#goethe was neither the first nor the last to write with empathy about situations while not living up to it in real life

[shredsandpatches]

Today in Incredibly Stupid Takes. It's not technically the absolute worst critical attempt I've seen to clear Gretchen of infanticide -- that's the one that tries to argue that the baby is actually stolen for retroactive (?) use as a potion ingredient in the Hexenküchen (!) -- but it's so dumb and reading it that way really cuts off the power of Gretchen's story at the knees. If you argue that Gretchen didn't kill her baby at all (and, in the case of this article, that she didn't even have a baby in the first place) the implication is that the only thing she's being punished for is having sex out of wedlock. Which isn't a crime! Not to us and not to Goethe! And it is so important that her redemption prefigures Faust's, that she is guilty (albeit with mitigating circumstances) and that she is saved -- gerichtet und gerettet.

(Okay I didn't need to quote the German but I love that wordplay so much)