Katharina Mommsen, still killing it at 90: “Goethe keeps me going.”

Happy birthday to a Stanford legend, who turns 90 today! Katharina Mommsen, the world renowned scholar of the great genius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, is not slowing down one bit. “She is still plugging away fourteen hour days on the ‘monster’ international project of dozens of volume on the genesis of the works of Goethe,” according to her colleague, Gerald Gillespie, an emeritus professor of German and Comparative Lit at Stanford. Inspiring? That’s putting it mildly. There’s much to learn from this lady, and not just about Goethe.

“What keeps me going?  The question is as simple as the answer and, I think, self-evident. Goethe keeps me going,” she told me. “The love of his art, and all art, is what keeps me going and always will. This essential inspiration is there for everybody.”

In short, she has no elixir she is about to patent. “I have no secret source of life that is not freely available to all, but one has to know how to grasp and embrace it,” she said. “Not everybody does.”

Life has taught her tenacity and resilience in other ways. Katharina and her late husband Momme Mommsen, a former conductor and fellow Goethe scholar, left prestigious research positions at the German Academy of Sciences in East Berlin when the Wall went up in 1961. They fled their homeland for the peripatetic life of the scholar, pursuing professorships, visiting and regular, in West Germany, Canada, and the U.S., finally settling at Stanford in 1974. Katharina accepted a position in German Studies and eventually held the Albert Guerard Endowed Chair for Literature.

An intimate birthday celebration will be held at her home with friends, colleagues, and students. The highlight of the afternoon will surely be this: the Consul General is coming down from San Francisco to bestow on her Germany’s highest honor for a lifetime of cultural service. Few people deserve it more.

Back to the “monster” international project: Gillespie describes it as “the dream shared with her husband Momme to restore the colossal project of a series on the genesis of works by the poet and polymath,” an effort called Die Entstehung von Goethes Werken in Dokumenten. “To implement this grand design, for coordinating the efforts of many scholars globally, Katharina established the Momme Foundation for the Advancement of Goethe Research in the millennial year 2000, an American educational charity that collaborates especially through the Weimar Goethe Archive and other institutions.”

And so the effort has taken her well into the 21st century, but she remains undaunted in the era of Pinterest and Twitter. “It’s surely true that times change and that we live in a different – digital – age,” she said. “But nothing about the age in which we live changes the transcendence of art. Bach will always be Bach. Nothing about a changing world, now or in the future, will ever alter this essence of life.”

Among the many gems by Katharina, Gillespie recommended in particular “her deep, sensitive study of the powerful friendship between the universal poet and the younger idealist Schiller in Kein Rettungsmittel als die Liebe: Schillers und Goethes Buendnis im Spiegel ihrer Dichtungen, a case of genuine, respectful  ‘romantic’ love between two creative spirits.”

“There is so much richness to appreciate in Katharina Mommsen’s life of devotion to German literature, but right after this celebratory pause, all her fans know she will be back at her desk coping with the next task.”

Perhaps Mommsen is best known, however, for her longstanding fascination with Goethe’s Islamic interests. In 1960, she published Goethe und 1001 Nacht, a revision of her dissertation at the University of Tübingen. Later, she published a study of Goethe’s motifs from Scheherazade’s tales in the classical Walgurgnisnacht and Helena scenes of Faust. She received praise for 1988’s Goethe und die arabische Welt as well.

“Goethe was enthralled by what we would call today the Islamic world. I write about these questions in my book Goethe and the Poets of Arabia (Camden House, 2014). But Goethe was fascinated from the beginning by the art and culture of the entire region, whether as a child by the stories from A Thousand and One Nights, or later by pre-Islamic Bedouin poetry, by Hafiz and other Persian poets, or by the poets of ‘Arabia’ as well as by those of Turkey.”

“Goethe grasped the simple truth, at a time when not everyone did, that art is universal.”

Tags: Gerald Gillespie, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Katharina Mommsen, Momme Mommsen

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 19th, 2015 at 7:52 am by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.