* This is the latest installment of “Problematica” and the third to focus on a single sentence. The first of these was about a line from William James’s Pragmatism. The second was about a James Dwight Dana wisecrack. This one is about a line from an 1827 poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. [Update: here is an addendum to this post, which puts pressure on some important claims in the essay.] Problematica is written by Max Dresow…

“[In] the beginning all the world was America, and more so than that is now.” So wrote John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, expressing the idea that America in the seventeenth century was a wilderness only slightly effaced by the civilizing efforts of some coast-hugging Europeans.

It was so much a colonial fiction. When Locke wrote, North America had been occupied for thousands of years by a rich diversity of people. They may have been innocent of money— that was the context of Locke’s remark— but Indigenous people were nonetheless vibrantly present, setting fires, planting seeds, building monumental structures, and generally “mixing their labor with the land” in a way Locke ought to have regarded as the basis for robust property rights.

But Locke wasn’t writing about a place, North America. What interested him was an idea he inscribed on that place— its supposed incompleteness. America was a ball of clay that had yet to feel the press of the sculptor’s hands. It was pure possibility: a boundless expanse waiting to be improved by honest labor, bereft of entanglements and unencumbered by history. It was youth and its promise, while Europe was old age in its decrepitude.

"The Oxbow," a famous example of American landscape painting showing the Connecticut River Valley after a thunderstorm (Thomas Cole, 1836)

The idea would go on to take firm root in American soil, surviving with some modifications into the nineteenth century. But it remained a basically European idea. Throughout Europe, America drew envy for its lack of historical baggage, as if the land were a theater of perfect simplicity, wholly absorbed in the present moment. No less a figure then Goethe said this in verse:

Amerika, du hast es besser
Als unser Kontinent, das alte,
Hast keine verfallene Schloesser
Und keine Basalte.
Dich stoert nicht im Innern
Zu lebendiger Zeit
Unnuetzes Erinnern
Und vergeblicher Streit.
[America you have it better
Than our continent, so old
You have no ruins of decaying castles
And no basalts to behold.
You never seem to be disturbed
Away from present life’s events
By memories that have no purpose
And useless, fruitless arguments.]

For Locke, the youthfulness of America was an opportunity and an invitation to honest labor. By Goethe’s time it had become a virtue: something to be envied and contrasted with the dilapidation of old Europe.

I just taught Locke in my environmental history course, which is why he’s on my mind. But what I’m interested in here is Goethe’s poem, which was written in 1827 when the poet was almost 80. Of course, the first thing that struck me was its suggestion that America lacked “useless, fruitless arguments.” A howler, even then. But that wasn’t the line that stuck in my head. It was the one about basalts. Why on earth did Goethe say that America had keine Basalte? He must have known this wasn’t true. No country the size of North America could lack a rock type like basalt, and no one as geologically sophisticated as Goethe could have made this mistake.* So what exactly was he trying to say?

[* Goethe never traveled to America, although he evidently had a positive impression of American intellectual life through his contact with students at Harvard (Melz 1949). This included the gift of a mineral collection from Joseph Cogswell; I wonder if it lacked basalts?]

Columnar basalt from the "Giant's Causeway," an area of interlocking basalt columns in Northern Ireland (Susanna Drury)

Basalt is an extrusive igneous rock. It forms when low density lavas belched or poured out of volcanoes cool and harden, sometimes in great amounts. A thought thus bubbles to mind. Perhaps the line about basalts was meant to refer to an absence of volcanic activity. To say that America lacked basalts was thus to say that it lacked the scabs of past eruptions— divisive arguments and whatnot.

Now, this would’ve been a curious thing to say about a country just fifty years removed from a divisive war of independence. But don’t waste any time thinking about it, because it can’t be right. The reason is that the septuagenarian Goethe was a geological anachronism. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Goethe clung to the idea that basaltic rocks crystallized out of a primordial ocean supercharged with minerals mostly absent from today’s seas. Indeed, not just basalt, but a whole series of rocks were formed by chemical precipitation from a universal ocean. These included the granites that form the core of many mountain ranges, and were accordingly believed to be the oldest rocks on the planet:

Every journey into uncharted mountains reaffirms the long-standing observation that granite is the loftiest and deepest-lying substance, that this mineral, which modern research makes easier to identify, forms the fundament of our earth, a fundament on which all other mountains rest. It lies unshakably in the deepest bowels of this earth; its high ridges sore in peaks which the all-surrounding waters have never risen to touch. (Goethe 1785)

Add to this structural claim the idea that lower rocks are older, and you arrive at the notion that granite is the Urstein, the primordial rock on the face of the earth (Sullivan 1999).

Abraham Gottlob Werner, mineralogist and geognost at the Freiberg Mining Academy and later, the University of Leipzig. (*Geognosy* is an antiquated word for what we now call stratigraphy, and according to some, a science more concerned with structural relationships than inferred historical sequences)

It is difficult to say who first came up with these ideas. But for most of the history of geology, they have been attributed to Abraham Gottlob Werner, professor of geognosy at the Bergakademie at Freiberg. According to Werner, the stratigraphic column could be decomposed into five formations, or masses of rock formed under particular conditions. In order of deposition, these were:

Das Urgebirge, consisting of granitoid rocks [in English, the Primary formations],
Das Uebergangsgebirge, consisting of a mix of crystalline matrix and mechanical sediments (sediments derived from pre-existing rocks) [the Transition series],
Das Flötzebirge, consisting of consolidated mechanical sediments [the Secondary formations],
Das aufgeschwemmte Gebirge, consisting of mostly unconsolidated sediments [Alluvium]; and
Vulkanische Gesteine, or volcanic rocks produced by the combustion of flammable materials like coal.

The formations formed a roughly linear series. After the deposition of Das Urgebirge (granite, gneiss, schist, primary limestone, etc.) and Das Uebergangsgebirge (clay slate, graywacke, greenstone, gypsum, etc.), sea levels dipped beneath the highest parts of the crust. At which point erosion began to grind up exposed rocks, causing sediments to accumulate in ocean basins. All this time sea levels were falling, but not steadily — and sometimes the waters even became turbulent and rose. This is how Werner explained the pancake-like deposits of basalt found atop certain European hills, with their arresting columnar jointing. These were the final residues of the great receding universal ocean, even though they officially belonged to the Flötz, or stratified rocks, making them something of a geological anomaly.

Goethe’s interest in geology was piqued in 1775 when, already a literary sensation, he traveled to Weimar to visit the duke of Saxe-Weimar. He would remain in Weimar for the rest of his life, holding a series of appointments including one that saw him tasked with reopening a defunct copper mine in Ilmenau (Caisley 2020). This once-productive mine had been abandoned when it proved impossible to reopen the mine shafts following a catastrophic flood (1739). Still, Duke Carl August hoped the remaining mineral riches might lift the fortunes of his impoverished duchy, still reeling from a great fire that claimed even his ducal palace.

A 17th century illustration of a silver and gold mining operation in Hungary

It was not to be. While Goethe’s labors were instrumental in reopening the mine (1784), this did not cause a torrent of mineral wealth to flow into the duchy. The expected copper and silver ores were not forthcoming. Goethe must have been tremendously disappointed. Then, disaster struck when the Martinrodaer Stollen, a seven kilometer tunnel sunk a hundred meters below the ground, flooded in 1796. The mining enterprise limped on for a further eighteen years before it was finally dissolved in 1814. By this point Goethe was long gone. Still, “[for] his geological pursuits…, Ilmenau served as both the crucible within which [his] interest in the subject was forged, and the cradle in which it grew” (Caisley 2020, 25). It was, as Jennifer Caisley says, the bedrock of his lifelong interest in the science. From Ilmenau to the world.

If Ilmenau was the crucible of Goethe’s geology, then Werner was the flame. A celebrated teacher, Werner had made a profound impression on Goethe’s colleague, J. C. W. Voigt, while the young man was a student in Freiberg. Werner would later have this effect on a whole cohort of geologists, including Leopold von Buch and the omnicompetent explorer-naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (Laudan 1987). Goethe must have been immediately, if vicariously, impressed.

But what caused Goethe to cleave so strongly to the basic conceptual framework promulgated by Werner? According to W. Scott Baldridge, he was attracted to the Wernerian idea “that all geological processes were gradual, slow, and evolutionary” (Baldridge 1984, 163). Not for Goethe the Sturm und Drang of violent causes. As Heather Sullivan writes in a study of Goethe’s geology:

Goethe… found Werner’s explanation of constant, regular forces and the gradual consolidation of the earth out of a fluid mass much more appealing than the rather dangerous sounding and erratic power of heat and pressure that soon came to remind people of the eruption of the French Revolution. (Sullivan 1999, 347)

Goethe later portrayed the confrontation between Wernerian quietism and its rival in Faust II. Act IV finds Faust and Mephistopheles reunited amid the sawtooth chaos of the mountains. Immediately, Mephistopheles launches into a reverie about the formation of the earth. In his telling, when the Lord banished the devils “from the air to the deepest depths,” they all fell to coughing, which caused the bowels of the earth to swell with “sulphur’s stench and acid.” Eventually, the bubble grew so large

That the level surface of the earth,
Thick as it was, was forced to crack and burst.
So we all gained another mountain from it,
And what was ground, before, now is summit.

“From this they deduced the truest law,” says Mephistopheles— that the lowest points on earth would become the highest, as if to defy the will of a God who would cast devils into a place where an “inward self-fueled fire leaps.” So mountains are born in fire and thrust up in violent convulsions.

"Der Watzmann" by Caspar David Friedrich (1824–5). The Watzmann is a mountain in the Alps south of Berchtesgaden.

Faust has heard this sort of thing before, and is not impressed. Calling the mountain masses “nobly dumb,” he proceeds to disclaim any interest in providing a special explanation for mountains. Instead, he evolves a story as placid as Wernerian geotheory:

When Nature in herself was grounded
The ball of Earth she neatly rounded,
Delighting in the mountains and the deep,
Setting rock on rock, and peak on peak,
Sloping the hills conveniently downward,
Softening them to vales, gently bounded.
They grow green, and joyfully she ranges,
Without the need for any violent changes.

In the usual scholarly parlance, Faust is a neptunist (after the Roman equivalent of Poseidon) whereas Mephisto is a vulcanist. These labels need to be handled with care. But in this context they are useful, since Goethe was a neptunist of the unreconstructed sort, which is to say, a neptunist who regards even basalt as a residue of the universal ocean.

We are coming back to the little poem about America, but first we should say something about the status of the neptunist-vulcanist debate in 1827. Too much has already been written about this; it is a staple of all general histories of geology, including the well-known accounts of Archibald Geikie (1897) and Charles Gillispie (1951). But for our purposes, it will suffice to follow David Oldroyd (1996), who observes that only one aspect of the debate had been decisively settled by the 1820s. This was the question of the origin of basalts. According to Geikie, “it was on this very point of the origin of basalts that the Wernerian ship finally struck and foundered.” At least we can say that by 1820, the ship was taking on water.

Fingal’s Cave, a sea cave on the island of Staffa in the Inner Hebrides (Scotland), and a favorite of illustrators and engravers who had apparently never seen it, or had only seen other fanciful depictions

Werner had concluded that previous investigators had been wrong about the origin of basalt in 1776. This was the year he visited the famous basalt hill at Stolpen in Saxony. There he discovered “not a trace of volcanic action, nor the smallest proof of organic origin.” He thus concluded that not all basalts are volcanic, and by 1787— “[a]fter further and more mature research and consideration”— that no basalts are volcanic. To those who would cite the resemblance of basalt and lava as proofs of the former’s igneous origin, Werner responded that volcanoes occur where flammable materials like coal underlie basalt; so lava eruptions take place when subterranean combustion melts overlying basalts, causing them to fuse together. (Werner apparently never saw an active volcano.)

Werner’s model gained some adherents, no doubt influenced by its author’s prestige. But they didn’t stick around for long. Even Werner’s most accomplished geological protege, Leopold von Buch, broke with his teacher after visiting the extinct volcanoes of Auvergne, and later, the Canary Islands. In Auvergne, dormant volcanoes occurred in association with hardened domes of lava and apparent lava flows, solidifying the association between volcanoes and basalts. (This association had already been noted in 1763, when Nicolas Desmarest carried out an extensive study of the area.) Things were even clearer in the Canaries, as von Buch wrote in 1815:

A large number of cones rising at a short-distance and a little above that sea of lava, and other volcanic craters that can be seen farther away in the direction of Chahorra Mountain… clearly mark the sources from which those impressive masses of materials have emanated. All the matter that forms those currents has the same source. They contain a lot of feldspar [a major component of basalt] and very thin parallel pieces of crystal.

(Ironically, the first critic of Werner’s mature views on basalt seems to have been J. C. W. Voigt, who, according to Geikie, criticized his teacher’s “mature” theory only a month after it appeared in 1787.)

Von Buch’s map of Teneriffe, a volcanic island in the Canaries (1836)

Where was Goethe in all this? According to Baldridge, “Goethe proposed a unique compromise” between the view that basalt was an aqueous precipitate and the view that it crystallized from a hot melt.

Basalts were products, he thought, of a “general volcanic ocean,” formed in a hot epoch following deposition of the primary (granitic) mountains. During this epoch so much material was deposited that even in Goethe's day enough residual heat remained in the vicinity of the oceans to enable volcanism to continue. (Baldridge 1984, 165)

The proposal, Baldridge observed, solved many problems. For one thing, it did not require basalts to be accompanied by craters. Since basalts were supposed to be the remnants of a molten ocean, basalts could occur anywhere, even in places where no volcanic activity had taken place. And where volcanic activity had taken place, apparent lava plugs and streams could be explained as the products of remelting, much as Werner had envisioned. The proposal also accounted for volcanic islands “and especially for the distribution of modern volcanoes,” which tend to occur in great arcs around the margins of oceanic basins, like the Pacific “Ring of Fire.” This, for Goethe, was a function of residual heat— not a terribly compelling suggestion, perhaps, but an ingenious one of the sort he had a special aptitude for.

So that was Goethe’s view about the origin of basalts: that they crystallized out of a roiling hot ocean long ago, when even granite mountains slept beneath the eternal waves. But, to repeat our main question, why did he say that America has keine Basalte? The meaning is clearly metaphorical. Especially on Goethe’s model, there is no way America could have ended up without any basaltic rock. Perhaps he was simply in the market for a geological metaphor for America’s youthfulness. Since he regarded basalt as an ancient rock type, to say that America lacked basalt was to say that it lacked one of the stigmata of old age. (He could hardly have said that America lacked granites, since on his view granites were the very pillars of continental land masses. No granites, no America.) But this doesn't strike me as a very satisfactory reading. There is meaning in the conjunction of two images: that of the crumbling castle and the exposure of basaltic rock, but it goes beyond a connotation of shared antiquity. In fact, I suspect it is rooted in a particular place in Saxony.

The Burg Stolpen (Stolpen Castle), with columnar basalt in the foreground (1863)

That place is Stolpen. Here, in the narrow streets of the old town, you can look up at the Schloßberg with its jointed columnar pillars arrayed in uneven terraces. In the summer these are clothed in shaggy greenery. In the fall they blaze dark orange. Atop them perches a castle that dates to the early thirteenth century. It was once the prison home of Anna Constantia, the beautiful mistress of Augustus the Strong. An adept political climber, Anna eventually fell foul of Augustus, whereupon she was arrested and confined in the Burg Stolpen. Forty-eight years later she died, still a prisoner. For the past 250 years the unfortunate woman’s remains have resided within the Castle Chapel.

Werner visited Stolpen just twelve years after the Countess’s demise. It was there he developed significant doubts about the igneous origin of basalt. He couldn't have picked a better place for his conversion. The name “Stolpen” comes from a Slavic word meaning “place of pillars.” More remarkably, the word “basalt” comes from Stolpen, which is where the Saxon scholar Agricola made the observations he would later describe in his De Natura Fossilum (1546), coining the term in a short description of the “ash-grey marbles” at the Stolpen Castle Hill (Tietz and Büchner 2018). If you were a mineralogist interested in observing basalt in situ— and you happened to be in Germany— you would head straight for Stolpen. So that’s what Werner did, and when he got there he touched off one of the prickliest debates in the history of geology.

I've not been able to discover whether Goethe visited Stolpen. But even if he didn't, he must have known about its basalt and probably its castle too. Stolpen presented a conjunction not present in America: a decaying castle built on the type location of the most controversial rock in the world.* It revealed at a glance all the problems Goethe saw in old Europe, from decrepit institutions to academic arguments that rage wildly over fallow ground. Castles, basalts, and Werner. Might Goethe have had Stolpen in mind when he wrote that America has keine verfallene Schloesser, Und keine Basalte?

[* The Burg Stolpen was already in an advanced state of decay when Werner first set eyes on it in 1776.]

In any event, the meaning of these lines is now clear. America had no equivalent of the pan-European debates about the origin of basalt— this is the crucial bit of context. Yes, there was conflict in America (slavery, anyone?). But the conflict was animated by concerns of the moment and was not so “useless and fruitless” as this tussle in theoretical geology. Basically, there were fewer things in America that occasioned idle disputes as there were in Europe. Not least “memories that have no purpose”— those changeable shadows of a real or imagined past so dear to the younger generation of romantics, with their overabundance of historical consciousness.

Goethe used the basalt metaphor one other time. In a notebook entry from 1819, he wrote, “Northamericans happy not to have basalt. No ancestors and no classical soil” (Melz 1949). I'm reminded of perhaps the best sentence Marx ever wrote: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Goethe might have added: in America the nightmare is absent, because the weight is less burdensome.

Goethe scribbled these words, perhaps, with a sigh. The aging poet was apparently as weary as his old continent. Yet his spirits lifted as he exhorted Americans:

Make happy use of this, your time!
And later when your children rhyme
Of kinder fates, oh, keep away
From robbers, knights, and ghosts, I pray.

References

* To read the addendum to this essay, follow this link. To summarize: it looks like Goethe might have actually thought that America had no basalt. (Lame!) He also seems to have abandoned his “volcanic ocean” model for the origin of basalt by the 1820s.

** I was able to find one published paper that discusses “Goethe’s basalts” from a geological standpoint. This is a < 1 page communication in Eos by David Stern, in which it is suggested that the line about “useless, fruitless arguments” “expresses Goethe’s wish to distance himself from the entire controversy [over the origin of basalt]” (Stern 2006, 256).

Baldridge, W. S. 1984. The geological writings of Goethe. American Scientist 72:163–167.

Caisley, J. S. 2020. The (im)materiality of Goethe’s geology. Ph.D dissertation (University of Cambridge)

Geikie, A. 1897. The Founders of Geology. London: Macmillan and co.

Gillispie, C. 1951. Geology and Genesis: A Study in the Relations of Scientific Thought, Natural Theology, and Social Opinion, 1790–1850. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

Goethe, J. W. 1785. On Granite (Granit II). https://sciencegroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Four-essays-on-granite.pdf

Laudan, R. 1987. From Mineralogy to Geology: The Foundations of a Science, 1650-1830. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Melz, C. F. 1949. Goethe in America. College English 10:425–431.

Oldroyd, D. 1996. Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

Stern, D. 2006. Goethe’s basalts. Eos 87:256.

Sullivan, H. 1999. Collecting the rocks of time: Goethe, the romantics and early geology. European Romantic Review 10:341–370.

Tietz, O. and Büchner, J. 2018. The origin of the term ‘basalt.’ Journal of Geosciences 63:295–298.

Other resources

Four pieces on granite, written by Goethe and translated by M. C. Ekama: https://sciencegroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Four-essays-on-granite.pdf

A wonderful little (okay, sorta long) essay on Goethe, geology, and granite: https://sciencegroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Goethe-and-granite.pdf

E. P. Hamm on Goethe’s mineral collection (with some observations on his time at Ilmenau): https://www.jstor.org/stable/4028099?seq=14

More from Jennifer Caisley: https://goethe-lexicon.pitt.edu/GL/article/view/60 (and also see her chapter in Goethe in Context, which condenses some material from her dissertation)

A nice article on the role of mountains in Faust, by Heather Sullivan: https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1010&context=mll_faculty