Chapter 18 explores Goethe’s influence on the development of the Weimar landscape, from the gardens of his own houses on the River Ilm and the Frauenplan, to the Ilm Park, grounds that belonged to Weimar’s ruler but were also made available for public leisure use. It also charts the reciprocal relationship between Goethe’s landscaping activity and his literary work, from the resonances of his Werther in his first garden on the Ilm, to those later pieces – especially Die Wahlverwandschaften (Elective Affinities) – which build on his own work with and study of gardens.

Childhood Gifts

NOT EVERYTHING, PERHAPS, comes as the result of pure choice; some things are a matter of timing and location.

I was born in Vienna, Austria, eight years after World War II ended. The city was occupied by Allied forces, but unlike Berlin, the city's center was not divided. Instead, the Allies took monthly turns in their administrative responsibilities. Politically, it was a precarious time. My family lived at the Stubenring, a less distinguished section of the city's most fashionable boulevard. The apartment was not ours. My father had rented a few rooms from a family who had arrived there from Hungary earlier. And there we were: my father, mother, maternal grandmother, and older sister who had left Poland as political refugees in 1949. Now, I was the last arrival to Vienna.

My birth certificate reflects my mother's false papers, which had helped her survive the last years of the war. Thus, my identity was and is quite questionable. One could easily argue that Liliane Weissberg does not exist at all. For the residents of the Stubenring, however, such circumstances were not the exception, but the rule. Many of the renters were Jewish refugees or returnees to Vienna, as I found out many years later when I began to study the Ringstrasse's history. At the turn of the century, the newly constructed avenue had attracted the newly established Jewish bourgeoisie and even upper class; by the early nineteen forties, most of these families had already emigrated or had been sent to concentration camps. Their apartments, still furnished at times, were rented to citizens loyal to the new National Socialist regime. After the war, some of these apartments changed hands again, and the former addresses of the Jewish wealthy became those of Jewish refugees who replaced, or became close neighbors of, former party members. I became part of this Viennese Jewish history.

My parents were Jews from the old Habsburg territory of Joseph Roth and Bruno Schulz. My mother's family hailed from Lwów, formerly Lemberg, the Austrian district capital of Galicia. My father, who was born in the nearby fortress town of Przemysl, had lived in Lwów, too; he had moved there to study physical chemistry at the Technical University.

NATHAN THE WISE (1779) is perhaps the most famous of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's works, and it certainly belongs to the classical canon of German literature. Lessing described the play not as a drama, but as a “dramatic poem,” and it is best known for a parable. This parable is inserted into a conversation between Nathan, a Jewish merchant, and the Sultan of Jerusalem. The Sultan calls for the trader, compliments Nathan on his wisdom, and asks him a question that is both honest and provocative: Which of the three major religions is the true one, Judaism, Christianity, or Islam?

Only a decade earlier, Lessing's friend, the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, was urged by the Swiss minister Johann Caspar Lavater to confirm that Christianity was the true and superior faith, and to convert. Nathan the Wise in turn is set at a time of religious strife, during the Third Crusade, and here, a third religion enters the discussion. But the Sultan does not want Nathan to declare Islam to be true, nor to challenge him to conversation. He simply asks a question. In response, Nathan offers a lesson in diplomacy. He does not choose among the three religions, he does not decide or put them into a hierarchical order. Nathan tells a story instead.

Nathan's story is the parable of the three rings, and it is easily summarized. According to a family tradition, a father was supposed to pass on an old ring to the next generation before dying; he was to give it to the son whom he loved best.

Artistic Documents

EVERY FIVE YEARS the international art exhibition Documenta takes place in Kassel, Germany. For the duration of each exhibition, Kassel turns into a center of the international art world and displays work by leading and emerging artists in multiple exhibit halls and buildings and in parks, streets, and public squares. Gallery owners, museum curators, and art lovers travel from all over the world to this small German town that then vies for attention with other art-friendly locales such as New York, Basel, or Miami.

The Italian-American curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, known as CCB, was in charge of the dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012. She chose a motto for the exhibit (“The dance was very frenetic, lively, rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted, and lasted for a long time”) and designed a concept that paired older art work, and even some antiquities, with work that was to be shown here for the first time. In making her choice of already existent material, CCB was interested in work that gives evidence of artistic techniques of present-day significance as well as in art that is politically informed. Specifically, she chose items that dealt with, or worked through, historical events that could be termed “traumatic.” Thus she included pictures featuring the photographer Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub in his Munich apartment, taken by David E. Scherman shortly after Germany's capitulation in 1945, and the traditionally woven tapestries featuring images of Nazi persecution produced by the Swedish-Norwegian artist Hannah Ryggen in the late thirties and forties. Many of the artists included in the show were women, among them contemporary conceptual and video artists who had been working in places that had experienced recent armed conflict or uprisings, such as Mariam Ghani, the Brooklyn-based daughter of the current president of Afghanistan, whose video installation dealt with Kassel and Kabul. Indeed, a small event related to the Kassel exhibitions was also staged as part of dOCUMENTA (13) in Kabul.