A Portrait of War, a Grammar of Peace: Goethe, Laukhard, and the Campaign of 1792

Abstract

When Prussia and Austria invaded France in 1792 in an attempt to defeat the revolutionary army, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) accompanied his sovereign Carl August on the campaign. Almost thirty years later, Goethe recorded his version of the defeat and catastrophic retreat of the allied forces. Goethe's account embraces the perspective of a privileged observer, who enjoys the relative comfort afforded by his social class. In contrast, the memoirs of Friedrich Christian Laukhard (1757–1822), a failed academic turned common soldier, who also participated in the campaign, are written from the vantage point of the experienced grunt. While Goethe's Campagne in Frankreich (1822) is often considered a minor accomplishment in a major oeuvre, Laukhard's Begebenheiten, Erfahrungen und Bemerkungen während des Feldzuges gegen Frankreich, which forms part of his autobiography Leben und Schicksale von ihm selbst beschrieben (1796), has received little scholarly attention.1 In spite of these different valuations, both Laukhard's and Goethe's texts have been subject to severe criticism. Laukhard's Begebenheiten has been disparaged because of its failure to turn experience into art, while Goethe's account was condemned for its failure to represent war truthfully. Clearly, Goethe's and Laukhard's texts are different in style, structure, and ideology, and yet there is one fundamental premise on which they agree. Both Goethe's Campagne in Frankreich and Laukhard's Begebenheiten, Erfahrungen und Bemerkungen während des Feldzuges gegen Frankreich are radically opposed to the concept of war as a sublime experience that many of their contemporaries endorsed and advocated. Laukhard's text offers a scathing critique of aristocratic abuse of power and deconstructs the notion of war as sublime through a focus on ‘the body in pain’ (Scarry). Goethe's text, on the other hand, which has often been accused of an uncritical stance towards the war, rejects the notion of war as a creative and ennobling force. Instead, Goethe traces war's destructive effect on the web of rules and habits that govern the peaceful working of society. Laukhardt records the horrors of war, Goethe seeks to delineate a grammar of peace amidst the terror of war.2

It's Not about Race: Good Wars, Bad Wars, and the Origins of Kant's Anti-Colonialism

“…This was the charged climate that surrounded Kant, which may explain that Perpetual Peace was published during the armistice, which kept Prussia out of the war until 1806 and allowed intellectuals to consider the question of war (Krimmer 2008, 47). Yet Britain remained at war and was belligerent in French-controlled areas such as the Cape of Good Hope and Saint Domingue in 1795.…”

“…Duke Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (from the electorate of Hanover, then a personal union with England) was married to George III's sister, Princess Augusta, and commanded the allied troops of Austria and Prussia in the War of the First Coalition (Brown 2003;Krimmer 2008). He also lent his name to the 1792 Manifesto 7 that threatened the "complete ruin" of Paris if the French monarchs suffered any violence at the hands of their people (Fremont-Barnes 2001, 25).…”

The contemporary making and unmaking of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain

“…Mol, 2008;Puig de la Bellacassa, 2009). Throughout this period, the influence of Scarry's thesis has been visible across multiple disciplines and topics, including black subjectivity (da Silva, 2012;Douglass and Wilderson, 2013), drama (Thompson, 2006;Freeland, 2011), history (Bourke, 2011), literary studies (Krimmer, 2008;Bernatchez, 2009;Townsend, 2012;Richards, 2013;Zhang, 2014), media and cultural studies (Biressi, 2004;Dauphinee, 2007), political and feminist scholarship (Philipose, 2007), and sexuality studies (Ross, 2012). As the diversity and reach of Scarry's influence demonstrates, her ideas have consistently provoked and informed debate about the body, about pain, and about the making (and unmaking) of subjectivity and world (and note that these last two are necessarily conjoined, since Scarry clearly shows how the making or unmaking of one is inevitably and simultaneously the making or unmaking of the other).…”