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| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(August 28, 1749 - March 22, 1832)
by Jane K. Brown, University of Washington
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe;
oil painting by Heinrich Kolbe, ca. 1822-1826 (Goethe-Mesum Duesseldorf)
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Johann Wolfgang Goethe is widely recognized as the greatest writer
of the German tradition. The Romantic period in Germany (the late eighteenth
and early nineteengh centuries) is known as the age of Goethe, and Goethe
embodies the concerns of the generation defined by the legacies of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Immanual Kant, and the French Revolution. His stature derives
not only from his literary achievments as a lyric poet, novelist, and dramatist
but also from his often significant contributions as a scientist (geologist,
botanist, anatomist, physicist, historian of science) and as a critic and
theorist of literature and of art. He was, finally, such an imposing personality
that for the last thirty years of his life he was Germany's greatest culturual
monument, serving as an object of pilgrimage from all over Europe and even
from the United State and leaving the small town of Weimar a major cultural
center for decades after his death. Out of this extraordinary personal
presence; out of his overwhelming, almost threatening, literary stature;
and out of the rejection of his political position in the turbulence of
nineteenth-century German politics, a tradition developed that Goethe's
greatness lay in his wisdom rather than in his literary achievement. Nevertheless,
the continuing fascination with his works, especially with Faust (1808,
1832; translated, 1823, 1838) confirms his position as one of the most
important writers of the Europen tradition.
Most of the available information about Goethes's earliest years comes
from his autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit
(From
my life: Poetry and Truth, 1811-1813; translated as Memoirs of Goethe:
Written by Himself, 1824). Written when the poet was in his sixties,
long after he was established as the great man of German letters, the work
must be recognized as Goethe's deliberately chosen image of himself for
posterity. Goethe was born into the Frankfurt patriciate in 1749. His mother,
Katharina Elisabeth Textor Goethe, was the daughter of the mayor; his father
was Johann Caspar Goethe, a leisured private citizen who devoted his energies
to writing memories of his Italian journey (in Italian), patronizing local
artists, and, above all, educating his two survivng children, the future
poet and his sister Cornelia. At an early age Goethe studied several languages,
as well as art and music. By his early teens he was casting his school
exercises in the form of an epistolary novel written in German, French,
Italien, English, Latin (with occasional postscripts in Greek), and Yiddish;
in his free time he wrote plays in French and poems for all occasion. Goethe
attributed great importance for his early development to the social and
political situation in Frankfurt, where the busy trade, the annual fairs,
the ceremonials associated with the crowning of the Holy Roman Emperor,
and the occupation by the French during the Seven Year War of 1756 to 1763
brought a wealth of cosmopolitan experiences to his very doorstep.
At sixteen he was sent by his father to the University of Leipzig to
study law, despite his own desire to study ancient literature in Goettingen.
Since the beginning of the century Leipzig had been the major center for
those Germans who looked to France for their cultural models. Johann Christoph
Gottsched, ardent neoclassicist and doyen of German letters for much of
the first half of the century, had taught at the university since 1730
and still determined the theater repertoire in Goethe's day. Goethe met
Gottsched and studied with Christian Fuerchtegott Gellert, the leading
poet of the day. Neither had any significant influence on the young poet,
despite his admiration for Gellert as a moralist. By the end of his second
semester Goethe had lost interest in the legal studies and felt he had
exhausted the limited literary resources to be found at the university.
He devoted his energy to learning the manners of polite society, to studying
art privately with Adam F. Oeserl, and to cultivating his talent on his
own, especially in conversations with his cynical friend Ernst Wolfgang
Behrisch, later tutor to the princess of Dessau. However much he admired
the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who was promulgating a new
classical ideal, Goethe's main interest in both art and literature was
for the real and natural; when he visited the famous art collections in
Dresden, he reacted with great enthusiasm to the Dutch school, dutifully
admired the work of the Italien school, and failed to visit the classical
antiquities. In literature he admired the works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
and Christoph Martin Wieland.
Dichtung und Wahrheit describes the development of this concern
for the real und natural as the most important advance Goethe made in Leipzig.
His earliest surviving works date from this period: two collections of
unpretentious social poems with mythological imagery in the style of the
Greek poet Anacreon -the *Buch Annette* (Book for Annette), a manuscript
discovered in 1895, and the Neue Lieder (New Songs, 1770), both
inspired by Anna Katharina Schoenkopf, daughter of the lanlord in the inn
where Goethe dined- and two short plays in alexandrines. The first play,
Die
Laune des Verliebten (The Wayward Lover, 1806) is a pastoral comedy
in which a jealous lover is cured when he learns that he, too, can be unfaithful;
its naturalness resides in its simplicity. The second, Die Mitschuldigen
(Fellow Culprits, 1787) was written soon after Goethe returned to Frankfurt
but is still in the style of the Leipzig works. At the end of this brief
farce each of the four characters disvoers that all of the others have
committed some crime equivalent to his own, so that they can all forgive
one another. The setting in a German inn and the topical political allusions
lend a superficial realism to the play; its true naturalness, however,
lies in the bittersweet ending, in which all the characters are forgiven,
but it is hard to imagine what future happiness could possibly be in store
for them. In this respect the ending is like that of a middle comedy of
Shakespeare, to whom Goethe was turning as the embodiment of nature in
literature.
In the fall of 1768 Goethe returned to Frankfurt, suffering from a serious
illness. His primary comforter during his year-long convalescence was Susanna
Catharina von Klettenberg, a pietist mystic who was to serve as the model
for the *schoene Seele* (beautiful soul) in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
(1795-1796;
translated as Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1824). Together
they read the literature of alchemical Neoplatonism, a popular activity
at the time in radical protestant circles, and performed alchemical experiments.
From there Goethe's reading extended into medicine. At the same time he
was also reading the works of Shakespeare, Lessing, and Rousseau, and continued
to do so after he was sent to Strasbourg in March 1770 to finish his law
degree.
Goethe's seventeen months in Strasbourg are usually identified as one
of the major turning points in his career, although the changes that took
place were clearly prepared by his activities and reading of the preceding
year. Strasbourg was more German culturally than Leipzig; Goethe made it
represent for himself and for German literary history the birthplace of
a new, thoroughly German literature. The first step in this process was
his *discovery* of the Strasbourg Cathedral and enthusiastic identification
of the Gothic style as German. The second and more important step was his
encounter with Johann Gottfried Herder, wo arrived in Strasbourg in September.
The rather difficult Herder imparted to Goethe his enthusiasm for popular
poetry, primitivism, recent speculation on the origins of poetry, the works
of Johann Georg Hamann, the poems of Ossian (James Macpherson), and above
all the novels of Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Oliver Goldsmith.
Everything Goethe learned from Herder was of decisive importance for him,
and not just for his Sturm und Drangjahre period, of which Strasbourg marks
the beginning; in the last decade of his life Goethe would still be fond
of asserting that Sterne and Goldsmith were among the handful of writers
from whom he had learned the most. The liberating impact of these new influcences
was visible almost immediately in the grace, power, and freedom of the
folksonglike poems he wrote for his Alsation beloved, Friederike Brion;
some of them remain among his most popular lyrics: *Mailied* (May Song)
and *Willkommen zum Abschied* (Welcome and Farewell), both included in
volume 8 of Goethes Schriften (Goethe's Writings, 1787-1790). Forty
years later, when Goethe described Friederike's family in Dichtung und
Wahrheit, he proclaimed that his treatment of the episode, even as
he was experiencing it, was stylized in terms of Goldsmith's The Vicar
of Wakefield (1766), all the way down to the names of the minor figures.
In September 1771 Goethe returned to Frankfurt, ostensibly to begin
a law career but in fact to begin the most visible literary career in German
history. The four years between his return and his departure for Weimar
contain the first flowering of his genius and constitute for many critics
the high point of his career. During this time Goethe began to practice
law both in Frankfurt and Wetzlar, seat of the supreme court of the Holy
Roman Empire; he also wrote book reviews, engaged in constant visiting
with literary friends, functioned as the center of the Sturm und Drang
movement, and traveled on the Rhine and in Switzerland. The autobiography
describes three emotional entanglements in this period. In Wetzlar in 1772
he met Charlotte (Lotte) Buff and fell in love with her before discovering
that she was engaged to his friend Johann Georg Christian Kestner.
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| Pastel drawing of Charlotte (Lotte) Buff, with whom Goethe fell
in love in Wetzlar in 1772 before discovering that she was engaged to his
friend Johann Georg Christian Kestner (Gustav Koennecke, Bilderatlas zur
Geschichte der deutschen Nationalliteratur - Graz: Akademische Druck- und
Verlagsanstalt, 1981- |
In 1774 he became involved in an uncomfortably close friendship with
Maximiliane Euphrosine von La Roche Brentano, daughter of the novelist
Sophie von La Roche and future mother of the poet Clemens Brentano, while
she was adjusting with difficulty to her marriage to Peter Anton Brentano,
a wealthy Frankfurt merchant. The following year he became engaged to Anna
Elisabeth (Lili) Schoeneman, the daughter of a wealthy banker; although
it inspired a spate of wonderful poems, the engagement was broken off in
September 1775. Goethe had begun his career both as a great personality
and as a great writer.
The Sturm und Drang movement aimed at establishing new policitcal, cultural
and literary forms of Germany. Following the intellectual lead of Rousseau,
Herder, and Hamann, it looked to the ancient, to England, and to the German
past for models to replace the French neoclassical tradition. Hence, Goethe
studied Shakespeare, Homer, Pindar, and Hans Sachs (a sixteenth-century
German writer of farces) and rejected the classicism of his former hero,
Wieland. In 1773 Goethe published an essay on the Strasbourg Cathedral,
Von
deutscher Baukunst (On German Architecture), in which he praised the
Gothic style; it also appeared the same year in the manifesto of the Sturm
und Drang movement, Von deutscher Art und Kunst (On German Culture
and Art), edited by Herder. Besides Herder Goethe collaboraters include
Johann Heinrich Merck, Johann Georg Schlosser (who married Cornelia Goethe
in 1773), Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, and
Heinrich Leopold Wagner. There was a dimension of religious and moral concern
in the movement, which resulted in Goethe's two pleas for religious tolanerance.,
Brief
des Postors zu ***an den neuen Pastor zu*** (Letter form
the Pastor of ***to the new Pastor of ***, 1773) and Zwo Wichtige bisher
unerorterte Biblische Fragen (Two Biblical Questions Not Previously
Expounded, 1883). He studied the works of Emmanuel Swedenborg and Benedict
de Spinoza and established connections with the theologian Johann Caspar
Lavater, the educator Johann Bernhard Basedow, and the philosopher Friedrich
Heinrich Jacobi, and with such members of the older generation of poets
as Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Heinrich Christian Boie, and Matthias
Claudius.
His first contribution in the 1771-1775 period was to unleash the Shakespeare
mania for which the Sturm und Drang movement is famous. His speech *Zum
Shaekespaers Tag* (For Shakespeare's Day, 1854) was presented two months
after his return from Strasbourg; a dithyrambic celebration of Shakespeare
as a poet of nature, it has remained one of the great milestones of German
Shakespeare criticism. Even more influental was the Shakespearean history
play Goetz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (Goetz von Berlichingen
with the Iron Hand; translated as Goetz von Berlichingen, 1799),
first drafted in November 1771 and published in a revised version two years
later. The play is based on a sixteenth century chronicle in which the
old baron Goetz tries to maintan his independence in the face of the encroaching
empire . In the resulting conflict between traditionand law Goetz's side
degenerates, against his will, into open rebellion. The evil of the court
is embodied in the beautiful Adelheid, who seduces Goetz's old friend Weislingen
into breaking his engagement to Goetz's sister Marie. After Weislingen
marries Adelheid, she poisons him. Goetz dies in prison, welcoming the
freedom of a higher world. The play is written in prose (the form of Wieland's
translation of Shakespeare), with explisive diction and many short scenes.
The emphasis on the prosaic aspects of Shakespearean diction and structure
shows that the play is not only a statement in favor of Shakespeare but
also a rejection of the orderly elegance of French neoclassical form for
German drama.
Goethe's other dramas of the early 1770s are of three types: short satires,
mostly from 1773, on literary and cultural themes in prose or in Knottelverse,
the doggerel couplets made popular by Hans Sachs; incomplete poetic dramas
on great figures such as Caesar, Mahomet, Prometheus, Egmont, and Faust,
the extant fragments of which are among Goethe's finest poems of the period;
and a group of completed plays of more conventional form -the tragedy of
Clavigo
(1774; translated as Clavidgo, 1798), the drama Stella (1776:
translated, 1798, and the operettas Erwin und Elmire (1775 and Claudine
von Villa Bella (1776), Clavigo and Stella both deal
with men like Weislingen who cannot be decisively faithful to a woman.
In the first version of Stella the shaky hero is finally shared
peacefully by the two women he has married; in 1787 Goethe gave the play
a more conventional tragic ending. These four plays mark the beginning
of a long series of operettas and operatic plays in Goethe's oeuvre.
Goethe's poems of this period set new standards for the genre in Germany.
There are ballads, such as *The Koenig in Thule* (The King of Thule, 1782;
later included in Faust); love poems, many of which were later set
to music by Beethoven and Schubert; and occasional poems, such as the masterpiece
*Auf dem See* (On the Lake), written in response to a boat trip on the
Lake of Zurich in the summer of 1775. There are also, finally, the great
Pindaric hymns -among them *Wanderers Sturmlied* (Wanderer's Storm Hymn,
included in volume 2 of Goethe's Werke (Goethe's Works, 1815-1819),
*Prometheus,* and *Ganymed* (both included in volume 8 of Goethe's Schriften,
1789).
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Leipzig, in der Weygandschen Buchhandlung. 1774. (Title page of the
novel that made Goethe famous)
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Goethes's most famous work of the 1771-1775 period is Die Leiden
des jungen Werthers (translated as The Sorrows of Werther,
1779), published in 1774. In this paradigmatic novel of eigtheenth-century
sensibility, Werther traces in a series of letters the course of his love
for Lotte, who is already engaged to a solid young offical when Werther
meets her. Misled by the warmth of Lotte's friendship but most of all by
his own intense imagination -which project upon Lotte all the ideals garnered
from his reading of Homer, Goldsmith, and Ossian- Werther gradually loses
touch with the world around him, ceases to narrate coherently (an editor
takes over the narration), and finally shoots himself. The novel is based
on Goethe's relationship with Charlotte Buff and her fiance, Kestner' the
suicide for love and acquaintance, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, provided the
model for Werther's death. As important as the personal experiences for
the novel are the literary experiences: the epistolary novel of sensibility
from Samuel Richardson through Rousseau reaches its zenith in this novel.
Through the passion of Werther the basic patterns of eighteenth- century
subjectivity are called into question. The same conflicts and torments
that Werther suffers in his relationship with Charlotte he also suffers
in his relationship with nature and God. Through Werther's destructive
preoccupation with himself Goethe offers a sympathetic yet penetrating
commentary on the effusive introspectivness of eighteenth-century consciousness,
with its burgeneoning psychology and crumbling metaphysics. By dramatically
shortening the form, composing with a tight but elaborate symmetrical sturcture,
incorporating foreign material such as translations from Ossian, inserting
subordinate narratives, and especially by allowing Werther no respondents
and then interrupting the flow of letters with a third-person narrator,
Goethe simultaneously brought the epistolary tradition to its peak and
to an end. The novel established Goethe as a European celebrity virtually
overnight. To his distress it was widely misunderstood to glorify, rather
than criticize, the fashionable melancholy of the age; he revised it extensively
for the 1787 edition, the version in which it is now read. For his entire
lifetime and beyond, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers was the work
by which Goethe was known to the non-German world; only Faust has
come to command the same kind of attention. |
Duke Karl August of Sachsen-Weimar, who invited Goethe to Weimar
in 1775; drawing by Johann Heinrich Lips (Gustav Koennecke, Bilderatlas
zur Geschichte der deutschen Nationalliteratur -Graz: Akademische Druck-
und Verlagsanstalt, 1981-
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In the fall of 1775 Goethe left Frankfurt to visit Weimar at the invitation
of the young duke Karl August. He quickly became the duke's close personal
friend, the general court wit, and the organizer of court theatricals.
In 1776 he was awarded the rights of citizenship and assigned administrative
responsibilities in the tiny duchy. Weimar was already a center for the
arts, since the duke's mother, Anna Amelia, had brought Wieland to be her
son's tutor; Goethe soon persuaded Herder to accept a position there as
well. Much of Goethe's time was spent traveling, either for offical reasons
or in company with the duke. He also made two journeys of literary interest:
to the Harz mountains in the winter of 1777 and to Switzerland in the fall
of 1779. Shortly after his arrival in Weimar he had entered into an intense
friendship with Charlotte von Stein, the wife of a court official: this
relationship dominated his emotional life for the next twelve years, transforming
him from the ebullient Sturmer und Dranger of the 1770s into the reserved,
polished courtier of his last four decades. Humanity, virtue, and selfcontrol
werde the code words of this relationship, as they were to be for much
of Goethe's subsequent writing. By the early 1780s Goethe was in charge
of mines, roads, war, and finance; in 1782 the duke procured for him a
patent of nobility (allowing him to add *von* to his name). Just as important
for his future development as the new location, occupation, and personal
relationships was the broadening of Goethe's intellectual interests in
Weimar: for the first time he became consistently interested in science.
As when he studied alchemy, his interest extended beyond reading to collection
and experimenting; but unlike his alchemical studies and some phrenological
work he had undertaken for Lavater, his work in geology, anatomy, and botany
led not only to literary results but to discoveries and scientific publications.
In 1784 he demonstrated the existence of the human intermaxillary (premaxillary)
bone and thereby the continuity of anatomical structures across species
(unbeknownst to him the discovery had already been made in Paris in 1780),
and in 1787 he conceived an influential theory of metamorphosis in plants.
The productivety of the early 1770s abated in Weimar -not surprisingly,
given Goethe's many other responsibilities- but it by no means collapsed.
Here he wrote many of his best-loved ballads, songs, reflective nature
lyrics, and love poems. While the sublime, irony, folk-song qualities,
pathos, and broad humor of his earlier poetry often persist, there I also
a new reflectiveness that moderates the emotion of the earlier poems. Goethe
continued to write operetta librettos and occasional satires for court
entertainments; to his repertory of *minor* drama he added court masques,
which he continued to write until late in his life; he also wrote a free
adaption of Aristophanes' The Birds (1787). He worked intermittently
on Egmont (1787; translated, 1848) which he had began shortly before
leaving Frankfurt; on successive versions, mainly in prose, of Iphigenie
auf Tauris, published in its final blank verse version in 1787 (translated
as Iphigenia: A Tragedy, 1793); and on Torquato Tasso (1790,
translated, 1861). He also wrote Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung
(Wilhelm Meister's Theatrical Mission, 1911), a lively fragement about
the state of the German theather.
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Goethe at age 30; oil painting by G. Oswald May (Gero von Wilpert,
Deutsche Literatur in Bildern (Stuttgart: Kroener, 1965)
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The pressure of all these competing interests finally became too great,
and Goethe fled to Italy, leaving Carlsbad in secret early in the morning
of September 3, 1786. He recorded his impressions at a time in a diary
for Frau von Stein; later he drew heavily on this diary for his Italienische
Reise (1817; translated as Travels in Italy, 1846). In his reflections
on Italy and his experiences there the interests and developments of the
previous twelve years coalesce and become clearly articulated. Goethe had
always expected to complete his education with a journey to Italy, as his
father had, and twice before he had almost set out on that journey. The
trip came to signify for him a rebirth, not only into a new life but into
what he was always going to become: at several levels it was a journey
of self-recovery. But it was in no sense a journey into himself, for his
main concern was to look at objects as much as possible for themselves
-at the rocks and the plants; the customs, theatricals, and festivals of
the people (but never their feelings or political concerns); architecture,
sculpture, and, to a lesser extent, painting. His Italy was the Italy of
the high Renaissance, which included and subsumed ancient Roman Italy.
Apart from brief stays in Venice and Naples and a tour to Sicily, Goethe
spent all of his time in Rome, visiting galleries and monument to study
painting and sculpture. For most of his stay he socialized only with the
German art colony, especially with Wilhelm Tischbein and Angelika Kauffmann.
He revised an completed Egmont, Iphigenie auf Taurus, and part of
Torquato
Tasso for the edition of his works that was underway (1787-1790); he
also added two scenes to the version of Faust he had composed before
he left Frankfurt for Weimar, and selected from his Faust material scenes
that he published in preliminary form as Faust: Ein Fragment (1790). |
Goethe on his Italian journey, 1786-1788; oil painting by J.H.W. Tischbein
(Gero von Willpert, Deutsche Literatur in Bildern (Stuttgart: Kroener,
1965) |
The three plays Goethe revised are usually considered the core of his
*classical* work, the first efflorescence of the objective style he developed
in Italy. Egmont is still concerned with the tragedy of the genius
too great for the world around him and with the problem of his consciousness,
but from the opposite point of view from that of Die Leiden des jungen
Werthers. If the latter portrays tragic preoccupation with the self,
Egmont
articulates the tragedy of what Goethe called *das Daemonische* (the *demonic*,
that pure unconsciousness that is in direct contact with the wellsprings
of being. Comparing himself to a sleepwalker, Egmont, prince of Garve,
refuses to be self-conscious, refuses to be interpretable, or to interpret
the behaviours of others. Immensely popular with the people of the Netherlands,
who are suffering under the rule of Philipp II of Spain, Egmont ignores
warnings that neither his rank, his record of service, nor his standing
with the people can save him when the regime decides he is too dangerous.
Rejecting all intrigue, he walks blindly into a trap set by the wily Duke
of Alba; but, like Goetz von Berlichingen, he finds freedom just before
his death in a vision of his mistress, Klaerchen, as Freedom personified.
The classicism of this play may best be identified in its symbolic, operatic,
yet still intensely psychological language and themes. The play, which
is in rhytmic prose, ranges in tone from Shakespearean mob scenes to what
Friedrich Schiller called a *salto morale in eine Opernwelt* (sommersault
into opera) at the end; actually, in their choral effect and the way that
they symbolize the situation of the hero, the mob scenes are already operatic.
Goethe was no longer imitating Shakespeare but had absorbed him into a
new dramatic form of his own making.
Iphigenie auf Tauris combines the same intense psychological
concerns with a symbolic form derived less from Shakespeare than from Euripides.
Goethe is generally understood to have internalized and psychologized Euripides'
drama, in which Orestes comes to barbarian Taurus in search of a statue
of Apollo's sister and finds his own sister there. By making the furies
invisible and by reinterpreting the oracle so that Orestes and Iphigenie
do not have to steal the statue of Diana, Goethe has indeed collapsed the
mythological level of the action into the human level; but at the same
time by replacing Euripdes' deux ex machina with humans telling the truth,
interpreting, and granting grace, he has raised the human level to the
mythological: by their acts Iphigenie, Orestes, and the king of Taurus
have civilized the world. The end of this play anticipates Faust in its
celebration of the creative power of the human mind and will. In Italy
Goethe recasts the play into blank verse. The meter had been established
in German drama by Lessing in Nathan der Weise (1779; translated as Nathan
the Wise, 1781); Goethe showed it capable of a sublimity and complexity
of diction previously achieved only in the classical meters of Klopstock
and of his own Pindaric hymns.
The power and flexibility of Goethe's new dramatic language emerges
fully in Torquato Tasso, which he finished revising after he returned
from Italy in the spring of 1788. The play shows Renaissance poet Tasso
when he has just completed his great epic, La Gerusalemme liberata.
He is unable to come to terms either with the real political world embodied
in the statesman Antonio Montecatino, or to find a satisfactory relationship
with his inspiring ideal, the princess Leonore d'Este, sister of his patron,
Duke Alfonso. Caught in complex intrigues, both real and imagined, Tasso
attempts to fight a duel with Antonio and is placed under arrest by the
duke; later, he impulsively embraces the princess. Seemingly abandoded
by the duke and the princess, he turns to Antonio for support as he sinks
into madness. The blank verse and the Renaissance setting frame a much
more objective version of the problem of Egmont. Egmont's freedom and lack
of selfconsciousness apear here as the idealism of the poet, who is above
the vagaries and political demands of the real world. Tasso's oppposite,
the consummate courtier Antonio, is not seen as evil, as Alba was in Egmont,
but rather as the other half of Tasso's incomplete personality. (Faust
was later to speak of the two souls in his breast, the one that sought
the heavens and the other that clung to the world). The two women in the
play, both named Leonore, are likewise complementary personalities; bound
together by their love for Tasso and for one another they seek to draw
Tasso in opposite diretions. By placing his hero between embodiments of
his own drives toward the ideal and the real, Goethe transformed his earlier
realistic psychologie into a symbolic representation of psychological analysis.
As a result, he was able to dispense with the Shakesperean mob scenes he
used so effectively in Egmont; in Torquato Tasso the psychological
aspects appear visible on the stage instead of being mirrored in minor
characters. Thus it is that despite their seeming lack of stage action
Iphigenie
auf Taurus and Torquato Tasso are among the most compelling
plays in the German language.
Goethe returned from Italy as, he declared, an artist. Karl August relived
him of all official obligations, except the directorship of the court theather,
which was officially established in 1791, and of libraries and natural-historical
and artistic collections in the duchy, including those at the University
of Jena. Goethe returned to emotional dislocations and resentments occasioned
both by the change he had undergone and by his decision to go to Italy
alone and in secret. Most severe among these was the rupture with Frau
von Stein, who could not forgive his having left her -let alone his open
installation of a mistress, Christiane Vulpius, in his house shortly after
his return. Only in the mid 1790s was any relationship with Frau von Stein
re-established, and then on a rather distant basis. Christiane bore Goethe
several children, only one of whom-Julius August Walther, born in 1789-
survived, and remained her companion until her death. Their marriage in
1806 did little to moderate the Weimar court's disapproval of Goethes scandalous
liaison with this uneducated *dicke Haelfte* (fatter half), as she was
cruelly called, but heir persistence in this situation is a measure both
of their devotion to one another and of Goethes's distance from his immediate
circle.
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Christiane Vulpius, who became Goethe's mistress in 1788 and his
wife in 1806; pastel drawing by F. Bury, 1800 (Gustav Koennecke, Bilderatlas
zur Geschiche der deutschen Nationalliteratur - Graz: Akademische Druck-
und Verlagsanstalt, 1981 -
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Indeed, he lived thereafter in a world of ideas and intellectual activities
rather than in a world of events. Even the Italian journey, which he treasured
for the rest of his life, was important to him as a remembered experience:
he was not at all pleased when the duke dispatched him to Venice in 1790,
though he used the time to learn more about Venetian paintings. In Weimar
he devoted his energy to studies of all sorts. In addition frmo his early
interest in geology, botany, and comparative anatomy he became passionately
interested in optics, and in 1790 he began publishing increasingly anti-Newtonian
essays about the theory of color and scientific method in general. Much
of his time was devoted to studying Kant, Plato and Homer. His other major
area of interest was art. The more academic development of his interests
was reflected in his new friendships with the educator and statesman Wilhelm
von Humboldt and the art historian Hans Meyer; the latter, whom he had
met in Italy, lived in his house from 1791 until 1802. The French Revolution
was the one political event that necessarily impinged on Goethe's life,
not only because it was a topic of constant interest in all circles but
also because the duke, who had entered the Prussian army, insisted that
Goethe accompany him on campaigns to France in 1792 and to the Rhine in
1793. Goethe reported on these events in *Campagne in Frankreich 1792*
(translated as The Campaign in France in the Year 1792, 1849) and
*Belagerung von Mainz * (Siege of Mainz), published together in 1822. He
continued his optical and artistic studies while trudging around after
the army; his refusal to be submerged in military activity enabled him
to present a clear picture of the daily reality of the campaigns.
Goethes' literary output in the early 1790s was relatively sparse. Two
short plays, Der Gross- Cophta (The Great Cophta), 1792) and Der
Buergergeneral (The Citizen General, 1793), and a dramatic fragment,
DieAufgeregten
(The Excited Ones, published in 1817), deal with the French Revolution
in poetic terms. The verse epic Reineke Fuchs (1794; translated
as Reynard the Fox, 1855) does so more effectively. This translation
and adaption into hexameter of a Low German version of the old story of
the fox at the court of the lion is the first result of Goethe's study
of Homer. But the most important poetry of these years is the cycle of
love poems *Roemische Elegien* (1795; translated as Roman Elegies Translated
in the Original Metres, 1876) written in the first year of his relationship
with Christiane. The poem describes the gradual acceptance of a German
visitor into the Roman world of history, love, art, and poetry. As the
poet takes possession of his Roman beloved, so too does he enter into the
cultural heritage represented by Rome to the eighteenth century and everything
represented by the south to the Gothic north. Written in the elegiac couplets
of Propertius, Catullus, and Ovid, and in their frank manner, the poems
transmute their Roman predecessors with the same facility and success as
Goethe's classical plays appropriate their predecessors. They created something
of a scandal when they were published but are now recognized as the greatest
love poems of the generation.
The year 1794 marks the beginning of Goethe's friendship with Schiller.
Schiller had come to Jena in 1789 as professor of history on an appointment
arranged by Goethe, but the older poet had had two reasons for keeping
his distance from the newcomer: not only had Schiller made his reputation
as a powerful Sturm und Drang poet a decade after Goethe had renounced
the movement, but he had recently given up poetry for immersion in Kant.
Only in 1794 did a conversation after a lecture in Jena bring the two together
into what rapidly became a mutually supportive and productive relationship.
Much of Goethe's energy in the following years was devoted to Schiller's
journal Die Horen, published from 1795 to 1797, and then to his
own successor journal, Die Propoylaen, published from 1798 to 1800.
The program of these journals and of the poets' other work together was
nothing less than the establishment of a classical German literature in
the sense that the literature of fifth-century Athens had been classical:
a literature that both represented and shaped a nation. While neither poet
ever really spoke for or influenced the nation in the way to which they
aspired, their mutual encouragement and criticism resulted in the greatest
masterpiece of both men's careers.
Their excitement and productivety derived, however, not only from their
friendship but also from the simultaneous emergence, largely under Goethe's
supervision, of the University of Jeana as the major center in Germany
for the study of philosophy and science. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel spent substantial
parts of the 1790s in Jena, Fichte und Schelling in appointments arranged
in part by Goethe. Drawn to Jena by their presence and by Goethe's presence
in nearby Weimar were, at various times, the major Romantic poets -August
Wilhelm und Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, Novalis
(Friedrich von Hardenberg), Friedrich Hoelderlin, and Heinrich von Kleist.
Drawn there also for frequent visits were Wilhelm von Humboldt and his
brother, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Goethe himself frequently
visited Jena to attend lectures and discussions on philosophy, science,
and literature. His scientific and literary studies continued unabated,
with extensive reading in Greek literature and under the influence of A.W.
Schlegel, renewed study of Shakespeare and the discovery of Calderon. He
also devoted much time to running the court-theater-producing, directing,
and training the company boeth in the great modern repertory created by
Mozart, Lessing, Schiller, and himself and also in the classics from the
Greeks through Shakespeare and Racine. Even more than in Frankfurt in the
1770s Goethe was at the center of German intellectual life. His poetic
achievement in all areas in this period is stagering. Against a rich background
of *minor* works-scientific papers; important theoretical essays on art
and literature; translation of works by Madame de Stael, Denis Diderot,
Benvenuto Cellini, and Voltaire; a fragmentary sequel to Mozart's Die
Zauberfloete (The Magic Flute); and a spectacular torso of a drama
about the French Revolution, Die natuerliche Tochter (The Natural
Daughter, 1804) -Goethe produced masterpieces which set the standards for
most of the nineteenth century in lyric poetry, prose narrative, and drama.
In addition to the flow of occasional and personal poems, Goethe and
Schiller wrote a large collection of satiric epigrams titled *Xenien* (Xenias,
1796) and a series of famous ballads. Goethe also continued his study and
practice of classical meters with a series of elegies and *Achilleis* (1808;
translated as *Achilleid,* 1890), a fragment in hexameter on the death
of Achilles. But his most important work in this genre is Hermannund
Dorothea (1798; translated as Hermann and Dorothea, 1801) a
hexameter idyll in nine cantos. About an innkeeper's son in a small German
town who courts a refugee fleeing the French, the poem constitutes Goethe's
most important poetic response to the revolution. At the same time its
delicately ironic double vision, in which its characters appear both as
limited, very German bourgeois and yet also as Homeric figures, makes the
poem the paradigmatic achievement of Goethe's classicism.
Goethe's prose narratives of the 1790s are no less remarkable. For Schiller's
Die
Horen he wrote *Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten* (1795; translated
as *The Recreations of the German Imigrants,* 1854), a collection of novellas
in a frame narrative about refugees -this time aristocrats instead of bourgeois-
from the French revolution; the cycle focuses on the development of individual
virtues such as sooperativeness and self-control as the basis for social
order. But it is more important for formal reasons than for its content:
it established the novella as a significant genre in German literature,
and the fairy tale with which it concludes was the inspiration and model
for similar works into the twentieth century. Nevertheless, in the context
of the 1790s *Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten* ranks as one of
Goethe's minor works, for the great narrative of the decade was
Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1796; translated as Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship,
1824), the revision of the novel Goethe had drafted before he went to Italy.
He had begun the revision in 1791, but the most significant part was completed
in 1795 in the first flush of his friendship with Schiller. As the new
title suggests, the novel no longer deals just with the theater but explores
the modes of being that are open to a thoughtful member of the middle class
at the close of the eigheenth century. In this respect the novel is like
Die
Leiden des jungen Werthers, but Wilhelm's problem is not the destructive
unity of a worl projected by his own solipsism; it is, rather, how to make
sense out of a world and circumstances which seem to lack any coherence
whatsover. The paradigmatic example of the European Bildungsroman,
Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre follows its hero through a series of love affairs
from late adolescence to early manhood as he flees his wealthy middleclass
home to become an actor, outgrows the narrow circumstances of the German
theater, and joins a secret society composed mainly of landed aristocrats
committted to developing new forms of stability in a changing world. As
in Torquato Tasso, the various figures he encounters embody
different possible modes of being for Wilhelm himself -ranging from the
loose actress Philine to the poetic child Mignon to the pious *schoene
Seele* (beautiful soul to the ideal woman Natalie), to whom he becomes
engaged. First the theater, a traditional metaphor for life, then the mysterious
secret society of the power provide the focus for Wilhelm's journey through
art and poetry toward active participation in the world. The novel encompasses
a vast range of individuals, character types, settings, episodes, and kinds
of narrative, as well as inserted songs. The Romantics immediately hailed
the novel as an immeasurable great achievement and then, in a series of
imitations, struggled with the challenges it posed. The novel sums up and
combines, as no single English novel before Charles Dicken's late works
did, the achievements of Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith; although it was
fashionable for English novelists in the nineteenth century to depolore
Goethe's novel for its loose morals, it established the tradition of the
Bildungsroman on which they all depend.
Faust is Goethe's best-known work of the 1790s. The core of the
tragedy of Margarete had been written in prose before Goethe left Frankfurt;
a manuscript of this version, known as the Urfaust (original Faust),
was discovered and published in 1887. Parts of this version plus the two
scenes composed in Italy had been published in 1790 as Faust: Ein Fragment.
From 1797 to 1801, with Schiller's encouragement, Goethe rewrote the existing
scenes, expanding some of them, and added the prologues, the pact scenes,
and the Walpurgis Night segment to complete Part I of the drama, which
was published in 1808. He introduces several important changes in the old
legend of the scholar who makes a pact with the devil Mephistopheles: his
Faust seeks not power through knowledge but access to transcendent knowledge
denied to the human mind; the pact is transformed into a bet under the
terms of which Faust will be allowed to live as long as Mephistopheles
fails to satisfy his striving for transcendence. Most significantly, Goethe
makes the second half of Part I into a love tragedy: Faust seduces Margarete,
an innocent young girl who embodies for him the transcendent ideal that
he seeks; she is condemned to death for killing their infant, but at the
last moment, as Faust and Mephistopheles abandon her in prison, a voice
from above declares that she is saved. Faust, in typical Romantic
fashion, conflates Neoplatonism, which opposes a transcendent mind to an
immanent world, with Kantianism, which opposes an internal subject to an
external object; thus, sometimes Faust has two souls, one of which longs
for transcendence, the other for the world (the Neoplatonist version of
the Romantic dialectic), and at other times he feels imprisoned within
himself and unable to apprehend the world outside his mind (the Kantian
version of the Romantic dialectic). Both sets of oppositions are resolved
in play or art. Faust's pact with the devil commits him, a striver after
transcendent absolutes rather like Werther, to submerge himself restlessly
in the reality of the world, like Wilhelm Meister. His opposing souls come
into brief moments of harmony with one another but in moment that, by the
terms of his pact with Mephistopheles, must not last. The tragedy of Part
I, and the tragedy of Margarete, is that the eternities of the spirit must
be subject to the destruction of time if they are to be perceived in the
world. The intellectual complexity is matched by the stylistic complexity:
Goethe transformed the unreflected, rather primitive Shakespeareanism of
the early Sturm und Drang version into the highly sophisticated, *classical,*
thoroughly catholic text of Part I, which appropriates and transmutes vast
numbers of texts from the entire Western tradition (excepting only the
Greeks, whom Goethe reserved for Part II). Similarly, the Faust theme,
which Lessing and after him the Sturm and Drang movement had identified
as the quintessential German theme, becomes in Goethe's treatment a bond
to link Germany to the European tradition. At the same time the unreflected
neoclassical definition of tragedy in the early version is transformed
into a renovation of non-Aristotelian forms, ranging from mystery play
and Corpus Christi play to eighteenth-century operetta. In Faust
Goethe established yet again a new genre, a world theater of such complexity
that it has had few successors -certainly none of equal stature.
The death of Schiller in 1805 and the defeat of the Prussians at Jena
in 1806 mark another major turning point in Goethes life. The concentration
of leading German intellectuals at the University of Jena gradually dispersed,
so that Goethe's loose ties to the younger Romantik generation were maintained
at an increasins distance. Furthermore, his sympathy with Napoleon, his
insistence on the independence of art from politics, and his unorthodox
social and religious attitudes alienated him from an ever-increasing portion
of his public; by the time of his death he was clearly Germany's greatest,
but not its most popular, writer. For most of the nineteenth century, in
fact, Heinrich Heine's label for Goethe, *der grosse Heide* (the great
pagan) stuck, with pagan generally understood in its most pejorative
sense. Nevertheless, for the next thirteen years Goethe continued his activities
in art, history, science, and literature at what for anyone else would
be considered a prodigious rate. He maintained his interest in classsical
art, wrote a biography (1811) of Philipp Hackert, an artist he had known
in Italy, and took great interest in the emerging talents of Caspar David
Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. Through his friendship wih Sulpiz Boisseree,
his early interest in Gothic art was reawakened; from 1816 until his death
he edited a journal, Ueber Kunst und Alterthum (On Art and Antiquity),
devoted to these interests. He collected manuscripts and coins, and began
reading more widely in history.
He also became more conscious of his own historic role, perhaps partly
as a result of being summoned to meet Napoleon in 1808. Around this time
Friedrich von Mueller began keeping records of his conversations with Goethe,
and Goethe started writing his autobiography. The first installment, Dichtung
und Wahrheit, appeared in 1811. Apart from the information this work
offers about Goethe and his interpretation of himself, it is important
for the view of his times that it contains. Goethe's great contribution
to the development of autobiography was his recognition that the individual
can only be understood in his historical context and that all autobiographical
writing is historiography.
Goethe worked steadily in the five years following Schiller's death
to complete his vast. Zur Farbenlehre (1810; translated as Goethe's
Theory of Colours, 1840), which he sometimes called his single most
important work. It consists of three parts: an exposition of Goethe's own
theory of color, a polemic against the Newtonian theory that white light
is a mixture of colors, and a collection of materials on the history of
color theory from antiquity to Goethe's own time. While Goethe's theory
has never been accepted by physicists, his insight on the perception of
color have been influental, as has his recognition that scientific ideas
are conditioned by their historical contexts.
As in art, Goethe's taste in literature remained open to Romantic influence;
to his continuing interest in Shakespeare and Calderon he added the medieval
German epic the Nibelungenlied. He also followed the work of the
new generation of poets, inside and outside of Germany, with great interest.
In the theater he produced a series of plays by Calderon, stimulating hereby
a lasting revival of his works; in addition, he produced plays by younger
Romantic dramatics, such as Heinrich von Kleist and Zacharias Werner. He
continued writing court masques, but only one major dramatic work, the
operatic fragment Pandora (1810). He wrote poems steadily, experimenting
with new forms in his first group of sonnets and trying out Persian attitudes
and forms in the West-oestlicher Divan (1819; translated as *West-Eastern
Divan,* 1874), a book of poems composed in response to the German translation
of Hafiz. Like the *Roemische Elegien,* these poems, many of them masterpieces,
are arranged into a sketchy plot that articulates the poet's encounter
with Hafiz and the culture he represents. The collection embodies better
than any of his work except Faust the aging poet's passionate concern
for *Weltliteratur* (world literature), by which term Goethe summarized
his belief in a literary tradition that transcended national boundaries.
The West-oestlicher Divan also contains *Noten und Abhandlungen*
(Notes and Treatises), brief essays on the history of Persian life and
letters. As in his autobiographical and scientific writings, historical
context had become indispensable to Goethe.
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Goethe at age 77; pastel drawing by Ludwig Sebbers (Gero von Wilpert,
Deutsche Literatur in Bildern - Stuttgart: Kroener, 1965)
|
Before Schiller's death Goethe had begun planning a sequel to Wilhelm
Meisters Lehrjahre that was, however, to be a cycle of novellas rather
than a novel. Several of these novellas were written in the succeeding
decade, but one of them so absorbed Goethes' interest that it developed
into a novel in its own right: Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809; translated
as *Elective Affinities,* 1854). The title refers metaphorically to the
capacity of certain elements to displace others during chemical reactions.
A young girl, Ottilie, and an unnamed captain arrive at the estate of Eduard
and Charlotte, and a double displacement ensures: Eduard and Ottilie are
attracted to each other, as are Charlotte and the captain. When Charlotte
gives birth to her and Eduard's child, it bears, paradoxically, the features
of Ottilie and the captain, with whom the spouses have committed adultery
only in spirit. The situation is resolved only when Ottilie forbids Eduard
to divorce Charlotte and then starves herself to death. The novel retraces
the concern of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, but in a more abstract
and symbolic fashion, as a third-person narrative with only inserted, impersonal
diary passages and a full-scale inserted novella. Eduard is a middle-aged
Werther who has survived the loss of his beloved Charlotte to marry her
on the rebound from her first marriage. Confronting his selfishness and
subjectivity is an inscrutable moral law embodied in a powerful natural
environment and in the equally inscrutable Ottilie. The novel subtly leaves
open to question the extent to which this law is not inherent in nature,
but projected by the characters themselves. With its paradoxical double
adultery, its frank treatment of divorce, its suicide, and its apparent
apotheosis, the novel scandalized most of its readers' despite its undeniable
and significant influence in the nineteenth century, especially in England
and America, it only became a respectable object of study in the twentieth.
It is now considered one of Goethe's major works.
Goethe's wife died in 1816; the following year their son August married
Ottilie von Pogwisch , who then ran the household she and August shared
with Goethe. Also in 1817 Goethe resigned as director of the court theater
after some forty years of supervising Weimar's theatrical life. In the
wake of Wartburg celebration of 1817, an expression of German liberal and
national sentiment, Goethe became even more alienated from the political
aspirations of his younger countrymen. He spent his last years almost as
a living monument to himself, sitting for portraits and busts and receiving
the visits of young intellectuals from near and far. This impression is
heightened by his extensive autobiographical activities in his last decade.
He completed Dichtung und Wahrheit und Italienische Reise und
wrote *Campagne in Frankreich 1792* and *Belagerung von Mainz,* as well
as shorter reports of his activities year by year. He also organized his
papers; published what he could; supervised the early stages of a complete
edition of his works, the Werke: Vollstaendige Ausgabe letzter Hand
(Works;
Complete Edition with Final Touches, 1827-1842); and arranged for the publication
of other papers after his death. Finally, he spent much time in conversations
that he knew were being recorded for posterity; the most famous of these
are the ones with Johann Peter Eckermann, beginnning in 1823.
But these last years were not devoted only to fixing the image of the
great personality. Goethe read widely and voluminously: classical authors,
Shakespeare, Calderon, his beloved English novelists, and contemporary
writers such as Lord Byron, Alessandro Manzoni, Sir Walter Scott, and Victor
Hugo. Between 1817 and 1824 he published essays on morphology and general
scientific topics in two series, continued his work in optics, read extensively
in medicine, and began reading and writing about meteorology. He continued
to write literary essays, reviews, and major poems. The most important
among the latter are *Urworte Orphisch* (Orphic Utterances), *Trilogie
der Leidenschaft* (Trilogy of Passion), *Chinesich-Deutsche Jahre und Tageszeiten*
(Sino-German Seasons and Times of Day), and the poems written in Dornburg
after the death of Carl August in 1828. A masterly novella, called simply
*Novelle* (Novella, 1828; translated as *Goethe's Novel,* 1832) was written
in 1826-1827. But Goethe also completed two major large-scale works. Wilhelm
Meisters Wanderjahre oder Die Entsagenden (1821; translated as Wilhelm
Meister's Travels; or, The Renunciants, 1827) and Faust,
Part II (1832; translated, 1838).
Like Goethe's other novels, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre represents
a significant advance in the nature and structure of the European novel,
though it took a long time for its true importance to be recognized. Goethe
had begun planning sequels to both Wilhelm Meister Lehrjahre und
Unterhaltungen
deutscher Ausgewanderten before Schiller's death. The result was Wilhelm
Meisters Wanderjahre, which appeared in a first version in 1821 and
in a substantially revised and expanded version in 1829. The frame is a
loose narrative of Wilhelm's journeymanship, his travels to increase his
mastery of life in company with his son Felix. On his way he is offered
innumerable novellas, reports, and collections of aphorismus to read, all
of which are included and many of whose characters, along with old friends
from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, wander in and out of the frame
narrative. The end of Wilhelm's journey, his reunion with his beloved Natalie,
is delayed to some indefinite time beyond the end of the novel. With this
loose structure Goethe questions the possibility of individual development
in the fragmented society that Europe had become during his lifetime and
thus calls into question the ideals of his earlier novel and of his cultural
program of the 1790s. It no longer seems possible for individual development
and education to lead to social cohesion and order. Sympathetic parodies
of eighteenth-century writers in the novel mourn the loss of subjectivity
imposed by the new historical conditions: the problem is exactly the reverse
of that in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers. Its complex ironies of
tone and structure made the novel inaccessible to early audiences. Only
in the twentieth century, as the accuracy of Goethe's reading of the nineteenth
century became clear, was it taken seriously; and only since Worl War II
have its literary merits begun to be appreciated.
The second part of Faust, completed in 1831 and published posthumously
at Goethe's desire, has had a similar -though, perhaps because of its undeniable
stylistic virtuosity, not quite so extreme- pattern of reception. Begun
in the later states of composition of Part I but completed only between
1825 and 1831, it is an elaborate unfolding and historicizing of the first
part. It shows Faust first at the imperial court, then at the *Klassische
Walpurgisnacht* (classical withe's sabbath), where he ransacks Greek mythology
to find Helena, who bears him a son. Later he returns to the wars of the
emperor, then spends his old age supervising land-reclamation projects.
Satisfied that he is working for the benefit of humanity, despite the murder
of an elderly couple (killed in a fire started by Mephistopheles' henchmen).
At the end of his life Faust renounces magic and dies, still striving to
improve his lands. Divine Grace, however, saves his soul, which is shown
ascending in pursuit of an ever-receding ideal embodied once more in Margarete,
*das Ewig-Weibliche* (the eternal feminine). Most of the play, from the
middle of Act I to the beginning of Act IV, grounds both itself and all
of modern European literature in the classical tradition, going back to
what was understood at the time as the oldest levels of classical mythology.
This undertaking is possible only on the basis of Goethe's extensive learning,
his ability to absorb and recreate literary styles, and his understanding
of the nature of allegory, a mode of writing that had been virtually lost
in the eighteenth century. But not only does the play sum up Goethe's and
Europe's relation to the classical tradition: it also reflects, like Wilhelm
Meisters Wanderjahre, on the state of European culture and politics
in Goethe's last years, and on the human condition in general. Despite
the richness of the text, it never loses sight of the central issues of
Part I. Over and over it makes the points that pure truth cannot be permanently
manifested in time -the tragedy of the historicist; that truth can be known
only temporarily and imperfectly in the world- the tragedy of the Platonist;
and that truth can only be known through the mental projections of the
seeker himself -the tragedy of the Kantian. Nowhere are the central concerns
of European Romanticism more cogently summed up in all their ramifications
than in Goethe's last masterpiece. On March 22, 1832, less than two months
after making his final revisions of Faust, Goethe died, probably
of a heart attack.
Like all Romantics, Goethe was a profoundly dialectical thinker. For
a variety of reasons, including the power of his personality, his preference
for concrete detail over broad abstraction, the complexity of his views,
and the uncongeniality of some of his attitudes in the prevailing political
and social climate, his dialectic was disassembled and his works fragmented
into the separate statements of a sage. Thus, opposing readings of Goethe
have developed -as serene Olympian or tortured nihilist, as the embodiment
of nineteenth-century culture or as utterly out of touch with the world
around him, as concerned or indifferent -and there has been a long tradition
of ambicalence toward him in Germany. The nineteenth century had strong
reservations about this rejection of a strong nationalist position, while
later generations have had more difficulty with his lack of direct political
engagement. But both the vehemence of these reations and the continuing
vitality of his work testify to a power of thought that he was aware of
from the earliest years of his career. An acquantaince speaks of his drive
in the early 1770s *die Gedanken selbst, wie sie waeren, zu denken und
zu sagen* (to think and say the thoughts itself as it really is). This
effort to articulate *the thought itself as it really is* is the challenge
his writing still presents.
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Papers:
The bulk of Goethe's papers are in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv,
Weimar, Germany. The Goethe Museum, Duesseldorf, Germany, houses a major
collection of manuscripts, portraits, and first editions. A smaller collection
of Goethe manuscripts is at the Freies Deutsches Hochstift Frankfurter
Goethemuesum (the museum is the house in which Goethe grew up), Frankfurt
am Main, Germany. The Speck Collection in the Beinecke Rare Books Library,
Yale University, contains first editions and a substantial collection of
Goetheana.
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| Goethe in Pictures: |
 
 
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Books:
Selected Books: Neue Lieder in Melodien gesetzt von Bernhard Theodor
Breitkopf (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1770);
Positiones juris (Strasbourg: Heitzius, 1771);
Von deutscher Baukunst. D.M. Ervini a Steinbach, anonymous
(Frankfurt am Main, 1773);
Brief des Pastors zu ***an den neuen Pastor zu ***: Aus dem Franzoesischen,
anonymous (Frankfurt am Main, 1773);
Zwo wichtige bisher uneroerterte Biblische Fragen zum erstenmal
gruendlich beantwortet, von einem Landgeistlichen in Schwaben,
anonymous (Lindau am Bodensee, 1773);
Goetz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand: Ein Schauspiel,
anonymous (Darmstadt, 1773); translated by Sir Walter Scott as Goetz von
Berlichingen (London: Bell, 1799);
Prolog zu den neusten Offenbarungen Gottes verdeutscht durch Dr.
Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, anonymous (Giessen, 1774);
Goetter Helden und Wieland: Eine Farce, anonymous (Leipzig,
1774);
Clavigo: Ein Trauerspiel (Leipzig: Weygand, 1774); translated
by Carl Leftley as Clavidgo: A Tragedy in 5 Acts (London: Johnson, 1798);
Neueroeffnetes moralisch-politisches Puppenspiel, anonymous
(Leipzig & Frankfurt am Main, 1774);
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, anonymous (Leipzig: Weygand,
1774); translated by Richard Graves as The Sorrows of Werther,
2 volumes (London: Dodsley, 1779);
Erwin und Elmire: Ein Schauspiel mit Gesang, anonymous
(Frankfurt am Main & Leipzig, 1775);
Nicht ich, sondern Heinrich Leopold Wagner hat den Prometheus
gemacht (Frankfurt am Main: Goethe, 1775);
Stella: Ein Schauspiel fuer Liebende in fuenf Akten (Berlin:
Mylius, 1776); translated anonymously as Stella (London: Hookham &
Carpenter, 1798);
Claudine von Villa Bella: Ein Schauspiel mit Gesang (Berlin:
Mylius, 1776);
Proserpina: Ein Monodrama, anonymous (N.p., 1778);
Aufzug des Winters mit seinem Gefolge (N.p., 1781);
Aufzug der vier Weltalter (N.p., 1782);
Die Fischerinn: Ein Singspiel. Auf dem natuerlichen
Schauplatz zu Tiefurth vorgestellt (N.p., 1782);
Goethe's Schriften, 8 volumes (Leipzig: Goeschen, 1787-1790)
-includes in volume 2 (1787), Die Mitschuldigen: Ein Schauspiel;
in volume 3 (1787), Die Geschwister: Ein Schauspiel, translated
anonymously as The Sister in Dramatic Pieces from the German
(Edinburgh & London: Printed for William Creech and T. Cadell, 1792);
Iphigenie auf Tauris: Ein Schauspiel, translated by W. Taylor as
Iphigenia:A
Tragedy (London: Johnson, 1793); in volume 4 (1787), Der
Triumph der Empfindsamkeit: Eine dramatische Grille; Die Voegel: Nach dem
Aristophanes; in volume 5 (1788),
Egmont: Ein
Trauerspiel in fuenf Aufzuegen, translated anonymously
as Egmont (London: Saunders & Ottley, 1848); in volume 6 (1790), Torquato
Tasso. Ein Schauspiel, translated by J. Cartwright
as Torquato Tasso (London: Nutt, 1861); in volume 7 (1790),
Faust:
Ein Fragment; Jerry und Beately: Ein Singspiel; Scherz, List
und Rache: Ein Singspiel;
Das Roemische Carneval, anonymous (Berlin: Unger/Weimar
& Gotha: Ettinger, 1789)
Versuch die Metammorphose der Pflanzen zu erklaeren (Gotha:
Ettinger, 1790);
Beytraege zur Optik, 2 volumes (Weimar: Industrie-Comptoir,
1791-1792);
Goethes's Neue Schriften, 7 volumes (Berlin: Unger, 1792-1800)
-includes in volume 1 (1792), Der Gross-Cophta: Ein
Lustspiel in fuenf Aufzuegen; as volume 2 (1794), Reineke
Fuchs, translated by Thomas Arnold as Reynard the Fox (London:
Natali & Bond, 1855; New York: Appleton, 1860);
Der Buergergeneral: Ein Lustspiel in einem Aufzuge. Zweyte Fortsetzung
der beyden Billets, anonymous (Berlin: Unger, 1793);
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: Ein Roman, 4 volumes (Berlin:
Unger, 1795-1796); translated by Thomas Carlyle as Wilhelm Meister's
Apprenticeship (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd / London: Whittaker,
1824; Boston: Wells & Lilly, 1828);
Epigramme: Venedig 1790 (Berlin: Unger, 1796);
Taschenbuch fuer 1798: Hermann und Dorothea (Berlin: Vieweg,
1798); translated by Thomas Holcroft as Hermann and Dorothea
(London: Longmans, 1801; Richmond, Va.: Enquirer Press, 1805);
Neueste Gedichte (Berlin: Unger, 1800);
Was wir bringen: Vorspiel, bey Eroeffnung des neuen Schauspielhauses
zu Lauchstaedt (Tuebingen: Cotta, 1802);
Taschenbuch fuer das Jahr 1804: Die natuerliche Tochter, Trauerspiel
(Tuebingen: Cotta, 1804);
Goethes's Werke, 13 volumes (Tuebingen: Cotta, 1806-1810)
-included in volume 4 (1806), Die Laune des Verliebten; in
volume 7 (1808, Der Zauberfloete zweyter Theil; in volume
8 (1808), Faust: Eine Tragoedie, translated by Lord Francis
L. Gower as Faust, in Faust; and Schiller's
Song of the Bell (London: Murray, 1823); in volume 10 (1808), *Achilleis*;
Sammlung zur Kenntniss der Gebirge von und um Karlsbad (Carlsbad:
Franiecki, 1807);
Die Wahlverwandschaften: Ein Roman, 2 volumes (Tuebingen:
Cotta, 1809); translated anonymously as *Elective Affinities* in Novels
and Tales) London: Bohn, 1854);
Maskenzug zum 30sten Januar 1810 (N.p., 1810);
Pandora: Ein Taschenbuch fuer das Jahr 1810 (Vienna &
Trieste: Geistinger, 1810);
Zur Farbenlehre, 2 volumes (Tuebingen: Cotta, 1810); translated
by Sir Charles L. Eastlake as Goethe's Theory of Colours (London:
Murray, 1840);
Philipp Hackert: Biographische Skizze, meist nach dessen eigenen
Augsaetzen entworfen (Tuebingen: Cotta, 1811);
Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, 3 volumes (Stuttgart
& Tuebingen: Cotta, 1811-1813); translated anonymously as Memoirs
of Goethe: Written by himself, 2 volumes (London: Colburn, 1824;
New York: Collins & Hannay, 1824);
Gedichte (Tuebingen: Cotta, 1812);
Des Epimenides Erwachen: Ein Festspiel (Berlin: Duncker
& Humblot, 1815);
Gedichte, 2 volumes (Stuttgart & Tuebingen: Cotta,
1815);
Goethe's Werke, 20 volumes (Stuttgart & Tuebingen:
Cotta, 1815-1819) -includes in volume 10 (1817), Die Aufgeregten;
Aus meinem Leben, zweyter Abtheilung erster Theil, zweyter Theil:
Italienische Reise, 2 volumes (Stuttgart & Tuebingen: Cotta,
1816-1817); translated by Alexander James W. Morrison as Travels
in Italy (London: Bohn, 1846);
Bey allerhoechster Anwesenheit Ihro Majestaet der Kaiserin Mutter
Maria Feodorowna in Weimar Maskenzug, anonymous (Stuttgart: Cotta,
1818);
West-oestlicher Divan (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1819);
Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre oder Die Entsagenden: Ein Roman.
ErsterTheil (Stuttgart & Tuebingen: Cotta, 1821); translated by Carlyle
as Wilhelm Meister's Travels: or, The renunciants (Edinburgh
& London: Tait, 1827);
Aus meinem Leben, zweyter Abtheilung fuenfter Theil: Campagne
in Frankreich 1792; Belagerung von Mainz (Stuttgart & Tuebingen:
Cotta, 1822); translated by Robert Farie as The Campaign in France
in the Year 1792 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1849);
Werke: Vollstaendige Ausgabe letzter Hand, 60 volumes,
volumes 41-60 edited by Johann Peter Eckermann und Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer
(Stuttgart & Tuebingen: Cotta, 1827-1842) -includes in volume 15 (1828),
*Novelle,* translated by Carlyle as *Goethes's Novel,* Frasers Magazine,,
6, no. 34 (1832); 383-393; in volumnes 21-23 (1829, revised and enlarged
version of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder Die Entsagenden;
as volume 41 (1832), Faust: Eine Tragoedie. Zweyter Teil in fuenf
Akten, translated anonymously, with Part I, as Faust Rendered
into English Verse, 2 volumes (London: Printed by Arthur Taylor,
1838); as volume 48 (1833), Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit,
Vierter Teil;
Faust in urspruenglicher Gestalt nach der Goechenhausenschen Abschrift,
edited by Erich Schmidt (Weimar: Boehlau, 1887);
Werke: Hg. Im Auftrage der Grossherzogin Sophie von Sachsen. Weimarer
Ausgabe, 143 volumes (Weimar: Boehlau, 1887-1919) -included in
Part I, volume 37, *Buch Annette*;
Goethe ueber seine Dichtungen: Versuch einer Sammlung aller Aeusserungen
des Dichters ueber seine poetischen Werke, 9 volumes, edited by
Hans Gerhard Graef (Frankfurt am Main: Literarische Anstalt, 1901-1914;
reprinted, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Bucxhgesellschaft, 1968);
Saemtliche Werke: Jubilaeums-Ausgabe, edited by Eduard
von der Hellen, 40 volumes (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1902-1912);
Saemtliche Werke: Propylaen-Ausgabe, 48 volumes (Munich
& Berlin: Propylaen, 1909-1932);
Wilhelm Meistes theatralische Sendung (Stuttgart: Cotta,
1911);
Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespraeche: 28 August 1949,
edited by Ernst Beutler, 24 volumes (Zurich: Artemis, 1948-1964);
Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, edited by Erich Trunz and others,
14 volumes (Hamburg: Wegner, 1949-1964; revised edition, Munich: Beck,
1982);
Gesamtausgabe der Werke und Schriften, 22 volumes (Stuttgart:
Cotta, 1950-1968);
Corpus der Goethezeichnungen, edited by Gerhard Femmel,
6 volumes (Leipzig: Seemann, 1958-1970);
Saemtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, edited
by Karl Richter, 25 volumes projected, 13 volumes to date (Munich: Hanser,
1985-);
Saemtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebuecher und Gespraeche,
40 volumes projected, 8 volumes to date (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1985-).
Selected Editions in English:
Autobiography and Works, translated anonymously, 3 volumes
(London: Bohn, 1848-1850);
Works, translated anonymously, 14 volumes (London: Bohn,
1848-1890);
Dramatic works, translated by Anna Swanwick and Sir Walter
Scott (London: Bohn, 1850);
Poems of Goethe, translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring (London:
arker, 1853; revised and enlarged edition, London: Bohn, 1874; New York:
Lovell, 1884) -revised edition includes *Hermann and Dorothea* and West-Eastern
Divan*;
Novels and Tales, translated by R. Dillon Boylan and others
(London: Bohn, 1854);
Works: People's Edition, 9 volumes, edited by F.H. Hedge
and Leopold Noa. (Boston: Cassino, 1882);
Works: Illustrated by the Best German Artists, 5 volumes,
edited by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen (Philadelphia & New York: Barrie,
1885);
Reineke Fox, West-eastern Divan, and Achilleid: Translated in
the Original Metres, translated by Alexander Rogers (London: Bohn,
1890);
Works: Weimar Edition, 14 volumes, edited by Nathan Haskell
Dole (Boston: Niccolls, 1902);
Goethe's Literary Essays, edited by Joel E. Spingarn (London:
Milford/New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921);
Faust, translated by Philip Wayne, 2 volumes (Harmondsworth,
U.K.: Penguin, 1949, 1959);
The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings, translated
by Catherine Hutter (New York: New American Library, 1962);
Elective Affinities, translated by Elizabeth Mayer and
Louise ogan (Chicago: Regnery, 1963);
Goethe, edited by David Luke (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin,
1964);
Elective Affinities, translated by R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth,
U.K.: Penguin, 1971);
The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novella, translated by
Mayer, Bogan, and W.H. Auden (New York: Vintage, 1973);
Faust, A Tragedy. Backgrounds and Sources, the Author on the Drama,
Contemporary Reations, Modern Criticism, translated by Walter Arndt,
edited by Cyrus Hamlin (New York: Norton, 1976);
Goethe's Collected Works, 12 volumes, edited by Victor
Lange, Eric Blackall, and Cyrus Hamlin (New York: Suhrkamp, 1983-1989)
-comprises volume 1, Selected Poems, edited by Christopher
Middleton, translated by Middleton, Michael Hamburger, David Luke, J.F.
Nims, V. Watkins (1983); volume 2, Faust I & II,
edited and translated by stuart Atkins (1984); volume 3, Essays on
Art and Literature, edited by John Gearey, translated by E. And
E.H. von Nardhoff (1986); volumes 4&5, From My Life: Poetry and
Truth; Campaign in France 1792; Siege of Mainz, edited by Thomas
Saine und Jeffrey Sammons, translated by Saine and R. Heitner (1987); volume
6, Italien Journey, edited by Saine & Sammongs, translated
by Heitner (1989); volume 7, Early Verse Drama and Prose,
edited by Hamlin & F, Rider, translated by R.M. Browning, Hamburger,
Hamlin, and Ryder (1989); volume 8, Verse Plays and Epic, edited
by Hanling and Ryder, translated by Hamburger, Luke, and H. Hannum (1987);
volume 9, Wilhelm Meister's Apprecenticeship, edited by Lange,
translated by Blackkall and Lange (1989); volume 10, Wilhelm Meister's
Journeyman Years, edited by Jane K. Brown, translated by Kirshna
Winston I van Heureck, and Brown (1989); volume 11, The Sorrows of
Young Werther; Elective Affinities; Novella, edited by D. Wellberry,
translated by Lange und J. Ryan (1988); volume 12, Scientific Studies,
edited and translated by D. Miller (1988).
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Other:
James Macpherson, 4 volumes, Works of Ossian, edited anonymously
by Goethe and J.H. Merck (volumes 1-2,, N.p.; volumes 3-4, Leipzig: Fleischer,
1773-1777);
Die Propylaen: Eine periodische Schrift, 3 volumes, edited
by Goethe (Tuebingen: Cotta, 1798-1800);
Voltaire, Mahomet: Trauerspiel in fuenf Aufzuegen, translated
by Goethe (Tuebingen: Cotta, 1802);
Voltaire, Tanred: Trauerspiel in fuenf Aufzuegen, translated
by Goethe (Tuebingen: Cotta, 1802);
Benvenuto Cellini, Leben des Benvenuto Cellini Florentisnischen
Goldschmieds und Bildhauers von ihm selbst geschrieben: Uebersetzt und
mit einem Anhange, translated by Goethe, 2 volumes (Tuebingen:
Cotta, 1803);
Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1804, edited by Goethe and Christoph
Martin Wieland (Tuebingen: Cotta, 1803);
Winckelmann und sein Jahrhundert: In Briefen und Aufsaetzen herausgegeben,
edited by Goethe (Tuebingen: Cotta, 1805);
Denis Diderot, Rameaus Neffe: Ein Dialog von Diderot. Aus dem
Manuskript uebersetzt und mit Anmerkungen begleitet, translated
by Goethe (Leipzig: Goeschen, 1805);
Ueber Kunst und Alterthum, 6 volumes, edited by Goethe
(Stuttgart: Cotta, 1816-1832);
Zur Naturwissenschaft ueberhaupt, besonders zur Morpphologie;
Erfahrung, Betrachtung, Folgerung, durch Lebensereignisse verbunden,
2 volumes,, edited by Goethe (Stuttgart & Tuebingen: Cotta, 1817, 1824);
Hans Sachs, Der deutsche Gilblas oder Leben, Wanderungen und Schicksale
Johann Christoph Sachse's, eines Thueringers; Von ihm selbst verfasst,
introduction by Goethe (Stuttgart & Tuebingen: Cotta, 1822);
N.A. von Salvandy, Don Alonzo oder Spanien: Eine Geschichte aus
der gegenwaertigen Zeit, foreword by Goethe, 5 volumes (Breslau:
Max, 1825-1826);
J.C. Maempel, Der junge Feldjaeger in franzoesischen und englischen
Diensten waehrend des Spanisch-Portugiesischen Kriegs von 1806-1816,
introduction by Goethe, 6 volumes (volumes 1-4, Leipzig: Fleischel; volumes
5-6, Brunswick: Verlags-Comptoir, 1826-1831);
Memoiren Robert Guillemard's verabschiedeten Sergeanten: Begleitet
mit historischen, meisten Theils ungedruckten Belegen von 1805 bis 1823.
Aus dem Franzoesischen, introduction by Goethe, 2 volumes (Leipzig:
Weygand, 1827);
Alessandro Manzoni, Opere poetiche, introduction by Goethe
(Jena: Frommann, 1827;
Manzoni, Der Fuenfte May: Ode auf Napoleons Tod, translated
by Goethe and others (Berlin: Maurer, 1828);
Thomas Carlyle, Leben Schillers: Aus dem Englischen, introduction
by Goethe (Frankfurt am Main: Wilmans, 1830).
Periodical Publications:
*Roemische Elegien,* Die Horen (1795); translated by Leopold
Noa as Roman Elegies Translated in the Original Metres (Boston:
Schoenhof & Moeller, 1876);
*Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten,* Die Horen (1795);
*Xenien,* by Goethe und Friedrich Schiller, Musenalmanach auf
das Jahr 1797 (1796);
Madame de Stael,, *Versuch ueber die Dichtungen,* translated by Goethe,
Die
Horen, 5 (1796): 20-55;
*Zum Shaekespears Tag*, Allgemeine Monatsschrift fuer Wissenschaft
und Literatur (April 1854); 247ff.
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