Foreign News: Iron-Age Pilgrimage

When Goethe’s death was told, we said:

Sunk, then, is Europe’s sagest head.

Physician of the iron age,

Goethe has done his pilgrimage.

When the U.S. Army entered Weimar, it found that the mortal remains of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had disappeared on an iron-age pilgrimage never dreamed of by Poet Matthew Arnold. Also missing from its place beside Goethe in the city’s Friedhof (cemetery) was the coffin of Goethe’s great friend and fellow poet, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.

The disappearance was the work of the Nazis. When it became clear that Weimar would fall, an alarmed Nazi Gauleiter ordered the poets’ bodies taken to Jena. Two unnamed German civilians—a doctor of philosophy and a lawyer—carried out the order, concealed the coffins in an air-raid bunker beneath a hospital. Then the U.S. Army neared Jena. This time the Gauleiter ordered SS men to destroy the bodies so that they would not fall into the hands of the “American barbarians.” But the bodies had disappeared. So had the two Germans in charge of them.

Last week the doctor of philosophy and the lawyer reappeared. Reverently, they turned over to the U.S. forces the two poets’ remains (which they had hidden with some household furniture). Soon they would lie again side by side in Weimar. In the light of the disaster which living Germans had brought upon themselves, Arnold’s lines on Goethe had almost the ring of prophecy:

And he was happy, if to know

Causes of things, and far below

His feet to see the lurid flow

Of terror, and insane distress,

And headlong fate, be happiness.