A Contribution to the Revival of “Sunken Intellectual Life”

The “Kommende-Tag-Verlag” has acquired the remaining stocks of Karl Julius Schröer's writings on Goethe: “Faust by Goethe. With introduction and continuous explanation by K. J. Schröer” and “Goethe and love” as well as “The performance of the whole Faust at the Vienna Hofburgtheater”. This gives me cause to say a few words about the last two small writings. “The Performance of the Complete Faust” was published in 1883. I often saw Karl Julius Schröer, who was both my teacher and fatherly friend, both in his lectures and in his study in Vienna's Salesianergasse. I saw how this man lived in the spirit of Goethe. At that time, he was working on his interpretation of Faust and of the other dramas of Goethe. The performance of the entire Faust that took place in January 1883 at three evenings in a row was an attempt to realize this work. The maturity of the view that Schröer had acquired during his studies of Goethe was reflected in the description of this performance. At that time, it was an outstanding artistic event in Vienna. What Schröer had to say about it seems so vivid even today that it can be read with full interest.

The little book “Goethe and Love” is probably unique in the rich Goethe literature. Every sentence is written from direct experience. Philosophy of life in the most beautiful sense of the word, presented to Goethe, appears before the reader. Schröer lived entirely in the Goethean way of idealism. At the time when he was working on this booklet, he gave a lecture in Vienna entitled “The Coming Views on Goethe,” an excerpt from which is printed in the appendix to “Goethe and Love.” “Fifty years have passed since Goethe's death, and it almost seems to us as if he were standing before our eyes more truly and more vividly than he did to his contemporaries fifty years ago; as if a kind of resurrection after death had already taken place.” Schröer wrote this in 1882; at that time he was convinced that such a resurrection of Goethean idealism was necessary. He thought he saw it coming. He wrote everything that exists about Goethe with this attitude in mind. But one can also be convinced that in the present such voices as Schröer's should be heard again. In the booklet 'Goethe and Love' we find the sentences: 'In the healing arts, great diagnosticians at the bedside are praised for their insight with which they recognize the habitus, the individual type of the patient, and from that, the disease. It is not their chemical or anatomical knowledge that helps them in this, but rather their intuition of the living being as a whole.... If such a diagnostician follows the intuitive method unconsciously, Goethe introduced it into science consciously. It led him to results that are no longer disputed; only the method has not yet been fully recognized.” This does, however, pose a challenge for knowledge, and intensive work should be done to fulfill it today.