Fabrication and Truth

In 1994 I completed the only book I wrote up to now, it was a translation from German into Dutch: the autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Dichtung und Wahrheit”, in which he describes his life up to his early thirties. It became published, I was as proud as a peacock, and the comments in the newspapers were, with one exemption, not too bad. I was fascinated by Goethe, and I still am, because he incorporates for me a way of looking and living that can’t be “covered” by any religion or doctrine, and gives answers to many problems of life. So in his drama “Faust” he lets God say to Mephistopheles: “A good man in his dark urges, is well aware of the right path”. He found himself a poet, in the German sense of the word: a “Dichter”, which means more than somebody who writes poems. The title of his book is mysterious and I postponed its translation until I finished the whole of the book’s translation. Its literal translation would be “Poetry and Truth”. However, at the other side of the spectrum of possible meanings of “Dichtung” it could also mean “Fabrication and Truth”. Nowhere in the book I could find any clue of why Goethe chose this title. The original title was “Aus meinen Leben”, later on he added: “Dichtung und Wahrheit”. Maybe he intended to clarify possible “fabricated” rumours about what happened during his youth and adolescence, by describing the “true” sequence of events, but that was only vague guessing. Until I came across a conversation between him and his friend Merck, hidden between other events and situations, about the relation between reality and poetry. Goethe stated that people often tend to follow, or believe in a fabricated, “poetical” conception of reality (“truth”). I think he thought of his novel “Die Leiden des jungen Werthers” (“The Suffering of the Young Werther”). This novel had become a great success, but it also caused a wave of suicides by young men who had lost their beloved girlfriend. Just like the main figure of the novel had done. Goethe called this phenomenon “translation of poetry into reality”, and saw a whole range of miserable and tragic human activities that could be explained this way, such as religion wars, revolutions, etc. In short, every theory or explaining story could be transferred into reality. Marx hadn’t published his “Kapital” yet, but we know now how this “fabrication” has been put on reality, reality was just the fabrication described in the eyes of the communist beholder. Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”(My Struggle): same story, and one can extend this to the followers of Bin Laden as well. The Catholics and Lutherans found that the Truth was that the Jews had killed Jesus (there were no Romans anymore to accuse) and that it was justified that the Jews were persecuted. And so on, and so on. Goethe added that he would rather see that people would try to transfer reality into poetry. And poetry is what Goethe saw as “description of the real Truth”, yes, a fabrication, but a fabrication inspired by a human sense of reality and a human awareness of the real Truth. A story, novel, theatre piece or other literal piece of art is a reflection of reality symbolised by sequences of actions and situations intended to present what’s really going on in the world. Trying to impose these poetic / theorising fabrications on reality itself (Marx called this “praxis”) can only lead to disasters.

I think this is what Goethe meant by his subtitle, later main title, of his autobiography “Dichtung und Wahrheit”.