Die Wahlverwandtschaften. 2 Bände gebunden in einen. Tübingen, J. G. Cotta, 1809.
First edition (Hagen 327 D1), two parts bound in one volume. Preliminary title and 306 pp.; 340 pp. Fischer records it in printing-paper and writing-paper states, with a small vellum issue for the author. Small octavo (160 × 100 mm).
Contemporary brown marbled calf with a gilt-fillet border to the covers and a richly gilt spine (very good; internally lightly and uniformly browned throughout, owing to the paper quality).
More than three decades separate Die Wahlverwandtschaften from Werther. The author who had transformed European literary culture in 1774 had become, by 1809, statesman, scientist, theatre director and the central intellectual figure of Weimar. Conceived first as a novella for Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, the project expanded after 1807 into an independent work. Its title holds its tension. Wahlverwandtschaften, "elective affinities," was a term from chemistry for the tendency of substances to leave one combination and form another. The German also shows its parts, Wahl (choice) and Verwandtschaft (kinship), and the novel unfolds in the space between them, asking whether human bonds are governed by choice or by attractions with the force of natural law.
Goethe had spent decades in the sciences, from botany and anatomy to optics and mineralogy, and here, a year before Zur Farbenlehre, he turned a scientific concept into one of the most daring literary experiments of the age. He later singled it out to Eckermann as "the only production of greater extent in which I am conscious of having laboured to set forth a pervading idea" [Eckermann, 6 May 1827]. The experiment unfolds on a country estate, where Eduard and Charlotte draw the Captain and the young Ottilie into their household and hospitality becomes a study of shifting attraction. Goethe states the principle in Part I, chapter 4. Those natures which, on meeting, "seize and mutually determine one another" are called related. In his own notice in the Morgenblatt of 4 September 1809 he insisted there is "only one nature," through whose rational freedom run traces of deeper necessity [Goethe, "Notiz," Morgenblatt, 4 September 1809].
Contemporaries were often unsettled by the book's restraint; Wieland, however, at once recognized its richness, reporting that Goethe held it must be read "three times" [Wieland to Charlotte Geßner, 10 February 1810]. More than a century later Walter Benjamin made it central to modern criticism, finding in it a "symbolism of death" and closing his essay, Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope [Benjamin, "Goethe's Elective Affinities," trans. Corngold, 309 and 356]. This copy preserves the novel as its first readers held it, two parts in contemporary marbled calf, the light browning the honest trace of Cotta's paper.
PROVENANCE
The Heribert Tenschert Collection.
REFERENCES
Hagen 327 D1; Goedeke IV/3, 388 (181); Kippenberg I, 384; Hirzel A 273; Fischer 704; Speck 2065; Brieger 725; Wilpert/Gühring 83.
Goethe, "Notiz [Die Wahlverwandtschaften]," Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 4 September 1809; Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 6 May 1827 and 9 February 1829; C. M. Wieland to Charlotte Geßner, 10 February 1810; Walter Benjamin, "Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften," Gesammelte Schriften I/1.
