Zumbusch: Romantic Thermodynamics. Theories on Force in the Era of Goethe (completed)
Prof. Dr. Cornelia Zumbusch: Romantic Thermodynamics. Theories on Force in the Era of Goethe
In poetics inspired by natural philosophy, both the primacy of the strongest possible effect and the notion of a great ›Kraftgenie‹ are dismantled between 1770 and 1830. Instead, force comes to the fore as the cause of a form conceived as mobile, changeable, and fleeting. The key here is offered by new conceptions of the power of poetry, as they can be found in literary texts. In Hardenberg's Klingsohr fairy tale, a child named Fabel joins galvanic chains in which bodies are electrified, magnetized, heated, and melted. In Goethe's Faust II, a boy named Lenker introduces himself as ›die Poesie‹ and hands out flaming gold that turns into bugs in people's hands. I interpret these small figures, who do not unleash violent forces of nature but gently control, harness, and transform them, as reconfigurations of poetic power operating in the forefront of thermodynamics. The first theorem of thermodynamics, formulated in the 1840s by Hermann von Helmholtz, states that potential, kinetic, chemical, electric, magnetic, and thermal force can be transformed into one another. To the thermodynamic thinking the world appears not as a mechanism, but as a self-organized metabolism, in which is burned and consumed, breathed and eaten. Goethe, with the formula of nature as ›Kraft, die Kraft verschlingt‹ , likewise places natural processes under the sign of a devouring that alternates between metabolic swallowing and textile interweaving. As will be shown, in the fantastic natural scenarios in Märchen, the Novelle, and above all in Faust II, he simultaneously develops the concept of a textual production that understands itself as a continued shaping and reshaping.