Dynamic Culture - Claudia Keller debunks a common image of Goethe's unwritten book on Italy. In the midst of the Napoleonic campaigns, from 1795 to 1797, Goethe, together with Johann Heinrich Meyer, plans a large-scale historical-geographical cultural analysis of Italy. The project remains an unwritten book, repeatedly postponed. Goethe only presents his Italian experience in the purely autobiographical Italian Journey, which was created between 1813 and 1817. He attempts to banish the "failed" endeavor from his memory. Research has followed Goethe in this and has adopted the image of the Weimar "Olympian" as the ruler over classical forms. However, Claudia Keller demonstrates that the Italian project unfolds its productivity in both epistemological and aesthetic terms precisely in its postponement. Thus, the period from 1795 to 1805 does not appear as such.