Approaching Italy: Goethe's 'Italienische Reise' and its reception by Eichendorff, Platen and Hein

This dissertation investigates the cultural construction of the German image of Italy from 1786 to 1831. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's visit to Italy, often privileged as the most crucial factor in his biography, canonized the model of travel as Bildung, just as his representation of the journey established a similar literary precedent. The thirty-year lapse between trip and text, however, illustrates the degree to which the ensuing political and social changes informed his own eventual reconstruction of the journey. A close reading of Goethe's Italienische Reise reveals an occasional discomfort regarding the physical remains of the Classical past, which generally has been overlooked in previous criticism. Goethe's ambivalence anticipates to some degree the post-French Revolution perception of Italy. Focusing on the intersection of image and influence, I explore the extent to which the Italies of Joseph von Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild and Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, August von Platen's Sonette aus Venedig, and Heinrich Heine's Reise von Munchen nach Genua, Die Bader von Lucca, and Die Stadt Lucca result from each author's response to Goethe's Romische Elegien and Italienische Reise.;The common thread of these vastly different texts, composed within an incredibly brief twelve-year span, is situated in the quest for originality and authenticity. The search for Italy is most often a pursuit to understand Germany and the writer's place within that society. As a result, the self-perception of the German as traveler is reflected in the representation of Italy.;Informed by recent English-language and German investigations of literary imagology and travel literature, as well as the British field of Grand Tour Studies, I approach the German voyage to and literary construction of Italy, as a highly valuable unit of cultural currency, which had the potential to determine literary success. I argue that these younger writers consciously engage with Goethe in order to parody, challenge, and sometimes displace the then prevalent mythological status of Italy within German letters.