Abstract: This article on the 1932 Goethe Year in Buenos Aires is a prequel to my study on the 1949 Argentine Goethe Year, which appeared in the 2021 Goethe Yearbook. The essay at hand examines commemorations of Goethe from March to October 1932 amid acute political, social, and economic crises in authoritarian Argentina. Its purview spans musical performances, school festivities, academic lectures, gallery exhibitions, and written scholarship. While most activities occurred in Buenos Aires, this transatlantic investigation also covers Argentine perceptions of European Goethe tributes and publications. No German author was so widely acclaimed; thus, the homages permit an analysis of Goethe's resonance across the breadth of Argentina's educated population, including Argentines of diverse political persuasions, European nationals and immigrants, and German-speaking nationalist and republican blocs. Goethe's reception also sheds insights on local perspectives concerning the global clash between humanism and nationalism, German and Latin American literary history, and the intensifying factionalism in German Buenos Aires. The 1932 Goethe Year reveals how host and immigrant populations drew hope from the iconic poet in a futile attempt to confront the foreboding times that would see humanity plunge to a nadir.

Keywords: Goethe, Argentina, Germany, internationalism, humanism, nationalist

Introduction

THIS ARTICLE ON the 1932 Goethe Year in Argentina is a prequel to my essay on the nation's commemorations of the 1949 Goethe Year, which appeared in the 2021 Goethe Yearbook. The two pieces share a locale and have many common protagonists, thus, although the focus here is on the centenary of Goethe's death, I will occasionally refer to the events in 1949 to plot the trajectory of several fundamental themes across the intervening seventeen tumultuous years. The 1932 Goethe Year portrays how Argentines and German immigrants perceived and celebrated Goethe locally, offering contrasting perspectives from host and immigrant populations, who themselves were not monolithic entities. The tributes to Goethe inform an evolving dialogue among these groups, revealing widening chasms among Germans and simmering tensions between them and their hosts as they contended with acute social and political crises on the cusp of a global calamity. Yet Goethe's universal appeal transcended divergences in politics, ethnicity, religion, and academic disciplines; thus, the centenary also saw cross-cultural projects among diverse German immigrants, Argentines, and European institutions. Furthermore, as I noted in my essay on the 1949 Goethe Year, Argentines and immigrants linked Goethe with other national literary icons, such as Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes.