Monatshefte

Focusing on the “Goethe effect” (111) in a series of intriguing psycho-biographies, Block offers a fascinating study of Italy’s attraction as evidenced in travelers from Winckelmann to Bachmann. Tracking the mysterious space Italy occupies in the minds of German and Austrian authors, he breaks the spell by spelling out how they have been drawn ever onward by Italy’s canonized magic, while emphasizing that in the illusive tradition of inscribing the land’s lure, this Italy might need an actual place to spell it for a while. By examining Winckelmann and Goethe’s legacies in the works of Heine, Nietzsche, Freud, and Mann, Block shows how belated writers are hindered by spellbinding phantasmagorias when trying to approach Italy in their own right: “To be on Goethe’s trails is [. . .] to pursue an origin that exists only as illusion” (10).

Winckelmann and Goethe are gloomy portents responsible for the castration of epigones, as well as for the development of fascist ideology. While compelling arguments [End Page 293] about authorship, censorship, repression, exile, and “the logic of substitution” (4) smoothly guide the reader through the book, one also encounters bolder claims such as this: “the ideal Italy that Goethe substituted for the real one [. . .] generates a history [. . .] not unrelated to the political alliance between Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany” (15). In addition to occasionally leaping to rash conclusions, Block’s method of inquiry consists of a curious admixture of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. Even though he is committed to Goethe the author (particularly to his nocturnal departure for Italy), rather than Goethe the text—there is a lot hors du texte, whereas close readings are more scarce—the book shows Goethe’s repressive influence, while dismantling structures to preserve their elements for recycling, exactly as Bachmann does, who is deployed as a mothering heroine to bracket Block’s elaborations on his “primary concern [. . .] men” (3).

Bachmann’s death in Rome, as well as her poem “Das erstgeborene Land”—Block simply identifies author with persona here (1)—appear only in the “Introduction” and the “Epilogue: Birthing Italy,” which is not surprising if one recalls Block’s principal interest in his male writers’ “dialogue with absence” (4), and in “Italy as a locus of cutting off” (6)—Italy’s geographic contour is read as phallic on this occasion. I cannot deny my uneasiness with Block’s stylization of Bachmann’s actual death into a “critical interruption of the tradition that Goethe established” (1), nor with his use of her death as a counterpart to Goethe’s “rebirth” in Italy. This reading of his is grounded in a dubious concoction of literal death with metaphorical birth, reminiscent of the problematic of Illness as Metaphor. Block’s reasoning culminates in the question of whether Bachmann’s death “might [. . .] not be [. . .] an auto-da-fé, the punishment exacted from one who seeks to awaken from the spell of Goethe’s Italy?” (3) By contrast, Bernhard in his Stimmenimitator states that Bachmann’s compatriots prevented her return to Austria and are responsible for her death.

“Opened Wounds: Winckelmann and the Discovery of the Art of the Ancients” offers a strong analysis of the art historian’s predilection for copies over originals: “copies keep desire focused on what is missing” (22). Block not only approaches the interconnections of Winckelmann’s life, work, homoeroticism, and death, but also sets the tone for subsequent chapters, where decisions whether or not to travel to Greece (Freud “goes too far” [14], while Winckelmann “bracket[s] out the real Greece” [34]), identity changes, and the ever fortified establishment of Italy as “space for vacationing, in which any form of resistance to desire is removed” (21) continue to play a significant role in completing a subtle argument about the paradox of the ideal as “present precisely where it is absent” (22).

In chapters 2 and 3, “Fathers and Sons in Italy: The Ghosts of Goethe’s Past,” and “Taking the Words out of the Father’s Mouth: Goethe’s Authorial Triumph,” Block shows how “Goethe’s Italian journey demonstrates the ideal possibilities that ensue from an absent father” (50). Goethe feels wie neu geboren, but Block’s translation of this idiomatic expression as “rebirth” (58) is questionable. Feeling refreshed or “rejuvenated” (157) would be an appropriate rendering, especially in light of the semantic fields of (re)birth, infection, disease, and death in the literal and metaphorical senses which Block ploughs thoroughly throughout. Rebirth has a spiritual ring to it, and one wonders why Block mentions Pietism only when Goethe’s Pietistic sensibility perceives Catholic practice as excess (61), or when mounting meaningful connections between Goethe’s Italy and Werther (65), but not in the context of rebirth, nor [End Page 294] in that of Pietistic self-observation and diary-writing. Goethe performs a “filial pay-back” (85–89), grounding his authorship in an illusion. Block’s discussion of Goethe’s father’s Viaggio in Italia and Goethe’s Italienische Reise unfolds how “translation permits a transference of [authorial] fate” (94).

Chapters 4–6 discuss Heine, Nietzsche, Freud, and Mann—“On Goethe’s Other Trail: Heinrich Heine’s Grand De-Tour,” “The Return of the Repressed: Nietzsche and Freud,” and “Goethe’s Other Italy: The Devil’s Playground”—demonstrating the impossibility of following Goethe in Italy. What speaks to Heine “is what has been cut off [. . .] from [. . .] fatherly patrons” (122) of Winckelmann and Goethe’s ilk. It is Heine’s deviation which “offers a promise of liberation” (130) by chronicling what Goethe did not witness. Heine does not return to Germany refreshed and celebrated, but exiled and censored. While working out relations between censorship and necrophilia, Block also hunts for details to define Heine’s as a specifically Jewish experience.

“Nietzsche’s mind, or what remained of it” (150), writes Block, and here my uneasiness about how he deals with the deaths of both Bachmann and Goethe’s son (171) is intensified. It is one thing to collapse, with great ease, the literal and metaphorical; it is one thing to enigmatically but apodictically refer to Nietzsche’s work as “haunted” and to Nietzsche as an “ellipsis” (162), but it is yet another to add insult to injury. While I consider Block’s readings of Nietzsche the weakest part of the book, his elaborations on Freud, whom Goethe needs in order “to be understood” (144), and Goethe, “the secret father of psychoanalysis” (144), are brilliant—and Goethe and Freud loom large throughout The Spell of Italy. After tending to Freud’s “Rome neurosis” and “Hannibal complex” (169), Block provides an enlightening reading of Gradiva, before moving into his final discussion of German culture and barbarism, of inner emigration and fascism, mainly in Mann’s view. Here, “Italy is nothing less than a drug that relieves the inner emigrant of any responsibility to the present” (203).

While Block’s argumentation is associative and repetitive, the book’s power lies in its formidable ability to address the vicissitudes of tradition from a variety of vantage points. Italy has been a convenient placeholder for the Mediterranean at large, which in turn has been interpreted as the cradle of European civilization. But this is not Block’s major point. Rather, it is the desire for Italy’s imagined seductive and infectious force that is at stake, the relationship between past and present, between assumed origin and belated substitution. Block’s reasoning is based on Althusser, as he acknowledges in a note (235), but also, perhaps, on Eliot’s retrospectively alterable tradition—only thus can Bachmann fare as a late and influential individual talent.