Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born August 28, 1749, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, is the poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era.
Goethe is the only German literary figure whose range and international standing equal those of Germany’s supreme philosophers (who have often drawn on his works and ideas) and composers (who have often set his works to music). In the literary culture of the German-speaking countries, he has had so dominant a position that, since the end of the 18th century, his writings have been described as “classical.” In a European perspective he appears as the central and unsurpassed representative of the Romantic movement, broadly understood. He could be said to stand in the same relation to the culture of the era that began with the Enlightenment and continues to the present day as William Shakespeare does to the culture of the Renaissance and Dante to the culture of the High Middle Ages. His Faust, though eminently stageworthy when suitably edited, is also Europe’s greatest long poem since John Milton’s Paradise Lost, if not since Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
Opera, Blood, and Tears presents The Life You Give: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with Werther (Massenet) and The Damnation of Faust (Berlioz) in celebration of his life in literature August 28 at 1pm EST on Clubhouse
Goethe was one of the very few figures of Germany’s 18th-century literary renaissance who were, in the full sense of the term, bourgeois. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he had no need, at least in the first half of his life, to seek princely patronage of his writing or employment as an official or an academic. The Frankfurt in which he was born and in which his social attitudes were formed was, as it is now, a wealthy commercial and financial centre, but it was also virtually a self-governing republic, a city-state within the Holy Roman Empire. The nobility and the grand and petty sovereigns who figured so much in Goethe’s later life had no part in his early experiences: he was a town child from a rich family in an essentially middle-class world.
His father, Johann Caspar Goethe (1710–82), the son of a wealthy tailor-turned-innkeeper, was a man of leisure who lived on his inherited fortune and devoted himself, after studying law in Leipzig and Strasbourg and touring Italy, France, and the Low Countries, to collecting books and paintings and to the education of his children. Goethe’s mother, Catharina Elisabeth Textor (1731–1808), was one of the daughters of Frankfurt’s most senior official and was a lively woman closer in age to her son than to her husband. Goethe was the eldest of seven children, though only one other survived into adulthood, his sister Cornelia (1750–77), for whom he felt an intense affection of whose potentially incestuous nature he seems to have been aware. Another emotional factor in the poet’s childhood that may have affected his later development was a love-hate relationship with a younger brother, who died in 1759 at age six: Goethe’s later relationships with literary contemporaries were ambiguous, though he nonetheless described them as “brothers,” and he was repelled by literary and artistic representations of death.
Goethe was educated with his sister at home by tutors until he was 16. His father had very definite ideas about his education and intended that Goethe should follow the pattern he himself had pursued as a young man: studying law, gaining experience at the Reichskammergericht (the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire) in Wetzlar, and eventually rounding off his worldly culture with a grand tour to Italy, after which he could marry and settle down, perhaps rising, as his father had not been able to do, to a position of responsibility in the city administration. Reluctantly and with some delay, Goethe followed his father’s prescription, although he did not complete the final stages until some years after his father’s death.
In 1765, therefore, Goethe left home to study law in Leipzig. The university there had been the centre of Germany’s literary revival over the previous 40 years. In the drawing academy run by Adam Friedrich Oeser—friend and teacher of the art historian Johann Winckelmann, then living in Rome—Goethe indirectly became one of Winckelmann’s disciples. Goethe had in almost-finished form a biblical play and a moralistic novel when he entered the university, but, after reading them to his friends, he ostentatiously burned them as unworthy of his now advanced taste and started to write erotic verse and a pastoral drama, Die Laune des Verliebten (1806; “The Lover’s Spleen”; Eng. trans. The Lover’s Caprice), begun in 1767. He fell in love with the daughter of an innkeeper, Käthchen Schönkopf, but she preferred someone more solid, a lawyer who eventually became deputy burgomaster of Leipzig. Goethe took revenge by starting his first mature play, Die Mitschuldigen (1787; “Partners in Guilt”), a verse comedy showing a woman’s regrets after a year of marriage to the wrong man. His emotional state became hectic, and his health gave way—he may have suffered an attack of tuberculosis—and in September 1768 he returned home to Frankfurt without a degree. Another bout of illness then brought him apparently near death, and in the aftermath he underwent a brief conversion from freethinking to evangelical Christianity. At the same time, though, he seriously studied alchemy and may already have formed the idea of writing a play about Faust, a half-legendary figure who sells his soul to the Devil for knowledge and power and who became the subject of Goethe’s greatest work.
From April 1770 until August 1771 Goethe studied in Strasbourg for the doctorate. However, he had now emerged from his Christian period, and for his dissertation he chose a potentially shocking subject from ecclesiastical law concerning the nature of ancient Jewish religion. The dissertation, which questioned the status of the Ten Commandments, proved too scandalous to be accepted, as perhaps he intended, and he took instead the Latin oral examination for the licentiate in law (which by convention also conferred the title of doctor). His legal training proved useful to him at various points in later life: unlike many of his literary contemporaries, who had backgrounds in theology, philosophy, or classical philology, he was from the start a practical man.
But Strasbourg was also the scene of an intellectual and emotional awakening that came over Goethe with something of the force of a conversion. In the winter of 1770–71 Johann Gottfried von Herder, already a famous young literary intellectual, was staying in Strasbourg for an eye operation. During their long conversations in a darkened room, Goethe learned to look at language and literature in a new, almost anthropological way: as the expression of a national culture, part of the historically specific genius of a particular people, concentrated from time to time in the genius of individuals, such as Shakespeare or the anonymous authors of the Scottish border ballads or, in 16th-century Germany, Martin Luther. Herder soon came to think of Goethe as possibly destined for such a role in his own time, while Goethe responded to Herder’s enthusiasm for oral literature by collecting a dozen folk songs from old women in German-speaking villages outside of Strasbourg and by trying his hand at writing some himself. In touring the Alsace countryside on horseback, Goethe became aware of the popular roots of his native language at the same time as he—partly under the influence of the contemporary English literature of sentimentalism, exemplified by Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768)—began to feel the emotional appeal of landscape. He also realized that Strasbourg Cathedral was an architectural masterpiece, though its Gothic style, which he erroneously thought more German than French, was then generally unappreciated, and he started an essay, Von deutscher Baukunst (1773; “On German Architecture”), in praise of its architect. To cap it all, he fell in love again. In the little village of Sessenheim, not far from the Rhine River, and on the smallholding of its Lutheran pastor, Goethe found a rustic paradise that seemed an embodiment of all that Herder had inspired him to think of as the German way of life. His liaison with Friederike Brion, one of the pastor’s daughters, was brief and intense, but he was already terrified of marriage and the fixity of commitment it seemed to involve. Once he had taken his licentiate at the university, he left Friederike rather abruptly and returned to Frankfurt. She appears to have suffered a breakdown, and the theme of the woman betrayed runs through all Goethe’s writing of the next eight years and beyond.
In Frankfurt Goethe started a legal practice but found the new literary possibilities to which Herder had opened his mind running away with him. His uneasy conscience over Friederike, combined with the inspiration provided by the memoirs of the 16th-century robber-baron Götz von Berlichingen, furnished him with the material of a play in a manner—Shakespearean and Germanic—of which he thought Herder would approve. Written down in first draft in six weeks in the autumn of 1771, Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, dramatisirt (“The History of Gottfried von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, Dramatized”), later titled simply Götz von Berlichingen, was eventually translated by Sir Walter Scott, who was inspired by Goethe’s example to think of using his own local history as the material for his novels. It also contains, however, an invented love-intrigue, focusing on the weak-willed Weislingen, a man who is unable to remain faithful to a worthy woman and betrays his class origins for the sake of a brilliant career. Götz was not published immediately but became known to a few friends in manuscript, and Goethe, already well-connected at the cultivated local court of Darmstadt, was asked to start reviewing for a new intellectual Frankfurt journal, the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen (“Frankfurt Review of Books”), which was hostile to the enlightened despotism of the German princely states, notably Prussia and Austria. He thereby effectively became part of the literary movement subsequently known as the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”). Both the political liberalism of that movement and its commitment to Herder’s ideal of a national German culture are clearly represented in Götz.
In the spring of 1772 Goethe, still following his father’s scheme, went to acquire some practical legal experience at the highest level: the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire in Wetzlar. Here he again fell in love, though this time there was no danger of marriage since the woman, Charlotte (“Lotte”) Buff, was already engaged. After an emotionally tormenting summer, spent largely with her and her fiancé, Goethe in September wrenched himself away and returned to Frankfurt. A little later he heard that another young Wetzlar lawyer he had slightly known, Carl Wilhelm Jerusalem, had shot himself; it was rumoured he had done so out of hopeless love for a married woman.
Law took up some of Goethe’s time in 1773, but most of it went on literary work—the dramatic fragment Prometheus dates from this period—and on preparing for the private publication of a revised version of Götz in the summer. This publication made his name overnight, even though it was a financial disaster. In 1774 an even greater literary success brought him European notoriety. He fused the two elements in his Wetzlar experiences—his affair, if it can be called such, with Lotte, and Jerusalem’s later suicide—into a novel in letters modelled on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie; or, The New Heloise (1761). Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), written in two months early in the year, appeared that autumn, at Michaelmas, and captured the imagination of a generation. It was almost immediately translated into French and in 1779 into English. The uncompromising concentration on the principal character’s viewpoint—no one else’s letters are communicated to the reader—permits the depiction from within of emotional and intellectual disintegration and partly accounts for the strength of the public reaction. Much moral outrage was generated by a work that appeared to condone both adultery and suicide, but for 35 years Goethe was known in the first instance as the author of Werther. He at once attracted visitors from all over Germany—among them the 17-year-old prince of Weimar, Charles Augustus (Karl August), who was about to come of age and so take over the government of his duchy and who was bowled over by the electric personality of the poet when he met him in December 1774.
The years from 1773 to 1776 were the most productive period in Goethe’s life: poems and other works, mainly fragments, poured out. Clavigo (1774; Eng. trans. Clavigo), a tragedy on the Friederike theme, was written in a week, and the plays Stella and Egmont were begun. Stella (1776; Eng. trans. Stella), in a picturesque blend of realism and self-indulgence, shows a man in love with two women who finds an unconventional resolution to his conventional conflict by setting up a ménage à trois. (A similar device concludes the potentially even more risqué one-act play Die Geschwister [1787; The Brother and Sister], written in 1776.) Egmont (1788; Eng. trans. Egmont), another historical drama but formally more controlled than Götz, uses the theme of the war for Dutch independence from Spain (Eighty Years’ War) to launch a more explicit assault on the cultural poverty of bureaucratic and military despotism. Also about this time, Goethe’s privileged acquaintances first record getting a sight of the developing manuscript of his Faust.
The year 1775 was one of decision for Goethe, and the issue was crystallized for him once again in an unsatisfactory love affair: could he settle down in Frankfurt and in marriage and still maintain his literary productivity? He became engaged to Anne Elisabeth (“Lili”) Schönemann, the daughter of a Frankfurt banking family and a suitable and attractive partner. But he was still afraid of being pinned down, and in May 1775, without a word to Lili, he suddenly set off with some admiring visitors, whom he had never met before, on a journey to southern Germany. The ostensible purpose was to visit Cornelia, his sister, who was now married, but Goethe also intended to go on (if possible) to Switzerland, widely regarded at the time as the home of political and personal freedom. He may even have toyed with the idea of visiting Italy, which in his father’s educational scheme would have been a prelude to marriage. Dressed in the costume Werther had worn and made famous—blue tailcoat and buff waistcoat and trousers—the party eventually reached Zürich. A boat trip led to the writing of one of Goethe’s most perfect poems, “Auf dem See” (“On the Lake”), and was followed by a walking tour through the mountains, with Goethe sketching all the time. Up on St. Gotthard Pass he contemplated the road down to Italy but turned away toward Lili and home.
Within weeks of his return to Frankfurt, however, Goethe’s engagement to Lili was at an end. Evidently, his hometown had come to seem suffocatingly provincial to him, its horizons too narrow for anyone interested in a truly national German literature. He had an invitation to visit the court of the young new duke of Weimar.
In Weimar Goethe could take a role in public affairs that in Frankfurt would have been open to him only after 40 years, if then. It was soon clear that more was wanted of him than supplying a passing visit from a fashionable personality. The duke bought him a cottage and garden just outside the city walls and paid for them to be restored. Six months after his arrival, Goethe was made a member of the ruling Privy Council—there were two other members, besides himself, who advised the duke—and Herder was summoned to become the primate of the duchy’s Lutheran church. Although at first Goethe had few duties beyond accompanying Charles Augustus and arranging court entertainments, he soon began to accumulate more prosaic responsibilities and was, initially at least, motivated by the idea of a reformed principality governed, in accordance with Enlightenment principles, for the benefit of all its subjects and not just of the landowning nobility. In 1779 he took on the War Commission, in addition to the Mines and Highways commissions, and in 1782, when the chancellor of the duchy’s Exchequer left under a cloud, he agreed to act in his place for two and a half years. This post made him virtually—though not in fact—prime minister and the principal representative of the duchy in the increasingly complex diplomatic affairs in which Charles Augustus was at the time involving himself. It was therefore essential to raise him to the nobility, and in 1782 he became “von Goethe” and moved into the large house on the Frauenplan that, with only one interruption, was to be his home in Weimar for the rest of his life.
Goethe was attracted to the world of the court. He recognized, probably unconsciously, that the autocratic principalities represented Germany’s political future better than the middle-class free city from which he came or the empire that was the constitutional framework for its existence. He also liked the idea (which he represented in a fragmentary epic, Die Geheimnisse [“The Mysteries”], in 1784–85 and later in his Wilhelm Meister novels) of a society of noble, self-disciplined people devoting themselves to their own culture and the improvement of the world. The reality, naturally, in no way corresponded to that ideal—the Weimar court was petty, backbiting, and snobbish—but in Charlotte von Stein, the wife of the duke’s equerry, Goethe thought he saw the ideal embodied. He felt destined for her even before he met her, and, for 10 years during which they were lovers in everything except a physical sense, he allowed her to exercise over him an extraordinary fascination. In her he saw fulfilled the longing for calm after storm and stress that he expressed in his two “Wandrers Nachtlieder” (“Wanderer’s Night Songs”), the second of which—“Über allen Gipfeln” (“Over All the Peaks”), written in 1780—is probably the best-known of all his poems.
With his ennoblement Goethe might be thought to have reached the pinnacle of his career. However, his literary output had begun to suffer. Until 1780 he continued to produce original and substantial works, particularly, in 1779, a prose drama in a quite new manner, Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris), which shows the healing process he attributed to the influence of Frau von Stein in the context of an emotionally charged brother-and-sister relationship and as a profound moral and theological reeducation. Thereafter, however, he found it increasingly difficult to complete anything, and the flow of poetry, which had been getting thinner, all but dried up. He kept himself going as a writer by forcing himself to write one book of a novel, Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (The Theatrical Mission of Wilhelm Meister), each year until 1785. In a rough-and-tumble, ironic way, reminiscent of the English novelist Henry Fielding, it tells the story of a gifted young man who aims for stardom in a reformed German national theatrical culture. At first the plot was transparently autobiographical, but Goethe’s own development gradually diverged from that of his hero, and the novel remained in manuscript during his lifetime. For 10 years Goethe turned away completely from publishing; the last lengthy work of his to be printed before the silence was Stella in 1776.
Goethe was never entirely at ease in his role of Weimar courtier and official. As an avowed non-Christian, he had no spiritual director he could consult, but on several occasions he turned to the unknown powers that he usually called “das Schicksal” (“fate” or “destiny”) and looked for a sign. In December 1777, uncertain whether staying in Weimar with increasing responsibilities was compatible with his literary vocation, he set off secretly to the Brocken, the highest summit in the Harz Mountains and the centre of much superstitious folklore, and determined that if he could climb it when it was already deep in snow—something no one had attempted in living memory—he would take this as a sign that he was on the right path. He succeeded and was rewarded with a “moment of serene splendour” and with the poem “Harzreise im Winter” (“Winter Journey in the Harz”), which expressed his newfound confidence. In 1779 he decided to mark his 30th birthday and his entry on more serious official duties with a long trip to Switzerland in the company of Charles Augustus. For a second time he came to the St. Gotthard Pass, where he once more turned away from the road to Italy so as to pursue his duty in Germany, hoping that events would show his life was coherent and he was doing the right thing.
By 1785, however, that hope had worn thin. In that year Goethe withdrew from the Privy Council and his most onerous responsibilities in the ducal Exchequer, with little to show for all his effort and with fundamental reform out of the question. His 40th birthday was coming into sight, and he was still unmarried. Worst of all, perhaps, his extra leisure seemed unable to revive his poetic vein. He had become increasingly interested in natural science: in geology, because of his work on the mines (he thought he could define the basic structure of rocks as rhomboidal and crystalline), and in anatomy, for the light it shed on the continuity between humans and other animals. From 1785 onward he was also interested in botany. But these were substitutes for his literary activity, and, though some of the professors in the local university at Jena showed a polite interest, he could not achieve in science the recognition he had won in poetry. He accepted an offer from Georg Joachim Göschen in Leipzig to publish his complete works in eight volumes, but so much was merely fragmentary that he was unsure what, if anything, he would be able to finish. In a state near to despair he decided at last to complete his father’s educational scheme and escape secretly to Italy, the land where Winckelmann had found fulfilment in the study of ancient art and architecture and which Claude Lorrain and Jacob Philipp Hackert (two artists whom he particularly admired) had depicted as an earthly paradise. He would travel incognito, breaking, if only temporarily, all his ties with Weimar—even with Frau von Stein—and taking with him only the task of preparing his eight volumes for publication.
On September 3, 1786, Goethe slipped away from the Bohemian spa of Carlsbad and traveled as rapidly as he could by coach to the Brenner Pass and down through the South Tirol to Verona, Vicenza, and Venice in Italy. On October 29 he arrived at last, only to find its ruinous state a painful disappointment. After finishing the rewriting of Iphigenia, which he was putting into blank verse before publishing it, and after sitting for what has become his best-known portrait (by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein), he decided in the spring of 1787 to move on to Naples, as his father had done before him.
As a geologist, Goethe climbed Vesuvius; as a connoisseur of ancient art, he visited Pompeii and Herculaneum. He consulted Hackert about his own drawing and joined the circle of the British ambassador in Naples, Sir William Hamilton, and the actress who was later to be, as Emma, Lady Hamilton, the ambassador’s wife and Lord Nelson’s mistress. But none of this could provide the culmination that Goethe had failed to find in Rome. He pressed on to territory his father had not touched, to Sicily, and here at last he felt “that now my journey is taking on a shape.” He had reached a landscape impregnated with a Greek past, in which Homer’s Odyssey seemed not fanciful but realistic; later he even toyed with the idea that Homer might have been a Sicilian. Goethe never went to mainland Greece, but in Sicily he thought he had seen the setting of Greek culture, and with some justification. He circled the island from Palermo, seeing the unfinished Doric temple at Segesta and the ruins of ancient Agrigentum, cutting across the interior to see Enna (where, according to myth, Proserpine was taken down into Hades), visiting the Greek amphitheatre at Taormina, and climbing one of the lesser peaks of Mount Etna, the place where the philosopher Empedocles was said to have ended his life. During this tour he drafted some scenes for a drama, Nausikaa, which was never completed but contains some of his most beautiful verse, evocative of the Mediterranean islands and, flitting about them, the almost audible ghosts of Classical antiquity. From Messina he returned to Naples, from which he visited the best-preserved of all Doric temples, at Paestum. Together with the Sicilian landscape, these temples provided him with the satisfaction for which he had been looking: a conception, or “idea,” as he called it, of the ancient world, which brought its literature alive to him as Rome had not been able to. He left Naples in June 1787 expecting to pass quickly through Rome and to be in Frankfurt in August to spend the last months of his leave with his mother.
But Charles Augustus, who had already extended Goethe’s leave, generously allowed him to live in Rome for another year. What Goethe came to value most about this time, though, was not the opportunity of seeing ancient and Renaissance works of art and architecture firsthand but rather the opportunity of living as nearly as possible what he thought of as the ancient way of life, experiencing the benign climate and fertile setting in which human beings and nature were in harmony. He was also pretending to be one of the colony of expatriate German artists in Rome (he was particularly friendly with the Swiss-born painter Angelica Kauffmann) and arranging there with a young widow of whom little is known his first protracted sexual liaison. His return to Weimar in June 1788 was extremely reluctant.
Charles Augustus crowned his generosity, however, by agreeing to a wholly new basis for Goethe’s presence in his duchy: Goethe was to be relieved of virtually all routine administrative tasks and freed to concentrate on the task of being a poet. Goethe resolved to preserve as much as he could of the Roman atmosphere in Weimar, set about hiring artists he had met in Italy, and at once—before there was time for any second thoughts—took himself a mistress, Christiane Vulpius, the daughter of the duke’s late archivist. She bore Goethe a son, August, on December 25, 1789. She was a busy and very competent housewife, but Weimar aristocratic society was merciless to her and grew suspicious of her lover. Goethe refused to undergo the church ceremony that was the only way of being legally married, and so her very existence could not formally be acknowledged. Frau von Stein suffered a kind of nervous collapse, and all but the most superficial communication between her and Goethe ceased.
By his 40th birthday, in 1789, Goethe had all but completed the collected edition of his works, including a revision of Werther, 16 plays, and a volume of poems. The only fragmentary drama it contained was Faust, which he saw no chance yet of finishing and which appeared in print for the first time in 1790 as Faust: Ein Fragment. In the same year, Goethe spent two months in and around Venice, and in the autumn he accompanied Charles Augustus to Silesia and Kraków, but the literary rewards of these journeys were slight: distichs in the Classical manner on his experiences, some of them bitterly satirical of contemporary political and intellectual developments. Together with some of the shorter poems on Christiane, they appeared in 1795 in the collection now known as the Venetianische Epigramme (Venetian Epigrams).
The years from 1788 to 1794 were lonely years for Goethe. His household was warm and happy enough, though no second child survived from Christiane’s repeated pregnancies. But outside the house, apart from Herder, who was increasingly disenchanted with Weimar, his only close friend was the duke. Personal loyalty to Charles Augustus partly explains Goethe’s hostility from the start to the French Revolution, of which Herder was a vocal supporter, and his accompanying Charles Augustus on campaigns against France in 1792 and 1793. These campaigns were Goethe’s first direct experience of war, and he found them a nightmare. He was lucky to survive the disastrous retreat from Valmy, in France, and to return home in December 1792, but he was back on campaign in 1793, observing the siege and virtual destruction of French-occupied Mainz. As a reward for his loyal support, Charles Augustus presented him with the freehold of the house on the Frauenplan in Weimar, which he remodelled into the form that has been preserved to the present day and which now also houses the Goethe National Museum.
Perhaps by way of compensation for his lack of literary success, he turned to science. In 1790 he published his theory of the principles of botany, Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (“Essay in Elucidation of the Metamorphosis of Plants”; Eng. trans. in Goethe’s Botany), an attempt to show that all plant forms are determined by a process of alternating expansion and contraction of a basic unit, the leaf. He also began to try to apply the same principle to anatomy in order to explain the skeletal development of vertebrates. This concern with apparent structure—for which he later coined the term Morphologie (“morphology”)—was not fundamentally different from the impulse that had originally brought him to geology. In 1791, however, a completely new scientific issue began to obsess him: the theory of colour. Convinced that Sir Isaac Newton was wrong to assume that white light could be broken into light of different colours, Goethe proposed a new approach of his own. Colour was to be seen as emerging from the mingling of light and darkness. At first he attempted, unconvincingly, to expound these ideas as new, alternative laws of physics (Beiträge zur Optik [1791–92; Optical Essays]). Later, however, he saw that it is of the essence of colour to require cooperation between the physical behaviour of light and the human perceptual apparatus. Goethe’s colour theory has real originality as a theory of vision rather than as a theory of light. In making this change to what one might call a more subjective science, Goethe was greatly helped by his study of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which was completely transforming the German intellectual landscape and was in particular being vigorously furthered in the University of Jena. The openness to Kant in turn made it easier for Goethe to respond positively when in 1794 one of Kant’s most prominent disciples, the poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller, who was then living in Jena, suggested that he and Goethe should collaborate on a new journal, Die Horen (The Horae), intended to give literature a voice in an age increasingly dominated by politics
Goethe recognized that the modern world is not a Classical world, but he was also certain that the Classical ideal was infinitely superior to anything his contemporaries could offer. In 1798 he started a new journal, Die Propyläen (“The Propylaea”), to preach an uncompromising gospel of the superiority of the ancients to the moderns. It lasted only two years, but in 1799, to carry on its work, he inaugurated a series of art competitions in which subjects from Classical antiquity were judged according to a rigid canon opposed to the great changes then taking place in German art, especially in landscape and religious painting. Goethe’s position was paradoxical and ironic in the extreme. On the one hand, he thought the modern movement of revolution in politics, idealism in philosophy, and romanticism in literature was irresistible and could be ignored only at one’s peril. He was on friendly terms with the Romantic theorists August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Friedrich von Schlegel, with the Romantic artists Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, and with the post-Kantian idealist philosophers Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who all, thanks to him, taught philosophy at Jena. On the other hand, he thought that the Classical world was the only true ideal and that the modern world was therefore profoundly misguided. Something of this new understanding went into his recasting of Faust, and Faust, as the representative of modern man, took on some of the characteristics of a philosophical idealist. Goethe’s feelings were more directly expressed in the last conventional drama he wrote, Die natürliche Tochter (“The Natural Daughter”), which he began planning in 1799 and which was finally completed, produced, and published in 1803. In it the French Revolution appears as the enemy of beauty and as inaugurating a new age in which the Classical world will survive in middle-class culture rather than in the courts that in the 18th century had been its home.
The period after the death of Schiller and the Battle of Jena was at first a sombre one. Goethe endeavoured to maintain Weimar’s cultural position by looking for a successor to Schiller as principal dramatist but failed to appreciate the genius of Heinrich von Kleist, whose comedy Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Pitcher) he produced in 1808. He drew a large number of strange and threatening landscapes, began a sequel—Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (“Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering”; Eng. trans. Wilhelm Meister’s Travels), with the telling subtitle oder, die Entsagenden (“or, The Renunciants”)—to his earlier Wilhelm Meister novel, and wrote his mysterious and tragic novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; Elective Affinities) and the related tragic fragment of a “festival play,” Pandora (1810). Elective Affinities purports to tell a Romantic story of the conflict between social conventions and passion—or Fate, or animal magnetism, or chemical affinity (all explanations are canvassed)—in the lives of four comfortable and cultivated people. Through the refractive medium of an exceptionally misleading narration, however, we glimpse a much bleaker world in which moral choice is hard, in which there are no consolations, and in which Romantic paraphernalia—whether speculative science, artistic medievalism, or landscape gardening—is a delusive distraction. But as he completed the novel, Goethe’s mood began to lift. In 1808 he met Napoleon during the Congress of Erfurt and was made a knight of the Legion of Honour. He became reconciled to Napoleon’s rule, regarding it as a more or less legitimate successor to the Holy Roman Empire, and, in the relatively peaceful interval after the Austrian war against France in 1809, a new serenity entered his writing. A wryly humorous poem on the subject of impotence and marital fidelity, “Das Tagebuch” (1810; “The Journal”), suppressed by Goethe’s heirs on grounds of obscenity until the 20th century, reflects this new realism, and for the sophisticated and worldly wise Continental public that he met on his visits to the Bohemian spas of Carlsbad and Teplitz, Goethe composed and published the first three parts of his autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–13; From My Life: Poetry and Truth).
The year 1817 saw the marriage of Goethe’s son, as well as Goethe’s resignation from the post of director of the Weimar theatre and his final surrender of the Frankfurt citizenship that he still nominally retained. He had to make a new will and could see his 70th birthday approaching. The period until 1823 was one of tidying up at the end of life. But there was no decline in Goethe’s energies. He completed another collected edition with Cotta, began some more-impersonal autobiographical memoirs (Tag- und Jahreshefte [1830; “Journals and Annals”]), wrote a vivid account of his military experiences in 1792 and 1793 (Campagne in Frankreich, Belagerung von Mainz [1822; “Campaign in France, Siege of Mainz”]), rather hastily finished off The Wanderings of Wilhelm Meister, and brought out many of his earlier, hitherto unpublished scientific writings in a new irregular periodical (Zur Naturwissenschaft Überhaupt [“On Natural Science in General”]). He also took up a new scientific interest, meteorology.
One more crisis remained. In 1818 Goethe resumed his summer visits to Bohemia. In Marienbad he was the guest of the Levetzow family and fell in love with the family’s daughter Ulrike, to whom in 1823, when she was 19 and shortly before his 74th birthday, he proposed marriage. Family reluctance probably played as great a part in Ulrike’s refusal as any personal disinclination. In anguish Goethe returned to Weimar, drafting in the carriage the poem “Elegie” (“Elegy”), which he later made into the centrepiece of “Trilogie der Leidenschaft” (1827; “Trilogy of Passion”).
Goethe stayed in Weimar and its immediate surroundings for the rest of his life. It was a final stage of renunciation, an acknowledgement of the reality of passing time and strength and life. But it was also a time of extraordinary, indeed probably unparalleled literary achievement by a man of advanced age. Partly in order to secure the financial future of his family—he now had three grandchildren and could not know that they would all die without issue—he prepared a final collected edition of his works, initially in 40 volumes, the Ausgabe letzter Hand (“Edition of the Last Hand”). In the course of this huge task, he rewrote and greatly extended The Wanderings of Wilhelm Meister (1821; 2nd ed. 1829). Less a novel than a collection of stories, extracts, and reflections in which fact and fiction, the prosaic and the intensely poetic, interact unpredictably, the book is held together by a framework narrative that violates conventional expectations as deliberately as much 20th-century experimental writing. It also engages directly with such 19th-century themes as industrialization, utopian socialism, public education, and immigration to America. He wrote a fourth section of his autobiography Poetry and Truth, completing the story of his life up to his departure for Weimar in 1775; he compiled an account of his time in Rome in 1787–88, Zweiter Römischer Aufenthalt (1829; “Second Sojourn in Rome”); and above all he wrote part two of Faust, of which only a few passages had been drafted in 1800. Yet he did not cut himself off from the world. He followed public events closely, such as the establishment of the first railways in Britain in 1825 and the July Revolution in France in 1830 (which influenced the closing scenes of Faust). In literature he read the first works of the Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac. His correspondence had become enormous, and the stream of visitors was never-ending—among them Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Heinrich Heine, Franz Grillparzer, William Makepeace Thackeray, Felix Mendelssohn, and King Louis (Ludwig) I of Bavaria, but also hopeful young unknowns, such as the would-be poet Johann Peter Eckermann, who, by noting down Goethe’s conversations at this time, wrote what Friedrich Nietzsche called “the best German book in existence.”
The year 1829 brought celebrations throughout Germany of Goethe’s 80th birthday. It also brought the first performance in Weimar of part one of Faust; Goethe assisted with the rehearsals but did not attend the performance. As he grew older, deaths naturally accumulated round him: Frau von Stein in 1827, Duke Charles Augustus in 1828. In 1830, however, came the unexpected and terrible news that his son had died in Rome during his own Italian journey. Goethe fell seriously ill immediately but recovered. He still had work to do, and only in August 1831—when, shortly before his 82nd birthday, he sealed the manuscript of part two of Faust for publication after his death—did he say he could regard any life that remained to him as a “pure gift.” The following spring, having caught a cold, he died of a heart attack, sitting in his armchair in the modest little bedroom beside his study, on March 22, 1832, at about 11:30 in the morning.
Work on Faust accompanied Goethe throughout his adult life. Of a possible plan in 1769 to dramatize the story of the man who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for earthly fulfillment, perhaps including his ultimate redemption, no firm evidence survives. In its first known form, Goethe’s version already contains the feature that most decisively differentiates it from its predecessors, the 16th-century German chapbooks about Faust and the puppet plays ultimately deriving from English dramatist Christopher Marlowe’s adaptation of those chapbooks for the stage: the tragic story of Faust’s love for a town girl, Margarete (Gretchen), and of her seduction, infanticide, and execution. This theme is entirely of Goethe’s invention; it was probably suggested to him by a case in Frankfurt in 1771–72, and it clearly links the play with other works that express his sense of guilt at abandoning Friederike Brion in 1771. This earliest manuscript version (usually called the Urfaust), to which Goethe probably added little after 1775, is a Sturm und Drang drama in a balladesque, sometimes mock-16th-century style—intensely poetic, both visually and verbally—in which the self-assertion of the magician Faust meets its nemesis in the Gretchen catastrophe. The precise nature of Faust’s agreement with the diabolical figure Mephistopheles remains inexplicit, however.
That issue was still unresolved in the scenes Goethe wrote for the first published version, Faust: ein Fragment (1790), which seems to suggest that the Gretchen story was destined to become merely a subordinate episode in Faust’s career through the gamut of human experience. Only in Faust: Part One (1808) does Goethe commit himself to his second great divergence from the traditional fable: his Faust now makes not a contract with the Devil but a wager. Faust wagers that, however much of human life the Devil shows him, he will find none of it satisfying—and if he is wrong (i.e., if he is satisfied), he is willing to give up living altogether. Faust now appears as a singularly modern figure, racing through satisfactions but condemned by his own choice to discard them all. His tragedy (from 1808 the word appears in the play’s subtitle) is that he cannot experience life as, for example, Gretchen experiences it: not as a potential source of satisfaction but as a matter of love, or of duty. This theme is common to both the first and the second parts of the play.
Goethe had always wanted to dramatize that part of the traditional story which shows Faust summoning up Helen of Troy, the quintessence of the beauty of the ancient world, and the logic of the wager required that Faust should at least taste the experience of public and political life. Faust: Part Two (1832) thus became an extraordinary poetic phantasmagoria, covering—as Goethe acknowledged—3,000 years of history and mingling evocations of Classical landscapes and mythological figures with literary allusions from Homer to Lord Byron and with satire of the Holy Roman Empire, the French Revolution, and the capitalism and imperialism of the 1820s. Yet it is all held together by the thematic device of the wager and by structural parallels with Part One, and at the end Faust is redeemed, not by his own efforts but by the intercession of Gretchen and the divine love he has known in her. Part Two is in a sense a poetic reckoning with Goethe’s own times, with their irresistible dynamism and their alienation from his Classical ideal of fulfilled humanity. As with much of Goethe’s later work, its richness, complexity, and literary daring began to be appreciated only in the 20th century.
Goethe was a contemporary of thinkers—Kant, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt—who carried out an intellectual revolution that is at the basis of most modern thinking about religion, art, society, and thought itself. He knew most of these people well, furthered the careers of several of them, promoted many of their ideas, and expressed his reaction to them in his literary works. The age they helped to make was an age dominated by the idea of freedom, of individual self-determination, whether in the intellectual and moral sphere or in practical politics—the age both of German Idealism and of the American and French revolutions. If there is a single theme running through Goethe’s huge and varied literary output, it is his reflection on subjectivity—his showing how in ever-changing ways we make our own selves, the world we inhabit, and the meaning of our lives. Yet he also shows how, without leaving that self-made world, we collide all the time with the reality of things. Ultimately, Goethe believes, this reality is not alien or hostile to us, because, whatever it is, we—and our capacity for experience—ultimately derive from it too. Goethe therefore calls it Nature, that out of which we are born.
Because of his unusually independent personal circumstances, Goethe was able to live through the consequences of the intellectual revolution as a free man, with no traditional religious or social attachments. (His eminent social and political position he owed to his friendship of more than 50 years with Duke Charles Augustus, but he could have been, if he had chosen otherwise, a wealthy lawyer and man of affairs in his native city of Frankfurt.) He led a long and productive life in which his energy and originality never slackened. He was, those who met him agreed, an intensely and uncannily fascinating man, and part of the secret of his fascination was that he was always changing: he was called a chameleon or a Proteus or simply inconsistent. In particular, his writings show a remarkable, but usually discreetly phrased, awareness of the permanently shifting character of human sexuality. His public never knew what he was going to do or write next: none of his works is like any of the others—he never substantially repeated himself. Yet he remained faithful to his duke, to his wife, to Weimar (his adopted homeland), to his rejection of Christianity, and to his literary vocation. The attractive power of his writing, which has not diminished with time, perhaps lies in the extraordinary strength of personality that it radiates, the certainty it conveys of an inexplicit unity underlying all its diversity, and the promise it seems to offer of a disclosure of the secret nature of personality itself.
By Nicholas Boyle / Source: Britannica
Sila Blume 