Good Evening Herr Goethe.

You never experienced flight, phone calls, email, facebook, or even a ride to the airport in a limousine. Your Vocabulary didn’t include words like google or android or television, and yet you were the communicator extraordinaire. You used the words you had with incomparable sensitivity and great awareness. You rocked it, Herr Goethe. And I am sorry that I didn’t pay closer attention earlier.

You did play a large part in my childhood. I recited your “Erlkönig,” read your “Faust,” bought your “Sorrows of Young Werther” and “Elective Affinities,” and discussed, at length, the period known as Weimar Classicism and its precursor, Sturm und Drang, with teachers and friends at the Hoelderlin Realgymnasium.

All the attention given to your writings should have made me a Goethe lover. But it didn’t. That is my stepfather’s fault. In our living room, ominous, always wagging a threatening finger at me, one of your sentences was displayed. Here, above an oversized couch I would read the printed words “Die Tat ist alles, nichts der Ruhm.” Below it, in small letters, your name: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

“The deed is everything; glory means nothing.”

Why should this noble statement spit its claim at me for the next 60 years?

Well! This statement embodies everything that was wrong in my life. Every lie. Every demand. Every threat. Every lonely game of solitaire I played, stubbornly revisiting the resentment caused by one incident of moral depravity. The deed was plastered all over the walls of my childhood.

It took me a lifetime to make peace with you, Herr Goethe, but in December I will travel to Weimar to let you know that I have forgiven you.

My stepfather called himself a “proud Prussian.” Today I look at his arrogance the way I look at a pedophile priest’s declaration that he is “a humble servant of God.” But how does a child weigh rhetoric and action against each other? If a man who should be the child’s protector becomes her abuser, how does she judge moral relevance? And, how does this relate to the serious proclamation of one so important as you, Herr von Goethe?

In my childish ways I interpreted your words with major emphasis on deed, knowing instinctively that my stepfather would not indulge in seeking glory. The deed itself was his glory. I was unable to separate the words on the wall from his conduct. You, Herr Goethe, condoned his behaviour, therefore your magnificent words were lies to this thirteen-year old girl. And for all these years, even though I had long forgiven my stepfather, I was unable to enjoy  your great poetry. Maybe we tend to absolve mere mortals from their sins, but show less leniency toward the shortcomings of those who might be our immortal heroes. 

My childhood was difficult, my young adulthood crazy, my marriages complicated by early impressions of male female relationships, and, I assume that my mothering, too, is compromised by past experiences. When I retired I began to write, cautiously at first, then more boldly. I stepped back in time. I discovered the very young me who braided daisy chains, sang the praise of gnomes, collected pebbles, shouted the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” from a mountaintop.

I reread the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” last year. In googling English translations to German poetry I learned that a young man in Germany had made a name for himself by rapping Goethe and Schiller in schools, and so promoting a new concept of reciting and learning the classics. Doppel-U, the rapper, brought me back to you. His unconventional, playful treatment of your poetry removed Herr Goethe, the man, from Herr Goethe, the writer.

Doppel U’s rap of the  ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice “ will accompany me on my trip to Weimar. In my daydreams I imagine myself walking through the cemetery on Christmas Eve, candles from a nearby tall spruce lighting the way, snowflakes falling from the sky, settling on my shoulders, the faint echo of caroling children’s voices hanging in the air. When I lay a single white rose on your grave I will recite “In die Ecke, Besen! Besen!” banning the ghosts forever into a corner of my conscious mind. Then I will drink a hot chocolate at the Resi and write in my travel journal about our meeting. The Resi, I am told, once bordered onto your first residence in Weimar. Today, what was once your living room has become a room for guests, known as Goethe Zimmer.

          Herr Goethe, you can’t imagine how much I am looking forward to this journey. And though you will be unfamiliar with many of my expressions and the innovations of two centuries beyond your lifetime, you will understand what this trip is all about.

See you soon,

Gisela.

P.S. I am traveling with a teddy bear; her name is Tyana J LittleString. The above photograph shows her on top of my packed suitcase.