SOURCE: “Goethe: Novelle,” in his The German Novelle, Princeton University Press, 1977, pp. 59-76.

In the following excerpt, Swales shows how Goethe's Novelle sustains a tension between social harmony and a secretly-longed-for glimpse at chaotic brutality.

In 1795 Goethe contributed a cycle of tales, entitled Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten (Conversations of German Emigrants), to Schiller's journal Die Horen. These stories are usually regarded as especially significant because they inaugurate the great line of nineteenth-century German novellen. Yet one must remember that they are by no means the only novellen that Goethe wrote. Two of his major novels, Die Wahlverwandtschaften (The Elective Affinities) of 1809 and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Travels) of 1821–1829, contain interpolated novellen, and late in his life (in 1827) he produced a story that is simply entitled Novelle. While it is impossible to find one common concern uniting all of Goethe's novelle production, one could maintain that very many of...