horizon—and even if its meaning turns out
to be sheer meaninglessness, as is typical of the more “artistic” genre of the
novella (TdR 42)—the epic narrator is responsible for his narrative’s repre-
sentativeness with respect to the meaning of life in all of its material density
(and not just as a “moral of the story”). The novel is unique among epic
forms in that it must try to mediate its own process of selection within the
148 Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

totality of everything that it does not and could not possibly hope to address
(TdR 43). Only at the genre’s limits, in its most exemplary works,27 are the
narrator’s subjective limitations made to indirectly appear—passively, by an
act of grace (Gnade, TdR 44)—such that the boundaries of the novel are
transformed into those of the world itself (seine Grenze zur Grenze der Welt
zu verwandlen, TdR 44).
Limit-cases define the novel in Lukács’s theory. If a novel rivals Homer’s
achievement in its synthesis of reality into an aesthetic whole, or if it tran-
scends the novel in the direction of another genre, it may be at once the most
aesthetically satisfying and the most Luciferian. The most ideal syntheses do
not ring true, because as long as it is a novel, formal autonomy has the poten-
tial to conflict with the external reality whose meaning the epic is obliged to
supply. Irony thus functions as a corrective when it reveals the novel’s ide-
alizations to be relative or counterfactual. According to Lukács’s summary
at the end of the fourth section of the first part, the meaning of a novel can
never be totally internal and aesthetically autonomous, because this meaning
ultimately refers to “a specific problematic of the world” (eine bestimmte
Problematik der Welt, TdR 72). Lukács thus characterizes Dante’s immanent
depiction of transcendence as follows:

However, only in a transcendent beyond [nur im Jenseits] is the mean-

ing of this world [der Sinn dieser Welt] able to become concretely
visible and immanent [abstandlos sichtbar und immanent]. In the
world itself [in dieser Welt], the totality is one that is either unstable
[eine brüchige] or merely yearned for [eine ernsehnte] . . . (TdR 51)

Dante is able to harmonize the reality of this world and its meaning only by
recourse to transcendence. A meaningful totality is possible only by com-
pletely separating the world from its meaning, by positing an alternate world
as the meaning and fulfillment of this world. In novels, however, aesthetic
harmoniousness becomes dissonant with respect to the randomness and
incomprehensibility of the world.
With the help of Virgil, who gave him a guided tour, Dante was able to
postulate a transcendent totality. The novel’s narrator and protagonist, on the
other hand, must search for it in the ruins of a world that cannot be imma-
nently “harmonized” without giving lie to the novel’s meaning. By defining
the novel as a process in which meaning is sought, the lack and absence of
given meanings (and thus a certain state of the world) is presupposed (TdR
51). Even when seeking reaches an end, when a given plotline reaches its
fulfillment or the seeking subject finds its object, it takes the form of a tem-
porary insight into “the meaning of life” (der Sinn des Lebens, TdR 70, 134)
which can only occur against the backdrop of a world in which fulfillment
is not the norm (TdR 53) and in which the “finding” is often a source of
disillusionment. The hero’s accomplished insight into the searching-process
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 149

of his own development can only have the character of an exception, which
precisely does not stand for the general experience of everyone, but rather
displays what the world and life normally are not. Most do not seek, and
most seekers do not find. Exceptional moments of the immanent unification
of world and meaning—Makarie moments—allow the merely formal closure
of the novel’s world by way of an exception that proves the rule. Thanks to
such moments of subjective illumination, the hero’s experiences can be expe-
rienced vicariously, as exceptions to the norm that occur despite the novel’s
faithful reflection of the fragmentariness and meaninglessness of the world.
The exemplarity of the novel’s resolutions is counter-exemplary (TdR 53)
and at odds with “the world as it is” (das Leben, so wie es ist, TdR 27) and
thus also—anticipating the next step of Lukács’s argument—ironic.
In the transition to the idea of irony, Lukács discreetly alludes to the
Dämon of Goethe’s “Urworte.” Lukács characteristically glosses the Dämon
idea with the word soul (Seele, TdR 56) and explains it as an experience in
which the external world is able to become the extension and medium of
the soul: “for the soul itself is the law” (denn die Seele selbst ist das Gesetz,
TdR 56). The life of this soul is not that of modernity, but of Greek antiq-
uity; it refers to a soul that does not (yet) encounter anything fundamentally
opposed or foreign to it, which does not (yet) know the “searching” quality
that Lukács attributes to the novel’s hero:

The human world that comes into view is one in which the soul is at
home [zu Hause], whether as man, god or demon [Mensch, Gott oder
Dämon]. In this world the soul finds everything it needs [alles, was
not tut]; it has no need to create or animate something out of itself
[aus sich selbst heraus zu schaffen], because its existence [Existenz] is
copiously fulfilled [überreichlich erfüllt] in the finding, collecting and
shaping [Finden, Sammeln und Formen] of that which is immediately
given and related to it as a soul [was ihr unmittelbar, als Seelenver-
wandtes, gegeben ist]. (TdR 56)

The fact that this “soul” may ambiguously be that of “man, god or demon”
indicates a prelapsarian existence more superhuman than human. Its lan-
guage reconceptualizes Goethe’s Dämon.28 Thus, more implicitly than in the
Heidelberg Aesthetics, Lukács here also relies on Goethe to theorize the uni-
fication of subject and object.
A comparison with Goethe makes the one-sidedness apparent with which
Lukács focuses on the Dämon (or “soul”) without regard for the balancing
powers of Tyche, Eros, Ananke, and Elpis.29 For Lukács as well as Goethe,
however—at least in the modern state of the world—the idea of a completely
unchecked Dämon is only a foil, a momentary ideal standing for everything
that human life generally is not. Lukács’s next paragraph thus posits an
impeding if not malicious Tyche:
150 Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

Interiority’s life of its own [das Eigenleben der Innerlichkeit] [inte-

riority split off from a coherent connection to the outside world] is
only then possible and necessary . . . when the gods are silent [wenn
die Götter stumm sind] . . . , when the world of deeds [die Welt der
Taten] has disconnected itself from humans. The independence [Selb-
ständigkeit] of this form of interiority has made it hollow [hohl]
and incapable of receiving the true meaning of deeds within itself
[unvermögend, den wahren Sinn der Taten in sich aufzunehmen].
Interiority has become unable to make a symbol of itself in deeds [an
ihnen ein Symbol zu werden] and to dissolve them into symbols [und
sie in Symbole aufzulösen]: the connection between interiority and
adventure [die Innerlichkeit und das Abenteuer] is forever severed
[abgetrennt]. (TdR 57)

For Lukács, this disconnection between the authenticity of the Dämon and
a godless, meaningless world of contingent forms defines the modern world
and its characteristic epic genre. Older epics told of heroes who symbolically
represented communities—who did not search, but were led. This idea of
heroism presumed the unity of “interiority and adventure”; whereas Tyche
in antiquity was opportune and auspicious, in the modern world she is a
hindrance to the Dämon’s self-actualization.
Lukács reproduces of the basic schema of Goethe’s Dämon-Tyche opposi-
tion, but he reads it very differently. Instead of viewing Tyche as a potentially
productive socialization, he interprets her exclusively as an agonistic oppo-
nent of Dämon; he resists Goethe’s attempt to bridge antiquity and modernity
in the enduring validity of the “Urworte.” Whereas Goethe saw in them a
timeless analytic system, for Lukács they express a unified relation of life and
world that only existed in Greek antiquity. On this point, Lukács is close to
Benjamin’s reading of the “Urworte,” which argues that the imagined unity
of Tyche and Dämon—of fate and character—is always a regression to the
mythic concept of the hero. Lukács sees it that way too but inverts the val-
uation. Where Benjamin posits the unity of life and world as a perpetual
phantasm of “myth,” Lukács supposes a primordial whole, which not only
actually existed, but which remains the only possible goal of history. He thus
characterizes modernity and the modern novel in the absent connection of
Dämon and Tyche as “the non-compatibility of empirical life and the sensory
immanence of meaning” (das Nicht-eingehen-Wollen der Sinnesimmanenz in
das empirische Leben, TdR 61).
The immediate unity of life and meaning may look like a sentimental ideal,
but the current unrealizability of this ideal means that Lukács (unlike Gun-
dolf) does not seek a contemporary epitome (such as Goethe) to show the
achievability of “heroic” existence. One might want to say that Dostoyevsky
fulfills this function, with the difference that his epics—perhaps no longer
novels—anticipate a future life ideal.30 Lukács saw Dostoyevsky as a figure
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 151

pointing toward the dawn of a new epoch, but there is no unified perspec-
tive available at present through which the meaning of life can be universally
mediated without lapsing into a subjectivity that would contradict the univer-
sality intended. To get around this problem, Lukács introduces irony in order
to theorize the novel as a perspectival matrix, a system of foils that prevents
access to final or authoritative meaning. The alternatives represented in the
world of the novel are suspended by the limitations of a narrator who recog-
nizes divisions without being able to overcome them. This limited acceptance
reflects and partially stabilizes the rift at the base of the modern experience
represented through the novel’s hero.
Given various splits, but especially the one between individual and
world—Dämon and Tyche, “soul” and “forms”—irony allows the novel’s
given world to be structured into two perspectives that mark the extremes of
interiority and exteriority. These perspectives are typically represented by a
protagonist and a narrator:

[Irony] means . . . an internal splitting [eine innere Spaltung] of the

normatively poetic subject [des normativ dichterischen Subjekts] into
[1] a subjectivity as interiority, which stands in opposition to alien
power complexes [die fremde Machtkomplexen gegenübersteht] and
strives to imprint this alien world with the contents of its longings
[die Inhalte ihrer Sehnsucht] and [2] a subjectivity that is able to
see through the abstractness [Abstraktheit] and thus through the
limitations [Beschränktheit] of the opposing and mutually alien sub-
ject- and object-worlds [Subjekts- und Objektswelten]; this perception
[Durchschauen] indeed leaves the duality of the world untouched
[die Zweiheit der Welt bestehen läßt], but at the same time, in the
reciprocal conditionality [die wechselseitige Bedingtheit] of the two
elements that are mutually and essentially alien to one another, it
catches sight of and shapes [erblickt und gestaltet] a unified world
[eine einheitliche Welt]. This unity is however purely formal [rein for-
mal]. (TdR 64)

The novel is the genre of the negative—ironic and counter-exemplary—depic-

tion of the unity of fate and character. With irony, the universal lack of unity
can become the basis of a speculative unification. In order to tell the story, the
narrator must be able “to recognize as necessary” (TdR 64)—and perhaps
even to accept, from a standpoint of “resignation” (TdR 61)—the unfathom-
able split within the world. Importantly, this realization “of limits” (TdR 64)
on the part of the narrator—of the limitations of any unifying perspective—is
only possible on the basis of the paradoxical and partial knowledge called
irony and not, for example, by a more stable figure, such as “renunciation”
(Entsagung), which would seek to unify this perspective into an ethical norm
and universal possibility of conflict resolution. Novelistic irony, though it
152 Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

walks the fine line between ambivalent resignation and ambiguous moral-
ization, allows problematic subjects to be depicted without moralizing or
generalizing.
The split between subject and narrator also reflects a temporal split
between the time of experience and its later narration. In Poetry and Truth,
in the context of the demonic, Goethe ironically characterizes this idea of
irony: “That’s what makes it youth and life in general: we generally first learn
to perceive the strategy after the campaign is over” (HA 10:183). Goethe
takes irony ironically where Lukács takes it seriously (in that he implies that
the problem that necessitates it is solvable). Thus the novel does not affirm
the solution—the Notlösung—of irony, but employs it as a “merely formal”
device to keep the real problem in focus: that the world is not a utopia but an
“ever-lost paradise” (ein ewig verlorenes Paradies, TdR 74).
Significantly, irony is less central in part 2 of The Theory of the Novel,
which focuses on the problems of protagonists. Lukács, it seems, is unable
to reintroduce irony in its proper place, the narrator-protagonist differential,
which resurfaces in part 2’s discussions of memory (TdR 110–14). The con-
text makes it clear, however, that hero and narrator are not fixed positions:
the process of aging—of achieving “mature masculinity” (gereifte Männlich-
keit, TdR 74–75)—turns demonic heroes into ironic novelists.

The Demonic and the Luciferian in The Theory of the Novel

By the time Lukács names the demonic in the fifth section of part 1 of his the-
ory, the general outlines of the topic are already so implicitly ubiquitous as to
make it almost superfluous to introduce Goethe directly. The fact that Lukács
does so can perhaps be read as a sign that he does not expect readers to make
the connection without a hint—or, on the other hand, that he thought read-
ers would notice it and he wanted to address it directly. Either way, the overt
recourse to the demonic suggests that he wanted his theory to be read in this
context. The explicit invocation of the demonic thus looks like the tip of an
iceberg which, implicit in the rest of the theory, is now announced.
When Lukács names the demonic and makes it into a manifest topic, he
does not do so in a simple way. He characteristically jumps in at the level of
consequences and implications. Also, in comparison to the first four sections
of his theory’s first part, the passages on the demonic appear oddly fragmen-
tary or even vestigial. Overall, the concluding fifth section has a summary
function with respect to the sections that preceded it, and the demonic flows
directly out of preestablished contexts. The introduction of the demonic by
name thus appears to be motivated by a desire to amplify and expound. But it
is not only an emphatic reiteration. Like the Luciferian in the Heidelberg Aes-
thetics, Lukács’s reflection of his thesis in Goethe’s concept introduces decisive
new elements that broaden and perhaps contradict the preceding theory.
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 153

The idea of the demonic first comes into play in a Novalis citation to the
effect that the belief in the identity of “fate and character” (Schicksal und
Gemüt) is “the youthful faith of all poetry” (der Jugendglaube aller Poesie,
TdR 74). The genre of the novel painfully breaks faith with this primal unity.
Starting from this thesis, the demonic emerges as part of a reflection on the
extended consequences of novelistic irony. Irony suspends “poetic” faith in
the heroic unity of fate and character. Despite and because of this point’s
apparent redundancy, its extension in the direction of the demonic allows
it to be reformatted in a language expressing the urgency of the underlying
historical problem. Irony, the symptom of the present epoch, is a symptom of
the narrator’s inability to concede the pointlessness of the hero’s aspirations
and give up “the youthful faith of all poetry”:

This insight [diese Einsicht], his irony, turns against his hero, who
perishes [geht zugrunde] out of poetically necessary youthfulness
[in poetisch notwendiger Jugendlichkeit] in the realization of this
faith, but the narrator’s irony also turns against his own wisdom by
forcing him to admit [einsehen] the futility of the hero’s battle [die
Vergeblichkeit dieses Kampfes] and the final victory of reality [den
endgültigen Sieg der Wirklichkeit]. His irony comprehends [erfaßt]
not only the deep hopelessness of the battle, but also the even deeper
hopelessness of giving it up . . . By figuring [gestalten] reality as the
victor, irony reveals [enthüllt] the vain inanity [Nichtigkeit] of this
reality in the face of the vanquished hero. (TdR 74)

If the narrator did not have some residual investment in the representative-
ness of the protagonist, the narrative would be pointless. The narrator, whom
Lukács frequently characterizes as representative of “mature masculinity”
(gereifte Männlichkeit), knows that he should know better than to worry
about young heroes and the youthful hopes of all poetry. But he cannot help
wishing he were wrong in this knowledge. He narrates the hero’s downfall
with irony, thereby causing reality’s triumph over “the youthful faith of all
poetry” to appear ambiguous. The meaning of his defeat remains uncertain,
especially with regard to its justice. The hero may end up in the wrong on
the world’s terms, but the world is not thereby vindicated. In Lukács’s hero-
centric conception, the narrator’s staged reflection of “world” and “soul”
leads to the insight that, regardless of the inevitability of the soul’s submis-
sion to the world’s ironclad necessity (Ananke), the latter is illegitimate as
long as Tyche defines its essence. The protagonist may fail, but the soul can-
not be made to forsake itself, its Dämon or nature: soul remains soul, and
world remains—mere fortuna.
To illustrate this, Lukács recalls the mythic heroes of antiquity (die Helden
der Jugend, TdR 75)—and of modern operas—who eternally incarnate the
“naive faith of all poetry” in the unity of fate and character. Even heroes like
154 Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

Ariadne, “crying on solitary isles,” or like Orpheus or Dante, “who plum-

met to the very gates of hell,” are always “led” (geführt) by a god who gives
their path “the atmosphere of security” (TdR 75). This vision of heroic youth
predictably introduces a contrast between the ancient unity of life and its
modern dissolution. Out of this familiar setup, Lukács attempts a freehand
reading of the demonic. Unlike Goethe, for whom the demonic is always only
a placeholder for the various possible combinations of life’s basic determi-
nants, Lukács interprets it as the modern lack of a coherent and universal
system of meaning, causation, and determination. In Goethe, all conceptions
of the demonic in all eras are relatively unsuccessful attempts to give reason
and coherence to underlying uncertainty. But for Lukács, the term declares
the bankruptcy of the modern world when it comes to providing coherent
paths that would offer even the “atmosphere” of security.
One might attribute the difference between Goethe’s conception and
Lukács’s either to the increasing uncertainty of the modern world, or, on the
other hand, to an increased expectation that the world is meant to be a safe
place. Lukács addresses this question of modernity’s theological or meta-
physical deficits: “The gods that have been driven out [vertrieben], or which
have not yet come into power, become demons” (TdR 75). Lukács’s image of
modernity is that of an interim, the long interim that followed the dissolution
of the ancient world. Though literally ancient history, this collapse remains
utterly contemporary for Lukács. The holdover in modernity of all poetry’s
misguided “youthful” faith in the formative power of character produces the
hero’s “Luciferian defiance” (luziferischer Trotz, TdR 80). Heroes may have
always been defiant, at least potentially, but what makes them modern and
Luciferian is the complete deregulation of this defiance in a “godless world”
(TdR 81). The young hero, even in modernity, wants to be a real hero, a hero
for all time, who can live up to the standards of antiquity. No longer “led”
by divinity, he is possessed of a “demonic” psychology (TdR 79)—closed and
self-sufficient “like a work of art or a divinity” (TdR 86). This modern situ-
ation makes him even more heroic and precisely demonic because, without
divine guidance, he must stage and execute the entire performance himself.
What this hero lacks, however, in his emulation of the heroic feats of antiq-
uity, is the narrator’s knowledge, gained through hard experience, that the
heroic model is no longer current—no longer possible. The narrator knows
that modern heroes are not led by gods, but must search for them—only to be
abandoned. Antiquity’s Luciferian role in the modern world causes modern
heroes to fail. The modern world is seduced into believing in unified forms
that no longer apply. The Orphic “Urworte” may have once defined a coher-
ent system, but for us their relation has dissolved into a complete non-relation.
The demonic in Lukács’s theory of the novel thus breaks into two variants:
(1) on the side of the hero, there is the “Luciferian” aspect, which stands for
the pressure that ancient ideals exert in the modern age. The Greek inheri-
tance becomes virulent whenever it is approached with the expectation of its
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 155

modern realizability. Further complicating matters is the fact that precisely

this expectation seems to be not only that of artists or heroes in novels, but of
numerous political programs. (2) The second aspect is the “demonic” irony
located on the side of the narrator. Demonic insight into the demonic means
recognizing that there is no divine plan. This perspective knows the truth
about the “Luciferian” status of inherited ideals and knows the hopelessness
of all attempts to realize them in the current state of the world. The sum of
these two aspects is that in modernity—and in the novel—the demonic irony
of the narrator’s perspective trumps and relativizes the hero’s “Luciferian”
defiance. The latter has only the status of a misunderstanding, a misplaced
classicism. The demonic quality of the modern world is displayed in the novel
as the incoherence of an existential coordinate system that would be both
subjectively meaningful and objectively valid. The “demonic” atheism of a
world without gods ultimately impacts not only the modern applicability
of ancient Urworte, but every conceivable system of relation and coherence,
whether it be fate and character, individual and society, means and ends,
history and progress, law and order, lifeworld and system, and so on. In the
completely ironic novel, every thinkable basis of narration would be retracted
and crossed out. A “demonic” or “godless” world is one of the instability
of every attributed meaning. Attributed meaning is the only meaning: sig-
nificance can be generated relatively and subjectively—ironically—but never
presupposed as immediately given or collectively or intersubjectively reliable.
The theological master-narrative that emerges from Lukács’s reading of
the demonic is that of the failure of Christian monotheism31 to replace the
gods that it displaced. The resulting power vacuum produced a world of
fragmented powers with limited jurisdictions. A Gnostic situation domi-
nates: “the being of the new God is borne [getragen] by the passing away
[Vergehen] of the old one” (TdR 76). At the very end of the section, Lukács
introduces this “Gnostic” theologeme even more dramatically as the culmi-
nation of a series of metaphysical poles that narrative irony, “itself demonic,”
encapsulates in the “metasubjective Dämon” of the hero. Irony, unable to
find a world proper to itself even after it has finished tracing the path of the
martyrdom of the protagonist’s subjective interiority, encompasses (1) the
narrator function as “the Schadenfreude of the creator-God at the failure of
all weak insurrections [das Scheitern aller schwachen Aufstände] to overturn
His powerful yet insignificant, botched creation [sein mächtiges und nichtiges
Machwerk]” and (2) the protagonist function as “the inexpressibly sublime
suffering of the redeemer-God at His inability to come in this world [über
sein Noch-nicht-kommen-können in dieser Welt]” (TdR 81–82).
It is not easy to determine the precise sense and reasons for Lukács’s
presentation of the novel’s formal polarities in terms of a Gnostic—Mar-
cionistic—dualism of Creator vs. Redeemer. This specification or redefinition
of what he understands as the “state of the world” risks ruining the in any
case dubious historical specificity of his conception of modernity, which
156 Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

was previously interpreted as a discontinuity with respect to a different ori-

gin (that of Greek antiquity). If, on the other hand, the talk of creators and
redeemers, old gods and new gods, gods and demons, is not taken literally,
but only as an extended metaphor, an elaborately ornamented analogue of
the “modern” situation, it would have a devastating effect on the persuasive-
ness of the philosophy of history upon which Lukács’s thesis is premised. If
naming of the demonic only allows for improvised “metaphorical” exten-
sions, then the result is only a confusing exaggeration that casts doubt on the
initial theoretical claims.
It is also not easy to justify Lukács’s decision to quote the most famous
lines on the demonic. Goethe’s words neither follow directly from Lukács’s
thoughts about demons as dethroned gods (TdR 75), nor do they lend any
direct support to his next claim that “the novel is the epic form of a world
that the gods have abandoned” (TdR 77). In this context, Goethe’s words
seem to testify to the experience of life in a godless world:

It [the demonic] was not divine [nicht göttlich] . . . , because it seemed
to lack reason [es schien unvernünftig]; it was not human, because it
had no understanding [hatte keinen Verstand]; it was not devilish,
because it was beneficent [wohltätig]; not angelic, because it often
betrayed Schadenfreude. It was like chance [Zufall], because it did
not prove consequent [beweise keine Folge]; it resembled Providence
[Vorsehung], because it gave indications of coherence [deutete auf
Zusammenhang]. Everything that limits us [alles was uns begrenzt]
appeared permeable [schien durchdringbar] to it; it appeared [schien]
to arbitrarily operate [schalten] upon the necessary elements of our
existence [die notwendigen Elementen unseres Daseins]; it drew time
together [zog die Zeit zusammen] and expanded space [dehnte den
Raum aus]. Only in the impossible did it seem content [schien es
sich zu gefallen], while disdainfully thrusting away the possible [das
Mögliche mit Verachtung von sich zu stoßen]. (TdR 76)

Lukács offers no direct comment or interpretation on this enigmatic passage.

He also makes no special effort to introduce or mediate Goethe’s words. An
interpretive commentary would have bordered on superfluity in any case,
insofar as the passage itself has the form of a riddle, the answer to which is
given as “the demonic.” It would be ludicrous to try to add or subtract from
Goethe’s meticulously crafted personification, and every attempt to “solve”
the riddle and call the demonic by another name would only reduce it to a
more familiar and non-enigmatic conception.
By foregoing interpretation, the main role of this quotation in Lukács’s text
is to be enigmatic—and perhaps to give credit to one of his theory’s sources.
The Goethe quote is a cipher or token, which Lukács uses to characterize the
world of the novel and the psychological dynamic of its protagonist-narrator
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 157

couplet (which is the main topic of his theory’s first part). By explicitly intro-
ducing the demonic in the Goethe citation, he installs a hiatus between the
name (“the demonic”) and the thing it refers to (the modern state of the
world that gave rise to the novel). Such a rupture is inevitably introduced
whenever the demonic is called by name: as a name for the problem of the
relation of fate and character, of human development and socialization, “the
demonic” can only be highly improper. When any relation—including that
of protagonist and narrator—is formalized as “demonic,” it is an affront to
the expectation of coherence implied by the analytic terms that underlie it.
From a certain perspective, in other words, the idea of the demonic always
sounds like an exaggeration or a distortion. Terms of relation like “individual
and society,” “freedom and history,” “fate and character,” “part and whole”
implicitly presuppose the possible coherence of their objects, whereas the
demonic blasphemously assumes that such categorical relations reflect only
nebulous interrelations or non-relations.
The word “demonic,” already in Goethe, comes with a strong presuppo-
sition of incoherence, and “a world forsaken by god” means the demonic
instability of meaning for which the word “demonic” is only the placeholder.
Lukács, however, was not necessarily ready to resign himself to the world
of this word. His citation of Goethe on the demonic produces an exposed
moment similar to the introduction of the Luciferian in the Heidelberg Aes-
thetics, but it does so with respect to familiar dualisms. The interjection of
the demonic shows Lukács himself to be ironically focused on the potentials
of Luciferian heroes. He casts himself as a demonic ironist—a narrator who
sings the downfall of the Luciferian in the face of the demonic. But even when
his own discourse reflects the narrator’s demonic irony, it leads him back to
the problems of the heroes. Though he knows the demonic, the modern, he is
fixated on mythic and tragic heroism, on divinely secured and representative
experiences. The Luciferian hero promises an experience and perhaps even a
victory that can, the narrator hopes, just as easily happen without gods or in
defiance of them. The experience of the Luciferian, of the realization of art’s
promise—even vicariously, artistically, and in its failure—may be the best the
modern world can hope for.
The constant permutation of the ancient-modern dualism (projected, for
example, onto the protagonist-narrator relation) follows a logic of “overex-
tended transcendence”32 that results from the condemnation of this world.
The problem is brought to a point at the end of part 2 of The Theory of the
Novel in words borrowed from Fichte on the “perfected sinfulness” (vol-
lendete Sündhaftigkeit, TdR 137–38) of the modern and (novelistic) world.
In context—with Dostoyevsky pointing to the horizon—this stereotypically
“Gnostic” insight into the utterly debased state of the historical world clearly
contrasts with a promise of future redemption. The assumption of a cosmic
conflict between a heroic Redeemer and an incompetent Creator whose main
attribute is Schadenfreude ironically reflects the extremes of the narrator’s
158 Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel

possible relation to the hero, but it may also be a symptom of Lukács’s search
for a real hero to restore meaning to the world. The demonic is invincible
to the extent that it is defined by the limits of time and space, whereas the
Luciferian, incarnated in the demonic hero “who thrives on the impossi-
ble,” represents the possibility of the demonic’s impossible overcoming. The
Luciferian is only Luciferian as long as it falls and fails. If Lucifer succeeds,
he turns out to be the Redeemer. If he succeeds, he lives up to his name—
“light-bringer”—and restores meaning and unity to the world. The demonic
in Goethe’s conception, by contrast, does not imply an eschatological horizon
or a philosophy of history; to the contrary, its philosophy of history, to the
extent that one can speak of one, posits the absence of such horizons. Goethe
also does not dualistically pit various aspects of the demonic against each
other; his famous words on the demonic from Poetry and Truth proceed
strictly through figures of negation (“not divine, . . . not human, . . . not devil-
ish,” etc.) and resemblance (“resembled,” “appeared”).
Lukács perceived that the problem of the demonic has two sides (a seri-
ous one and an ironic one), but he was not ironic enough—perhaps not old
enough—to perceive that consequent irony will always trump the philosophy
of history. As a reader the young Lukács took the problems of heroes seri-
ously, whereas the aging Goethe, when he came to write about the demonic,
looking back on his youth in his later years, is clearly a “narrator” in Lukács’s
sense. And this represents the minimal premise of a demonic philosophy of
history: demonic irony, Schadenfreude, comes after the age of heroes.

Epilogue on Gnostic Relapses

Lukács’s “Gnostic” turn in The Theory of the Novel anticipates postwar

debates on the demonic, which crystallized around the figures of Carl Schmitt
and Hans Blumenberg.33 In the terms of this later debate, the demonic, and
especially the “monster motto” (der ungeheurere Spruch, Nemo contra deum
nisi deus ipse, “only a god can go against a god”) either formats (according
to Schmitt) a Gnostic-dualistic conflict that is inherent to monotheism, or else
(according to Blumenberg) it is the formula of a mythic-polytheistic balance
of powers in which individual self-assertion is both possible and ethically
allowable but simultaneously subjected to an extensive system of limitations
and checks. What Lukács shows in this context is how difficult it may be to
separate these two options—given that the decision between them is never
simply a question of how to read Goethe. The case of Lukács poignantly
shows that even (and especially) the highest levels of reading are never free
from political-theological and metaphysical assumptions.
Goethe’s work, and especially his idea of the demonic, perhaps unsur-
prisingly, provides the ideal stage for playing out metaphysical intuitions. If
Lukács shows anything, it is that the demonic can easily become the medium
Georg Lukács and the Demonic Novel 159

for the kind of self-seeking and self-finding that defines the “quests” of mod-
ern heroes. But what any given individual actually finds under the heading
of the demonic is ultimately governed by the vagaries of the demonic itself.
Certainly, it is easy to stand against anti-modern Gnostic “recidivists”—espe-
cially when they are characterized that way. But, then again, perhaps it is not
so easy, when things get serious. The young Lukács was nothing if not seri-
ous, and in this sense his attempt to use the idea of the demonic to depict the
modern world as a world system predicated on unmitigated atheism may still
contain some arguments against Blumenberg’s idea that the modern world,
at least in its ideal state, should be conceived as a stable polytheistic “bal-
ance of powers.” If Lukács were right, then Gnostic relapses, including his
own, would be more than understandable. But to the extent that the “reality”
of the demonic apparently lies mostly in individuals’ presuppositions about
it, this might be a minimal reason—assuming one is needed—to side with
Blumenberg.
The demonic in Lukács’s conception, like Spengler’s, tends to anticipate
crises, toward which it can only relate as an overreactive overcompensation
in the direction of a form of transcendence that is not only utopian but hos-
tile to the world as such. In contrast with such scenarios, Blumenberg (and
Goethe) would assume that the “demonic” state of the world is not uniquely
modern, but is only a residual condition, the perennial endurance of a rela-
tive lack of absoluteness. This lack, however, is one that modernity and the
modern novel have often tasked themselves with overcoming, not always
with foreseeable consequences.
 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

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Wetters, Kirk.
Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
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Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/33934.

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 Chapter Seven

Demonic Inheritances
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons

Mythic ages display the highest degree of reality [den höchsten

Grad der Wirklichkeit]. In them, inside and outside are almost
one and the same, which means that there are no events that
are disturbingly disconnected or merely superficial [es gibt
ein beängstigend-beziehungsloses, bloss äusseres Geschehen
überhaupt nicht]. Everything is real. [Alles ist wirklich.] Gods
are at work everywhere. [Überall wirken Götter.]
—Heimito von Doderer, diary entry from August 17, 1936

The Demonic Novel

As in the preceding chapter, this one pursues the hypothesis that Goethe’s
conceptions of the demonic may reflect, wittingly and unwittingly, an
infrastructure of the novel that is focused on character in the nineteenth
century—and, in a somewhat different configuration, focused increasingly
on event and situation in the twentieth century. At the latest since Lukács’s
strange overemphasis of the demonic, there must have been a general but
not necessarily fully articulated awareness of it and of its possible connec-
tions to the novel. The demonic in Lukács was simultaneously overstated
and implicit, but his grasp of it went far beyond that of his contemporaries
(with the exception of Benjamin, who also read about it in Lukács). This situ-
ation seems to have impeded a coherent reception—in Goethe, in the novel,
or otherwise.1 Fate and character (the demonic’s lowest terms, according to
Gundolf) are analyzed by Lukács in a way that mostly avoids reference to the
demonic, which is first called by name only in the middle of the theory in a
way that can easily make it appear to be a separate topic.
In the German-speaking world around 1920, however, the appearance of
Dostoyevsky’s novels in German in translations by Less Kaerrick (a.k.a. E. K.

161
162 Demonic Inheritances

Rahsin) combined with the widely read treatments (by figures like Simmel,
Gundolf, Lukács, and Spengler) of the demonic in the context of Goethe’s
philosophy would have certainly contributed, especially in literary circles, to
a general awareness of the demonic. Such an awareness made it possible for
authors to intentionally engage with and incorporate the demonic at vari-
ous levels of the writing process. The difficulty, however, of using existing
material as a recipe for writing the “demonic novel” would not have been
unfamiliarity (since the sources themselves were extremely well known) so
much as the complexity, variety, and limited compatibility of the versions of
the demonic in circulation. And another more subtle difficulty is that, accord-
ing to Lukács’s theory, the demonic was already the basis of the traditional
novel, which he conceived as a genre whose history was essentially finished.
Lukács’s philosophy of history implicitly discourages the formulaic
application of the demonic to contemporary novels. Lukács argues that the
novel—from Cervantes to Tolstoy—was always defined by the disintegra-
tion of antiquity’s unified and coherent conception reflected in Goethe’s
Orphic “Urworte,” which present life and development as a “quintessence.”
In Lukács’s theory, a matrix of coherence stabilized both the “heroic” world
of antiquity and its exemplary literary form, the Homeric epic. The dissolu-
tion in modernity of this coherence of the individual Dämon and its world
produces the demonic; modernity is not a secularized but a demonized Chris-
tianity, which killed its god but failed to find an adequate replacement. On the
basis of this extreme polarization of ancient and modern, the novel’s efforts
at epic cohesion only produce provisional attempts—pseudomorphoses—
with respect to an unperceived epochal rift. The novel tries to reproduce the
parameters of Homeric antiquity in a world in which they have fallen apart.
To make this conception plausible, Lukács relies on an absolutely harmoni-
ous view of antiquity, which is opposed to an absolutely dissonant modernity.
Goethe by contrast often assumes the underlying continuity of all ages and
thus does not so drastically split the demonic along an ancient-modern fault
line. Benjamin, on the other hand, like Lukács also assumes such a split but
sees continuity in his idea of “the mythic,” which is conceived as problematic
remainder and not as a lost ideal (as Gundolf, Lukács, and Spengler imag-
ine). For Benjamin the epochal breaks are less strict—and the valence of his
cultural critique is reversed: he is not against modernity per se, only against
mythic holdovers that are masked and worsened by modernity’s misguided
belief in its own modernity.
Lukács’s theoretical architecture is troubled by the nebulousness of his
emphatic claim of the non-relation of the modern world and epic catego-
ries. Cut loose, without anchor, “homeless,” the lost life system of antiquity
demonizes a modern world to which it cannot apply; Lukács expresses this as
a disconnection of “inside” and “outside,” “soul” and “forms,” Dämon and
Tyche. This “homelessness” of the modern soul becomes doubtful, however,
especially in the second part of the theory, when Lukács tries to illustrate it
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 163

in the interpretation of novels. For him, novels paradigmatically deal with

the life and socialization of characters—but precisely this subject matter can
easily give the impression that the split between inside and outside is not
absolute. The novel is presupposed as the genre of the incompatibility of
epic form and modernity, forcing Lukács to read novels’ apparently success-
ful mediations of the relation of individual and world as counter-exemplary
(exceptional), ideological, or ironic. But the process-oriented depictions of
novels themselves may give a different impression: in order to actually write
a novel—to design such a process through which exemplarity or counter-
examplarity is to be proved—the possibility of a coherent relation of subject
and world cannot be ruled out a priori. To the contrary, precisely the counter-
exemplarity of novelistic protagonists and their experiences implies that—if
anywhere—the connection of inside and outside must be possible here.
Lukács’s abstractly historicized conception allows him to claim that the
tradition of the novel is finished and that Dostoyevsky is the sole figure who
points beyond it toward a new epic genre with a more cohesive transcenden-
tal base. The philosophy of history that underpins Lukács’s theory would
force a novelist who accepted it to comply with a norm whose time has either
passed or is yet to come, and thus The Theory of the Novel has no obvious
implications for a normative poetics of the novel. In order for the demonic to
be put to work in new novels, Lukács’s utopian anticipation of a new epoch
would have to be at least partly set aside in favor of the assumption that the
underlying conditions of modernity have not fundamentally changed—and
neither have those of the novel. In fact, not much time would have needed
to pass for the transformation of the novel that Lukács foresaw to become
questionable. His tendency to give “history” credit for changes in literary
form also would have encouraged novelists who wanted to write on the basis
of his theory to supplement (and contradict) it with some kind of a practical
poetics. One avenue for such an unorthodox application is the open system
of the demonic—which only partly belongs to Lukács’s theory. Especially if
a hypothetical novelist were aware of Goethe’s conceptions of the demonic,
it could be reinterpreted in novelistic practice. The minimal condition for the
application of Lukács’s theory is thus the willingness to look into his sources
as well as other contemporary theories of the demonic.
Beyond these basic requirements, the conscious redesign of the novel
based on the demonic would have required an increase in the overall level
of abstraction, a willingness to think about the transcendental base of epic
form. This theoretical approach precludes both the unself-conscious continu-
ation of inherited models and the deliberate revolutionization of them. The
former approach would be conservative or merely conventionalist, whereas
the latter would represent a willed transgression of the limits of the form
itself. Lukács’s introduction of the demonic blocks these familiar ways of
dealing with inherited genres. In view of novelistic practice, the transcenden-
tal presets of “the demonic” necessitate meta-levels, layers of reflection, and
164 Demonic Inheritances

an overall increase in self-consciousness. A well-known example of the kind

of meta-novel I have in mind—by an author who knew something about the
demonic—is André Gide’s The Counterfeiters. The title raises genre-based
expectations that the novel will be about crime or at least about counter-
feiters—but these expectations are only partly realized. The title refers, if
anything, to the act of forgery—of fiction—through which experiences are
turned into novels. Gide’s title, Les faux-monnayeurs, refers, if it refers at
all, beyond content, narrative, plot, or thematic elements to the genre of the
novel—but also to the novel of the same title that Édouard is writing in the
novel. Gide’s novel is, however, not identical with Édouard’s; it cannot be the
case that The Counterfeiters of the diegesis literally is Gide’s novel—at least
not without producing an infinite regress and subordinating external reality
to the reality of the novel and thereby reversing their hierarchy. The most that
can be said is that Gide’s novel is about Édouard’s novel (of the same title)
and perhaps that “counterfeiting” defines both novels’ form and content.
In the counterfeit yet exemplary world of Les faux-monnayeurs, the secret
title of the novel—of every novel—is The Counterfeiters. In the same way,
Heimito von Doderer’s Die Dämonen (The Demons) is a novel of the novel,
whose title places it at the limit of novelistic meta-reflection. Setting aside for
the moment Lukács’s and Goethe’s concepts of the demonic—both of which
Doderer was familiar with—the usurpation of the title of Dostoyevsky’s Die
Dämonen alone suffices to make Doderer’s novel a meta-novel in the manner
of Gide. Since 1906 when Bésy (The Possessed or Demons) was published in
German as Die Dämonen, the title belonged to Dostoyevsky. The similarities
do not end there: the narrator, Geyrenhoff, is a clear variation of “G—ff,” the
narrator of Dostoyevsky’s Demons; like G—ff, Geyrenhoff is a self-appointed
chronicler of strange events that befall an extended group of friends and
co-conspirators; in Doderer’s novel as in Dostoyevsky’s, the first-person nar-
rator who introduces the story is mysteriously superseded (or replaced) by a
semi-omniscient perspective. Such obtrusive connections make it clear that
Doderer’s novel is a variation on Dostoyevsky’s, a reflection of it, a novel
about a novel—and not a purely autonomous effort of world-creation.
At the beginning of Doderer’s Demons, Kajetan von Schlaggenberg
accuses Geyrenhoff of authoring “novelistic reports” (romanhafte Berichte).2
These “reports” refer to the chronicle upon which Die Dämonen is based
(according to the fiction of the novel itself); Doderer’s Die Dämonen is thus
subtitled “According to the Chronicle of the Section Councillor [Sektionsrat]
Geyrenhoff.” One key difference between this design and Gide’s Counter-
feiters is that the former never refers to the novel-within-the-novel by the
title Die Dämonen. Geyrenhoff’s chronicle or “journal” (Tagebuch) is a com-
pendium of which Geyrenhoff is—in the beginning—the primary author; he
also accepts contributions from others, over which he—initially—exercises
primary editorial authority. This, combined with the systematic reference
to Dostoyevsky, eliminates the need for Gide’s more overtly self-referential
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 165

device of giving the novel the same title as the “novel in the novel.” Gide pio-
neered the form, but Doderer’s decision to “remake” Dostoyevsky establishes
a comparable self-referential continuum that highlights the importance of
“demons” for the genre of the novel in much the same way as Gide empha-
sized “counterfeiting.” The point in both cases is to introduce a theoretical
meta-register that otherwise would have been absent or much less evident.
When the title of a novel becomes an intransparent self-referential device,
its meaning is not (as one might expect) hollowed out and emptied, but rather,
opened up to the spectrum of meanings that can find their way through the
lens of the word “demons.” The proper name of the title—Die Dämonen,
with the definite article—does not evidently refer to the characters or plot
events;3 this makes the title mysterious and causes it to resonate at other
levels. This is facilitated by the systematic reference to Dostoyevsky and the
fact that his novel also does not exhibit a transparent relation between title
and story. The net result is a highly ambiguous relation between the proper
name—Die Dämonen—and this novel (by Heimito von Doderer) and its spe-
cific contents. Lacking a clear internal referent for the titular demons, the
many ambiguous meanings of the word “demons” become a question and a
problem. Doderer thus deeply disturbs the possibility of establishing a single
referent behind his novel’s title; secret, symbolic, or thematic meanings are
also made problematic by the complex system of internal and external refer-
ences, behind which hide a multiplicity of real or imagined demons.
Even before Doderer employed this strategy, Dostoyevsky’s title argu-
ably functioned in much the same way. Thomas Bernhard’s autobiographical
novel, Die Kälte (The Cold), illustrates this by referring to Dostoyevsky’s
Demons in a way that makes it unclear whether he means “Dostoyevsky’s
Demons” or “Dostoyevsky’s demons.” The passage in question describes a
literary awakening, the moment in which the young protagonist (who will
eventually become a novelist) hears the demonic call of literature. The confu-
sion of Demons and “demons” is made possible by the German language’s
capitalization of all nouns (proper and common) and Bernhard’s failure to
mark Dostoyevsky’s title with italics or quotation marks:

I read The Demons by Dostoyevsky [ich las Die Dämonen von Dos-
tojewski]. Never in my life had I read a book of such insatiability
and radicality [von dieser Unersättlichkeit und Radikalität] and never
such a thick book. I intoxicated myself [ich betäubte mich], I dissolved
myself for a time in the demons [ich löste mich in den Dämonen auf].
After I came back, for a while I did not want to read anything else,
because I was certain that I would fall into a monstrous disappoint-
ment [eine ungeheure Enttäuschung], into a horrifying abyss [einen
entsetzlichen Abgrund]. For weeks I abstained from all reading. The
monstrousness of the demons [die Ungeheuerlichkeit der Dämonen]
had made me strong, had showed me a way [Weg], had told me that I
166 Demonic Inheritances

was on the right path [Weg]—the way out [hinaus]. I had been struck
by a wild and great literature [eine wilde und große Dichtung], in
order to myself emerge as the hero. It did not happen frequently in
my later life that literature [Dichtung] had such a monstrous effect
[eine so ungeheure Wirkung]. (Bernhard, Die Kälte 141)

The language of the passage is typically Bernhardian in its extremity. The

adjectives—insatiable (unersättlich), radical (radikal), monstrous (ungeheuer,
Ungeheuerlichkeit), horrible (entsetzlich)—all describe Dostoyevsky’s novel
and simultaneously characterize the unbelievably positive and exhilarating—
“heroic”—experience of reading it. The complete lack of any reference to
plot, characters, or themes puts all of the weight on the title, which, especially
in its second and third iterations, seems to refer to “the demons” in a way
that makes it sound like Dostoyevsky’s novel is “the demons” to which its
title refers. This implication is confirmed a few pages later:

In the demons I had found my correspondence. [In den Dämonen

hatte ich die Entsprechung.] I looked in the institute library for fur-
ther such monsters [nach weiteren solchen Ungeheuern], but there
were no more. It is superfluous to recount all of the names of those
whose books I opened and then immediately closed again, because
they necessarily revolted me with their pettiness and worthlessness
[Nichtswürdigkeit]. The literature outside of the demons [die Litera-
tur außer den Dämonen] was nothing for me, but I thought: there
must certainly be other such demons [es gibt mit Sicherheit andere
solche Dämonen]. These, however, were not to be sought in this insti-
tute library, which was stuffed full of tastelessness and tedium, with
Catholicism and National Socialism. But how was I to get ahold of
other demons? [Wie komme ich aber an weitere Dämonen heran?]
(Bernhard, Die Kälte 142–43)

Dostoyevsky’s novel is the novel—against which all of literature is compared

and found wanting. “Demons” is the name of that which all literature deserv-
ing of the name should be, and its demonizing effect stands for that of literature
itself. No actual work, however—not even Dostoyevsky’s Demons—could
stand up to such an idealization, which is clearly at least partly an effect of
what the reader brings to the work. In context, the word “demons” thus refers
to a conversion experience, to the discovery of a calling, mediated in and
by literature; the autobiographical narrator is placed on a path to find—or
write—the works that “demons” inspired him to search for.
At the time when Bernhard’s demonic self-discovery supposedly took
place, Doderer’s novel was unfinished, but at the time of the publication of
Bernhard’s book, Doderer’s Die Dämonen had become an acknowledged
if controversial milestone of postwar Austrian literature. In Bernhard’s
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 167

anecdote of his Dostoyevsky epiphany, the title of Doderer’s novel may also
resonate, perhaps especially in the words “National Socialist” and “Catho-
lic.” Bernhard refers to his countryman Doderer obliquely at the same time
as he effaces and replaces him with the Russian Dostoyevsky. Creative pater-
nities thus move across national boundaries and generations; this problem
is echoed, on the one hand, in Bernhard’s notoriously negative relation to
Austria and, on the other, to his grandfather Johannes Freumbichler, who
inspired him to become a writer.4
To produce these implications, Bernhard exploits the specific ambiguity of
the word “demons” and the lack of singularity of the title Die Dämonen. In
Germany after 1956, and especially in Austria, this title existed solely as a dyad,
which allowed Bernhard to return to Dostoyevsky and at the same time resist
Doderer’s appropriation of his title. This reading is confirmed by an interview
in which Bernhard criticizes Doderer for choosing the title Die Dämonen: “He
called one of his books ‘The Demons.’ Only I never found a demon in there.
[Ein Buch hat er ‘Die Dämonen’ genannt. Nur hab’ ich nie einen Dämonen
drinnen gefunden.]”5 Unlike Dostoyevsky’s novel, which is the incarnation of
its title, for Bernhard Doderer’s is a misrepresentation. The key to the success
of this title, however, in both Doderer and Dostoyevsky, is arguably its extreme
ambiguity: a story that literally contains demons might be called many things—
for example, Faust—but just because it contains demons or is “about” demons,
that does not mean that “the demons” is the best title. As the condensation of a
novel’s subject matter, “The Demons” only makes sense if the causations, rela-
tions, and dynamics thereby named cannot be captured otherwise.
Beyond this specific literary-historical constellation, the problem with
demons is their ambiguity, the lack of certainty as to their presence or absence,
their good or bad intents, their precise role in events. This ambiguity corre-
sponds to the “transcendental homelessness” that Lukács attributes to the
novel. For him, a world in which there is certainty about the presence and
absence of demons, about their precise intents, spheres, and cognizances, is
the world of the Homeric epic. Here, regardless of what happens, the fates
of heroes are subject to divine wills. Dante actually mapped infernal space,
giving demons specific jurisdictions and localizations, but in the novel—in
“demons” from Dostoyevsky to Bernhard—it is unclear which powers govern
the course of things. Goethe’s Elective Affinities in Benjamin’s reading charac-
terizes this situation as “mythic” ambiguity, the hopelessness of which may be
resolvable in momentary flashes of divine meaning (or authorial mourning).
Lukács also emphasizes such possibilities, but reads their mere subjectivity
and obvious constructedness as a sign of their falseness. For him, the glimmer
on the horizon is only put there for show. It is a piece of “congealed transcen-
dence” (geronnene Transcendenz, TdR 38) that must be removed if a work is
to live up to the title The Demons. In this sense, the “demonic novel” would
stay strictly within what Benjamin calls the mythic—but not for the sake of
glorifying this condition of atheistic incoherence and senselessness.6
168 Demonic Inheritances

The complete lack of “congealed transcendence” would correspond to the

Trauerspielbuch’s idea of baroquely “overextended transcendence.” In this
sense, the title “the demons” congeals the “transcendent” (authorial) perspec-
tive not in the direction of hope, but of hopelessness. It takes a “hopeless
state of the world,” to which Lukács believes the novel indirectly attests, and
directly states it, making it overtly emblematic of the world of the novel. Such
a consciously demonic novel no longer presupposes a coherent world, but
instead supposes its incoherence in a way that makes every narratable thread
seem like an unexpected epiphany. Such a becoming conscious—and making
conscious—of a given state of the world may indicate, in Lukács’s sense, a
shift of epochal significance, a change in “transcendental location” and in the
constitution of the genre. In this reading, “Demons” is the new proper name
of the novel’s fully recognized counter-exemplarity. A “demonic” world,
in which all forms of development are out of synch, is not entirely hope-
less, but its hopes have become completely worldly. There is hope—such as
Bernhard’s retrospectively stylized hope that he will emerge as a hero—but
there is no longer any hope that the world will be permanently redeemed (as
Lukács seemed to expect) or that Goethe’s Orphic demons will turn out to
be divinities.
The deliberate introduction of the demonic into the design of the novel
is thus more than the “application” of a theoretical model. For Lukács, the
demonic was always the genre’s latent paradigm, but, after Lukács, “demons”
is the word through which, perhaps partly for contingent reasons, this para-
digm begins to make itself manifest.

The Genesis of Doderer’s Demons

In July 1936, Doderer writes in his diary: “Around the turn of the year
1930/31, I started writing down the novel . . . ‘The Demons,’ a work predis-
posed toward great scale [eine sehr umfänglich veranlagte Arbeit]” (TB 819).7
At the end of 1930 he first read Lukács’s Theory of the Novel. As promising
as this coincidence may appear, Lukács is not the sole source of Doderer’s
conception. The search for origins leads to complexities,8 but whatever
sources one may want to imagine, the literary attractiveness of “demons,”
starting with Goethe, certainly lies in their polyvalence, ambiguity, and abil-
ity to flexibly encompass many levels and aspects of worldly existence.
Already in September 1925, Doderer uses the adjective “demonic”
(dämonisch) with a high degree of sophistication as a part of a reflection on
how the cultural foreignness of Dostoyevsky’s works may have promoted their
systematic misunderstanding among German-speakers. Doderer conceives a
reading of Dostoyevsky like that of Bernhard’s Die Kälte, in which the real
and perceived strangeness of the novels allow for intense subjective appropri-
ation. “Precisely the non-understanding” (gerade das Nicht-Begreifen) of the
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 169

Russian character leads Germans (and Austrians) to act “as if they themselves
were somehow or somewhere just as ‘demonic’ and absolute [so ‘dämonisch’
und unbedingt]” (TB 287). The words “demonic” and “absolute” appear to
be meant synonymously. The word “demonic” itself, set in quotation marks,
may invoke the German title of Dostoyevsky’s novel—but the unclarity of
what it means is the precondition of the appropriative reading. This unclar-
ity necessitates a further circumlocution in the word “absolute.” Based on
the Dämon stanza of Goethe’s Orphic “Urworte,” the rendering of the word
“demonic” as “absolute” (unbedingt) is plausible: Dämon describes the
starting-state of individual character, prior to all “conditions” (Bedingungen)
that may be placed on it from the outside. Reflected back at Dostoyevsky,
the unconditional defiance of the social order may make his characters seem
demonic to non-Russian readers who pretend to such defiance.
This example shows that Doderer was lexically competent with the
demonic well before he read Lukács and before he had the idea of giving the
title Die Dämonen to his longest novel. Beyond Lukács and Dostoyevsky, it
is impossible to determine with certainty which sources may have contrib-
uted to Doderer’s conception, but in the 1920s he must have encountered the
demonic in connection with Goethe. According to diary entries, he read the
first part of Spengler’s Decline of the West in 1922 (TB 93, 95); Goethe’s Poetry
and Truth and The Conversations with Eckermann are also mentioned in his
diaries of the 1920s. A reading list from August 1924 (TB 238–41) contains,
in addition to the works already mentioned, Wilhelm Meister, The Italian
Journey, “Benvenuto Cellini,” and Goethe’s correspondence with Schiller. If
“Wundt / Psychologie” (TB 240) refers to Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie (Social
Psychology), then this would be yet another possible source.9
The 1924 reading list also overlaps to a surprising degree with the canon
of Lukács’s Theory of the Novel. In addition to Goethe and Dostoyevsky, the
list includes Cervantes’s Don Quixote as well as nineteenth-century fictions
like Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Goncharov’s Oblomov,
Gogol’s Dead Souls, Kleist’s “Michael Kohlhaas,” Flaubert’s Éducation sen-
timentale, and a slightly more recent novel, Pontoppidan’s Lykke-Per (Lucky
Peter, translated into German in 1906 as Hans im Glück). However, there is
no reason to assume that Doderer based his readings around Lukács. There
is no evidence that Doderer read The Theory of the Novel in the 1920s, and
a November 27, 1930, diary entry gives the impression of a first reading:

I have read the first part of the Theory of the Novel by Georg Lukács.
Here a conceptual explanation is presented of something that I found
out for myself by experience [auf dem Wege der Erfahrung]. Though
it is written in a different language than mine, certain passages of this
book (S. 31ff., S. 41)10 thoroughly describe the point where I hope to
make my mark today [bezeichnen durchaus den Punkt, auf dem ich
heute antreten will]. (Nov. 27, 1930; TB 367)
170 Demonic Inheritances

According to this note, in 1930 Doderer’s reading of Lukács helped him to

crystallize his own thinking.
Lukács confirmed to Doderer that he was on the right track with respect to
his plans and future artistic ambitions. The overlap of both authors’ “canons”
thus probably primarily reflects a shared basis for their compatible concep-
tions of the novel. One notable difference, however, between theorist Lukács
and the novelist Doderer is the latter’s greater interest in recent works. Of
course, Lukács’s theory predates many of Doderer’s readings, but the inclu-
sion of Rilke, Thomas Mann, Frank Wedekind, and Stefan George reflects
a shift toward modernism. In diary entries from the same period, Doderer
also notes enthusiastic reactions to Kafka and Rilke (TB 203, 212, 259, 273,
286).11 Doderer’s diaries in the 1920s are also punctuated with reflections on
Dostoyevsky (TB 19, 164, 176, 239, 275), whose centrality is underscored in
1925: “Dostoyevsky . . . is today . . . without a doubt the most widely read
author in the entire German language (I mean the red Piper volumes)” (TB
287). Only in the later 1930s, after Doderer has begun his own Demons,
does Dostoyevsky’s Demons emerge as an important topic in the diaries (TB
584–85, 608, 983–86, 1062). The earliest entry, from April 1933 (584–85), is
of outstanding importance. Dostoyevsky’s novel appears here together with
many other names, words, and phrases; the list is labeled as “thematic” (for
Doderer’s Demons novel?), but its date makes it doubly significant: this diary
entry was written a little more than a week after Doderer joined the Aus-
trian Nazi Party. It thus likely—despite the appearance on the list of the term
“fulfillment-recoil” (Erfüllungs-Rückstoss)—that these themes were noted at
a time when Doderer was deeply committed to the Nazi movement.
Despite this clue, the full intent behind such a cryptic list of titles and
themes will never be certain. What makes the list important, however, despite
the difficulties of deciphering, is its inclusion of many of Doderer’s main pre-
occupations of the early 1930s. Many of the list entries may relate to his
nationalist (and National Socialist) convictions at the time; these are fairly
easy to identify because they are expounded at length in other entries. The
mention of Dostoyevsky, Lukács (TB 584), and the parenthetical inclusion of
the word “Demons” (Dämonen) are strong indications that the “themes” of
the list relate to his ongoing work on The Demons (which did not yet have
a definite title). Close to the top of the list is Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,
the German right-wing publicist and editor of the Dostoyevsky edition from
Piper. Moeller took his own life in 1925; his appearance on Doderer’s list in
1933 establishes a connection between the political and literary “themes.”12
Doderer’s political convictions as they relate to the work on The Demons
are fully articulated in the “aide mémoire” to The Demons of the East-Mark
(Die Dämonen der Ostmark, the novel’s working title in the 1930s).13 The
aide mémoire, dated 1934, would have been written only a few months after
the “thematic” list; as late as July 1936, Doderer composed a diary-letter
to the publisher Gerhard Aichinger, which includes a shorter version of the
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 171

aide mémoire. Aichinger was the primary editor of the German-Austrian

Daily (Deutschösterreichische Tages-Zeitung), a newspaper which was—in
the words of Doderer’s biographer, Wolfgang Fleischer—“the organ of the
Austrian NSDAP-Hitler movement” (Fleischer, Das verleugnete Leben 232).
Fleischer emphasizes, as does Alexandra Kleinlercher’s 2011 biography, that
Doderer’s publications with Aichinger were short literary texts without a
clearly discernible political orientation. However, it seems likely that Doderer
hoped that overtly political elements would help him on the way to literary
success. In 1936 he moved to Dachau, perhaps in hopes of advancing his
career in Germany, and to this end he wrote to ask Aichinger to support his
admission to the Nazi literary bureaucracy (Reichsschrifttumskammer). The
application was successful, but the fulfillment of this nominal requirement
to publish in Germany did not bring Doderer any immediate advancement.
Despite the fact he wanted his novel to be “high literature” in the tradition
of Dostoyevsky, the work he describes to Aichinger (TB 819–21) and in the
“aide mémoire” is a vehicle of nationalist and anti-Semitic ideology. The plot
focuses on a Jewish conspiracy, a “three-level Theatrum Judaicum” operative
within Austrian society (TB 820). The first part of the projected novel, enti-
tled “Stew” (“Eintopf”), follows various characters and their relationships
in order to demonstrate the impossibility of Jewish integration and assimila-
tion. The second part, called “Watershed” (“Wasserscheide”), which Doderer
never completed, was supposed to depict a parting of ways, a self-imposed
apartheid of incompatible elements. Without speculating extensively on why
this version of The Demons was never completed, I will summarize key points
from Alexandra Kleinlercher’s biography, which substantially revises previ-
ous accounts: the origins of Doderer’s sympathy for Nazism are not fully
known; they may go back as far as 1927 (Fleischer, Das verleugnete Leben
190–91). Low self-esteem combined with Doderer’s inability to support him-
self through his work as a writer may have led him to blame others for his
lack of success. This dynamic also played a role in his first marriage to Gusti
Hasterlik, a Catholic of Jewish descent. The failure of this relationship may
have catalyzed Doderer’s anti-Semitism; both versions of The Demons can be
read as advancing this thesis. According to Kleinlercher, Doderer’s enthusi-
asm for right-wing causes reached its high point in the early 1930s. His move
to Germany in 1936, instead of deepening his commitments, was the begin-
ning of his disillusionment. Kleinlercher cites Doderer’s characterization of
Nazism as a metaphorical “ex-lover” (eine ehemalige Geliebte)14 to argue
that opportunism was not his only motive. The diaries of the 1930s confirm
this interpretation. Doderer may have been generally susceptible to ideol-
ogy and authority claims, in which case his literary writing may have given
him a means of distancing himself from them. In any event, his turn away
from fascism was most likely gradual. There is no specific date when he deci-
sively and finally rejected Nazism—but it was certainly after 1936 (the date
which Doderer and others have often put forth). He never officially left the
172 Demonic Inheritances

Nazi Party, and his behavior after the Anschluss could probably be charac-
terized as passive complicity. His 1938 conversion to Catholicism, however,
went strongly against official Nazi ideology, and there is no evidence that he
was ever militaristically inclined; even at his worst, he never espoused politi-
cal solutions to social problems. War in particular was never in his perceived
self-interest: he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht in 1940 at the age of
46, and this experience seems to have finally shattered whatever hopes he
had invested in the Hitler movement. Like Lukács, Doderer was committed
to the possibility of revolution and self-revolution—but he also often gener-
alized his disillusionment with fascism into a theory of the impossibility of
both individual and collective revolution. According to his 1948 “Sexuality
and the Total State,” revolutionary transformation—in life as in society—
can never be rationally planned, managed, or implemented, but must emerge
from the immanent dynamics of life and situation. These changes in Doder-
er’s politics, to the extent that they can be reconstructed, have no immediate
bearing on the interpretation of his works, whose style and themes remain
surprisingly constant through his long career.
Against this background, I return to my main topic: in the 1936 letter to
Aichinger, Doderer does not mention Dostoyevsky’s Demons, despite the fact
that it is central in his diaries. Perhaps Doderer wrote what he thought Aich-
inger wanted to hear, but the diaries from this period reflect an increasingly
careful reading of Dostoyevsky that may have been leading him away from
the letter-draft to Aichinger. His initial right-wing reading of Dostoyevsky’s
Demons makes sense up to a point: the novel draws on current events sur-
rounding the figure of Sergey Nechayev and generally explores, in a tone that
is at once satirical and deadly serious, the social and ideological fragmen-
tations that result from the alliance of liberal-progressive movements and
revolutionary socialism, nihilism, and anarchism—but this reading ignores
aspects of craft and composition that are extraneous to the political message.
Doderer’s decision to copy Dostoyevsky’s unusual narrative design reflects a
focus on formal elements that do not lend themselves to political messaging.
The events of Doderer’s novel, like Dostoyevsky’s, are chronicled by an unre-
liable narrator, “G—ff” or “Geyrenhoff”; the narrative itself is anything but
linear, introducing a large number of characters in a way that makes it very
difficult to perceive plotlines and character motivation. In Doderer’s final
version, the fundamental unclarities are arguably more coherently resolved,
but ultimately there is no clear answer to the question of how the perspective
of the first-person chronicler is ultimately synthesized into a coherent multi-
perspectival whole.
Going back to 1933 and the thematic list, however, one finds no sign that
Doderer was interested in such complexities. The list contains a quote from
Dostoyevsky’s Demons, which clearly fits with Doderer’s nationalist agenda:
“Whoever belongs to no people also has no God!” (Wer aber kein Volk hat,
der hat auch keinen Gott!).15 Moeller von den Bruck quotes this line in his
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 173

preface to Dostoyevsky’s Demons (Dostojewski, Die Dämonen, 1919, XXII),

raising the possibility that Doderer may not have even read the novel to the
end in 1933.16 The line comes up repeatedly, always from the same charac-
ter, Shatov, who often voices Slavophile sentiments. The novel shows him
(like most if not all of the characters) living in a way that is at odds with
his convictions; his painful awareness of his latent hypocrisy emerges in the
long dialogue with Stavrogin (Dostojewski, Die Dämonen, 2008, 339–53), in
which nationalism’s self-contradictions are highlighted: nationalism, like all
-isms, reflects an ideology; it presupposes the inability to immediately belong
to a nation that is only espoused as an absent ideal to be achieved by way of a
political program. According to Shatov’s sentence at the end of the novel: “As
a result of the impossibility of being a Russian, I became a slavophile” (Dos-
tojewski, Die Dämonen, 2008, 840). This sentence, which Moeller does not
cite, may even imply that every ideology is by definition abstract and com-
pensatory in its relation to its ideals. Dostoyevsky’s novel presents a further
devastating critique of political ideology by depicting the ease with which
political programs may be adopted, disseminated, and exchanged: Shatov
inherited his Slavophile thinking, apparently almost verbatim, from Stavro-
gin—who himself no longer believes it (if he ever did). But neither Doderer
nor Moeller is interested in the formal or anti-ideological aspects of the
novel; thus the word “national sentiment” (Nationalgefühl), which appears
on Doderer’s 1933 list, almost certainly refers to nationalism in Moeller’s
sense.
Doderer, like Moeller, reads Shatov’s sentence as a piece of “congealed
transcendence”—as the direct expression of the author’s opinion or per-
spective; according to Lukács, such unconditional expressions of authorial
opinions violate a fundamental principle of the form of the novel.17 A few
years later, Doderer returns to the topic of nationalism in Dostoyevsky (TB
985); this diary entry is now clearly based on more than Moeller’s introduc-
tion, and Doderer clearly has difficulty reading the novel as a simple advocacy
of nationalism. But he still closes with Shatov’s sentence: “Whoever belongs
to no people also has no God!” The definitional unity of “people” and “god”
is clearly modeled on the one God of the Jewish people and the nation of
Israel—which might lead one to wonder what Shatov’s sentence means to a
Christian. To the extent that he assumes a plurality of peoples (and a plural-
ity of gods), his version of nationalism is not (Christian) universalism but
(idolatrous) polytheism. This background may give a limited insight into why
Doderer, born an Austrian Protestant under the Habsburg monarchy, may
have looked to Jewish, Russian, and German ideals of nation for an identity
that he felt he lacked; his conversion to Catholicism also fits this narrative.
The details of the transformation of the 1930s version of The Demons
into a different (but still similar) novel have been documented in detail, and
the manuscript of the long fragment of the first version, though unpublished,
is available to read.18 The story of this transformation is not my primary
174 Demonic Inheritances

concern. I would observe, however, that the “demons” paradigm itself per-
mits vast ideological swings: the title itself posits the ambiguous presence of
seemingly malevolent or at least unexplained forces, but the novel by this title
need not actually identify or reveal the ultimate sources of demonic influences.
It also need not explicitly “demonize” specific groups or individuals. The
anti-Semitic version, by definition, would have pursued such a demonization,
whereas the tendency of the later revisions is, if anything, to demonize the
proto-fascist elements.19 This demonization is, however, left rather implicit,
no doubt so as to avoid “congealed transcendence,” and perhaps also because
the demonic, rigorously understood, is antithetical to demonization. If “the
demons” are finally identified and a single chain of causation is established,
then there are no demons anymore. Supposedly demonic forces are thereby
localized and demystified. Villains and the dynamics of vilification are thus
central to the creation of demonic effects, but the more obvious this becomes,
the more the demonic—which inheres in the uncertainty and unknowability
of historical and narrative causation—will be eliminated.20

“The Pure Types”

Considering Doderer’s prolificness as a diarist and in general, and given the

obvious importance of the demonic throughout his work, he wrote surpris-
ingly few extended reflections on the topic and none definitively tying him to
a single conception. Nowhere will Doderer write or say, even in his diaries,
that his idea of the demonic comes from Goethe, Spengler, Lukács, or anyone
else.21 Nevertheless, I have an interest in pinning him down, and thus I turn
to relatively far-flung clues that show his familiarity with the demonic in the
senses that began to proliferate during his lifetime.
One such clue, perhaps the most important one, can be found in the April
1933 “thematic” list (introduced in the previous section). Following the name
“Moeller van den Bruck,” Doderer notes—in quotation marks—the deci-
sive words of the Dämon stanza of Goethe’s “Urworte”: “imprinted form”
(geprägte Form). This minimal citation is set next to the words “the pure
types” (die reinen Typen), which are followed by the name, in parentheses,
of Doderer’s main literary mentor, the painter-novelist and Klimt protégé
Albert Paris Gütersloh. The Goethe citation, though fleeting—and distress-
ing insofar as his morphological conception here appears in the service of
a nationalist and anti-Semitic agenda—is a good indication that Goethe’s
idea of the Dämon may have been a part of the earliest phase of Doderer’s
Demons.
It is not so easy to say what the “pure types” may be. In Gütersloh’s work
that was most important for Doderer at the time, the Bekenntnisse eines
modernen Malers (The Confessions of a Modern Painter)—also known as
Die grosse und kleine Geschichte (Big History and Little History)—the idea
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 175

of “types” appears frequently. Gütersloh’s usage is close to what Carl Schmitt

in Roman Catholicism and Political Form calls “representative” types, which,
according to a “Catholic” concept of representation (as opposed to the pre-
dominant modern “Protestant” economic reason), are the basis of society
and of social roles. This role-based representational understanding of identity
does not provide a solid basis for reading the idea of “pure types” in conjunc-
tion with the idea of “imprinted form” (geprägte Form), which invokes a
more internalized individual-developmental model. More productive, how-
ever, is Doderer’s 1929 essay, Der Fall Gütersloh (The Gütersloh Case), in
which human developmental possibilities are theorized in an opposition
between two “pure types.” Thus, in light of the citation of Goethe’s geprägte
Form in the 1933 thematic list, the “Urworte” appear to have served as the
model for the 1929 essay’s attempt to explain the origins of a genius like
Gütersloh in a world or society that typically does not foster artistic genius.
This presentation on genius from 1929—the year before Doderer read
Lukács—is of particular interest because there is no way to ascertain how
much Doderer knew about Goethe’s various conceptions of the demonic.
Even a partial re-theorization of the “Urworte” in 1929 suggests, however,
that by April 1933 at the latest he had consciously made the connection
between geprägte Form and the demonic. In the 1933 list, “imprinted form”
and “pure types” are juxtaposed (in the context of themes related to The
Demons) in a way that suggests a developmental, typological, and morpho-
logical understanding of geprägte Form. Doderer’s reading of Spengler in
the early 1920s is a possible source for his knowledge of the “Urworte” and
related contexts. This means that when Doderer read Lukács in 1930, the
demonic would have been an aspect of Lukács’s argument that was already
quite familiar to Doderer. Thus it is unlikely, in my view, that in 1929, without
any prior knowledge of the demonic, he spontaneously generated his theory
of “pure types” and only later drew the connection to Goethe’s Dämon.
The first section of the 1929 essay is titled: “Two Ways into Life” (“Zwei
Wege in’s Leben”); the first sentence reads: “A child is born and a new
world is thereby made possible.”22 Unlike Goethe’s Dämon, for Doderer the
moment of birth itself is not symbolic of the emergence of a new, unique, and
discrete identity—a “world” defined by “strict limits” (die strengen Gren-
zen of the “Urworte”). Instead, Doderer’s newborn looks at a “new world,”
which appears at first to be “peculiarly and uniquely deformed,” which is
“too close” and produces a “correspondingly distorted perspective” (WdD
40–41). Rather than defining the individual as an autonomous entelechy with
pre-given limits, Doderer’s newborn sets its own limits together with those of
the external world, in order to produce a “self-made apparentness” (selbst-
geschaffene Anschaulichkeit). The newborn is not itself a new world (and is
not pre-programmed with any kind of anamnesis), but instead creates a new
world in its perceptual misunderstandings of the world it is born into. The
main illustration of this is language acquisition: the infant’s “own tangled
176 Demonic Inheritances

and very dense impressions [Vorstellungen],” which it “attaches to whatever

words it may have snapped up [irgend einem aufgeschnappten Worte unter-
schiebt],” define a moment of subjective world creation—which is inevitably
destroyed when the infant learns the “fixed meaning [of words], which the
adults have all agreed upon” (WdD 41). In this account, the coercive effects
of “world” begin very early—with the word. There is no individual before
or outside of this world, because the encounter with the “adult world” is by
definition the victory of existing conventions over the infant’s creation.
The second paragraph introduces the further possibility that the infant
might be allowed to work unimpeded on the project of its “world creation”
(Weltschöpfung). The self-made world of infancy is hypothetically extended
and allowed to gain ground against the “real world” (“the chaotic ocean
which washes up against the known world [of the infant]”). The only way
this can happen, Doderer contends, is if the infant resists the temptation and
pressure to use words and names to assimilate an untransparent outer world.
If the infant were able to create its relation to the world without the “short-
cut” of language, then it would be able to remain for its whole life in this
“ideal condition” of a self-made world “whose limits [Grenzen] precisely
correspond with those of its own abilities” (WdD 41). Reflected against the
norms of the real world, however, Doderer concedes, most children’s realiza-
tion of this ideal would produce “the worldview of an idiot” (das Weltbild
eines Idioten). But such an idiosyncratic and idiotic world would nevertheless
be a more pleasant one in which to live, because it would never have to sacri-
fice its own primary creative role to the creations of others. It would never be
disrupted, in Doderer’s words, by “relations with an outside” (Beziehungen
nach außen)—with the contested realities that define the adult world (WdD
41). The unity of interiority and exteriority, of individual and world—the
“home” which Lukács and Spengler locate in the infancy of world history—
lies in the actual infancy of all individuals; it is a home that they are always
already in the process of losing.
Doderer remarks that the infant’s “autochthonous construction of its own
horizons” (der autochthone Ausbau ihres Gesichtskreises) is the last thing
that systems of socialization (Goethe’s Tyche) encourage. From the perspec-
tive of education, it would be inefficient to let everyone find their own way.
Even assuming it were possible to allow each their own development, this
would be infinitely more time-consuming than a standardized training pro-
cess, which distributes a “fixed guideline for orientation” (ein fertiges und
orientierendes Schema). In addition to this problem of efficiency, Doderer
admits that institutionalized autodidacticism would “probably never” suc-
ceed in allowing each individual to independently create a valid and viable
world (ein giltiges, lebensgerechts Bild). In order to avoid producing idiots—
which nobody wants, Doderer ironically underscores—“the little god” (der
kleine Gott) is mercilessly subjected, “long before school,” to the “tried and
true forms of language, opinion and every other field,” thereby “altering and
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 177

irritating the process of his independent creation (the dubious life-value of

which is known to the adults)” (WdD 41).
Rather than a complete split between interiority and exteriority (which
Lukács takes as definitive of the modern condition), Doderer supposes that
the entire point of socialization is—“breach by breach” (Bresche auf Bresche,
WdD 41)—to overcome this split. The most intense and effective way of
appropriating and affirming the fixed forms of society is by way of “talents,”
which are the vehicles through which the child (the object of socialization)
proves its “specific capacity in the correct and skillful combination” of
given forms (WdD 42). The child’s first words testify that “it has accepted
its parents” and “has given up its ambitions of world creation” (WdD 42).
However, the disciplinary force of reality may still produce some reticence,
and the drive toward an otherworldly self- and world-creation—a twist on
Goethe’s Dämon that “can never be cast out”—may slumber “beneath the
crust” of fixed forms. This situation continues, as in Goethe’s “Urworte,”
until Eros—“awakening sexuality”—intervenes and “produces (as they now
freely admit) a really authentic connection to the external world [eine wirklich
echte Beziehung zur Außenwelt]” (WdD 42). As was the case with the process
of socialization, however, ironic notes (“as they now freely admit”) indicate
that even sexuality, like the forms and conventions of socialization, may not
define a completely authentic connection to reality that can fully displace
the self-made forms of childhood. Especially sexuality may seem uncanny:
“This connection, which seemed to completely originate from the most
internal and intimate sources, is experienced in many moments, strangely
enough, as something foreign approaching from without” (WdD 42).23 The
“dull impact” (der stumpfe Stoß) of sexuality nevertheless gives momentum
and eliminates “any last remnants of the unfinished” (alle noch vorhandenen
Reste des Unfertigen) (WdD 42).
Having sketched the norm of development, Doderer turns to his primary
interest, the exceptions. The typological division into two “pure types” takes
a predictable form: “In very few cases,” the normative forces of socialization
are not able to “entirely destroy” the loyalty to the forms of pre-childhood
(das Kindergelöbnis).24 In adulthood, the forms and forces of normalization
may continue to produce a space “beneath the crust,” in which the child
“continues its secret efforts” while the adult “proceeds through a life” whose
reality is not fully admitted. The grown child feels “strangely separated” from
reality “as if by an empty space” (wie durch einen stets noch vorhandenen
leeren Raum getrennt, WdD 42). Such a distance from the norms and forms
of life, Doderer emphasizes, does not produce “productive members of soci-
ety”; this “type”—initially defined negatively by its discomfort with given
forms—is not “sympathetic” with the others who promptly and unquestion-
ingly conformed. Doderer’s construction, in contrast with that of the young
Lukács (who believed in a complete split between interiority and exteriority,
between “soul” and “forms” as definitive of modernity), admits the normality
178 Demonic Inheritances

of norms and characterizes the strong split between inside and outside as
an exception with respect to a universal developmental potential. There is
no way to decide between these two theories—but they have very different
implications with respect to the givenness of norms: Lukács’s model denies
given forms legitimacy to the degree that no souls can find a genuine home in
them, whereas Doderer—closer to Spengler—accepts their legitimacy based
on the assumption that there will always be some kind of alienated and alien-
ating regime of forms, languages, and conventions. The world’s forms are
legitimate to the extent that the production of forms is inevitable. Doderer
thus focuses on the question of what individuals can possibly do with or
against an unpleasant superstructure of externally imposed forms.
The difference between the form-acquirers and those who tend to be idi-
otic is the basis of the theory of the two “pure types” or “two physiognomic
peoples” (zwei physiognomische Völker) that inhabit our “civilized life”
(zivilisiertes Leben, WdD 42). Doderer’s reliance on the idea of physiognomic
tact—physiognomischer Takt, a conception from Spengler—suggests that the
developmental difference between the two types is immediately evident on
the surface, even if its causes go unrecognized. The two types are: (1) the cre-
ative type who is in touch with his or her “inner child” and (2) the outwardly
successful type who is completely in touch with current forms. Doderer con-
cedes that there is a whole spectrum of intermediary possibilities, but for
the purposes of his theory he focuses on the two “pure types.” The second
type (the one with great facility in acquiring forms) is not a rare specimen,
whereas the pure form of the “creative type” is almost impossible to discover:
“The one population is large, the other is diminishingly small” (Das eine Volk
ist groß, das andere verschwindend klein, WdD 42). Intermediary forms and
numerical differences notwithstanding, the two pure types represent a “fun-
damental difference” (ein gründlicher Unterschied) which, unlike Goethe’s
Dämon, does not play out at the level of character, but is foundational for a
difference of spiritual or intellectual type (geistiger Typus, WdD 42).25
Doderer addresses the lack of any pure examples of the second pure type.
One might imagine, not wrongly given the time and his political leanings,
that the “spiritual type” will turn out to be a spiritual elite—but this intent is
impeded by the near impossibility of discovering or producing this type in its
purity. To the extent that the theory of pure types is only meant to introduce
the artistic physiognomy of Albert Paris Gütersloh as the epitome of a new
kind of genius, the theorization of the “pure types” can be taken with a grain
of salt. But my claim is that this material remained of great importance for
Doderer, especially in his Demons project. The pure types provided building
blocks not only for the unfinished manuscript of the 1930s, but also for the
published version. Based on the plans of the version from the 1930s, recorded
in the “aide mémoire,” it appears that the anti-Semitic “watershed” was to be
subordinated to a final apotheosis of “spiritual purification” centered around
the figure of “Kajetan’s teacher” (Kyrill Scolander in the published version).
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 179

“Scolander” was a pseudonym, not only in the novel but also in Doderer’s
diaries, for Albert Paris Gütersloh. Kajetan, on the other hand, is a writer and
Doderer proxy who contributes to Geyrenhoff’s novelistic reports; Kajetan
is identified at the beginning of both versions of the novel as the author
of a book about his teacher, the writer-painter Scolander.26 The last para-
graph of the aide mémoire projects an ending in which Kajetan’s teacher,
“only occasionally named in the novel and indeed only in connection with
one of Kajetan’s books on his teacher’s biography,” “constitutes, so to speak,
the symbolic center for the new circle, which has now been purified” (bil-
det sozusagen den sinnbildlichen Mittelpunkt für den jetzt neuen, gereinigten
Kreis);27 the new direction of the circle, its “spiritual position” (spirituelle
Stellungsnahme), is “most strongly embodied by precisely this one man” (sich
eben in diesem einen Mann am stärksten verkörpert). At the very end of the
novel, Kajetan will give a speech on “the new empire” (das neue Reich).
Given the almost thirty-year genesis of The Demons, it could hardly be
expected that Doderer would precisely follow the initial plan. The attempted
ideological revision is another story, but, all things considered, what is most
surprising is that he finished it at all—and that he, in many large and small
ways, mostly retained the original conception. The final chapter of the pub-
lished version is still called “Schlaggenberg’s Return” (“Schlaggenbergs
Wiederkehr”), just as it is called in the last paragraph of the aide mémoire,
but rather than a “watershed,” in the end of the published version the charac-
ters go their own ways at the end of the 1920s, with the future history of the
twentieth century looming. Rather than a new coherence of the circle around
its master, Scolander (a.k.a. Gütersloh), the published ending centers around
various inheritance stories, marriages, and the burning of the Justizpalast in
Vienna on July 15, 1927. Doderer had always intended to incorporate the
latter event, but in the published novel this event is without unifying func-
tion with respect to the circle of friends and co-conspirators; the marriages
that tie up the various plotlines are also represented as entropic with respect
to the unity of the circle. Rather than discovering a new spiritual center, the
group splinters.
Focusing on the implementation of the theory of “pure types” between
the two versions of The Demons circumvents the question of Doderer’s
personal convictions. At a pragmatic level, in the 1930s the nationalist and
anti-Semitic narrative of the aide mémoire would have become increasingly
irrelevant.28 Even under the pretext of “backward-looking prophecy” (DD
11, 301), utopian social transformation through racist self-segregation and
the crystallization of “pure spiritual types” would have been superfluous
after the Nuremberg laws. Established National Socialism had little to offer
to Doderer’s antisocial “creative types.” The anti-Semitic and pan-Germanic
nationalist agenda of the aide mémoire thus lost its object. Regarding Güt-
ersloh, it is a question of the degree of disillusionment that Doderer may
have experienced: by the 1950s it would have been pointless—recalling Egon
180 Demonic Inheritances

Schiele’s 1918 portrait of Doderer’s master—to make The Demons a pedestal

for a self-styled genius of an earlier era. What does endure in the 1950s, how-
ever, is the 1929 theory’s assertion of the difficulty or even impossibility of
realizing the second pure type. This unrealizability sets limits on the overtly
idealized (counter-exemplary) models of self-realization presented by the fig-
ures of Leonhard Kakabsa and “Kaps” (who are new to the published version
of the novel).29 Both are also eccentric to the circle, which fails to define the
difference between the novel’s “central” and “peripheral” characters.
The introduction of new exemplary characters extrinsic to the circle of die
Unsrigen (“our group”) is significant; it is also possible to identify many of
them as cases of “latent genius” (Genie in Latenz).30 In Kaps and Kakabsa,
the creative type’s fundamentally autodidactic relation to world and forms
comes closest to being realized. But this realization does not occur in fig-
ures of great societal, historical, or political significance, but, to the contrary,
in characters who measure success in their own terms. Among even more
minor characters, the figurations of “genius in latency” become shadowy
and nocturnal: undeveloped autodidacts are demonic and hybrid existences,
grotesques who populate and cultivate private worlds at the margins of soci-
ety. Regarding such figures, Doderer’s 1929 description of “creative types”
applies: “The smallest minority appears in relatively coherent shapes [in
einigermaßen ausgeprägten Gestalten], but mostly only in every conceivable
more or less poorly worked out—blurry or distorted—preliminary stage [in
allen möglichen mehr oder weniger übel geratenen, verschwommenen oder
verschrobenen Vorstufen]” (WdD 42). What goes for geniuses in latency
who are unable to achieve a coherent shape also obtains for many of “our
group”—who may not be geniuses, but who are uncomfortable with their
current state of latency. They are not demonic in the sense that they have
strong characters, but because they are suspended at a purgatorial phase in a
perhaps impossible development.
No figure in The Demons represents this more than “Quapp,” Charlotte
von Schlaggenberg, Kajetan’s sister, who stands at the center of the novel’s
multiple inheritance narratives. Her nickname (Kaulquappe = “tadpole”)
designates her as an unfinished nature, and her life is lived, in the words of
Doderer’s Gütersloh essay

as if in two parts, . . . like a compound word that produces a con-

tradiction or like a name that is composed of a natively familiar
surname and a strangely foreign first name [aus einem heimatlich
vertrauten Zunamen und einem seltsam fremdländischen Vornamen
besteht] and thus cannot be pronounced without breaking apart in
the middle [beim Aussprechen in der Mitte entzweibricht]. (WdD 44)

I will let the xenophobic potentials of this analogy pass without comment.
The main reason to cite them is that “Quapp,” like her author “Heimito,”
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 181

fits the bill. None of her names are proper: known as “Quapp” and also
“Lo,” her last name is not that of either of her biological parents (“Ruth-
mayr” and “Charagiel”); her given name, “Charlotte,” is the diminutive of
the French “Charles,” which sets it off against the bombastically Germanic
surname “von Schlaggenberg.”31 Charlotte was a bastard child, who, adopted
as a baby by the Schlaggenbergs, turns out to be the recipient of multiple
inheritances. A farce like this can hardly be presented without irony, and
the narrator, Geyrenhoff, is aggressively critical of the effects of these inheri-
tances on her development. But at least superficially, Quapp’s story appears
to have a happy ending: her multiple monetary inheritances seem to resolve
the contradictions of her biological inheritance (the disharmony of the char-
acters of parents she never knew) and within her “spiritual” development;
previously a struggling violinist, Quapp’s newfound wealth and marriage
lead her to abandon her creative efforts, which retrospectively look like they
were always a false path.32
The novel’s depictions of Quapp leave no doubt that reconquests of the
inner realm of childhood are painful and do not always work out. Quapp’s
brother, Kajetan, claims that she, like her mother, “knew how to inherit” (Sie
hat zu erben verstanden, DD 1077, 1141) and that this ability will allow her
to resolve the dissonances of her various inheritances. Beyond the irony of the
phrase “knowing how to inherit” (which suggests that one could be skilled in
passively receiving things that originally belonged to others),33 the narrator,
Geyrenhoff, never accepts Kajetan’s interpretation of Quapp’s “second biog-
raphy” (zweite Biographie, DD 1077). Geyrenhoff points out that he also
knows how to inherit,34 and in the novel’s final pages he violently expresses
his unhappiness with the transformations brought about by the monetary
realization of the other half of Quapp’s biography. His final reflections (DD
1344–45) are provoked by his anger that Quapp, after her inheritance, never
asked him about her former boyfriend, Imre Gyurkicz, whose death Gey-
renhoff witnessed on July 15, 1927. Gyurkicz can hardly be counted as a
character who comes off well in The Demons, but Geyrenhoff suddenly and
unexpectedly comes to view him differently after witnessing Imre’s death:
“truly he [Imre] became my friend at the very last moment!” (DD 1344).
This aside in the novel’s final scene repeats an earlier line, which Geyrenhoff
uttered to the Hofrat Gürtzner-Gontard at the time of Imre’s death: “ ‘he was
a friend of mine’ (now I could really say it!)” (DD 1249).
The reason for this change of heart, apparently, is that Imre, whom Gey-
renhoff and others clearly perceive as a superficial and outwardly oriented
“successful type” with excessive facility in acquiring finished forms, was ulti-
mately able to resolve the contradiction between inside and outside. Imre,
“unlike Quapp,” Geyrenhoff writes, “was finally able to resolve” his version
“of her ‘trema’-cramp, to annihilate his darkest, most deeply internal, abject
ignominy [Schmach]” (DD 1249). The strange word “trema” is (among other
things)35 a diacritical mark (¨) that looks like the German umlaut but indicates
182 Demonic Inheritances

(unlike the umlaut, which produces diphthongs) that two adjacent vowels are
to be pronounced separately (as in the word “naïve”). This meaning of trema
is, however, not the primary one in The Demons: Geyrenhoff clearly uses the
word to refer to a problem that affects Quapp’s vibrato; she suffers from a
trema, which causes her fingers to tremble in a way that negatively affects her
tone production (DD 943–44). The diacritical mark is, however, perhaps also
relevant as yet another figure of Quapp’s split identity. In any case, Quapp’s
spastic performance (DD 1007) is interpreted by the narrator (who is not
Geyrenhoff in this case) as the symptoms of a wound—a trauma:

Her experience of the trema was the most deeply seated, the darkest
in Quapp’s life up to that point, a dark scar in the core of her person
and simultaneously a demon [ein Dämon zugleich] that came to her
as if entirely from the outside as soon as she was supposed to show
her art. (DD 944)

Quapp’s daemon, the core of her person and identity, is “simultaneously”

a demon (Dämon), which torments her “as if from the outside” as soon as
she tries to express what is inside.36 No longer a problem of character (as in
Goethe), here, as in the theory of pure types, the daemon-demon represents
the contested point between a new self-creation and the inability or unwill-
ingness to master or comply with inherited forms. A few pages later, the idea
of the trema is used as a metaphor for a more general problem: Imre, despite
his superficiality and because of the impending failure of his relationship
with Quapp, is suddenly able to look beneath his own surface to discover
“the wound, the dark scar at the core of his existence, his ‘trema,’ one might
say” (DD 949). A difference with Doderer’s 1929 conception can be noted
here: even the outwardly oriented types, who are excessively interested in
the mimetic acquisition of forms (without internally re-creating these forms),
may still suffer due to the forms’ inability to fill the void left behind by the
unrealized world of childhood.
The metaphor of the trema culminates in the scene of Imre’s death. Why
does Geyrenhoff think that Imre, in his death, was able to resolve his trema
in a way that Quapp was never able to? The answer to this question revolves
around the contrast between the two polar types, both split by an unresolved
primal trauma: Quapp tries (but fails) to re-create the prelinguistic world
of childhood through art, but she can never “find herself” or “express her-
self” authentically there.37 Imre, on the other hand, seeks to find himself in
the representational forms of the outside world; this motivates his eclectic
acquisition of trophies and “emblems” (DD 949), which fail to meaning-
fully reflect a coherent interiority. According to Geyrenhoff, Imre manages
to resolve his trema where Quapp fails, because his arbitrary assumption of
poses and postures leads him to his destiny in the end—to his death—which
is something different from an arbitrary symbol to fill an internal void; it is
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 183

something the world gives back to him that allows him to realize an identity
that was previously only put on. His death is thus functionally equivalent to
Quapp’s “inheritance,” except that, in her case, it is not clear that solving the
trema with money actually solves the problem. Money, in Geyrenhoff’s read-
ing, may be simply an anesthetic that dulls the pain of the trema. This is the
sense of his internalized rage during their final farewell at the train station:
“Of course, I also—understood how to inherit. But at least I did not have the
memory of a hen and—no! because of this amnesia! [nein! daher!]—a heart
of stone” (DD 1344). For Geyrenhoff, the result of Quapp’s lack of memory
is an inability to mourn. She not only apparently fails to mourn Imre’s death
but also forgets the loss of the trema, her Dämon that connected her to her
pre-adult world. Thus, according to Geyrenhoff (in opposition to Kajetan),
Quapp does not understand how to inherit, because she does not value her
own memories.
Split or bastard natures who spend their lives waiting to inherit—who
knows how prevalent they are?—represent the developmental norm of the
life stories of The Demons. They in no way reflect the process of “purifica-
tion” that Doderer envisioned in the 1930s. In Lukács’s terms: modern heroes
will never be purified of their “halfness,” which is precisely what makes them
exemplary in comparison to idealized counter-examples. The sum of the nov-
el’s inheritance stories shows the contingency of development in modernity
and in general. Chance (Tyche), for example, plays a role in the opportunities
and external factors (including money) that govern the fates of “talents” and
the specific forms of their eventual realization or non-realization. If Quapp
and Imre are taken as cases of the “pure types” that Doderer had in mind
in 1929, they reflect—Leonhard’s success story notwithstanding—a rupture
that runs through every individual, which is precisely not healable by the
bourgeois happy ending. At best, external pressures fall away and the figure
in question becomes narratively uninteresting once the battle with the demon
is given up; at worst (in the case that Quapp’s real talent is being rich, as
Kajetan suspects), the result would be a kind of “demonic” automatism, a
purely natural development, a fatefully pre-programmed biological procliv-
ity that does not allow the individual to play a role in the outcome of her
talents.
The final version of The Demons emphasizes the uncontrollability of
the forces that may activate—but more often block—the free use of inborn
gifts. These forces may be felt internally (like Quapp’s “demon”), but they
are shown to originate outside of and ultimately to transcend the internal
dynamics of the discrete individual. The Gütersloh essay, on the other hand,
suggests a kind of natural selection through which the “starting speed”
(Anfangsgeschwindigkeit) of the childhood “act of creation and ordering
[Schöpfungs- und Ordnungsakt]” affects the ability to resume this creation
as an adult (WdD 43). Complicating things further, Doderer’s early theory
of the “pure types” supposes the contingency of talents themselves, which
184 Demonic Inheritances

are not simply the “gifts” they are often mistaken for (in the eyes of the
adult world) but highly specific bridges or access points to the given world
and its arbitrary forms. The moment of “talent” is thus demonically charged
already in 1929, not as an avenue of pure self-expression (of the daemon),
but as a highly conflicted space that lies somewhere between autonomous
self-creation and the automatic appropriation of inherited forms.
In 1929 Doderer was under no illusions about the fact that artists may
belong to either “type.” The artist, he explicitly indicates, “can belong to
either of the aforementioned physiognomic populations [Völker]” (WdD 46).
The more raw talent a developing artist possesses, the stronger will be the
connection to already existing forms—and the weaker and more beleaguered
will be “the realm of childhood” (WdD 45). Artistic talents are “specific
abilities” (spezifische Fähigkeiten) that “are not at home in the innermost
cell of the individual [in der innersten Wesenszelle des Menschen]” but are
instead “encountered there” as “something that is to a certain degree for-
eign [gewissermaßen als ein Fremdes]” (WdD 45). The further problem, as
it emerges in the next paragraph, is that “specific abilities,” even when the
individual is able to make “free use” (freien Gebrauch) of them, inevitably
become destinies (Schicksale)—careers—which shape the external form of
life and eventually bring it into line with the given forms of the adult world
(WdD 46). The true artistic project (and for Doderer in 1929 also the true
political project) is the resumption of the unfinished work of childhood. True
artists must not only accept and make “free use” of their talents in order to
become successful. Instead, the reconquest of the Kinderreich forces the indi-
vidual to “become the destiny of his own talents” (and not only the other way
around) (WdD 46) and to engage in a “war against the talents” (Krieg gegen
die Talente, WdD 49). Gütersloh represented this artistic model in 1929—but
the problem at issue is independent of this model. Evidence of this can be
seen in Doderer’s continued engagement with the “pure types” in the final
version of The Demons, after Scolander has become a truly vestigial figure.
In 1929 Doderer used Gütersloh’s double talent (his gifts both as a writer and
a painter) to exemplify a “type” who does not accept the self-evidence of a
single defining ability. In this model, art draws on the Kinderreich and gives
its unborn forms expression in the medium of a pre-given and essentially
external talent. Art “creates everything anew, which was encountered in the
already extant creations of others” (alles das neu schaffend, was von Anderen
bereits vorgefunden wurde, WdD 47).
This “re-creation of what is already given” results in the creation of some-
thing entirely new. This conception is evident in the role of writing in The
Demons. Regardless of its object, writing is intensely determined by preexist-
ing forms of language and always reflects inherited forms of givenness. A limit
case of this is Kaps’s dream diary, which transcribes an especially internal
form of antecedence. The writer is especially dependent not only on oth-
ers, but on everything—including and especially language—other, external,
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 185

or foreign to the self. This relation of dependency is primarily developed in

the narrator figure of Geyrenhoff, who intends to “chronicle” the doings of
“our group” in a diary, but in the process discovers that “writing simultane-
ously with the events” implies the “total transcription” (eine Totalität des
Aufschreibens) of reality (DD 61). He is constantly forced to retrospectively
account for the gaps in his past and present knowledge of unfolding events.
The passage of time compounds the impossibility of a “total writing” of real-
ity, constantly transforming it into an exponentially greater total rewriting
of reality. The effort necessary to keep up with even a very small excerpt of
the past (much less to keep up with the present) totally exceeds the process-
ing ability of writing.38 Rather than a mimetic or “realistic” relation, which
is completely out of language’s grasp, the genesis of a novel as it is repre-
sented in The Demons only takes its start in an attempt to “re-create” or
duplicate what is already there. In the moment when the writer sees that the
re-creation is creating something new—out of the depths of his or her “sec-
ond biography”—the pretense of an objective chronicling is abandoned. The
work of writing continues, if it continues, as a novel.39 The novel is thus the
most exceptional form of what The Demons calls “second reality” (zweite
Wirklichkeit); the successful novel is, as Lukács knew, the reconstruction of
a “given” reality—but if it is based on an alternate pre-reality that the writer
inherits from childhood, then it is far more real and more primary than the
so-called reality of the adult world.
Such an approach protects the novel from its own tendencies to become
tendentious by reducing its polemical and critical aspect—which for Lukács
defines the genre up to Dostoyevsky. In a passage of The Theory of the Novel
on “congealed transcendence,” which Doderer often references in his diary,
Lukács states that “the implication of an ‘ought’ destroys the sense of life”
(das Sollen tötet das Leben) and that “an epic hero built out of an imperative
‘ought’ [ein aus sollendem Sein erbauter Held der Epopöe] will always only
be a shadow of the living individual in the historical world” (TdR 39). At the
very end of Lukács’s theory, Dostoyevsky stands for the possibility of a sheer
representation of the world. Unlike Tolstoy, whose works remain “polemi-
cal,” Dostoyevsky’s novels display sovereign indifference—“neither affirming
nor denying” (weder bejahend noch verneinend)—to history and the repre-
sentational imperatives of the traditional novel (TdR 137). The overcoming
of the novel’s critical-polemical character and correlated tendency to ideal-
ize is itself an ideal which Doderer, following Lukács, strove to realize. On
March 30, 1935, he wrote in his diary:

Criticism [Kritik] of “existing conditions,” whatever its object may

be, contains a will to improve the matters under consideration, which
means the will toward some kind of an “ought” [“Sollen,” quotation
marks by author]. The writer, however, always has to do with the
world in me as it is and never with a world as it should be. (TB 671)40
186 Demonic Inheritances

The plan of the first version of The Demons is as a massive deviation from
this ideal. It is also debatable whether the anti-ideological ideology of the
final version resolves the problem. But formally—given the possibility of
lapses—the solution, which Doderer borrows from Dostoyevsky’s Demons,
is to splinter the narrating voice into separate instances that are not omni-
scient and to overtly reflect on their relative cluelessness and differences of
perspective. Instead of denying the narrator’s perspective and opinion, in
this “objective” style the narrative voice reflects a lack of omniscience. The
obvious fallibility of the narrator obstructs the production of “congealed
transcendence” by leaving the reader free with respect to the narrator’s
reports and dubious attempts to interpret them. In this sense—in contrast
with Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities—the “demonic” novel
in the tradition of Dostoyevsky is supposed to lack a moment of decisive
perspectivization that would point toward an outside or a beyond.41 In the
model of The Demons, the novel itself is simultaneously the inside and the
beyond. Thus the demonic novel is—or is meant to be—bottomless and unin-
terpretable in its lack of closure and limitless interpretability. In the end it
may not be important (or decidable) whether this ideal reflects a new kind of
novel (as Lukács and Doderer hoped), or whether it reflects the old problem
of demonic ambiguity (which for Benjamin was always constitutive of the
forms of literature and life in the inseparability of truth content and material
content). What is certain though is that the universal title for such an ideal or
“total” novel is The Demons.

On Irony and the Demonic Character

In comparison with the predicament of “creative types,” who are plagued by

the demons of their failed and partial self-realizations, the “demonic char-
acters” of The Demons are fewer and simpler. In an inversion of the “pure
types” hypothesis of Doderer’s Der Fall Gütersloh (The Gütersloh Case), The
Demons follows a presupposition that there are no pure types—or that they
are diminishingly few. Unlike the 1930s version of the novel, which was sup-
posed to culminate in a “purification” of the struggling creative types around
the figure of Kyrill Scolander (a.k.a. Gütersloh), the published version focuses
on the normal situation of creative and non-creative types without explicitly
differentiating the two; this can be seen in the Quapp-Imre pairing, as well
as in figures like Williams, Drobila, Mary K., and Kakabsa—to say noth-
ing of the younger generations. In the context of The Demons, therefore,
demonic characters—strong characters or pure types—are in the minority, as
are characters (to use Lukács’s terminology) who are “narrower” (schmäler)
“than the external world that is given to them as the stage and substrate of
their deeds” (TdR 83). Lukács describes these figures, who are possessed of a
“demonic character,” as the protagonists of an “abstract idealism.” Doderer,
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 187

however, hyper-aware of the pitfalls of idealism and ideology, explicitly

configures these “idealist” types as victims of delusional “second realities”
(zweite Wirklichkeiten), which refer, for example, to the fanaticism, pedantry,
and sexual obsessions exemplified by Kajetan and Herzka.
The key metaphorical depiction of the idea of second reality appears in
the fictional 1517 manuscript of Ruodlieb von der Vläntsch, which details
the exploits of Herzka’s ancestor, Achaz von Neudegg. The sentence in
question speaks of a split, of an internal demonization, which makes these
characters—who are numerous—distinctly different from those who may be
possessed by a demonic character: “Undt mir ist, als wuerdt ich aus zweien
halbeten mannern wyder ain gantzer; und war von den halbeten der ain von
holtz” (And it was to me as if out of two half men I became whole again; and
of the two halves, one was made of wood, DD 805).42 When René discusses
this sentence with Williams, he connects it to the idea of “second reality.”
Williams says: “Back then they called it a demon”; Stangeler replies: “And
rightly so” (DD 1023). René goes farther than the theory of the pure types,
arguing that not only “abstract idealisms” and creative pursuits (especially
writing) but also everyday “opinions” (Meinungen) and “worldviews” (Welt-
anschauungen) are essentially irrational (DD 1023).43 For this reason it may
have been better and more accurate to view every more or less crazy violation
of the given orthodoxy of the “adult world” as a form of demonic possession.
Such “demonic” impulses are without rational basis to the extent that they
are futile attempts to restore a counter-world of childhood. The theory of
“second reality” thus supposes a different split between “inside and outside”
than that of Lukács: it is a temporal split within the inside, which produces
wildly divergent “worlds” from each individual to the next. This split is not
exclusively a problem of modernity, and revolutions in the “adult world”
or “social contract”—though some may be better than others—can never
(as Lukács imagined) completely resolve the split within individuals, to the
extent that the latter are conceived as an infinity of unrealized (and unrealiz-
able) worlds.44
As in the case of Quapp, the various splits of second realities are produc-
tive of demons—or are the product of them. Such demons are spirits that
emerge from the depths of individual biography and collective history. Rather
than allowing even a partial realization of the dream of childhood, they tor-
ment their victims with the experience of unrealizability. This corresponds
to one of Goethe’s definitions of the demonic, its “thriving on impossibil-
ity”: nur im Unmöglichen schien es sich zu gefallen (HA 10:175). If this is
the norm of demonic possession in Doderer’s novel, then the truly demonic
characters appear to be exceptions or experiments, attempts to imagine what
an undivided character or unobstructed self-realization might look like in
reality. One such case is Quapp’s mother, “the Baroness Claire Neudegg, later
the Countess Charagiel” (DD 54). Geyrenhoff remembers encountering her
when he was only sixteen, a very brief interaction that impressed upon him
188 Demonic Inheritances

the “limitless stupid gall” (grenzenlos dumme Frechheit)45 and “completely

inimitable overbearance” (ganz unnachahmliche Anmaßung) of her behavior
and facial expression (Gesichtsausdruck, DD 114). The word “arrogance”
(Arroganz, DD 114) connects Charagiel to the novel’s central villain, Leveille,
whose character, like Charagiel’s, is primarily developed through the impres-
sions it makes on others.
Recalling encounters with Charagiel and Leveille, Geyrenhoff asks him-
self the same question as when he first met the Countess Charagiel. It is a
question of inheritance: “Where do these people get it from?” or, even more
literally: “Where do these people take it from?” (Woher nehmen diese Leute
das nur? DD 114).46 Almost everyone may have themselves asked this ques-
tion at some point after encountering an arrogant or overbearing person.
The question is not answered until much later in the novel. The importance
of this answer is indicated by its verbatim repetition in two different contexts
(separated by many pages). In the first appearance, narrated by Geyrenhoff,
the Prince Alfons Croix speculates about the character of Charagiel. Croix is
himself arguably another kind of demonic character; he is indirectly marked
as a Goethe surrogate by Geyrenhoff’s characterization of Croix’s sidekick,
Mucki Langingen, as a “miniature Eckermann” (DD 846).47 Unlike most of
the novel’s characters, Croix is a power center without a psychology and
apparently without an internal split. But instead of being animated by the
demonic “gall” of villains such as Charagiel and Leveille, Croix is a wise and
benevolent figure who helps Geyrenhoff in a moment of crisis.
Croix’s comments about Charagiel are part of a longer conversation,
but—in case the reader missed them the first time—they are cited about two
hundred pages later by a different narrator who apparently had access to the
manuscript of Geyrenhoff’s account of the conversation with Croix. The later
narrator, whose viewpoints may make it possible to identify him as Kajetan,
ignores the original topic (Charagiel), cites only the first half of Croix’s dis-
course, and reads it as a commentary on the bad company that frequents the
Café Alhambra.48 This narration not only recontextualizes Croix’s speech, it
dismisses the context and understanding established by Geyrenhoff, thereby
greatly expanding its potential applicability to include the borderline and
criminal existences of a nocturnal Vienna. This citation thus generalizes
Croix’s concept in a way that implicitly characterizes the malevolent killer
Meisgeier. Either way, however, it attempts to answer Geyrenhoff’s question:
Where do they take it from?

“Selbst die unmöglichsten Personen mit ihren sicher indiskutablen

Verhaltensweisen sind immerhin Konkretion geworden, haben, von
sich selbst aus betrachtend, immer recht—sobald sie daran zweif-
eln, sind sie eben keine unmöglichen Personen mehr—und man muß
mit Aufmerksamkeit jene anschauen, welche so undankbare Rollen
spielen: denn diese Rollen sind unentbehrlich.” (DD 846, 1040)
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 189

[Even the most impossible people (with their behaviors that are
undoubtedly completely out of the question) have nevertheless
become concretions and are always in the right from their own
perspective—as soon as they doubt it, they cease to be impossible
people—and we should be especially attentive to those who play such
thankless roles: because these roles are indispensable.]

The desire to pose an “answer” to a central question in the form of a ques-

tionable reflection—not as “congealed transcendence”—may explain why
these words were included twice in the novel.
Based on the more generalized perspective of the second citation of
Croix’s words, which applies them to all “villains” and demonic characters,
it is possible to make a few observations: the language of “roles” empha-
sizes the artificiality of demonic characters; villains do not necessarily see
themselves—“from their own perspective”—as villains; the very idea of a
villain is first and foremost a literary type, a personified version of evil and
things that go wrong in the world. The identification of such evils with spe-
cific individuals or groups may give some comfort to the reader or viewer of
works of fiction. Perhaps life even imitates art to the degree that it is possible
to actively assume such roles. But being someone else’s idea of an incarnation
of the demonic can never be a rewarding self-actualization, and the introduc-
tion of a logic of roles makes it impossible to see individuals or groups as the
origin or cause of a given story. The role always preceded the actor, and for
this reason, Kaps’s imagination of a kraken lurking in the sewers of Vienna
is a far more adequate metaphor for the unknown origins of trouble than is
the petty criminal Meisgeier, who in the end fails to personify the kraken.
The two figures are identified with each other only for the sake of their dif-
ference: Meisgeier, who dies on July 15, 1937, is a comic-book killer—an
obvious literary device—whereas the “metaphor” of the kraken is an image
of everything that unknowably surfaces from the depths. The latter is much
more real than any individual “demonic character.”
Croix’s speech seems to say that even “villains,” who are only perceived as
demonic characters, are ultimately playing a “thankless” yet “indispensable”
role. The thanklessness of such roles is obvious, but their indispensability
is less so. Croix offers no analysis of why a society cannot function with-
out such figures or how they may have been scapegoated for the benefit of
the rest. He implies, however, that apparent “demonic characters” may be
the concrete results of either psychological coping mechanisms or of mor-
ally neutral aspects of character. The novel’s depictions lend little support
to this hypothesis, because the sources of such compensations are left in the
dark, leaving the reader to ask Geyrenhoff’s question: “Where do they get it
from?” Because the reasons for apparent malevolence or villainy cannot be
known at second- or third-hand (perhaps not even at first), the motivations
of “demonic” figures are off-limits for the novel’s non-omniscient narrators.
190 Demonic Inheritances

Thus, though Croix’s speech invites the consideration of various possibilities,

neither it nor the novel can give a definitive answer. Even the implication,
however, of the artificiality and externality of demonic characters reintro-
duces the possibility of a split psychology based on the difference between the
apparent unquestioning arrogance of demonic characters and the possibility
that this unquestioned lack of self-doubt is only a given or chosen role.
As long as there is a split—which everyone has to a degree, according to
Der Fall Gütersloh—it will be uncertain if a given character is demonic or if
he or she only seems demonic. The Demons thus resists the idea that there
are any actual “demons” and avoids a narrative politics of “demonization.”
Literal demons are subordinated to the nebulous causal and interpretive
matrix of the demonic. In 1952, in an entry in his Repertorium existentiale,
Doderer wrote under the heading “CHARAKTER—DÄMONOLOGIE”
(Character—Demonology): “Every person who realizes only his or her own
character is demonic” (Jeder Mensch, der nur seinen Charakter realisiert, ist
dämonisch).49 The idea of the pure realization of one’s own character seems
to have been a prevalent fantasy in the wake of Goethe, promoted both by his
life and by his idea of an unchecked demon of individual identity (as geprägte
Form, die lebend sich entwickelt). The degree to which Doderer invested
in such fantasies (or tried to invest them in Gütersloh) is not of primary
importance—but, already in 1929, his Der Fall Gütersloh presented such a
powerful conception of Tyche (as “world,” “education,” and “socialization”)
that he concluded that the only way for the individual to actualize its demon
is to resurrect it in the middle of life. In the published version of The Demons,
he remains unable to make a compelling case for the realizability of demonic
characters.
Instead, the typical self-relation of The Demons is described in a 1963
Repertorium entry on irony: “Irony is our relation or comportment with
respect to the figural remnants within us, to the figures that we were unable
to become” (Ironie ist unser Verhalten [im Doppelsinne des Wortes] dem
Rest von Figur in uns gegenüber, die wir nicht haben werden können, R 126).
Irony names the relation to a past self or other self, an alter ego, whom
“we” never were or were never able to become. “We” are always already plu-
ral, populated by the remnants of “figures” and characters that might have
been. Irony in this sense is the true sphere of the demonic. It “thrives on
impossibility” and is the inheritor of that which was unrealized and remains
unrealizable. And yet, by retrospectively inhabiting such past possibilities, it
is especially the writer—the prose narrator and novelist—whose task it is to
realize the unrealized in fictional characters. This corresponds with Lukács’s
conception of irony as a split between an (older) narrator and a (younger)
protagonist, but it fits even better with Goethe’s words from Poetry and
Truth: “We usually learn to perceive the strategy only after the campaign is
over” (wir [lernen] die Strategie gewöhnlich erst einsehen, wenn der Feldzug
vorbei ist, HA 10:183). Geyrenhoff says something similar in the “Overture”
Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons 191

to The Demons, when he is confronted with the narrative challenge not to

depict himself as “less stupid and unknowing than [he] actually was, as we
certainly all are with respect to a life that is playing out right in front of us,
the further extension and vanishing-point of which was impossible for us to
know” (DD 11).
Geyrenhoff was hardly a young man at the time when he played the role
of protagonist in his own “novelistic sketches.” The novel also cannot have a
definitive ending, because its ending and meaning depend on the perspective
and the elapsed time from which one looks at it. Though Geyrenhoff claims
to “know it all” as he writes the overture, his reflection on his previous state
of knowledge indicates that the meaning of events—their eventual transfor-
mation into a novel—may always exceed him. For this reason, the demonic
novel does not end on its last page—nor in “congealed transcendence,” nor
in Benjamin’s idea of das Ausdruckslose (which might be considered a special
case of congealed transcendence)—but rather finds its limit, in the sense of
the theory of pure types, at the limits of the world.
 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

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Wetters, Kirk.
Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
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 Conclusion

Transformations of the Demonic

In the introduction, I claimed that the “the demonic is not one (thing)”
and that it is a “something.” Lest this be taken as an indication that it is
nothing at all and that I, following Goethe, have allowed it to expand into
all-encompassing vagueness, this conclusion will attempt to answer the ques-
tions: What is the demonic? What revealed itself in its reception? And, to the
extent that it may be taken as a renaming of other already known or more
clearly defined conceptions, what are the effects of this renaming? There are
no simple answers, but I will attempt to delineate a series of possibilities:
1. Failed Secularization.  The demonic is the perceived or self-perceived
situation of modernity as the result of a secularization that killed its gods
without being able to fill the power vacuum thereby produced. This is
Lukács’s understanding, which can be put in familiar Nietzschean terms: God
was killed, we killed him—but gods remained. The demonic in this sense
is not a new polytheism and pluralism, because the “gods” in question are
only demons possessed of a limited ability to establish general conditions
of meaning, validity, coherence, stability, and authority. Lukács’s conception
acutely articulates this, but the problem is ubiquitous in the early twentieth
century.
2.  The Lowest-Terms of Existential Analysis.  Goethe’s “Urworte Orphisch”
conceives the demonic as a universal coordinate system of human life and
development. Goethe’s complex conceptual model would be comparable to
the system vs. environment or system vs. lifeworld models of the twentieth-
century social sciences, but it was more often understood in a reduced way as
a relation of fate vs. character, nature vs. nurture, and so on. The metaphorical
registers of Goethe’s five stanzas allow wide application to varied structures
and systems. Though the Dämon vs. Tyche opposition primarily reflects birth
vs. socialization, Eros, Ananke, and Elpis emphasize more “adult” factors
such as love and sexuality, procreation and profession, resignation, disillu-
sionment, and hope. Conceptions like the “Urworte,” including the social
sciences’ attempts to define the conditions of human development, strive for
maximum generalizability. Such conceptions thus often have a metahistorical
or ahistorical consistency; this is very much the case for Goethe’s “Urworte,”
but specific historicizations can also be derived from it.1

193
194 Transformations of the Demonic

3. Demonic History. In Goethe’s autobiography, the apparently fixed terms

of the “Urworte” dissolve into infinite paths that are impossible to foresee
and to unambiguously trace after the fact. The attempt to narrate any spe-
cific development, any story or history, in its lowest terms begins to confuse
the unique function and discrete identifiability of supposedly separate causal
factors. Given the complexity of reducing an individual life or collective his-
tory to basic determinants, events and causations become entangled, even and
especially if they are approached at a high level of abstraction. The categories
of the “Urworte” give the impression of an ordered and possibly objective
development, but from the perspective of the one who lives through this
development, the process appears mysterious. In life, it is impossible to say
what came from nature, what from nurture, and what from fortune. Goethe’s
autobiography attempts an extended narrative sorting of such factors, but his
introduction of the demonic at the end declares the impossibility of a final
reckoning. Looking back, chance arguably plays the main role, but precisely
for this reason the individual’s role in making and taking chances is also a pri-
mary factor. This model’s extreme degree of uncertainty places it in opposition
to the philosophy of history (Geschichtsphilosophie), but this does not mean
that it is ahistorical or anti-historical, only that it bears a greater affinity to
positivist historiography than to meta-history. The master narratives of meta-
history, philosophy, metaphysics, and religion are discourses of the repression
of the demonic; in comparison to such discourses, the demonic either repre-
sents meta-meta-history—as the return of the repressed—or it represents the
consequent rejection of all metahistorical and metaphysical truth claims.
4. Demonic Ambiguity. The suspicion that there may have been higher
forces in play easily combines with the ironic awareness that mysteri-
ous “fates” can usually be explained rationally. Reason need not explain
everything; it must only posit that everything is, in theory, explicable. This
produces a latent differential between natural and supernatural causation,
which leads the demonic to be identified with ambiguity. Especially Freud’s
theory of the uncanny and his idea of ambivalence in Totem and Taboo
suppose a modernity that continually questions whether “primitive” or
“modern” ways of explaining the world are applicable in given cases. Freud’s
near-contemporaries, Spengler and Benjamin, also produced conceptions of
demonic ambiguity, but whereas Freud’s theory of ambivalence supposed
modernity’s recidivism to primitive interpretations, Spengler associated the
demonic with pre-ambivalent subjectivity. By affirming the demonic as a
desirable form of atavism, modernity is in the paradoxical position of only
being able to perceive this atavism through the lens of its own characteristic
rationality. Benjamin’s conception of demonic ambiguity goes one step fur-
ther by arguing that the demonic is essentially a phenomenon of ambiguity
and that ambiguities are essentially demonic. For Benjamin, modernity is not
only subjectively but also objectively demonized by systems of institutional-
ized ambiguity, which are simultaneously more pervasive and more occulted
Transformations of the Demonic 195

than those of previous eras. The ambiguities in question include the ambigu-
ity of law-making and law-maintaining violence, law and justice, law and
fate, fate and character, guilt and fate. The belief in the rationality of modern
systems—which is, according to Weber, the very source of their legitimacy—
systematically represses the fact that these systems remain tied to ambiguous
aspects of older systems, leading to a false legitimation and profound mis-
apprehension with respect to the general state of things. The increasingly
demonic quality of the modern world is the result of its wildly self-deluded
belief in itself as a rational era of disenchantment (Entzauberung).
5. Morphological Demonology.  Goethean and Spenglerian morphology
envision a general comparative study of the development of all forms in
order to take the pulse of the cosmos itself. In Goethe’s morphological writ-
ings, the demonic oscillation of Dämon (as form) and Tyche (as formlessness
and entropy) are the systole and diastole, the mysterious and unidentifiable
energy that flows within and animates creation. The demonic in this sense is
Being or Nature, conceived as a force. This nature is not evidently benevolent,
because it only applies to the natural world (and perhaps to art), whereas
human lives, histories, and societies are mostly excluded or ambiguous in
their relation to its cosmic ebb and flow. That which animates the cosmos is
“demonic”—threatening and mysterious—in its relation to “oasis earth.”2 In
Goethe’s scientific writings, the morphologically ordered universe offers, at
best, a precarious opportunity for human dwelling, self-development, and (as
Blumenberg would say), “self-assertion” (Selbstbehauptung); Spengler’s mor-
phology goes further, seeing the demonic threat of “nature” as a predictable
pattern, a law of the rise and fall of human cultures.
6. Demonic Character.  To the extent that the unique identity of the indi-
vidual is taken to be the decisive element in an existential lowest terms, the
demonic is not a set of parameters of human development but rather defines
the limits with respect to which exceptions and transgressions may be per-
formed. In the paragraph of Poetry and Truth on demonic character, Goethe
interprets the demonic in terms of the outer limits of existence by focusing
on individuals who represent a unique challenge, not only within their own
historical moment but “to the universe itself” (das Universum selbst, HA
10:177). The universe always triumphs over the individual in the end, but
the paragraph closes with the “the monster motto” (der ungeheure Spruch):
Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse (None but a god can go against a god,
HA 10:177). This formulation, perhaps due to its clarificatory or illustrative
value with respect to Goethe’s enigmatic definitions of the demonic, allowed
“demonic character” to become a dominant understanding of the demonic
more generally.3 In book 20 of Poetry and Truth, however, demonic char-
acters are presented as reactive and representational in their relation to the
demonic itself. Such characters, like demons, inhabit an imaginary world into
which Goethe fled in order to escape from the demonic. The self-portrait of
book 20 shows a protagonist tormented by a pathological inability to decide,
196 Transformations of the Demonic

who invents a perfectly unself-conscious and charismatic character named

Egmont. Neither Egmont, however, nor his rival Alba define the demonic—
nor does Napoleon, who famously represented Goethe’s real-world ideal of
demonic character. In the context of the monster motto, demonic charac-
ter reflects the untransparent origins of rivalry, enmity, and titanic striving.
The idea of demonic character questions the limits of what a charismatic or
single-minded person can do or be despite the constant opposition of chance
and history. At the limit, demonic characters may exhibit signs of demonic
possession or madness, but, at the more conventional level, they reflect the
fascination exerted by heroes, villains, and martyrs.
7. Demonic Irony.  Heimito von Doderer’s novel The Demons, which is
demonstrably rooted in Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Spengler, and Lukács, focuses
on forms and manifestations of the demonic while deemphasizing and prob-
lematizing demonic character. His novel shows the limits placed on the
development of “demonic” geniuses or heroes (in Lukács’s sense) by contrast-
ing such figures against the obstacles to their self-realization in a supposedly
“modern” world in which human lives are systematically ordered and insti-
tutionally administered. Such systems produce a multiplicity of internal and
external checks upon the self-realization of character and talents. In The
Demons, the human norm is a developmental limbo, whereas heroes, villains,
and geniuses—if they exist at all—are indistinguishable from the idealiza-
tions of conventional literary types.4 What emerges is both frustration and
relief with respect to the modern requirement of living an unexampled life
without precedent or role model. The antidote to demonization thus remains
Lukács’s novelistic irony, which reveals demonic characters as false idealiza-
tions. Irony is also demonic in a different sense: it is only possible in the
interim of a “failed secularization,” in which things are not what they seem
to be; in which the old gods have been replaced by demons; in which a single
unquestionable overarching source of value, meaning, and authority has been
fragmented into semi-autonomous spheres and perspectives; in which even
God Himself—Lukács’s “Schadenfreude of the creator”—can only be con-
ceived as ironic.
8. Demonic Political Theology.  The demonic can also be understood as
a limit case of theological rhetoric. The transformations listed above allow
it to be characterized as a borderline form of what is often called political
theology. The demonic is, however, not a typical case of the use of theologi-
cal imagery to mask political ends (as Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the
Modern Age argues against Carl Schmitt). In the context of such consid-
erations, the choice of the term “the demonic” can only be understood as
theological rhetoric plus irony, with the irony residing in the fact that what is
called “the demonic” refers precisely to an a-theological or atheistic situation.
The demonic posits an absence of reliable providential principles (i.e., gods),
which does not result in utter chaos or a completely a-teleological void but
which produces a world of limited teleologies in which the coherence that
Transformations of the Demonic 197

remains is ironically called “demonic.” The point of the theological metaphor

of the demonic, therefore, is that in the absence of gods, there also can be no
real demons. But whatever is running amok in the world, for better or for
worse, is the result of “demons.”
This irony behind the idea of the demonic prevents it from being a classic
case of political theology defined as the secularization of a previously religious
or theological substance that has been legitimately or illegitimately trans-
posed into a modern political and societal form. The demonic is, however,
from a variety of political perspectives, regularly invoked to contest the desir-
ability or realizability of proclaimed secularizations—but it is not a “secular”
circumlocution of a previously religious concept of the type: “x is the secular-
ized y.” Even if one were to hypothesize that the demonic represents a modern
version of the ancient idea of fate, this would not be coherent because the idea
of fate itself may exist in various modern versions that may or may not cor-
respond to prior “religious” conceptions. Benjamin argues that the correlated
ideas of fate and the mythic continued to exist in modernity, which also makes
it difficult to see why the demonic should be fate’s “secularization.” The con-
nection of the demonic to fate only makes sense in the context of an unstable
characterization of the transformation of an idealized past moment within a
supposedly modern world. The word “demonic” may (negatively) character-
ize fate, but it implies a belief neither in “demons” nor in “secularization.”
To the contrary, this idea of “demonic” fate excludes the belief in demons to
the extent that it is overtly metaphorical; and it is ironic in Lukács’s sense to
the extent that it knowingly attributes something like demonic influence to a
world in which no actual demons are expected to appear.
In a short text by Blumenberg called “Political Theology III” (recently
published in his correspondence with Schmitt), he suggests that the dubious
and confusing idea of political theology may refer to and express the con-
stantly renewable striving for new absolutes and absolutisms.5 This definition
implies that the non-absolute—the demonic—is characteristic of the secular
status quo. Such a demonic state can ambiguously serve both as the pretext
for its own overcoming—in the coming of new “gods”—and as the vehicle
for coming to terms with the perennial absence of absolutes. The demonic in
this sense is both the primary affect of a secular world and the motor of a
return to religion.
9. Demonic Remainders in the History of Reason and Rationalization. 
The following sentences from the scene of Mignon’s death at the end of
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship were written well before Goethe
had developed his “official” concept of the demonic, but they easily fit into
this context:

Er dachte mit großer Schnelle eine Reihe von Schicksalen durch, oder
vielmehr er dachte nicht, er ließ das auf seine Seele wirken, was er
nicht entfernen konnte. Es gibt Augenblicke des Lebens, in welchen
198 Transformations of the Demonic

die Begebenheiten gleich geflügelten Weberschiffchen vor uns sich hin

und wider bewegen und unaufhaltsam ein Gewebe vollenden, das wir
mehr oder weniger selbst gesponnen und angelegt haben. (HA 7:544)

With great speed he thought through a series of fates, or rather, he

did not think, he merely allowed something to work [wirken] upon
his soul, which he could not remove from it. There are moments in
life, in which the events [Begebenheiten] are like the weaver’s flying
shuttles that move to and fro in front of us and ceaselessly complete a
textile that we have more or less spun and set into motion ourselves.

Mignon cannot be revived, and Wilhelm’s experience of disorientation and

shock is expressed as an idea of the demonic that is not identical to fate but
reacts to a fate-like situation. The demonic here is the course of events itself,
reflected in the mind of the subject-object of these events; it is the subjec-
tive calculation and retrospective permutation of possible fates in view of
the ambiguity of (1) the degree to which the individual is productive of and
responsible for the events in which he or she plays a role and (2) the degree
to which other forces and instances may have set the stage and written the
script. In the face of events that seem to move by themselves as a perpe-
tuum mobile external to the subject, he or she is able to imagine unfolding
events as a by-product of his or her intended actions and unconscious intents.
This version of the demonic inheres in the individual’s contradictory sense
of responsibility for events and the simultaneous inability to control their
course. Such a relation to events formulates itself retrospectively as guilt: the
pull of the demonic is experienced most intensely at a point when it is too late
to substantially alter the outcome. As in Wundt’s and Freud’s conceptions of
primitive man’s relation to demons, the demonic is essentially a “post-” con-
struction, a relation after the fact to a completed transgression. The demonic
is the justified or unjustified, unjustifiable sense of complicity with a finished
course of events. Fate in this model is not a single fate, but a serial conception
whose mechanics can only be determined partially and belatedly.
Regardless of whether the term “crisis” is used to describe any aspect
of demonic events or the reaction to them, the relation to such events is
that of a process of rationalization, not in the sense of Max Weber, but as
a pragmatic attempt to make sense of a fait accompli. The explicability
or inexplicability of the chain in question, its questionable unity and the
degree to which it appears to be generated by or to impinge upon the free-
dom of the subject, makes a difference for the convincing applicability of
the adjective “demonic” in any given instance. The demonic thrives on the
unknowability of origins and causes; it subsists at the limits of explicability
and theorizability. In Benjamin’s terms: the demonic occurs within the zone
of divine violence, in which an old order has not yet consolidated itself in a
new one and the rationality and ends of ongoing events remain undecided.
Transformations of the Demonic 199

The existence of such a zone of demonic ambiguity implies nothing about the
chains of events that gave rise to it. A sequence of events may be rational or
irrational, expected or unexpected, predictable or unpredictable, accidental
or necessary, depending on the mode of its analysis and the perspective from
which it is viewed. The demonic, on the other hand, depends on a specific
perspective: even for so-called primitive man, it is an uncanny encounter with
the limits of rationalization based on the presupposition that events can be
brought into line with reason (in the sense of ends) and with reasons (in the
sense of causes). If this were not the case, there would be no internal calculus,
no sense of an unbalanced equation, no demonic anomaly—only business as
usual. As a category of event, the demonic manifests itself between “systems”
and their “environments”—but its perception is connected to the “lifeworld”
of individual subjects. The demonic is, however, primarily an aspect of nei-
ther instrumental nor of communicative reason—but the communication of
the demonic, the attempt to come to terms with it, implies specific modes
of communication. For Goethe, Urworte are the medium of intersubjective
communication (Verständigung) about the demonic. The demonic is also not
a question of the rationality or irrationality or the good or evil intents of
given subjects: it manifests itself in the subjective inability to perform a suc-
cessful rationalization, but this inability itself—virtually by definition—may
not be rationalizable. Having or expecting a reason for everything may itself
be a form of irrationality, whereas the demonic reflects a rational deferral in
the application of reasons.
This is not only a conservative finding with respect to the ongoing poten-
tials of traditions called “theory” and their commitments to reason and
rationality. My work shows how the demonic shaped a largely unrecognized
or misrecognized prehistory of twentieth-century theory (especially of the
Frankfurt School). The demonic refers to a structure of historical motivation
that puts pressure on the differences between instrumental, theoretical, and
communicative reason—and therefore also lends itself to literary formulation.
The demonic may consist and persist in the recognition and misrecognition
of crises, but it says nothing about the proper response to them or which
(if any) genres of writing or action are appropriate or adequate. Thus, in
the light of the demonic, one might be tempted to see theory as an increas-
ingly outmoded form of discourse—but for anyone invested in theoretical
problems, this suggestion itself poses pressing theoretical questions. What
if previous understandings of the rationality of “lifeworlds” and “systems”
no longer hold? What happens when theoretical distinctions based on an
increasingly tenuous recourse to a specific “state of reality” (Weltzustand in
Lukács’s sense) can no longer be made coherent in terms of an underlying
philosophy of history? What if the demonic is, as usual, in the process of
shifting its paradigms?
 Demonic History
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Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
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 Appendix

German Text and English Translation of

Goethe’s “Urworte Orphisch” (with Commentary)

“Urworte Orphisch” (“Orphic Primal Words”)

Nachstehende fünf Stanzen sind schon im zweyten Heft der Morphologie

abgedruckt, allein sie verdienen wohl einem größeren Publicum bekannt zu
werden; auch haben Freunde gewünscht daß zum Verständniß derselben eini-
ges geschähe, damit dasjenige was sich hier fast nur ahnen läßt auch einem
klaren Sinne gemäß und einer reinen Erkenntiniß übergeben sey.
[The following five stanzas are already printed in the second issue of the
morphology, but they certainly still deserve to become known to a larger
public. Certain friends have also expressed the desire that something might
occur for the sake of their comprehension, in order that what is at present
almost exclusively the object of an uncertain premonition be rendered in
accordance with a clearer meaning and a purer understanding.]
Was nun von älteren und neueren orphischen Lehren überliefert worden, hat
man hier zusammenzudrängen, poetisch, compendios, lakonisch vorzutragen
gesucht. Diese wenigen Strophen enthalten viel Bedeutendes in einer Folge, die,
wenn man sie erst kennt, dem Geiste die wichigsten Betrachtungen erleichtert.
[In the following I have tried to compress whatever has been passed down
of older and newer Orphic teachings, to present them in a way that is at once
poetic, compendious and laconic. These few strophes contain much of great
significance in a sequence, which, once one has come to know it, make the
most important observations easy for the mind.]

Daimwn, Dämon
Wie an dem Tag der Dich der Welt verliehen
Die Sonne stand zum Gruße der Planeten,
Bist alsobald und fort und fort gediehen,
Nach dem Gesetz wonach Du angetreten.
So mußt Du sein, Dir kannst Du nicht entfliehen,
So sagten schon Sybillen, so Propheten,
Und keine Zeit und keine Macht zerstückelt
Geprägte Form die lebend sich entwickelt.

201
202 Appendix

[Daimwn, Demon
As on the day you were granted to the world,
The sun stood to greet the planets,
You likewise began to thrive, forth and forth,
Following the law that governed your accession.
You must be so, you cannot flee yourself,
Thus sibyls long ago pronounced, thus prophets,
And neither time nor any power can dismember
Characteristic form, living, self-developing.]

Der Bezug der Ueberschrift auf die Strophe selbst bedarf einer Erläuter-
ung. Der Dämon bedeutet hier die nothwendige, bey der Geburt unmittelbar
ausgesprochene, begränzte Individualität der Person, das Charakteristische
wodurch sich der Einzelne von jedem andern, bey noch so großer Aehn-
lichkeit unterscheidet. Diese Bestimmung schrieb man dem einwirkenden
Gestirn zu und es ließen sich die unendlich mannigfaltigen Bewegungen
und Beziehungen der Himmelskörper, unter sich selbst und zu der Erde,
gar schicklich mit den mannigfaltigen Abwechselungen der Geburten in
Bezug stellen. Hiervon sollte nun auch das künftige Schicksal des Menschen
ausgehen, und man möchte, jenes erste zugebend, gar wohl gestehen daß
angeborne Kraft und Eigenheit mehr als alles Uebrige des Menschen Schicksal
bestimme.
[The title’s relation to the strophe itself is in need of a clarification. Here
the Dämon refers to the necessary and delimited individuality of the per-
son that is pronounced at birth in an unmediated fashion; the Dämon refers
to that which is characteristic, that by which each individual differs from
every other, no matter how great the similarities may be. This determina-
tion used to be attributed to the influence of the constellations, and it was
possible, quite ingeniously, to produce a relation quite conveniently between
the infinitely manifold motions and relations of the heavenly bodies, among
themselves and with respect to the earth, and the manifold permutations of
human births. Through this connection, the future destiny of the individual
was supposed to proceed, and, assuming the initial premise is accepted, one
can quite easily concede that innate force and individuality determine human
fate much more than anything else.]
Deshalb spricht die Strophe die Unveränderlichkeit des Individuums mit
wiederholter Beteuerung aus. Das noch so entschieden Einzelne kann, als ein
Endliches, gar wohl zerstört, aber, so lange sein Kern zusammenhält, nicht
zersplittert, noch zerstückelt werden, sogar durch Generationen hindurch.
[Thus the strophe pronounces the invariability of the individual with
repeated assurance. That which is most decisively individual, insofar as it is
finite, can certainly be destroyed, but, as long as its core remains intact, it can
never become fragmented or torn apart, even across generations.]
Goethe’s “Urworte Orphisch” 203

Dieses feste, zähe, dieses nur aus sich selbst zu entwicklende Wesen kommt
freylich in mancherley Beziehungen, wodurch sein erster und ursprünglicher
Charakter in seinen Wirkungen gehemmt, in seinen Neigungen gehindert
wird, und was hier nun eintritt, nennt unsere Philosophie:
[Of course even this entity—fixed and tough, an essence to be developed
only out of itself—enters into many relations that may impede the effects
of its first and original character, or hinder it in its affections. That which
appears in this moment of resistance, according to our philosophy, is called:]

Tuch, das Zufällige

Die strenge Gränze doch umgeht gefällig
Ein Wandelndes, das mit und um uns wandelt;
Nicht einsam bleibst Du, bildest Dich gesellig,
Und handelt wohl so wie ein anderer handelt.
Im Leben ists bald hin-, bald wiederfällig,
Es ist ein Tand und wird so durchgetandelt.
Schon hat sich still der Jahre Kreis geründet,
Die Lampe harrt der Flamme die entzündet.

[Tuch, the Accidental

Yet this strict limit is gently circumscribed
By a fluctuation that flows around and with us;
You are not alone, but shape yourself socially,
And must certainly act just as another acts.
In life things are often due, overdue, redone,
It is a trinket, passed in makeshift thrift.
The circle of the years is already silently closed,
The lamp awaits the flame that will ignite it.]

Zufällig ist es jedoch nicht daß einer aus dieser oder jener Nation, Stamm
oder Familie sein Herkommen ableite: denn die auf der Erde verbreiteten
Nationen sind, so wie ihre mannigfaltigen Verzweigungen, als Individuen
anzusehen und die Tyche kann nur bey Vermischung und Durchkreuzung
eingreifen. Wir sehen das wichtige Beyspiel von hartnäckiger Persönlichkeit
solcher Stämme an der Judenschaft; europäische Nationen in anderer Welt-
theile versetzt legen ihren Charakter nicht ab, und nach mehreren hundert
Jahren wird in Nordamerika der Engländer, der Franzose, der Deutsche gar
wohl zu erkennen seyn; zugleich aber auch werden sich bey Durchkreuz­
ungen die Wirkungen der Tyche bemerklich machen, wie der Mestize an
einer kläreren Hautfarbe zu erkennen ist. Bey der Erziehung, wenn sie nicht
öffentlich und national ist, behauptet Tyche ihre wandelbaren Rechte. Säu-
gamme und Wärterinn, Vater oder Vormund, Lehrer oder Aufseher, so wie
204 Appendix

alle die ersten Umgebungen, an Gespielen, ländlicher oder städtischer Local-

ität, alles bedingt die Eigenthümlichkeit, durch frühere Entwicklung, durch
Zurückdrängen oder Beschleunigen; der Dämon freylich hält sich durch alles
durch, und dieses ist denn die eigenliche Natur, der alte Adam und wie man
es nennen mag, der, so oft auch ausgetrieben, immer wieder unbezwinglicher
zurückkehrt.
[It is however not accidental that one derives one’s descent from this or
that nation, tribe or family: because the nations that are spread across the
earth are, just like their manifold branching, to be seen as individuals, and
Tyche can only intercede by way of mixing and crossing. We see the most
important example of the stubborn personality of such tribes in the Jewry.
European nations, transported to other parts of the world, also would not
cast off their character, and after several hundred years in North America,
the Englishman, the Frenchman, the German, will still be recognizable. At the
same time however, the effects of Tyche will make themselves known in the
case of crossings, just as the mestizo can be recognized by lighter colored skin.
In child-rearing and education, as long as they are not public and national,
Tyche also asserts her mutable rights. Wet nurse and babysitter, father or
guardian, teacher or supervisor, just like all of the earliest environments,
playmates, rural or urban locality, all of this conditions the individual pecu-
liarity, whether through an earlier development, or by forcefully suppressing
or accelerating. The Dämon, of course, perseveres through all of it, and this
is then the proper nature, the “old Adam” and whatever else one may wish to
call it, who, so often he may be driven out, always returns again even more
irresistibly.]
In diesem Sinne einer nothwendig aufgestellten Individualität hat man
einem jeden Menschen seinen Dämon zugeschrieben, der ihm gelegentlich
ins Ohr raunt was denn eigentlich zu thun sey, und so wählte Sokrates den
Giftbecher, weil ihm ziemte zu sterben.
[In this sense of a necessarily erected individuality, every person was
ascribed with his own Dämon, who occasionally mumbles into his ear to tell
him the proper course of action, and thus Socrates chose to take the poison,
because it was fitting that he should die.]
Allein Tyche läßt nicht nach und wirkt besonders auf die Jugend immer-
fort, die sich, mit ihren Neigungen, Spielen, Geselligkeiten und flüchtigem
Wesen bald da bald dorthin wirft und nirgends Halt noch Befriedigung findet.
Da entsteht denn mit dem wachsenden Tage eine ernstere Unruhe, eine
gründlichere Sehnsucht; die Ankunft eines neuen Göttlichen wird erwartet.
[But Tyche does not relent and continues to exert its influence, especially
upon the young, who, with their inclinations, games, camaraderies, and fickle
nature, often cast themselves in this direction and that, and are nowhere
able to find rest or satisfaction. Thus emerges with the dawning day a more
earnest discontent, a more fundamental longing; the arrival of a new divinity
is awaited.]
Goethe’s “Urworte Orphisch” 205

ErwV, Liebe
Die bleibt nicht aus!—Er stürzt vom Himmel nieder,
Wohin er sich aus alter Oede schwang,
Er schwebt heran auf luftigem Gefieder
Um Stirn und Brust den Frühlingstag entlang,
Scheint jetzt zu fliehn, vom Fliehen kehrt er wieder,
Da wird ein Wohl im Weh, so süß und bang.
Gar manches Herz verschwebt im Allgemeinen,
Doch widmet sich das Edelste dem Einen.

[ErwV, Love
And there she is!—He hurtles down from the heaven,
Where he had lifted himself out of ancient chaos,
He soars and surges forward on airy wings
Surrounding brow and breast across the vernal day,
Seems now to flee, but in flight he turns about,
Creating pleasure in the pain, so happy and forlorn.
Many a heart drifts away in generality,
But the noblest devotes itself to the One.]

Hierunter ist alles begriffen was man, von der leisesten Neigung bis zur
leidenschaftlichsten Raserey, nur denken möchte; hier verbinden sich der indi-
viduelle Dämon und die verführende Tyche mit einander; der Mensch scheint
nur sich zu gehorchen, sein eigenes Wollen walten zu lassen, seinem Triebe zu
fröhnen, und doch sind es Zufälligkeiten die sich unterschieben, Fremdartiges
was ihn von seinem Wege ablenkt; er glaubt zu erhaschen und wird gefangen,
er glaubt gewonnen zu haben und ist schon verloren. Auch hier treibt Tyche
wieder ihr Spiel, sie lockt den Verirrten zu neuen Labyrinthen, hier ist keine
Gränze des Irrens: denn der Weg ist ein Irrthum. Nun kommen wir in Gefahr
uns in der Betrachtung zu verlieren, daß das was auf das Besonderste ange-
legt schien ins Allgemeine verschwebt und zerfließt. Daher will das rasche
Eintreten der zwey letzten Zeilen uns einen entscheidenden Wink geben, wie
man allein diesem Irrsal entkommen und davor lebenslängliche Sicherheit
gewinnen möge.
[Included here is everything imaginable, from the most quiet affection to
the most impassioned raving. Here the individual Dämon and the seducing
Tyche join together; the human seems to belong only to himself, to allow
his own desire to reign, to indulge his own instinct, and yet these are mere
contingencies that introduce themselves at this moment, alien natures, which
distract him from his own path. He means to capture and is himself taken
prisoner; he thinks he has won and is already lost. Even here Tyche plays its
game, it entices the disoriented individual to new labyrinths. Here there is no
206 Appendix

limit to his erring: because the way itself is error. Now we are in danger of
losing ourselves in the observation that that which seemed to be predisposed
to the most particular and specific now floats away and dissolves into the
realm of generality. For this reason, the sudden interjection of the final two
lines gives us a decisive signal, as to the sole means by which one may escape
this perdition and gain lifelong security from it.]
Denn nun zeigt sich erst wessen der Dämon fähig sey; er, der selbstständige,
der mit unbedingtem Wollen in die Welt griff und nur mit Verdruß empfand
wenn Tyche, da oder dort, in den Weg trat, er fühlt nun daß er nicht allein
durch Natur bestimmt und gestempelt sey: jetzt wird er in seinem Innern
gewahr daß er sich selbst bestimmen könne, daß er den durchs Geschick ihm
zugeführten Gegenstand nicht nur gewaltsam ergreifen, sondern auch sich
aneignen und, was noch mehr ist, ein zweytes Wesen, eben wie sich selbst, mit
ewiger unzerstörlicher Neigung umfassen könne.
[Because only now does the Dämon show what it is capable of; he, the
independent, selfish one, who has intervened in the world with unconditional
desire, and only felt frustration when Tyche got in his way, here and there—
now he feels that he is determined and stamped not only by nature. Now
he perceives within himself that he can determine himself, that he may not
only forcefully acquire the object that fate has brought to him, but also may
assimilate it and, more importantly, can embrace a second being like himself
with eternal, indestructible affection.]
Kaum war dieser Schritt gethan, so ist durch freyen Entschluß die Frey-
heit aufgegeben; zwey Seelen sollen sich in einen Leib, zwey Leiber in eine
Seele schicken und indem eine solche Uebereinkunft sich einleitet, so tritt,
zu wechselseitiger liebevoller Nöthigung, noch eine Dritte hinzu; Eltern und
Kinder müssen sich abermals zu einem Ganzen bilden, groß ist die gemein-
same Zufriedenheit, aber größer das Bedürfniß. Der aus so viel Gliedern
bestehende Körper krankt, gemäß dem irdischen Geschick, an irgend einem
Theile, und, anstatt daß er sich im Ganzen freuen sollte, leidet er am Einzel-
nen und dem ohngeachtet wird ein solches Verhältniß so wünschenswerth als
nothwendig gefunden. Der Vortheil zieht einen jeden an und man läßt sich
gefallen die Nachtheile zu übernehmen. Familie reiht sich an Familie, Stamm
an Stamm, eine Völkerschaft hat sich zusammengefunden und wird gewahr
daß auch dem Ganzen fromme was der Einzelne beschloß, sie macht den
Beschluß unwiederruflich durchs Gesetz; alles was liebevolle Neigung frey-
willig gewährte wird nun Pflicht, welche tausend Pflichten entwickelt, und
damit alles ja für Zeit und Ewigkeit abschlossen sey, läßt weder Staat, noch
Kirche, noch Herkommen es an Zeremonien fehlen. Alle Theile sehen sich
durch die bündigen Contracte, durch die möglichsten Oeffentlichkeiten vor,
daß ja das Ganze in keinem kleinsten Theil durch Wankelmuth und Willkhür
gefährdet werde.
[This step is hardly taken, and freedom is given up through free deci-
sion; two souls must adapt to one body, two bodies to one soul, and in the
Goethe’s “Urworte Orphisch” 207

introduction of this agreement, thus they are joined, in reciprocal loving

duress, by a third; parents and children must likewise shape themselves into
a whole, and great is the satisfaction, but even greater is the sense of lack.
This body, comprised of so many members, takes ill, according to the way of
the world, in one or the other of its parts, and rather than taking pleasure in
itself as a whole, it suffers in its members, but such a relation is nevertheless
deemed to be as desirable as it is necessary. The advantages are attractive to
all, and each one concedes to go along when it comes to the disadvantages.
Family follows family, tribe follows tribe; a people has discovered itself and
perceives that the individual’s decision is also proper for the whole, and it
makes this verdict irrevocable in law. Everything that loving affection gave
voluntarily now becomes duty, which develops into thousands of duties. And
so that everything is resolved for all of time and eternity, neither state nor
church nor tradition will permit any lack of ceremonies. All members provide
for themselves through the most binding contracts and a maximum of public-
ness, so that precisely the whole may not be endangered even in its smallest
parts by fickleness and willfulness.]

Anagkh, Nöthigung
Da ist’s denn wieder wie die Sterne wollten:
Bedingung und Gesetz und aller Wille
Ist nur ein Wollen, weil wir eben sollten,
Und vor dem Willen schweigt die Willkühr stille;
Das Liebste wird vom Herzen weggescholten,
Dem harten Muß bequemt sich Will und Grille.
So sind wir scheinfrey denn, nach manchen Jahren,
Nur enger dran als wir am Anfang waren.

[Anagkh, Necessity
Now all follows once again the stars’ will:
The terms and laws and the wills of all
Are but a single will, just because we have to,
And before the will all choice is silenced;
The most beloved is exiled from the heart,
Desire and fancy submit to hard compulsion.
Thus apparently then, after many years, we are
Only more tightly bound than in the beginning.]

Keiner Anmerkungen bedarf wohl diese Strophe weiter; niemand ist dem
nicht Erfahrung genugsame Noten zu einem solchen Text darreichte, nei-
mand der sich nicht peinlich gezwängt fühlte wenn er nur erinnerungsweise
sich solche Zustände hervorruft, gar mancher der verzweifeln möchte wenn
208 Appendix

ihn die Gegenwart also gefangen hält. Wie froh eilen wir daher zu den letzten
Zeilen, zu denen jedes seine Gemüth sich gern den Commentar sittlich und
religios zu bilden übernehmen wird.
[This strophe is in need of no further commentary; there is no one whose
experience has not provided him with adequate notes to such a text, no
one, who has not felt himself painfully compelled, when he even so much
as recalls such situations in his memory, and there are even quite a few who
would want to despair, when the present moment holds him captive in this
way. How happily we then must rush to the final lines, where every gentle
spirit will gladly take over the task of creating their own ethical and religious
commentary.]

Elpis, Hoffnung
Doch solcher Grenze, solcher ehrnen Mauer
Höchst widerwärtge Pforte wird entriegelt,
Sie stehe nur mit alter Felsendauer!
Ein Wesen regt sich leicht und ungezügelt,
Aus Wolkendecke, Nebel, Regenschauer
Erhebt sie uns, mit ihr, durch sie beflügelt,
Ihr kennt sie wohl, sie schwärmt nach allen Zonen;
Ein Flügelschlag! und hinter uns Aeonen.

[Elpis, Hope
But such a limit, such a steely wall,
Its most revolting portal is unlatched,
Though it may stand with a mountain’s age!
A being arises lightly, without reigns,
Out of the clouds’ cover, fog and rainfall,
It lifts us up, with her, by her wings,
You know her well, she swarms toward every zone;
A wing flap! and behind us lie the eons.]
 Demonic History
Wetters, Kirk

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Wetters, Kirk.
Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present.
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Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/33934.

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 Notes

Introduction
1. Goethe translations are in all cases my own. Unless otherwise noted, cita-
tions refer to the widely available Hamburg edition: J. W. von Goethe, Werke:
Hamburger Ausgabe (14 vols.), edited by Erich Trunz (Munich: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998) (abbreviated HA followed by volume and page
number). When other editions contain important differences, they are also ref-
erenced: J. W. von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher, Gespräche (39
vols.) (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999) (abbreviated FA);
Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, edited by Karl Richter et al. (Munich: Carl Hanser
Verlag, 1985–98) (abbreviated MA).
2. Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (abbreviated AaM), 437; unless other-
wise noted, all translations are my own.
3. On “onomasiology,” see Assmann, “Translating Gods: Religion as a Factor
of Cultural (Un)Translatability.” Where semasiology “starts from the word and
asks for the referent,” onomasiology “starts from the referent and asks for the
word” (139).
4. See Brodsky, In the Place of Language, on the architecture of the referent in
Goethe: “the form of the referent . . . [is] demarcation rather than signification
. . . as neither given in nature nor by thought . . . but made . . . through . . . the
forming of a place to which perception returns, on which imagination lingers”
(xv).
5. Mephistopheles himself is not a conventional personification of evil. He
famously claims to be “a part of the power that always wishes for ill and always
makes good” (Faust, vv. 1335–36; HA 3:47). See Schmidt-Dengler, “Teuf­
lisches bei Goethe,” which argues that after Klopstock’s Messias the German
Spätaufklärung became unable to identify the devil. The increasing fuzziness of
religious-metaphysical competencies allowed the devil to cede his position to the
demonic. But this is not the end of demons. To the contrary, lacking a single
personification of evil (Satan), evils become decentralized, depersonified, inex-
plicable. See also Muschg, “Goethes Glaube an das Dämonische” (336); and
Anderegg, Transformationen: Über Himmlisches und Teuflisches in Goethes
Faust (100, 170). Contrary to Goethe’s remarks to Eckermann, Anderegg estab-
lishes affinities between Mephisto and the demonic.
6. Muschg, “Goethes Glaube an das Dämonische,” says almost the same thing,
with a broader and more drastic emphasis: “The concept of the demonic thus
replaces the concept of God” (337, my translation).
7. The conception in question is that of Heraclitus’s fragment 119—ethos
anthropos daimon—which is often understood to mean that a man’s character is
his fate. See, for example, the discussion in Heidegger’s “Letter on ‘Humanism,’ ”

209
210 Notes to Pages 6–8

which argues that the fragment does not mean “Man’s Dämon is his individu-
ality [Seine Eigenart ist dem Menschen sein Dämon]” (Wegmarken, 354)—but
rather: “Der (geheuere) Aufenthalt ist dem Menschen das Offene für die Anwe-
sung des Gottes (des Un-geheueren)” (356). The Heraclitus connections are also
developed—at a degree of separation from Goethe—in Krell, Daimon Life; and
Hadot, The Veil of Isis.
8. Unlike Nicholls, I see Goethe’s concept as decidedly post-classicist. See
Szondi’s idea of “overcoming classicism,” developed in “Die Überwindung des
Klassizismus” and Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie 1 and 2.
9. Matala de Mazza’s “Dämonologie: Anmerkungen zu Hans Blumenberg”
outlines Blumenberg’s relation to Goethe. Her interpretation differs somewhat
from mine, perhaps because for me the demonic represents a specific mode of
self-reflection in Goethe, to which Blumenberg has a particular affinity. If, as
Matala de Mazza puts it, “Goethes Daseinskonzept der philosophischen Hal-
tung Blumenbergs widerstreb[t]” (169), then the aspect of Goethe’s thought that
Blumenberg resists is the titanic self-fashioning of the young Goethe. Thus Blu-
menberg (sympathetically) sees the demonic as a late attempt to come to terms
with an earlier (failed) Daseinskonzept. My own reading of Blumenberg is elabo-
rated in “Working Over Philosophy: Hans Blumenberg’s Reformulations of the
Absolute.” Wellbery in The Specular Moment expresses the shortcomings and
the strength of Blumenberg’s work in his characterization of it as “speculative
fiction” (445).
10. Hofmann’s 2001 Goethes Theologie provides a further contrast. Hof-
mann weaves the history of theological perspectives on Goethe together with the
theological possibilities presented by Goethe’s works. Hofmann represents the
discipline of theology, and raises the important question of the degree to which
Goethe can be adequately treated within traditional disciplinary boundaries.
11. The demonic in this understanding (addressed in chapter 3) is the sub-
lime object of myth, religion, and metaphysics. The following sentence expresses
the relation of the demonic and the mythic in Blumenberg: “Was er [Goethe]
an Napoleon dämonisch nennen wird . . . gehört der Kategorie des Mythischen
an” (AaM 559). Goethe translates the mythic as the demonic—and Blumenberg
translates it back.
12. For a detailed analysis of this figure of the “flight behind an image,” see
Kreienbrock’s forthcoming “Bilderfluchten: Zur Goetherezeption bei Hans Chris-
toph Buch, Hans Blumenberg und Georg Simmel.”
13. In another passage, Blumenberg cites Goethe’s words to Eckermann
from March 2, 1831, which state that the demonic manifests itself in events
(Begebenheiten) that cannot be resolved by understanding or reason (Verstand
und Vernunft). Blumenberg comments that this is “not an attempt at defining
the demonic but a description of the resistance that characterizes it” (AaM
518–19).
14. This is something different than Paul de Man’s Resistance to Theory.
Rather than subjects’ resistance to theoretical discourses, Blumenberg means the
resistance produced by objects that cannot be fully theorized.
15. Hofmann, based on Blumenberg, reads the demonic as a figure of disconti-
nuity in nature and history (Goethes Theologie, 355–74). Hofmann’s theological
approach unsurprisingly emphasizes the demonic (not the daemonic), but he
Notes to Pages 8–12 211

underscores “the vast compass of this word, which serves . . . as an Ersatz-con-
cept for the indeterminate divine beyond all preexisting models of theological
interpretation” (362, my translation).
16. I realize that this aspect may be a problem for some readers, but I would
respond that especially when it comes to Goethe, there is a need of scholarly
work that does not latently or overtly grapple with problems of mimetic rivalry
and ressentiment.
17. My approach generally accords with Mandelkow’s lengthy study, Goethe
in Deutschland. Reception history “does not seek an empathic relation to past
historical standpoints but to critically reflect these standpoints in the light of
contemporary research-interests [gegenwärtiger Erkenntnisinteressen]” (1:13, my
translation).
18. Conversations with colleagues in Bonn during my sabbatical year made
me concretely aware of this: Lars Friedrich traced the demonic to Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, Stephan Kraft to Gottfried Benn. A less personal example of
such connectivity is Jochen Schmidt, whose commentaries on Hölderlin’s “Der
Rhein” invoke the Dämon stanza of Goethe’s “Urworte Orphisch” (Schmidt,
Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens 1:405–6; Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und
Briefe, 862). The lines in Hölderlin read: “Ein Räthsel ist Reinentsprungenes. . . .
Denn / Wie du anfiengst, wirst du bleiben, / So viel auch wirket die Noth, / Und
die Zucht, das meiste nemlich / Vermag die Geburt, / Und der Lichtstral, der /
Dem Neugeborenen begegnet.” Given that Goethe’s poem was written more than
a decade later and without any awareness of Hölderlin’s, the connection might be
read as a sign of the infectiousness of the underlying idea (e.g., genius). The infec-
tion is thus traceable—but not isolable as long as it is traced under the heading of
“the demonic.” The term’s indefiniteness allows for a kind of unregulated traffic,
which does not mean that nothing is moving. To the contrary, it is a black market
of underground transactions.
19. In a broader sense, the critical awareness of the demonic represents a
critique of forms of social-characterological-political analysis that have been
endemic to countless spheres of thought and action. The demonic in this sense is a
limit-concept, a conception of the limits of the world—constantly changing due to
globalization and technology—as well as of the limits of history and the human.
The specificity of the word “demonic” characterizes the attempt to transcend
or transgress such limits. “The demonic” names a field of possible transvalua-
tions that are often simply referred to as “modern.” Calling modernity demonic
is not automatically conservative or anti-modern, to the extent that it refers to
the incessant dynamics of unforeseeability and unintended consequences: beyond
the ne plus ultra, skillful navigation is all there is.
20. Together with Gide, I would mention Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, a complex
case meriting a separate treatment. The novel’s fictional translator-biographer
renders the German word Dämon in English as “guiding genius” (109). This
seems to support the reading of Dämon as daemon, except that this daemon
belongs to a protagonist named Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (“devil’s shit” in Car-
lyle’s own translation, xiii). The “genius” is further specified as Eros, which, as
Teufelsdröckh writes, “may be either true or false, either seraphic or demoniac,
Inspiration or Insanity” (110), thereby implicating it in the ambiguity of the
demonic. Teufelsdröckh’s beloved Blumine is, in the same chapter, interpreted
212 Notes to Pages 12–15

as a Lucifer figure—emphasizing the lumine in Blumine. She is a “Light-bringer”

(111) and “Morning star” (113), who leaves Teufelsdröckh “falling, falling,
towards the Abyss” (113). Additional traces of Goethe’s demonic are evident
in Carlyle’s novel, in a persistent metaphorics of spectrality: 117 (“the Future is
wholly a Stygian Darkness, spectre-bearing”), 130, 143 (“the Universe is not dead
and demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres”), 151, 167 (“poor devil! Spectres
are appointed to haunt him”), 196 (“Witchcraft, and all manner of Spectre-work,
and Demonology, we have now named Madness”), 198 (“but a pale spectral
illusion”), 201 (“the veriest Spectre-Hunt”), 223 (“an authentic Spectre”); see
also the discussions of “Demon-Worship” in the chapter “The Dandiacal Body”
(207–18).
21. See especially Blumenberg’s Work on Myth (AaM 567–604).
22. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 69 and 99.
23. Next to Tillich, I would also mention Wundt’s chapters on demons in his
Völkerpsychologie (1906 and 1910), which represent an attempt to systematize
the phenomena qualifiable as “demonic.”
24. Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und
sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen, esp. 179–82. Otto relies on Goethe’s definition
of the demonic as that which evades both “reason and understanding” (Ver-
stand und Vernunft, 179) and clearly considers it a predecessor of his idea of
the numinous (das Numinose, 180). The change of name reflects a clear shift
in emphasis: Otto connects Goethe with “heathen” irreligiosity (182). Between
Otto and Tillich, Volz’s 1924 Das Dämonische in Jahwe also develops a theologi-
cal discourse on the demonic. Volz, whose essay appeared in the same series as
Tillich’s (Mohr-Siebeck in Tübingen), refers to both Otto and Goethe (41). See
also Nicholls (Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic, 229–34) on Blumenberg’s ref-
erence to Otto’s das Numinose (AaM 559); both Nicholls and Blumenberg find
that the substitution of “the numinous” for “the demonic” reflects a deliberate
misunderstanding.
25. Muschg’s 1958 “Goethes Glaube an das Dämonische” posits Goethe’s
“belief” in all kinds of demons. Muschg’s postwar anti-Gundolf position holds
the line against classicization, harmonization, and idolization. The focus on
Goethe’s biography, personality, and beliefs falls within a counter-tradition that
tends to view the demonic as an aspect of Goethe’s supposed superstitiousness.
26. Agamben’s “Benjamin and the Demonic” discusses ancient traditions
of daemonology (or demonology); Goethe comes up occasionally, but ancient
sources are the main focus. Agamben speaks of an idealized “alter ego” that
began to be conceived in the “fusion of the ancient pagan and Neoplatonic motif
of the idios daimon of every man with the Jewish motif of the celestial image,
demuth or zelem, in whose image each man is created” (145–46).
27. Scholarship on ancient demonology traces comparable semantic and ortho-
graphic borderlines: Rosen-Zvi’s Demonic Desires, a study of the rabbinic yetzer
and “other demonic and semi-demonic entities” (9), deals with “demons” as the
sources of evil. Padel, however, cited by Rosen-Zvi (7), writes of “daemons” in
the context of fifth-century Greek antiquity. The conceptions developed by Padel
are in turn compatible with post-Goethean ideas of the demonic: “Something
‘comes in’ from the outside . . . . Something already in the mind comes out”
(Padel, In and Out of the Mind, 134). Daemons “had to be lived with, just as
Notes to Pages 15–19 213

we have to live with radioactivity, carcinogens in our food, and a thinning ozone
layer” (138).
28. I use the “primal words” without capitalization when referring to the five
words alone (and not to the poem); even more frequently, however, I will use
the German Urworte or “Urworte” (to refer to the poem). Also, in the three
publications of the poem during Goethe’s lifetime, it was punctuated differ-
ently: “Urworte. Orphisch.” (1820), “Urworte Orphisch.” (1820), and “Urworte.
Orphisch.” (1828). I concentrate on the second 1820 publication, so I have fol-
lowed its punctuation; the full German text, including Goethe’s commentary, and
my own English translation are reproduced as an appendix.
29. Schmidt questions whether the “Urworte”—as a work—should be referred
to in the singular or plural. He argues for reading them as a poem rather than as
poems or a cycle of poems. Schmidt’s argument is based on the interdependence
of the stanzas (Goethes Altersgedicht, 28)—but the top title, “Urworte,” is plu-
ral, and Goethe himself does not refer to this work as “a poem” but rather as “a
series” of Urworte and as “stanzas” (Buck, Goethes “Urworte. Orphisch,” abbre-
viated UO, 72). To preserve the plurality and the integrity of this series, I refer
to the “Urworte” and their corresponding “stanzas” in the plural. In contrast to
Schmidt, see Sewell, The Orphic Voice (269–75): “Each of the Urworte . . . is a
poem” (274).
30. See Swales, “Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Urworte. Orphisch’ ” (63). But
Swales is hardly alone. Nicholls, though he largely avoids the question, indirectly
follows Swales and many others in focusing on the Dämon-Tyche pair. The con-
flation of Dämon and das Dämonische is the norm—against Benjamin’s critique
of Gundolf and despite Goethe’s indication (UO 72) that all five stanzas comprise
a concept of the demonic.
31. The long-standing tradition of invoking unattributed snippets of the
Dämon stanza as a part of panegyrics—nominally attributed to Goethe—on the
power of fate and the lives of great men continues even in relatively recent publi-
cations. See, for example, Seibt’s Goethe und Napoleon, 244–45.
32. Another side example is Hans Pfitzner’s musical setting of the “Urworte”
for vocal quartet, chorus, and orchestra, which was left incomplete after his death
in 1949 (Schrott, Die Persönlichkeit Hans Pfitzners, 137–39). Pfitzner is a good
reader of Goethe’s stanzas insofar as he understands them as a cycle, and his use
of solo voices with chorus balances individualizing and collectivizing moments.
But it is striking that one of the last works of such a notoriously conservative
composer should be an “Urworte” setting.
33. To give a sense of how established the language of the demonic had become
only a few decades later, I quote from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der
Aufklärung, a sentence that may echo Spengler or Benjamin—in addition to
Otto or Freud: “Das von den Dämonen und ihren begrifflichen Abkömmlingen
gründlich gereinigte Dasein nimmt in seiner blanken Natürlichkeit den numinosen
Charakter an, den die Vorwelt den Dämonen zuschob” (Adorno, Gesammelte
Schriften, 3:45).
34. The “demonic novel” is meant as a condensation of the connections
between the demonic and the novel and not as a specific subgenre. Nor is it a
“modern epic” in Franco Moretti’s sense. But, taking a cue from Moretti, the
demonic novel may fit his characterization of Russian literature, in which “epic
214 Notes to Pages 19–21

and novel are intertwined with an intensity unknown to other European litera-
ture” (Modern Epic, 50). Extending Moretti’s theses, Doderer’s Demons may
reflect Austria’s exceptional relation (comparable to nineteenth-century Russia)
to the European historical norms of progress and enlightenment. For the same
reason, another important case would be Melville’s Moby-Dick: the importance
of Goethe’s idea of the demonic for the conception of the figure of Ahab is argued
in Robert Milder’s “Nemo Contra Deum . . . : Melville and Goethe’s ‘Demonic.’ ”
This essay contains striking formulations, the importance of which is amplified
by the fact that Milder is not a Goethe scholar by trade: “the demonic occupied
an anomalous position in both a theistic and an atheistic scheme of the universe”
(225); “Goethe’s solution was as appalling as the problem it addressed, for it
seemed to abandon the world to the rule of the demonic while positing a God
who, if He existed at all, was so removed from human affairs and so morally and
spiritually indeterminate that belief in Him was not far from practical atheism”
(227). Milder notes that the demonic is a subjective projection, but does not go
so far as to call it a superstition: “It gathers under one denomination and causal
scheme various undeniable elements of human experience, but whether it exists
as anything more than a projection is a moot point” (231–32); for Melville “it
may have been the very ambiguousness of the demonic which proved most lib-
erating” (232).

Chapter One
1. Compare UO 21–30; see also Staiger (Goethe, 3:96–99); Swales (“Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe ‘Urworte. Orphisch,’ ” 59); Nicholls (Goethe’s Concept of
the Daemonic, 230–40); and Schmidt (Goethes Altersgedicht Urworte. Orphisch,
8–11). Buck reproduces the three first publications of Goethe’s text, while Schmidt
includes the facsimile of a manuscript in the hand of Goethe’s copyist (41–43).
Buck also includes excerpts of diary entries’ correspondences pertaining to the
“Urworte” (UO 67–76) as well as the writings of Hermann, Creuzer, and Zoëga
(UO 76–86). To my knowledge, no one (including Buck) has systematically inves-
tigated these sources in the context of the “Urworte.” The reason for this neglect
may be the complexity and—for Germanists—relative obscurity of the material.
If I were to speculate on Goethe’s motives with respect to debates on the origins
of antiquity, I would say that he wanted to maintain the unity and polar opposi-
tion of the Greek “classical” vs. the Israelite world (structured by polytheism vs.
monotheism). Goethe disagrees with historical methods that mix traditions “by
transsubstantiating everything with everything else” (UO 74). The “Urworte”
seek to speculatively imagine a transcendental origin of antiquity—which may
also run the risk of “confusing everything”—but I believe that Goethe’s intent
was to produce a synthetic ideal of pre-antiquity from which everything else,
including monotheism and polytheism, could be derived. This attempt pertains
not only to the discourses up to Goethe’s time, which are complex enough, but
to similarly motivated later works, such as Bachofen’s Mutterrecht and Freud’s
Moses and Monotheism.
2. In a letter to Sulpiz Boisserée from July 16, 1818, Goethe expresses the
desire to “bring diffuse antiquity back to its quintessence” (UO 72).
3. Jochen Schmidt (Goethes Altergedicht Urworte. Orphisch) underscores the
paradigmatic status of the primal words as general categories that encompass
Notes to Pages 21–30 215

all human life (10). However, the context of Goethe’s scientific writings suggests
extensions beyond the primary anthropological valence.
4. See Willer, “Urworte: Zum Konzept und Verfahren der Etymologie”; Willer
describes the German “Ur-” prefix as “an inherited transfer that creates both
distance and continuity” (36, my translation); he also develops early nineteenth-
century contexts—etymology and comparative mythology—into which Goethe’s
“Urworte” intervened.
5. Blumenberg also emphasizes (AaM 165–91) that the time prior to the foun-
dational texts of antiquity is much more vast than the times for which we have
written records. What we perceive as a foundation and an origin can only have
been the culmination of a lengthy process.
6. Compare Swales (“Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Urworte. Orphisch,’ ”
62–63); Schmidt (Goethes Altersgedicht Urworte. Orphisch, 16 and 32); Gun-
dolf’s reading is addressed in chapter 3. Buck reads the relation as dialectical.
It is, however, not a Hegelian dialectic. Rather than an immanent movement
of opposition and reversal, the “Urworte” consistently reflect the intervention
of an external force: the unity and uniqueness of Dämon must conform to a
more general Tyche; this opposition is catalyzed by the appearance of Eros,
who unexpectedly promotes social integration (Ananke). The Eros-Ananke
transition is arguably the most dialectical, except that its immanent movement,
like that of the Dämon-Tyche opposition, merely produces standstill. Eros and
Elpis are winged beings who intervene from the outside and transcend a static
opposition.
7. Buck reads the “Du” as the reflex of a lyric “Ich” (UO 33), but for me the
“Urworte” are not essentially lyrical: the universality of the “you” apostrophizes
each individual reader.
8. Georg Simmel’s 1913 Goethe declares that an “abyss” separates “the artis-
tic boundedness and self-sufficiency of form” from “the infinity of becoming”;
geprägte Form covers over a “problem” and a “question” of “how form can live
and that which has been imprinted can develop” (81, my translation). Compare
Simonis, Gestalttheorie von Goethe bis Benjamin, 69; and Krois, “Cassirer als
Goethe-Interpret,” 304–6.
9. In Blumenberg’s attempt to define form as the source of “meaningfulness”
(Bedeutsamkeit), he relates symmetry to circularity and recursiveness (Kreis­
schlüssigkeit) with reference to both visual-symbolic and temporal-narrative
dimensions. In this context, he cites the line on geprägte Form (AaM 78). Devel-
opment is thus conceived as an “imprinted form” of temporal Kreisschlüssigkeit.
10. Compare Nicholls, Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic, 66–67; Swales,
“Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Urworte. Orphisch,’ ” 63.
11. The Dämon-Tyche relation in Zoëga and Goethe substantially prefig-
ures Bachofen’s 1861 opposition of matriarchy and patriarchy: “The paternal
principle of limitation [Beschränkung] corresponds to the maternal principle of
universality [Allgemeinheit]” (Das Mutterrecht, 13, my translation). See also Ass-
mann’s discussion of Isis in Moses der Ägypter (76–78).
12. Compare Nicholls (Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic, 242–43); Swales
(“Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Urworte. Orphisch,’ ” 70). Swales goes further
than I would in attacking Goethe, while Nicholls goes further than I would in
defending Goethe from Swales.
216 Notes to Pages 30–40

13. See book 4 of Poetry and Truth, which retells the story of the Tower of
Babel; this collapse is offset by the “luck” (Glück) of a “patriarch” (Stammvater)
who was able to “imprint his offspring with a decisive character” (seinen Nach-
kommen einen entschiedenen Charakter aufzuprägen), thereby giving rise to a
nation with longevity (HA 9:130). This political theology reduces ancient history
to natural selection.
14. I agree with Swales’s emphasis on gender in the “Urworte,” but her analyses
are often not detailed enough to draw precise conclusions. For example, I ques-
tion whether Dämon is “fundamentally male” (“Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
‘Urworte. Orphisch,’ ” 69) or whether, defined as “individuality,” it might not
apply to all genders.
15. Compare Schmidt, Goethes Altersgedicht Urworte. Orphisch, 14–15.
16. See Bersier, “Sinnliche Übermacht—übersinnliche Gegenmacht,” which
observes a hospitable and a demonic Eros in Goethe. Partly for biographical
reasons, she argues for an increase in the latter in Goethe’s later literary works.
17. Naumann’s “Talking Symbols: Ernst Cassirer’s Repetition of Goethe”
leaves no doubt that for Goethe (as well as for Cassirer) Eros is fundamentally a
form of “self-reflection” (371) with profound epistemic consequences.
18. See Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur: “Eros and Ananke are the parents
of human culture” (66, my translation).
19. Pierre Hadot, N’oublie pas de vivre also emphasizes that “le poésie ne
représente pas un genre littéraire, pratiqué par un écrivain, mais une attitude,
un exercice spirituel” (232). I became aware of Hadot’s chapter on Goethe’s
“Urworte” only after I had completed my own. In order to highlight the overlaps
and discrepancies between the two independent readings, I decided not to revise
my text in light of Hadot’s.
20. Compare Schmidt, Goethes Altersgedicht Urworte. Orphisch, 26; I am
perplexed by Schmidt’s assertion that Elpis, though dominated by “freedom and
expanse,” is “ambivalent.” The mirage character of hope is well known, and in
the end the interpretation depends on the degree of hopefulness of the individual
reader, but even if Elpis implicitly lowers expectations (through the relation with
Ananke), she remains a figure of clear-sightedness, above “clouds, fog and rain.”

Chapter Two
1. The Frankfurt edition suggests that it was written around 1798 (FA 1017)
and gives it the title “Betrachtung zur Morphologie” (FA 1023).
2. For a detailed account of this synthetic method in relation to the philos-
ophy of the period, see Förster, Die 25 Jahre der Philosophie: “Characteristic
. . . of scientia intuitiva is that, unlike Hegel’s science, it does not start from the
supreme idea but instead seeks . . . to ascend to it through knowledge” (364, my
translation).
3. Goethe’s morphology is not included in the epistemic shift of Michel Fou-
cault’s The Order of Things, but it could probably be understood within this
narrative. However, morphology’s reliance on analogy and similarity may also fit
in Foucault’s idea of the pre-classical episteme. And Foucault’s attempt to solve
the problem of diachronic form or “structure” may be an example of morpho-
logical method. Compare Simonis, Gestalttheorie von Goethe bis Benjamin (67);
and Pörksen, “Alles ist Blatt” (127). The emphasis of analogy over causation may
Notes to Pages 40–51 217

mystify or “literarize” science; see Pörksen, who argues that Goethe’s method
was contrary to the sciences’ trend toward increasing abstraction (“Alles ist
Blatt,” 129).
4. Pörksen, “Alles ist Blatt,” begins with a facsimile of this famous fragment. I
follow the wording and orthography of the facsimile.
5. Compare Pörksen (“Alles ist Blatt,” 110).
6. Förster’s “Goethe and the ‘Auge des Geistes’ ” reconstructs the philosophical
underpinnings of Goethe’s generative-developmental morphology. He never men-
tions geprägte Form die lebend sich entwickelt, but he does paraphrase it in the
context of Goethe’s “leaf”: “To really comprehend [the living plant] . . . I must
know the law underlying its development, its typus or archetype, so that I can
generate imaginatively a new plant from it” (95, emphasis mine).
7. See Simonis, Gestalttheorie von Goethe bis Benjamin (34–39). See also Eva
Geulen’s recent “Urpflanze (und Goethes Hefte zur Morphologie),” which does
not focus on “discrepancies” (Simonis 34, my translation), but argues that the
Urpflanze-idea has been systematically overinvested: “Urpflanze is the name, the
cipher, of the need . . . to suspend contradictions between abstract idea and con-
crete intuition” (Geulen, “Urpflanze,” 155).
8. A morphological text called “Bildungstrieb,” published in 1820 but prob-
ably written 1817, argues that the “unity and freedom” of organic beings “cannot
be conceived without the concept of metamorphosis” (HA 13:33–34).
9. The morphological essay “Fossiler Stier” (published 1822) shows that
Goethe himself was not immune to this way of thinking. Citing Dr. Körte, Goethe
compares the skull of a fossil steer with a modern domesticated one. On the
basis of formal-aesthetic criteria, the latter is clearly favored (HA 13:198). The
fusion of nature and culture favors Bildung, progress, and development. Goethe
especially focuses on the horns, which are a weapon in nature, but useless and
ornamental in the domesticated animal (HA 13:202–3).
10. In “Einwirkung der neueren Philosophie” (published 1820), Goethe reflects
on Kant’s first critique. Here he not only conceives analysis and synthesis as
natural forms, but assimilates them to the alternating rhythms of human under-
standing (HA 13:27).
11. For Pörksen, morphology implies Sprachskepsis (“skepticism of language”)
(“Alles ist Blatt,” 112).
12. In a longer text, “Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen,” first written and
published after Goethe’s return from Italy, then revised and republished in Zur
Morphologie in 1817 and again in 1832, further terminological layers may be
uncovered. For example, “Verwandschaft” is correlated to metamorphosis (§53,
§69, §71, §80, HA 13:80–88). The “rhythmic” model of systole and diastole is
echoed in §50 (and repeatedly thereafter) in the idea of “expansion and contrac-
tion” (HA 13:79).
13. In the Pandora chapter of Goethe, Gundolf writes: “Symbol is to the
individual what myth is to the collective: organic expression, involuntary self-
externalization, the becoming image of inner life. Allegory is the conscious
attempt to find the significant image for such a life (individual or collective)”
(583, my translation).
14. My idea of analogia entis owes more to Heimito von Doderer than to Saint
Thomas—but Doderer’s idea of it may have also owed something to morphology.
218 Notes to Pages 53–62

15. A further analogue of the Lucifer function is Goethe’s sonnet “Mächtiges

Überraschen,” which conceives the genesis of a new world in the collision of
“demonic” unities. See Campe, “Goethes Mächtiges Überraschen,” especially his
reading of the reflected “flickering” (Blinken) of the stars (90).
16. The negation and transcendence of the (narcissistic) self-ness of the self
may be a “Plotinian” moment. See Davidson’s introduction to Pierre Hadot, Plo-
tinus, or The Simplicity of Vision (10–13). Goethe’s figure of pulsation, however,
suggests a continuous and immanent—less mystical—version of this process.
17. In an alternate version of the end of book 8, Goethe does not allow his
own ideas to flow as smoothly into general words of wisdom, but criticizes the
“embarrassing efforts” (peinliche Bemühungen) of his youth (MA 16:986). One
line, however, offers support for the connection of book 8 to the demonic in
book 20: “Ich enthalte mich hier aller Bemerkungen darüber um so mehr, da ich
späterhin werde bekennen müssen, wie ich durch mancherlei andere ähnliche
Vorstellungen hindurch gegangen” (MA 16:986). Both the passage from book 8
and the passage on the demonic from book 20 were first drafted at the beginning
of the 1810s: book 8 between winter 1811 and summer 1812 (HA 9:736), and
the demonic in the spring of 1813 (HA 10:644).
18. Compare Breidbach, Goethes Metamorphosenlehre, 310.

Chapter Three
1. For a relatively recent assessment, see Mandelkow, Goethe in Deutschland
1 (267–80). Mandelkow links Gundolf, Chamberlain, and Simmel by way of
their shared hostility toward modernity (and the corresponding desire for cul-
tural renewal). Despite Gundolf’s shortcomings (276–78), Mandelkow notes his
vast influence (276) as well as certain strengths in comparison to the scholarship
of the time (278).
2. Gundolf’s spelling differs from the English transliteration, Ananke.
3. The connection to the grey sisters from the end of Faust is highly interest-
ing, however, in that they—together with their brother, Death—are also five in
number.
4. The unity of the “Urworte” could be demonstrated by the fact that the other
allegorical figurations that Gundolf names could be read as subordinate moments
of the “Urworte.” Death’s absence is undoubtedly significant, but the numerous
figures of its transcendence may reveal it to be derived rather than “primal.” Gun-
dolf’s invocation of karma in the same breath as entelechy gives a sense of just
how open the demonic is to projections from various sources. Poetry and Truth’s
vague reference to sources—“after the example of the ancients and others who
thought of something similar” (HA 10:175–76)—gives license to free association.
5. Staiger’s Goethe equates the Orphic “Urworte” with “the complete depic-
tion of Goethe that lies before the reader [in Staiger’s biography]. For everything
which the poet and scholar ever thought about man is truly compressed here with
maximum power into only a few lines” (3:99, my translation). This is still rather
close to Gundolf. The “Urworte,” as I read them, neither represent the last word
on the demonic nor are they a direct self-representation of Goethe’s “thought.”
6. Compare Schmitz, “Das Ganz-Andere: Goethe und das Ungeheure” (428).
Schmitz also understands the sentence with the exclamation point as a list of
Urworte, but he does not cite the line about Orphic “Urworte.” Schmitz treats the
Notes to Pages 62–82 219

demonic more systematically than and in less space than any other commentator;
in the end he sees it as an Ahnung (435) of ideas that others were able to more
clearly formalize. For me, on the other hand, Goethe’s strength lies precisely in
his awareness of the limitations of concepts that act as if their objects were more
knowable than they actually are.
7. See Blumenberg, “Nach dem Absolutismus der Wirklichkeit” (AaM, chapter
1), as well as my essay, “Working Over Philosophy.”
8. Gundolf’s analysis of the “Urworte” is brief, but the language of the Dämon
stanza clearly informs his overall approach; “geprägte Form, die lebend sich ent-
wickelt” is a leitmotif in his introduction (Goethe, 1 and 5). On Gundolf and the
George circle’s “tendency to read morphology ideologically,” see Annette Simonis
(Gestalttheorie von Goethe bis Benjamin, 18, my translation).
9. In the first years of the twentieth century, as Geulen shows in “Nachlese:
Simmels Goethebuch und Benjamins Wahlverwandtschaftenaufsatz,” Simmel
proposed a morphological reading of Goethe’s life, the major assumptions of
which are shared not only by Gundolf and Spengler. Morpho-biography argu-
ably continued to dominate even in those, like Benjamin and Blumenberg, who
disputed key elements of it.
10. For all of the sobriety and decided populism of Staiger’s introduction to
the first volume of his 1952 Goethe, it still has much in common with Gundolf.
Staiger sees a quasi-morphological progression in Goethe’s life (9), emphasizes
the incompatibility of literature with scientific analysis (11), and monumental-
izes and heroizes Goethe to establish contemporary relevance: “Wie bestehen wir
heute vor ihm?” (1:11).
11. Goethe sees the significance of life in its productivity, which posterity per-
ceives retrospectively (Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 650–60). Shakespeare
(658) shows how all particulars of a work (Hamlet) may be subordinated to an
overarching power that guarantees the coherence of the whole.
12. Cassirer is one of the few who situate the demonic through a retelling of
the end of Poetry and Truth. His lecture at Yale, “Bemerkungen zum Faustfrag-
ment und zur Faustdichtung” (esp. 58–59), is not primarily about the demonic.
Krois, “Urworte: Cassirer als Goethe-Interpret,” notes the intensity of Cassirer’s
“Urworte” reception.
13. Goethe’s method of neutralizing the power of the world in the interest of
his own Selbstbehauptung is a main topic of Blumenberg’s Arbeit am Mythos
(esp. AaM 482).
14. Goethe’s famous “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” may be read as an illustration
of this.
15. Ironically, in Poetry and Truth and the Italian Journey, being at home
implies a predominance of foreign influences, whereas travel frees one from both
self- and other-determination. Travel, conceived radically, leaves the compulsions
of self and identity behind. The idea of Wiedergeburt (“renaissance”) in the Ital-
ian Journey does not have a precise analogue in the “Urworte.”
16. In the Gespräche mit Eckermann (March 11, 1828), the word “aperçu” is
repeatedly connected to the demonic (653, 657, 658). “Aperçu” may be another
word for Urwort, and “der Gedanke” is another potential synonym. See Hof-
mann, Goethes Theologie (285–329), in connection to Urworte and Jung-Stilling
(296–98).
220 Notes to Pages 83–95

17. This is also an implication of Dostoyevsky’s Demons. Pyotr Stepanovich

suffers when his expectations are dashed; Nikolai Stavrogin attempts to presup-
pose nothing at all so that nothing can challenge his system. Neither is a success.
Even “insane” individuals make decisions based on “character” or some other
disposition: Kirillov’s attempt at self-unification—to become God through sui-
cide—fails to convince the other characters (and perhaps the reader) this is his
real motive.
18. Book 16 of Poetry and Truth discusses the demonic in relation to animals;
“natural phenomena that show [deutet auf] understanding, reason or even will
[Verstand, Vernunft, ja auch nur auf Willkür] astonish and even horrify us” (HA
10:79; also 10:177). Humans understand “nature” as Ananke (“the realm of
necessity”); this produces “horror” (Entsetzen) when animals appear to exhibit a
rational will. The demonic emerges out of categorical confusion, but this cannot
necessarily be solved by more rigorous distinctions, because categorical presup-
positions (animals = nature = necessity) are what produce the problem in the first
place.

Chapter Four
1. Doderer’s early diaries, the Tägebucher 1920–1939, will be abbreviated TB;
all Doderer translations are my own.
2. See the recent study by Kleinlercher, Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung:
Antisemitismus und Nationalsozialismus bei Heimito von Doderer.
3. Osmancevic, Oswald Spengler und das Ende der Geschichte, sees a new
relevance of theories of decline in an era marked by the limitations of optimistic
theories of “the end of history.”
4. In Doderer’s Repertorium (abbreviated R), a self-made dictionary of impor-
tant ideas, in an entry dated 1963, entitled “Improvement [Besserung],” he writes:
“One may feel bad about a vice that has abandoned one or a mistake that one
is no longer capable of. One used to fight against it, and therein lay the tension.
Now there’s nothing there. Emptiness, Erfüllungs-Rückstoß. A door is closed”
(R 37).
5. This micro-narrative can be found in Doderer’s “Sieben Variationen über
ein Thema von Johann Peter Hebel” (1926), “Die Bresche” (1924), and in his
Siberian writings.
6. Quotations from Spengler’s Decline of the West are marked with the abbre-
viation UdA; translations are my own.
7. Janensch’s Goethe und Nietzsche bei Spengler sees Spengler’s cyclical con-
ception as a reversion to understandings of pre-Christian antiquity, whereas
teleology reflects the modern, Christian, eschatological, and linear ideas of
history. Spengler and Nietzsche use cyclical history to oppose the modern con-
ception. This may be true as far as it goes, but the problem becomes abstract if
other contemporary theories (for example, Max Weber) are not a part of the
implicit context.
8. See Wetters, The Opinion System, 50–56.
9. A Spenglerian patterning may be visible in the structuralist anthropology
of Claude Lévi-Strauss; see Kuhnle, “Ekelhafte Stadtansichten,” focusing on the
idea of “entropy” (153–54). Spengler and Lévi-Strauss have similar styles of cul-
tural symbolic analysis; Tristes Tropiques’s emblematic sunset may also be read
Notes to Pages 95–100 221

as a symbol of decline (Untergang). Goethe and Spengler—and morphology—

thus inform the background metaphorics of intellectual filiations extending from
structuralism to cultural studies and beyond. More evidence of this can be found
in Liu’s 1996 dissertation, “The Question Concerning Morphology: Language,
Vision, History, 1918–1939,” which traces Goethe’s morphology through Spen-
gler, Propp, Mauss, Levi-Strauss, and others. Liu claims: “As the first application
of morphology to culture, and thus to some degree the inspiration of the various
morphologies that succeeded it, Spengler’s text remains an incidental origin in
the genealogy of formalist, structuralist, and poststructuralist thought” (16, foot-
note). (I thank Arnd Wedemeyer for calling my attention to Liu’s work.)
10. Spengler is not entirely vanquished: his ideas are still present in right-
leaning political discourses. In the academic context, Adorno’s “Spengler nach
dem Untergang” offers both critique and postwar recontextualization. When it
comes to satirizing Spengler’s theoretical weaknesses, Robert Musil’s contribu-
tion is the last word: “Es gibt zitronengelbe Falter, es gibt zitronengelbe Chinesen;
in gewissem Sinn kann man also sagen: Falter ist der mitteleuropäische geflügelte
Zwergchinese. Falter wie Chinese sind bekannt als Sinnbilder der Wollust. Zum
erstenmal wird hier der Gedanke gefaßt an die noch nie beachtete Übereinstim-
mung des großen Alters der Lepidopterenfauna und der chinesische Kultur. Daß
der Falter Flügel hat und der Chinese keine, ist nur ein Oberflächenphänomen”
(cited from Felken, “Nachwort” to Spengler’s UdA, 1261).
11. Adorno, “Spengler nach dem Untergang,” 47.
12. Despite similarities, Herder’s historicism is not identical with Spengler’s
comparative morphology, above all because the former does not assume the sub-
stitutability of individuals within a morphologically stabilized universal history.
Spengler operates with a fixed universal historical frame, whereas Herder empha-
sizes strict singularity. See Cassirer, Philosophie der Aufklärung, 309.
13. See Löwith, Meaning in History, 11–12.
14. A passage of part 2 of Decline of the West expresses this idea with tragic-
heroic pathos: “The last race [Rasse] to keep its form, the last living tradition,
the last leader [Führer] go through the goal victorious” (UdA 1101; see also UdA
686).
15. See Strong, “Oswald Spengler: Ontologie, Kritik und Enttäuschung”;
Strong connects Spengler with later critical thought, especially Foucault’s episteme
(185–86). The insight into past epistemic moments for the sake of identifying and
critiquing our own is close to Spengler’s idea of archaeology: “Archaeology itself
is the expression of the feeling that history repeats itself” (UdA 4–5).
16. Spengler fits into all three of the “three conservatisms” presented at the end
of Habermas’s “Modernity: An Unfinished Project” (53–54). This may be a prob-
lem in Habermas’s typology or a sign that Spengler, due to his theory’s internal
contradictions, is archetypal for twentieth-century conservatism.
17. Spengler is a declared anti-classicist and anti-romantic. Renaissance, both
as a name for an artistic period and as an idea, is also an object of scorn. In all of
these cases, his objection is that imitation—as well as canonizing and classicizing
gestures—is always inauthentic and belated in comparison to the original orga-
nicity of “culture.” The eighteenth-century morphological idea of Bildungstrieb,
though it does not appear in Spengler, is also worth mentioning here. Degner’s
Bilder im Wechsel der Töne addresses Bildungstrieb (171–79) in Hölderlin,
222 Notes to Pages 100–106

thereby producing an intensely anti-morphological conception. His poetics of

Bildungstrieb skew perceived morphological continuity toward an aesthetics
and literary practice opposed to single-outcome systems. What Degner terms a
“Revision des Blicks” is the “recursive construction” (176) of alternate unreal-
ized Bildungstriebe. Where the sentimental gaze remains fixated on a supposedly
perfect past, Hölderlin pursues a strategy of deliberate pseudomorphosis.
18. Many readers implicitly pass judgment on Spengler and his moral charac-
ter. These readings miss the “dramatic irony” and become victims of it. Spengler
brought a tradition of negative portrayals down on himself, but vilification is
counterproductive. For example, Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-
Gedankens (2:202–5), seems uncertain if Spengler is a cause or an effect of the
historical dynamics he implicates himself in. Schmidt, citing the same passages as
Hermann Heller’s 1930 essay, repeats Heller’s verdict. Schmidt thus appears anti-
quated in comparison with much earlier work such as Adorno’s “Spengler nach
dem Untergang” (1938, English 1941, 1950, Prismen 1955) or Lübbe’s 1980
“Historisch-politische Exaltationen: Spengler wiedergelesen.”
19. Compare Mandelkow, 240–261; on Spengler in particular, 259.
20. Spengler claims that cross-cultural borrowing occurs under the aegis of
the epistemic prejudices of the target culture. Spengler views such appropriations
negatively, as an impediment to the self-developing entelechy of discrete cultural
monads; great cultures emerge in spite of pseudomorphosis (UdA 784).
21. Spengler at one point defines Urworte as axioms, deductive a prioris, which
“give shape to experience rather than emerging from it” (UdA 483).
22. Another example of Spengler’s confusion of author and protagonist is a
famous line from Tasso, which Spengler puts in Goethe’s mouth: “. . . Goethe gab
es ein Gott, zu sagen, wie er leide” (UdA 382).
23. Spengler does not like the language of “problems,” which seems too activ-
ist and trivially academic to him: “As long as we have hope, we tend to call the
arcanum a ‘problem’ ” (UdA 571).
24. The importance of Goethe’s “Urworte” for Spengler (and the contrast
between Benjamin’s dialectical image and Spengler’s analogical “simultaneity” of
epochs) have been noted in Ophälders’s “Dialektik eines Bildes des Abendlandes.”
25. Compare Adorno, “Spengler nach dem Untergang,” 65.
26. According to Spengler, in modernity only law is retrograde, an un-Faustian
holdover from earlier times (UdA 617–55).
27. In part 2 of Decline, Spengler says that the privileged recipient of “inner
certainty” is “the true statesman” who is “history incarnate” (die Geschichte in
Person) (UdA 1113); “there are moments [Augenblicke] in which an individual
knows himself to be identical with fate and the center of the world [die Welt-
mitte] and experiences his personality almost as a cloak [Hülle] in which the
history of the future is preparing to dress itself” (UdA 1115).
28. Twentieth-century classics on reason and causation in history might
include works of Weber, Lukács, Schmitt, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, and
Adorno-Horkheimer and, after the war, Koselleck (Critique and Crisis), Blumen-
berg (Legitimacy of the Modern Age), and Habermas (Theory of Communicative
Action).
29. Liu, “The Question Concerning Morphology,” is persuasive on this point,
but he is perhaps too willing to overlook Spengler’s official thesis in order to
Notes to Pages 106–111 223

postulate post-poststructuralist undercurrents. Liu follows Badiou in questioning

philosophy’s relation to the representation of infinity (116–21). The increasing
general awareness of the idea of infinity, Liu argues, ushers in an era that Spen-
gler’s Decline anticipated and helped to precipitate. Liu daringly goes against
the endemic rejections of Spengler, but for me the messianic-epochal implica-
tions he develops remain too meta-historical. Liu’s findings could be productively
contrasted with theories that insist on the idea of redemption vs. theories that
suppose a political theological “covering” of sacred concepts with secular ones.
30. A parallel passage from part 2 shifts the emphasis away from the primal
unity and toward a primal entanglement of exception and rule: “An animal is
afraid of individual dangers, but early man trembled before the entire world.
Everything within him remained dark and unresolved. The quotidian and the
demonic are completely and lawlessly entangled [unentwirrbar und regellos ver-
strickt]” (UdA 894).
31. The “warp and weft” metaphor of the demonic is rewritten in Doderer’s
“Sexualität und der totale Staat” in the relation of burning logs to the grid of a
grating, which allows ash to fall through (Wiederkehr der Drachen, 286). The
unburned logs represent primitive unity, whereas the ash is the alienation of mod-
ern thought after it has passed through a rational-conceptual grid.
32. See Schmitz, “Das Ganz-Andere: Goethe und das Ungeheuere,” which
expands upon the idea of sittliche Weltordnung (427).
33. Faust imagines something like this at the end of his life (HA 3:344; vv.
11433–44) before Care (die Sorge) catches up to him; Blumenberg’s Work on
Myth conceives the unity of primitive man as “the absolutism of reality,” which
refers to a situation of pure terror and the absolute state of exception; the post-
absolutist state of reality is a “work on myth” characterized by balanced (i.e., not
unified) powers.
34. Compare Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: “In modern Germany there
were a great many Spenglers before the master-metahistorian had his day” (188).

Chapter Five
1. An exception is Axer’s forthcoming “Alldeutig, zweideutig, undeutig,” which
focuses on Benjamin’s essay on Karl Kraus. Among older work, Agamben’s “Ben-
jamin and the Demonic” stands out, but it often overlooks the connection to
Goethe or takes it as self-evident. Agamben’s emphasis of messianic motifs over
“demonic ambiguity,” however, and his implicit equation of the demonic and
the Luciferian, for example, reflect unresolved misunderstandings and conceptual
difficulties.
2. Citations of Benjamin refer to the Suhrkamp edition (abbreviated GS); trans-
lations are my own. Simonis’s Gestalttheorie von Goethe bis Benjamin includes
an extended narration (323–27) of Benjamin’s engagement with Goethe. Lindner,
“Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” makes an even stronger case, mentioning Ben-
jamin’s 1931 plan, which he was never able to realize, to write a lengthy book
on Goethe (480).
3. See Fehér, “Lukács und Benjamin: Affinitäten und Divergenzen.”
4. A letter to Max Horkheimer from 1940 (Gesammelte Briefe, 6:413–14) sug-
gests a late rereading, focused on the later sections of Spengler’s book. Benjamin
sees The Decline of the West as symptomatic for the development of Hitlerian
224 Notes to Pages 111–113

ideology. Benjamin’s criticism of the left’s confused response to part 1 and relative
silence about part 2 may perhaps be readable as indirect self-criticism. Whether
he knew Spengler’s work or not, Benjamin never refers to it by name in his pub-
lished work. But Benjamin’s polemics against others—especially Gundolf—leave
little doubt about his position toward Spengler.
5. The remark—“Was soll ich von ihm halten? Ein trivialer Sauhund”—is
recorded by Werner Kraft (“Über Benjamin,” 66). The wide circulation of this
anecdote has exaggerated its importance: Benjamin’s negative attitude toward
Spengler is unsurprising, but the 1933 comment in itself adds nothing. The full
anecdote, however, is more interesting: Kraft asked Benjamin what he thought
of Spengler’s politics in the 1930s (his opposition to Hitler), but the response
reflects a general indictment of Spengler’s philosophy. Kraft implies that, despite
the harsh reaction, Benjamin may have once shared his contemporaries’ inter-
est in Spengler. Kraft sees both Spengler and Benjamin as figures who are more
interesting than their fate: “Gewiß war Spengler ein Verhängnis, und doch zeigt
ein Photo in dem Almanach des Verlages Beck ‘Das Aquadukt’ [sic] (1963) das
ergreifende Bild eines jungendlichen Philosophen, das auch Benjamin ergriffen
hätte” (66). The volume in question, Der Aquädukt (1963), includes features
on Egon Friedell, Franz Blei, Hilde Spiel, and Heimito von Doderer. Kraft’s odd
claim that Benjamin would have been fascinated by the 1910 photo of Spengler
may be rooted in Kraft’s desire to see a resemblance between the young Spengler
and the young Benjamin.
6. See Wundt’s chapter, “Dämonenglaube und Dämonenkulte,” from his 1905
Völkerpsychologie: Mythus und Religion (457–576). Wundt’s approach to the
demonic in 1905 reflects a degree of similarity with Goethe’s “Urworte” and
Poetry and Truth—as well as with Gundolf’s Goethe. Wundt’s demons also
exhibit “demonic ambiguity”: a demon may be an evil spirit or a “guardian
demon” (Schutzdämon), a “duplication of the personality” (Verdoppelung der
Persönlichkeit) or a “demonic embodiment of the human fate” (dämonische
Verkörperung des menschlichen Schicksals) (457).
7. By the time of the publication of part 2 of Decline in 1923, Spengler had
integrated Freud’s theory into his claims (UdA 693–96).
8. Scholem’s remarks pertain to the two versions of Benjamin’s essay (“Die
Lehre vom Ähnlichen” and “Über das mimetische Vermögen”). In further sketches
on this topic, dated from the mid-1930s, Benjamin wrote: “A further canon of
similarity is the totem. The Jewish ban on image-making is probably connected
to totemism” (GS 2.3:957).
9. Compare Sagnol, “Recht und Gerechtigkeit bei Walter Benjamin”:
“In opposition to the claims of the whole tradition of the philosophy of law
[Rechtsphilosophie], law [das Recht] [in Benjamin] does not represent an accom-
plishment of man, his emancipation from mythic forces [Gewalten] that formerly
ruled humanity but is instead their ominous remainder [verhängnisvoller Über-
rest]” (60, my translation).
10. Cf. Martínez, Doppelte Welten, 38; and Sagnol, “Recht und Gerechtigkeit
bei Walter Benjamin,” 63.
11. Thanks to Google, it is easy to discover that the line comes from chapter 7
of France’s 1894 Le Lys rouge. The same line from France is cited somewhat more
fully in part 2 of The Decline of the West: “Jedes Recht ist von einem einzelnen
Notes to Pages 113–121 225

Stande im Namen der Allgemeinheit geschaffen worden. Anatole France hat ein-
mal gesagt, ‘daß unser Recht in majestätischer Gleichheit dem Reichen wie dem
Armen verbiete, Brot zu stehlen und an den Straßenecken zu betteln’ ” (UdA 630).
The reference functions similarly in both authors’ critiques of the modern institu-
tion of law.
12. For both Benjamin and Blumenberg, myth is a polemic against a preceding
age, but for the latter it expresses a distance from and a polytheistic fragmenta-
tion of a previous “absolutist” era in which humans were utterly at the mercy
of unnamed horrors. Though not necessarily reflective of progress, myth at least
represents a process of rationalization (in both senses) in which the mere appear-
ance of controllability is decisive. For Benjamin, the blindness that comes with
myth’s progressive sublimations magnifies the final costs. Blumenberg acknowl-
edges that modernity may only raise the stakes without ever fully breaking from
myth, but his idea of “work” pragmatically focuses on myth’s ongoing ability
to mitigate the hostility of existence. Both Benjamin and Blumenberg oppose
Christianity’s hybridization of myth and monotheism. Blumenberg calls it an
“absolutism of transcendence” (AaM 158) that contradicts myth’s efforts to
lower the stakes (by telling stories of how a tenuous livability came about).
13. The intense interest of recent science fiction with this problem reflects the
way that it plays out under the conditions of modern technology. Especially the
idea of “apophenia” developed in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition explores
the question of whether there is really a “conspiracy” (a demonic force behind
unfolding events) or whether the chances that coincidences and patterns will be
perceived and realized are only increasing through more extensive technological
networking.
14. The English title of this work, Origins of the German Mourning Play, is
cumbersome; thus I will follow the common convention of referring to it simply
as the Trauerspielbuch.
15. See Blumenberg, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit; and my own “Working
Over Philosophy.”
16. Doderer’s “Sexualität und der totale Staat,” though perhaps not perfectly
consistent on this point, is overall a clear case of the confusion of analogy and
affinity. Doderer’s understanding of “analogy” may be that of Aquinas’s analogia
entis inflected by Spenglerian morphology; compare Kleinlercher’s conversation
with Wolfgang Fleischer (Kleinlercher, Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung, 355).
17. Hamacher’s “Afformativ, Streik” describes the afformative as an “event of
formation that does not give rise to any form” (Ereignis der Formierung, das in
keiner Form aufgeht, 364). This contrasts with speech act theory’s idea of the
“performative,” which is apparently conclusive, executive, and formulaic.
18. Haverkamp’s Figura Cryptica also emphasizes the Goethean figura mor-
phologica encrypted in the dialectical image (52–53).
19. Simonis’s Gestalttheorie von Goethe bis Benjamin characterizes Benjamin’s
version of morphology in terms of fragmentariness and dynamic openness with
respect to the form-ideals of classicism, thereby deemphasizing the anti-classicist
side of Goethe’s own conception of metamorphosis. A stereotyped classicism
thus tends to overstate and mischaracterize the differences between Goethe and
Benjamin: “Benjamin glaubt in Goethe somit einen exemplarischen Vertreter der
Moderne zu erkennen” (330, emphasis mine).
226 Notes to Pages 121–127

20. Benjamin’s Goethean anti-Platonism is echoed in Blumenberg’s criticism of

Rothacker’s appropriation of the idea of geprägte Formen in his Philosophische
Anthropologie. Rothacker sees a historical conservation of forms in institutions,
but Blumenberg argues that apparent continuity only covers troubling discontinui-
ties: “Zeit schleift die Prägnanzen [the significances of inherited forms] nicht ab, sie
holt aus ihnen heraus, ohne daß man hinzufügen dürfte: ‘was drin ist’ ” (AaM 79).
21. Simonis sees the Goethe essay as a work of “extraordinary significance
. . . within Benjamin’s oeuvre” (Gestalttheorie von Goethe bis Benjamin, 330).
Lindner (“Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften”) observes the essay’s meticulous
organization (from which Benjamin eliminated all subsections and subtitles);
according to Lindner, it represents “a maximum” in Benjamin’s theoretical stylis-
tics (ein Maximum seiner schriftstellerischen Darstellungskunst, 473).
22. There is, as far as I can see, no compelling reason to strictly periodize
Benjamin’s work. The 1931 essay on Karl Kraus, for example, is arguably compa-
rable to the Goethe essay in its complexity and returns to some of the same topics
(including the demonic). Axer’s “Alldeutig, zweideutig, undeutig” shows how the
later essay reconfigures concerns that had occupied Benjamin since the 1910s.
23. The first paragraph concludes with an excursus on fate and character in
relation to sign systems. I bracket it, however, because Benjamin introduces this
topic primarily in order to exclude it. He concludes that “signifying relations can
never be conceived causally.” This rules out all semiotics of physical signs as the
effects of character or as predictors of fate. The semiotic question is “an equally
closed and difficult relation,” but it is a “different problem.” The topic of the
essay is thus not the signification of fate and character but the relation of fate and
character itself (GS 2.1:172).
24. According to the economical formula of the Trauerspielbuch: “The tragic is
to the demonic as the paradox is to ambiguity” (Das Tragische verhält sich zum
Dämonischen wie das Paradoxon zur Zweideutigkeit, GS 1.1:288).
25. According to an early fragment: “Heidentum entsteht wenn die Sphäre des
geniushaft Menschlichen, der Urphänomene der Kunst, Musisches und mechané
die symbolisch für das Dasein der Heiligkeit sind zur Sphäre der Geistigkeit selbst
erhoben werden, zur dämonischen Gemeinschaft. / Das Heidentum steht in der
Sphäre des Dämonischen und des Geniushaften” (GS 6:90). In striking contrast
to assumptions of art’s loss of its communal function in modernity, Benjamin
seems to suggest that the communal and cultural potentials of art are the result
of false idolization and heathen religiosity.
26. The confusion of Benjamin’s reading with the one he attacks persists even
in recent interpretations. In Martínez’s Doppelte Welten, Benjamin is made into
“the most decisive example” of the mythic reading, which “posits a radical dif-
ference between our modern world and the one represented in The Elective
Affinities” (37–38). For Benjamin, the ambiguities of Goethe’s novel are precisely
those of “our modern world.” See Liska’s “Die Mortifikation der Kritik” for a
comprehensive though certainly not exhaustive inventory of misreadings and
deliberate distortions of Benjamin’s essay.
27. Leacock’s reading of Benjamin’s essay emphasizes the importance of the
idea of decision. I also think of Dostoyevsky’s Stavrogin, who, according to the
narrator, up to and including his last act, goes to great length to wordlessly show
that he acts consciously.
Notes to Pages 128–137 227

28. Peculiarly, perhaps tellingly, Lindner’s short list of the sources upon which
Benjamin based his polemic against Gundolf does not include the “Urworte”
(“Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” 479–80).
29. Like Gundolf, Spengler tends to systematically exclude Elpis; see UdA 571.

Chapter Six
1. See Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (I): “Don Juan . . . is the expression for the
demonic qualified as sensuous; Faust is the expression for the demonic qualified
as the spiritual that the Christian spirit excludes” (90). In Goethe’s conversation
with Eckermann on June 20, 1831, Mozart is cited as an example of demonic
inspiration in opposition to the idea of Komposition: “How can one say that
Mozart supposedly composed his Don Juan!” (Eckermann, Gespräche mit
Goethe, 736). Goethe’s position here is evidently informed by his thinking on the
conflict between Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire (HA 13:245–46; FA 838).
2. The characteristic male gendering of the demonic character is deeply rooted
in the connection of (male) geniuses and figures like Don Giovanni representing
productive and destructive male sexuality. Perhaps the demonic might be viewed
as a parallel discourse to the more negatively connoted conception of hysteria.
The young Lukács’s connection of the demonic with male heroes and narrators
is apparently in line with this—but in other contexts Friedrich Hebbel’s Judith
epitomized his idea of heroism.
3. The narratorless demonic novel remains absolutely current. Suarez’s 2006
action thriller, Daemon, and its sequel FreedomTM, for example, grapple with
the demonic in view of technology’s possibilities of fundamentally altering the
systems by which individual destinies are produced. A computer program (a
“daemon” or “bot”) is able to master chance and control the plot; old hierarchies
of money and power are mediatized and repurposed into a rational meritocracy
of individual self-realization; in FreedomTM, the computer-daemon turns out to
be a classical daemon capable of superseding positive law: “The entire concept
of a daemon stems from the guardian spirits of Greek mythology—spirits who
watched over mankind to keep them out of trouble” (82). (I thank Prof. Bettina
Schlüter for making me aware of Suarez’s novels.)
4. Szondi has remarked that Lukács’s theory is “not thinkable” without Hegel’s
philosophy of art (Poetik und Geschichstsphilosophie, 1:309).
5. Esztétikai kultura (Aesthetic Culture), Budapest 1913; cited from Márkus,
“Die Seele und das Leben. Der junge Lukács und das Problem der ‘Kultur,’ ” 110.
6. Resembling the subject-object opposition, the title of Lukács’s 1911 Die Seele
und die Formen (The Soul and the Forms) also reconfigures Goethe’s Dämon-
Tyche. The aesthetic strives toward “the mystical moment of union of inside
and outside, soul and form” (Die Seele und die Formen, 17, my translation).
This conception is compatible with Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie, which defines a
Dämon as “a higher-order soul,” residing somewhere between individual psyche
and collectively recognized divinity: “the meaning of the concept of the Dämon
experiences two important shifts. The one leads . . . toward the idea of the soul;
the other expands it limitlessly by extending it to include everything beyond the
reach of human power. On the one hand the Dämon returns itself to the shape of
the individual soul, on the other hand it raises itself to become a god” (458–59,
my translation).
228 Notes to Pages 137–139

7. Lukács, Theorie des Romans, 137 (my translation); abbreviated TdR.

8. Broch writes in Der Tod des Vergil of an “overcoming of the demonic
[Überwindung des Dämonischen]” (73). Whereas Lukács’s theory envisions a
possibility of this-worldly transcendence, in Broch’s novel death is the horizon
of its overcoming.
9. See Löwy, “Der junge Lukács und Dostojewski,” emphasizing the breadth
of Lukács’s readings in the 1910s. This can also be seen in Lukács’s Dostojewski
Notizen und Entwürfe. Hoeschen’s Das “Dostojewsky”-Projekt focuses on neo-
Kantian aspects of Lukács’s thought and argues against overemphasizing Hegel;
Simmel and Lebensphilosophie are also downplayed.
10. Cited from Nyíri’s preface to Lukács’s Dostojewski Notizen und Entwürfe
(12).
11. See TdR 5–17; Spengler is also named in the 1962 introduction (10). The
philosophy of history of Lukács’s 1916 theory in some ways resembles Spengler’s
deterministic Decline: Lukács speaks confidently of “the present state of spirit”
(der gegenwärtige Stand des Geistes, TdR 126), “the basis within the philoso-
phy of history” (geschichtsphilosophische Grundlage, TdR 122), “the intuitive
visionary of the philosophical-historical moment that will not return” (der intui-
tive Visionär des nicht wiederkehrenden geschichtsphilosophischen Moments,
TdR 116); such formulations show that Lukács, like Spengler, believed in the
“demonic” connection between artistic genius and the historical moment. This
belief (or superstition) has since been the object of literary satires, such as Borg-
es’s “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote.” More recently and directly focusing on
Lukács, Menasse’s Selige Zeiten, brüchige Welt tells of Leo Singer, who wants
to rewrite Hegel’s philosophy of history backward in order to update it for the
post-1968 world. In the process, Leo unwittingly follows in the footsteps of the
young Lukács.
12. Lukács’s Heidelberg connections would have made him aware of Gundolf’s
Goethe interpretation well before 1916. See Lukács, Briefwechsel 1902–1917,
325, 393; also Fehér’s “Das Bündnis von Georg Lukács und Béla Balázs bis zur
ungarischen Revolution 1918”: “It is well known what a central importance
Goethe’s unique theory of the symbol had for Lukács’s entire aesthetic develop-
ment” (164, my translation).
13. According to Szondi, Schlegel “[will] neben den Gegenständen immer auch
die eigene Position erkennen” (Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie 2:113).
14. On the turbulence of Lukács’s intellectual development, see Márkus’s “Die
Seele und das Leben”; on the early aesthetic theories in particular, see Márkus’s
“Lukács’ erste Ästhetik: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Philosophie des jungen
Lukács.” Márkus writes of “kaleidoscopic changes . . . combined with emphatic
consistency of the basic problems and intents” (104, my translation).
15. Despite the fact that Adorno probably never read the Heidelberg Aesthetics,
an affinity may be noted. See Hohendahl’s “Art Work in Modernity,” which finds
that “Adorno’s theoretical endeavors can only be understood against the back-
ground of Lukács’s early work” (34).
16. Here Lukács’s aesthetics may seem to intersect with Blumenberg. Unlike
Lukács, Blumenberg is comfortable with bracketing’s “negative” side effect of
producing a plurality of semi-autonomous worlds.
17. Lukács, Heidelberger Ästhetik, 28 (my translation); abbreviated HÄs.
Notes to Pages 139–147 229

18. “Das Luciferische” only appears once in the Heidelberg Aesthetics, but it
also appears in the Theory of the Novel and the Dostoyevsky notes. Márkus sum-
marizes the conception: “The young Lukács interprets . . . art’s utopian function
of creating a reality that would be adequate to man . . . as precisely its ‘Lucifer-
ism’: The work brings about harmony and fulfillment prior to (and without) the
real redemption of man” (Die Seele und das Leben, 101, my translation). Márkus
also writes: “According to [Lukács’s idea of “Luziferismus”], the perfected world
of the work of art . . . can only represent . . . ‘an anticipation of perfection, har-
mony prior to and without redemption’ [ein ‘Vorschuß auf Vollkommenheit,
Harmonie vor und ohne Erlösung’]” (209).
19. “Between Ahab and the whale there plays out a drama that could be called
metaphysical in a vague sense of the word, the same struggle that is played out
between the Sirens and Ulysses. Each of these pairs wants to be everything, wants
to be the absolute world, which makes coexistence with the other absolute world
impossible; and yet each one has no greater desire than this very coexistence, this
encounter” (Blanchot, The Book to Come, 8). The Book to Come (esp. 97–104)
implicitly builds on Lukács’s Theory of the Novel and Goethe’s (or Gundolf’s)
idea of the demonic.
20. The idea of normative inversion, which I use here in an extended (perhaps
stretched) sense, comes from Assmann’s Moses der Ägypter. The idea of an inver-
sion may help to explain Fehér’s claim in “Am Scheideweg des romantischen
Antikapitalismus”: “ ‘Luciferian’ does not mean a repudiated or purely negative
state in the vagaries of human history” (291, my translation).
21. Here one can note the differences between Benjamin’s and Lukacs’s concep-
tions. In the terms of Benjamin’s “Elective Affinities,” art could only be Luciferian
if the interruption of das Ausdruckslose had never marked the borders of work
and world.
22. On Lukács’s idealization of Greek antiquity as the unity of perfect his-
torical realization of culture and society, see Márkus, “Die Seele und das Leben”
(118).
23. See the Heidelberg Aesthetics’s opening discussion of the heterogeneity of
art and culture (15). Modern cultural forms are dependent and reproductive,
which, in comparison to art, makes them less interesting. But if art is Luciferian,
then a high valuation of art is symptomatic of cultural problems.
24. Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy represents a conspicuous absence in Lukács’s
1916–18 aesthetics, but it is a work he was certainly familiar with. Compare
Lukács, Briefwechsel, 2 and 230. The Theory of the Novel also never names
Nietzsche, but he is an easily discerned opponent of its opening section. Nietzsche
“psychologizes” the Greeks and conceives “the perfection of form in an idiosyn-
cratic and solipsistic way as a function of inner devastation [als Funktion des
inneren Zerstörtseins]” (TdR 23).
25. According to Márkus, the Heidelberger Ästhetik represents “einen einzigen
kritischen Kampf gegen den Geist der Hegelschen Philosophie” (Die Seele und
das Leben, 227).
26. The idea of Glanz inverts a famous topos from Faust II: “in the color-
ful reflection [of the rainbow] we have life [im farbigen Abglanz haben wir das
Leben]” (v. 4727; HA 149). This kind of reflection is not substantial enough for
Lukács (HÄs 163), because colorful refractions are only broken light.
230 Notes to Pages 148–158

27. Especially in part 1, it is often uncertain which epics Lukács has in mind.
Dante, Cervantes, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (TdR 45) in any case make the
list, while part 2 introduces limit cases such as Pontoppidan’s Hans im Glück,
Flaubert’s Education sentimentale, Tolstoy’s War and Peace—and Dostoyevsky.
Lukács never mentions Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, but its “theoretical” approach
and connections to Goethe makes it an obvious precursor to Lukács’s theory.
28. It is impossible to know to what degree Lukács may have had Goethe in
mind in any given passage, but the following remark from the Heidelberg Aes-
thetics shows proficiency with Goethe’s terms: “Das Zufällige ist hier im Sinne
des Goethischen ‘Tyche,’ der produktiv-machenden Gelegenheit zu verstehen”
(HÄs 205).
29. All of the Urworte are implicitly developed in part 2 of Lukács’s theory. I
read the more purely theoretical first half as a consequent execution of Goethe’s
paradigms of the demonic, whereas part 2 attempts to illustrate the theory’s appli-
cability, arguably to the point of excess, in formulations such as “der dämonische
Charakter” (TdR 83), “die Dämonie der Verengung der Seele” vs. “die Dämonie
des abstrakten Idealismus” (TdR 83), the “Verzaubertsein [der Wirklichkeit] von
bösen Dämonen” (TdR 83), “dämonisches Besessensein” (TdR 85), “[die] vom
Dämon nicht ergriffenen Gebieten der Seele” (TdR 86), “[der] Gott, . . . [der] in
Wahrheit ein Dämon geworden [ist]” (TdR 89), “die [historische] Periode der
freigelassenen Dämonie” (TdR 90), “[das] entweichen der aktiven Dämonen”
(TdR 91), “reine Dämonie” (TdR 93), “das dämonisch Humorvolle” (TdR 94),
“subjektiv-psychologische Dämonie” (TdR 94), “eine dämonische Gewalt”
(TdR 97), “negative Dämonie” (TdR 97), “[das] wahnsinnig dämonische Ge­
sichertsein” (TdR 116).
30. Lukács’s enthusiasm for Dostoyevsky may have been partly inspired by
the mania surrounding the Piper edition of his works (edited by the conservative
revolutionary Arthur Moeller van den Bruck). According to Garstka’s Arthur
Moeller van den Bruck, German nationalists looked to Russia and Dostoyevsky
for relief from Western-liberal ideas; they saw Russia as a land “of independent
‘soulful’ development” (der eigenständigen ‘seelischen’ Entwicklung), a “misin-
terpretation” that was “widespread among the German intelligentsia” of the first
half of the twentieth century (18, my translation). Lukács’s Dostoyevsky notes
in fact refer to the Piper edition. One might further speculate that in the 1910s
and 1920s, Dostoyevsky was read not only as a figure of national identity, but in
the light of nostalgia for an unreformed, “orthodox” Christianity—Christianity
without a “Protestant ethic” or an iron cage.
31. Volz’s 1924 Das Dämonische in Jahwe argues (with Job in mind) that
monotheism, in order to make its theodicy coherent, must assimilate demons into
the concept of divinity. Gnosticisms and dualisms, on the other hand, undo this
separation.
32. I borrow this term from Benjamin’s Trauerspielbuch, in which it refers
to baroque Christianity’s and the baroque theater’s tendency to overextend the
difference between the desolation of the historical world and the perfection of
salvation (GS 1.1:246).
33. This debate has been further reflected in two collections on the contem-
porary theoretical significance of the inheritances of Gnosticism: the first, from
1984, was edited by Taubes, Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie, Bd. 2:
Notes to Pages 158–168 231

Gnosis und Politik; and the second, from 1993, was edited by Sloterdijk and
Macho, Weltrevolution der Seele: Ein Lese- und Arbeitsbuch der Gnosis. The
main sources of the debate, from Eric Voegelin (214–15) to Blumenberg (228–34)
and Odo Marquard (234–41), are excerpted in the later volume. The Taubes
volume, in addition to an essay by the editor himself (9–15), again includes Mar-
quard on the idea of a “gnostisches Rezidiv” (31–36) as well as a critique of this
conception by Wolfgang Hübener (37–53). After Voegelin, the debate was reacti-
vated by Blumenberg’s arguments against a Gnostic relapse in Die Legitimät der
Neuzeit. Schmitt’s Politische Theologie II first brought Goethe (and der unge-
heuere Spruch) into the equation, and Blumenberg devoted a chapter of Work
on Myth to the refutation of this reading (“Lesarten des ‘Ungeheueren Spruchs,’ ”
AaM 567–604). The recently published Schmitt-Blumenberg Briefwechsel also
includes selections of relevant texts (35–86). In the letters themselves, see espe-
cially Blumenberg’s letter from August 7, 1975 (132–34). In the somewhat
different context of “literary” Gnosticism, Bloom’s “Lying Against Time: Gnosis,
Poetry, Criticism” is also pertinent.

Chapter Seven
1. This conclusion roughly follows Kai Luehrs’s “Fledermausflügel im Bücher-
kasten”; I am less convinced, however, that Lukács’s theory is as epigonal as
Luehrs imagines.
2. Doderer, Die Dämonen, 10; abbreviated DD.
3. See the entry on “Dämonen” from Henner Löffler’s Doderer-ABC (94–104).
Without claiming to have definitively identified every demon in the novel, Löffler
offers helpful interpretive suggestions which generally equate the “demons” with
the delusional “second realities” (zweite Wirklichkeiten) that plague the novel’s
protagonists.
4. Compare Honold, “Bernhards Dämonen”: “Thomas Bernhard’s grandfather
was his good demon” (19, my translation). My work supports the connection
between the demonic and the process of literary creation, but looking at it
through Doderer highlights the implicit patricide in Bernhard’s recourse to Dos-
toyevsky (his literary “grandfather”).
5. Hoffmann, Aus Gesprächen mit Thomas Bernhard, 22.
6. See Liska, “Die Mortifikation der Kritik,” who argues that the point of Ben-
jamin’s Goethe essay is to wrench some “congealed transcendence” out of the
novel’s “chaos of symbols”—a chaos which critics have often read as a sign of the
work’s aesthetic perfection (581). It makes a difference, in other words, whether
the unresolvable meanings of the “total novel” are valued positively (as a kind of
surplus) or negatively (as a deficiency characteristic of the modern, secular world).
7. The earliest genesis of the novel certainly lies before 1930. My findings show
this, as does Kleinlercher’s Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung (214–15).
8. The secondary literature on Doderer’s novel, for good reasons, foregrounds
the connection to Dostoyevsky. See especially Chevrel’s “Die Dämonen: Doderer
und der Fall Dostojewskij(s).” I do not deny Dostoyevsky’s central importance,
but he may also function as a decoy with respect to other sources. According to
Doderer: “Criticism has been unable to establish an intensive connection between
me and Dostoyevsky” (cited from Chevrel 142, my translation; see also Klein-
lercher, Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung, 215).
232 Notes to Pages 169–173

9. Wundt’s definitions are compatible with the absence of demons in Doderer’s

novel. According to Wundt, a demon is any incorporeal spirit, including dream
images and everything which, from the subjective perspective, appears to be
beyond “the usual course of events [der gewöhnliche Verlauf des Geschehens]”;
demons manifest themselves in “metamorphoses that resist every rule [jeder
Regel wiederstrebende Metamorphosen]”; they exist “everywhere where unusual
things happen [überall, wo Ungewöhnliches geschieht]” (Völkerpsychologie, 458,
my translation).
10. The page numbers refer to points in Lukács’s argument that support Doder-
er’s epic conception of (1) the worldliness of the novel, (2) the importance of
narration (and the figure of the narrator), (3) the problems of authorial-narrative
perspective (Gesinnung) and meaning (Sinn and Sinngebung) and (4) the inad-
missibility of direct communication between author and reader (“congealed
transcendence”). After 1930, whenever Doderer cites Lukács in his diaries, he
refers to at least one of the two passages noted in 1930 (TB 680, 684, 727, 898,
918, 1032, 1128, 1171–72, 1175); this continues into the ’40s and ’50s (Tan-
genten, 15–17, 25, 340–41, 351, 412, 455, 796, 826; Commentarii I, 174, 259).
11. In 1925, Doderer describes Kafka’s The Trial as “one of the absolute best
books of all of the ones I know” (TB 273). Of Rilke’s Malte, he writes: “I admit
that I had read the ‘Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge’ once before, but it is very
evident that I did . . . not recognize what a work it is. Most powerful power that
has given itself all of the attributes of power! [Gewaltigste Kraft, die sich aller
Attribute der Gewalt begeben hat!]” (TB 286). In the same entry, Doderer men-
tions Rilke’s “Stundenbuch,” which he read as a prisoner of war in Siberia: “It
was almost as if an angel—diving down and soaring up again—had lifted me up
and drawn me out of all of the misery. This what a poet can do [Solches vermag
ein Dichter]” (TB 286).
12. This is to my knowledge the only mention of Moeller in Doderer’s writ-
ings. The mention of Moeller may add something to the existing accounts of the
sources of Doderer’s nationalism and anti-Semitism. Doderer was certainly influ-
enced by the “conservative revolution” or “Germanic ideology,” as Fritz Stern
calls it in his The Politics of Cultural Despair. Stern claims: “No other modern
writer save Nietzsche had as great an impact on German thought as Dostoyevsky,
and the character of that impact was largely shaped by Moeller” (210).
13. See Kleinlercher, Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung, 214–15. In the 1940s,
after the failure of Die Dämonen, Doderer’s Die Strudlhofstiege emerged from his
attempts to deepen his characters’ earlier lives and their relation to their milieu.
In the 1950s, after Die Strudlhofstiege was published to wide acclaim, Doderer
revised Die Dämonen in ways that retained elements of the original conception
while distancing himself from the political and anti-Semitic agenda that defined
the novel in the 1930s.
14. Kleinlercher, Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung, 331.
15. Dostoyevsky, Die Dämonen (2008), 53.
16. Only two months before their final separation in November 1932, Gusti
Hasterlik gave Doderer a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Die Dämonen (see Kleinlercher,
Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung, 215).
17. Compare TdR 38. The improvement of Doderer’s Dostoyevsky read-
ing can be seen in the entry of March 26, 1937. The figure of Schatoff is now
Notes to Pages 173–179 233

a representative of “the Russian ideology” (TB 984) and “what is monstrous

about the whole thing [das Ungeheuerliche an der ganzen Sache] . . . is that Dos-
toyevsky here opens up one of his greatest perspectives on the philosophy of
history [eine seiner grössten geschichtsphilosophischen Perspektiven öffnet] . . .
without allowing this transcendence to congeal on him [ohne dass ihm die Tran-
scendenz gerinnt]” (TB 985).
18. See Kleinlercher, Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung, 209–89. Though
Kleinlercher’s readings are perhaps not the last word in terms of literary nuance,
she decisively shows how Doderer integrated an anti-Semitic program into the
first version of Die Dämonen and how he came to distance himself from it in the
published version.
19. See Sommer, “In die ‘Sackgasse’ und wieder hinaus.”
20. Kleinlercher reads the figure of Zienhammer in Doderer’s Der Grenzwald
as a refusal of vilification. Doderer writes: “Zienhammer ist weitaus kein perfek-
ter Schurke, wenn es so etwas überhaupt gibt” (Kleinlercher, Zwischen Wahrheit
und Dichtung, 152).
21. See D. Weber’s “ ‘Welch ein gewaltiger Apperzipierer!’ Zu einigen Goethe-
Zitaten bei Heimito von Doderer.” Weber portrays Doderer as a “lax” reader of
Goethe who “cites from memory or second hand [vom Hörensagen]” (173, my
translation). This may be accurate, but as a general characterization it may be
inaccurate. Even if Doderer was often lax, this does not mean he was always lax.
Weber also observes that Doderer’s connection to Goethe was “extremely inten-
sive” (höchst intensiv, 173).
22. Doderer, Die Wiederkehr der Drachen, 40; abbreviated WdD.
23. The German sentence reads: “Eine Beziehung, die durchaus im Innern zu
entspringen schien, dennoch aber, seltsam genug, in manchen Augenblicken als
ein Fremdes, Herantretendes erlebt ward” (WdD 42). This comes strikingly close
to Goethe’s Eros commentary: “der Mensch scheint nur sich zu gehorchen, sein
eigenes Wollen walten zu lassen, seinem Triebe zu fröhnen, und doch sind es
Zufälligkeiten die sich unterschieben, Fremdartiges was ihn von seinem Wege
ablenkt” (UO 15).
24. Doderer is not consistent about the precise point of onset of the “adult
world.” The emphasis on language acquisition places it at the end of infancy—but
he also often speaks of “childhood.” The reticence of the newborn corresponds
with Hofrat Gürtzner-Gontard’s metaphor in Die Dämonen of the fetus cover-
ing its face: “The young human simply protests against entering into life on the
conditions offered . . . [Der junge Mensch wehrt sich einfach dagegen, unter den
dargebotenen Bedingungen, ins Leben einzutretet . . . ]” (DD 487; see also 498).
25. Stefan Zweig’s 1925 Der Kampf mit dem Dämon stands out among the
numerous sources that could have inspired Doderer to connect the idea of the
demonic to the “Typus” of the genius (11). Zweig’s book is exemplary in the
genre of “spiritual biography” of “heroic” geniuses (12) that was fashionable
among conservative revolutionaries and the George circle. Zweig, implicitly in
dialogue with Gundolf, justifies his focus on Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche
as an anti-classical and anti-bourgeois—“tragic”—contrast to the model of
Goethe.
26. The “Ouvertüre” to Die Dämonen from the 1930s is retained with minimal
changes in the 1956 published version.
234 Notes to Pages 179–185

27. Sommer, ed., Gassen und Landschaften, 56.

28. Kleinlercher, Zwischen Wahrheit und Dichtung, also makes this point, with
respect to the eventual collapse of Doderer’s Demons project in 1940: “the fic-
tional depiction of a social division of Jews and non-Jews . . . was already largely
realized in reality” (330, my translation).
29. Important recent work has been devoted to these central and simultane-
ously marginal figures; see Petutschnig, Ist er die Mitte?; and Siegel, “The ‘Dream
Diary’: Heimito von Doderer’s Poetics of the Journal.”
30. The idea of genius in latency is coined in Die Strudlhofstiege (510, 689,
706, 725); in Die Dämonen it can be observed in the contrast between Leonhard
(whose genius emerges from latency) and the “struggling” main characters (who
may not be geniuses at all); see my “Konjunktivisches Erzählen in Heimito von
Doderers Die Dämonen.”
31. Another alter ego of the author, René von Stangeler, also has a split name:
“René” (short for Renato?) echoes the name of the minor character Renata, who,
as Siegel (“The ‘Dream Diary’ ”) has emphasized, may be interpreted as a figure
of “rebirth.”
32. On the complexities of Quapp’s development and the narration of it, see
my “Konjunktivisches Erzählen in Heimito von Doderers Die Dämonen.”
33. Bastards especially need know-how in order to inherit. The contrast
with an archetypal literary bastard, Edmund from Shakespeare’s King Lear,
shows the difference between Quapp’s passivity and actively “knowing how to
inherit.”
34. The beginning of Die Dämonen finds Geyrenhoff, many years after the
events of the novel, living—apparently having outlived his wife and her money—
in a painter’s atelier, which he had “more or less inherited” (gewissermaßen
beerbt) from Schlaggenberg (DD 7). Schlaggenberg, a non-inheritor, is skilled
at finding such quarters. The elapsed time between the novel’s main plot and
the narration of the “Overture”—and the uncertainty as to what happened in
between—mutes the novel’s happy endings.
35. For more on Quapp’s trema, see my see my “Konjunktivisches Erzählen in
Heimito von Doderers Die Dämonen.”
36. The Dämon as a traumatic inability to perform also appears in Die Strudl-
hofstiege in René’s speech on “psychology . . . [as] disinfected demonology” (689).
37. This paradigm of the “seeking” protagonist (the “meaning” of whose life
is supplied by the ironically reflecting figure of the narrator) fits precisely with
Lukács’s conception. It is also worth noting, however, that Doderer’s most ide-
alized figures (Kaps and Kakabsa) are no longer artists (or at least receive no
recognition as such) and their development is not primarily defined by seeking,
but by the development of a system for receiving and practicing internal inheri-
tance. “Success” and a certain external recognition (as in Kakabsa’s case) or the
relative lack thereof (as in Kaps’s case) is secondary in comparison to the narra-
tor’s recognition of these figures, which is crucial.
38. A far-fetched but related example is Bamford’s The Shadow Factory, which
chronicles the attempts of the National Security Agency to produce a total tran-
scription of reality. Even given huge databases and a virtually limitless ability to
collect and transcribe, the temporal factor may prove insurmountable even to a
supercomputer devoted to “Total Information Awareness.”
Notes to Pages 185–187 235

39. The chronicler who tries to write simultaneously with events—without

the possibility of retrospective reductions—also parallels Pierre-Simon Laplace’s
famous “demon.”
40. About two years later, on May 10, 1937, Doderer repeats the same point
without direct reference to Lukács: “The narrator in his ideality has no other
attitude [Gesinnung] than that of life where it really happens [d[a]s Leben, wo es
wirklich geschieht]. He is the advocatus vitae against all congealed transcendence
[geronnene Transcendenz]. . . . This means . . . that he never collects God in any
kind of a verifiable way or into any single point but rather tries to distribute Him
as such a fine emulsion through the entirety of all of the reported events [als eine
derart feine Emulsion durch das Ganze aller berichteten Begebenheiten], that the
writing hand itself . . . no longer knows what it is actually reporting about” (TB
980).
41. Because Doderer’s Die Strudlhofstiege contains the kinds of caesuras that
Benjamin finds in the Elective Affinities, it might be categorized as a traditional
(not demonic) novel. The Strudlhof steps themselves fulfill this function, espe-
cially if Melzer’s ascent (355, 895) is read in connection to what Benjamin calls
“astral metaphorics.” In The Demons “sick terrestrial stars” (kranke Erden-
sterne) refer to the lights of the distant city and the astrological constellation of
the fates of “our group” in this environment (DD 20, 285, 328, 388, 1093, 1118,
1125, 1141, 1146, 1152, 1162, 1343); this contrasts with Die Strudlhofstiege,
in which the stars “rose, quietly twinkling, over his [Melzer’s] inner as well as
outer horizons . . . , an interpretable constellation [ein deutbares Sternbild] that
became a figure [die Figur annahm], connected from star to star by fine silvery
spider-threads [von Stern zu Stern durch feine silberne Spinnenfäden verbunden]”
(894–95).
42. I rely implicitly on Petutschnig’s Is er die Mitte?, which reads metaphors
of wood and prosthetics as figurations of the problem of zweite Wirklichkeit
(114–33). What emerges in light of the theory of the pure types is a conception
of reality as essentially prosthetic, even and especially in the “success stories.”
Language is the ultimate prosthesis that must be integrated and subordinated to
the free use of the individual, “a dead object which through exercise is intended
to be immediately integrated into the body” (122, my translation).
43. This is comparable to Benjamin’s criticism of the ambiguity of Goethe’s
concept of nature, which turns “the words of reason . . . [into] possessions of
nature” (GS 1.1:148).
44. This conception, if one accepts it as fundamental to Doderer’s thinking,
would have deep implications for his theories of apperception. In Der Fall Güter­
sloh, the “first reality,” the first world, is the “distorted perspective” of the infant.
The spontaneous force of apperception stands in relation to an act of deep memory
that has nothing to do with the “objective” perception of a “real” world (whose
conventional forms are pervasive and coercive). However, this theory of pure
types contradicts the theory of second reality in Doderer’s 1948 “Sexualität und
der totale Staat,” which also begins with a typological opposition that supposes a
“true” “analogical” reality at the base of the “pseudological” second realities that
individuals (in modern societies) create as defense mechanisms. The difference of
argumentation between the two essays may reflect Doderer’s commitment to a
“realist” reading of his work (which became the most influential interpretation).
236 Notes to Pages 187–195

The reductions and misunderstandings that resulted from expectations of realism

and their attribution to Doderer’s intents are delineated in Rudolf Helmstetter’s
Das Ornament der Grammatik (esp. 116–19). Despite shifts and inconsisten-
cies in Doderer’s self-theorization, “the pure types” were not simply replaced by
“second reality.” As late as 1966, in “Meine neunzehn Lebensläufe,” Doderer
presented an autobiographical version of the theory of pure types; he character-
izes his “development” as “the very belated attempt to make up for the prenatal
advantage [das sehr verspätete Nachholen jenes vorgeburtlichen Vorsprungs]” of
geniuses (WdD 493).
45. The German word Frechheit, which is also important for Doderer’s next
novel, Die Merowinger, is associated with demonic character; this is also the case
in the Piper translation of Dostoyevsky’s Demons. The word has no perfect Eng-
lish equivalent; in German it is a more fixed attribute without the implications
of behavior expressed in English words like “audaciousness,” “insolence,” or
“impertinence.” Perhaps, following Benjamin’s “Fate and Character,” Frechheit
may be seen as a morally neutral category because it does not pertain to freedom
of action; it should also be noted, however, that Frechheit may have been a part
of Doderer’s vocabulary of anti-Semitic stereotyping.
46. The difference between “taking” and “receiving” is a crucial one through-
out Doderer’s works. It is characteristic of a certain (modern) psychology to want
to “take” things that can only be “given” (Dinge zu nehmen, die nur hinzugege-
ben werden können). See, for example, Die Strudlhofstiege, 687.
47. Croix’s name also reflects his demonic character. Doderer’s “Grundla-
gen und Funktionen des Romans” points to a traditional connection between
the “hybrid space” of the crossroads and the demonic (WdD 162). Geyrenhoff
crosses paths with Croix (DD 840) at a moment when he is at an internal cross-
roads; the subsequent conversation is characterized as “a kind of central station”
(eine Art von Zentrale, DD 844–45). In a June 5, 1959, diary entry, Doderer
compares the demonic to a void at the base of life, like a plug pulled from a bath-
tub: “Das Dämonische—äußerste Intensität ohne Richtung, an Ort und Stelle
kreisend—öffnet plötzlich ein Loch am Grunde unseres Lebens, als hätte man den
Stöpsel einer Badewanne gezogen” (Commentarii I, 189).
48. On bad company and the demonic, Doderer wrote in his diary on March
2, 1962, that “all bad society has something demonic about it [Alle schlechte
Gesellschaft hat etwas Dämonisches]”: “Wir unterliegen in schlechter Gesell-
schaft keinem messenden Anspruche mehr, dürfen uns aber noch immer für was
besseres halten. Keine Gesellschaft zieht so an sich wie die schlechteste” (Com-
mentarii I, 322).
49. Doderer, Repertorium, 45; abbreviated R.

Conclusion
1. A comparison of Goethe’s “Urworte” and Shakespeare’s “The Seven Ages of
Man” is illuminating: in Shakespeare, the universal moment is expressed mostly
in the beginning (“all the world’s a stage”) and at the end (“mere oblivion,” “sans
everything”), whereas the intervening development is presented in historically
and culturally specific images. Goethe, on the other hand, formulates his “ages”
for maximum applicability.
2. See Schmitt’s letter to Blumenberg from December 9, 1975 (Briefwechsel, 144).
Notes to Pages 195–197 237

3. A major force behind this shift was certainly Kierkegaard. See his The
Concept of Irony (part 1, chapter 2.1), which introduces the demonic through
Socrates: “the daimonian is a qualification of subjectivity . . . But subjectivity
is not consummated in it; it still has something external” (165). As in Goethe’s
conception, in Kierkegaard it may be possible to find multiple conceptions of
the demonic. For example, The Concept of Anxiety introduces the demonic
under the heading of “Anxiety About the Good” (118). See Jaspers’s summary of
Kierkegaard’s conception in Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (428–32). A tell-
ing difference with Goethe emerges in Jaspers’s conception of das Dämonische as
der Dämonische: “Der Dämonische existiert” (The demonic [person] exists, 429).
Goebel’s Charis und Charisma (79–94) also reflects a strong divergence between
Goethe and Kierkegaard. The words “theological” and “psychological” may best
capture the difference of emphasis. According to Goebel, Kierkegaard’s theologi-
cal decisionism attempts a systematic definition of what Goethe calls “demonic
character” (87). Goethe’s Poetry and Truth, though psychological in some aspects,
is anti-theological insofar as it views the “private” theologies and psychologies of
individuals as reactions to the uncontrollable contingency of a more impersonal-
objective conception of the demonic as a force. Kierkegaard inverts this, turning
the demonic into a pretext for its opposite, the leap of faith. Goebel argues that
this famous leap is unable to be permanently stabilized, implying a reversion to
Goethe’s conception (94).
4. Doderer’s de-substantialized and demystified approach sets his novel apart
from Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Doderer read Mann’s novel at the end
of the 1940s after the initial failure of his Demons project. Mann remains more
obviously seduced by the idea of genius and its connection to a specifically Ger-
man Geistesgeschichte, whereas Doderer’s idea of “genius in latency” focuses less
on the exceptional or demonic quality of geniuses than on the insurmountable
obstacles to their development.
5. Blumenberg-Schmitt, Briefwechsel, 171.
 Demonic History
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 Demonic History
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 Index

Adorno, Theodor, 96, 98, 111, 213n33, 122, 125–26, 130–31, 133, 168,
221n10, 228n15 226n24, 230n32. See also under
aesthetics, 13, 39, 57 fate; Gundolf, Friedrich; modernity;
Agamben, Giorgio, 15, 212n26, 223n1 morphology
Aichinger, Gerhard, 170–71, 172 Benn, Gottfried, 211n18
Aristotle, 5, 6, 27, 101 Bernhard, Thomas, 165–67, 168, 231n4
Arnold, Gottfried, 51 Bildungstrieb, 221n17
Blanchot, Maurice, 140, 229n19
Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 214n1, 215n11 Blumenberg, Hans, 65, 104, 117,
Bamford, James, 234n38 228n16; on the demonic, xi, 3, 5,
Benjamin, Walter, 10, 13, 16, 73, 111– 6–9, 12–13, 66, 109, 159, 210n9,
33, 161, 226nn25–28; on analogy and 210n11, 210nn13–15, 212n24; on
affinity, 118–20, 191; on character, form, 215n9; on myth, 7, 225n12; on
124; on criticism, 125–26, 128–29, political theology, 197; on prehistory,
132, 133; on the demonic, xi, 10, 13, 215n5, 223n33; on Rothacker,
56, 111–15, 122–26, 129, 133, 186, 226n20; and Schmitt, 12, 158–59,
194, 198; on equality, 113–14; on 196, 197; self-assertion and, 53, 195
formulaic language, 116–18; Goethe Boisserée, Sulpiz, 21, 22
and, 16, 18, 21, 74, 111, 113, 117, Borges, Jorge Luis, 228n11
120–22, 125–33; on law, 112–15, Brakke, David, 14–15
123, 224n9, 225n12; on the mythic, Broch, Hermann, 228n8
112–14, 121, 123–24, 125–26, 128– Brodsky, Claudia, 209n4
29, 132, 133, 150, 162, 167, 197; on Buck, Theo, 23
the novel, 19, 132; on prehistory, 112, Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 90
114–15, 224n8; on sentimentalism,
120; on similitude, 118; Spengler and, Caesar, Julius, 72, 73, 105, 109
111–12, 115, 117, 119–20, 122, 223– Cagliostro, Alessandro di, 84
24nn4–5; on tragedy and comedy, Carlyle, Thomas, xii, 10; Sartor
123–24, 226n24 Resartus, v, 211n20, 230n27
works: “Analogy and Affinity,” Cassirer, Ernst, 216n17, 219n12
118–20; Arcades Project, 120, Cervantes, Miguel de, 162, 169, 230n27
121; “Critique of Violence,” 112, Creuzer, Friedrich, 21, 22, 24
113–15; “Fate and Character,” Cuvier, Georges, 43, 103, 227n1
113, 115–17, 122–25, 236n45;
“Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” daemon (daimon), classical, 5, 6, 8,
16, 59–60, 111, 116–17, 122, 12–15, 227n3
125–33, 167, 186, 226nn21–22, Dante Alighieri, 76, 148, 154, 167,
226nn26–27, 229n21, 231n6, 230n27
235n41, 235n43; “Karl Kraus,” Darwin, Charles, 104
223n1, 226n22; “The Storyteller,” Degner, Uta, 221n17
19, 111; Trauerspielbuch, 115, 120, Delph, Demoiselle, 77, 79

249
250 Index

de Man, Paul, 210n14 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 13, 138, 150–51,

demonic, the: definitions of, ix–xi, 157, 161, 163–67, 169–70, 185,
3–11, 13, 15, 65–67, 71, 75, 83, 230n27, 230n30, 231n4, 232n12
101, 135–36, 157, 169, 187, 190, works: The Brothers Karamazov,
193–99, 210n15, 211n19, 212n24, 115; The Demons, xi–xii, 39, 84,
214n34, 227n6, 232n9; gendering 164–67, 170, 172–73, 186, 220n17,
of, 34, 48, 216n14, 227n1; 226n27, 236n45. See also under
predestination and, 11–12, 15, 18, Doderer, Heimito von
72, 106; theology and, 5, 12, 13–14,
15–16; twentieth-century views of, Eckermann, Johann Peter, x, 67, 74,
xi–xii, 13; as the unknown, ix–x, 89–90
8–9, 15, 63–64, 101, 198. See also entelechy, 5, 6, 27, 102
under novel and under featured Enlightenment, 14, 55, 96
writers epic, the, 136–37, 142, 147–48, 150,
demons (persecuting spirits), ix–x, 162–63, 167, 213n34
5, 12, 14–15, 112, 167, 190, 197, Erfüllungs-Rückstoß (realization- or
209n5, 212nn26–27 fulfillment recoil), 87–90, 92
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 138 ethnography, 112
Doderer, Heimito von, 161, 164–91,
217n14; on child development and fate: in Benjamin, 116–17, 121, 122–24,
types, 175–80, 182–84, 235n44; the 127, 197, 226n23; in Goethe, 11, 12,
demonic and, ix, 80, 88, 93, 165, 17, 24, 26, 36, 60, 72–75, 77, 79, 80,
166–69, 174–75, 180, 182–83, 186– 84, 100, 117, 198; in Spengler, 18, 44,
91, 196, 231n3, 232n9, 234n36, 92, 96–100, 103–4, 106–8, 112, 121
236n45, 236nn47–48; Dostoyevsky Fehér, Ferenc, 229n20
and, 164–65, 168–69, 170, 172–73, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 157
186, 231n8, 232nn16–17; on Flaubert, Gustave, 169, 230n27
Erfüllungs-Rückstoß, 87–88, 170, Fleischer, Wolfgang, 171
220n4; Goethe and, 169, 174–75, Förster, Eckart, 217n6
177, 233n21, 233n23; on irony, Foucault, Michel, 98, 104, 216n3,
190; Lukács and, 168–70, 172, 175, 221n15
185, 232n10, 235n40; metafictional France, Anatole, 113, 224n11
approach, 19, 164–65; Nazi Frankfurt School, xii, 199
affiliation, 87–88, 166–67, 170–72; Freud, Sigmund, xi, 9, 10, 89, 112, 113,
philosophy of history, 92–93; 137, 194, 198, 214n1, 224n7
reading background, 169–70; “fulfillment recoil.” See
Spengler and, 169, 175, 178 Erfüllungs-Rückstoß
works: The Demons, 19, 88,
89, 164–74, 178–91, 196, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Étienne, 43, 103,
214n34, 232n13, 233n18, 227n1
234nn28–31, 234n34, 234n37, George, Stefan, 74, 170
237n4; early writings, 88, Geulen, Eva, 217n7
220n5; Der Grenzwald, 233n20; Gibson, William, 225n13
The Gütersloh Case, 175–80, Gide, André, 11–12, 13, 164–65,
183, 186, 190, 235n44; Die 211n20
Merowinger, 236n45; “Sexuality Gnosticism, 12, 16, 155, 157, 158–59,
and the Total State,” 172, 223n31, 230n31
225n16, 235n44; The Studlhof Goebel, Eckart, 237n3
Steps, 79, 232n13, 234n30, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: on
235n41 composition, 43; conversations with
Index 251

Eckermann, x, 74, 89–91, 95, 209n5, 218n17, 220n18, 237n3; “Principes

209n13, 227n1; on culture, 24, 30, de Philosophie Zoologique,” 43;
33, 50–51, 54; the demonic and, “Probleme,” 46; “The Sorcerer’s
x–xi, xii, 3–7, 9–13, 15–19, 24–34, Apprentice,” 219n14; The Theory
37, 39, 42–49, 51–55, 59–84, 90, of Colors, 143, 145; Torquato
99, 100–101, 105–9, 111–12, 114, Tasso, 92, 222n22; Wilhelm’s
115, 122, 126, 133, 135–38, 141, Meister’s Apprenticeship, 102, 197–
154, 156–58, 161–63, 174, 187, 98; Wilhelm’s Meister’s Journeyman
190, 193–96, 199, 209n13, 212n20, Years, 143, 144–45, 149, 230n27.
212nn24–25, 214n34, 218n17, See also under fate; Lukács, Georg;
219n16, 220n18, 230n29; on irony, morphology
152; in Italy, 41, 50; on the Jews, 30; Goncharov, Ivan, 169
“monster motto,” 83, 109, 158, 195, Greek antiquity, 22, 142, 145–47, 153–
158, 195–96; on Mozart, 227n1; 54, 214nn1–2, 215n5
on the novella, 85; on religion, Greek religion, 21–23
51–56, 64 Gundolf, Friedrich, xi, 5, 9–10, 16–17,
works: “Analysis and Synthesis,” 40; 18, 39, 59–62, 68, 70–75, 78, 80, 90,
“Betrachtung zur Morphologie,” 96, 100, 161–62, 218nn1, 219n8;
39–40, 216n1; Egmont, 4, 74, Benjamin’s polemic against, 16, 59, 74
75–76, 79–80, 83, 196; Elective 111, 117, 125, 126, 128–30, 224n4,
Affinities, 16, 18, 49, 111, 125, 227n28; and Lukács, 137, 161; on
129–33, 167; “The Fate of the symbol and allegory, 217n13
Manuscript,” 49–50; Faust, 5, 49, Gütersloh, Albert Paris, 174–75, 178–
52–53, 92, 100–101, 143, 144, 167, 79, 184, 186
209n5, 218n3, 223n33, 227n1,
229n26; “Fossiler Stier,” 217n9; Habermas, Jürgen, 221n16
“History of His Botanical Studies,” Hadot, Pierre, v, 216n19
41; Italian Journey, 42, 79, 89, Hamann, Johann Georg, 5
219n15; “Maxims and Reflections,” Hasterlik, Auguste, 171, 232n16
143; On Art and Antiquity, 23, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 10,
39; “On the Metamorphosis of 138, 139, 143, 216n2, 227n4
Plants,” 41–42, 49, 217n12; On Heidegger, Martin, 96, 209n7
Morphology, x, 17, 23, 39, 41, Heller, Hermann, 98, 222n18
45, 49, 51, 54, 90; “On the Spiral Heraclitus, 6, 209n7
Tendency of Vegetation,” 47–48; Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 5, 97,
“Orphic Primal Words,” x, xi, 6, 15, 221n12
16–19, 21–37, 39, 42–43, 45–46, Hermann, Johann Gottfried Jakob, 21,
49–51, 54–57, 59–64, 67–71, 75, 22, 24
90, 101–2, 111, 117, 122–23, 128– Hoffmann, E. T. A., 84
32, 135, 136, 142, 149–50, 154, Hofmann, Peter, 210n10, 210n15
162, 169, 174–75, 193–94, 201–8, Hofmansthal, Hugo von, 116, 122,
211n18, 213nn28–32, 214n1, 211n18
214–15nn3–7, 216n14, 216nn20– Hölderlin, Friedrich, 128, 131, 211n18,
21, 218nn3–6, 222n24, 230n29, 221n17
236n1; Poetry and Truth, x, 3–4, Homer, 137, 147, 148, 162, 167
6–7, 16, 17–18, 24, 47, 51–52, Husserl, Edmund, 138–39
54–56, 60, 64, 66–67, 69–73,
75–84, 89, 90, 99, 107–8, 111, Job, 65, 82, 230n31
122, 126, 133, 135–36, 141, 152, Jonas, Hans, 3, 12–13
158, 190, 194, 195–96, 216n13, Jung-Stilling, Heinrich, 81–83
252 Index

Kaerrick, Less (E. K. Rahsin), 161–62 Macrobius, 21, 24, 70

Kafka, Franz, 115, 135–36, 170, 232n11 Mandelkow, Karl Robert, 211n17
Kant, Immanuel, 35, 39, 42, 94–95, 101, Mann, Thomas, 136, 170, 237n4
104, 139, 143, 145–46; Goethe on, Márkus, György, 229n18, 229n25
217n10 Marx, Karl, 104
Kierkegaard, Søren, 10, 13, 111, 138, Matala de Mazza, Ethel, 210n9
139, 227n1, 237n3 Melville, Herman, xii, 10, 214n34,
Kleinlercher, Alexandra, 171, 233n18, 229n19
233n20, 234n28 Menasse, Robert, 228n11
Kleist, Heinrich von, 115, 169 Mephistopheles, 5, 53, 209n5
Koselleck, Reinhart, 94, 104 metaphysics, 64, 96
Kraft, Werner, 224n5 Michelangelo, 105–6
Kuhn, Dorothea, 40 Milder, Robert, 214n34
modernity, 13, 15, 18, 94–95, 96, 99,
Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 235n39 107, 125–26, 133, 159, 162, 193–95,
Lavater, Johann Caspar, 76, 81 211n19; Benjamin and, 113–15, 194–
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 5, 27 95, 197; Lukács and, 146–47, 150,
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 220n9 154–56, 162–63, 177
Liu, Albert, 221n9, 222n29 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 170,
Lucifer, 52–54, 158, 212n20, 218n15; 172–73, 230n30, 232n12
the “Luciferian,” 140–41, 143–48, Moretti, Franco, 213n34
152, 154–55, 157–58, 223n1, morphology: Benjamin and, 56, 117–
229n18, 229nn20–21 22, 128, 225n19; defined, 39–40,
Luehrs, Kai, 231n1 98–99, 119; Erfüllungs-Rückstoß
Lukács, Georg, xi, 9, 10, 16, 78, 87–88, and, 89–90; Goethe and, 39–57, 63,
136–59, 167–70, 177–78, 183, 199; 71, 73, 90–91, 93, 96–97, 103–4,
aesthetics, 138–42, 146–47, 229n18, 118, 120–21, 124, 143, 195, 216n3,
229n23; on Christianity, 155, 162; and 221n9; morpho-biography, 219n9;
the demonic, 111, 136–37, 149, 152– the novel and, 56; Spengler and, 91,
59, 161–62, 167–68, 186, 193, 227n2; 93, 96–97, 98–99, 100, 102, 103–6,
Dostoyevsky and, 230n27, 230n30; 109, 118, 120, 122, 124, 126, 195,
Gnosticism and, 155, 157, 158–59; 220n9, 221n12
Goethe and, 136, 138, 139, 141–45, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 90, 135,
149–50, 152, 156–57, 228n12, 227n1
230nn28–29; on Greek antiquity, 142, Muschg, Walter, 209n6, 212n25
145–47, 149–50, 153–54, 156, 162; Musil, Robert, 115, 221n10
influence on Benjamin, 111; influence
on Doderer, 168–70, 185, 196; on Napoleon, 8, 13, 72, 73, 83, 90, 105,
interiority, 150, 151, 177, 187; on 109, 196
irony, 149, 151–52, 153, 155, 157, Nazism, 87, 88, 166–67, 170–72, 179,
190, 196; philosophy of history, 199, 223n4
228n11; Spengler and, 228n11 Nicholls, Angus, 5, 6, 7–8, 10, 212n24
works: Heidelberg Aesthetics, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 13, 94, 100,
138–45, 146–47, 149, 152, 157, 104, 193, 229n24, 232n12; and the
229n18, 229n25, 230n28; Soul and “eternal return,” 97, 121, 220n7
Form, 227n6; Theory of the Novel, Novalis, 153
10, 12–13, 18–19, 56, 84, 136–38, novel, the: Benjamin on, 19; the
141–59, 163, 168, 169, 185, Bildungsroman, 102, 135; the
229n18, 229n24. See also under demonic and, xi–xii, 10, 18–19,
modernity; the novel 84–85, 135–37, 152–53, 161–68,
Index 253

186, 213n34, 227n3; Lukács on, Spengler, Oswald, xi, 10, 13, 16–17,
10, 12–13, 18–19, 56, 84, 136–38, 18, 27, 44, 91–109, 111–12, 117–20,
141–59, 162–63, 167–68, 173, 185, 169, 221–22nn16–18, 222nn20–24,
234n37; science fiction, 225n13. See 222n26–27, 222–23nn29–30; on
also the epic archaeology, 221n15; on art, 106;
the demonic in, 18, 60, 75, 96, 99,
onomasiology, 4, 63, 209n3 100–101, 103, 105–9, 112, 115, 137,
Orwell, George, 71 159, 162, 194; the Faustian in, 100,
Otto, Rudolph, 14, 212n24 101, 103, 109; Goethe and, 92, 96,
100–104, 108–9, 222n24, 227n29;
Padel, Ruth, 212n27 irrationalism in, 105; on law, 124,
Petutschnig, Thomas Hans, 235n42 127, 222n26; “philosophy of the
Pfitzner, Hans, 213n32 future,” 97, 99; philosophy of history,
Plato, 8, 42, 121, 139, 144, 147 91–95, 97, 104, 106, 220n7, 221n10,
Plotinus, 143, 145, 218n16 228n11; substitutability, 92–93, 96,
“political theology,” 16, 196–97, 97, 102–3, 129; typology in, 101, 103,
216n13 128. See also under Benjamin, Walter;
Pontoppidan, Henrik, 169, 230n27 fate; morphology
possession, 12, 13, 15 Staiger, Emil, 218n5, 219n10
pseudomorphosis, 100, 106, 109, 126, Stein, Charlotte von, 42
162, 222n17, 222n20 Stern, Fritz, 232n12
Sterne, Laurence, 85
Raphael, 90 Stoicism, 122
Rhodes, Cecil, 99, 109 Sturm und Drang, 5
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 170, 232n11 Suarez, Daniel, 227n3
Rothacker, Erich, 226n20
teleology, 44, 73, 91, 93–94
Sagnol, Marc, 224n9 theology. See under the demonic
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 139 Tillich, Paul, 13–14
Schiele, Egon, 179–80 Tolstoy, Leo, 139, 162, 169, 185, 230n27
Schiller, Friedrich, 13, 99–100, 120, 138,
228n13 uncanny, the, 89, 194, 199
Schmidt, Jochen, 6, 23, 59, 213n29,
222n18 Volz, Paul, 212n24, 230n31
Schmitt, Carl, 10, 12, 87, 158, 175, 196
Schmitz, Hermann, 218n6 Weber, Max, xi, 10, 104, 108, 195, 198,
Scholem, Gershom, 112–13 220n7
Schönemann, Lili, 75–77 Wedekind, Frank, 170
Shakespeare, William, 219n11, 234n33, Willer, Stefan, 215n4
236n1 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 13
Simmel, Georg, 120, 137, 162, 215n8, Wundt, Wilhelm, xi, 112, 113, 137, 169,
219n9 198, 224n6, 227n6, 232n9
Simonis, Annette, 225n19
Socrates, 5, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 25, 101, Zoëga, Georg, 21, 29
237n3 Zweig, Stefan, 233n25