Goethe’s house is quite large and very sensual. Wooden floors creak in every room, which are filled with paintings, drawings, busts, decorative plates. Outside the garden is filled with herbs and flowers. Birds chirp, an owl hoo-hoos.
Visitors are offered either a booklet or an audio guide. Perhaps half of us walk about with a handheld guide to our ears, intently listening to a recording which describes what we see. On the groundfloor, off the entryway to the house is a tiny theater, where a few visitors listen to an announcer’s sonorous voice describe the house and its furnishings.
I took the booklet, which is very nicely done. A number of rooms also have cards with the English translation of that room’s description.
The audio devices prompted me to think about McLuhan’s conception of hot and cool media. Goethe’s house is such a feast for the senses, while we visitors walk about with electronic devices in our hands, focused on voices which are elsewhere. I sit here in the garden with a cellphone in my hands. A man wanders the garden before me with a digital camera. He tells a woman he’s taking photos for ideas for his own garden.
