Positiones Juris quas auspice Deo ... in alma Argentinensi die VI. Augusti MDCCLXXI publice defendet Ioannes Wolfgang Goethe. Strassburg, Johann Heinrich Heitz, 1771.

Blue original double wrappers (some light staining throughout, heavier on the first two leaves carrying the title, but otherwise in remarkable original condition, entirely uncut and unopened).

One blank leaf, 12 pp., one blank leaf. Collation (1) )(⁴ )( )(² (1). Quarto (276 × 258 mm). Laid paper without watermark.

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This is Goethe's dissertation, and the rarest of all his writings, though strictly it is the printed theses that stood in place of the dissertation the Strasbourg faculty refused him. No more than about ten copies are recorded, all but the present one in public institutions, among them Munich, the Kippenberg copy at the Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf, and Yale.

What sets the present one apart, beyond a rarity already lamented in the early nineteenth century, is that it survives exactly as it was published, in its original double wrappers, entirely uncut and, a thing scarcely to be believed, still unopened after two hundred and fifty-five years.

In 1771 Goethe, then twenty-one, had reached the last stage of his legal studies at Strasbourg. He had never warmed to the law, having begun it at Leipzig in 1765 only to spend most of his time on literature and art, to the despair of his professor Böhme, and for his inaugural dissertation he chose a subject from church law, a field he said was almost more familiar to him than world history.

His father, the Frankfurt jurist Johann Caspar Goethe, pressed him toward a solid legal grounding, while Goethe himself, by his own account, half hoped the contentious work would never see print (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book 11).

The work argued that the lawgiver has the right to fix public worship, holding that all public religions, the Christian among them, had been established by rulers, and that the state therefore had the power to prescribe a form of worship (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book 11).

Two of its propositions were incendiary, the reduction of Christianity to a merely political foundation and a private freedom of belief that left every dogma non-binding, and the dean, Johann Friedrich Ehrlen, suppressed the work, while the theologian Elias Stöber denounced its author as a mad despiser of religion.

The dissertation itself is lost, and its argument has been reconstructed from the surrounding evidence [Genton 1971; Landau 2007].

In place of the rejected dissertation the faculty allowed him to defend a set of Positiones Juris, fifty-six statements in law. He disputed them on 6 August 1771 and was admitted, with the grade cum applausu traditionally reported, to the Licentiate of Law, a degree that in the Empire ranked with the doctorate, so that he could afterwards sign himself Dr. Goethe.

No record of the spoken defence survives, which makes these printed theses the only first-hand text of the examination, one he later remembered meeting with great gaiety, even frivolity.

The first forty propositions are conventional Roman civil law, and his own voice begins at the forty-first, where the list turns to legislation, criminal justice and the philosophy of law.

Several of the theses point unmistakably toward the writer he was about to become. He compresses his censored dissertation into epigram, that all legislation belongs to the sovereign and that the welfare of the state is the highest law, after Cicero.

He rejects codification at the very moment Europe was hurrying to codify, holding that the body of law should never be gathered into a single corpus but kept brief in words and ample in substance, and revised in each generation or whenever a new ruler comes to power, an instinct for law as a living and self-renewing form that looks ahead to Savigny.

And he asks, as a question still disputed among the learned, whether a woman who kills her newborn child should be put to death, the very crime and penalty of the Gretchen tragedy, with the Frankfurt execution of the infanticide Susanna Margaretha Brandt in 1772 close behind it, while a neighbouring thesis condemns the torture by which such confessions were drawn.

These questions never left him.

The Weimar infanticide case of Johanna Höhn, decided in 1783 while Goethe sat as privy councillor, answered the thesis in life [Wilson 2008], and the same concern with sovereign right and with guilt returns in Faust, in Götz von Berlichingenand at the close of Die Wahlverwandtschaften [Chaevitch 2019; Jackson 2015].

As jurisprudence the piece is slight, but as a portrait of the mind on the eve of Götz and Werther it is extraordinary, and it remains the only first-hand record of the examination that made him Dr. Goethe.

PROVENANCE

European private collection.

REFERENCES

Hagen 35; Goedeke IV/3, 102 (43); Kippenberg I, 403 (Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf); Hirzel A 26; Yale, Speck 698, 200 mm height (!); Speck 698 (the Yale copy of the edition, trimmed to 200 mm, against this uncut copy's 276 mm); Wilpert/Gühring 2; Weimarer Ausgabe I/37, 117–125.

On the lost dissertation: Genton (ed.), Goethes Strassburger Promotion (Heitz, 1971); Landau, Bayerische Akademie(2007).

On the theses and the lost dissertation: Schubart-Fikentscher, Goethes 56 Strassburger Thesen (Weimar, 1949); Genton (ed.), Goethes Strassburger Promotion (Basel, 1971); Landau, Bayerische Akademie (2007).

On the theses in Goethe's later work: Wilson, German Life and Letters 61.1 (2008); Chaevitch, Goethe and Law (Harvard, 2019); Jackson, Goethe and the Nobility (Glasgow, 2015); Ghibellino (ed.), Goethe in the Thought of Peter Häberle(2024).