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Precedence of text presentation over the critical apparatus
The Preface to this critical Goethe edition in 143 volumes extends to only seven pages, and the information about the numerous manuscripts and prints of the poems in the first volume occupies a mere six pages. The apparatus of variant readings is also maximally concise, being meant as no more than a "critical appendix".[18] The presentation of the texts as the author intended them finally to be given to the public was considered of greater importance than the description of manuscripts and prints or the details of variants and versions. The editors' reticence reflects their decision on what matter they considered more or less worth communicating to the reader. If one recognises two different editorial aims, each attainable on the basis of authentic and authorial records as preserved for modern authors: firstly, to reconstruct the shaping and reshaping process of literary works, and secondly, to define the particular form of a work with which the author wished in the final instance to be publicly identified, it is clear that the editors of the Weimar edition unambiguously gave precedence to the second. The processes of composing and revising a work were merely of historical antiquarian interest to them.[19] Generally cognisant of Goethe's attitude to his literary output as embodied in the last edition of his works which he himself supervised (the
The serious lack of information within the apparatus, crucially insufficient details about the manuscripts and the selective and isolative rendering of the variant readings[21] have been explained as due to the fact that the "editors of the Lachmann school"[22] were still bound to the model of editorial technique in classical philology. There may be some truth in this, even though, if so, the method has not become outwardly effective—the apparatus, for instance, is not arranged in the form of footnotes. However, the explanation casts underserved aspersions on the pioneers of editing in modern German philology, making them appear as indiscriminate imitators. What brings them close to their colleagues in classical philology is a formal matter: the merely selective consideration of witnesses not chosen as editorial base texts. Yet the reasons for such selectivity differ. In the case of classical philology, the selection serves to justify the critically constituted text and is hence determined by its purpose. In modern editing, by contrast, the author's authentic or authorised text did not require any justification, and the selection of the variants was thus not linked to any objective aim, but was subjectively motivated. This explains the methodological aimlessness of the apparatus in the Weimar Goethe edition. It is determined by "the most respectful consideration for the wider circle of educated readers."[23] "Negligences or mere spelling errors" in the manuscripts are excluded as an unnecessary encumbrance; it is only variation which "is heard in the spoken language and which affects the syllable count and hence, in verse, the metre" that is considered worthy of record.[24] This guiding rule, it is true, is not observed consistently.[25] The apparatus of the Weimar edition has been called a "dead apparatus"[26] by one of its fiercest critics. With regard to individual volumes this is certainly an unfair criticism, but as an overall appraisal it does characterise the curiously functionless nature of the apparatus. The editors can hardly have remained unaware of the obvious difference between transmissional variants (the concern of classical philologists) and the genetic variants integral to the author's own manuscripts.[27] Yet they clearly were at a loss how to deal with these,[28] because they saw themselves primarily neither as textual critics nor as documentary historians, but as readers. This understanding of their role corresponds to their model of the author.
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