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Les jardins et parcs paysagers allemands au siècle de Goethe by Eryck DE RUBERCY – Château de Bénouville
German landscaped parks and gardens during Goethe’s age
Germany has preserved and restored many of its landscaped gardens which benefited from extensive expansion during the 18th and 19th centuries. In his novel Elective Affinities, Goethe was the first in Germany to offer a version that was as Romanesque as it was didactic of the profound change represented by landscape art in the aesthetic criteria of the garden art of his time. And we know that Goethe was influenced so by his visit, in 1776, to the Wörlitz garden, transformed into a landscaped park by the Prince von Anhalt-Dessau. Yet it would be a mistake to believe that German landscaped gardens were but imitations of their English counterparts. To content oneself with such an observation would be to fail to recognise an entire and extremely stimulating and productive period of landscape art, during which German garden art liberated itself from the English authority to develop its own principles. Under the impetus of several princes of the Holy Roman Empire, the period saw the unprecedented blossoming of theoretical manuals and active landscaping practice to which the emergence of great names in landscaping art, well beyond German frontiers, such as Friedrich von Skell, Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, Joseph Lenné, etc. bear witness.
Eryck de Rubercy
The essayist and critic Eryck de Rubercy, co-author with Dominique Le Buhan of Douze questions à Jean Beaufret à propos de Martin Heidegger (Univers-Poche, coll. Agora, 2011, first edition: Aubier, 1983), has also translated German writers and poets, in particular Max Kommerell’s essays on Hölderlin (Aubier, 1989), poems by Stefan George (Fata morgana, 1981 and 2004. Nelly Sachs Prize), together with five volumes of the works of August von Platen (La Différence, 1993-2002). He is also behind the publication of Trois variations sur Claude Monet, by Louis Gillet and of his essays and conferences De Giotto à Matisse, (Klincksieck, 2010 and 2012) and the presentation of several works. The familiar relationship he developed with nature throughout the preservation of a landscaped park by Paul de Choulot (1794-1864) was behind his anthology entitled Des poètes et des arbres (La Différence, 2005) and his publications in 1998 and in 2014 of Aperçus sur l’art du jardin paysager (in association with Marie-Ange Maillet and Stéphanie de Courtois) by Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, of which he translated the Petite revue de parcs anglais (Klincksieck, 2014). He regularly works for the Revue des Deux Mondes, the Nouvelle Revue Française, L’Atelier du roman and Jardins.