A Portrait of War, a Grammar of Peace: Goethe, Laukhard, and the Campaign of 1792

When Prussia and Austria invaded France in 1792 in an attempt to defeat the revolutionary army, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) accompanied his sovereign Carl August on the campaign. Almost thirty years later, Goethe recorded his version of the defeat and catastrophic retreat of the allied forces. Goethe's account embraces the perspective of a privileged observer, who enjoys the relative comfort afforded by his social class. In contrast, the memoirs of Friedrich Christian Laukhard (1757–1822), a failed academic turned common soldier, who also participated in the campaign, are written from the vantage point of the experienced grunt. While Goethe's Campagne in Frankreich (1822) is often considered a minor accomplishment in a major oeuvre, Laukhard's Begebenheiten, Erfahrungen und Bemerkungen während des Feldzuges gegen Frankreich , which forms part of his autobiography Leben und Schicksale von ihm selbst beschrieben (1796), has received little scholarly attention. 1 In spite of these different valuations, both Laukhard's and Goethe's texts have been subject to severe criticism. Laukhard's Begebenheiten has been disparaged because of its failure to turn experience into art, while Goethe's account was condemned for its failure to represent war truthfully. Clearly, Goethe's and Laukhard's texts are different in style, structure, and ideology, and yet there is one fundamental premise on which they agree. Both Goethe's Campagne in Frankreich and Laukhard's Begebenheiten, Erfahrungen und Bemerkungen während des Feldzuges gegen Frankreich are radically opposed to the concept of war as a sublime experience that many of their contemporaries endorsed and advocated. Laukhard's text offers a scathing critique of aristocratic abuse of power and deconstructs the notion of war as sublime through a focus on ‘the body in pain’ (Scarry). Goethe's text, on the other hand, which has often been accused of an uncritical stance towards the war, rejects the notion of war as a creative and ennobling force. Instead, Goethe traces war's destructive effect on the web of rules and habits that govern the peaceful working of society. Laukhardt records the horrors of war, Goethe seeks to delineate a grammar of peace amidst the terror of war. 2