Glossen

by Sarah McGaughey

I have tried many times to write these lines of introduction to Glossen 48, but my Doppelidentität as scholar and parent has prevented me in so many ways since March 2020. My days and thoughts have been filled with to-do lists and the tasks of isolation in COVID-times and did not leave much room for reflection about the existential exclamation that Frederick A. Lubich referenced in the original call for papers for this issue of Glossen. Still, the famous lines of Goethe’s Faust, “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust”, spoken by Faust to his student Wagner early in the drama, placed assumptions about identity into question over two hundred years ago, just as the COVID pandemic has led to major shifts in my understanding of who I am. And I am not alone. Our national and personal responses to the threat of COVID have shifted our social, personal, and professional relationships and that shift caused many of us to reflect on chosen and given identities. Goethe’s lines are, today, a call to examine and challenge the notion that each individual is one body, one soul. For even Faust expresses a universal truth as he exclaims his exceptionality: To strive, to live, to think is not to allow for identity in a singular, materialized form.

A brief excursus into the literary history of Goethe’s lines since the 20th century deepens their connection to Glossen. The quote shaped Thomas Mann’s speech “Germany and the Germans” at the Library of Congress in 1945 and written while he was at work on Doktor Faustus (1947). At that historical moment, and for Mann in particular, Germans and Germany came more into focus from the distance of Washington D.C. than they ever seemed to in Germany or Europe. The post-Holocaust, exiled German turned US citizen saw in the quote the basis for a transatlantic political and cultural understanding of Germans and Germany. The concept of two souls materialized in geo-political form with the creation of the two Germanies in the next four years and over the course of the latter half of the century, two different traditions of reading and interpreting Goethe’s Faust developed. In 2016 inspired by this Faustian tradition Thea Dorn again emphasized the transatlantic connection between the US and Germany when in her Faustian novel Die Unglückseligen Johann Wilhelm Ritter appears in the 21st century USA to confound the geneticist Johanna Mawet. The Faustian is tied to both transatlantic and East-West German experience, the core of the Glossen mission.

As with the first issue on Doppelidentitäten, Glossen 47, readers will find a mix of contributions of varying genres devoted to the topic of doubled identities. Glossen 48 presents work that refers to the limits and possibilities of such identities. Most of the contributions refer to national identities — Polish, German, US-American — as the depths and heights of life between and within national cultures are plumbed. Others, though, note the plurality, particularly linguistic plurality, within and between national borders.

Welcome to Glossen 48!