Literary historian extraordinaire Karl S. Guthke has shed light on yet another dark corner of the Age of Goethe. Most readers of this review will catch the irony of his title in relation to a certain biographical detail about Goethe—that he never in his life glimpsed the Atlantic Ocean in person, and hence could hardly have traveled to South America. The subtitle explains the irony: living abroad in Weimar. The “travels” we learn about are vicarious, through books and oral debriefings. What Goethe may have known about Latin America has been a subtopic of previous work by Guthke, such as Goethes Weimar und “Die große Öffnung in die weite Welt” (2001). Nor is (as Guthke acknowledges in footnotes) this the first book to play on topography in this fashion, for example, Dieter Strauss titled his book Goethes Wanderjahre in Lateinamerika und der Südsee (2014), and Sylk Schneider published Goethes Reisen nach Brasilien; Gedankenreise eines Genies (2008).

An important stimulus for Goethe's interest was provided by individuals who were part of his network. Alexander von Humboldt dedicated his 1807 Ideen zur Geographie der Pflanzen to Goethe, who read the work with great interest, as he did nearly everything that Humboldt published on the Americas. Duke Carl August's “man in London,” Johann Christian Hüttner, regularly sent résumés of British travel books, to give an idea of what should be purchased. These reports, delivered between 1814 and 1824—namely, the period in which Spanish America won its independence—have remained in 120 pages worth of manuscript, and have so far been mentioned only in passing by Goethe scholars, rather than fully analyzed, as Guthke does in this book. Goethe, who most likely made most of the purchasing decisions given the poor quality of the Duke's English skills, acquired twenty-one of the books for the Weimar library, the bibliographic data for which Guthke provides. Thus, the brief chapter that revisits published Goethe references to Spanish America is followed by the remark that these sources are “wenig aufschlussreich” (25). The bulk of the book is taken up with an amplification of Hüttner's reports, as though we were looking over Goethe's shoulder at them and noticing what he underlined.