Boydell and Brewer C. Hurst & Company Chapter Title: Literary Form and International World Order in Goethe: From Iphigenie to Pandora Chapter Author(s): CHENXI TANG Book Title: Goethe Yearbook 25 Book Editor(s): Adrian Daub, Elisabeth Krimmer, Sean Franzel Published by: Boydell and Brewer, C. Hurst & Company. (2018) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt2111dp0.12 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Boydell and Brewer, C. Hurst & Company are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Goethe Yearbook 25 This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CHENXI TANG Literary Form and International World Order in Goethe: From Iphigenie to Pandora T GOETHE was an age of tumult in the international world. Armed conflicts were frequent and increased in scope and intensity: Seven Years’ War (1756–63), American Revolutionary Wars (1775–83), French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), the Greek War of Independence (1821–32), to name just a few examples. A key instrument for regulating and ordering the tumultuous international world was international law. The scion of a distinguished lawyer family, Goethe studied, among other things, international law in his academic legal training, following in the footsteps of his maternal forefather Johann Wolfgang Textor who authored Synopsis Juris Gentium (1680), a significant work in the history of international law. The theses that he prepared in 1771 for his final exam, the so-called Positiones juris, include statements about ius naturae (Theses I, LVI) and ius gentium (Thesis XLVII), that is, those areas of jurisprudence that formed the basis of international law in early modern Europe.1 Later on, as a high official at the court of Weimar, Goethe acquired first-hand experiences in international politics and international law.2 Especially his stint on the battlefields alongside the Duke of Weimar during the First War of Coalition against Revolutionary France, documented later in Campagne in Frankreich and Belagerung von Mainz, must have confronted him with the whole range of international legal issues. Theoretical studies as well as practical experiences revealed to Goethe the purpose as well as the limitations of international law: as the law between states, international law was supposed to provide for a normative world order, but it patently failed to do so, as made painfully clear by the continual wars raging around him. If it was as a jurist that Goethe became aware of the problems of international law and world order, it was as a poet that he tried out possibilities of resolving them. In this regard, he went through three phases. First, he used poetic writing as a medium for negotiating specific issues in the international world and finding imaginary solutions to them. Exemplary for this phase was Iphigenie auf Tauris, the prose version of which was completed in 1779, at a time when Goethe headed the War Commission at the court of Weimar and presumably had to face international issues on a daily basis. The second phase fell in the years of the Revolutionary Wars, when international law seemed to unravel altogether. The prime example for this HE AGE OF Goethe Yearbook XXV (2018) This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 184 Chenxi Tang phase was the novella cycle Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten published in 1795, a text that stages the fragility, indeed the collapse of international law (as well as that of natural law on which international law was predicated) and entrusts instead the literary imagination with the task of envisioning a normative world order. Finally, in Pandora, a masque or festival play (Festspiel) first published in the midst of Napoleonic Wars in 1808, Goethe moves beyond international law itself and discovers the root cause for the inability of international law to provide for a normative world order—the institution of the modern state. While the state represents a legal order within itself, it exists in a lawless vacuum in relation to other states. There can be no binding international law. Pandora contrasts the institution of the state with aesthetic contemplation, turning world order into a matter of aesthetic appearance. The present essay investigates Goethe’s literary responses to the problem of international world order from Iphigenie auf Tauris to Pandora. At its center is the question of literary form. Iphigenie auf Tauris employs a particular literary form, that is, tragic drama, to negotiate fundamental issues about the state and international relations, as well as more specific political and legal issues such as the right of foreigners. Drawing on both ancient models and early modern innovations, this play proposes an international legal regime with the individual person as a legal person alongside the state, anticipating Kantian cosmopolitanism as well as certain aspects of international human rights law. Literary form helps resolve international issues and thus institute a new legal order for the world. By contrast, in Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, a literary form—in this case the novella—is set to work as the fungible agent of the literary imagination that is supposed to provide an alternative to international law, if not to replace it altogether. Finally, Pandora problematizes the very relationship between world order and literary form. Literary form, no longer exemplified by any particular genre, is supposed to transfigure the political world into an aesthetic appearance, evoking a world order that is not political or legal in nature, but is to be judged by aesthetic norms. This essay focuses on Iphigenie auf Tauris and Pandora, as I have discussed the issue of literary form and international law in Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten in another essay.3 Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, ostensibly an adaptation of Euripides and bearing the generic subtitle “Ein Schauspiel” in its first published version of 1787, follows the formal conventions of tragic drama established in the early modern period. In Poetices libri septem of 1561, a grand new poetics brought forth by the Renaissance, Julius Caesar Scaliger pinpoints four features of tragedy: “In tragedy, there are kings and princes from cities, fortresses, and camps; the beginning is calmer, the end horrible; the language is solemn, refined, and far removed from vulgar speech; it is filled with anxiety: fears, threats, exiles, and death.”4 Among these four features, the royal rank of protagonists is the most crucial one, for the solemnity of language and the anxiety-suffused atmosphere are both attributable to the princely personage. Horrible endings are preferable, but not absolutely necessary, for many tragedies have more or less happy endings. Scaliger’s This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Goethe Yearbook 185 prescriptive definition of the tragic form was to exert a lasting influence, reiterated in theoretical discourse and implemented in poetic practice, not seriously challenged until the time of Diderot and Lessing who advocated the so-called domestic or bourgeois tragedy. Iphigenie auf Tauris fits this early modern conception of tragedy to a fault. Iphigenia, the priestess at Diana’s temple in Tauris, soon turns out to be the princess of Mycenae, and Orestes turns out to be the prince and king-to-be, so that their climactic argument with the Taurian king Thoas amounts to “ein Gespräch der Fürsten,” a conversation among princes (2015).5 With the threat of ritual killing, madness, rage, and agony as its main plot elements, the drama is “filled with anxiety” indeed. It may be classified as a “complex tragedy with a happy ending,” more specifically a “tragedy of averted sacrifice” as exemplified by Mozart’s Idomeneo (1780).6 Usually considered the beginning of Weimar classicism, Iphigenie auf Tauris taps into the tradition of the haute tragédie of French classicism, with a tightly structured plot unfolding in one single place and during a minimum period of time. Not surprisingly, then, Goethe himself characterizes it as “tragédie en cinq actes, tout à fait selon les règles” (tragedy in five acts, quite according to the rules) in a list of works prepared for Louis Bonaparte.7 According to the doctrine of royal absolutism, which came into being at the turn of the seventeenth century, the royal person embodies the state. Concerning itself with the actions of royal persons as it did, tragedy in early modern Europe was designed to negotiate the weightiest issues of the state—its violent origins, its internal strife, and its often belligerent relations to other states. Guided by the formal principles of early modern tragedy, Iphigenie auf Tauris tackles a number of such issues, including especially the law between sovereigns, or international law. Animated at the same time by the ethical and political ideas of the eighteenth century, it offers radically new solutions, thereby envisioning a model of international world order, which foreshadows Kantian cosmopolitanism and may also serve as a measure for today’s debates about international human rights, migration, and the right of the refugee. The main plot elements of Euripides’s Iphigenia among the Taurians (ca. 413BCE) make up an international conflict of some sort: after being acquitted by the gods for killing his mother to avenge his father Agamemnon, Orestes is instructed by Apollo to steal the sacred statue of Artemis from Tauris; he and his companion Pylades are captured, and Iphigenia, the priestess at the temple of Artemis, is supposed to administer their killing in accordance with the Taurian custom of sacrificing all foreigners landing on their shores; Iphigenia recognizes Orestes as her brother and decides to help him in stealing the statue of Artemis and to escape together with him; King Thoas calls upon his subjects to pursue the Hellene ship, but the goddess Athena enters to stop him, resolving the conflict between the Hellenes and the Taurians in favor of the former. Euripides’s Iphigenia-material enjoyed great popularity among dramatists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at a time of continual wars on the European continent and beyond.8 The international conflict as its core was represented in different ways. For example, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Iphigénie en Tauride (first performed in This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 186 Chenxi Tang Paris in 1779), with a libretto by Nicolas-François Guillard, ends with the Greeks and Taurians reconciled in a universal peace: Une paix douce et profonde Règne sur le sein de l’onde. La mer, la terre et les cieux, Tout favorise nos voeux.9 [A sweet and deep peace Reigns over the breast of the wave. The sea, the earth, and the heavens, All promote our wishes.] Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris approaches the conflict in terms of international law, or more precisely, in terms of one particular area of international law—the law of foreigners.10 Due to increasing trade and travel, the right of foreigners became an important area of international law in the eighteenth century. Johann Jakob Moser, the leading publicist in the second half of the century, documented the practice of major European states in this area in the sixth volume of his Versuch des neuesten Europäischen Völker-Rechts in Friedens- und Kriegs-Zeiten (Essay on the Most Recent European International Law in Times of Peace and War).11 Incidentally, the volume was published in 1778, at exactly the same time as Goethe was working on Iphigenie auf Tauris. Emer de Vattel’s 1758 Droit des Gens, the standard work on international law for a long time to come, devotes a whole chapter (Book II, Chap. 8) to the rights and duties of a foreigner in relation to the state in which he sojourns, deriving them from natural law. In this context, Vattel mentions the ancient legend about the custom of sacrificing foreigners to Diana in Scythia: A sovereign may not allow the right of entrance into his territory granted to foreigners to prove detrimental to them; in receiving them he agrees to protect them as his own subjects and to see that they enjoy, as far as depends on him, perfect security. Thus we see that every sovereign who has granted asylum to a foreigner considers himself no less offended by injuries which may be done to the foreigner than if they were done to his own subjects. Hospitality was held in great honor by the ancients, and even barbarian Nations such as the Germans. Those savage peoples who maltreated foreigners, such as the Scythians, who sacrificed them to Diana, were regarded with horror by all Nations, and Grotius says with reason, that by their extreme cruelty they cut themselves off from human society.12 Here Vattel makes a remarkable connection between ancient hospitality and the right of foreigners based on natural law. Hospitality was a legal institution in antiquity serving to regulate human intercourse outside of a polis. The exercise of hospitality was considered a mark of civilization, whereas the lack thereof was considered a mark of barbarism.13 As we know from the numerous scenes of encounter in Homer’s Odyssey, the basis of hospitality was the mutual recognition of the native and the foreigner as human under the eyes This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Goethe Yearbook 187 of Zeus. With a nod to Grotius who, as a humanist, tended to cite ancient authors to support his modern theory of natural law, Vattel reconceives hospitality as a matter of natural law, regarding its exercise as a mark of human nature and the lack thereof as a mark of inhumanity. The “asymmetric counter-concepts” of Hellene versus barbarian, which the ancient Greeks used to establish and valorize their identity over against others, morph imperceptibly into the equally asymmetric counter-concepts of human versus inhuman, which were employed in the eighteenth century to postulate a normative idea of human society.14 The Scythian custom of sacrificing foreigners, of course, is the scandal, around which the dramatic plot of Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris revolves (Tauris was a region of Scythia). Yet instead of evaluating this custom in terms of the asymmetric distinction between the civilized Hellene and the barbarian, and instead of simply translating this age-old distinction into the equally asymmetric distinction between human and inhuman, Goethe’s drama deconstructs the concept of barbarian altogether. It shows that the sacrificial killing of foreigners is, if anything, a manifestation of absolutist sovereign power. Against this background, the drama develops a new model of sovereign power, which goes hand in hand with a new conception of the individual human being as an emotionally and morally capable person. Accordingly, it envisages an international world in which two types of legal subject co-exist: the sovereign person and the individual person. The normative order of such an international world rests upon a new right to hospitality (Gastrecht)—a right that, in contrast to hospitality in antiquity, has no longer transcendent moorings but is immanently legitimated. This new right to hospitality or right of foreigners, as we shall see, moves beyond the natural law still advocated by Vattel. The two opening scenes of Iphigenie auf Tauris rehearse the semantics of the asymmetric counter-concepts Hellene versus barbarian (Koselleck 218–29). Iphigenia, stranded on foreign shores, embraces her Greek identity all the more ardently. While pining for her homeland day and night—“Das Land der Griechen mit der Seele suchend” (12; Seeking with all my soul the land of Greece15)—she has managed, in her capacity as the priestess of Diana, to persuade Thoas, the King of Taurians, to halt the sacrificial killing of foreigners. Human sacrifice is always taken to be the surest index of barbarism. Its suspension by Iphigenia, then, seems to testify to the Greeks’ difference from, superiority to, and civilizing power over the barbaric Taurians. This asymmetric opposition between the Greek and the barbarian is apparently not only assumed by the heroine, but recognized by Taurians themselves as well, as Arkas’s praise of Iphigenia’s achievement (117–43) leads us to believe. Yet already the third scene of the first act brings it into question. Thoas requests Iphigenia’s hand in marriage, she rejects his proposal, and he then asks for an explanation. Her response takes the form of a genealogical narrative of her origin. Beginning with her titanic ancestor Tantalus’s outrage against the gods and ending with her father Agamemnon’s sacrifice of herself on Aulis, it is a blood-drenched narrative of abominable betrayals and horrendous murders among the kin. Even before Iphigenia finishes her story, disgusted by the repulsive episode of Atreus slaughtering his This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 188 Chenxi Tang brother Thyestes’s sons and serving up their flesh to Thyestes as dinner, Thoas exclaims: . . . es sei genug Der Greuel! Sage nun, durch welch ein Wunder Von diesem wilden Stamme du entsprangst. (397–99) [. . . I have heard Enough abominations! Tell me by What miracle you sprang from that wild race.] By speaking of Iphigenia’s lineage as a “wilden Stamme,” or a savage tribe, the “barbarian” Thoas turns the table on the Greeks. Indeed, the sacrificial killing of foreigners in Tauris pales in comparison to the atrocious bloodlust of this Greek royal family. Later on, after having learned of her father Agamemnon’s gruesome murder at the hands of her own mother, Iphigenia is to agree with Thoas about the barbarity of her Greek ancestry: Weh dir, unseliges Myken! So haben Tantals Enkel Fluch auf Fluch Mit vollen, wilden Händen ausgesät. (967–69; Emphasis added) [Oh poor Mycene! How wild a crop of curses they have sown Upon you, the accursed Tantalids!] The branding of the royal house of Mycenae as “savage” by both Iphigenia and Thoas upends the asymmetric distinction between the Greek and the barbarian, between civilization and barbarism, placing them instead on an equal footing. If the civilized Greeks and the barbarians are equally barbarous, equally savage, what does barbarism or savagery actually consist in? King Thoas puts his finger on the question by explaining what is usually considered the most damning evidence of barbarism—the sacrificial killing of foreigners: Dies Ufer schreckt die Fremden: das Gesetz Gebietet’s und die Not. (258–59) [My shores mean fear to strangers; so the law And so necessity command.] The killing of foreigners is dictated by law and necessity. This pronouncement of the Taurian king amounts to the epitome of the absolutist doctrine of sovereignty. First, he asserts that the law (Gesetz) demands the killing of foreigners. In the age of absolutism, the law was seen as issuing exclusively from the sovereign will. Second, by juxtaposing law with necessity (Not), he alludes to the dictum “quod non est licitum in lege, necessitas facit licitum,” or necessity renders the illicit licit. It is a dictum already formulated in Gratian’s Decretum and often invoked in the age of absolutism, meant to highlight the power of the sovereign to decide on the state of exception, to make lawful what lies This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Goethe Yearbook 189 outside of the law.16 The power to make laws under ordinary circumstances and the power to decide on the state of exception combine to define sovereignty. Sovereign power, both as the source of law and the capacity for declaring the state of exception, is first and foremost a power over the life and death of individuals. The killing of foreigners as practiced in Tauris is thus nothing else than the manifestation of sovereign power. As such, it can be suspended if the sovereign wills it so, as has been the case since the arrival of Iphigenia in Tauris. Or it can be reinstated if that is the will of the sovereign. After his proposal is rejected by Iphigenia, Thoas decides to resume human sacrifice (503–21). As potestas legislatoria, sovereignty may not only enact and promulgate laws, but also interpret, change, abolish, or re-enact laws.17 In short, if the practice of human sacrifice is seen as that which marks out the Taurians as barbarians, then barbarism consists ultimately in the sovereign power. Sovereign power is barbarous because it manifests itself, either by law or by necessity, as violence. In a certain sense, the royal house of Mycenae proves to be even more barbarous, for while in Tauris sovereign violence is visited upon foreigners only—we are told that Tauris enjoys domestic peace and prosperity—violence reigns supreme in Mycenae internally. This Greek royal house inflicts violence on itself. This upending of the asymmetric distinction between the civilized (Hellenes) and the barbarian (Taurians) in Iphigenie auf Tauris resonates with Immanuel Kant’s observation that Europeans are more barbarous than the so-called barbarians because they wreak greater havoc with the war machine of the sovereign state. In his essay “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht” (Idea For a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose) written at around the same time (1784) as Iphigenie auf Tauris, Kant speaks of “the barbarous freedom of established states.”18 From the outset, Iphigenia embodies a principle that would put an end to violence, lay a new foundation for political community, and redefine sovereign power. Already in the opening monologue, we hear her articulate this principle: Weh dem, der fern von Eltern und Geschwistern Ein einsam Leben führt! Ihm zehrt der Gram Das nächste Glück vor seinen Lippen weg, Ihm schwärmen abwärts immer die Gedanken Nach seines Vaters Hallen, wo die Sonne Zuerst den Himmel vor ihm aufschloß, wo Sich Mitgeborne spielend fest und fester Mit sanften Banden aneinanderknüpften. (15–23) [How lonely is the man who lives alone Far from his family! Bitter grief corrupts Each present joy before his very lips. His yearning thoughts swarm back unceasingly Towards his fathers’ house, where first the sun Disclosed the heavens to him, where between Brothers and sisters tender bonds of love Were forged for ever as they lived and played.] This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 190 Chenxi Tang The keyword here is “sanfte Bande,” tender bonds between parents and children, as well as between siblings—in a word, emotional bonds. Given her bloodthirsty ancestors, and given her own experience of being slaughtered at the hands of her father on Aulis (a killing thwarted in the last minute by the goddess Diana who spirited her away in a cloud), it is surprising that she should sing the praise of “tender bonds” among family members. It is all the more surprising that her praise rings louder still after having heard what has happened to her family since the Aulis episode: her father slain in cold blood by her mother, and her mother slain by her brother to avenge her father. Iphigenia’s embrace of emotional bonds is thus not based on experience, but a normative gesture in spite of an experience to the contrary. Precisely because of the actual reign of violence, she envisions an ideal community forged by emotional bonds. In so doing, Iphigenia turns out to be a follower of sentimentalism current in the mideighteenth century, a sister of Werther as it were. For advocates of sentimentalism such as David Hume and Adam Smith, the internal impulses of affection and feeling take on a normative valence, serving as the basis of an ideal community—the sentimental community. The term “sentiment” came to mean an opinion steeped in the affective life, a principle arising from emotional experience, a norm that is felt. Iphigenia goes even a step further by making emotional bonds the foundation of sovereign power and the sentimental community a model for the state, as shown effectively in the episode of the emotional healing of her brother Orestes, the king-to-be of Mycenae. The emotional healing of Orestes takes place in the third act, the midpoint of the five-act drama. In Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the Furies persecuting Orestes are chthonic beings representing archaic matriarchy. In Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris, by contrast, the Furies are internalized by Orestes and become a mental pathology simply referred to as “madness” in the play, something that we may call paranoia today. Orestes is no longer persecuted by the external advocates for the mother, but by his own conscience, or rather by an awareness of having done violence to something valuable, something that ought to be—the affection among family members. As his friend Pylades puts it, Du mehrst das Übel Und nimmst das Amt der Furien auf dich. (756–57) [You are making matters worse. Leave to the Furies their own office.] Orestes’s “madness” indexes an unresolved emotional tension in his self. Accordingly, his matricide also appears to be an emotional act. In a sense, Orestes combines two characters in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, the young farmhand and the scribe Heinrich, who commit a murder and fall into madness, respectively, for unfulfilled love. Orestes proves to be an emotional being. This makes him susceptible to the sanfte Bande. The sisterly love of Iphigenia and the friendship of Pylades cure him of his “madness”: This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Goethe Yearbook 191 Pylades: Erkennst du uns und diesen heil’gen Hain Und dieses Licht, das nicht den Toten leuchtet? Fühlst du den Arm des Freundes und der Schwester, Die dich noch fest, noch lebend halten? Faß Uns kräftig an; wir sind nicht leere Schatten. Merk auf mein Wort! Vernimm es! Raffe dich Zusammen! [. . .] Orest zu Iphigenien: Laß mich zum erstenmal mit freiem Herzen In deinen Armen reine Freude haben! (1332–42) [Pylades: Do you not know us, and this sacred grove? This daylight never shone upon the dead! These are our arms, your sister and your friend Still hold you fast, and you are still alive! Hold on to us: and we are not empty shadows. Listen to me, hear what I say! Collect Your senses [. . .] Orest (to Iphigenia) Oh, in your arms, now with my heart set free, Now let me feel pure joy for the first time!] Orestes is a test case of the normative principle embodied by Iphigenia— the principle that an individual is capable of sympathy or emotional bonds with others, and that the emotional bonds constitute an ideal community. This case has a pronounced political dimension. Appealing to the gods, Orestes celebrates his healing: O laßt mich auch in meiner Schwester Armen, An meines Freundes Brust, was ihr mir gönnt, Mit vollem Dank genießen und behalten! Es löset sich der Fluch, mir sagt’s das Herz. Die Eumeniden ziehn, ich höre sie, Zum Tartarus und schlagen hinter sich Die ehrnen Tore fernabdonnernd zu. Die Erde dampft erquickenden Geruch Und ladet mich auf ihren Flächen ein, Nach Lebensfreud und großer Tat zu jagen. (1355–64) [Oh gods, let me too, in my sister’s arms, On my friend’s bosom, here hold fast with joy And gratitude to what you now have granted! The curse is lifting, my heart tells me so. The Eumenides return to Tartarus— I hear their flight, I hear the brazen gates This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 192 Chenxi Tang Clang shut behind them like far deep-down thunder, The earth breathes out a sweet refreshing fragrance, Invites me to explore its wide expanse Seeking great deeds and life and happiness.] These verses resonate unmistakably with the end of Aeschylus’s Eumenides, yet envision a rather different model of political community. Persecuted by the Furies for his matricide, Orestes in Aeschylus turns to Athena. The patron goddess of Athens assembles a law court to adjudicate Orestes’s case. With the law court—the Areopagus—instituted, which lifts the curse of blood revenge and puts an end to retaliatory murder, Athena escorts the bloodthirsty Furies to “[their] place below and beneath the earth” where they, turned into kindly spirits or Eumenides, may “receive great reverence with rituals and sacrifices.”19 A law-governed polity comes into being, which buries the destructive powers of bygones ages and keeps them alive in collective memory by commemorative rituals. Orestes in Goethe, by contrast, finds his case resolved in the affectionate embrace of his sister and friend. It is affection that lifts the curse. The Furies, destructive powers in his emotional household, disappear into the psychic underworld, leaving him an emotionally available individual ready to bond with others. The healed Orestes stands for the kind of community forged by emotional bonds. Given his status as the heir to the throne of Mycenae, this kind of community serves as the model for the state under his reign. The sovereign power is henceforth to be based on feeling, and the state is henceforth to be a sentimental community. The “große Tat” or great deeds that he speaks of at this point refers clearly to the rebuilding of Mycenae according to this model. Later on, Iphigenia calls the emotionally healed Orestes the “last hope” of the royal house of Mycenae (1966), while he himself expects his sister to place the “old crown” on his head (2139). Here at the end of act 3, sovereign power is reconceived in terms of emotional bonds, and the sentimental community is established as the model for the state. We may expect that the barbarous violence in Mycenae will cease. But how about the relations between sovereigns? This is the question at the center of the final two acts of Iphigenie auf Tauris. The concept of barbarian remains in use, providing justification for the violence of the Greeks against others. King Thoas has a caustic observation to offer: Der Grieche wendet oft sein lüstern Auge Den fernen Schätzen der Barbaren zu, Dem goldnen Felle, Pferden, schönen Töchtern; Doch führte sie Gewalt und List nicht immer Mit den erlangten Gütern glücklich heim. (2102–6) [Greeks often cast covetous eyes upon The distant treasures of barbarian peoples, Their golden fleeces, horses, lovely women. But force and guile have not secured them always A safe homecoming with their captured prize.] This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Goethe Yearbook 193 Indeed, Orestes the Greek comes to Tauris to steal the image of Diana, ready for violence at every turn. After curing Orestes and thus creating an entirely new kind of sovereign, Iphigenia is now poised to redefine the relations between sovereigns, or international relations, dispensing with the concept of barbarian. In a first step, she includes all human beings in the “tender bonds” of feelings and sympathy. Facing the long-awaited prospect of returning home, Iphigenia suddenly realizes that these are human beings too whom she leaves behind in Tauris (1524–25). In particular, she remembers the fatherly kindness of Thoas towards her. Emotional bonds may exist across borders. In a second step, she moves on to a moral imperative—that of truthfulness—but relates it back to feelings: she feels the urge to tell Thoas the truth about her brother’s plot of stealing Diana’s image. The fundamental conviction of sentimentalism that moral norms flow from feelings and that feelings are moral is perhaps nowhere more powerfully illustrated. Taken together, the two steps undercut the asymmetric distinction between Greeks and barbarians, gesturing toward a universal sentimental community that is at the same time also a universal moral community. Thoas drives home this point by means of a rhetorical question: Du glaubst, es höre Der rohe Skythe, der Barbar, die Stimme Der Wahrheit und der Menschlichkeit, die Atreus, Der Grieche, nicht vernahm? (1936–39) [Do you expect a rude and barbarous Scythian To hear the voice of truth and human kindness, When Atreus, the Greek, was deaf to it?] With the concept of barbarian thus deconstructed, the relations between sovereigns can be defined anew.20 In the final scene of the play, Thoas and Orest encounter each other as two equal sovereigns—one is the king of Tauris and the other the king-to-be of Mycenae. They are spoiling for a war, only to be disarmed by Iphigenia, first by her words, then by her very existence, as Orestes claims her to be the sister whom Apollo’s oracle instructs him to bring back from Tauris (instead of Apollo’s own sister Diana). Through Iphigenia, they become emotionally and morally capable individual persons. Indeed, the main strands of the dramatic plot—the emotional healing of Orestes and the transformation of Thoas from a sovereign bent on exercising his will to a sensible individual listening to “the voice of truth and humanity”—are recapitulated here towards the end of the play. In a sense, the dramatic plot as a whole performs the function of fashioning a normative personality. As individual persons, however, Orestes and Thoas do not lose their status as sovereigns:“Laß deine Seele sich zum Frieden wenden” (2135; Now let your heart be turned to thoughts of peace!). Orestes appeals to Thoas as an individual person (“deine Seele”) to bring about a relationship between sovereign persons (“Frieden”). Their respective dual status as individual person and as sovereign person implies that the relations between sovereigns, or international relations, correspond to, and are intertwined with, the relations between emotionally and morally capable individual persons, and that the This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 194 Chenxi Tang community of such individual persons—the sentimental and moral community—serves as the model for international community. The final scene of Iphigenie auf Tauris, with two sovereigns facing each other (Thoas and Orestes) and one foreigner poised to return to her home country (Iphigenia), stages the international world. There are two kinds of legal person in this world: individual persons and sovereign persons. The centerpiece of the law governing this world—international law—is the law pertaining to the relations between individual persons and sovereign persons, that is, the right of foreigners. It takes the form of a “freundlich Gastrecht,” or right to hospitality: . . . Ein freundlich Gastrecht walte Von dir zu uns: so sind wir nicht auf ewig Getrennt und abgeschieden. (2153–55) [. . . Let friendship And hospitality prevail between us, Not final separation.] Whereas hospitality in antiquity has a transcendent grounding—Zeus is the protector of strangers—the new right to hospitality conjured up by Iphigenia is immanently legitimated, founded as it is on the normative power of feelings and moral imperatives. “Rettet mich, / und rettet euer Bild in meiner Seele!” (1716–17; Save me, and save your image in my soul): Iphigenia’s anguished plea to gods indicates that the divine has moved into the human heart. As a legal institution, this new right to hospitality also moves beyond the mere principles of natural law. In the tradition of international legal thought from Grotius to Vattel, the right of the foreigner is quintessentially the right of the individual in the state of nature, which consists mainly in the right to life and security. The new right to hospitality, by contrast, presupposes an emotionally and morally capable individual person, as well as a sovereign person embodying a sentimental and moral community.21 As such, it heralds the cosmopolitan international law formulated by Kant in Zum ewigen Frieden (1795, On Eternal Peace), although Kantian cosmopolitanism, with its normative ideas of republican constitution, federation of republican states, and universal hospitality based on moral principles, certainly marks a new departure.22 In Iphigenie auf Tauris, the tragic form accomplishes a significant piece of legal work by bringing about a new right to hospitality. Two years after the publication of the play, the Revolution broke out in France. Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, written in the midst of the Revolutionary Wars, deals also with foreigners, albeit of another kind, namely war refugees. In the international world depicted by this novella cycle, however, there is no right to hospitality to speak of, indeed no legal norm whatsoever. There is only the rumbling of cannonades. Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten does not attempt to propose any new legal norm as Iphigenie auf Tauris does, for international law is now apparently beyond repair. There is no shortage of legal norms in the world of states, but with every state insisting on its sovereignty and acknowledging no higher authority that would apply and enforce This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Goethe Yearbook 195 them, laws are no more than a scrap of paper. As a response to the crisis of international law, Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten turns to the literary imagination to seek the possibility of a normative world order. For this purpose, it re-invents the generic form of the novella that first took shape in the late medieval romance-language literature (see Tang). Whereas in Iphigenie auf Tauris literary form serves to further international law constructively, in Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten literary form helps search for an alternative to international law, thereby imagining a world order beyond the law. If Iphigenie auf Tauris and Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten exemplify two different modes in which literary form bears on world order, the festival play Pandora is concerned with the very relationship between literary form and world order, philosophically through the overall allegorical mode of the play, and poetically through the dramatic plot. At the center of Pandora is the antithesis between its two allegorical characters Prometheus and Epimetheus, the former a practical, active man, and the latter a subjective, contemplative man. As the embodiment of vita activa, Prometheus stands, as we shall see, for the Hobbesian world of states, a world in which a political community may be internally governed by laws but is permanently at war with others. It is a world of violence and anomie. As the embodiment of vita contemplativa, Epimetheus is consumed with the inconsolable sorrow over the loss of his wife Pandora who, as the embodiment of perfect beauty, stands for aesthetic form, especially literary form. Both brothers are figures of need: Prometheus signifies the lack of a normative order in the political world, and Epimetheus signifies the yearning for aesthetic (literary) form. Allegory and dramatic plot intertwine with one another in Pandora. As allegory, the play turns on the question of how to overcome need, that is, how to achieve a normative order in the political world, on the one hand, and how to get hold of aesthetic form, on the other. As a drama revolving around the opposition and reconciliation between Prometheus and Epimetheus, the play shows that the need for normative order and the need for aesthetic form, signified by the two brothers respectively, can be overcome only at the same time, or rather only together outside of time. A normative world order can be achieved only through the appearance of aesthetic form, and aesthetic form appears only through the realization of order in the political world. The simultaneous appearance of form and realization of order take place in a condition that is already indicated by the generic designation of the play (Festspiel) and is enacted at the end of the play: the Fest. In his early dramatic fragment Prometheus written in 1773 and the hymn “Prometheus” penned soon after, Goethe represents the mythic Prometheus as a genius artist who defies God and creates man. The man created by an artist, of course, is an artificial man in the broad sense. It is also an artificial man in the sense of Thomas Hobbes, that is, a political society. In the introduction to Leviathan, Hobbes writes: “For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended.”23 The scene of creation in the Prometheus-fragment of 1773 shows a political society in the making This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 196 Chenxi Tang (line 246–314).24 The script that this scene enacts is the narrative of the origin of civil state, which Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.25 The Promethean creation in Pandora is also a political society. The script, however, is now borrowed not from Rousseau, but from Hobbes. Hobbes postulates a state of nature, in which every man lays claim to everything and thus inevitably comes into conflict with everyone else. In the state of nature, there is a war of all against all. To put an end to this hideous condition, the multitude form, by “covenant of every man with every man,” a unified, artificial person to whom every individual surrenders his right in exchange for security. “This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a Commonwealth,” or a civil state (Hobbes, Leviathan, Chap. XVII). The civil state ensures peace and security for all citizens, but it exists in a state of nature in relation to other states. The world of civil states—the international world—is thus mired in a war of all against all. The Promethean world as depicted in Pandora illustrates such a condition of permanent and universal war. In an explicit reference to the dictum homo homini lupus, which Hobbes used to characterize international relations,26 the Shepherds in Pandora explain their purchase of weaponry from the Smiths: Dem Wolf begegnen wir, Menschen, mißwilligen; Denn selbst die Billigen Sehn es nicht gern, Wenn man sich was vermißt; Doch nah und fern Läßt man sich ein, Und wer kein Krieger ist, Soll auch kein Hirte sein. (268–72)27 [Into the wolf we run, Men full of spite; Even those who do right Don’t like the look of a man Who’s afraid to fight; But far and near Trouble is cheap; If you are unfit for war You are unfit to herd sheep.] Later on, the Shepherds set Epimetheus’s house on fire in an act of revenge. What the fire-bringer Prometheus really brings is weapons and arson. He says to the belligerent Shepherds: Entwandelt friedlich! Friede findend geht ihr nicht. Denn solches Los dem Menschen wie den Tieren ward, Nach deren Urbild ich mir Beßres bildete, Daß eins dem andern, einzeln oder auch geschart, Sich widersetzt, sich hassend aneinander drängt, Bis eins dem andern Übermacht betätigte. (291–97) This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Goethe Yearbook 197 [Depart in pace! For where you go you’ll find no peace. Such was the destiny of men and animals In whose rough image better destiny I shaped, That one another, single of conjoined in hordes, They struggle with, in hatred come together and conflict, Till the one party yielded, one remained supreme.] Prometheus proves to be an unabashed warmonger. His motto is “Nur Waffen schafft!” (308; Weapons alone provide!). Belligerence in external affairs goes hand in hand with the iron rule by draconian laws in domestic affairs. Prometheus condemns his violent son Phileros: Hier morden? Unbewehrte? Geh zu Raub und Krieg! Hin, wo Gewalt Gesetz macht! Denn wo sich Gesetz, Wo Vaterwille sich Gewalt schuf, taugst du nicht. (434–36) [What, murder here? Defenseless persons? Go to pillage, war? Go where brute force makes laws. For where paternal will And law established force you are unfit to go.] In short, the allegorical character of Prometheus captures the condition of the political world in the age of sovereign states, a condition characterized by strict rules in domestic affairs and general lawlessness in the world at large. It is worth noting that Goethe wrote Pandora under the immediate impression of Napoleonic campaigns across Europe. He met Napoleon personally in 1808, the same year as he published the piece. In the words of Hans Blumenberg, “Prometheus wird Napoleon, Napoleon Prometheus” (Prometheus becomes Napoleon, Napoleon Prometheus).28 Epimetheus, in the meantime, finds refuge in the melancholy memory of his wife Pandora, the “gottgesandte Wonnebild” (128) or the god-sent image of pleasure. Pandora, apostrophized by Epimetheus repeatedly in terms of image or well-proportioned shape, personifies the realm of form that eludes durable possession by humans. In particular, she is associated with literary forms. Among the graceful “divine images” that Pandora reveals to Epimetheus, there is first erotic lyric poetry: “Dort, siehst du, sprach sie, glänzet Liebesglück empor!” (103; That brightness there, she said, is that of love’s delight.). There is then epic poetry: Daneben zieht, so sprach sie fort, Schmucklustiges Des Vollgewandes wellenhafte Schleppe nach. (105–6) [Next to it, she continued, adornment-happy ones Draw wave-like after them the trains of flowing gowns.] There follows tragedy: Doch höher steigt, bedächtig ernsten Herrscherblicks, Ein immer vorwärts dringendes Gewaltgebild. (107–8) [Yet higher rises, with a grave, imperious gaze, A shape of power, relentless, with one urge: press on!] This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 198 Chenxi Tang Finally, there is comedy: Dagegen, gunsterregend, strebt, mit Freundlichkeit Sich selbst gefallend, süß zudringlich, regen Blicks, Ein artig Bild, dein Auge suchend, emsig her. (109–11) [Against it, friendly, winsome, and with lively glances, Delightfully impulsive and self-satisfied, Seeking your eye, a charming figure busily moves.] In addition to these principal generic forms in the European tradition, Pandora also draws attention to mixed forms, which morph into one another yet afford no less pleasure: Noch andre schmelzen kreisend ineinander hin, Dem Rauch gehorchend, wie er hin und wider wogt, Doch alle pflichtig, deiner Tage Lust zu sein. (112–14) [And more there are that, circling, mingle, interfuse, Obedient to the vapour drifting to and fro, Yet all at your command, to gratify your days.] Prometheus and Epimetheus, one the allegory of the political world and the other the allegory of the aesthetic contemplation of form, are diametrically opposed to each other, as forcefully brought to the fore by their heated stichomythia about the qualities of Pandora. Prometheus dismisses Epimetheus’s nocturnal world of aesthetic contemplation, for it is of no practical use to the world of actions. He once rejected Pandora, seeing her appearance, if anything, as a reflection of Hephaistos’s workmanship. Epimetheus, for his part, avoids Prometheus’s practical world of mindless activities and unceasing strife, deriving pleasure instead from the appreciation of Pandora as form, as aesthetic appearance. Yet precisely in their opposition the two brothers are reconciled. This unfolds through the mimetic layer of the play: the dramatic plot involving Prometheus’s son Phileros and Epimetheus’s daughter Epimeleia. Phileros comes to a rendezvous with his beloved Epimeleia, finds a shepherd with her, misunderstands the situation, kills him, and seeks to punish her. Condemned by his own father, Phileros jumps into the waves, and in response Epimeleia commits herself to the flames. But both rise again miraculously, to be united in love. Phileros transforms into Dionysus, and a general festival is to begin. Eos, the goddess of the dawn, announces: Pantherfelle von den Schultern Schlagen schon um seine Hüften, Und den Thyrsus in den Händen Schreitet er heran ein Gott. Hörst du jubeln? Erz ertönen? Ja, des Tages hohe Feier, Allgemeines Fest beginnt. (1035–41) [From his shoulders and to his hips now Panther-skins are wrapped around him This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Goethe Yearbook 199 And, the thyrsus in his hands, he Strides triumphant now, a god. Do you hear the cheers, the trumpets? Yes, the day’s high celebration, Festival for all, begins.] This is a story of transfiguration. The waves and flames that engulf Phileros and Epimeleia erase all the divisions. Their resurrection brings about a new world, a world of loving concord symbolized by their impending union. It is the ecstatic world of the festival. In this new world, the strife, violence, and domination embodied by Prometheus become mere play, while the aesthetic (literary) form yearned for by Epimetheus acquires life and reality. Like Prometheus’s world, the festival is a realm of deed and work, but it is, to quote Ernst Cassirer,“keine Arbeit, die ihren Wert erst durch den äußerlichen Zweck, dem sie dient, erhält, sondern hier ist die Tätigkeit selbst ein Ausfluss des ursprünglichen und reinen Formwillens und erhält von ihm aus ihren eigentümlichen und selbständigen Wert” (not work that receives its value only through the external purpose it serves, but here the activity itself is the product of an original and pure will of form and receives its characteristic and independent value out of this will of form).29 Like Epimetheus’s world, the festival is a realm of form, but it is no mere passive contemplation of form, but an active creation and realization of form. Form, enlivened and realized through play, transfigures the very lack of order into order—aesthetic order. The strife-ridden political world embodied by Prometheus becomes aesthetic appearance. As a festival play, Goethe’s Pandora enacts this transfigurative power of the festival. The festival thus understood is the prototype of aesthetic work or, more specifically, literary work. Couched in a literary form, the international world, however lacking in lawfulness, becomes aesthetic appearance and, as such, abides by a normative order—that of literary representation. The literary negotiation of world order means ultimately the displacement of international law by literary form. Thirty years separated Pandora from Iphigenie auf Tauris. It was three cataclysmic decades in the political world, bearing witness to enlightened absolutism, the French Revolution, continual wars, the end of the Holy Roman Empire, and the triumph of Napoleon. In this period, Goethe’s literary production demonstrated the changing functions of literary form in relation to international law and to the problem of world order. In Iphigenie auf Tauris, the form of tragedy is constitutive of international law by bringing about a new legal norm. In Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, the form of novella performs more of a compensatory function, as it offers an alternative to international law in envisioning a normative world order. In Pandora, finally, literary form, no longer concretized by any genre, transfigures the political world into aesthetic appearance, thereby displacing the question of legal norms by that of aesthetic norms. University of California, Berkeley This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 200 Chenxi Tang NOTES 1 See Gertrud Schubart-Fikentscher, Goethes sechsundfünfzig Strassburger Thesen vom 6. August 1771 (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1949); Ludwig Schneider, “Gedanken über die Bedeutung des Naturrechts bei Hugo Grotius und Goethe,” Grotiana 4, no. 1 (1983): 95–117. 2 Werner Ogris, “Goethe—amtlich und politisch,” in “Die wahre Liberalität ist Anerkennung”: Goethe und die Jurisprudenz, ed. Klaus Lüdersen (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1999) 290–95; Alfons Pausch and Jutta Pausch, Goethes Juristenlaufbahn: Rechtsstudent, Advokat, Staatsdiener (Cologne: Verlag Dr. Otto Schmidt, 1996) 207–9. 3 See Chenxi Tang, “The Transformation of the Law of Nations and the Reinvention of the Novella: Legal History and Literary Innovation from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten,” Goethe Yearbook 19 (2012): 67–92. Further references appear as Tang and page number. 4 Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem, ed. Luc Deitz (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Fromann-Holzboog, 1994), Liber 1, Caput VI. 5 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Iphigenie auf Tauris, in Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer et al., 40 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag) 5:553–619. Further references appear as FA and verse number. 6 See Blair Hoxby, What Was Tragedy: Theory and the Early Modern Canon (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015), Chap. 4:“Operatic Discoveries: The Complex Tragedy with a Happy Ending,” 162–99, in particular the section “Idomeneo and the Tragedy of Averted Sacrifice,” 187–99. 7 “Ouvrages poétiques de Goethe,” in Goethes Werke, ed. im Auftrage der Großherzogin von Sachsen, vol. 53 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolge, 1914) 208. 8 On Iphigenia-adaptations in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see FA 5:1023–25. 9 Iphigénie en Tauride, accessed August 1, 2017, http://www.opera-guide.ch/opera. php?uilang=de&id=134#libretto. 10 See Bernhard Großfeld and Oliver Brand, “Das Recht in Goethes Iphigenie auf Tauris: Zum 250. Geburtstag des Dichterjuristen,” JuristenZeitung 54, no. 17 (1999): 809–814; Alois Wierlacher, “Ent-fremdete Fremde: Goethes Iphigenie auf Tauris als Drama des Völkerrechts,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 102. 2 (1983): 161–80. 11 Johann Jakob Moser, Versuch des neuesten Europäischen Völker-Rechts in Friedens- und Kriegs-Zeiten, Sechster Theil (Frankfurt am Main: Varrentrapp, 1778) 34–119. 12 Emer Vattel, The Law of Nations, or the Principles of Natural Law Applied to the Conduct and to the Affairs of Nations and of Sovereigns, trans. Charles Fenwick (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Institution, 1916) 145. 13 Rudolf von Jhering, “Die Gastfreundschaft im Alterthum,” Deutsche Rundschau 51 (1887): 358. 14 See Reinhart Koselleck, “Zur historisch-politischen Semantik asymmetrischer Gegenbegriffe,” in Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979) 211–59. Further references appear in the text as Koselleck and page number. This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Goethe Yearbook 201 15 The English translation of Iphigenie auf Tauris and Pandora is quoted from Goethe’s Collected Works, Vol. 8: Verse Plays and Epic, ed. Cyrus Hamlin et al., trans. Michael Hamburger et al. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987). 16 Giorgio Agamben, The Omnibus Homo Sacer (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017) 186– 87. 17 See Heinz Mohnhaupt, “Potestas legislatoria und Gesetzesbegriff im Ancien Régime,” Ius Commune 4 (1972): 188–239. 18 Immanuel Kant, “Idea For a Universal History With a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss. 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 49. 19 Aeschylus, Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation Bearers. Eumenides, ed. and trans. Alan H. Sommerstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009) 481–83. 20 For a detailed discussion of the semantics and dramaturgy of the barbaric, see Markus Winkler, Von Iphigenie zu Medea: Semantik und Dramaturgie des Barbarischen bei Goethe und Grillparzer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2009). 21 In this sense, the argument developed here differs from Wierlacher’s. His essay “Ent-fremdete Fremde,” the only scholarly analysis of the question of international law in Iphigenie auf Tauris, argues that Goethe’s drama affirms the principles of natural law and a contractually based right of foreigners. 22 The historian Lynn Hunt points out that today’s idea of human rights began with the sentimental literature in the eighteenth century. Sentimental novels, she argues, generated imagined empathy “by inducing new sensations about the inner self,” and thereby “reinforced the notion of a community who could relate beyond their immediate families, religious affiliations, or even nations to greater universal values.” Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007) 32. By contrast, Samuel Moyn sees the idea of human rights in the proper sense begin much later, namely in the 1970s. See his The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010). 23 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiaticall and Civill (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), Introduction (unpaginated). Further references appear as Hobbes, Leviathan and chapter number. 24 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Prometheus, FA 4:407–19. 25 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) 25–109. 26 Hobbes, Elementa Philosophica de Cive (Amsterdam: Elzevirium, 1647), Epistola dedicatoria. 27 Johann Wolfgang Goethe Pandora, FA 6:661–99. Quoted by verse number. 28 Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1979) 504–66. 29 Ernst Cassirer, “Goethes Pandora,” in Idee und Gestalt (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921) 17. This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Tue, 14 Aug 2018 15:31:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms