As always,

for Gisela Maria

 CONTENTS

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

A Difficult Birth with Fortunate Consequences • Family Ties •

Between a Pedant and a Cheerful Nature • Goethe’s Sister •
The Child of a Free Imperial City • Practice in Writing •
The Rhymester and the First Gretchen Affair •
Self-Confidence Shaken • An Emergency Postponed •
Finding Poetry in the Everyday

CHAPTER 2

Living Large in Leipzig • The Great Men of Yesterday •

The Kätchen Affair • Preliminary Studies for an Epistolary
Novel • Behrisch • Therapy for Jealousy: The Lover’s
Spleen • Practical Exercises in Art •
Dresden • Disappearing in the Image • Breakdown

CHAPTER 3

The Aftermath of Leipzig • Partners in Guilt • Illness •

Approaches to Religion • Attempt at Piety • Two Mentors:
 Langer and Susanna von Klettenberg •
No Consciousness of Sin • The Pious Magician • The Sickroom
as Laboratory • The Search for Chemical Revelation

CHAPTER 4

Piety and Kätchen Recede • Strasbourg • Exhilaration •

The Spirit of the Place • Strasbourg Cathedral as a Test
of Courage • “On German Architecture.” •
Salzmann • Lersé • The Influential Encounter with Herder •
New Values: Life, Creative Power, Individuality, Expression •
Playing Cards with Herder

CHAPTER 5

Jung-Stilling • The Aperçu, or Sudden Inspiration •

The Psychology of Awakening and Creativity •
Friederike and the Romance Novel in Sesenheim • Not On to
Paris • The Shakespeare Speech • The Diminished
Doctorate • Leaving Strasbourg

CHAPTER 6

The Lawyer • Litigation as an Exercise and Prelude to Götz von

Berlichingen • Götz as a Wild West Hero • The “Law of the
Fist.” • The Sovereign Individual versus Modernity •
Sticking to It, Thanks to His Sister • The Author Helps
Himself • First Reactions

CHAPTER 7

Goethe’s Busy Idleness • Poetry without a Profession •

Johann Georg Schlosser • The Infanticide Trial and the Gretchen
Tragedy in Faust • Johann Heinrich Merck •
 Among the Darmstadt Sentimentalists • The Wayfarer •
The Reviewer • Goethe’s Early Aesthetics •
A Summer Love in Wetzlar

CHAPTER 8

A Portrait of the Young Goethe • Correspondence with the

Kestners • Jerusalem’s Suicide • Götz Is Published • Becoming
a Star • Exhilaration • Prometheus • Poet or Prophet?
Muhammad • Satirical Campaigns against False Prophets

CHAPTER 9

Making poetic use of One’s Own Life • Paths to Werther •

Personal matters • The Weariness of Living • Werther’s Love
and the Fate of Imagination • What Is Missing When We Are
Absent from Ourselves • Werther’s Impact

CHAPTER 10

Cornelia’s Misfortune • Clavigo, the Faithless One •

Lavater and Basedow • Prophets right and prophets left, the
World’s child in between • A Summer Cruise down the
Rhine • Celebration of Friendship • Friedrich Heinrich
Jacobi • An Invitation to Weimar • Lili and Auguste, an
Amorous House of Mirrors • Two Different Speeds •
Journey to Switzerland • Weimar, an Escape of Sorts

INTERMEDIATE REFLECTION: UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS

CHAPTER 11

Complications at Court • The Wieland Affair •

Charlotte von Stein • Wild Antics at First •
 Klopstock Rebuffed • Herder Receives the Call

CHAPTER 12

My writing has become subordinated to life •

Genius Doesn’t Protect You from Being a Dilettante •
Against the Literati • The Disastrous Case of Lenz

CHAPTER 13

More Sturm und Drang Visitors: Klinger and Kaufmann •

Goethe’s Wards • A Lesson in Behavior • Pegasus and Red
Tape • Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission: Dictated, Not
scribbled down • December 1777: “Winter Journey in the Harz”
and a Trial by Ordeal

CHAPTER 14

A Farce on the Sublime: The Triumph of Sentimentalism •

Christel Lassberg’s Suicide • A Political Mission •
Weimar’s Self-Assertion and the League of Princes • In Berlin •
“Govern!” • The Blended and the Pure • Conscripting Soldiers
and Iphigenia • The Temple Precincts of Art

CHAPTER 15

The Idea of Purity • Goethe’s Tao • The Crucifixion of

Woldemar • Jacobi Insulted • The Second Journey to
Switzerland • Friederike and Lili: Two Wrongs Righted •
The Beautiful Branconi and Confusion: Peace lies over all the
peaks • Goethe and Lavater: Religion on Trial

CHAPTER 16
 Peace and Granite • Reconciliation with Jacobi •
Reading Spinoza • Spinoza, Lessing, Jacobi, and the
“Prometheus” poem: tinder for an explosion • Naturalism and
Idealism: Opposing or Merging • Jacobi’s Philosophy of
Religion
and Goethe’s Nature Study • The Intermaxillary Bone •
Reconciliation with Herder

CHAPTER 17

Should He Stay in Weimar? • Difficulties of a Double Existence

•
The Origins of Tasso • Ineffectual Offices • Crisis •
The Complete Works: A Graveyard of Fragments? • Goethe
Wants to Change His Life • The Escape to Italy as a Test of
Self • The Risks • Departure in Secret

CHAPTER 18

The Italian Journey: No Forwarding Address • Beginning to

Relax • Palladio • I’m studying more than enjoying
myself • Rome • Iphigenia Completed • Among the
Artists • Moritz • Naples and Sicily • The Enchantment of the
Phaiakians • Second Sojourn in Rome •
Egmont Completed • Faustina • Farewell to Rome

CHAPTER 19

Return to Weimar • Charlotte von Stein and Christiane

Vulpius • Erotica • “Roman Elegies” •
Meeting Schiller • Moritz and a New Concept of Art’s
Autonomy • Art and Other Vital Forces • Tasso and Antonio
Again • Familial Bliss in the Hunting Lodge

CHAPTER 20
 The Revolution, this most terrible of all events •
Against Pervasive Politicizing • Goethe’s Praise of Restraint •
In the War • Goethe’s New Realism • Back in Weimar •
Revolution as Farce: The Citizen-General and The Agitated •
Atrocities in Mainz and Reineke the Fox

CHAPTER 21

Goethe Gathers His Circle around Him •

Love, Friendship, Science, and Art Keep Life Going •
Fichte in Jena • Goethe’s New Interest in Philosophy •
The Friendship with Schiller Begins with a happy event •
The First Exchange of Ideas

CHAPTER 22

Writing for Die Horen • Two Ideas against the Evils of the
Times:
Schiller’s Aesthetic Education and Goethe’s sociable
education •
The centaur • The “Xenia”: Joint Attacks on the Literary
Establishment • Schiller as Midwife to Wilhelm Meister •
An Anti-Romantic Work? • The Peaceful End of Die Horen

CHAPTER 23

Herrmann and Dorothea • Living Despite History •

Looking for Real Estate • The Treasure Hunter • The Summer
of Ballads • Return to the path of mist and fog • At Work on
Faust • Travel Preparations • An Auto-da-fé • An Encounter
with Hölderlin • The Third Trip to Switzerland •
Overcoming Terror at the immensity of the world

CHAPTER 24
 The Clogged Springs of Poetry • Thinking about Genres:
Drama and Epic • Propyläen Classicism • The Collector and
His
Circle • Contra Dilettantism and False Proximity to Reality •
Theatrical Reform • Weimar Dramaturgy •
Translating Voltaire’s Mahomet: A Reparation •
Fichte and the Atheism Scandal • Back to Faust

CHAPTER 25

Among the Romantics • Schelling • Gravely Ill • Return to

Life • Drawing the Balance of the Revolutionary Epoch:
The Natural Daughter • Partisan Quarrels • Trouble with
Kotzebue • Alienation from Schiller and Friendship
Restored • Schiller’s Death

INTERMEDIATE REFLECTION: RED TAPE AND PEGASUS

CHAPTER 26

Mourning Schiller • Flirtation • Faust Again • A Long

Conversation about Faust with Heinrich Luden • The Disaster of
October 14, 1806: Weimar Plundered and Occupied • Goethe in
Fear and Happiness • Life Changes • Meeting Napoleon in 1808

CHAPTER 27

Pandora or Goethe’s Double Mask: Diligent Prometheus and

Dreaming Epimetheus • Theory of Color Completed •
On the Deeds and Sufferings of Light • Contra Newton •
In Praise of the Observable • Nature as a Sense of Life and
Object
 of Research • Encounter with Schopenhauer: The Pupil Who
Would Be Master

CHAPTER 28

Theater Squabble: A First Clash with Karoline Jagemann •

Work on Elective Affinities • The Novel as the second part of
the
Theory of Color • The Chemistry of Human Relations •
How Free Is Love? Consciousness is not an adequate weapon •
Inner Nature as Fate • A Split with the Romantics •
The Physics and Metaphysics of Sexual Love •
Nature as an Abyss • Renunciation

CHAPTER 29

Leave-Takings: Anna Amalia and Goethe’s Mother •

An Occasion to Look Back • Work Begins on the Autobiography
•
Self-Reflection • How Much Truth Is Possible, How Much
Poetry Is Necessary? • Narrated and Narrative Time •
Recollections of the Old Empire and Thoughts on the
New Power Structure • Pondering the Demonic •
Another Farewell: the Death of Wieland •
Thinking about Immortality

CHAPTER 30

Political Events Cast Long Shadows • Napoleon’s Downfall and

a
Dubious Liberation • Guarding the sacred fire •
Paying Tribute to the Spirit of the Times • Hafez and patriarchal
air • West-Eastern Divan • Goethe and Marianne •
The Lyric Interplay of Love
 CHAPTER 31

West-Eastern Divan and Poetry as a Life Force •

Islam and Religion in General • Poet or Prophet? •
What Is Spirit? • Belief and Experience • The Acknowledgment
of the Sacred • Indirect Divinity • Critique of Plotinus:
Spirit Beset by Reality • Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years
Put to the Test • Yearning vanishes in productive activity •
The Conflict between Prose and Poetry •
To What End Renunciation?

CHAPTER 32

Memory Work • Repeated reflection • Between Walls

of Paper • The Aged Goethe in Company • Why Always Think
the Same Thing? • Against the Spirit of the Times and for the
Carlsbad Decrees • Three Sojourns in Marienbad •
Ulrike and the Elegy • Farewells

CHAPTER 33

Faust: the Work of a Lifetime Finished at Last •

From heaven through the world to hell and Back •
I shall see to it that the parts are charming and entertaining
and
give food for thought • What Food for Thought Does Faust
Give?

CHAPTER 34

Eckermann and Goethe’s Other Assistants • The Definitive

Edition • Enforcing the Copyright • Schiller Again •
Zelter: Short History of a Long Friendship •
Leave-Takings: Frau von Stein, Karl August, Goethe’s Son •
Last Outing to Ilmenau • “Peace lies over all the peaks” •
Against time’s flotsam and jetsam • Death

FINAL REFLECTION: BECOMING WHO YOU ARE

TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHRONOLOGY
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING
INDEX
 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

IN ORDER TO GIVE A UNIFIED VOICE TO QUOTATIONS FROM

GOETHE’S works and letters, I have chosen to translate them myself rather
than use previous translations. Goethe employed an astonishingly wide range
of verse forms and styles in the course of his long life. Some forms will be
familiar to anglophone readers, from the French-influenced rhymed
alexandrines of the early verse comedy The Lover’s Spleen to the doggerel-
like Knittelvers of the early parts of Faust, to the stately iambic pentameter
of Iphigenia in Tauris and Torquato Tasso. Other forms will be less familiar,
especially those—so popular among German poets of the late eighteenth
century—that imitate the verse of classical antiquity, such as the dactylic
hexameter of the bourgeois epic Herrmann und Dorothea or the distichs of
The Roman Elegies.
The lyric poetry that flowed so effortlessly from Goethe’s pen poses
particular challenges, especially when it is rhymed. I have striven to
preserve the sense and meters of the original and gratefully snatched a rhyme
when I could. When I couldn’t, I had to settle for assonance, consonance,
near rhyme, or no rhyme at all, and infelicities are entirely mine.

This desire to raise up as high as possible the pyramid of my existence

—whose basis and foundation were given to me—outweighs everything
else and can hardly be forgotten even for a moment. I dare not tarry. I
am already at an advanced age, and perhaps fate will break me in the
middle of life and the Tower of Babel will remain an incomplete stump.
At least they should be able to say it was a daring attempt.
—GOETHE TO LAVATER
CA. SEPTEMBER 20, 1780
 PREFACE

GOETHE WAS A REMARKABLE EVENT IN GERMAN

INTELLECTUAL history—but an event without consequences, according to
Nietzsche. Goethe was not inconsequential, however. While it is true that he
was not able to change the course of German history, he was outstandingly
successful in another respect: as the exemplar of a life combining intellectual
riches, creative power, and worldly wisdom. It was a life begun under
auspicious circumstances and full of passion, but it also required struggle
and was threatened by challenges and dangers from within and without. It is
the individual shape of this life that is endlessly fascinating. By no means
was its course a foregone conclusion.
Our times do not favor the creation of individuality. The price we pay for
our universal interconnectedness is increased conformity. Although Goethe
was intimately connected to the social and cultural life of his time, he also
knew how to maintain his individuality. His principle was to take in only as
much of the world as he could process. Whatever he could not respond to in
a productive way he chose to disregard. In other words, he was an expert at
ignoring things. Of course, he was also compelled to take an interest in much
he would have preferred to be spared. But as far as possible, he was bent on
determining the scope and direction of his own life.
Today we have a clear grasp of human metabolism; from Goethe, we can
learn how a healthy intellect and spirit function: how they complement the
body. We can begin to understand what to take in and what not to take in.
Goethe knew, and that was part of his worldly wisdom.
And so we are inspired not just by Goethe’s work but by the exemplary
life he led. Taken together, his life and work serve as an inexhaustible source
of inspiration. He had an inkling of his legacy, even though in one of his last
letters to his friend Karl Friedrich Zelter he wrote that he was entwined with
an epoch that was ending. And yet Goethe seems alive and present, at times
more so than many of our contemporaries.
Every generation has the chance to understand its own time better through
the mirror of Goethe. By describing the life and work of a great genius and at
the same time using his example to explore the opportunities and limits of the
art of life, this book will attempt to hold up that mirror.

A young man from a prominent family in Frankfurt am Main studies at the

universities of Leipzig and Strasbourg without completing a degree and
finally becomes a lawyer. He is constantly falling in love, and both girls and
grown women swoon over him. His play Götz von Berlichingen makes him
famous in Germany, and the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther makes him
the talk of all literary Europe. Napoleon will later claim to have read the
novel seven times. Waves of visitors come to Frankfurt to see and hear the
handsome, eloquent young genius. A generation before Lord Byron, he feels
himself to be the darling of the gods, and like Byron, he also has poetic
dealings with the devil. While still living in Frankfurt he begins work on
Faust, the canonical modern drama, a task it will take a lifetime to complete.
After being celebrated as a genius in Frankfurt, Goethe grows weary of
literary life and in 1775 makes a radical and risky break by moving to the
small duchy of Saxony-Weimar, where he befriends the young duke and rises
to a ministerial post. He dabbles in scientific research, takes off for Italy, and
on his return enters into a common-law marriage. And all the while he is
writing novels, plays, and unforgettable love poems, engaging in a
competition of sorts with his friend and fellow writer Friedrich Schiller. He
is politically active and in contact with prominent artists and scientists. Even
while still alive, Goethe becomes an institution. He sees himself historically
and writes Poetry and Truth, arguably the most important European
autobiography since the Confessions of Saint Augustine and of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. But stiff and dignified as he could sometimes be, in the works of
his old age he shows himself to be a daring and sardonic Mephisto, ignoring
all convention.
Yet he was always aware that literary works were one thing and life
another. He was determined to give his life the character of a work as well.
What is a work? Something that rises out of the flow of time, has a beginning
and an end and, between them, a clear form: an island of significance in the
sea of inchoate contingency that Goethe dreaded. For him, everything needed
a form, and he either discovered it or created it—in everyday affairs, in
intimate friendships, in letters and conversations. He was a man of rituals,
symbols, and allegories, a friend of intimation and allusion, and yet he
always wanted to achieve a result, create a form, complete a work. That was
especially true in his duties as an official. The roads should be improved, the
peasants freed of unnecessary burdens. The hardworking poor should receive
wages and bread. The duchy’s mines should generate revenue and its theater
audiences have something to laugh or cry about every evening, if possible.
One side of him comprises the works that give shape to life, the other is
his attentiveness, the supreme compliment one can pay to life itself—one’s
own and others’. Goethe felt that nature deserved to be observed with the
same loving attention. He was convinced that one need only look carefully
for the most important truths to reveal themselves. It was as simple as that
and involved no secrets. He practiced a kind of science that did not go
beyond what one could observe with the senses. He was delighted by most of
what he discovered. He was pleased by what he succeeded at. And if others
weren’t pleased, in the end it didn’t matter to him. His allotted time was too
precious to waste on critics. Adversaries are to be disregarded, he once
said.
Goethe was a collector, not only of objects but of impressions. And he
approached personal encounters in the same spirit. He always asked himself
whether and how they furthered him—his favorite way of putting it. Goethe
loved what was alive, and he wanted to capture and give form to as much of
it as possible. A moment given form is a moment preserved. Six months
before he died, he made his last climb up the Kickelhahn, a small mountain
near Ilmenau, to read once more the verse he had scratched on the wall of a
hunter’s hut long ago: Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh—Peace lies over all the
peaks.
There is no other modern author for whom the biographical source
material is so rich, but also no author so encumbered by opinions,
conjectures, and interpretations. This book approaches perhaps the last
universal genius through primary sources alone—his literary works, letters,
diaries, and conversations, as well as the accounts of his contemporaries.
Thus Goethe comes alive again, as if for the first time.
And with his life, his times also come alive. This is a man who lived
through several historical turning points and cataclysms. He was raised in an
era of playful rococo style and formal, old-fashioned urban culture; he was
challenged by the French Revolution and worried about its intellectual
consequences; he experienced the reordering of Europe under Napoleon, the
fall of the emperor, the end of the Holy Roman Empire, and a French
restoration that could not turn back the clock and restore the ancien régime.
He recorded the beginnings of modernism more sensitively and thoughtfully
than anyone else, and the span of his life also encompassed the dispassion
and speed of the age of railroads and the early dreams of socialism. He was
a man whose name would later be used to characterize a period of enormous
upheaval: die Goethezeit, the Age of Goethe.
 GOETHE:
LIFE AS A WORK OF ART
 CHAPTER 1

A Difficult Birth with Fortunate Consequences. Family Ties.

Between a Pedant and a Cheerful Nature. Goethe’s Sister.
The Child of a Free Imperial City. Practice in Writing.
The Rhymester and the First Gretchen Affair.
Self-Confidence Shaken. An Emergency Postponed.
Finding Poetry in the Everyday.

....

AT THE BEGINNING OF HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, POETRY AND Truth,

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe describes his difficult birth in 1749 but,
perhaps ironically, also mentions its fortunate consequences for the town at
large.
Through the midwife’s carelessness, the newborn infant was almost
strangled by the umbilical cord. His face had already turned blue and he was
presumed dead. Those in attendance shook him, thumped him, and he started
to breathe. Goethe’s grandfather Mayor Johann Wolfgang Textor was
prompted by this near-fatal delivery to overhaul the practice of obstetrics in
Frankfurt. A course of instruction for midwives was introduced, which may
have benefited many of those born after me. The autobiographer delivers
his first tongue-in-cheek punch line.
Grandfather Textor, after whom the newborn was named, had once refused
to have a noble title conferred on him—because it would have prevented him
from making socially acceptable matches for his daughters. One of them,
Katharina Elisabeth, would become Goethe’s mother. Textor was not rich
enough for the nobility, and as a nobleman would have been too grand for the
bourgeoisie. And so he chose to remain what he was: a distinguished citizen
who, as mayor, was influential enough to help bring about advances in
midwifery.
In the imperial city of Frankfurt, the mayor, or Schultheiss, was not only
the highest-ranking administrative official but also served as the emperor’s
representative, for Frankfurt had the privilege of being the location for the
election and coronation of each new emperor. As mayor, Textor was one of
those permitted to hold the baldachin, or ceremonial canopy, over the
emperor. Young Wolfgang basked in his reflected glory, to the annoyance of
his playmates. Through him, however, the young boys gained access to the
Kaisersaal, the emperor’s hall in the Römer, Frankfurt’s town hall, where
they could play at reenacting the great events that took place there. Goethe
remembered his grandfather Textor with great affection. He depicts him
tending the flowers and fruit trees in his garden, picking roses while wearing
a dressing gown like a cassock and a baggy cap of black velvet, thereby
imparting to his grandson the feeling of inviolable peace and unending
continuity.
The image is probably a touch idyllic. According to a contemporary
account, a rumor circulated in Frankfurt that at a family gathering in late
1759, when the French were garrisoned in the town during the Seven Years’
War, Goethe’s father reproached his father-in-law the mayor for allowing
foreign troops into the city in exchange for money, whereupon Textor threw a
knife at his son-in-law, who then drew his dagger. This scene is not reflected
in Poetry and Truth. Instead, Goethe writes that his grandfather never
showed a trace of violence; I cannot remember ever seeing him angry.
Goethe’s paternal grandfather was a tailor who had moved to Frankfurt,
worked his way up to become the leading couturier for the local aristocracy,
and married the wealthy widow of the proprietor of an inn called the
Weidenhof. So the tailor became a successful innkeeper and wine merchant,
eventually leaving his heirs two houses, other real estate, and 100,000 taler
in cash.
He wanted something even better for his son Johann Caspar, and since he
could afford it, he sent him to the expensive and highly regarded gymnasium
in Coburg, then to the universities of Leipzig and Giessen. After a practicum
at the Imperial High Court in Wetzlar, Johann Caspar graduated from Giessen
as a doctor of law. It was expected that he would spend his career in
Frankfurt’s municipal government, but he was in no hurry. He wanted to see
the world first and set off on a grand tour that lasted a year. He traveled via
Regensburg and Vienna to Italy, stopping in Paris and Amsterdam on his way
back. He later wrote, in Italian, a description of his visit to Venice, Milan,
and Rome; this travelogue became his primary preoccupation for a decade.
He had plenty of leisure time, as he was unable to secure a government
position upon his return in 1740.
According to Goethe’s autobiography, his father sought appointment to one
of the subaltern offices ohne Ballotage—that is, without competition and
therefore without remuneration either. Denied the position, his vanity was
wounded and he swore never again to seek or accept office. Nevertheless, he
seized the opportunity to purchase from the Court Council of the Empire, in
residence in Frankfurt during the reign of Emperor Charles VII (1741–44),
the title of imperial councilor, an honorific usually reserved for the mayor
and oldest lay judges. Thereby, Goethe writes, he had made himself the
equal of the loftiest and could no longer begin from the bottom. Not that he
wanted to. Thus in 1742 Johann Caspar Goethe was named councilor by the
emperor at about the same time that Katharina Elisabeth Textor, his future
wife, developed an adolescent crush on the same monarch.
Katharina Elisabeth was the eldest of Textor’s daughters. They called her
the Princess because she disliked housework, preferring to stretch out on the
sofa and read novels. And as she later told the writer Bettine von Arnim, the
coronation of Charles VII, which she had witnessed as a young girl in 1742,
seemed to her like a scene from a novel. The post horns heralding the
emperor’s approach had been unforgettable. She had followed Charles into
the church and watched the handsome youth with the melancholy gaze praying
and batting his long black eyelashes. The emperor had even nodded to her
from his horse, and she felt herself to be one of the elect. And so, six years
later, when the eighteen-year-old married the thirty-nine-year-old Johann
Caspar Goethe, it didn’t seem such a momentous occasion to her. She
married him “with no particular inclination,” although she did allow that he
was a “handsome man.”
The marriage was a further impediment to Johann Caspar’s admission to
the town council since the city had strict injunctions against nepotism. And so
he remained a Partikulier, a private individual, spending his time managing
his fortune, writing his travelogue, collecting books and pictures, raising
silkworms, and educating his children, especially his promising son Johann
Wolfgang.
 Whether the career of the imperial councilor really was as Goethe
describes it, we don’t know. Did Johann Caspar lack ambition or business
acumen? Was his knowledge of the law too academic and not practical
enough? Were there reservations about him because he was the son of an
innkeeper with perhaps too haughty a public manner? Did his allegiance to
the Wittelsbach emperor Charles VII disadvantage him with Charles’s
Habsburg successors? Perhaps all these factors combined to thwart him in
his professional career. In any case, if one can believe Goethe’s depiction of
his father, he was quite satisfied with his lot. My father considered his life
up to that point close to all he could have wished for.
But there probably were some problems—problems Poetry and Truth
hints at, although it is usually anxious to smooth out and harmonize things.
For example, it relates how as a boy Goethe had to listen to his playmates
casting aspersions on his ancestry. They said his father had not had an
honorable birth and as an infant had been foisted upon the proprietor of the
Weidenhof by a nobleman who had persuaded the innkeeper to publicly
declare himself the father of Johann Caspar. Instead of pulling the hair of
these slanderers or feeling humiliated, however, Goethe writes that he felt
flattered by these rumors. I was not at all displeased to be the grandson of
some aristocrat. From then on, the boy looked for similarities between
himself and portraits of high-born men and imagined an entire novel built
around his noble descent. Goethe writes that he was infected with a kind of
moral illness and closes this passage with the self-critical reflection: How
true it is that everything that reinforces a person’s inner conceit and
flatters his secret vanity is so highly prized that he never wonders whether
it otherwise honors or disgraces him. The imperturbable self-confidence of
the boy is remarkable. He was just seven years old when he wrote, I cannot
reconcile myself to what is satisfactory for other people.
The episode not only reveals the boy’s vanity but also suggests that his
father’s social position was less than secure. And Johann Caspar did not
enhance his reputation by living with his young family in the home of his
mother, the former proprietress of the Weidenhof. Until the death of this
grandmother, whom Goethe remembers as a lovely, gaunt woman, always
neatly dressed in white, his father was not the master of the house on the
Hirschgraben (the “stag pit,” a street that followed the course of a filled-in
moat that had surrounded the medieval town). Johann Caspar had to wait to
realize his ambitious plans for this property. He would have found no
difficulty in that, however, since his habit was always to proceed slowly and
deliberately.
The house was renovated in 1755. The building next door was
demolished, and the first thing to be installed on the cleared lot was a large
wine cellar to hold the stock left over from the Weidenhof, which included
rare and prized vintages. Much later, Goethe had the remaining bottles
shipped to Weimar, where his plucky common-law wife, Christiane Vulpius,
defended them from French marauders in 1806.
The simplest thing would have been to tear down the main house too, but a
new structure would have had to conform to the strict municipal building
code. The existing overhang of the upper stories, for example, would have
been forbidden, significantly decreasing the building’s floor space. And so at
considerable expense and risk, the upper stories were propped up in order to
construct a new ground floor. Except for a few weeks, the family remained in
the house despite the noise and dirt of construction. All this made a deep
impression on the six-year-old Goethe. It is the topic of one of his earliest
texts, a dialogue between father and son. The father says, Add to that all the
danger to the workers, especially in building the main staircase, as you
can see here, since almost the entire vaulted ceiling had to be held up by
countless supports. The son replies, And despite all that danger, we have
continued to live here. It is good that one doesn’t know everything. I would
certainly not have slept as soundly as I did.
The entire renovation—and especially the roomy stairwell—was his
father’s pride, the work of a man who otherwise had few accomplishments to
show. Goethe touched on this sore point during an argument with his father at
the end of 1768, when he returned home from the University of Leipzig.
Johann Caspar expressed dissatisfaction with his son’s academic
performance, and Goethe retorted by criticizing his father’s plans for the
renovation. The expansion of the stairwell, he said, had wasted space that
could have been put to better use by enlarging the rooms. He maliciously
reminded his father of a quarrel Johann Caspar had had with Count Thoranc,
the military governor of Frankfurt during the French occupation of 1759–61,
in that very stairwell, the implication being that something about the structure
seemed to invite unwelcome encounters. Having learned of the French
victory over the Prussians. Goethe’s father, who supported Frederick the
Great, had refused to congratulate Count Thoranc as he passed him on the
stairs. Instead, he growled fiercely, I wish they had sent you to the devil.
The remark had come close to landing him in prison.
Goethe reports this incident with understanding for his father but, even
more, with sympathy for Thoranc, whom he depicts as noble, polite,
considerate, and, above all, a connoisseur of the arts. Thoranc set up a
French theater in Frankfurt and made sure that the boy was always admitted
free of charge. The count also supported the visual arts and employed local
painters who came and went in the house on the Hirschgraben. The boy was
permitted to watch them at work and was soon dispensing unsolicited advice.
Thoranc was quite fond of the cheeky, precocious lad. Goethe’s father,
however, his authority already undermined by the billeting, was displeased
that his son had taken Thoranc’s part in the quarrel.
Though there were tensions in Goethe’s relations with his father, Johann
Caspar spared neither money nor attention in advancing his talented child. He
hired private tutors who were expected not only to inculcate his son with the
conventional curriculum—Latin, Bible study, etc.—but to promote the
aesthetic disciplines as well: drawing, writing poems, making music. He
also instructed the child himself, especially in the history of Frankfurt, the
law, and geography. My father, wrote Goethe, was by nature a teacher, and
since he was removed from doing business, he was eager to pass on to
others what he knew and was able to do. He read his son the Italian
travelogue he had written and introduced him to his collection of books and
engravings. Delighted to observe his son’s literary progress, he conscien‐
tiously archived the pieces he considered especially successful, and
continued to do so for years. It was not by chance that Johann Caspar had
chosen for his newly drafted family coat of arms the lyre, the symbol of the
Muses and fine arts.
Of course, his wish was that his son become a lawyer like himself and
perhaps even choose the same universities—Leipzig, Wetzlar, and
Regensburg—for his training, but not at the expense of an appreciation for the
arts. In the brief period during which Goethe practiced law, Johann Caspar
paid for him to have a scribe so that he was free to continue to devote
himself to literature. He greeted his son’s first literary successes with the
greatest pleasure and wanted him to travel to Italy in his footsteps. I was
supposed to follow the same path, writes Goethe, but farther and in more
comfort. He valued my native talents all the more since he lacked them.
For he had acquired everything only by ineffable diligence, tenacity, and
repetition. Sooner or later, seriously or facetiously, he would often assure
me that he would have behaved very differently with my aptitudes and not
spent them so profligately.
When Goethe shared a law office with his father in 1773, the usual
hierarchy was turned on its head. It was his father who, slow to make plans
and carry them out, acted as a sort of private articled clerk, presenting
drafts to his son, who was as brilliantly quick-witted in legal matters as in
his poems. Goethe writes, I completed the drawing-up so easily that it
caused him the greatest possible paternal joy, and once he even went so far
as to say that if I were a stranger to him, he would be envious of me.
Of course, the father commanded the boy’s respect, but he was not the kind
of authority figure against whom the young Goethe had to strenuously defend
himself. No symbolic patricide was necessary. The anti-tyrannical pathos of
the Sturm und Drang authors is not to be found in Goethe. His later,
Promethean rebellion has other sources and is directed at other targets.
Thus the son had no need to emancipate himself from his father, and in
many respects he even adopted his father’s idiosyncrasies. Johann Caspar’s
pedantry and caution, which his son at first felt to be rather tedious, later
became evident in Goethe himself. He explicitly praises his father’s
stubbornness and persistence—characteristics he did not initially claim as
his own. And yet Goethe came to embrace both persistence and seriousness
by way of the idea of Spiel, play. Even Johann Caspar’s persistence had
something playful about it because in his case, too, it was not imposed by a
profession. It was his hobbies that he pursued with complete earnestness and
pedantic persistence. The same was true of his son, who was led by desire
and whim to begin many things and then leave them unfinished, but in most
cases completed them later, even if it took a lifetime, as it did with Faust.
Father gave me my physique / and an earnest education. / From Mother
comes my cheerfulness / and love of fabrication. Goethe’s mother was
young—closer in age to him and his sister Cornelia than she was to her
husband. During home tutoring sessions, she sat with them in the children’s
corner. She still had a lot to learn herself. She had never learned how to spell
correctly. Later, she joked about it and urged her son not to torture his own
son: “don’t plague the boy about his spelling—Maybe he inherited his
spelling habits from his Grandmother.” She always wrote just as she talked,
and spelled phonetically, the way she heard speech. “Napoleon has even
deklared us noocheral,” she wrote in a letter of 1806. But she was also
aware when she struck the right tone; and she had a talent for vivid
description. “The gift God gave me is a lively depiction of everything I know
about, great things and small, truth and ferry tails etc. as soon as I join a
circul everything turns cheerful and happy because I’m telling stories.”
And so she did. She told the children fairy tales. On beautiful summer
days, Wolfgang would carry her armchair, which they called the fairy-tale
chair, into the courtyard, and decorate it with garlands. It gave his mother
pleasure to immerse herself in the children’s world, because she had
preserved a bit of the child in herself. Hence her talent for storytelling, her
love of fabrication. She was “extremely eager” to continue spinning out a
story, every evening if possible, while Wolfgang sat at her feet, devouring her
with his “great black eyes.” If he didn’t like the way a story was going, the
veins in his forehead would swell in anger. The next day he would tell his
grandmother how the story should have gone, and she would relay that
information to his mother, who would continue the story that evening as the
little boy wished. Then he was happy and “with shining eyes awaited the
fulfillment of his daring plots.”
His mother introduced fairy-tale magic into the house and made peace
when necessary. When the Thoranc affair led to serious tension, she calmed
the waters. She always tried to mediate in conflicts between father and son.
She loved jolly company, and when her son’s early fame in the Sturm und
Drang period brought many of his friends into her home—Friedrich Klinger,
J. M. R. Lenz, Heinrich Wagner—she called them her “sons” and relished
their nickname for her, Mother Aja, after the mother in the chapbook The
Four Sons of Aymon. When Klinger was studying in Giessen and complained
about how boring the town was, she offered sage advice: “I always thought it
was child’s play for you poets to idealize all locations, even the bad ones. If
you can make something from nothing, then unless the devil had a hand in it
you ought to be able to make Giessen into a fairyland. At least, that’s my
great strength.” Goethe appreciated his mother’s talent for poeticizing real
life. Her example helped to keep him from any urge he may have had to turn
poetry into reality through misguided earnestness. In Poetry and Truth he
writes, But whereas I felt relieved and enlightened by having transformed
reality into poetry, my friends were confounded by believing they had to
transform poetry into reality.
His mother’s realism, tempered by a sense of the poetic, was generously
open to surprises (which she loved) and she seized every opportunity for
mirth. She kept an open mind and did not allow her worries to embitter her.
She once wrote to Anna Amalia, the mother of the Duke of Weimar, Goethe’s
patron, that she had “sworn a sacred oath to always have one day say to the
next, snatch all the small pleasures but don’t anatomize them—in a word,
enter more and more into a childlike spirit every day.” She freely partook of
the pleasures that raise one’s spirits. Although she would later send the best
bottles from her cellar to her son in Weimar, she said she would “drink the
less good wines . . . to the last drop to save the cost of transport.” And while
she had been warned off snuff, she continued to use it into old age, explaining
to her daughter-in-law that “without a pinch of tobacco my letters were like
straw—like waybills—but Now! they almost write themselves.”
She didn’t begrudge others their pleasures either. In her letters to her son,
she called Christiane Vulpius his “bedmate” and wrote to Christiane herself
in 1803, “I hear you’ve put on weight, gotten nice and Corpulent, I’m glad
because it’s a sign of good health—and it’s the usual thing in our family.” She
talked about the body without embarrassment—in matters of art as well,
irreverently referring to the ancient sculptures in her son’s collection as
“bare bottoms.”
She was proud of and even a bit coquettish about her own artless nature.
She once wrote to the actor G. F. W. Grossmann, “But since God has so
favored me that, from youth on, my soul has never been laced into a corset
but could grow and prosper to my heart’s content, spread wide its branches,
etc. and has not been pruned and maimed into a fan shape like those trees in
boring ornamental gardens; I can thus feel everything that is true and good
and honest.” She loved the theater and its milieu because there things were
less constrained. When the house on the Hirschgraben started to empty out
with Goethe’s move to Weimar and the death of his father, she invited theater
people to fill it. She became good friends with some and exchanged letters,
but not regularly or for long. People came and went; out of sight, out of mind.
She lived for the moment and let herself be carried along by the changing
times, passing on to her son this will to live in the present. It later cost
Goethe considerable effort to acquire a sense of responsibility and to think
about the future. For that his father was the model.
As spontaneous and devoted to the moment as his mother was, she never
neglected or forgot her son, but she also avoided becoming a burden to him.
She would have liked to visit him often in Weimar, but Goethe invited her
only once, during the wars that followed the French Revolution, when he
believed that it would have been dangerous for her to remain in Frankfurt.
Although he began making preparations for her visit, in the end she held out
at home. She had had French soldiers quartered in the house on the
Hirschgraben a few times before. She was used to such tribulations and
could accommodate herself to them very well.
Goethe never said directly why he didn’t want his mother living near him.
Perhaps he feared that her free and easy ways would rub people the wrong
way in the rarefied and formal world of Weimar. And he may have wished to
spare them both the vexation. On the other hand, he was also aware that she
was well liked by those in his social circle. With Anna Amalia, for example,
she maintained a cordial, spirited correspondence.
Whatever the reason, after he left his parents’ house, he did not want his
mother nearby. He no longer wanted to be her Hätschelhans—her nickname
for her “pampered pet.” From 1775 until 1808, the year of her death, he
visited her only four times. She did not complain to him, but she confided her
disappointment to friends. For her, the days he was with her were cause for
celebration. The banker Abraham Mendelssohn, the father of the composer
Felix Mendelssohn, encountered the two of them in 1797 outside the theater.
“He was accompanying his mother—an old, powdered, pretentious woman
—to the comedy.”
Her son was her favorite and remained so. His birth was followed, in
quick succession, by those of five siblings. Only his sister Cornelia, a year
and a half younger than Goethe, survived into adulthood. She and Wolfgang
were the closest of companions; it was a fragile relationship that would have
long-lasting effects on Goethe. As a child, he experienced the deaths of four
other siblings, one after the other. When the seven-year-old Hermann Jakob
died, Goethe’s mother was surprised—as she later told Bettine von Arnim—
that Wolfgang “shed not a tear” but instead displayed a sort of annoyance.
Asked whether he hadn’t loved his brother, he ran into his room and pulled a
pile of papers from under his bed. They were covered with lessons he had
written down, and he explained “that he had done all this to teach it to his
brother.”
He could no longer teach anything to Hermann Jakob, but he could give
lessons to his six-year-old sister, Cornelia. Whatever he had learned, read,
or picked up along the way had to be passed on immediately. Learning by
teaching would remain with him. Cornelia worshipped her brother and was
an eager pupil. She also took part in the little plays Wolfgang staged with
neighbor children. Whatever there was to be experienced, the siblings
shared and mastered hand in hand, as Goethe writes in Poetry and Truth.
There he also tells a story that would later be applied to the relationship
between the siblings—not by Goethe himself but by later interpreters,
especially Sigmund Freud. The boy had been playing with the kitchen
crockery at a window that gave onto the street. He began to throw dishes out
the window and clap his hands at the lovely noise they made. Neighbor boys
urged him on, and he collected all the crockery he could get his hands on and
threw one piece after another into the street until his parents, returning home,
put an end to the game. The disaster had happened, Goethe writes, and at
least one had an amusing story for so much broken pottery.
His parents didn’t find the story so amusing and neither did Sigmund
Freud, who discovered in it the subconscious aggression of a child who
didn’t want to share his mother’s attention with any siblings. He interprets
the smashing of porcelain as an Ersatzhandlung, a redirection activity, the
expression of a murderous fantasy. The bothersome competitors for his
mother’s attention should disappear. Hence Wolfgang’s lack of sorrow at the
death of his younger brother. According to Freud, Goethe tells the tale of the
broken crockery in order to unconsciously savor once again the triumph of
remaining his mother’s only darling. “If one has been the undisputed favorite
of the mother, one possesses for the rest of one’s life that triumphant feeling,
that confidence of success, which not infrequently brings actual success in its
wake.”*
That Goethe was indeed his mother’s favorite was clear; and he
developed a strong sense of himself. But that is obviously not what concerns
Goethe in this story. He explicitly places it in a different context. He depicts
how children lived who didn’t grow up locked inside the house but in a
myriad of ways came directly into contact with the street and the open air.
In the summer, the kitchen was separated only by a screen from the life of the
street. One felt free by being accustomed to what was public. The little
story of the smashed crockery was meant to illustrate what that lovely
freedom could lead to. The main actors are perhaps actually the neighbor
children, the public for whose sake the little boy throws the dishes into the
street. Later, Goethe would again and again warn against letting oneself be
distracted or controlled by the interests of the audience. The public sphere
makes one free and provides stimulation, but it also constrains. With this as
background, the anecdote can also be understood as a sort of primal scene in
Goethe’s lifelong ambivalence toward the public—he needed his audience
but also needed to protect himself from them.
Wolfgang grew up a city child. His formative impressions were not of
rural solitude and the quiet life of nature, but of crowds of people. It could
not have been otherwise in an important commercial hub like Frankfurt, with
its thirty thousand inhabitants and three thousand houses, its narrow,
meandering lanes, its squares, churches, docks, bridges, and city gates.
Goethe gives vivid descriptions of his walks through this labyrinthine world:
the smells of spices, leather, and fish from the shops; the sounds of artisans at
work, the weavers and blacksmiths, the cries of the tradesmen; the meat on
display and swarming with flies in front of the butcher shops. It was a chaos
in which everything seemed to be produced by chance and caprice, not by
any directing spirit. And yet it somehow all seemed to fit together. Over all
this present ferment loomed the past, awe-inspiring and mysterious: the
churches and monasteries, the town hall, the towers, walls, and moats. The
boy loved to accompany his father when he browsed the bookstalls for old
volumes and prints. There the children could find dog-eared copies of their
favorite chapbooks, The Four Sons of Aymon, Till Eulenspiegel, The
Beautiful Magelone, Melusine, and the History of Doctor Faustus. The lad
developed a certain penchant for old-fashioned things, writes Goethe. He
goes through the old chronicles with his father and is especially fascinated by
the depiction of the coronation of the emperor right there in Frankfurt. Soon
he is so familiar with the origins and significance of the old customs and
ceremonies that he takes pride in explaining them to his playmates.
The city spoke of the past: bewilderingly present, loud, mysteriously still
there. Goethe was surrounded by people and their work; nature was
something separate, where one went on excursions. The city child had to
make a point of seeking it out or gazing longingly into the distance—from the
third floor of his house, for instance, where Wolfgang learned his lessons at
the window, looking out across the rooftops, gardens, and the town walls to
a lovely, fruitful plain; the one that stretches toward Höchst, some five
miles off. When the sun was setting, he could not get enough of the view.
He was a highly gifted boy but not a child prodigy like Mozart, whom he
once heard give a virtuoso performance. Wolfgang was a quick study.
Languages came naturally to him. While still a boy he had a fair command of
Italian, French, English, Latin, and Greek and could even read some Hebrew.
With Cornelia, who was similarly talented, he concocted a childhood plan to
write a novel in six languages. They never carried it out, but in the letters
they wrote to each other while he was a student in Leipzig they both switched
easily into French or English. The Bible was read in Latin and Greek, and the
boy was most fascinated by the stories of the patriarchs from the Old
Testament. In Poetry and Truth he retells the story of Joseph as he
remembered writing it down in his youth; the act of doing so, he says, brought
him inner composure and peace, even when what was happening outside
was so wild and strange.
He was constantly filling up notebooks, with the advantage that he could
dictate to Dr. Clauer, a destitute, emotionally disturbed man whom Goethe’s
father had taken in as his ward. Clauer liked to take dictation and copy things
out; the activity helped calm him. On bad days he could be heard ranting and
raving in his room; madness was housed right next door.
The young Goethe devoured all the literature he could get his hands on,
from the legal tomes he found in his father’s library to Friedrich Gottlieb
Klopstock’s biblical epic Messias, Johann Gottfried Schnabel’s enormously
long utopian novel Felsenburg Island, and the sometimes melodramatic,
sometimes salacious French plays by the likes of Racine and Voltaire. And
again and again he read the Bible, for him a book full of delightful stories—
like the Thousand and One Nights he would discover later. In his reading he
was always eager to process, repeat, reproduce what he had absorbed,
which led to countless little plays, poems, fragmentary epics—everything
quickly scribbled down in remarkably deft imitations of conventional forms
and themes. With apparent ease he could feel his way into various levels of
style—at sixteen, for example, he conjures orthodox Protestant emotion in
“Poetic Thoughts on Christ’s Descent into Hell,” offering up the hellish
slough in gruesome images and reveling in fantasies of punishment. In the
end, Christ mounts to heaven triumphant:

The lightning blazes

And thunder strikes the violators,
And hurls them into the abyss

The God-Man shuts the Gates of Doom,

And soaring up from realms of gloom,
To his splendor is restored.
A year later, at university in Leipzig, he found this poem embarrassing and
regretted not having destroyed it as he did many other juvenilia.
Most of his early efforts at writing are those of a model pupil, but
occasionally they are also cocky, like the dialogue with a playmate by the
name of Maximilian, originally written in Latin and translated, by Goethe,
into German. How shall we pass the time until our schoolmaster arrives?
asks Maximilian. With grammar, Wolfgang replies. That’s too boring for
Maximilian, and he suggests banging their heads together to see who can hold
out the longest. God forbid, answers Wolfgang, mine at least is not made for
such a thing . . . we’ll leave that game to the goats. But at least you acquire
a hard head from the exercise, Maximilian counters. To which Wolfgang
replies, There’d be no honor in that. I’d rather keep mine soft.
Dialogues of this sort belonged to the art of rhetoric, which schoolboys
were required to practice. Composing verses was also part of the
curriculum, and that too proved easy for the young Goethe. He soon became
convinced that he wrote the best poems. He liked to recite them for his family
and friends. There was a regular get-together on Sundays where everyone
recited poetry, and the boy was surprised to discover that the others, who
produced very feeble things, apparently thought that they were very good and
took pride in their work even when their tutors had written the poems for
them. His comrades’ obviously foolish self-assessment unnerved him. Was
his opinion of his own verses equally unjustified? Was he himself really as
good as he thought? This uncertainty, he writes, deeply troubled me—and for
a long time, for it was quite impossible for me to find some external
indicator of the truth. Indeed, I even hesitated in my productions, until at
last my frivolousness and sense of self . . . reassured me. Once again: his
extraordinarily sturdy sense of self.
The boy’s skill at writing verses, however, eventually entangled him in
shady goings-on that included the first model for the Gretchen affair at the
core of his great play Faust. It is doubtful that things happened just as he
presents them in Poetry and Truth, but we have no other sources for the
incident. In any case, it is a beautiful story about the power of words.
A group of young people who have heard about Goethe’s talent as a
versifier approach him and ask him for an example of his skill, a well-turned
love letter in verse, composed as though written by a shy maiden to a young
man. He produces one in the blink of an eye. They continue to give him
assignments, and he remains oblivious to the uses to which his words are
being put. And so I fooled myself into thinking that I was pulling someone’s
leg, and the result was some delight and some trouble for me. Members of
the group had persuaded the mayor’s grandson to somehow ensnare his
grandfather in a complicated scheme of which they would be the
beneficiaries. In the end, the talented versifier found himself an unwitting
accomplice in a tangled web of corruption, forgery, and fraud. Goethe
remarks somewhat portentously that this was his first opportunity to gaze into
the social abyss.
The initially pleasurable aspect of the affair was the acquaintance of a
pretty, somewhat older girl, probably a waitress, whom he calls Gretchen.
He fell in love with her. The fifth chapter of Poetry and Truth, a high point
of the autobiography, depicts two artfully interwoven stories: the shady
machinations he had been drawn into as well as an account of the splendid
celebrations surrounding the coronation of a new Holy Roman Emperor,
which the young man attended hand in hand with Gretchen, as if the events
had been specially arranged for the two lovers.
In the wake of the discovery of the shady affair, Gretchen had to leave
Frankfurt, supposedly after testifying, I cannot deny that I liked seeing him
and saw him often, but I always thought of him as a child and my affection
for him was truly that of a sister. The infatuated boy was so insulted that he
fell ill. He could hardly swallow and worked himself up into a fit of weeping
and raving. At the same time, it was degrading that I had sacrificed my
sleep and health and peace of mind for the sake of a girl, a girl whom it
pleased to regard me as an infant and, much like a wet nurse, think herself
wise compared with me.
He sought to free himself from these feelings. One of his tutors
recommended philosophy. But there he found things presented in such a way
that he could not get the ideas into his head. He preferred secrecy and
mystification and for that, religion and poetry were more suitable than
philosophy, which annoyed him with its persistent explanations. At best, he
proved to himself that he was capable of penetrating such philosophical
works. But what he needed now was self-affirmation.
The Gretchen affair had drawn him out of his self-absorption; it meant the
end of his half-childish, naïve self-confidence. He had been made painfully
aware of others’ opinions. He now saw himself from the outside. It seemed
to him that once, even in the greatest crowd, he had not needed to think of
others observing him, but now he was tormented by a hypochondriacal
notion that all eyes were trained on my being in order to hold it fast,
examine, and censure it.
In the context of this loss of immediacy and the oppressive experience of
being observed, not only by others but by himself, a second incident
occurred, one not related in Poetry and Truth but preserved in letters.
When he was not quite fifteen, Goethe wrote to the chairman of the League
of the Virtuous, asking to be admitted to this secret club, founded by some
young people from prominent families. His missive to the seventeen-year-old
Ludwig Ysenburg von Buri is the earliest letter by Goethe that has come
down to us. In it he admits his faults. He knows that self-examination is part
of the ritual. He names three flaws. First, his choleric temperament: he is
quick to anger but does not bear grudges; second, he likes to give orders, but
where I have nothing to say, I can also refrain from doing so; third is his
immodesty—even to strangers he talks as if he had known them for a
hundred years.
His application was unsuccessful. They didn’t want this young man who
pressed his suit so self-confidently. A few letters that circulated among the
members of the league have been preserved. “For heaven’s sake do not attach
yourself to him,” writes one, and another: “I learned that he is very devoted
to dissipation and many other unpleasant faults I have no desire to
enumerate.” And a third remarks, “For the rest, he is more a blabbermouth
than a steady, thorough character.”
The fifteen-year-old Goethe had sought to join the League of the Virtuous
because he was attracted to older and presumably more mature
contemporaries. He felt superior to and quickly bored by those his own age.
He did have some friends: Ludwig Moors, the son of a lay judge and
burgomaster; Adam Horn, whose father was a minor municipal official; and
Johann Jakob Riese, also from a good family. The four friends made
excursions into the surrounding countryside, read to one another, and debated
together. Goethe was their undisputed leader. “We were always the lackeys,”
Moors later recalled, and Horn, who followed Goethe to Leipzig, reported
from there in a letter to Moors that one still couldn’t get the better of their
friend: “no matter which side he takes, he always wins, for you know what
force he can give even to specious arguments.” It is clear that the young
Goethe inspired admiration but also resentment. It’s easy to imagine that a
boy might not be universally popular who required his mother to lay out three
outfits for him every morning: one for at home, one for ordinary sorties and
visits, and one with a bagwig, silk stockings, and ornamental sword for
ceremonial occasions.
All the same, he was always the center of his circle, with more ideas for
games and activities than anyone else had. One of the few that was probably
not his idea was the “marriage game.” To avoid having spontaneously paired
couples become too attached to each other, partners were chosen by lot for a
set length of time. It provided practice in being together but wasn’t to be
taken too seriously. It was congenial to Goethe’s spirit of playful curiosity.
After the unpleasant Gretchen affair, it allowed him to flirt for a while,
practice, and put off not only serious love affairs but other relationships too.
He called it taking pleasure in the poetic side of ordinary things.

* Sigmund Freud, “Eine Kindheitserinnerung aus Dichtung und Wahrheit,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol.
10 (Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1969), 266.
 CHAPTER 2

Living Large in Leipzig. The Great Men of Yesterday.

The Kätchen Affair. Preliminary Studies for
an Epistolary Novel.
Behrisch. Therapy for Jealousy: The Lover’s Spleen.
Practical Exercises in Art.
Dresden. Disappearing in the Image. Breakdown.

....

AFTER THE EMBARRASSING GRETCHEN AFFAIR AND HIS

rejection by the League of the Virtuous, the sixteen-year-old came to dislike
his native Frankfurt. His rambles through the streets no longer gave him the
pleasure they once had. The ancient walls and towers put him off, as did the
people, especially those who knew of his misadventure. Suddenly everything
and everyone was cast in a gloomy light, including his father: And in the end,
after all his studies, efforts, journeys, and diverse pursuits, did I not
behold him leading a lonely life between his four walls, such as I could not
wish for myself? He longed to leave, to go to a university. His father was
also of the opinion that his talented son, who already had effortlessly
acquired so much knowledge, should now begin his studies in earnest.
Goethe was attracted to the University of Göttingen, where the outstanding
classicists Christian Gottlob Heyne and Johann David Michaelis taught. He
hoped that a thorough study of the ancients would give his facile poetry more
weight and substance and that he could acquire the discipline and rigor
needed for an academic career in belles-lettres. But his father urged him to
study jurisprudence in Leipzig, where he himself had studied and still had
contacts he could mobilize to help his son. Johann Caspar talked endlessly
about his student days. His son let him talk but had no scruples about holding
to his plan to study literature and philology. In retrospect he called his
behavior impious.
In the fall of 1765 he bid farewell to the friends of his youth. None of them
had been permitted to study where they’d hoped. Johann Jakob Riese was
sent to Marburg, Ludwig Moors to Göttingen. Johann Adam Horn had to stay
in Frankfurt for another half year before he could begin his studies in Leipzig.
That’s why Hörnchen (Hornlet, as they dubbed him) had to throw the
farewell party for his departing friends. He too was a rhymester, and since he
knew that Goethe had plans other than to study law, he sent him off with the
following doggerel:

It’s off to jolly Saxony where you have longed to live,

The country where the poets their loveliest verses give.
...
From childhood on you’ve striven to master poesy,
Now show us it’s a poet, not a lawyer, you shall be.
...
The Muse still smiles upon you. Surely you must know it.
And so in Leipzig too you’ll always be a poet.

Goethe depicts his boyhood self riding to Leipzig in a book dealer’s

coach, packed in coats and blankets and carrying a lot of luggage. The new
university student was bringing along his favorite books, his manuscripts, and
an extensive wardrobe. He was on the road for six days. Near Auerstedt the
coach got stuck in the mud. I did not fail to eagerly exert myself and must
have overstrained the ligaments in my chest in doing so, for soon
thereafter I felt a pain that came and went and did not leave me completely
until many years later.
At the time Leipzig was roughly the size of Frankfurt, with about thirty
thousand inhabitants. It was not full of ancient winding streets like Frankfurt,
however, but had broad avenues, uniform façades, and residential
neighborhoods laid out on a grid. It was known for its inner courtyards that
functioned like town squares where an active business and social life took
place. Goethe’s living quarters were in one of these courtyards. He had two
bright, comfortable rooms located only a few steps from Auerbach’s Cellar,
where he was soon a frequent guest. Leipzig, like Frankfurt, had a trade fair
that attracted people from all over Europe. There one could see all manner of
dress—from quaint to flamboyant—and hear an international babel of
languages. Goethe wrote with some pride to Cornelia that everything was
much louder and more colorful and diverse than in Frankfurt. He was
especially charmed by the Greeks, descendants of the ancient people he knew
only from books. When there were great crowds at fair time, students—
including Goethe—were expected to turn their rooms and apartments over to
the merchants. For a while he had to make do with a tiny attic room in a
commercial building on the edge of town. In Leipzig one was less protected
from the wind than in the old lanes of Frankfurt, and Goethe was plagued by
constant colds. His friends made fun of his red nose.
The medieval town walls had been torn down at the beginning of the
eighteenth century and linden trees planted in their place. The populace came
to promenade among them, to see and be seen. The fashion of the day was
galant, and even the students, known elsewhere in Germany for rowdy
behavior, strolled—to the extent they could afford it—in silk stockings and
powdered hair, each with a hat under his arm and a diminutive sword at his
side. The local poet Just Friedrich Zachariä, whom Goethe knew, celebrated
Leipzig for its elegance:

If you’re to live in Leipzig, cast off those awful clothes

Or else the men will mock you and girls turn up their nose.
A black bagwig is needed. That pigtail’s got to go,
And no more hats to hide the bagwig’s gallant show.

Procure a smaller sword and a ribbon round it wind,

And that will be an emblem of belonging to our kind.
Stop brawling. You don’t need to rise to every challenger.
Speak with graceful gallantry; your odor should be lavender.

The young Goethe was well equipped to live in grand style. His father
provided him with a monthly allowance of a hundred gulden (the annual
income of a hardworking artisan). He ate at a well-stocked table. In a letter
of October 1765 to his friend Riese, he boasts of consuming chickens, geese,
turkeys, ducks, partridges, snipe, trout, hares, venison, pike, pheasants,
oysters, etc. These appear every day. The theater was expensive—if one
wanted good seats and, like Goethe, invited friends along. He was always
generous, giving picnics in the surrounding countryside and paying for tavern
visits. Excellent fabrics had been purchased for his wardrobe, but his father
had saved money by assigning the needlework to one of his household staff.
The results, unstylish, stiff, and clumsily showy, made a ridiculous
impression, and so Wolfgang exchanged every last suit, dress coat, shirt,
vest, and neckcloth for the latest Leipzig fashions. When Horn saw his friend
again he hardly recognized him. In August 1766 he wrote to their mutual
friend Moors, “If you could only see him, you would have to either fly into a
rage or burst out laughing. . . . In his pride he is also a fop, and all his
clothes, beautiful as they are, are of such a mad goût that it distinguishes him
from the entire academy.” Goethe himself had written to Riese, the fourth
member of their group, I’m cutting a great figure here, and added, But as
yet I’m no fop. But apparently he had become one after all, at least to the
bedazzled eyes of Hörnchen. He valued his appearance and strove to make
an impression because as a stranger in sophisticated Leipzig, he felt easily
intimidated. Wherever he went, people made him feel that he was lacking in
elegance, the social graces, and the art of conversation. The Saxons took
exception to his Hessian vernacular; grotesquely enough, they considered
their own dialect to be the epitome of beauty. And since he found card games
distasteful, people thought he was a bore, and an annoying one to boot. I have
a bit more taste and knowledge of beauty than our galants, and at large
gatherings I often could not help demonstrating to them the poverty of
their opinions, he writes his sister Cornelia. After a few initial successes, he
was less often invited to respectable houses. Among his fellow students,
however, he was considered an intellectual prodigy, and with his still
somewhat awkward charm he was in great demand among both younger and
more mature women. The former wanted to flirt, the latter to mother him.
The wife of Privy Councilor Böhme, a professor of history and
constitutional law to whom Goethe had a recommendation from Frankfurt,
took him under wing, advising him on his clothing and deportment and
seeking to soften his manner. He read his poems to her, and she cautiously
critiqued them. In her gentle way, she suggested what he had heard more
directly from some of his professors—namely, that he should be more modest
and devote himself to his studies. But they bored him. Roman civil law has
plagued my memory for the last half year and truly, I haven’t retained
much, he writes to Cornelia. Legal history would probably have interested
him more if the professor hadn’t gotten bogged down in the Second Punic
War. There was no comprehensive knowledge to be had here. I’m going to
hang myself I know nothing. All the same, he never blames himself when he
fails to get on with his studies. Rather, he criticizes his father for forcing him
to study in Leipzig.
Despite his anxiety and alienation, however, there were moments of high
spirits and merriment even in his first weeks in Leipzig. In a letter to Riese,
Goethe encloses one of the poems he composed with such ease. Written as a
sideline and with no obvious ambition, some of them are particularly good:

Just like a bird that perches on a branch

Within a lovely wood, inhaling freedom,
Enjoying the gentle air all undisturbed.
On outspread wings and singing then he glides
Onward from tree to tree, from bush to bush.

Half a year later he complains of his sorrow to the same friend. He is Alone,
alone, quite alone. And again a little poem depicts his emotional state: My
only pleasure it would seem / Is lying, from all men removed, / Among the
bushes, by a stream, / And thinking of the ones I love. Back in prose, he
spells out what it is that oppresses him and drives him into solitude, and after
a few sentences he slips back into verse:

You know how great my love for poetry

How great the hate was, beating in my breast
Gainst those whose only thoughts were wholly given
To the law and to its sacred shrines.
...
How firmly I believed (yet wrongly, too)
The Muse would love me, give me oft a song.
. . . Yet barely was I here, when the thick fog
Was lifted from my eyes and I could see
The fame of those great men, could hear at last
How much there is required to earn such fame.
At last I saw that what I thought to be
My lofty flight was nothing but a dream,
And I a worm that, crawling in the dust,
 Looks up and yearns to be the eagle mounting
To the sun. . . .

Before the complaint becomes monotonous, a witty turn of phrase

fortunately occurs to the author. The worm enviously watching the eagle’s
flight is suddenly lifted up by a whirlwind and carried with the dust up into
the air, where it also can feel lofty for a little while, until the wind inhales:
The dust settles down, / and with it the worm that now creeps as before.
To be sure, the young poet acts more apologetic than he really is, for he
blithely continues to versify. They are poems in which he is at odds with his
poetic calling, poems that bring out his self-doubt. He writes to his sister in
September 1766 that for the time being, he intends to use his poems only as a
decorative addition to his letters.
He is still intimidated by the great men of literature who set the tone in
Leipzig. He dares not show his face to the greatest of them, Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing. There would have been an opportunity to do so when Lessing
visited Leipzig for a performance of his play Minna von Barnhelm.
The local luminary was Professor Gellert. Through his fables, comedies,
and the novel The Life of the Swedish Countess von G., Christian
Fürchtegott Gellert was at the time probably the most famous and widely
read author in Germany. People revered Klopstock, but they read Gellert. In
his works, Enlightenment thought was presented sentimentally and therefore
pleasurably, its pedagogical purpose wrapped in a chatty style. Gellert made
things easy for his readers. He avoided extremes and was pious in a rational
way, as when he begins a celebration of the creation: “Who opens up the
womb of Earth / To bless us with Her goods?” His poems were suitable for
inclusion in hymnals and his fables for grade-school primers, and he did not
shy from offering moral instruction or practical advice. His recommendation
to writers was, “Your wit would fain delight the world, / So sing while fiery
spirit lasts.”
His own wit had burned itself out by the time Goethe attended his lectures,
a few years before Gellert’s death. Mounted on a white horse given him by
the prince-elector, he arrived for his talks at a leisurely trot. The sickly,
modest man delivered them in a thin voice and with circumspect gestures, his
theme all of morality. He still enjoyed some popularity with the reading
public and was accorded great respect. The students were permitted to
submit their literary endeavors for his inspection. He took them home and
corrected them in red ink, then discussed selected passages in his next
lecture. Believing that the young men should first of all learn to express
themselves clearly in prose, he was reluctant to accept anything in verse. In
Poetry and Truth, one can still feel the young Goethe’s sense of slight that
Gellert took so little notice of his submission of a wedding poem, written for
the nuptials of his uncle Johann Jost Textor. Gellert passed it to his deputy
and successor Christian August Clodius, who used copious amounts of red
ink because Goethe had summoned half the Olympic pantheon in his poem, if
with humorous intent that Clodius failed to recognize.
Gellert’s star was in decline. That was even more true of Johann Christoph
Gottsched, a physically huge man whom Prussian recruiters would have been
eager to secure for the Lange Kerls of the Infantry Regiment No. 6,
composed of taller-than-average soldiers. Between 1730 and 1750,
Gottsched had established himself as the arbiter of literary taste. He had
driven the stock character of Hanswurst (Punch) from the stage and was at
pains to housebreak and domesticate German literature by imitating French
models. He demanded that literature pledge itself to uplifting imitation, moral
utility, and verisimilitude. Homer, he declared, in having us believe that “two
valiant peoples would butt heads for ten long years for the sake of a beautiful
woman,” violated reality in the Iliad to such an extent that he could “in no
way be salvaged.” Such theories could not but alienate the young Goethe,
who read Homer with great enthusiasm. It was clear to him that
verisimilitude and closeness to nature must not be defined in a way that
resulted in such banalities. To him, Gottsched had quite simply failed to keep
up with the times. In Poetry and Truth, he depicts an encounter with him as a
scene from a comedy. Goethe is ushered into a reception room. At the same
moment, Gottsched enters the room, gigantic, in green, wearing a dressing
gown lined in red, and bareheaded. A servant bursts in through a side door
and hastily hands him an enormous full-bottomed wig. With one hand
Gottsched puts it on his head and with the other he boxes the servant’s ears
for being late. The latter staggers out the door, whereupon the sizable old
patriarch gravely bade us sit down and held a fairly long discourse with
great decorum.
By this time the literary lions of Leipzig no longer seemed as great as they
had in his apologetic poem to Riese. But that itself could become a problem.
And so little by little, he wrote in Poetry and Truth, the moment
approached when all authority would vanish and I myself began to doubt,
indeed to despair of, the greatest individuals I had known or thought of.
In the fall of 1767 Goethe ceremoniously consigned the greater part of his
juvenilia to the stove, throwing his landlady into a panic with all the smoke.
No longer discouraged by the great men, he was instead guided by his own
high standards, which he had so far failed to meet. The key words he noted
down for a planned autobiography in 1767 were Self-development through
the transformation of experience into an image. These few words
adumbrated his poetics of the time. It was not enough to be in conformity
with everyday reality, nor to simply express one’s inner life. Experience
should be transformed into an image. Experience is fleeting, and artistic
creation preserves a lasting trace, an image: experience given a form. The
young Goethe was already well versed in the manipulation of forms, but he
had since learned that one must fill them with their own life. He called it
working according to nature, which also meant leaving himself free so that
something could grow and flourish. He knew he possessed characteristics . .
. necessary for a poet. He just needed to be left alone, not distracted by
premature criticism. Only then would he be able to show his true nature. Let
them leave me be. If I possess genius, I shall become a poet even if no one
corrects me. If I possess none, no critiques will help.
The young Goethe, who here explicitly claims the right to undisturbed self-
expression, had also discovered letters as his preferred training ground for
subjective writing. One can feel how much he enjoys using language to make
his new reality vividly present when writing to his sister. I open my eyes and
look here!—Here stands my bed! There my books! There a table decorated
as your dressing table never can be. . . . But I am forgetting that you
others, you little girls, cannot see as far as we poets can. But powerful
descriptive language is not enough. What must be added is the stuff of
experience—experience that challenges the art of linguistic representation.
The great experience that provided the material for a flood of letters was
Goethe’s love affair with Anna Katharina Schönkopf, three years his elder. It
began in the spring of 1766. Ännchen or Annette, as Goethe called her (to
everyone else she was Kätchen), was the daughter of a wine merchant and
innkeeper. The lawyer Johann Georg Schlosser, Goethe’s future brother-in-
law, stayed in Schönkopf’s inn for the Easter fair, as did Goethe’s friend
Horn, who was now beginning his own studies in Leipzig. Goethe came to
lunch with them at the inn, made the acquaintance of the innkeeper’s daughter,
and in just a few days, he was head over heels in love. Contemporary
witnesses are unanimous in their description of Kätchen as a pretty, smart,
and somewhat flirtatious young woman, free and easy while still maintaining
her distance. At first Goethe concealed his inclinations. He pretended that he
had been drawn in by someone else, an aristocratic young woman, and even
Horn believed him. When Goethe finally revealed the truth to him six months
later, Horn was very enthusiastic. “If Goethe weren’t my friend,” he wrote to
Moors, “I would fall in love with her myself.” Horn also reports that Goethe
loves the innkeeper’s daughter “very tenderly,” but “with the completely
honest intentions of a virtuous person, although he knows that she can never
become his wife.” Indeed, Goethe emphasizes in a letter to Moors that he has
won the favor of the young woman not with gifts or by displaying his social
superiority. I have gained her only through my heart, he writes with pride;
the young woman’s virtuous heart is for him a guarantee that she will never
leave me except when duty and necessity bid us part.
It sounds all too rational, not like a love that will assert itself against all
restrictions, like that of Werther, the hero of his first novel, but rather a
precocious variety of the deliberateness of Albert, Werther’s rival for Lotte’s
love, who does not come off well in the novel. Goethe knew that his father
would not accept this affair with an innkeeper’s daughter becoming
permanent and so never wrote him of it. His sister was in on the secret, but
even then he mentioned it only incidentally, downplaying its importance. The
little Schönkopf girl, he wrote to Cornelia in French, did not deserve to go
unmentioned among his acquaintances. She was a housekeeper who looked
after the laundry and clothing. She was very good at it and derived pleasure
from helping him in these matters, and he loved her for it. He didn’t want to
make his sister jealous, and so invented this version.
How different this love appears in his letters to Ernst Wolfgang Behrisch,
his closest friend during his Leipzig years! It was also in Schönkopf’s inn, at
the same time he met Kätchen, that Goethe met Behrisch. Eleven years his
senior, he became his spiritual guide. In the years that followed, the young
Goethe, who usually felt superior to those of his own age, would continue to
seek out older friends more advanced in experience and prudence. He looked
to them to help him plumb the depths of his unsettled inner life. Johann
Daniel Salzmann and Johann Heinrich Merck would fill this role in
Strasbourg and Darmstadt, respectively.
 Behrisch had come to Leipzig as the private tutor of the twelve-year-old
Count von Lindenau and had taken up residence with his pupil in Auerbach’s
courtyard, a few steps from Goethe’s own rooms. He was an odd fellow, of
striking appearance: tall and gaunt, with a long, sharp nose. He affected the
grand manner and could have been a model rococo galant, were it not for his
aversion to bright colors. He dressed in various shades of gray—bluish gray,
greenish gray, plain gray. He assumed a certain ceremonious decorum that
contrasted with his waggish nature. He enjoyed disagreeing with the usual
way of doing things. He had contempt for poets who had their works printed
and thought that the best verses should circulate only in manuscript. He
therefore copied out Goethe’s poems, which he liked, bound them together
under the title Annette, and gave them to his young friend with the advice to
always publish his work that way. His primary rule was never to cheapen
yourself, either toward those above or below you. He mocked empty and
stilted behavior and writing. People feared his wit. He combined a refined
appearance with a sense for what was natural, but without letting it
degenerate into the coarseness that would later characterize the writers of the
Sturm und Drang movement. He accompanied Goethe to the pleasure gardens
outside the city walls and consorted with girls who, as Goethe would write
apologetically in Poetry and Truth, were better than their reputation.
Behrisch occasionally brought his tutee along on these outings, and that cost
him his job as tutor in October 1767. His reputation, however, was
undamaged, and afterward he was summoned as tutor to the court of Dessau.
It was a severe loss for Goethe, and in an ode to Behrisch he gave vent to his
anger:

Honest man,
Flee this land.

Dead swamps,
vaporous October fogs,
Weave their effluence
inseparably here.

Birthplace
of insect pests,
 murderous husk
of their evil.

From the beginning, Goethe confided his relationship with Kätchen to

Behrisch. Initially, he reported his triumphs. He had conquered the heart of
the much-courted girl. He initially writes to Behrisch in French; later, as his
passion and jealousy grow, he uses German. He says what a pleasure it is to
watch another man striving to please Kätchen while he sits, seemingly
unmoved, in a corner, utters no gallant remark, doesn’t flirt, so that the other
thinks he’s a fool lacking savoir faire—and in the end this fool gains rewards
for which the other would have made a pilgrimage to Rome.
This self-confidence did not last, however. Kätchen’s job at the inn put her
in constant contact with young men. In October 1767, a student from the
Baltic coast by the name of Ryden took up residence. He was a handsome
and self-confident Russian of German extraction, a ladies’ man. Goethe grew
suspicious, and Kätchen, already familiar with such behavior, sought to
reassure him. With the most ardent caresses she begged me not to plague
her with jealousy. She swore she would always be mine. And what won’t
one believe when one is in love. But what can she swear? Can she swear
never to look different than now? Can she swear that her heart should
cease to beat? But I will believe that she can.
Goethe describes to his friend a scene that drives him mad. Ryden enters
the room and asks Kätchen’s mother for the tarot cards. Kätchen is present.
She wipes her eyes as if something had gotten into them. Goethe is familiar
with this gesture and thinks he knows what it means. She does it to conceal
embarrassment or a blush. Why is she embarrassed, why blushing? The
answer is clear to him. There’s something going on between her and Ryden.
Enamored eyes see more sharply, he writes Behrisch, but often too sharply.
Advise me . . . and comfort me . . . . But don’t make fun of me, even if I
deserve it.
We don’t know what advice Behrisch gave him; his letters have not
survived. He could not have been very alarmed—reading, in the very next
letter, that the jealous lover at least maintained enough composure to pen a
“Marriage Song,” in which the possession of a woman is depicted with
relish: In the bedroom, far from feasting, / Sits Amor faithful at the head. /
His eye is peeled for wantons seeking / To steal a march on your marriage
bed.
 In October, Behrisch left for Dessau, and a veritable flood of letters began.
Goethe gives minutely detailed descriptions of the ups and downs of the state
of his soul, his bouts of jealousy, his moments of feeling reassured. The
letters become noticeably and self-consciously literary, as if Goethe were
becoming a figure in an epistolary novel. For pages on end he complains
about the pangs of love, describes incidents that arouse his jealousy,
moments of reconciliation and devotion, then more disturbances. He sighs
and moans, regains his distance, and writes wise reflections as if watching
himself from the wings: Love is misery, but every misery becomes lust when
by lamenting we salve the constricting, stabbing sensation that alarms our
heart and transform it into a gentle titillation. The writer of these excited
and, at the same time, calculated letters is taking pleasure in these
descriptions. Actually, the letters should be saved for later use in a novel, he
thinks: I can’t help it; I have many good ideas and can’t use them except to
write to you. If I were an author I would be more frugal in order to waste
them on the public someday.
The letter-writing lover is genuinely overwhelmed by his feelings, but he’s
both a participant and a recorder. It is not that he seeks out experiences and
gets involved in situations in order to express them in words; he’s not
indulging in romantic feelings so that he can write about them, but they do
acquire an additional titillation when he does. He puts his romantic troubles
to work, orchestrates, prolongs, and intensifies them, creating an imaginary
stage as he writes. The letters are addressed not just to Behrisch but also to
himself, the future author. He himself sits in the audience and watches the
performance of what he’s writing. It’s a complicated process in which he is
living through an experience that inherently becomes completely real only in
the excited language of the letters.
The series of diary-like reports to Behrisch that begins on November 2,
1767, and continues till the end of that month is almost a novel in letters like
Werther. Goethe’s ambition was to write so that two gaps would disappear
simultaneously: the gap between him and his love affair and the gap between
him and his friend. This hand that now touches the paper to write to you,
this happy hand pressed her to my bosom. The caressing hand is also the
writing hand. He transfers touching his beloved to touching his friend, who is
reading what he’s writing. The act of writing establishes an intimate
connection. At seven o’clock on the evening of November 10, he writes—
almost cries out—Ah Behrisch, this is one of those moments! You are gone,
and the paper is cold comfort compared with your arms. And now we can
watch the letter writer (who also is watching himself) as he kindles a fire
with words and sentences: My blood runs more quietly, I shall be able to
speak to you more calmly. But reasonably? God only knows. No, not
reasonably. He keeps interrupting himself, hesitating, starting anew: I’ve cut
myself a new quill to pull myself together. Let’s see if we can proceed. . . .
Annette is—no not that. Quiet, quiet, I’ll try to tell you the whole thing in
order. One of the jealous scenes follows.
Kätchen had gone to the theater without him. He had followed her there. I
found her box. She sat in the corner . . . . Behind her chair Herr Ryden, in
a very intimate position. Ha! Think of me! Think of me! in the gallery! with
a spyglass—watching them! Curses! Oh, Behrisch, I thought my head
would explode with fury. They were playing Miss Sara.* . . . my eyes were
in the box, and my heart was dancing. Now he leaned forward . . . . Now he
stepped back, now he leaned over her chair and said something to her, I
ground my teeth and watched. Tears sprang to my eyes, but they were from
looking so keenly, I haven’t been able to weep yet this entire evening. His
first thought is to rush home and describe the experience to his friend. But
then he tarries another moment, in doubt as to whether he is really seeing
what he sees, or only what he thinks he sees: I saw how coldly she
responded to him, how she turned away from him, how she barely answered
him. . . . Ah, my spyglass did not flatter me as my soul did, I wished to see
it! He storms home with his doubts and sits down at the table to write. Yet
another quill. Again a few moments of peace. Oh, my friend. The third page
already. I could write you a thousand and never tire. But then he tires after
all, falls asleep in his chair, wakes up again, and pulls himself together: But I
must fill up the page this evening. I still have a lot to say. But the incident
has already been made the most of.
The power of imagination he had praised to the skies a few days earlier
must come to his aid: It pleases the imagination to wander about in the
vast, mysterious field of images, looking there for expressions when truth
is not permitted to take the nearest path. Because his experiences have been
exhausted, he gives himself over to his imagination, which conjures up the
coming days for him. What shall I do tomorrow? I know. I shall be calm
until I enter the house. And then my heart will begin to beat, and when I
hear her steps or her voice, it will beat faster, and after the meal I will
leave. If I happen to see her, tears will spring to my eyes and I’ll think,
God forgive you as I forgive you, and may he give you all the years you
have stolen from my life; that’s what I will think. I’ll look at her, be
grateful that I can half believe that she loves me, and leave again. That’s
how it will be tomorrow, the day after, and forever more.
He continues in this vein for a little while, then finally goes to bed. The
next day he reads the letter through once more and is satisfied with it. By this
impetuous desire and this equally impetuous abhorrence, this raving and
this lust you will recognize the youth and will pity him. A sentence follows
that will recur in The Sorrows of Young Werther and become proverbial:
What made the world a hell for me yesterday makes it heaven today. Here
we witness a process whereby a brilliant sentence, pregnant with
significance, emerges from the uninhibited flow of writing, to be stored away
in his inner archive for future literary use. Two days later, having still not
mailed the gigantic letter, he notes after rereading it: My letter has a nice
predisposition to become a little work.
Following the initial storm of jealousy that sweeps through this little work,
his thoughts cool. As his jealousy subsides, he relaxes, but he also notes with
concern what that means: the violence of love had much decreased from its
usual strength. Jealousy is obviously necessary for passion to reach the
proper operating temperature. He also registers the fact that Kätchen seems
to enjoy holding sway over him. It pleases her to see a proud person like me
chained to her footstool. She pays him no heed as long as he lies still, but
if he tries to pull free, then she notices him again, and her love reawakens
with her attention. So the best thing for him to do is to make Kätchen jealous
in his turn. He finds the opportunity to do so among the Obermanns and the
Breitkopfs, families in whose houses he was a welcome guest and who had
pretty daughters to flirt with. And indeed, Kätchen became jealous and made
scenes.
Things went back and forth in this way until the spring of 1768, when the
breakup occurred—amicably, Goethe claimed in a letter to Behrisch: We
began with love and are ending in friendship.
In the same letter he sends his friend the comedy The Lover’s Spleen. Even
before leaving Frankfurt he had drafted it as a conventional rococo pastoral,
then revised it several times, bringing it closer and closer to his own
amorous troubles until it became a comedy of jealousy. It pleased him so
much that it survived the autos-da-fé of the following years. He told his sister
it was a good little piece . . . since it has been carefully copied from nature.
 The lives of two couples are interwoven but also contrasted. Lamon and
Egle pursue their games of love in a dallying, charming, and frivolous way.

LAMON: Can there be any harm in finding others pretty?

I don’t complain if you say, “There’s a handsome man.
So charming and so witty.” Agreed, and here’s my hand,
As pledge I won’t be angry.
EGLE: Don’t be. I’ll promise you
Not to be angry either, for it’s my weakness too.
With friendly smiles I listen while men chat in my ear.
...
Jealousy becomes me even less than you.

Eridon and Amine, on the other hand, have problems because Eridon
wants complete control of his lover and watches over her suspiciously, his
jealousy lying in wait for anything or anyone approaching her. Egle to Amine
on her lover’s jealousy: No wonder it upsets him when you go to a dance. /
He is even jealous of the grass you tread by chance. / And hates as a rival
the little bird you love. Amine is tormented by Eridon’s jealousy, but she is
honest enough to admit that it also flatters her pride: His jealousy’s a sign of
his great adoration / And compensates my pride for all my tribulation. Her
friend thinks she’s deluding herself: Dear child, I pity you and fear no hope
remains, / Since you love misery. You rattle with your chains / And tell
yourself it’s music.
Goethe mirrors his own jealousy in Eridon. All the more remarkable, then,
how unsympathetic this figure is and how much he gets on the others’ nerves,
especially those of his beloved. Amine complains about this domineering,
hypochondriacal, and frequently bad-tempered fellow:

If he tortures me with a silly accusation

It only takes one word, a soft recrimination,
And he’s a different man, his sour mood subsiding,
And often he will cry when he sees me crying,
Fall sweetly to his knees to beg me for forgiveness.

Amine’s more experienced friend Egle gives her the paradoxical advice
that she should counter Eridon’s jealousy not by protesting her innocence but
instead by acting ambiguously. Eridon gets himself all worked up precisely
because he has so little cause to be jealous. Without a cause for woe, he fain
will make one up. So he needs to be treated with doses of his own medicine
to effect a cure. Eridon is simply too confident of her love and needs to have
his confidence shaken: Let him think without him you’d get along just fine. /
He’ll rant a little while—sit tight and bide your time. / Then a mere look
from you will do more than a kiss. / Teach him fear of losing you and then
he’ll be in bliss.
As Egle finally realizes, it’s too subtle a strategy for Amine, so she
chooses another therapy. She deploys her own seductive charms against
Eridon. When he finally embraces and kisses her, she at first lets it happen
and then shames him with the question, You say you love Amine? . . . Yet just
now you kissed me. / You’ll repent this falsehood, just you wait and see.
She forces him to realize that the two things are not incompatible—being in
love yet stealing a kiss from another from time to time, or in Eridon’s own
words: A little pleasure will not steal my heart from you.
The whole affair, however, is not quite so harmless. A motif emerges that
will gain great significance in Goethe’s later works—above all in his novel
Elective Affinities: imagined infidelity, embracing one woman while thinking
of another. Which one is really intended? The anonymity of desire is
unfathomable. Individuals seem interchangeable, the objects of desire
obscure. Such aspects are almost too weighty for a rococo comedy. Goethe
himself alludes to this in his autobiography by referring to the insulting and
humiliating experiences that were the source for his insubstantial playlet: I
never tired of pondering volatility, inclinations, the mutability of the
human condition, ethical sensuality, and all the heights and depths whose
conjunction in our nature can be regarded as the riddle of human life.
The play about curing jealousy has a happy end. Less happy was the end of
the affair with Kätchen, although in the letter to Behrisch Goethe writes, we
have parted; we’re happy. After his apparently calm assertion that they
began with love and are ending in friendship, he abruptly changes his tone.
But not I, he continues, I still love her, so much, my God, so much. Goethe
is by no means done with her. He does not want to leave her but can’t make
her any promises. He feels guilty and hopes, for the sake of his own
exoneration, that she will find an upright man; how happy he would then be!
He promises not to inflict pain on her by taking up with another woman. He
will wait until he sees her in the arms of another man and only then feel
himself free to love again.
One gets the impression from the letters to Behrisch that in the end, it was
the young Goethe who initiated the separation. However, if one follows the
later depiction in Poetry and Truth, another image emerges. There Goethe
presents his younger self as a pest of Eridon’s ilk, infected with the
obsession that leads us to make an entertainment out of torturing the
beloved and dominating a girl’s devotion with gratuitous and tyrannical
moods. For example, he says that he took out on her his bad mood about
some unsuccessful poems because he felt all too sure of her. This bad mood
wrapped itself in absurd bouts of jealousy that she endured for a while with
incredible patience. But then he could not help noticing that to protect
herself, she was inwardly withdrawing from him. And only then did she give
him real cause for the jealousy that was until then unfounded. It led to
terrible scenes, and from then on he really had to court her and fight for her.
But it was too late. He had already lost her.
At the time, however, he didn’t see things so sharply, or at least didn’t
depict them that way to Behrisch. As we have seen, he chose a more
flattering version, in which it was he who brought about the separation.
In search of a counterbalance during the turbulent weeks of this love affair,
Goethe devoted himself to artistic endeavors: drawing and painting with
Adam Friedrich Oeser at the art academy and engraving and etching with
Johann Michael Stock. He had met Oeser in his third semester and admired
him. He was the director of the newly founded Leipzig Academy in the
Pleissenburg castle, well versed in theory, and a versatile painter, His
gregarious and humorous personality made him popular with students and
clients. He was flooded with commissions. He painted altarpieces and
theater backdrops, produced book illustrations and miniatures, and advised
princes and aristocrats on the decor of their palaces and the design of their
gardens. In Dresden, where Oeser had previously worked, he had been a
close friend of the archaeologist and art theorist Johann Joachim
Winckelmann and had shared a house with him. In the summer of 1768, he
was looking forward to Winckelmann’s return from Italy, and Goethe was
eager to see the famous man in person. Oeser had given Goethe
Winckelmann’s writings, for which he expressed the greatest admiration, and
Goethe had read them with a good deal of reverence. But then news arrived
that Winckelmann had been murdered in Trieste. Oeser was incommunicado
for several days, and Goethe regretted that in addition to Lessing, whom he
had avoided out of shyness, he had now also missed the chance to meet this
other intellectual hero.
Even before Winckelmann, Oeser had begun to favor an idealized version
of classical antiquity—later captured by Winckelmann in the phrase “noble
simplicity and quiet grandeur”—over the baroque style. But unlike
Winckelmann, Oeser had nothing of the missionary in him, no passion for the
absolute. Instead, he pursued his art more playfully, cared nothing for the
judgment of posterity, and served his clients by giving them no more than
what they wanted. Oeser’s free and easy lack of affectation and intellectually
original manner were good for the young Goethe. Oeser encouraged his
attempts at painting and inspired him to think about art. After his return to
Frankfurt Goethe wrote him a long letter of thanks, saying that he had learned
more from him than in all his years at the university. My taste for beauty, my
knowledge, my insights—did they not all come from you? How certain, how
brilliantly true I now find the strange and almost incomprehensible
sentence that the workshop of a great artist does more to develop the
budding philosopher, the budding poet, than the lecture hall of a world-
renowned scholar and critic.
Gellert, Clodius, and others had found fault with his literary attempts,
while Oeser had obviously found a way to be a positive influence. Whether
complete censure or complete praise: nothing is so destructive to one’s
capabilities. Encouragement after censure is sun after rain, fruitful and
productive. Indeed, Herr Professor, if you had not encouraged my love of
the Muses I would have despaired. In Poetry and Truth, however, Goethe
expresses a less positive opinion of him: His teaching influenced our
thinking and our taste, but his own drawing was too indistinct to guide me
—only half conscious as I was of the objects of art and nature—toward
rigorous and clear artistic practice.
Especially during the complicated affair with Kätchen, Goethe had found a
peaceful focal point in Oeser. It was also Oeser who gave him the idea of
undertaking a trip to nearby Dresden to visit its painting collection. In late
February 1768, as he was breaking up with Kätchen, Goethe set off for the
Saxon capital. He found lodging with an educated, whimsical shoemaker
who appears in Poetry and Truth as a combination of Hans Sachs and Jacob
Böhme. He spent days looking at the paintings. As yet he had no eye for the
Italians, not even for Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, and was more attracted by
the genre scenes of the Netherlandish masters. Suddenly, the shoemaker
reminded him of a figure in a painting by Ostade. In Poetry and Truth he
writes, It was the first time that I became so acutely aware of a gift that I
later made more conscious use of, namely, to see nature with the eyes of
this or that artist whose works I had just been looking at with particular
attention.
The trip to Dresden was a pilgrimage to art that gave him the curious
feeling of having lived with the shoemaker as if in a painting. He kept the
visit a secret; he was consumed by a feeling that he had disappeared into the
pictures and was now stepping out of them and back into reality, his friends
and acquaintances in Leipzig staring at him as if he had returned from the
dead. The distance he felt from them may have softened his separation from
Kätchen a bit. And yet that separation was still so difficult and painful that in
Poetry and Truth he traces the serious illness he would soon undergo back to
pangs of love: I had really lost her, and the madness with which I avenged
my mistakes on myself, by assaulting my physical self in several senseless
ways in order to punish my moral self, contributed very much to the bodily
ills under which I lost some of the best years of my life.
There were other contributing factors. Goethe had been in Leipzig for
three years without completing his studies. For now, the student of
jurisprudence had to regard himself as a failure. Even though he talked about
it in a jocular tone, it oppressed him. He revealed his anguish to Behrisch:
And I’m going ever more downhill by the day. 3 months, Behrisch, and then
it’s the end.
He was weakened physically. The heavy Merseburg beer dispensed in
Leipzig and the coffee offered on every possible occasion caused him
digestive problems. He had inhaled poisonous fumes at the workshop of
Stock the engraver. He didn’t know whether the pains in his chest came from
that or were caused by the pulled muscle he had suffered three years earlier
during the coach accident on the way to Leipzig.
One night in late July 1768 he was awakened by a severe hemorrhage. The
doctor who was called diagnosed a life-threatening pulmonary illness. A
swelling had appeared on the left side of his neck. For a few days he was
near death. The young man had won the affection of several families during
his years in Leipzig, and he received devoted care from the Breitkopfs,
Obermanns, Stocks, Schönkopfs, and Oesers, and of course from little Horn
and his other dining companions. Especially active was Ernst Theodor
Langer, Behrisch’s successor as private tutor to the young count Lindenau.
Langer was a pious man devoted to mystical speculation, though too self-
willed to join one of the Pietistic or Herrnhuter circles. He was often in
attendance in Goethe’s sickroom. He was no zealot and had no desire to
proselytize, but he was anxious to win for Jesus the heart of this young
patient who was perhaps near death. In Poetry and Truth, Goethe speaks
with great affection of the companionship Langer provided during these
difficult days. What he had to say with pleasant consistency easily found
the ear of a young person detached from the things of this earth by a
troublesome illness, who found it highly desirable to turn the activity of
his intellect toward the things of heaven. Goethe’s contact and subsequent
correspondence with Langer would later influence his experiments with
Pietism.
His condition improved. In August 1768 he ventured outside again at last,
haggard, emaciated, and pale as a ghost. He describes himself in that way in
a letter to Friederike Oeser, the painter’s daughter, a few weeks after his
departure. She had vigorously tried to help the patient sit up. She greeted me
with a great whoop and laughed herself silly at the comical idea that a
man in his twentieth year could think of dying of consumption!
On August 28, 1768, his nineteenth birthday, Goethe left Leipzig. He stood
in front of Kätchen’s house but didn’t enter or say goodbye. Still sick and
weak, provided with a bit of heavenly consolation from Langer, he left
Leipzig as a pitiful dropout with no degree.

* Miss Sara Sampson, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

 CHAPTER 3

The Aftermath of Leipzig. Partners in Guilt. Illness.

Approaches to Religion. Attempt at Piety.
Two Mentors: Langer and Susanna von Klettenberg.
No Consciousness of Sin. The Pious Magician.
The Sickroom as Laboratory.
The Search for Chemical Revelation.

....

IN A NOTE OF 1810 THAT DID NOT FIND ITS WAY INTO HIS
AUTOBIOgraphy, the sixty-year-old Goethe reflects on the disparity between
the ease with which, as a young man, he was able to absorb the rules and
conventions of poetry, drama, and rhetoric, and the difficulties he had in
giving satisfactory form to his life. In that attempt he lacked the compass
needle I would have needed, all the more so since, at every halfway
favorable wind, I always hoisted all my sail and thus was at every moment
in danger of running aground. Although fate had provided him with
excellent mentors, they had unfortunately sent him in different directions.
For one, the primary maxim of life was good nature and tenderness, for
another it was a certain agility, for a third indifference and levity, for a
fourth piety, for a fifth diligence and doing one’s duty, for the next
imperturbable cheerfulness, and so forth, so that before my twentieth year
I had run through the schools of almost all moral philosophers.
These teachings were necessarily contradictory, and he was unsure how to
balance them, especially when each in turn was raised to a primary
principle. He writes that in his youth he always threw himself completely
into things, cheerful, free, and lively. Moderation and clarity had not been
his cup of tea so far. That would come later.
The year 1769 was a kind of interlude for the young Goethe. As we shall
see, his mentors that year were religious ones. His life was on hold. It was
uncertain whether he would ever really get back on his feet. From time to
time he felt himself a doomed man. It may well be, he wrote to Kätchen
Schönkopf in late 1768, that he would be dead before Easter. They should
bury him in Leipzig, and on his name day Kätchen should visit the deceased
Johannismännchen.* If he should survive, he didn’t know how he was going
to proceed. He would like to go to Paris to see how life is lived in France.
He barely mentions continuing his legal studies, although his father insisted
on it and could not conceal his disappointment at finding, instead of a
sturdy, active son who will graduate and follow his preordained path
through life, a sickling.
He was as dissatisfied with himself as his father was. He read through the
letters he had sent home from Leipzig (carefully filed away by his father) and
discovered a certain smug arrogance in them, the aping of a genteel tone.
The poems he had frequently appended to the letters now seemed all too
superficial. He was looking for his own voice, for himself.
Emaciated and weak, lying in bed or sitting wrapped in blankets, he
polished the poems he’d brought home. Some had been included in
Behrisch’s calligraphic collection; he’d given others to Friederike Oeser as a
farewell present. In 1769 he put together a collection for which Theodor
Breitkopf, a friend from Leipzig, composed melodies. It appeared under the
title New Songs, Set to Music by Bernhard Theodor Breitkopf and was
Goethe’s first publication, although it did not name him as author.
In his sickroom, Goethe worked on the play Partners in Guilt. The idea
originated in Leipzig. He revised what had started as a one-act farce into a
three-act comedy, and it pleased him so much he included it in later editions
of his works. In Poetry and Truth he calls the play a cheerful burlesque with
a gloomy family background. A well-to-do traveler named Alcest is robbed
while staying at an inn. Söller, a good-for-nothing spendthrift living there at
the expense of his father-in-law the innkeeper, commits the theft and then
witnesses his wife, Sophie, the innkeeper’s daughter, going to an assignation
with Alcest. The innkeeper also sneaks in, intending to rifle through the
traveler’s baggage, so all three—Söller, the innkeeper, and Sophie—
encounter one another in Alcest’s room, where each accuses the others of
being the thief. In the end, when Söller is revealed as the perpetrator, the
others feel guilty as well. Order is only apparently restored. For the time
being it’s over, says the relieved thief. It’s better to be made a cuckold than
hanged as a thief. According to Goethe’s later self-commentary, the piece
expresses playfully, in somewhat rough and crude terms, the highly
Christian saying: He that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.
This set of moral instructions for how to read the little play illuminates the
change taking place in the young Goethe. In his search for direction, he was
seeing whether piety suited him. To be sure, this was not the first time his
thoughts had turned to heavenly things. In the autobiography he writes how
much the Old Testament enchanted him. As a boy he had tried, with the help
of a tutor, to read the Pentateuch in Hebrew. For him, these were simply
wonderful stories of the suffering and joy of religious heroes who lived in
the unshakable conviction that a God stood at their side, paid them visits,
took an interest in, led, and saved them. In these stories God is superhuman,
yet very human in his anger and jealousy, someone with whom the religious
heroes can commune. In reading about them, you became as familiar with
God as they were. God lived in these stories like a figure in a novel, and
when you read them, you believed in this God of the desert dwellers in the
same way you believed in the pirate Störtebecker, the sons of Aymon, Til
Eulenspiegel, or Clever Hans. They were lovely stories that Goethe took
refuge in as a boy, finding himself both in the greatest solitude and the
greatest company there among the widely scattered pastoral tribes.
He was devoted to that fairy-tale world. The general, natural religion he
learned from other teachers, which was probably also his father’s religion,
was another matter. It consisted of the conviction that behind nature was
concealed, as it were, a great, productive, ordering, and directing being,
and he adds the comment, such a conviction is obvious to everyone. He does
not say here whether he thinks this conviction is justified; the phrase behind
nature, however, is an unusual one for Goethe. He usually stressed that one
should not look for God behind but rather within nature. But it was also clear
to him that a naïve, childish imagination pictures nature as a product,
constructed and controlled by a master craftsman. This natural religion, as
he calls it, is part of the curriculum one could and should learn as a child.
The stories from the days of the patriarchs, on the other hand, were poetry.
The boy had made an attempt to lend the rather dry natural religion a
personal and ceremonially poetic aspect. In Poetry and Truth, Goethe
recounts how he piled fruit, leaves, and flowers onto his father’s cylindrical
music stand (which was painted red and decorated with golden flowers) as
an offering to what he could only imagine to be the God of nature. And since
he was unable to give him any form, he would honor him with his works:
Natural products were to be a simile for the world, and above them would
burn a flame symbolizing the spirit of man, yearning upwards toward its
maker. At sunrise, incense sticks were to be ignited by means of a
magnifying glass. At first, the altar was a success and heady aromas began to
spread, but then the candles burned down into the red paint, it began to stink,
and his father’s beautiful music stand was damaged in the effort to give
expression to the spirit of man yearning upwards. He closes his depiction of
his childhood sacrificial ritual: One is tempted to regard this accident as a
warning sign of how dangerous is any desire to approach God in such a
way.
Yet this approach was not completely wrong. He had observed the taboo
against making a graven image and had honored the invisible God through his
works. For him God stood in direct connection to nature: a God of
burgeoning growth, a God of the rising sun. Gratitude for light, the cult of the
sun that the boy staged in his earnestly playful way, remained the most
religious of all functions for all of Goethe’s life. As an old man writing
“Notes and Essays toward a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern
Divan,” he uses the example of ancient Persian religion to characterize the
sun cult: Praying to the Creator, they turned toward the rising sun as the
most strikingly magnificent phenomenon. . . . Everyone, even the most
humble, could realize the glory of this heartwarming ritual every day.
Those who can accept prayer as a daily gift seemed to him people favored by
God, those who have not yet had their lofty feelings deadened by pious
boredom.
The boy’s worship was directed against just such pious boredom, against
the Protestant religious education that taught only a kind of dry morality, a
lesson that could appeal to neither soul nor heart. Which is precisely why
the lad invented his own personal worship, turning not to the God of morality
but to the God of creative nature, in reverence to both God and himself.
Goethe’s next significant contact with religion came the year before he
moved to Leipzig, when he saw himself enmeshed in the dubious affair of
trading in offices and fraud and, as a result, had to part with “Gretchen.” The
young man felt that he was being regarded skeptically by his fellow citizens:
I had lost the unconscious bliss of walking around unknown and
unblemished. The eyes of society were upon him, and he fled into a
protected realm of beautiful, leafy groves. Only later does he realize that in
so doing, he had chosen a sacred place, so naturally secluded that a poor
wounded heart can hide itself there.
This sacred space was supposed to protect him from entanglement in a
malevolent society. He thought that its anathema could not reach him there. It
is thus a sanctuary, an aspect of religion that is explicitly directed against
society and promises exoneration. He justifies his behavior to a friend who
tries to draw him back into social intercourse: why shouldn’t he be allowed
to build a fence around this place in order to sanctify and seclude himself
from the world! Surely there is no more beautiful way to worship God than
that which arises in our breast in simple conversation with nature and
requires no images!
But this is ultimately a defensive attempt to carve out a sacred space,
separate from ordinary life, in order to protect transcendence from the
leveling effects of society. The momentary bliss he feels is restricted, for his
gaze remains fixed on the limits of space and time. It resembles what happens
in prayer. In the “Notes and Essays toward a Better Understanding of the
West-Eastern Divan,” he writes that in most cases, prayer does not pervade
life. Usually an effulgent sense of momentary bliss is followed by
disenchantment, and the unsatisfied . . . person, returned to himself, falls
back into the most unending boredom, the boredom of mundane life.
How, then, can strong feeling be stabilized and the magic of the sacred
place come to pervade the secular? The boy probably did not ask himself the
question in quite that way. But the author of the autobiography asks it—and
gives a double answer.
It is art that extracts some lasting divinity from the mundane, and it is the
church that transports divinity into everyday life with its liturgical order.
It is the beauty of art, in analogy to the divine, that can celebrate and give
permanence to a place or a moment in time by giving it form in visual images
or words. In Poetry and Truth, Goethe declares that we are unable to
perceive what is sacred when it is not fortunate enough to flee to beauty
and enter into a profound unity with it, whereby both become equally
immortal and indestructible. Following this passage, the autobiography
relates how, after seeking refuge in the sacred grove, the boy begins to paint
in pictures and in words. Precisely because divinity is experienced as
something so ephemeral, the boy feels the urge to capture something similar
in word and image. Thus he began to develop an aesthetic religion of vivid
clarity. The eye was the primary organ with which I apprehended the
world.
As a student in Leipzig, Goethe set off on what he describes as image
hunts. But since on his solitary walks the observer encountered few objects
that were either beautiful or sublime, and he was moreover plagued by
insects, he began to pay attention to the small lives of nature and became
accustomed to see in them significance . . . that tended sometimes toward
allegory, sometimes toward symbolism, according to whether observation,
emotion, or reflection predominated. The search for meaning in the
observation of nature as a continuation of religion by aesthetic means—the
artistic cultivation of the sacred—would continue throughout Goethe’s life.
The epiphany of the natural world takes place in its artistic depiction, which
is also a kind of revelation.
The other form in which the sacred is stabilized is in the liturgy and
sacraments of the church, especially the Catholic Church. The sympathetic
and even celebratory passages about the church in Poetry and Truth were a
surprise to Goethe’s readers. Until the publication, in 1812, of the second
volume of the autobiography, readers had known Goethe as a bitter critic of
Catholicism, one who had rejected its dogmas—from the concept of original
sin to belief in the devil—as the worst superstition. He described the fate of
the Catholic Calderón, for instance, as the saddest case of an author of
genius forced to idolize what is absurd, and he considered it Shakespeare’s
good fortune to be spared the bigoted delusions of Catholicism.
The passages in the autobiography about the rich liturgical and
sacramental life of the Catholic Church, which stands in contrast to the
impoverished rituals of Protestantism, are embedded in the depiction of his
years in Leipzig. During those student days, Goethe would hardly have
thought as deeply about the essence of Catholicism as he does in the
autobiography. But early on he was repelled by the austere moralism of the
Protestant Church. It was not a religion to his taste, lacking as it did a
fullness of imagery and pageantry. Orthodox Protestantism was not a real
religion for him, only a moral code.
In retrospect, Goethe remarks that, in the end, his childhood sacrificial
ceremony, his worship of nature and the establishment of a sacred grove, his
hunt for images of divinity in nature, and the cult of beauty were religious
gestures intended to compensate for the lack of a life ordered by ritual. He
describes in the seventh book of Poetry and Truth how such a life might
appear. The churchgoing religious man, he writes, must be accustomed to
regarding the inner religion of the heart and the outer religion of the
church as one and the same, as that great, general sacrament that divides
into so many other sacraments and communicates its sanctity,
indestructibility, and eternity to them all. He continues, And so through a
shining round of uniformly sacred acts . . . the cradle and the grave,
however far apart they happen to lie, are bound together in a constant
circle.
He could well imagine such a life, but it was not the life he led. He writes
that he had begun quite early to develop his own religion, far from the church
and its life of sacramental order. However, he would give a quasi-
sacramental order to his own life. He made rituals of the activities of daily
life and recognized the value in official acts and ceremonious behavior.
Ludwig Wittgenstein once called culture a kind of “monastic rule.” That was
certainly the case for Goethe, and it became more so with advancing age.
Goethe had not found a spiritual home in Protestantism. In retrospect, he
says that his elders tried to instill in him the fear of sin, and it worked for a
while. He was tortured by gloomy scruples. In Leipzig he tore himself free
from them. In lighthearted hours he was even ashamed to have ever been
beset by such scruples, so foreign did they seem to him by then. He had left
behind his strange bad conscience along with the church and the altar.
His attempts at piety, in fact, had little to do with church and altar. It was a
feeling of love and not contrition that attracted him for a while to the spiritual
world of the Herrnhuters and Pietists.
For a short time, his mentor during this phase of his life was Ernst
Theodor Langer, who had become his friend during his last months in
Leipzig. Langer, although not a Herrnhuter himself, had friends from the sect
who lived in Frankfurt, and they tried to draw the young Goethe into their
fraternal community. During their long walks together, Langer himself had
expounded the Gospel to Goethe with such enthusiasm that the young man
was willing to sacrifice many hours to this activity, hours he had meant to
spend with his beloved. I returned his affection most thankfully, writes
Goethe, confessing that under Langer’s influence, he at last found himself
ready to say that what I had until then valued as human, I would now
declare to be divine. This remark refers to the image of Christ in the
Gospels. Until then, Jesus had been for him a teacher of wisdom. Now he is
trying to accept him as God become man, the embodiment of a revelation
that, as was usual with the Pietists, was supposed to speak directly to the
heart and thus be more felt emotionally than grasped intellectually.
For a while, Goethe was attracted to the social sphere of such heartfelt
piety. Because at that time his mother was also drawing closer to the
Herrnhuters, gatherings were held, at her instigation and with his father’s
reluctant approval, in the house on the Hirschgraben. In his letters to Langer,
Goethe is relieved to report that the local Herrnhuters were not so strict in
the matter of clothing, and he is going to meetings and really finding them
to my taste. It is not lost on him, however, that they accept him only warily,
like the fallen angel Abaddon. And they’re right not to trust him, for although
he is making an honest effort to encounter religion with love, the Gospel with
friendship, and the sacred word with veneration, he is still no Christian, but
perhaps will become one yet.
In another letter to Langer, Goethe analyzes the obstacles from a Pietistic
point of view. Pietistic instruction asks that one become free of self-love, for
it impedes God’s influence on the soul. But he writes that this love of self is
precisely his problem; it is still too powerful within him. He cannot forgo it,
because it is part of his actual passion, which is directed more toward
authorship than toward God. The decisive sentence in this self-analysis is
My fiery head, my wit, my efforts at and fairly well-founded hope of
becoming a good author in time are—now that I’m speaking honestly—the
most important obstacles to a complete change of heart. His gift of lively
perception and love of invention make him, in the eyes of the pious, a person
who is still too flustered by his devotion to worldly things.
But he has no wish to shed this devotion to worldly things. He knows that
it is what makes him the kind of poet he wants to be. He loves the light, while
the Pietists prefer the twilight. During a gathering in his father’s house, he
interrupts the service. What’s the point of this darkness! I said, and lit a
chandelier that hung above us. It brightened things up nicely.
Goethe’s interest in Pietism led to skeptical self-examination. It was the
practice of the Pietists to scrutinize the subtle impulses in the soul’s relation
to God. They developed their own terminology, which the young Goethe
adopted and employed with such assurance that he was soon using it as a
flexible tool for expressing the stirrings of his soul, even without pious
intention. For example, he speaks of Offenherzigkeit—openheartedness—
not only in the Pietistic sense of the soul’s openness to God but also for
cordial openness between people. And in his letters to Langer, he describes
romantic matters of the heart—the aftereffects of his separation from
Kätchen—in a play on the Pietistic love for the Sacred Heart. He feels as
cold and calm as if he had completely forgotten her; his soul is still, without
desire. This was how the Pietists usually described the soul’s obduracy
toward Jesus, but Goethe uses these words to describe the extinguishing of
his love for Kätchen. Goethe calls the confessions in his letters to his friend
the history of my heart. In this discourse on love he sometimes means only
Kätchen, sometimes Jesus as well. He has lost Kätchen but perhaps gained
Jesus. Word of success comes in early 1769: You see, dear Langer . . . the
Savior has caught me at last. I ran too far and too fast for him, but he’s
caught me by the hair. He’s still unsure, however. In the same paragraph he
sighs, But worries! worries! Always weakness in faith.
A genuine experience of conversion in the Pietistic sense probably did not
occur. But how lovely it would be to have such an experience. He was able
to portray it without actually having it. He empathizes with and can tune his
language to the Sacred Heart tone. Then there is no need to speak of Jesus
himself, only of his own heart. All his attention was focused on it or, as he
would soon write in The Sorrows of Young Werther, And I hold my little
heart like a sick child, granting it its own way in everything.
In Goethe’s experiments with piety, Langer was his long-distance spiritual
guide. Susanna von Klettenberg, a friend and relative of his mother’s, was
his local mentor. She was in her midforties and lived in her family’s stately
town house, unmarried, looked after by servants, and courted by the
Herrnhuters. She accepted their attentions but still preferred a pious life
according to her own taste. She had once been engaged to the municipal
assessor Ohlenschlager, but they had broken off the engagement because she
was too spiritual and he too worldly. She took Jesus as her inner bridegroom,
enveloped him in a cult of love, and maintained only sisterly—or, in the case
of the young Goethe, maternal—relations with the men close to her. He
writes in Poetry and Truth that her favorite—indeed perhaps her only—
topic of conversation was the moral lessons a person can draw from self-
observation; they were then joined by her religious sentiments, which in a
very charming, even inspired way she considered to be both natural and
supernatural.
 In a section entitled “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” in book 6 of his
novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Goethe would draw a portrait of
this woman, making use of her notebooks and letters and giving the whole
thing the form of an autobiographical report. From this text, we can sense the
quality of the piety that the young Goethe found so attractive.
Susanna von Klettenberg had not sought and found her Savior out of a bad
conscience, nor did theological subtleties play a role. She was quite
interested in natural science and theoretical speculation, but did not find it
necessary to seek a rationale for God. For her, God was simply self-evident,
a feeling of happiness, a revelation of the heart. Jesus lived within her as an
inner friend to whom she was attached by an erotically tinged love. I can
hardly recall a commandment, we read in the “Confessions of a Beautiful
Soul.” Nothing appears to me in the form of a law. It is an instinct that
directs and always leads me aright; I follow my sentiments in freedom and
know as little of restriction as of repentance.
In Susanna von Klettenberg, Goethe found an attractive piety without
sanctimony, living freely by its own resources, with no oppressive dualism
between feeling and moral reason, direct experience and dogmatic principle.
She did not believe in an external divine reality. Instead, she believed in her
own self, which became better in union with Jesus—raised to a higher level
and thereby gaining spontaneity, lust for life, and expressive capability. Her
soul is beautiful because it is not compelled by anything and also has no need
to compel itself. In her, morality is lovely.
What Nietzsche would later call “cross, death, and grave” was central for
the Herrnhuters, but it played only a minor role for her. That is why she calls
herself a Herrnhuter sister in my own way. She certainly believed in
Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross, but she asks, What is belief, anyway?
She answers, To consider the narrative of an event true—how does that
help me? I must be able to take possession of its effects, its consequences.
She speaks of the pull by which her soul is led to a distant beloved. She has
a distinctly physical feeling of liberation, and that becomes a truth that only
later can be cast as articles of faith. If one has felt nothing, however, then one
should not argue about the truth of sentences, even if they are the sacred
sentences of the Gospels. In such dogmatic quarrels, even believers can
lapse into injustice and, in order to defend an outward form, almost destroy
its inner essence.
 Susanna von Klettenberg speaks almost too frequently of the serenity with
which, despite illness, she leads her life and lives her faith. In Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship, it is Wilhelm who sees this serenity, coupled with
the purity of her existence. What shone out from these writings most was
what I would call the purity of existence, not just her own, but of
everything that surrounded her. The independence of her nature and the
impossibility that she would take up anything not in harmony with her
noble, loving spirit.
In retrospect, Goethe wonders what Susanna von Klettenberg, for her part,
found so attractive about him. She took pleasure in what nature had given
me as well as in much that I had acquired. His restlessness, impatience, his
striving and searching, did not repel her, for she interpreted them as
expressions of the fact that he still lacked a reconciled God. He simply
hadn’t found Him yet. What was important for her was that one remain true to
oneself. She definitely did not want anyone to do anything simply for her
sake. What she sensed and appreciated about the young Goethe was his
spirited willfulness. She had no desire to convert him. Faith should come
from within. If he occasionally behaved like a heathen toward her, she
preferred that to the way he was earlier, when I made use of Christian
terminology but never really succeeded at it.
Goethe lacked any consciousness of sinfulness or a need for contrition,
and that kept him at a distance—not from Susanna von Klettenberg but from
the Herrnhuters. He declared his allegiance to Pelagianism, which in the
history of Christian dogma represents a benevolent assessment of human
nature. This was in contradistinction to the idea of regarding people as
essentially corrupt and sinful. The former was more to Goethe’s taste; for
him, both external and internal nature in its grandeur is a delight, not a
burden. He once said to Susanna von Klettenberg that he didn’t know what he
needed to ask God’s forgiveness for. He was not conscious of having
intentionally incurred any guilt and did not feel responsible for anything that
was not volitional.
Goethe was able to take quite a few liberties with her, and she still took
him under her wing. She understood something of his illness, for she herself
had suffered from tubercular pulmonary hemorrhage. She owed her
temporary recovery to the skill of Doctor Johann Friedrich Metz, a strictly
observant Herrnhuter, an inexplicable man with a sly glance, amiable
conversation, and for the rest, abstruse. There was something mysterious
about him, and he was said to possess almost magical powers. He was a
pious man who experimented in the borderland between natural science and
magic.
In early 1769, when Goethe was suffering from a worrisome and rapidly
growing scrofulous swelling on his neck, Metz attended him at night with his
miraculous medicine, a jar containing a dry, crystallized salt that tasted
alkaline and was instantly effective. The swelling subsided, and Goethe
became engrossed in mystical chemical-alchemical books that Metz
recommended to him—Welling, Paracelsus, Basilius Valentinus, Athanasius
Kircher, Helmont, and Starkey. Not only did they introduce him to the almost
forgotten universe of apocryphal wisdom and Neoplatonic and Kabbalistic
lore, but they contained chemical formulas and alchemical recipes. Metz
suggested that it was possible, through study, for his patient to learn how to
prepare the healing treasure himself. These sources would remain important
to Goethe his entire life; in them he found nature presented in a beautiful
conjunction, even if perhaps in a fanciful way. It appealed to his theoretical
curiosity beyond the immediate healing of his illness. The marvelous dream
of making gold also attracted him. All of it would soon flow into the first
drafts of Faust.
While he had edifying conversations with Susanna von Klettenberg, Metz
helped him set up a small laboratory in his sickroom for the production of
marvelous and curious essences. The pious Klettenberg contributed an assay
kiln, flasks and retorts, and a small supply of supposedly efficacious
minerals. Things went along quite cheerfully, since we . . . took more delight
in these mysteries than their revelation could have provided.
As was to be expected, the experiments themselves failed. They heated up
white gravel from the Main River, hoping that the liquefied stones mixed
with certain salts would become the sought-after rare substance—that the
transition from mineral to organic form would be effected. But gravel dust
was all that was precipitated, and nothing productive appeared from which
one could hope to see this virginal earth transition into the maternal
condition. What they had hoped to produce was what later would be called
“Earth Spirit” in Faust.
Despite these disappointments, however, the sick young man was quite
pleased with his forays into religion and chemistry and alchemy. New worlds
had opened up to him. He discovered piety in a beautiful soul and natural
history tinged with mysticism in his experiments.
 Goethe would remain loyal to the study of natural history, but piety in the
form of acceptance of Christian dogma went no further than his experiments
of 1769.

* A play on Goethe’s first name. The “Manikin Johann” was a wooden statue of John the Baptist set up
in front of St. John’s Church in Leipzig on the saint’s feast day, June 24.
 CHAPTER 4

Piety and Kätchen Recede. Strasbourg. Exhilaration.

The Spirit of the Place. Strasbourg Cathedral as a Test of Courage.
“On German Architecture.”
Salzmann. Lersé. The Influential Encounter with Herder.
New Values: Life, Creative Power, Individuality, Expression.
Playing Cards with Herder.

....

IN SEPTEMBER 1769, GOETHE ATTENDED A SYNOD OF

HERRNHUTER congregations in Marienborn, near Frankfurt. The meeting
was a disappointment, and he was repelled by the sectarian spirit of the
“quiet in the land,” as the Herrnhuters called themselves, borrowing a phrase
from Psalm 35. Even a year later, he could still write to Susanna von
Klettenberg of his annoyance that anyone could confuse his own whimsies
and God’s purpose. He realized that he didn’t belong and didn’t want to
belong. He confessed to his spiritual mentor that these pious folk were so
sincerely boring that his own vivacity couldn’t put up with it. Moreover, as
has already been said, he lacked any consciousness of sinfulness. And so he
once again directed the fervor of his feelings toward worldly things. The
theme of emulating Christ disappears even from his letters to the pious
Langer.
But Kätchen Schönkopf also began to fade from Goethe’s thoughts. In a
letter of late 1769, he tells her he is writing only because he dreamed of her
the night before. He asks her not to send him an answer and says he has only
faint memories of her, with as little feeling as if I were recalling a stranger.
That his memories were fading can probably be partly attributed to the fact
that Kätchen had become engaged. Her fiancé was a law student, Christian
Karl Kanne, to whom Goethe himself had introduced the Schönkopfs. Goethe
also intimates in his letter that he will soon be moving.
A month later, the decision to move to Strasbourg was definite. It was his
father’s wish; he had studied there himself. Not only will he go to
Strasbourg, he tells Kätchen, to whom he had intended not to write anymore,
but from there, he says, he will continue on to the wider world—to Paris.
And if he should find a woman to marry, he would set up house at his
parents’ residence: I’ll get 10 rooms, all well and beautifully furnished in
the Frankfurt style . . . I’ll have a house; I’ll have money. My heart, what
more could you want? A wife!
Exhilarated and with his health on the mend, Goethe arrived in Strasbourg
in early April of 1770 and took rooms, first in the inn Zum Geist and then on
the Old Fish Market square. Councilor Johann Friedrich Moritz, a Herrnhuter
intimate of his mother’s, had given him a manual of devotion as a going-away
present, and Goethe opened it on the day of his arrival. He found Bible
verses that spoke so strongly to him that he immediately told his mother about
them. Thirty years later she could still recall them: “Enlarge the place of thy
tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not,
lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes; For thou shalt break forth on the
right hand and on the left.”*
Goethe interpreted these words as confirmation of his premonition of
power and success. He too would break forth and overflow. He felt
expansive, whereas in Leipzig he had been fairly intimidated at first. To
Johann Christian Limprecht, a friend from his Leipzig days who was a
student of theology, poor as a church mouse, and half blind from all his
reading, Goethe sent a louis d’or with a note saying that at present he had an
abundance of cheerfulness and would like to give some away.
His letters written during this period contain long sentences that anticipate
the style of Werther and attempt to capture his surroundings. In a letter to
Katharina Fabricius, a friend of his sister’s, he describes his impressions
during a hike in the countryside outside Strasbourg: As I looked out over the
green valley on my right and the river flowed so grayish and quiet in the
twilight, and on my left the heavy darkness of the beech trees on the
mountain hung over me, as the bright little birds moved quietly and
mysteriously through the bushes around the dark rocks, my heart grew still.
In Werther, he would write, When the dear valley steams around me . . . .
When I feel the scurry of the little world among the blades of grass . . .
nearer to my heart . . . then when twilight falls on my eyes and the world
around me and the sky rest completely in my soul. . . .
Unlike Werther, the letter writer is, at present, not yet in love. His heart is
quiet, he writes, because it is still free: What happiness it is to have a light,
free heart! When one falls in love, however, one is shackled with chains of
flowers, and, for fear of breaking them, one dare not move. He compares
love to a rocking horse, always moving, always working, but never budging
from the spot. Yet he wants to make progress—for now, in the study of law.
He had left Leipzig without a degree and intended to make up for that in
Strasbourg. He would take his exams and graduate. He attended bar reviews
that drilled topics for the exam. He did not find them difficult, especially
since he had already learned much of the material from his father when he
was still a boy. He wrote to Langer, What am I studying? Above all else, the
distinctions and subtleties by which they have made right and wrong fairly
similar. That is, I’m studying to be a doctor of canon and civil law.
On September 27, 1770, Goethe passed the qualifying examination, the
first academic test he had successfully completed. He was now a candidate
for the degree and absolved from attending lectures. The next step was the
composition of a dissertation. Again, he gave himself plenty of time. There
were more important things he wanted to do and things of more significance
that now rained in upon him.
He was not particularly impressed with the town itself at first. Strasbourg
was about the size of Frankfurt—with comparably ancient, winding streets—
and completely different from the recently built, elegant neighborhoods of
Leipzig. The city had belonged to France for almost a century. Goethe
became aware of that immediately upon arrival, when he witnessed Marie
Antoinette and her entourage being received into the city, on her way to Paris
as the fiancée of the French king. There was a popular celebration. On the
meadows beside the Rhine, tents had been pitched that contained exhibits,
including a copy of Raphael’s School of Athens from the Sistine Chapel.
There’s nothing one can say about it, he writes to Langer, but I know this
much: that I will reckon a new epoch in my perception from the moment I
saw it for the first time. There is a profundity of art in such a work. The
festive mood, the hubbub, the surging crowds in the streets and on the
squares, the flags and colorful banners in the windows—it all reminded
Goethe of the imperial coronation he had witnessed in Frankfurt a few years
earlier, but here it was no sentimental reminiscence of former glory but a
brilliant self-representation of the French monarchy, a modern political
power. His pleasure was not unalloyed, however. He felt snatched away and
whirled around by delight and nonsense and struggled to retain his sense of
self. Only now do I begin to think that I too exist. The relation to power
was the same as to love: you were enchanted and lost your head and no
longer knew who you were: When we are touched, our pride is ineffectual.
That’s what our princes and our girls know, and do with us what they will.
The officers and troops stationed here were French, as were the higher
royal officials. The great majority of the population, however, spoke
German, although their dialect was difficult for him to understand. It was “the
most miserable German one can hear, in the coarsest, most disgusting,
hideous pronunciation,” according to Friedrich Christian Laukhard, a writer
who sojourned in Strasbourg a few years after Goethe. But the latter found
the dialect pleasant and later, in the mouth of Friederike Brion, even
supremely lovely. The city swarmed with transient visitors. Everyone
traveling from southern or central Germany to Paris made a stop here, on the
border between two cultures to get a taste of either French or northern
German manners. Eager to get to Paris, Goethe considered Strasbourg a way
station. But it wasn’t long before he came to appreciate the city and its
relaxed and merry way of life. Since there was dancing everywhere—on the
squares, at the inns, and in the gardens of restaurants outside the town—he
took dancing lessons. He also became fond of horseback riding. He had the
money to rent a horse, and on it he roamed the surroundings. Later, the animal
would carry him to his beloved.
The first thing he visited was the cathedral, already regarded in those days
as an attraction to be seen. But in the beginning, it was only the steeple that
interested him—as a challenge. He climbed the 330 steps to reach the top
and triumph over his acrophobia, just as he stood near the drums during
evening tattoo to overcome his sensitivity to noise. All by myself I climbed to
the very top of the cathedral steeple and sat in the so-called Neck (beneath
the Knob or Crown, as they call it) for probably a quarter of an hour, until
I dared step back out into the open air, where you stand on a platform
hardly a cubit square, and with no particularly good handholds, and have
before you the endless countryside, while things in the immediate vicinity
and the decorations hide the church and everything on which and above
which you stand. It’s exactly as if one saw oneself lifted into the air by a
Montgolfier balloon. I often repeated this fear and torture until I became
indifferent to it.
Physical training, tests of courage, conquering his fears—these things
would play a role again later during hikes in the Alps and while Goethe
clambered over the ruins of Rome, where he had to walk across planks
without railings to get a closer look at some of the artwork. Thus even before
he realized the artistic significance of the Strasbourg cathedral, it was an
athletic challenge that he also mentions in “On German Architecture,” his
essay on Erwin von Steinbach, the legendary architect of the great church.
Goethe wrote it shortly after his residency in Strasbourg, and Johann
Gottfried Herder made the text famous when he included it in his own
monograph On German Character and Art.
Kant had declared that in the presence of the sublime, man becomes aware
of his insignificance and learns humility. But only a small shift is necessary
to reveal that the individual himself is also great—for example, when one
realizes that human creativity was necessary to construct such greatness. The
young Goethe—and with him the entire era—used the term genius to refer to
human greatness as a creative force. In genius, which included a measure of
defiance and also of presumptuousness, humanity reached its true height. It
was given to few to beget the idea of Babel in their soul is how Goethe puts
it in his essay on the Strasbourg cathedral and its architect. The cathedral is
just such an idea of Babel, realized in stone, whose challenge you really
meet only if you climb it. Then you no longer belong among the ants
crawling around it, or to the weakling aesthetes. They will always get dizzy
from your colossus. A genius must have a head for heights, as must anyone
who approaches those who possess genius.
For the rest, Goethe was determined to enjoy the free, convivial, animated
way of life offered by Strasbourg. He had a new circle of friends, his fellow
boarders at Mlle Lauth’s near the Fish Market. As in the Schönkopfs’ house
in Leipzig, both students and more mature gentlemen, mostly bachelors,
gathered there. They would prolong their lunch into the afternoon and discuss
matters academic and amorous and, often, political. It struck the young
Goethe as the French way of life, but he had as little taste for political
discussion as he did for the dry Alsatian wine that flowed like a river here.
The authority figure in this circle was the forty-eight-year-old Johann Daniel
Salzmann, head clerk in the office of the surrogate’s court and a journalist of
Enlightenment inclinations. He was worldly wise, amiable, and well-
connected to the intellectual life of Strasbourg. Through him, Goethe was
able to establish contacts, and the two men carried on intense discussions of
philosophy and religion. Goethe has Salzmann in mind when he paints for
Susanna von Klettenberg the portrait of a levelheaded antitype to the Pietists:
a man of much good sense and extensive experience who has always
viewed the world with sangfroid and believes he has discovered that we
have been put upon this earth especially to be useful to it, and that we can
make ourselves capable of that, to which end religion is of some help.
Like Behrisch and Langer in Leipzig, Salzmann was Goethe’s mentor in
Strasbourg. Goethe tells Salzmann that he considers himself a person of
genius, but one in need of judicious direction from an older friend. He calls
himself a weather vane. He will write to Salzmann from Sesenheim† about
his love for Friederike Brion, and those letters are the few pieces of direct
evidence we have of the affair. After his time in Strasbourg, Goethe
maintained contact with Salzmann for a while. In the end, it was the older
man who allowed the connection to peter out. His younger friend’s pursuit of
genius was probably too far removed from the reality of surrogate’s court,
where Salzmann spent his days protecting widows and orphans. Write to me
soon and don’t consider it a sin to write more often, Goethe urges in his last
letter to Salzmann.
Goethe made another friend at Mlle Lauth’s table, a theology student his
age named Franz Lersé. He would later borrow his name for the doughty
Lerse in Götz von Berlichingen. In the play, Lerse is the steadfast friend, the
paragon of loyalty and upright sentiments, and that is how the real Lersé is
described in Poetry and Truth. (He wrote and pronounced his name with the
accent, which makes it sound less than doughty.) In Goethe’s autobiography,
Lersé appears as someone who always knew how to remind us in his dry,
humorous way what we owed to ourselves and others and how we should
behave in order to live in peace with our fellow man as long as possible.
Goethe needed to be reminded, since a certain irritability remained from
the illness he had survived. Lersé helped him regain his balance. A talented
fencer, Lersé was good at refereeing physical and mental contests. He
remained neutral and intervened only if someone behaved unfairly. Artful and
quick-witted, he was feared as a debater and liked to experiment and play
with theses and arguments. Although not a law student, he declared himself
willing to play the role of opponent when Goethe was preparing to defend
his dissertation, and Lersé was able to argue his friend into a corner.
 An encounter with especially far-reaching consequences was with Johann
Gottfried Herder. Only five years older than Goethe, Herder was already a
famous man and liked to parade his superiority by playing the grand seigneur.
Like his other friends, the young Goethe at first did not challenge Herder’s
authority. He called his acquaintance (he avoids the word “friendship”) with
Herder the most significant event of his time in Strasbourg. In book 10 of
Poetry and Truth he especially recalls their first meeting, when at the
entrance to the Zum Geist inn he caught sight of a man about to climb the
stairs. He vividly remembers the way the fellow had casually stuffed the long
tails of his black silk coat into his pants pocket. He was so elegantly dressed
that one might have mistaken him for an aristocratic abbé. Herder was
friendly, but Goethe soon found himself cast in the role of a pupil being
reprimanded, a role he could not shake during the months he spent in
Strasbourg. It was a new experience for him; up to then, the older and more
mature people he had attached himself to had gently sought to mold him, and
perhaps he had even been spoiled by their indulgence. Things were different
with Herder, however. From him one could never expect approval, no
matter how one behaved. Goethe put up with it because Herder filled his
head with new ideas.
The older man had come to Strasbourg to undergo a painful operation on
his lacrimal sacs by the famous surgeon Johann Friedrich Lobstein. The
bottom of the sac had to be cut open and a hole bored into the bone behind it.
A horse hair would then be inserted into the hole to keep it from growing
closed so that a new tear duct could form. Goethe forced himself to attend
this horrific operation and was able to be of service and help to such a
worthy man in several ways. Herder, who bore the torture with fortitude,
was forgiven his often moody and critical episodes.
Famous and frequently attacked for his writings on literary history,
philosophy, and theology, Herder had given up his position as cathedral
preacher in Riga in 1769 and had gone to sea aboard a merchant ship to
escape the aggravations of his office and of the literary scene. While storms
raged around the ship, he noted down that he had been living with “crippled
senses” and that the time had finally come for a great exercise in loosening
things up. Pregnant with projects and plans, Herder disembarked in France
and continued on to Paris, where he met the skeptic Diderot. He was treated
with respect in the salons, but people found his ideas exaggerated and
unclear. Back in Germany, he was offered a position as tutor and travel
companion for the depressive son of the prince-bishop of Lübeck on a tour
through Europe. Although far below the level of his ambition, the assignment
was well paid, and so he accepted it with some misgiving. It was in this state
of mind, dissatisfied and bursting with ideas, that he encountered the young
Goethe.
Herder was certainly susceptible to the beguiling charms of the younger
man’s personality—Goethe’s candor, eagerness to learn, self-confidence,
unself-consciousness, inventiveness, talent for improvisation, and playful and
carefree nature. And yet, a great reservation remained. Herder wrote to his
fiancée, Karoline Flachsland, in Darmstadt, “Goethe is really a good person,
but extremely light—much too light and sparrow-like.”
As Goethe’s first major works, especially Götz and Werther, began to
appear one after the other, Herder usually had a critical and disparaging
reaction ready for Goethe, or was at best patronizing. To others, however, he
expressed respect and even admiration. Again and again, Goethe surprised
Herder with his published works, about which he would remain mum while
writing them. He explains why in Poetry and Truth. Whenever he was
attracted to certain themes and objects, he did not want to be influenced by
Herder’s impulse to criticize, for no inclination . . . is so strong that it
could maintain itself in the long run against the negative comments of
outstanding men whom one trusts. Goethe here refers to Götz and especially
to Faust, a story that by the end of his time in Strasbourg was already
ringing and humming in multiple tones in his head.
While Herder lay in bed recovering from his operation, Goethe visited
him twice every day, in the morning and in the evening. If Herder was in a
state of inner discord—attracted by Goethe’s brash genius yet also critical—
it was no different with Goethe. On the one hand he felt great affection and
veneration for Herder, but on the other also discontent with the patronizing
and critical way he treated him. Nevertheless, he spent entire days with him
and gradually got used to his chiding and reproving as he came to
appreciate more each day the breadth of his knowledge and depth of his
insights.
What were those insights? They were what gave birth to a new way of
thinking in the last third of the eighteenth century.
The Enlightenment had developed its image of man from the starting point
of human reason, as if it were the strongest, most decisive faculty. As a
result, society and morality were intellectualized and viewed with an eye to
their utility. Like a German Rousseau, Herder rebelled against this line of
thought. He aimed to loosen sclerotic systems, dismantle their conceptual
structures, and take hold of life, understood as the unity of intellect and
nature, reason and feeling, rational norm and creative freedom. Reason,
Herder once wrote, is always a “later reason.” It operates with concepts of
causality and is thus incapable of grasping the creative process, which does
not proceed causally. Herder is searching for a language that clings to the
mysterious emotion and ambiguity of life, a language that often makes use of
metaphors instead of concepts, seeks empathy rather than structure. Much
remains vague, suggestive, intuitive. The floating, rambling nature of
Herder’s thought and language offended rigorously conceptual contemporary
thinkers like Kant. But not Goethe. And ultimately, Herder’s philosophy of
life inspired the cult of genius in the Sturm und Drang movement.
In the idea of the genius, a newly awakened and self-confident generation
found a way to challenge the hierarchical, rigid, circumscribed world of
bourgeois and courtly decorum. O my friends! writes Werther, why does the
river of genius so seldom break forth, the flood tide so seldom rush in. Petit
bourgeois obsequiousness, breadwinning, the entire machinery of society in
which one feels like a tiny cog or screw, and added to that, a dry rationalism
with no respect for secrets—the younger generation was disgusted by it all.
They were devoted to intellectual freedom and, above all, the spirit of
beauty, but were forced to face mundane daily life. Goethe declared that
Shakespeare, to whose work Herder had introduced him, had overcome
artistic paralysis by daring to chase all noble souls from the Elysium of so-
called good taste, where in tedious twilight they drift and yawn through a
shadow life.
In the German Sturm und Drang, only the artist was classified as a genius,
whereas in England and France, politicians, scientists, and men of fashion
could also count as geniuses. Herder’s idea of the artist as the epitome of
genius has had a long-lasting effect, right down to the present.
When irrational creative power was ascendant, it followed that art need
not imitate a prescribed, universally valid reality. Art became an expression
of individuality. From that point on, art would not just imitate life but be
itself the expression of an individual life. Instead of mimesis, poiesis now
reigned, and that involved a normative shift. It was no longer a question of
conforming to prescribed, eternally valid patterns and conventions.
Originality was what was wanted now. It was a point of pride to be an
original genius, or at least be regarded as one.
And so an enormous artistic self-confidence took hold, a confidence that
found bold expression in Goethe’s poem “Prometheus”: I sit here, forming
men / In my own image. An exaggerated individualism, a powerful sense of
self, is at work here. And yet Herder had also turned his philosophy of life
toward the collective. The single person, shaping himself into an individual,
is and remains the center of significance. But the life the individual feels is
also alive in a community, which Herder imagines as a sort of larger
individual. For Herder, life is ordered in concentric circles, from the family
to the clan, the people, the nation, to all of humankind. He speaks of the
peoples of the earth as the “folk spirits” that thrive in peaceful proximity like
various plants in the garden of humanity, contributing to the richness of human
diversity. The point of unity of a so-called folk spirit lies not in its intellect
but deeper, in its emotions. What applies to an individual also applies to the
culture of an entire people: its cultural expression is an end in itself, the
awakening to a higher, enhanced life. There is no reason, Herder declares, to
look down on a nation’s folk poetry. Original geniuses should learn from the
folk, listen to songs and folktales. And so they listened, collected, and
sometimes put into circulation ancient folklore that wasn’t actually genuine.
The epic poetry of “Ossian,” which had great currency among the Sturm und
Drang writers, was attributed to an ancient Scottish bard but was actually
written by their contemporary James Macpherson. Herder himself published
Goethe’s poem “Little Heath Rose” in one of his collections of folk songs.
Goethe had no objection, for he had developed a taste for such things and
collected folk songs in Alsace that he passed on to Herder.
Herder gave Goethe a wealth of ideas and suggestions. In retrospect,
however, Goethe emphasizes that in many cases the groundwork had already
been laid, the ideas were already fermenting within him. In any event, he now
was in a happy position . . . to complete everything I had thought, learned,
acquired, and attach it to something more lofty. Thus Goethe describes the
process by which his intuitions and obsessions come into their own in the
larger intellectual sphere. The time was ripe for what he desired and what he
was capable of doing.
His relationship to Herder would later be weighed down by heavy
conflicts and end with a complete rift shortly before Herder’s death.
Goethe’s look back on this friend is thus not completely sunny, and he admits
that sometimes the only way he could put up with Herder was to restrict
contact to playing cards with him.

* Isaiah 54:2–3.
† Goethe’s spelling of the Alsatian village Sessenheim has become so entrenched in the history of
German literature that I have preserved it here.—Trans.
 CHAPTER 5

Jung-Stilling. The Aperçu, or Sudden Inspiration.

The Psychology of Awakening and Creativity.
Friederike and the Romance Novel in Sesenheim.
Not On to Paris.
The Shakespeare Speech. The Diminished Doctorate.
Leaving Strasbourg.

....

ALTHOUGH A THEOLOGIAN BY TRAINING, HERDER OPENED up a

world to the young Goethe in which religion proper played almost no role.
For Herder, man was a being animated by spirit, a spirit he considered to be
both man’s inner nature and the living principle of all nature. This was more
congenial to Goethe than the Pietists’ conception of man as the child of God
or the Herrnhuters’ devotion to Jesus. Such piety no longer spoke to him, but
he continued to be impressed by men who were guided by powerful religious
experience: converts with no burning need to convert others to confirm their
belief, pious men with no missionary zeal or dogmatic assertiveness. He
admired inspired individualism in matters of belief and found sympathy with
men who sought their salvation on their own.
Just such a man turned up in the Strasbourg circle in the summer of 1770.
Nine years older than Goethe, Johann Heinrich Jung was a former tailor and
schoolteacher who had come to Strasbourg to study medicine, with the goal
of perfecting his skill at removing cataracts, a procedure he had already been
practicing. Goethe felt immediately drawn to this gentle yet energetic man.
He had asked him to relate his life story and found it so riveting that he
encouraged Jung to write it down. The resulting autobiography appeared in
several volumes between 1777 and 1817; the author added “Stilling” to his
name to suggest that, though he kept his distance from Pietistic and
Herrnhuter circles, he counted himself among the “quiet in the land” (die
Stillen im Lande). An autodidact who had worked his way up from the
humblest of circumstances (his father was a charcoal burner, village
schoolmaster, and tailor in Westphalia), Jung-Stilling lacked money or long-
term patrons, but was inwardly buttressed by an almost childlike trust in
God. He reminded Goethe of his mentor Susanna von Klettenberg, although
that well-to-do aristocrat was not as dependent on God’s help. Jung-
Stilling’s trust in God helped him in ways that were sometimes so miraculous
Goethe was still impressed when writing about him decades later: The
elemental part of his energy was an indestructible belief in God and the
unmediated help that flowed from Him, which was evidently confirmed by
uninterrupted provision against and unfailing rescue from all want and
every evil.
For Goethe, Jung-Stilling demonstrated that trust in God could mobilize
one’s own powers. In that sense, trust in God represented a kind of higher
trust in oneself, one that involved not only the empirical self but also an
elevated, enhanced self that felt secure in God. Jung-Stilling was an active,
hands-on person but still resembled a sleepwalker, as Goethe writes, whom
one must not call out to, lest he plunge down from the heights of belief that
give his life security.
For his part, Jung-Stilling depicts how Goethe made certain that the
company at table would not make fun of him and his piety, although Goethe
belonged to the “savages” and insouciantly lived out his “free existence.”
Jung-Stilling similarly kept himself in check, avoided becoming an
annoyance, and was left in peace “except that Goethe occasionally would
roll his eyes toward me.” He exercised undisputed “reign over the table
without seeking it.”
What was it about Jung-Stilling that so fascinated Goethe? It was not his
confidence that everything in his life, both good and bad, was portioned out
by God. Such divine pedagogy seemed presumptuous to Goethe, who by this
time no longer believed in a God who took a personal interest in directing
and overseeing one’s life. Such a conviction, he writes, was neither pleasant
nor beneficial for him. It must have been something else that attracted him.
He found in Jung-Stilling an intellectual experience, elevated to the realm of
religion, that he calls an aperçu; a weighty concept in Goethe’s late
philosophy, he defines it, in Poetry and Truth, in connection with Jung-
Stilling’s character: to become aware of a great axiom, which is always the
operation of an intellect imbued with genius. He continues, Such an aperçu
gives its discoverer the greatest joy because it prefigures the eternal in an
original way. It needs no period of time to be convincing, but springs
complete and perfect from the moment.
When a flash of insight, an idea, or a sudden intuition illuminates some
relation until then obscure and puzzling, making it instantly clear and evident,
that is what Goethe calls an aperçu. At first he uses it primarily for insights
about the natural world. In science, everything depends on what we call an
aperçu, becoming aware of what actually underlies appearances, he writes
in the History of the Theory of Color.
To Goethe, there are three major aspects of the aperçu as an extraordinary
perceptual event.
Its true object is not some random or inconsequential phenomenon but one
that grants insight into an entire complex, into the eternal. Though the object
may be individual and concrete, its symbolic transparency also allows a
glimpse of the eternal harmony of existence. Goethe, for example, will
interpret the discovery of the intermaxillary bone in humans (which he also
describes as a sudden insight) as a glimpse into the total interconnectedness
of nature, since this bone, which had been discovered in animals but not yet
in man, served as proof of a continuous transition between man and animal,
proof that nature makes no sudden leaps. Thus the intermaxillary bone
becomes the object of an aperçu: a totality suddenly revealed in a single
thing.
Vis-à-vis the subject, the aperçu leaves the person feeling transformed, as
if liberated from his isolation and elevated into an awareness of a totality. It
is a perception that allows a presentiment of his similarity to God. He has
been touched by a revelation, not of a transcendent God, as in the Christian
religion, but rather owing its existence to the inspired perception of nature.
Its effect is nonetheless similar to the way one can be reoriented and
transformed by a relationship to God.
The third aspect relates to the sudden, instantaneous nature of the entire
process. All at once one sees things anew, looks at the world with new eyes
and experiences a turning point in one’s life. From then on, everything is
transformed. Life has been interrupted and there is a dramatic sense of before
and after. While an aperçu is conventionally understood as nothing more than
a trenchant turn of phrase, for Goethe it implies an existential shift in the
wake of an inspiration.
Goethe calls an aperçu with these three aspects—experience of a totality,
transformation of the subject, and suddenness—an operation of cognitive
genius.
If Goethe was fascinated by Jung-Stilling—though he did not share his
childlike relationship to God, his divine pedagogy—it was because he
sensed the operation of cognitive genius in this pious man. Jung-Stilling had
experienced a wholeness—namely, the God of the Bible: his inner man had
been completely transformed. And it all happened suddenly, as in an aperçu.
The young Goethe, who, as we have seen, senses something of genius in
himself and soon will live through his own epoch of the cult of genius, sees
in Jung-Stilling a type of religious genius. Jung-Stilling also draws life from
an aperçu, which, however, has been transported from the cognitive to the
religious realm. What the pious call awakening, conversion, or rebirth
fascinates Goethe not because he himself is still pious but because it helps
him understand the psychology of genius, to grasp what it is that also drives
him, this sudden inspiration that shines a whole new light on life and
transforms the inner man.
Jung-Stilling lived among his friends and acquaintances in Strasbourg as
such a person, one who has experienced a transformational aperçu. He was
open and talkative whenever he encountered sympathy and understanding, but
withdrawn when unappreciated. If others teased him, Goethe would leap to
his defense. Goethe visited him, writes Jung-Stilling (who tells his life story
in the third person), “grew fond of him, became his brother and friend, and
under all circumstances endeavored to show his affection to Stilling.”
Turning to those who would not have expected Goethe to have such a friend,
Jung-Stilling adds, “It is a shame that so few are acquainted with the heart of
this excellent man!”
Goethe was generally helpful to his friend in practical matters, and when
Jung-Stilling left Strasbourg suddenly in the summer of 1770 to hurry to his
deathly ill fiancée in Westphalia, Goethe lent him money. When he returned,
his first thought was to visit Goethe, who greeted him cordially and renewed
the introduction to his circle of friends. Since the summer of 1771, in
addition to Lersé and Salzmann, it now also included Jakob Michael
Reinhold Lenz. Jung-Stilling’s autobiography goes on to say that “Stilling’s
enthusiasm for religion did not keep him from also feeling cordial affection
for men [such as Goethe] who were more freethinking than he, as long as they
were not scoffers.”
Johann Konrad Engelbach and Friedrich Leopold Weyland too belonged to
the company around Mlle Lauth’s table, and Goethe went on horseback rides
with them into the surrounding countryside. Engelbach, a few years older
than Goethe, had also come to Strasbourg to finish his uncompleted bar
examination as quickly as possible. Unlike Goethe, he had done so in only
five weeks, by June 1770, and turned over his lecture notes to his fellow
student to use in preparation for the exam. Goethe and Weyland escorted
Engelbach on his journey home to Saarbrücken, a trip that led Goethe to
Sesenheim, where his love affair with the pastor’s daughter Friederike Brion
would begin. Weyland was a distant relative of the Brion family and
introduced Goethe to them. He was a medical student and later had a practice
in Frankfurt. He never forgave Goethe for his behavior to Friederike and
avoided any further contact with him.
Goethe narrates the Sesenheim idyll in Poetry and Truth as a self-
contained novella, with the hint that it wasn’t so idyllic after all, because of
its dissonant ending. The lover leaves his beloved, and the farewell was
perhaps different from that in the poem from the spring of 1771: You left, and
I stood looking down, / And watched you go with tear-blurred eye. Or the
other way around, as in a later version: I left, and you stood looking down /
And watched me go with tear-blurred eye. About the end of the idyll, Poetry
and Truth notes laconically, Those were painful days whose recollection
did not remain with me.
It is not necessary to retell in detail the pretty story Goethe relates in
Poetry and Truth, but a few aspects of it are noteworthy. Goethe and
Weyland arrived in Sesenheim on a beautiful summer day, the former
pretending to be a poor student of theology. He loved such masquerades,
traveling incognito, playing hide-and-seek, and continued to do so later,
during his trips to the Harz Mountains and Italy.
At the Brion home he even appeared in two different disguises. At first, he
was a poor theology student. When he realized he was falling for Friederike
after their first walk together in the moonlight, he fled the house the next
morning and in the neighboring village disguised himself as a village lad
named Georg, which caused even more confusion. The romantic affair with
Friederike was soon in full swing: games of forfeits, cheerful socializing,
walks, languid summer days, and starry nights all played a part. Her parents
noticed something was afoot and were willing to let the couple continue
along for a while in such an indeterminate state. Pastor Brion discussed his
plans for the renovation of the parsonage with his guest. It reminded Goethe
of his own father’s passion for remodeling. The days passed. On Friederike’s
first appearance: At that moment she really appeared at the door; and truly
the dearest star rose into this rural heaven. The lover on Friederike: Her
nature, her form never appeared as lovely as when she was walking along
a raised footpath; the grace of her demeanor seemed to compete with the
flowers of the field and the irrepressible cheerfulness of her face with the
blue of the sky. There is a presentiment of the end: Such a youthful
inclination, conceived by chance, can be compared to a cannonball fired at
night. It climbs in a gentle, shining line, mixes with the stars, even seems
to pause among them a moment, whereupon, however, it describes the same
trajectory, only reversed, downward, at last bringing ruin where its path
ends.
Why this ending? Why doesn’t the lover keep the promise he appears to
have made, if not explicitly, then certainly by his behavior? The reasons a
young woman pulls back always seem valid, but never those of a man,
according to Poetry and Truth.
Goethe presents the story in retrospect as if it had been clear to him from
the start that premature inclinations cannot promise lasting success. Isn’t
this a projection of adult sangfroid back into the beginnings of youthful love?
But let us recall what the young Goethe wrote to his schoolmate Moors about
his love for Kätchen Schönkopf: The virtuous heart of my S. is my
guarantee that she will never leave me except when duty and necessity bid
us part. Even then, love’s tempest of emotion was undercut by a sober,
realistic awareness: what I am getting myself into and experiencing at this
moment will not stand the test of reality. The usual course of things will part
us, and perhaps that is for the best. . . . The young man seems to be aware that
he does not yet want to commit himself to a lasting relationship. So it was
with Kätchen, and so it obviously was in his relationship with Friederike.
We have only a few remnants of their romance. The draft of a letter from
Goethe to Friederike has been preserved, as well as a few letters to
Salzmann from the early summer of 1771, written during his several weeks at
the parsonage in Sesenheim. Those and the poems he sent to Friederike are
all there is.
 These documents reveal the lover’s dramatic mood swings. In one he
compares himself to a weather vane turned by every shift in the wind. The
world is more beautiful . . . than I have seen in a long time. Then an abrupt
shift. He senses that one is not a whit happier when he gets what he wished
for. He has conquered Friederike, but that no longer satisfies him. Perhaps
Friederike has noticed, for the dear child continues to be sick with sadness
and that gives the whole affair a skewed appearance. This is followed by
the revealing comment, Not even taking into account conscia mens,
unfortunately not recti,* that accompanies me, a reference to the passage in
Virgil’s Aeneid that depicts how, with the help of Juno and Venus, Aeneas
makes Dido fall in love with him while knowing he will leave her. He
therefore cannot have a clear conscience. Obviously, at this point Goethe
knew he would leave Friederike, though she didn’t know it yet. Two years
later, Goethe would send his Götz to Salzmann and ask him to forward it to
Friederike, remarking that it would be a consolation to her that Weisling’s
betrayal of Maria in the play is avenged.
In his disguise, Goethe showed his skill at playing a double role . . . one
real and one ideal. He wished to lead a life like literature, which can be
more incisive and meaningful than life itself. This making life into literature,
the youthful urge to compare oneself to figures in novels, was one of his
most venial attempts to acquire something higher. In Poetry and Truth he
confesses not only that he is modeling his presentation of the entire
Sesenheim episode on Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, but also
that he had lived out many of the situations in that novel, from which Herder
had been giving him and his friends enchanting readings at about the same
time. When he was introduced to Sesenheim and the pastor’s family, it
seemed that he had been transported from this fictitious world into a
similar, real one. The family, their heartfelt intimacy, and especially the
mother and daughters seemed to him just as honest, cheerful, unpretentious,
and wise as in the novel, if fortunately not as tested by suffering. There is a
masquerade in the novel as well. The family’s benefactor, the uncle of their
villainous landlord Mr. Thornhill, conceals himself behind the figure of the
quirky Mr. Burchell—quite possibly what gave Goethe the idea for his own
disguise. He would also have liked to see himself as the benefactor of this
family, though after he left Friederike, that was certainly not what he was.
Only the quiet beauty of his poems remains, poems faithfully preserved by
Friederike.
 These verses represent the real birth of Goethe as a lyric poet, free of the
rococo and anacreontic elements of his Leipzig years: no more conventional
dalliance, pretentious maxims, or pedagogical posturing, no stereotyped
languishing or flirting. One detects the influence of Herder: naturalness,
powerfully subjective expressiveness, insouciant delight in singing out his
song, reflectiveness without over-intellectualizing, simplicity, and unaffected
symbolism. In his Sesenheim songs, some of which were first published in
Johann Georg Jacobi’s journal Iris in 1775, Goethe appears even younger
than in the early poetry from his Leipzig days. They are definitely occasional
poems, originally addressed to Friederike and sent to her from Strasbourg.
Some he may also have written down in Sesenheim, improvising with a light
touch, as was his habit. Some were intended to be sung on the spot, “May
Day,” for example:

How brightly nature

Shines for me!
Now beams the sun!
Now smiles the lea!
...
You bless with beauty
The dewy field,
In a haze of blossoms
The burgeoning world!

O maiden, maiden,
How I love thee!
Your eyes are flashing!
How you love me!

They were separated during the winter of 1770–71. The lover looks back
on their first meeting and their first game of forfeits:

I love the angel, she feels the same,

I won her heart in a parlor game
And she is mine now, heart and soul.
Fate, you turned to joy my sorrow.
 Now let today be like tomorrow
And teach me to deserve her love.

He had promised another visit in the spring of 1771, and Friederike must
have sent him frequent reminders:

You golden children, I’ll be there soon.

In vain the winter seeks to lock us
Up within our heated room.
We’ll sit ourselves down by the fire,
Regale ourselves a thousandfold
And love each other like the angels.
There we shall weave us little wreaths,
And make each other small bouquets
And be like little children.

As spring approached, he sent her a painted ribbon and enclosed a poem that
again sounds somewhat anacreontic:

Little leaves and little blossoms

Strewn for me with gentle hand
By good and youthful gods of springtime
Dallying on this airy band

Zephyr, take it on your pinions

Wrap it round my dear one’s dress.

It is unfortunate that we don’t know exactly when he wrote the famous

poem that in the later versions of 1789 and 1810 bears the title “Welcome
and Farewell,” for it connects meeting and parting so intimately:

My heart was beating—quick, to horse,

Like a hero setting off to fight!
Already evening cradled earth,
And on the mountains hung the night.
 The mist already clothed the oak tree,
So like a giant looming there,
Where darkness peered out of the bushes,
Its hundred eyes were one black stare.

The moon upon its hill of clouds

Shone through the haze, so dismal, drear;
The quiet wings of wind were beating
Ghastly whispers in my ear;
The dark night spawned a thousand monsters—
Yet courage grew two thousand ways;
My spirit—a consuming fire,
My heart—dissolving in the blaze.

I saw you, and the gentle joy

Flowed from your sweet gaze to me.
My heart—completely at your side,
And every breath I drew for thee.
Fair weather, rosy-pink with spring
Lay upon your lovely face,
And tenderness for me—ye gods!
I, undeserving, hoped to gain.

The farewell, how distressed and gloomy!

From your glances spoke your heart.
What love there was in your sweet kisses,
What joy there was, and oh, what hurt!
You left, and I stood looking down,
And watched you go with tear-blurred eye;
And yet, what joy! to have been loved,
And loving, oh God, what a joy.

Almost nine years later, during his second journey to Switzerland, in late
September 1779, Goethe again visited the Brion family in Sesenheim. He
saw the coach that he had not very successfully painted a decade earlier. He
found copies of the songs he had contributed. The neighbors were summoned
to see him, including the barber who had always shaved him. As he writes
with some satisfaction, they all had vivid recollections of him. After this
second visit, he left Sesenheim with the feeling that now he again can return
in thought to that little corner of the world with contentment and live in
peace with the reconciled spirits of these people within him. Whether that
was really the case is anyone’s guess. Friederike never married, and after her
death her sister, with whom she had spent the last years of her life, burned
Goethe’s letters to her.
As in Leipzig, Goethe made no plans to complete his studies swiftly. He
was happy in Strasbourg. It was not only the affair in Sesenheim and Herder
that kept him there, but also the beautiful countryside and the pleasant way of
life. Originally he had thought of using Strasbourg only as a jumping-off
place for Paris, the world capital of culture. He had probably said nothing to
his parents about that, and in the end he gave up the plan precisely because of
his experiences in the borderland between the two cultures. In Poetry and
Truth one can feel his suppressed annoyance and sense of insult at what he
felt to be arrogant rejection and snubs by some Frenchmen. Goethe read
French and spoke it fluently, even if, as he himself admits, his facility was
much more motley than that of any other foreigner, patched together from
scraps of reading and idioms overheard from theater people, domestics, and
officials. He thought he was completely at home in the language but was
forced to realize that at every turn, he was being corrected. The Frenchmen in
Strasbourg, at least the officers and higher officials, treated him courteously
at first. But when they noticed that he was not satisfied with the role of guest
in a foreign culture, they started to correct and improve his French. He felt
humiliated. When he was in conversation and had something interesting to
say, he wanted people to respond, not make petty corrections. He became
convinced that, at best, one might be tolerated by the French but would never
be accepted into the bosom of the church of the one true language. His
injured pride made him critical. Wasn’t French culture perhaps overvalued,
had it not become old and sclerotic, its formal traditions ossified? Herder
encouraged him in this view, one that had already been expressed a decade
earlier by Lessing in a critique of the French theater. In Poetry and Truth
Goethe writes, We thus found ourselves on the border of France, suddenly
entirely free and devoid of French character. We found their way of life too
set and too genteel, their literature cold, their criticism destructive, their
philosophy abstruse and yet inadequate, so that we had reached the point
of devoting ourselves at least experimentally to raw nature.
In his Sesenheim songs, Goethe had hit this natural tone exceptionally
well. Encouraged by Herder, he began to collect folk songs in the Alsatian
countryside. He sent them to Herder with a note saying, Until now, however,
I’ve carried them next to my heart like a treasure; any girls who want to
find favor in my eyes must learn to sing them.
Lest nature in their poetry became too raw, they took Shakespeare—whose
star was just beginning to rise in Germany—as their model. Goethe had first
read him in Leipzig in Christoph Martin Wieland’s prose translation. Under
Herder’s tutelage in Strasbourg, Goethe and his friends began to make a cult
of him.
While still there, Goethe got the idea of celebrating the revered dramatist
on his name day, following the example of the English actor David Garrick,
who had initiated the first such festival in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769.
Goethe drafted a celebratory speech, but he was back in Frankfurt on
October 14, 1771, the appointed day, so he summoned a few friends (whom
his father had to feed) and read his encomium of Shakespeare to them.
Precisely because it has hardly anything informative to say about
Shakespeare or his work, this speech provides insight into Goethe’s
enthusiasm for the English playwright. For him, Shakespeare was a symbol
of a new kind of writing and thinking. He saw in him a reflection of his own
ambitions. We have within ourselves the germ of merits we can appreciate.
In constantly varied turns of phrase sprinkled with exclamation points, the
speech evokes the pleasure of life and criticizes judicious folk who burden
life with trouble for themselves and others. Shakespeare is mobilized against
them as someone who with gigantic strides takes the measure of life’s
enormous riches. Whoever follows this great wayfarer will know the world,
and himself, in an enhanced form: I vividly felt my existence expanded by an
eternity.
Goethe was referring both to life and to art: to the fact that Shakespeare
was said, for instance, to have swept aside the rule of the three unities
promulgated by the French theater. The unity of place—imprisoning timidity.
The unities of action and time—onerous shackles on our imagination. The
liberation from such rules will find a mighty reverberation in Götz von
Berlichingen, which Goethe was already contemplating while writing this
speech. It is there in the play’s saber-rattling diction. He is in a feud with
traditional theater, he declares, and fulminates against French adaptations of
Greek antiquity: What are you doing with that Greek armor, little
Frenchman? It’s too big for you and too heavy. Against the artificiality of
French figures he invokes Shakespeare’s vigorous characters: And I cry
nature! Nature! Nothing as natural as Shakespeare’s men and women.
Goethe’s tutelary spirit Prometheus is already mentioned in this speech.
Shakespeare vied with Prometheus, copied his humans feature by feature,
but in colossal size.
He praises and polemicizes in powerful, wild, and vague words. One
passage characterizes Shakespeare’s dramatic art so succinctly and aptly,
however, that Goethe often returned to it later: Shakespeare’s theater is a
beautiful cabinet of curiosities in which the history of the world flows past
our eyes along the unseen thread of time. . . . His plays all revolve around
that hidden point (which no philosopher has ever seen or determined)
where the uniqueness of our self, our supposed free will, collides with the
necessary course of the world. Hegel could not have said it better half a
century later.
With this speech, Goethe wanted above all to rouse himself to creativity. It
was more difficult for him to pull himself together for the examination for
doctor of law that he still had not taken. I lacked real knowledge and no
internal direction urged me to that subject matter.
If he lacked internal direction, it would have to come from without: his
father was pressing him. In the early summer of 1771, Goethe finally wrote
his dissertation. As his topic he chose the relationship between state and
church. He intended to resolve the question of whether the state was
permitted to determine the religion of its subjects. Since the dissertation
itself has not survived, we can only extrapolate from Poetry and Truth,
where Goethe gives a twofold answer. He argues that the state may establish
the mandatory public rituals of the religious communities for their respective
clergy and laity but that it ought not attempt to control what each individual
thinks, feels, or meditates in private. He thus grants the state dominion over
external, but not internal, religious life. Subjective religiosity should remain
free. He owed that much to Susanna von Klettenberg, Langer, and Jung-
Stilling. He also of course claimed freedom for his own recent experiment
with piety, but without letting the least trace of it appear in his dissertation.
Although he defends a protected space for the affairs of a domestic,
heartfelt, homey religion, he seems to have adopted so little of the heartfelt
and homey aspects of the Christian religion that the dissertation was
regarded as a scandal by the Strasbourg theological faculty. A professor
named Elias Stöber wrote to a friend, “Herr Goethe has played a role here
that has made him an excessively witty half-scholar, and not just suspected of
being, but well-known to be, a demented despiser of religion. It is almost
universally believed that in his upper story he must have a screw either loose
or already missing.” Another professor suspected that the young man had
puffed himself up with “some of Herr von Voltaire’s spiteful opinions,”
having claimed that “Jesus Christ was not the founder of our religion” but
rather “scholars using his name” in order to facilitate a “sound politics.”
The dean of the faculty asked Goethe either to withdraw his dissertation or
publish it without the university’s blessing. The university simply would not
accept the responsibility for printing it. In Poetry and Truth Goethe claims
not to have cared; that he was still reluctant to make anything of his publicly
available. He sent the dissertation to his father, who prepared a copy and
carefully filed it away. It was eventually lost. His father was obviously
disappointed by the course of events. It could not have pleased him that, after
the failure of the dissertation, his son was satisfied with a licentiate’s degree.
For this less prestigious degree Goethe needed only to propose and defend a
few simple theses—child’s play for him. He could have purchased a
doctorate, but he declined to do so. The licentiate was generally regarded as
the equivalent of a doctorate, though not by the lawyers in Frankfurt, who
insisted on the distinction. For that reason, Goethe was later unable to use the
title in business dealings in that city. Everywhere else he was referred to as
“Dr. Goethe.”
In August of 1771 the newly minted “doctor” left Strasbourg to return to
his father’s house in Frankfurt. There is no evidence that he paid another visit
to Friederike to say a final farewell.

* A conscience (which is) unfortunately not right.

 CHAPTER 6

The Lawyer. Litigation as an Exercise and Prelude to

Götz von Berlichingen. Götz as a Wild West Hero.
The “Law of the Fist.” The Sovereign Individual versus
Modernity. Sticking to It, Thanks to His Sister.
The Author Helps Himself. First Reactions.

....

IN AUGUST 1771, GOETHE APPLIED TO BE ADMITTED TO THE bar

before the court of lay judges, employing the deferential officialese of the
day: Thus for me at present, nothing can be the object of more interest and
ambition than to place the science and knowledge I have by now acquired
in the service of my fatherland, namely, initially as a lawyer . . . in order
thereby to prepare myself for any more important tasks which it might be
the pleasure of the excellent and venerable authorities to entrust to me.
His father regarded admission to the bar as a path to higher office, and to that
end Goethe hinted, in his application, at larger ambitions. Johann Caspar
wanted his son to be a mayor like his grandfather Textor, who held that
highest civic office in the free imperial city until 1770 and died shortly
before Goethe’s return from Strasbourg. Goethe was admitted to the bar on
September 3, 1771. He would continue to practice law—at first seriously,
later almost entirely pro forma—until the fall of 1775, taking frequent time
off for travel and writing. From 1771 through 1775, he conducted twenty-
eight trials.
It was not difficult for him to find work as a lawyer. His prominent family
and good contacts were helpful. There was a glut of lawyers in Frankfurt, but
friends and acquaintances with successful practices, such as the Schlosser
brothers, passed litigation and trial work on to him. His father helped, too,
not entirely selflessly—for Johann Caspar, it was an opportunity to be more
than a man of independent means and to step back into the practice of law.
In a town like Frankfurt, infamous for its legal squabbles, lawyers did not
enjoy the best reputation. Goethe alludes to the fact in Götz, where a doctor
of canon and civil law by the name of Olearius says of Frankfurt, The rabble
almost stoned me when they heard I was a lawyer. Though someone of
Goethe’s pedigree was spared the fate of a hack lawyer, like other beginners
he still had to seek out his first clients among small tradesmen, artisans, and
Jews from the ghetto. Almost all his cases were civil.
The practice of law in Frankfurt did not usually involve oral arguments.
Cases were negotiated in writing between litigants. In Goethe’s first trial, a
curious situation arose. The opposing lawyer was his school chum Moors,
who had begun practicing in Frankfurt half a year earlier. The two friends
began—no doubt with some amusement—to inflate the case. Instead of
merely representing their clients, they began to “play” them, exchanging
insults under their names. The briefs were so devoid of official restraint that
the court issued a reprimand to both lawyers for their “indecent style, which
serves only to exacerbate the litigants’ existing feelings of anger and
bitterness.” Johann Georg Schlosser had warned him: Goethe had read one of
his briefs to Schlosser and proudly declared that the client had been very
satisfied with it, and his friend had responded, “In this case you have proved
yourself more a writer than a lawyer; you must never ask how such a
document pleases your client, but how it will please the court.” The court
was not pleased, and though his client won the case (which involved a
complicated inheritance), it was only because the court was equally
dissatisfied with Moors, and for the same reason.
Of interest here is Goethe’s style. He characterizes Moors as a furious
termagant . . . whose overheated brain, incapable of arguing with reason
and cause, exhausts itself in abusive language. . . . After his deeply
concealed legal erudition has long writhed in labor pains, out pop one or
two laughable, mousy, digest definitions that bear witness to their mother.
Let them run! Moors very likely answered with coarse language of his own.
In his second brief, Goethe writes, The same register of insults that
characterize the previous brief is again on parade in this one. . . .
Impertinence and vileness sound from every part of this document. . . .
What can one expect from such an opponent? To convince him? It is my
good fortune that the matter does not depend on that. It would take
superhuman powers to help the congenitally blind to see, and restraining
madmen is a matter for the police.
For Goethe, this juridical role playing was a warm-up for literary role
playing; in November and December 1771, he was simultaneously working
on the first version of the historical drama The History of Gottfried von
Berlichingen with the Iron Hand. Published a year and a half later, the play
would at one stroke make him famous throughout Germany. In the trial, he
played a single role, that of his client. In the drama, there were various roles
into which he had to think his way and among which he could distribute
himself. Each would have something of him, but he was especially close to
Götz.
In Strasbourg, Goethe had envisaged a play about the historical figure after
reading his autobiography. Götz (circa 1480–1562) was a knight who lived
during the Reformation and the Peasants’ War and was constantly entangled
in feuds. By the early sixteenth century, the era of wild, free robber barons
was coming to an end, a development in which the historical Götz played no
prominent part. But Goethe gave him one, realizing he could make him the
embodiment of an entire vanishing world. It was the same spiritual world of
the fifteenth century that Goethe had become acquainted with in his
alchemical and Kabbalistic explorations during his year of illness in 1769.
Herder, too, had expressed enthusiasm for this era of towering figures such
as Luther, Ulrich von Hutten, and Dürer. For Goethe, the legendary figure of
Faust also belonged to this circle of great men who had appeared as the old
empire was breaking apart and its intellectual unity splintering, thus
reopening a space for powerful, original, highly individual figures. Götz was
such a figure to him, an example, as he later wrote, of a rough-hewn, well-
meaning, and self-sufficient individual in a wild, anarchic time.
What fascinated Goethe about Götz was precisely what fascinates us in
westerns today: a romantic look at a bygone world in which the individual
still counts. The man who looks out for himself and never cedes his
independence to social institutions. For although one gains in security
thereby, one is also diminished in stature. Goethe created Götz as a
counterimage to a modernity that Schiller so tellingly described as making
man smaller in order to do something great with him. The species gains
while the individual loses. Götz is the great individual whose downfall is
preordained.
 In Patriotic Fantasies, by the jurist and social theorist Justus Möser,
Goethe had already discovered a defense of the old Faustrecht—under
baronial law, the right to pursue justice for oneself: the “law of the fist.” Its
promised liberation from the legal thicket that so vexed the student of
jurisprudence drew Goethe to Götz, and to his refusal to be diminished.
Instead, as he says in the play, he is subject to no one except the emperor.
What is vexing but also inevitable is that society intervenes between the
highest authorities—God, the emperor—and oneself. This complicates and
confuses matters. Götz despises this state of affairs and will founder on it, yet
even in defeat still feel independent. Society can destroy but not change him.
He remains true to himself. That is how Goethe sees his Knight with the Iron
Fist and perhaps how he wanted to see himself.
As his Shakespeare speech shows, Goethe’s reading of the great English
dramatist provoked his sympathy for loners of colossal stature, doomed
heroes of independence. With Götz he wanted, like Shakespeare, to discover
the hidden point . . . where the uniqueness of our self, our supposed free
will, collides with the necessary course of the world.
Götz is not the sort of champion of freedom who would later appear on
stage in figures like the Marquis Posa in Schiller’s Don Carlos. He does not
demand political freedom, but demonstrates how to live freely. In Götz,
freedom is not primarily a matter of consciousness but of being.
The young author wanted to take part in this free existence by writing
about it. We have within us the germ of achievements we can admire. In
writing, a world unfolds and he is caught in its spell. He lets his alter ego
operate in an imaginary space and feels an incomparable expansion: I feel
with incredible vividness how my existence is infinitely extended. How
could it be otherwise when even the counterworld that will bring Götz down
originates in the absolute authority of the playwright? Adelbert von
Weislingen, for example, belongs to that counterworld. He switches sides
and abandons Maria, Götz’s sister. He, too, has something of the author who
abandoned Friederike. As for the seductive Adelhaid, who intrigues against
Götz, Goethe confessed that had positively fallen in love with her. Thus if his
existence is infinitely extended, that extension assuredly also includes the
social reality hostile to Götz. The author’s imagination lives in Götz and at
the same time transcends the limits imposed on him. As the author of a little
theatrum mundi, he also commands the necessary course of the world to
which Götz succumbs. The example of Shakespeare had taught Goethe what
characterizes a great dramatist: he doesn’t identify only with his hero, but
grants all his figures the right to life. Götz’s adversaries are not there merely
for contrast. Only in this way can theater become that cabinet of curiosities
in which the history of the world flows past our eyes along the unseen
thread of time.
It was ambitious to try to follow in Shakespeare’s footsteps, but the young
Goethe had self-confidence to spare. He writes to Salzmann in Strasbourg
that he is throwing his genius into the work on this play so that his
productive power will not have to hum to itself. In the process, he is able to
enjoy all the power I feel within myself. He is through with the distracted
life in Strasbourg.
He set resolutely to work even before he had completely worked out the
plot. During these weeks, his sister was very important to him. He had
already told her so much about his plan that Cornelia began to lose patience
and urged him not to always just indulge in windy talk, but finally set down
on paper what is so vividly alive in me. And so he plunged in and wrote
swiftly. In the evening he would read to her what he had written during the
day. She applauded his effort but also expressed some doubt about her
brother’s perseverance. Would he really finish the play? Her doubts were an
additional challenge. He had to prove something to her—and to himself—by
pressing ahead. And so I kept ceaselessly at work, following straight along,
looking neither backwards nor to the right or left, and in about six weeks I
had the pleasure of seeing the bound manuscript.
That he looked neither backwards nor to the right or left suggests
diligence. But he also ignored conventional aesthetic rules governing the
unity of time, place, and action. In a series of colorful scenes with an epic
narrative feel, one location gives way to the next: an inn, the forest, Götz’s
castle, the bishop’s palace in Bamberg, the soldiers’ camp, the town hall in
Heilbronn, the Reichstag in Augsburg, a Gypsy encampment, the courtroom.
Time is discontinuous, sometimes compressed and at others drawn out, with
frequent jumps. The events of the play took place over several decades in the
life of the historical Götz. One can gauge this in the figure of Georg; in the
course of the play he grows from a boy to a young man and becomes Götz’s
squire. The main action, the dispute between Götz and Weislingen, is
interwoven with numerous secondary plots, some of which are acted out
while others are only narrated. Goethe was giving free rein to his
imagination, which blossomed into particular situations and characters
without heed to the unity of the whole. Thus the plot has several focal points,
but no single climactic scene.
Even between Götz and Weislingen there is not just one turning point but
three. At the beginning of the play, Adelbert von Weislingen, the friend of
Götz’s youth who has become his adversary at the court of the bishop of
Bamberg, is captured by Götz’s men. Götz treats him as a friend and
successfully woos him back to his side. Weislingen becomes attached to
Maria, Götz’s sister. That is the first turning point. When Weislingen returns
to Bamberg, he succumbs to the seductive Adelhaid—the second turning
point. When Götz joins forces with the rebellious peasants, Weislingen is the
enforcer who is supposed to carry out the death sentence against his former
friend, but after a parley with Maria, he withdraws the sentence. That is the
third turning point, but it comes too late for him. Adelhaid, who in the
meantime has her eye on the successor to the throne, has him poisoned. Her
verdict on him is, You always were one of those miserable creatures without
the power to do evil or good.
That is decidedly not true of Adelhaid. She lives through the magic of her
erotic attraction, which she has no hesitation in deploying to further her
political and economic interests. The beautiful widow collects men—first
Weislingen, then his manservant Franz. Even Sickingen, one of Götz’s
comrades, falls under her spell, at least for one night, An error that made me
into a god. In the end she is hauled before a secret tribunal, and the
executioner stabs her with the words, God, you made her so beautiful, and
couldn’t you make her good?
It gradually becomes clear that it is these shifting pairings that actually
drive the play’s plot. Weislingen is brought back to Götz’s side by Maria. But
his attachment to her dissolves when he succumbs to Adelhaid’s more potent
charms. Maria, abandoned, attracts Sickingen, but not for long, since he in
turn falls under Adelhaid’s spell after she rejects Weislingen. In this game of
musical chairs, Maria is the loser. She is unable to hold on to either
Weislingen or Sickingen, losing them both to Adelhaid.
It is probably not insignificant that Goethe chose to make Götz’s sister
Maria the erotic loser, for his own sister, who had helped him so much with
the play, was in his eyes also a loser in love.
He would intimate as much in his autobiography, where he speculates
about why Cornelia had so little physical attraction for men. He mentions
that her skin was seldom clear, that her strongly rounded forehead made an
unpleasant impression, and that her person possessed not the least bit of
sensuality. Thus she failed to form close attachments to the young men she
found attractive. That was her misfortune, he wrote, which she felt all the
more strongly because she was perfectly conscious of her own worth. “But
how can I aspire to bliss when I have no charms that elicit tenderness?” she
wrote in a secret diary she kept at the time. Her brother, however, felt drawn
to her as if by a magnet. The siblings were intimately connected. She was his
confidante during the development of his physical and moral powers. It is
natural that many have suspected Goethe of incestuous inclinations toward
this sister, who was only a year younger, because he hinted at it himself: The
inquisitiveness of youth, the astonishment at the awakening of sensual
urges . . . many wayward stirrings and confusions arising from them were
shared and overcome by the siblings hand in hand, and they were all the
less enlightened about their strange condition since the more they drew
near to each other, the more powerfully the sacred reserve of their close
relation kept them apart. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that
Goethe would present his sister as an asexual being. I must honestly admit,
he writes, that sometimes when I fantasized about her fate, it pleased me to
think of her not as a housewife but as an abbess, the leader of a community
for noblewomen.
It is exactly because his sister had no success in love that he sees her as
having a beneficial effect. It is the same with Götz’s sister Maria. In the long
run she is unable to preserve her relationship with either Weislingen or
Sickingen, but her moral influence is strong enough to persuade Weislingen to
take back the death sentence against Götz.
The play opens up a field of erotic tensions where people struggle for
victory and suffer defeat. Adelhaid is the actual victor. Goethe, who fell in
love with his own figure, had to force himself to prevent her from enjoying
her triumph. In the end she gets punished; it was necessary to have that much
sympathy for the losing sister. Maria (and with her, Cornelia) had to obtain
satisfaction.
Weislingen’s servant Franz is buffeted by the lovers’ quarrels, a helpless
victim of his desire. He, too, is in love with Adelhaid, but he loses any will
of his own. In his servile devotion, he abases himself and secretly poisons
his master at Adelhaid’s behest. He embodies a perverted kind of love that
Goethe warned against in a letter written in Strasbourg: They say it [love]
gives you courage. Not at all. As soon as our heart is soft, it’s weak. Franz
is the lovesick weakling gone berserk.
All around Götz conditions are changing: intrigue, shifting coalitions,
betrayal. The whole world conspires against him. He alone remains
unchanged. His attachment to his wife, Elisabeth, is indissoluble; they are a
couple whom only death can separate.
But even in Goethe’s version, Götz is not a knight in shining armor. The
quarrels he picks are quite dubious. For instance, when a tailor from
Heilbronn wins a prize at a shooting match in Cologne, the local merchants’
guild illegally refuses to award it to him. Götz has taken up his cause, rides
to Cologne, and—as Elisabeth tells it—bullies the gentlemen there until the
prize is given. Maria, however, reminds her that to settle such a trifling
matter, a number of innocent people were slaughtered and asks, When we try
to replace one misery with another, isn’t the general evil increased
thereby? Elisabeth, otherwise a warmhearted woman, is suddenly
transformed into a subtly arguing jurist, and one gets the impression that here
Goethe, the freshly minted lawyer and licentiate of canon and civil law, is
taking the floor: Whoever mistreats the citizens of another city neglects his
duty to his own subjects, for he exposes them to the right of retaliation.
Goethe realized that such a speech did not fit Elisabeth’s character, and he
deleted it from the second version of Götz.
Other fights that Götz starts are similarly hard to justify. When the bishop
of Bamberg detains one of his men, Götz ambushes a transport of goods on its
way to the bishop. This was one of the raids that the historical Götz boasted
of in his autobiography. Whenever the real-life story of the Knight with the
Iron Hand enters the play, there is always—even in the view of Goethe’s
contemporaries—a lack of justification. The only mitigating fact is the
knight’s loyalty to the empire. The princes and rulers of provinces pursue
their territorial interests, and only Götz is loyal and brave and declares
himself prepared to defend the imperial border against the Turks for the
emperor. Neither the historical Götz nor Goethe’s hero actually does so, but
his declarations of intent are enough to gain the favor of the emperor. That is
why the monarch, on the occasion of the imperial decree of execution against
Götz (and Selbiz), does not want any harm to come to them.
When Goethe describes Götz as one of the noblest Germans in a letter to
Salzmann, he doesn’t mean the historical ruffian, but his own cleaned-up
image of him. He is the model of a powerful, successful man less in his
behavior than in the judgment of posterity.
For Elisabeth, Götz is a benevolent man, but not out of weakness or
conciliation. Charity is a noble virtue, but it is the prerogative of strong
souls alone. Men who are always benevolent out of softness are no better
than people who can’t hold their urine. A man like Götz wants to live well
himself, but he lives and lets live and is without resentment. Envy is also
foreign to his nature. He is able to act out his anger and doesn’t let it eat at
him. In an altercation with one of the leaders of the rebellious peasants, he
expresses his disdain toward the coward whose bile eats away at his insides
like a malignant tumor because his nature doesn’t have enough strength to
spurn it once and for all. He is the guarantor of his own honor. He can
defend himself and doesn’t have to go running to a lawyer. He loathes
complicated social arrangements, institutional interventions, and the
machinations of diplomats. The same is true in matters of faith. Götz has no
need of intercession by priests. He approaches his God directly, preferably
when he is feeling strong. God reflects on a prayer only when we put all our
strength into it. From the perspective of Brother Martin, distantly
reminiscent of Martin Luther, Götz seems to represent unspoiled nature. The
monk laments three things that cripple human nature: poverty, chastity, and
obedience, and Götz is for him the diametric opposite. He lives well, loves
well, and is his own master. Because he can fight, he has no need to grovel.
At the sight of Götz, Martin cries, It’s a pleasure to behold a great man.
In sum, Götz is the embodiment of freedom. He doesn’t demand it and
doesn’t take it, he simply lives it. Adelbert to Götz: You alone are free, you
whose great soul is sufficient unto itself and has no need either to obey or
to rule in order to be something. It’s precisely that greatness that envious
natures like Adelbert’s find hard to take in the long run. Götz’s freedom
reminds him of his own inner lack of freedom. He cannot bear to see a
powerful rival flourish, and so all feeling of greatness in another becomes a
torment. That is another reason he betrays his former friend.
Before Götz is driven from his besieged castle by imperial troops, he has
visions that are too softhearted for his nature. He dreams of rulers who will
feel boundless joy to be fortunate in their subjects. These visions must be
chalked up to an author who indulges in softhearted moods as well as blood
and thunder. The great hour of reconciliation draws near. Götz, the tough guy
from the era of the Peasants’ War slips into the sentimental literary German
of 1770: When their well-cultivated, blessed land seems to them a Paradise
compared with their prim, constrained, solitary gardens . . . then neighbor
will grant peace to neighbor because he himself is happy. Then no one will
seek to extend his borders. He will rather remain the sun in his circuit than
be a comet running its terrible, erratic course through many others.
Such views are too idyllic for Georg, Götz’s squire. He asks anxiously
whether he’ll still be allowed to ride. Götz reassures him that there will still
be plenty of opportunity to ride and hunt. We’ll clear the mountains of
wolves, fetch a side of meat from the forest for our neighbor peacefully
tilling his field and then sit down to supper with him. What’s more, there
were still the Turks and the French, who’d need their heads knocked together
to protect the empire. What a life that would be, Georg, to risk one’s skin
for the general good.
This vision of an orderly world in which the knights are no longer ruffians
but the defenders of the fatherland was retained in the second version of the
play, but to keep it from seeming too unrealistic, its connection to reality is
reinforced. Götz exclaims, Have I not known excellent men among the
princes, and will their kind have died out? And he tells how the Landgrave
of Hanau gave a hunting party, and how they ate in the open air and the
country folk all came running to see them . . . nothing but cheerful faces,
and how they took part in the glory of their lord, who feasted among them
there on God’s good earth.
Goethe has Götz dream of a better future, thereby not entirely neglecting
the Enlightenment doctrine, promoted by Gottsched and Lessing, that the
public be morally instructed and improved. Yet in the end, Götz declares
what the reader has long since guessed: that his time has passed. Great
characters no longer had a chance in a bourgeois world of petty regulation.
Götz’s melodramatic forecast shortly before he dies promises nothing good
for the future: The time of deception is approaching. . . . The weak will
reign with cunning and the brave man will fall into the nets that cowardice
stretches across his path.
Goethe finished the play in December 1771. For the time being, he was
satisfied at having proved to himself and his sister that he could persevere
until he finished something. He had gotten down on paper what he had been
carrying around in his head for a while. Copies of the play circulated among
his friends and acquaintances. He didn’t yet know whether he would have the
play printed; he hadn’t even thought about the possibility of having it
performed. Whether it was suited for the stage was not a factor he had
considered, since it was meant for the inner stage of his imagination. Yet like
every author, he imagined the reactions of the public and the critics. What
would they think of it? Would they raise a clamor because it violated the
rules not just of the theater but of convention and propriety?
He sent the play to Johann Heinrich Merck, the military paymaster of the
Landgrave of Darmstadt and eight years Goethe’s senior, along with an
accompanying poem. Its mocking, sarcastic tone mirrors that of this new
friend, who was a great connoisseur of literature. It’s not always new cider
that bursts old wineskins, he writes. Sometimes the opposite occurs, and it is
content from olden times that sends up a feeble present.

To all the fools in powdered wigs

And all the literary prigs
Councilors, scribblers, maidens, brats
All sinners against poetic arts—
Contempt and scorn now be their fate.
They all deserve undying hate.
And so if critics and their kind
Or philistines with narrow mind
Chance before our house to pass,
To them we’ll show our naked ass.

Herder was also sent a copy of the play, with a note from Goethe saying he
wouldn’t undertake any more revisions until you have voiced an opinion;
for I know that then a radical rebirth must occur if it is to enter into life.
Herder let him cool his heels for six months before he sent his assessment. In
the meantime, there were new projects. Goethe planned to write a play about
Caesar and another about Socrates. He was already beginning to collect
material and make notes. He was sticking with great figures. At last Herder’s
verdict on Götz arrived. His letter has not survived, but we can gather from
Goethe’s answer that Herder played the schoolmaster. But as he had not done
in Strasbourg, Goethe now protested the criticism. Herder had belittled Götz,
and Goethe answered, I belittle him even more than you do. He trumps the
criticism with self-criticism, even though he doesn’t go into details. Herder
had written that the play was too contrived. Goethe responded, That’s
annoying enough. He pointed to Lessing’s tragedy Emilia Galotti, one of
Herder’s favorite plays; wasn’t it just as contrived? To other people, Herder
expressed a much more positive opinion of the play. He told his fiancée,
Karoline Flachsland, that she would enjoy “some hours of heavenly bliss”
when she read Götz. “There’s an uncommon amount of German strength,
depth, and truth to it, although now and then only the thought is there.” That’s
always how Herder was. He was incapable of freely praising and admiring
anything. He always had to mix in a little poison.
While copies of the play were still circulating among his friends, Goethe
was already polishing it and making improvements. For Merck, who had
immediately liked the play, the revisions were going on too long. He pushed
Goethe to publish it. Revisions only made a thing different, but seldom better.
“Hang the diapers on the fence and they’ll dry soon enough!” he said.
In Poetry and Truth Goethe claims to have revised Götz so often that a
completely new play lay before me. He could say so only because at that
point, his first draft hadn’t been published yet. If you compare it to the second
version, you can see that it was essentially still the same play. The language
had merely been smoothed out and tightened up and a few scenes rearranged
or deleted, especially in the last act, where in the first version the action
around Adelhaid and the Gypsies had gotten too long.
The play finally appeared in the spring of 1773; Goethe published it
himself. The response was tremendous. Overnight, Goethe had made a
conquest of the German reading public. The author had created a work, and
then another story began about how the published work changed the author.
 CHAPTER 7

Goethe’s Busy Idleness. Poetry without a Profession.

Johann Georg Schlosser. The Infanticide Trial and the
Gretchen Tragedy in Faust. Johann Heinrich Merck.
Among the Darmstadt Sentimentalists. The Wayfarer.
The Reviewer. Goethe’s Early Aesthetics.
A Summer Love in Wetzlar.

....

GOETHE HAD NO PARTICULAR AMBITIONS AS A LAWYER. But

even in the painting, drawing, and writing to which he was entirely devoted,
he still saw himself as far from mastery. In a letter to Herder written in the
summer of 1772, he is highly self-critical. He has only strolled around and
nowhere really taken hold of anything, the essence of any mastery. In his
own judgment, what he lacks is stamina and thoroughness. What he is doing
doesn’t feel like work; everything simply comes too easily to him. It’s as if
his poems were carried to him on the wind. Sometimes he writes them down
so quickly he doesn’t even take the time to fold the paper neatly and place it
on his desk before beginning. At parties and in company he can take requests
and improvise poems on the spot. It’s a game, and one with occasional
amorous overtones. He doesn’t give a thought to having his work published.
Götz was also drafted in a single burst of inspiration, quickly written down
and circulated among Goethe’s friends with no clear plan to publish.
Known as a writer mainly to his circle of friends, he as yet didn’t feel like
a writer himself. He had a sense of his own capabilities, but he knew he still
lacked discipline. In another letter to Herder, he for the first time invokes the
image of a charioteer he’d found in Pindar: When you stand boldly in your
chariot with four fresh horses rearing wildly against your reins, and you
discipline their power, whipping the errant ones into line and the rearing
ones down to earth, and you drive and steer them, turning, whipping,
stopping, and driving forward again, until all sixteen hooves carry you to
the finish in a single rhythm—that is mastery. It was an image he would use
again—and with special intensity in Egmont and at the end of Poetry and
Truth.
In Frankfurt there was some surprise that this highly talented young man
hadn’t yet settled down to pursue his legal career. And yet he circulated,
proud to display his elegant clothes. He was always the center of attention
wherever he went. People sought him out, and he sought out convivial
companions. His circle of friends grew, and what he wrote was at first meant
only for them, as a favor and sign of affection.
He didn’t need to worry about earning a living, and his artistic output had
nothing to do with money. Financially, it was only a supplement. And that
seemed only right to him, since writing and making poems arose from an
abundance of inner riches. Was it also superfluous? At times he suggested it
was. As Götz says, Writing is busy idleness. It’s sour work for me. While
writing down what I’ve done, I get annoyed about wasting time in which I
could be doing something. In a letter to Betty Jacobi, Goethe writes:
Although the Bible says Ye shall know them by their fruits, are the things
we scrawl onto paper, whether written or printed, our fruits?
Expressions like these betray self-doubt on the part of a so-called man of
action. But he rarely articulated such doubts; certainly they did not preoccupy
him. More often than not, he was moved by his own artistry. As he wrote in
his essay on the Strasbourg cathedral, there is a forming nature in man that
becomes immediately active once his existence is assured. As soon as he
has nothing to worry about and nothing to fear, the demigod, active in his
tranquillity, reaches out for material into which to breathe his spirit.
This hints at the figure of Prometheus whom Goethe had chosen as the
patron saint of artistic omnipotence. In letters from the period, Goethe
frequently invokes creative genius and speaks disparagingly of his father’s
attempts to tie him down to a bourgeois existence. He puts up with them, he
writes to a friend, because he is confident of his own power: One tug and all
the sevenfold raffia ropes are severed! People sensed his power, but not all
were persuaded by it or by him. For some, the talented young man was too
much of a lightweight. Others were enchanted. Women were especially
drawn to him, among them Herder’s fiancée, Karoline Flachsland; her
friends the Darmstadt ladies-in-waiting Henriette von Roussillon and Luise
von Ziegler; and Sophie von La Roche and her daughter Maximiliane. They
all gushed about this brilliant young man who showered them with poems.
Men of all ages felt attracted to him. Quite simply, he impressed people with
a promise of great things to come. Johann Georg Schlosser, who had known
Goethe since childhood and would remain his friend until his marriage to
Goethe’s sister, Cornelia, ended their relationship, wrote to Johann Kaspar
Lavater, a Swiss pastor, poet, and physiognomist who also cultivated
Goethe’s friendship, “If he ever finds happiness in the world, he will make
thousands happy, and if he never does, he will always be a meteor that our
contemporaries will never tire of gaping at . . . it takes a certain strength of
soul to remain his friend.”
Like Goethe, Schlosser was from a respectable family of lawyers in
Frankfurt. His father had been a member of the city council and a lay judge.
Schlosser was already an experienced and successful lawyer when Goethe,
ten years younger, began dabbling in the profession in the fall of 1771.
Schlosser was conscientious and competent, but the work left him feeling
unfulfilled and ambivalent. He wasn’t devoted heart and soul to his practice.
The love of truth was his supreme ideal, and he therefore sometimes felt
uncomfortable as a lawyer: “Here by secret means, a sly scoundrel is making
my innocent tongue into the tool of hidden injustice.”
Schlosser was a highly literate connoisseur of English, French, and Italian
literature, which he also translated. He wrote English verse in the style of
Pope, French epigrams on the model of Voltaire, and Italian arias in the
manner of Metastasio. He was also working on a German translation of the
Iliad. An aesthete and a moralist who was also deeply pragmatic, his
Catechism of Moral Doctrine for the Rural Populace, which offered
suggestions for the improvement of rural living conditions, earned him
recognition in political circles. He proposed that the clergy teach and do
humanitarian work, thereby freeing themselves from pedantry and doctrine.
Goethe admired this work—it inspired his 1773 “Letter of the Pastor in
*** to the New Pastor in ***”—but he was blindsided by Schlosser’s
marriage to his sister. Schlosser seemed to Goethe to be too
incommunicative, cool, and sober to be anything like the right match for
Cornelia. On the other hand, in religious matters he was too effusive. Above
all, as Goethe admits in Poetry and Truth, he was also simply jealous of
Schlosser.
Schlosser had passed several legal cases on to the neophyte Goethe. But
more important was the insight he gave Goethe into the prosecution of
Susanna Margaretha Brandt, an infanticide who was publicly executed by the
sword on January 14, 1772. The event stirred up the entire town; executions
had by then become rare.
It was an experience that Goethe would use in the tragic story of Gretchen
in Faust, which he had begun to work on in the early 1770s. He had a close
connection to the events, since he had several relatives and acquaintances
who were directly involved in the trial, as the scholar Ernst Beutler* has
discovered. Besides Schlosser, who participated as a lawyer, there was also
Goethe’s uncle Johann Jost Textor, who as a member of the court had the
official duty of asking the executioner whether he thought himself capable of
decapitating the condemned woman with a single blow of his sword. And it
was Schlosser who, on behalf of the executioner, petitioned the court to
allow the latter’s son to carry out the execution. The town clerk who
prepared the arrest warrant had served as private tutor to both Goethe and
his sister. The doctor who attended the condemned woman before her
execution was Johann Friedrich Metz, the family friend who had treated
Goethe in 1769 and encouraged him to carry out his experiments in alchemy.
Goethe knew the head judge who found the woman guilty and solemnly
pronounced the death sentence; he had been involved in the Gretchen affair
when Goethe’s first love and her dubious friends were being investigated by
the court.
Partial copies of the transcript of the trial have been discovered among
Goethe’s possessions, and he was familiar with the details of the woman’s
confession, which are reflected in the Gretchen tragedy in Faust. Susanna
Margaretha Brandt named a journeyman goldsmith as the father of the dead
child. He had moved on to Russia. For a jaunty lad / Good air is elsewhere
to be had. And he is gone, as the early version of Faust has it. Brandt stated
that the man had used a magic potion to take advantage of her. Poison is also
at play when Faust seduces Gretchen. The infanticide declared that she was
acting under the compulsion of the devil. In Goethe’s play, it is Mephisto.
Scholars have long tried to determine which scenes of Faust were written
first. Perhaps Ernst Beutler is correct in surmising that, following the trial
and execution of Brandt, Goethe penned the prison scenes. The prison where
Brandt awaited her death, the tower of the old Katharine Gate, was a mere
two hundred yards from Goethe’s house on the Hirschgraben.
Goethe was present at the elaborately ceremonious execution. The head
judge, clad in a red cloak and accompanied by the headsman and his
assistants, came to lead the condemned woman to her death. She was brought
into the “Poor Sinners’ Chamber” as the tower bells tolled. The last meal
was served, and the judges, the headsman and his assistants, the watch, and
the clergy ate their fill while Susanna Brandt took only a swallow of water.
She was then led in procession through the city by soldiers and clergymen
who sang and prayed. At the place of execution, she was bound, her neck
was exposed, and “amid unceasing cries of the gentlemen of the clergy” her
“head was successfully taken off in one stroke.” Almost the entire population
attended the spectacle. The corresponding scene in Faust: Just listen to the
townsfolk shuffling through the streets! Do you hear? Not a loud word. The
bell is calling!—The death sentence is pronounced!—Every neck twitches
at the edge that’s twitching for mine.—Hark, the bell.
Half a year earlier, in his licentiate examination in Strasbourg, Goethe had
defended the death penalty in his fifty-third thesis, as was customary. In the
fifty-fifth thesis, however, he had deflected the question whether a woman
who kills her newborn child should be subject to the death penalty by
simply pointing out that this was a matter of dispute among doctors of law.
Which side Goethe took during his oral defense we do not know. But in the
Gretchen tragedy, Faust would like to free his lover from the punitive hands
of the law. Faust scolds Mephisto, the evil spirit, whom he blames entirely.
That lovely, innocent creature locked up in prison as a malefactor and
subject to horrible torments! . . . And meanwhile, you lull me in insipid
pleasures, conceal her growing misery from me, and let her perish
helplessly. Mephisto answers, She’s not the first! And Faust: . . . Not the
first!—Misery! Misery! . . . I am pierced to the marrow by the affliction of
this one woman alone and you calmly grin at the fate of thousands. But
Faust isn’t concerned with the fate of thousands either; he wants to rescue
from punishment this one woman alone, for whose fall he is responsible.
Gretchen prefers to be saved by means of her punishment. God’s judgment
come upon me, I am yours! Save me, and turning to Faust she implores, You
holy angels save my soul—you terrify me, Heinrich. Even though her
punishment itself is not questioned and is sealed by Mephisto’s She has been
put to death! it is still remarkable that the author looks at the lover, who
escapes scot-free, from the perspective of the condemned Gretchen. He cries
out, I won’t abandon you! But he is immediately dragged off by Mephisto—
whether to new adventures or to his ruin remains ambiguous in the early
version. He rages on without a backward glance. Goethe was just as driven.
As he wrote to Salzmann, My friends must forgive me. My nisus† forward is
so powerful that I seldom can force myself to take a breath and look back.
The trial and execution of Susanna Brandt seem to have turned Goethe
from the law. He refused an offer from the faculty in Strasbourg to award
him, for a fee, a doctorate in jurisprudence. As he wrote to Salzmann, he had
lost his desire to be a doctor. He was so sick of the business that, at the
most, I do my duty only for the sake of appearances.
In late December 1771, Georg Schlosser had introduced Goethe to Johann
Heinrich Merck, a court official in Darmstadt. In Poetry and Truth Goethe
calls him a singular man who had the greatest influence on his life. Like
Schlosser, Merck was both a professional bureaucrat and a man of letters. He
had sought to make Goethe’s acquaintance because he hoped to win him as an
author for the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen (Frankfurt Literary
Advertiser), a review whose editorship he assumed in 1772. The periodical
appeared three times a week and was a continuation of the old Frankfurter
Gelehrte Zeitung, a once important academic journal that had lost its
relevance owing to its dry, academic style. Merck was determined to shake
things up, engage new reviewers, and speak to a broader readership with
literary interests. He exploited his good contacts in the literary world and
succeeded in acquiring prominent contributors such as Herder. But he was
also on the lookout for new talent, and through Schlosser he became aware of
Goethe.
Goethe wrote to Herder about the first evening he spent with Merck in
December 1771, I was as pleased as I could be to find another person in
whose company feelings develop and thoughts are clarified. Merck was no
less pleased: “He’s a man after my own heart, one of the very few I have
found.” He was beginning to “fall in love” with him, he wrote to his wife.
Goethe left the recently completed manuscript of Götz with his new friend
at their first meeting. Merck had asked to see it; Goethe’s “enthusiasm and
genius” made him curious to read the work.
Merck was eight years older than Goethe. Born in Darmstadt, he had
remained there, and was highly regarded at the little court of the Landgrave
of Hesse-Darmstadt. He served officially as military paymaster, but in reality
he was a kind of finance minister for the ministate and exercised influence on
its affairs. He advised the court on the purchase of artworks and was
presumed to have made some money for himself from such transactions. With
his learning and personal connections, he was the center of educated society
in the town. He was esteemed but also feared, for this tall, gaunt, sharp-
nosed man was notorious for an equally sharp tongue and for dispensing
ridicule, sarcasm, and harsh opinions. Goethe thought his glance had
something of a tiger, and in retrospect he speaks of an incongruity in
Merck’s character: by nature an upright, noble, reliable man, he had
become embittered against the world and allowed this unhealthy,
mercurial aspect such free rein within himself that he felt an irresistible
urge to deliberately play the joker and even the rogue.
Goethe had great respect for Merck’s opinions because he realized that
they were free of flattery. In fact, one had to be prepared for some
maliciousness. He often went about things in a negative and destructive
way. But once you’d gotten used to that, there was much to be gleaned from
his opinions and advice. A few years later, Goethe wrote in his diary that
Merck was a wonderful mirror, the only person who completely
understands what I am doing and how I do it, and yet sees it differently
than I do, from another vantage point, and that produces a beautiful
certainty.
Goethe was willing to take advice from Merck. As we have already seen,
it was the latter who urged Goethe to publish Götz, with the adage “Hang the
diapers on the fence and they’ll dry soon enough!” Merck was mercilessly
critical of other works by Goethe. The play Clavigo, for example, he
declared to be at best conventional, and he advised his friend to restrict
himself to things that others weren’t capable of. Goethe accommodated
Merck and accepted his criticism without resentment. In retrospect, however,
he suggests that in the end the friend he valued so much did himself no favors
with his basically negative attitude. And in fact, Merck’s story took a sad
turn. Eventually he quarreled with most of his old friends and acquaintances,
making few new ones. His relationship with Goethe grew distant. Finally, he
lost all interest in literature and art. He attempted to become an entrepreneur,
but with little success. A cotton spinning mill he founded went bankrupt.
Worn down by serious illness, he put an end to his life on June 27, 1791.
When their friendship began, Merck was an all-around talent who painted,
wrote poetry, translated, was well informed about science, and had a knack
for technical things. And for all that, he had a cool intellect. It is all the more
surprising that in addition to writing literary criticism, he belonged to the
circle of so-called Sentimentalists. Goethe met this group on his first visit to
Darmstadt in March 1772.
Members included a man named von Hesse, who served as privy
councilor, and his wife and her sister Karoline Flachsland, who since 1770
had been secretly engaged to Herder. She was waiting impatiently to marry
him; he was in Bückeburg working as court chaplain. Others in the circle
were Henriette von Roussillon, who served as a lady-in-waiting to the court.
Despite her youth, she was plagued by the illness that would claim her life,
and she had ceased to seek a lasting relationship. When not lying sick in a
darkened room, she by turns entertained brilliantly and was steeped in a
melancholy that she directed into an obsession with poetry. Her friend and
fellow lady-in-waiting Luise von Ziegler was healthy, pretty, and just as mad
about poetry. She had a hut built in a park where she passed pleasant summer
days with a white lamb, which she led across the meadows on a red leash.
The three young women had made a pact of friendship and given one
another nicknames. Henriette von Roussillon became “Urania,” Luise von
Ziegler “Lila,” and Karoline Flachsland “Psyche.” Since the two ladies-in-
waiting were often traveling with the court, there were frequent farewells,
which afforded wonderful opportunities for tears. There was much weeping
in general, and appropriate poems were read. Klopstock was high on the list
of favorites, but they also read Gellert and Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim as
well as the “Night Thoughts” of Edward Young, the sentimental novels of
Samuel Richardson, and, of course, Rousseau. There was no holding back—
voluptuous emotion, lachrymose inwardness, and a playfully rococo cult of
friendship prevailed. The apostle of this sentimental circle was Franz
Michael Leuchsenring, a soft, affectionate man who was a tutor at the
Darmstadt court. He was deeply devout, but for most members of the circle,
the cult of feeling was more aesthetic than religious. The important thing was
one’s feelings and feeling one’s feelings, sensing sentimentality—an
intensification by reduplication. The Sentimentalists were sophisticated, not
naïve. Much attention was paid to verbal expression and the staging of their
meetings. The whole thing was a parlor game, with nonstop embraces,
caresses, and tears.
It is astonishing that the sarcastic Merck belonged, and that he thoroughly
enjoyed participating. Perhaps it was exactly because the playful aspect of
the group’s emotional intensity was so obvious. It was something that could
please even as cool a head as his. The poet Gleim, one of their idols, once
paid a visit—another opportunity for a sentimental scene. Karoline
Flachsland wrote to Herder, “Merck, Leuchsenring, and I surrounded dear
old gentle, sprightly, honest Father Gleim in a corner and surrendered
ourselves to the full sentiments of most tender friendship. He wept a tear of
joy and I, I lay with my head on Merck’s breast. He was extraordinarily
moved, wept with me, and—I don’t know what all I did.”
It was into this circle that Goethe strayed on his visit in the spring of 1772.
Numerous arms reached out to embrace him, for they all realized that a true
poet had arrived. “Goethe is full of songs,” the enraptured Karoline writes
Herder, who was not exactly pleased by his fiancée’s enthusiasm.
For his part, Goethe enjoyed his new friends much more than he did the
company of lawyers in their stuffy chambers. He spent many lovely spring
days with Karoline and the others. Goethe saw himself as a wayfarer,
stopping here and there to sample and flirt, and he was familiar with their
notion of the reduplication of feeling. He, too, knew what it meant to be in
love with being in love, and what’s more, he could make poetry out of it.
Lila, Urania, and Psyche—these three Graces are immediately
commemorated, in an encounter edged with lyric gold.

When for the first time you

approached the stranger
in loving anticipation,
stretched out your hand to him,
he felt in advance
all the bliss
stirring toward him.

The gods gave us

Elysium here on earth.

That was for Urania, and a few strophes later, it was Lila’s turn:

I cast a hopeful glance

at Lila; she comes toward me.
 Heavenly lips!
And I stagger toward her,
look and sigh and stagger—
What bliss! What bliss!
The feeling of a kiss!

Psyche, a.k.a. Karoline Flachsland, got a poem of her own that would cause a
good deal of trouble in days to come.
The Sentimentalists went on group rambles in the pretty country around
Darmstadt, dedicating hills and rocks to one another. Each had at least one
little rise that bore his or her name. Goethe chose for himself a rock that was
somewhat higher than the others’, scaling it to scratch his name onto it. In a
little ceremony, he consecrated the rock with a poem dedicated to Psyche. It
depicts a scene in which Karoline leans against the stone, her head cushioned
by the moss, and thinks of the absent one, meaning Herder. The poet wishes,
however, that she also think of the

bewildered wayfarer: and a tear wells up

at the thought of past joys,
then you lift to heaven
your pleading eye,
see above you
there, my name.

Herder was not amused by the poem and was very put out when he heard
that, after Goethe’s departure, Karoline actually made a pilgrimage back to
the rock in question. He composed a parody of Goethe’s consecration of the
rock and wrote to Karoline in a fit of pique, “In more ways than one you cut a
very sorry figure” in Goethe’s poem. Goethe sent Herder an angry reply: So I
also want to tell you that I was recently infuriated by your answer to the
“Consecration of the Rock” and called you an intolerant cleric. . . . As far
as that point is concerned, from now on your right to cause your girl
melancholy hours will not be interfered with. The relationship between the
two men took a cooler turn and didn’t warm up again for two years.
The Sentimentalists liked to call Goethe the “Wanderer,” and he indeed
often walked from Frankfurt to Darmstadt, even in wind and rain. On one of
these hikes he conceived the hymn “Wanderer’s Storm Song,” a daring,
formally experimental poem. When I was met on the way by a terrible storm
that I had to brave, I passionately sang this half-nonsensical stuff out
loud.
If we compare the Sentimentalists’ flirtatious lyrics with this poem, which
Goethe circulated among his friends but didn’t publish until much later, in
1815, we can measure how far he was from their delicately amorous rococo
style. “Wanderer’s Storm Song” is a skillful expression of wild, chaotic
feeling. The poem, with its energetic defiance, strikes a Promethean tone:

Genius, he whom you do not forsake

Not the rain or the gale
Breathes a chill on his heart
Genius, he whom you do not forsake,
Will sing against the rain cloud
Against the hail storm
Sing against them like the
Lark, you up there
Genius, he whom you do not forsake.

That incantatory repetition, Genius, he whom you do not forsake, is a

declaration, a plea, a wish, a demand. Who is this Genius? The pantheon of
Greek gods is mobilized: Phoebus Apollo, the god of the sun, warmth, and
song; then Father Bromius, a pseudonym for Dionysus, the god of wine,
fertility, and ecstasy; and finally Jupiter—Zeus, ruler of the gods. It was from
Pindar that Goethe learned to weave these appeals and demands into his
poem. Herder had introduced him to the Greek poet, and he was attempting to
translate him. I live in Pindar now, he wrote to Herder in July 1772. To be
sure, when he shoots his arrows one after another toward his target in the
clouds, I still stand and gape. Now he gapes no more but, instead, shoots
his own arrows into the clouds at the gods. But the gods of Pindar can help
him only if he helps himself and has confidence in himself. The Genius to
whom he appeals is in the last analysis his own. Whatever the gods have
ordained for him, he will not be distracted from his goal:

There on the hill—

Heavenly might—
Only enough glow—
 There is my hut—
To wade that far.

Those are the closing lines. In contrast to the broad opening verses, one
hears panting. Someone has actually run out of breath here. We must not
forget—if we can believe Goethe—that the poem was actually composed
during his hike. The wade at the end sounds quite unheroic and casts an
ironical light on the emotional gestures of the beginning. Exhaustion after
great effort makes itself felt: it is the exhaustion of the path Goethe has
traveled. He is daring himself to measure up against Pindar. The poem’s
rhythms imitate the bursts of exertion needed to fight against wind and rain.
Anacreon, who makes an appearance with the pair of doves / In his tender
arm, is mentioned almost contemptuously, for this wanderer has contended
with more powerful forces—namely, with the Gale-breathing godhead.
So this is how Goethe may sometimes have arrived in Darmstadt to visit
the Sentimentalists, having trekked from Frankfurt on foot. Wind-blown and
rain-soaked, he made his way to them and then returned to Frankfurt, staying
in one of the inns in the Fahrgasse.
Goethe the Wanderer had in the meantime become a reviewer in Frankfurt.
The man who would later write, Strike him dead, the dog. He’s a reviewer
was one himself. Merck, having utterly transformed the Frankfurter Gelehrte
Anzeigen, had finally persuaded him to write for it. Its pages were stripped
of didactic philosophizing and boring moral commentary and filled with
gripping, irreverent criticism. In accordance with the changing spirit of the
times, expressions of opinion had a personal edge.
Wit instead of pedantry—this was to Goethe’s liking. His very first piece,
a scathing review of a German imitation of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental
Journey, strikes a tone unusual even for the latest reviews under Merck: As
police officers of the literary court . . . we will allow the preceptor [that is,
the author] to continue living for a time. However, he must be sent to the
new workhouse where all useless, prattling writers grate Oriental roots,
sort variants, scrape documents, cut up indexes, and perform other similar
manual tasks. He dismisses a tragedy by a certain Pfeufer in a single
sentence: Herr Benignus Pfeufer may be an upright man in other respects,
but with this wretched play he has prostituted his name once and for all. A
thick tome on Moral Beauty and Philosophy of Life bores the reviewer, who
calls it pathetic twaddle.
 One can tell that he wrote the reviews quickly and offhandedly, sometimes
without even having read the book: a glance at the introduction was enough.
But sometimes he feels challenged to provide a more thorough discussion—
for instance, of Johann Georg Sulzer’s influential The Arts in Their Origin,
Their True Nature, and Best Application. In his review, Goethe attempts to
clarify his own aesthetic principles.
He writes that it is still too early for an authoritative theory of the arts.
Everything is still in ferment, and the artist and lover of the arts should
remember that with any theory, he blocks the path to true enjoyment. Above
all, the reviewer challenges the commonly held principle, elaborated by
Sulzer, that art is an imitation of nature.
Goethe confidently declares that with its forms, art creates a new nature:
an artificial, incomparable, original, and surprising nature. It has no need to
measure itself against what already exists, but should be judged according to
its own inner truth. Thus Goethe opposes the principle of imitation of nature
with the principle of creative expression.
But since the principle of imitation applies not just to concrete natural
objects but also to the traditional forms of representation that one should
emulate as well, the critique of imitation has a double significance: art needs
to be liberated both from conventional forms and from dull realism. With his
Götz as well as his nature and love poetry, Goethe was attempting exactly
that.
Whoever ties art to the imitation of nature assumes the goodness and
beauty of nature, Goethe claims, and quotes Sulzer, who says of nature that it
touches us “through pleasant impressions.” Goethe answers, Are not raging
storms, floods, rains of fire, subterranean infernos, and death in all the
elements just as true testimonies to its eternal life as glorious sunrises
over ripening vineyards and perfumed orange groves?
Goethe denies that beauty in nature only needs to be imitated, and in the
fervor of his polemical dismissal adopts the extreme counterposition: beauty
must be forcibly wrested from a cruel nature. Far from following the
example of nature, art must resist it. He advances an entirely novel thought:
art is precisely the counterforce, it arises from the individual’s struggle to
maintain himself against the destructive force of the whole.
From this vantage point, he ventures a daring look at the culture of the
future. Humanity, he writes, is in the act of closing itself off in a cultural
palace behind walls of glass. A century later, Dostoevsky would define
modernism in exactly the same way.‡ The young Goethe anticipates him en
passant and also suggests Dostoevsky’s conclusion that the glass palace, the
artificial world that has been wrested from nature, becomes a site of
complacency. The powerful assertion of self against nature morphs into
luxurious relaxation. Decadence threatens. Man, Goethe writes, gradually
becomes softer and softer. How was such decadence to be avoided? The
reviewer can answer even that. Since art and culture owe their existence to
the resistance to nature, one should ally oneself with this resistive power and
not simply take it for granted. One should pay attention to the difficulties
artists have to overcome and the power that allows them to do so. That is
how the creative impulse is fortified—nature pays it tribute.
Yet the artistic power of anti-nature that is here invoked is, in the final
analysis, itself nature, and the young Goethe knows that too. What else could
it be? There is a kind of natural impulse to oppose what seems complete and
finished in nature. Or, according to the traditional formulation, “natura
naturans,” creative nature, opposes “natura naturata,” incarnate nature. In
another review, Goethe defines this power of natural anti-nature as genius. It
is our firm belief that genius does not imitate nature, but rather itself
creates, like nature. His early aesthetic is concentrated in this sentence.
There is one more review that deserves to be quoted at length. Goethe
wrote it after he had already moved to Wetzlar. He used a review of a trivial,
conventional love story to describe a pair of lovers who would truly deserve
to be depicted:
O Genius of our Fatherland, let a young man flourish soon who, full of
youthful strength and high spirits, would be first the best companion for
his circle of friends, choose the best games, sing the happiest little songs .
. . to whom the best dancer would joyfully give her hand . . . let him find a
girl worthy of him!
When more sacred feelings lead him from the bustle of society into
solitude, let him discover a girl on his pilgrimage whose soul is all
goodness and whose form all gracefulness, who has had the good fortune
to develop in a quiet family circle of active, domestic love. Who is the
favorite, friend, and support of her mother and the second mother of her
home, whose always affectionate soul irresistibly wins every heart for her,
from whom poets and wise men would willingly learn and take delight in
her native virtue, prosperity, and grace.—And if she feels in hours of
solitary peace that with all the love she broadcasts she is still missing
something, a heart that is as young and warm as she and would yearn with
her for more distant, more hidden joys. Firmly yoked to his invigorating
company, she would strive toward all the golden prospects, eternal
togetherness, lasting union, eternally entwining love.
Let the two of them find each other. At the first approach they will sense,
darkly and powerfully, what an epitome of bliss each is taking hold of in
the other. They will never leave each other. . . . Truth will be in his songs
and living beauty, not colorful soap-bubble ideals like those floating about
in hundreds of German songs.
But do such girls exist? Can there be such youths?
The reviewer has good reason to think that such a girl and boy really do
exist, for he himself is the boy and the girl is Lotte Buff, and what happens
between them takes place half in Wetzlar and half in a dream.
Goethe arrived in Wetzlar in the middle of May 1772 to register as a
trainee at the Reichskammergericht, the Imperial Chamber Court. Like his
father before him, he was there to gain further professional experience,
especially in the area of constitutional and administrative law. The Imperial
Supreme Court was the highest court for all civil disputes among the imperial
estates, as well as between subjects and the authorities. Criminal cases were
not tried there. The court had been in existence since 1495, first in Speyer
and, since the end of the seventeenth century, in Wetzlar. The little town of
about five thousand inhabitants was swarming with judges, procurators,
lawyers, diplomats, and their subordinate officials, legation councilors, and
officers of the court, all pursuing their abstruse and never-ending cases.
Some had already lasted over a hundred years. They concerned sinecures,
taxes, debts, border disputes, and tenancy arrangements. The litigants spent
money attempting to speed up or slow down their cases. Corruption was
widespread, and to put a stop to it an inquiry had been ordered five years
before Goethe’s arrival, thanks to which the army of officials had grown
even larger. In the summer of 1772, its investigations were still in progress.
There was no specific program for trainees. One could poke around in the
piles of documents and had an enormous number to choose from: sixteen
thousand unresolved cases were stacked up in the offices—the dense
juridical underbrush of the venerable Holy Roman Empire of the German
Nation. The scene in Faust in which Mephistopheles introduces a newly
arrived student to the various fields of study summarizes Goethe’s
experiences in Wetzlar: Laws and rights are handed down / Passed on like
some eternal plague / From generation unto generation, / They shamble on
from place to place.
Goethe devoted hardly any time to such things. He attended very few
trials, which consisted of the public reading of long, learned writs. Goethe
had barely arrived in Wetzlar when people started making jokes about the
slim doctor of law with the large eyes who was studying every possible
subject except law. He was reputed to be an aesthete and a philosopher, and
it soon got around that he also wrote reviews. The legation secretary
Wilhelm Jerusalem, whose suicide would make him famous not long
afterward, knew Goethe from his days in Leipzig and referred to him
disparagingly as a “Frankfurt newspaper writer.” Götz had not yet been
published but was already being talked about, and a group who dined
together and, like the Sentimentalists, made a game of giving one another
nicknames dubbed Goethe “Götz the Upright.” Here too, Goethe made an
impression and people sought his friendship. He could discourse beautifully
on Homer, Pindar, Ossian, and Shakespeare and read from their works in his
sonorous voice. Goethe socialized with young lawyers and legation
secretaries. He was not attracted to the circles of higher officials, who were
often aristocrats. Wherever he went, he immediately became the center of
attention. The Hanoverian legation councilor Johann Christian Kestner,
Charlotte Buff’s fiancé, describes how he met Goethe that summer. He was
out in the neighboring village of Garbenheim, a popular destination for
excursions. “There,” writes Kestner, “I found him lying on his back in the
grass under a tree while conversing with those standing around him—an
Epicurean philosopher (von Goué, the great genius), a Stoic philosopher
(von Kielmannsegg), and a middle thing between those two (Dr. König)—
and quite at his ease.”
He lies nonchalantly in the grass while the others stand around and listen
to his words. Kestner depicts the scene with some irony. This man in the
grass is certainly impressive, but how seriously can one take him? Is that any
way to talk to people if you have any self-respect? Or doesn’t he have any?
Kestner had joined them and noticed that “interesting things” were being
discussed, and the most interesting things were being said by this Goethe
fellow. “You know that I don’t make snap judgments,” Kestner writes. “I did
find that he has genius and a lively imagination, but that wasn’t enough for me
to esteem him highly.” He got to know him better at the home of his fiancée,
Lotte Buff. There Goethe had been introduced pretty much as he would later
describe Werther’s introduction in the novel: Goethe had taken part in an
excursion to the hunting lodge in Volpertshausen, where the party had also
planned to organize a dance. Twelve gentlemen and thirteen young women of
impeccable reputation had been invited. The nineteen-year-old Charlotte
Buff was riding in the same coach as Goethe. He falls in love with the dainty
young woman with sky-blue eyes and curly blond hair. Dancing went on for
half the night. According to Kestner’s testimony, Goethe did not yet know on
that first night that Lotte “was no longer free.” And since the engagement was
not yet official, when Kestner later joined the party, he acted as if he and
Lotte were only good friends.
The next day Goethe paid Lotte a visit in the so-called Deutsches Haus, the
seat of the Order of Teutonic Knights, where her father was the bailiff of the
order’s holdings. His wife had died some time ago, and as his oldest
daughter, Lotte took care of her younger siblings. On this first visit, Goethe
came upon a scene he would later depict in Werther: Lotte, surrounded by the
crowd of her little brothers and sisters, cuts slices of bread for them, wipes
their noses, settles their arguments, and scolds or praises them as needed.
In Poetry and Truth Goethe stresses that it was precisely the fact that Lotte
was already engaged that made him carefree. It took him by surprise to
suddenly find himself so passionately entangled and enraptured that he no
longer knew himself. All the more so because Lotte was the kind of woman
who finds general favor but does not excite intense passion. That was, by
the way, also the opinion of Merck (as ruthless as Mephistopheles) when he
paid a visit to Wetzlar. He told his friend he would do better to seek out a
more attractive lady friend instead of wasting his time on a hopeless
romance.
Lotte had set clear limits on Goethe’s romancing, but with the approval of
her fiancé wanted to continue the friendship. Kestner also found Goethe
attractive and didn’t want to do without him. And so after the
misunderstanding had been cleared up, Goethe remained a friend of the
engaged couple. Thus they continued to live through the splendid summer
in a genuine German idyll, to which the countryside lent the prose and a
pure affection the poetry. They walked through the fields of grain, listened
to the song of the lark, groaned under the heat, got drenched by
thunderstorms, and sat around the kitchen table shelling peas. It could have
continued like that for quite a while, but according to Kestner, Goethe had
“qualities that can make him dangerous for a young woman, especially one
who is sensitive and has taste.” Although Kestner had confidence in his
beloved, he doubted whether he was capable “of making Lottchen as happy
as he could,” as he wrote to a friend. He wanted to lose neither Goethe nor
Lotte. Thus it was a great relief for him when Goethe finally realized “that he
would have to use force to obtain his peace of mind.” Force in this case
meant the decision to depart Wetzlar in secret.
Goethe left Wetzlar early on September 10, 1772, without announcing his
departure. The three had spent the previous evening together. Kestner wrote
in his diary, “He, Lottchen, and I had a curious conversation about conditions
after this life, about going away and coming back, etc., a conversation
initiated by Lottchen, not by him. We agreed that whichever of us died first
should, if he could, give those still alive news of the conditions of that life.
Goethe became quite despondent.” The next morning, Goethe left behind two
letters of farewell, one for Kestner and, enclosed in it, one for Lotte. To
Kestner he wrote, If I had stayed a single moment longer with you, I
wouldn’t have been able to control myself. And to Lotte: Now I am alone
and can weep. I leave you two happy and shall not go out of your hearts.
Lotte cried when she read his letters. Despite the relief she felt, some
sadness was inevitable. “But she was happy that he was gone,” Kestner notes
in his diary, “since she couldn’t give him what he wanted. For he was very
much in love with her—to the point of mania. But she always distanced
herself from such things and never granted him anything but friendship, which
she formally declared. We spoke only of him.”
They would speak of him many more times, at first in a friendly and
affectionate way, but for a while, after the publication of Werther, with
bitterness and resentment. But that too would pass.

* Ernst Beutler, Essays um Goethe (Frankfurt a. M. and Leipzig: Insel, 1995).

† Latin: effort; pressure.
‡ See Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, pt. 1, chap. 7.
 CHAPTER 8

A Portrait of the Young Goethe. Correspondence

with the Kestners. Jerusalem’s Suicide.
Götz Is Published. Becoming a Star.
Exhilaration. Prometheus. Poet or Prophet? Muhammad.
Satirical Campaigns against False Prophets.

....

BEFORE FOLLOWING GOETHE ON HIS PATH, LET’S PAUSE for a

moment to consider how he must have appeared to those around him: to a
sober, insightful observer such as Kestner, for instance, who, despite great
respect for Goethe, had grounds to regard him skeptically. A surviving draft
of one of Kestner’s letters contains perhaps the most powerful and vivid
portrait we have of the young Goethe.
“[Goethe] has what one calls genius and an extraordinarily lively
imagination. He is intensely emotional. He has a noble way of thinking. He is
a man of character. He loves children and can become very involved with
them. He is bizarre, and there are various things about his behavior and
appearance that could make him unpleasant. But nevertheless, he is in the
good books of children, women, and many others.—He does whatever
occurs to him without worrying whether it pleases others, is fashionable, or
permitted by good breeding. He hates all constraints.—He holds the female
sex in high regard.—In principiis he is not yet settled and is still searching
for a certain system. . . . He is not what one would call orthodox, however
not from pride or caprice or to make a show. He . . . doesn’t like to disturb
others in their settled opinions. . . . He does not go to church, not even to
Communion, and seldom prays. For, as he says, ‘I’m not enough of a liar for
that.’ . . . He has great respect for the Christian religion, but not in the form in
which our theologians would present it. . . . He strives for truth but has more
regard for feeling it than for demonstrating it. . . . He has made belles-lettres
and the arts his principal study—or rather, all branches of knowledge except
those by which one earns one’s bread. . . . He is, in a word, a very
remarkable person.”
The wealth of ingenious ideas, the strong emotional presence, the
disregard of convention and fashion, and the spontaneity—these are the
characteristics that make an immediate impression. More subtle are the
seriousness and conscientiousness, especially evident in religious matters.
He has respect for religion but not for its claims to temporal power or its
dogma. This “remarkable person” follows his own path in everything and has
boundless curiosity about the world, which he satisfies in his own way. He is
far removed from the branches of knowledge “by which one earns one’s
bread” and so also from the exclusive focus on getting ahead in his
profession. Of course, he can also afford to be that way. Kestner, very much a
sober man who had to earn his bread, records this characteristic of Goethe’s
without contempt or enthusiastic admiration; he is simply amazed at so much
free-and-easy self-assurance.
Goethe left Kestner in Wetzlar with this image of himself as he set off on
foot down the Lahn Valley toward Frankfurt. On the way he paid a visit to the
celebrated author Sophie von La Roche, who lived with her husband and
children in a stately residence in Ehrenbreitstein. Her husband was an
enlightened diplomat, worldly-wise, tolerant, and somewhat patronizing
toward the aesthetes his wife attracted to their house. Sophie, a cousin of
Wieland’s and at one time engaged to him, gained fame with her epistolary
novel The History of Fräulein von Sternheim.* People mistook the novel’s
sensitive, virtuous heroine for the author and were disappointed with von La
Roche the cool society woman. That had also been Goethe’s first impression
when he met her through Merck in the Darmstadt circle in early 1772. Now
she opened up to him, however, and though an innate reserve would always
remain, the two developed an intimate, trusting relationship, Goethe
occasionally calling her Mama in his letters. He was the witty
conversationalist, entertaining but careful to keep his mercurial temperament
in check. He would remain in contact with von La Roche over three
generations: through her daughter Maximiliane von Brentano, whose black
eyes he borrowed for Werther’s Lotte, and her granddaughter Bettine von
Arnim.
Back in Frankfurt, his father’s reproaches awaited. Goethe’s sojourn in
Wetzlar had been expensive, but what had it added to his professional
development? The father kept track, but the son didn’t and simply let his
father pay. In a letter to Kestner, he complains, Dear God, when I grow old,
will I be like that? Will my soul no longer cling to what is amiable and
good? Strange that one should believe that the older a person becomes, the
freer he should be from everything mundane and petty. He becomes more
and more mundane and petty.
Goethe found the atmosphere at home oppressive. There was also trouble
with the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen. Some of the senior clergy had taken
offense at the cheeky tone of the reviews, and the periodical had been sued.
The publisher also complained that some things were too difficult for readers
to understand. Goethe decided to give up his work as a reviewer, and wrote
an ironic “Epilogue” as a farewell to his audience at the end of 1772. He
says he has learned what it means to want to communicate with the public,
to be misunderstood, and so on and so forth.
In October 1772, news arrived from Kestner that an acquaintance in
Wetzlar, the former legation secretary Siegfried von Goué, who had devoted
himself to drinking and writing tragedies, had taken his own life. I honor
such a deed, writes Goethe, and bemoan humanity and leave all the shitty
philistines to such tobacco-smoked reflections as “I told you so.” I hope to
never burden my friends with such news.
It proved an unfounded rumor. Goué was alive and well and had in the
meantime moved to Göttingen. Two weeks later, however, a real suicide
occurred in Wetzlar. Wilhelm Jerusalem shot himself. Everyone was talking
about it, because Jerusalem’s name was familiar to many. He was the son of
a well-known religious writer who was a close friend of Lessing’s. There
was much speculation about what could have driven the young man to take
his own life. Was it an anxious striving for truth and moral goodness, as
Goethe wrote to Sophie von La Roche? Had Jerusalem perished from his
lofty moral aspiration? Kestner wrote that an unhappy love affair with a
married woman was said to have played a part. This news was terrible and
unexpected, answered Goethe, immediately blaming Jerusalem’s father, who
had raised his son to be overly pious: If that damned cleric his father isn’t
to blame, may God forgive me for hoping he breaks his neck.
 Goethe asked Kestner for details of the suicide. Kestner wrote an
extensive, detailed report, itself almost a literary masterpiece, on which
Goethe would draw a year later for Werther, not just its concrete details but
also a number of felicitous phrases. The famous last sentence of the novel—
No clergyman accompanied him—is straight from Kestner’s report.
In Poetry and Truth Goethe describes the composition of Werther as
though the news of Jerusalem’s suicide was the initial spark for the literary
reworking of his summer romance in Wetzlar. In fact, an entire year went by
before Goethe began writing the novel. And several other things had
happened in the meantime.
Goethe was in a gloomy but frivolous mood. He had an active
correspondence with Kestner and flirted with the role of a romantically
frustrated family friend. As if wanting to torture himself, he demanded that he
be allowed to procure the wedding rings for the couple. He sent the rings on
April 7, 1773, with the message that, from then on, he would no longer be
eager to see the two of them. Nor would he attend the wedding. He had taken
Lotte’s silhouette down from where it hung above his bed. Only when he
heard the news that she was lying in would a new era begin and I will love
her children instead of her. And then once again, in a letter to Kestner, he
turns over the question whether it was right for him to leave Wetzlar so
hastily. Was he too cold or too hot? It cost me little, and yet I cannot
understand how it was possible. It’s as if he must defend himself against the
charge of having been too cool a lover—an absurd thing to say to Kestner,
who had been happy to have Goethe out of the running. But Goethe acts as if
he had thereby cut a sorry figure in Kestner’s eyes. Should he have fought
more for Lotte? Is he not really a ladies’ man? And between you and me,
without boasting, I know something about girls. He writes that he is not
jealous of Kestner and hints at his own intention to get married. There is
mention of a possible candidate—he probably had Anna Sibylla Münch in
mind, having drawn her name in a marriage-lottery parlor game. He writes
that he has dreamed about Lotte: he was walking through an allée with her on
his arm and people were stopping to stare at them. And so I dream, he
continues, and dawdle through life, conduct nasty trials, write dramas and
novels and so on, sketch and flirt and keep it up as fast as I can go. At
times he acts relieved to be out of the affair, at others he complains that he
can’t get Lotte off his mind. In any case, he feels very strange. I don’t know
why I’m writing so much. I’m such a fool.
 He also strikes gloomy notes. I’m wandering through the desert, or My
poor existence is congealing into barren rock. He hints that he is sometimes
in a shooting mood. In Poetry and Truth he talks of a dagger that he kept for
a while on his nightstand, with which he often experimented to see whether
he could succeed in sinking the sharp point a few inches into my breast. He
couldn’t, and so in the end laughed at myself, threw off all hypochondriacal
fancies, and resolved to live.
Then came the success of Götz. The play appeared in June 1773,
anonymously and without place of publication, paid for by Merck and
Goethe. And since the experienced businessman Merck had left for Russia in
the entourage of a Darmstadt princess, Goethe also had the expense of
marketing and distribution. It was a huge best-seller, for its time, making it
impossible for the author to remain anonymous. Nor did Goethe want to. A
half year later, there was a second authorized printing, to forestall pirated
editions, which it did not succeed in doing. Despite Goethe’s opinion that the
play was a closet drama because of its shifting locations and lack of unified
plot, it was almost immediately staged, first in Berlin (with the addition of a
Gypsy ballet) and then in Hamburg, Breslau, Leipzig, and Mannheim. The
newspapers introduced the young author to a wider public. With Götz—and a
year later to an even greater extent with Werther—Goethe had conquered a
new reading and theatergoing audience. A reading public, until then quite
sedate, discovered a sudden taste for sensationalism. Everyone who was
anyone had to know the play and its author, or at least to have heard of him,
and the new star in the literary firmament brightened the correspondence of
his contemporaries, especially women. Somewhat later hubbub about the
play even reached the ears of Frederick the Great, and the king of Prussia
was not amused. He called Götz a “vile imitation of those bad English
plays,” by which he meant the works of Shakespeare. Without mention of his
name, the author was berated as the destroyer of literary taste. But the public
was proud of him on patriotic as well as literary grounds. People were no
longer content to be lectured on literary matters by the king. A national
literary self-confidence had grown, owing in large part to the success of
Götz.
Most reviews ranged from approval to euphoria. In Christoph Martin
Wieland’s monthly Der Teutsche Merkur (The German Mercury) the play
was “the most beautiful and interesting monster” that deserved the “liveliest
thanks of all German patriots.” Wieland himself maintained a cautious
distance from such praise, but also admitted that an author had emerged who
raised the greatest hopes. Of course, Goethe’s former house organ, the
Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen, also praised the play: “We could tell from
the very first pages that things would get pretty boisterous, but we forgot our
Aristotle and reveled in it.”
Numerous imitations appeared. The theme of knights became fashionable.
Heroes alone against the world, with or without hands of iron, capable
matrons looking after the castle, lovely maidens, evil schemers in armor, and
beautiful, wicked women now peopled the stages. Since Götz was a
historical person and there were descendants who could now bask in their
ancestor’s reflected glory, other bearers of famous names got the idea to have
themselves portrayed in plays. A Baron von Riedesel of Eisenach announced
a prize of twenty ducats for a play about one of his ancestors. He even had
Lessing in mind as the judge, but nothing came of the scheme.
Overnight, Goethe’s name became so famous all over literary Germany
that people even attributed to him J. M. R. Lenz’s Der Hofmeister (The
Tutor), published anonymously shortly after Götz. Goethe’s name stood for
the new, earthy, powerfully visceral tone, for theatrical picture books,
liberation from the conventional rules, lack of didacticism, and verbal
originality. Not long thereafter, however, Goethe had no trouble returning to
traditional forms with the play Clavigo, as if to prove that he could do both
the one thing and its opposite.
He had an overwhelming sense of omnipotence. Not only did he want to
do what he was capable of, but he also felt capable of doing whatever he
wanted. On September 15, 1773, he tells Kestner what he’s working on: And
a drama for performance so those fellows see that if I choose to, I can
observe the rules and depict morality and sensitivity. Adieu. One more
word in confidence as a writer: my ideals of beauty and greatness are
developing more each day, and if my vitality and my love don’t desert me,
there is still much to come for the people I love and the public can have its
share too.
In his euphoria, Goethe sketched out the play Prometheus. In mid-July
1773 he writes Kestner, The gods have sent me a sculptor, and if he finds
work here as we hope, I can forget many things. . . . I’m adapting my own
situation as a play in defiance of God and man.
He found material on Prometheus from Aeschylus, Lucian, and Ovid in
Benjamin Hederich’s Basic Lexicon of Mythology. Two fragmentary acts
were as far as he got. They do not contain much action, but instead a series of
great verbal gestures, the theme being defiance of the gods. Prometheus is
cast as a rebel, no longer a willing subject of the gods. In the background,
one sees the Caucasus. Those who know their mythology know that there the
gods chained Prometheus to a rock as punishment for bringing fire to men.
But the play chooses a different episode from the story of Prometheus. To
sideline him, the gods offer Prometheus a comfortable place in Olympus. But
he would be dependent on them still, a sort of castellan, as Prometheus says
mockingly in a Götz-like tone. His brother Epimetheus recommends he
accept their offer. Prometheus replies, They want to share with me, and I
maintain / That I have nothing I need share with them. / What I have they
cannot snatch away. . . . The circle my activity completes.
For Goethe, this activity (the German Wirksamkeit also means
“effectiveness”) is above all his literary output and the power of the word,
and so he brings in Minerva as the goddess of inspired speech. Prometheus
sees himself in league with her and depicts the wonderful effect the goddess
has on him. These lines are about the peculiar process of inspiration. Goethe
knew what it felt like to suddenly experience yourself as a medium for the
thoughts and ideas flooding through you; to have your normal consciousness
creatively expand; to become a different person and yet stay the same.
Prometheus to Minerva:

And you are to my spirit

What it is to itself
...
Always as if my soul were speaking to itself
...
So was I not myself,
It was a god who spoke
When I thought I was speaking,
And when I thought a god was speaking,
I spoke myself.
And thus with you and me
So indivisible.

In the second act, Prometheus gives a sample of his activity. He does what
authors also enjoy doing—forms men in his own image, though with clay
rather than words:

Look down, Zeus

Upon my world: it lives.
A world that I have formed in my own image
A race of men who are my equal.
To suffer, weep, enjoy, and to be happy
And to ignore you, as do I.

The story continues a little further. Men learn to assert themselves against
one another, to defend their freedom and the property they have acquired
through their work. Then they are initiated into the mysteries of the unity of
love and death. It all happens hurriedly, in quick succession. But what one
recalls above all is Prometheus’s defiant rebellion against Zeus: And to
ignore you.
These rebellious lines recur in the famous ode, also entitled
“Prometheus”: Cover your heaven, Zeus. It was probably meant to open the
third act, but was published as a stand-alone poem in 1785, without Goethe’s
permission, in his friend Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s On the Teachings of
Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn, as an alleged example of
daring atheism in the style of Spinoza. There will be more to say about this
later.
The tone struck in this first-person poem attacking the Olympian gods is
even more aggressive and self-assertive than that in the play. Though it ends,
as in the play, with Here I sit, forming men, the powerlessness of the gods is
pilloried even more sharply:

I know nothing so pitiful

Under the sun as you gods.
Your majesty kept alive
By offerings and whispered prayers
And you would wither if not for
Children and beggars,
Those hopeful fools.
 Why should that be true only of the Greek gods and not of the Christian
God as well? Who aided me against / The malice of the Titans / . . . Did not
you, my sacred, glowing heart / Do everything yourself? A heart that dares
such things doesn’t need the Christian God either. Whoever was so disposed
could hear something blasphemous in the poem, doubtless why Jacobi
published it and why it caused a scandal. In Poetry and Truth, Goethe tries
to blunt the explosive critique of religion. Even though one can and did
engage in philosophical and even religious reflections about this work, it
properly belongs completely to poetry.
Goethe’s Promethean self-confidence is based on the most secure
foundation of his life at the time, namely, his poetical productive talent.
Something always occurred to him. He was full of ideas and wrote before he
got out of bed in the morning, at night, during the day, in company, alone, and
with or without wine. You could request whatever you wanted from him, I
was ready to deliver. Since his natural gift at this point in life was available
whenever and wherever he needed it, in my thoughts it pleased me to make
it the foundation of my entire existence. This idea was transformed into an
image: the old mythological figure of Prometheus occurred to me. . . . The
story of Prometheus came alive within me. I altered the old robe of the
Titans to fit my size.
There was something cocky and insouciant about Goethe. He tried
everything: poems in the folk-song manner, odes in Pindar’s style, theater in
imitation of Shakespeare, county fair–style slapstick, and doggerel like Hans
Sachs’s all flowed easily from his pen. He was a quick-change artist able to
change others as well.
And that was the impression he made on people around him: that he was a
magician. Bolstered by the success of Götz, he was surrounded by an aura of
the unprecedented. People called him a “genius,” sought him out, and hung on
his every word. Some called him “possessed” (Jacobi) and others a “genius
from head to toe” (the writer and art critic Wilhelm Heinse). The Swiss
writer Johann Jakob Bodmer feared that “his fire will consume him.” People
regarded him as a miracle of nature.
He attracted people who honored him with almost religious fervor. An
acquaintance from his Strasbourg years wrote, “This Goethe, the only one I
must . . . stammer and sing and wax dithyrambic about . . . this Goethe has all
but taken wing and risen above all my ideals. . . . I would never have been so
able to experience the feeling of the disciples at Emmaus in the Gospel, when
they said, ‘Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us?’ Let us
make him our Lord Jesus forever and let me be the last of his disciples!” At
times people gathered around him as around a prophet. Ludwig Julius
Friedrich Höpfner, a former colleague at the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen,
reported on a visit Goethe paid to Giessen: “some sitting, some standing—a
few of the learned gentlemen were even standing on chairs and looking over
the heads of their colleagues into the assembled circle from whose center the
full voice of a man emerged, a man who was enchanting his listeners with his
spirited talk.” People compared him to Jesus and felt incapable of “writing
anything comprehensible about this extraordinary creature of God.” When
Goethe set off from Frankfurt on one of his hikes, he sometimes had a train of
young girls and children following him. And in Darmstadt, where he stayed
with Merck, the curious gathered in front of the house. Merck made jokes
about it and urged his friend to go out and bless the crowd. At times the
whole business became creepy for Goethe, especially because people even
beset him in his own house. He had to give regular audiences, four times a
week, but agreed to see people only in the morning. The room was always
full.
It was never Goethe’s aim to force or exploit the impression he made.
Instead, he was aware of the problems it caused. Was he still a poet or
already a prophet? That was the question.
In the euphoria of his poetic inspiration, he felt enough the prophet to be
able to empathize with figures like Muhammad or Abraham when God
manifested fully in them. In his fragmentary drama Mahomet, the prophet
says, Dost thou not see him? At every quiet spring, under every blooming
tree I encounter him in the warmth of his love. How I thank him; he opened
my breast, took away the hard hull of my heart, that I might feel his
approach.
Goethe the poet had clearly experienced things that led him to think about
the descent of the Holy Spirit in the miracle of Pentecost: The fullness of the
holiest, deepest feeling pushed man for one moment into a supernatural
existence. He spoke the language of the spirits and from the depths of the
godhead his tongue blazed life and light. Thus he describes it in a short
essay entitled “What Does It Mean to Speak in Tongues?”
He felt a similar spirit in himself. It did not reveal the hereafter, however,
but made his own inner life and the temporal world gleam with beauty and
gave him the feeling of participating in the creative power that animates the
universe. This spirit spurred him on so that at times his writing hand could
hardly keep up.
Prophet or poet? In the end, Goethe opted for poetry. The true poet is
inspired like a prophet, but without missionary zeal or the claim to be a
mouthpiece for God. And yet: As a temporal gospel, true poetry announces
itself by knowing how to liberate us, through internal serenity and external
pleasure, from the earthly burdens that weigh us down. Like a balloon, it
lifts us and the ballast that we carry into higher regions, leaving earth’s
tangled paths lying spread out before us in a bird’s-eye view.
Both prophet and poet are overwhelmed, enraptured by their inspiration,
and feel themselves to be a medium—that is their similarity. But Goethe is
looking for the difference. Poetic inspiration and a prophet’s divine afflatus
may flow from the same source, but unlike the poet, the prophet also wants to
spread abroad the divinity that is within him. The prophet seeks to attract
followers. He must put himself on the level of the coarse world that he wants
to influence. And so he becomes calculating and alienates himself from his
original inspiration—even to the point of becoming violent.
It was the prophet’s fate that the young Goethe intended to portray in the
play Mahomet. At the same time, he was also using satire to skewer suspect
“prophets,” some of them made-up, like the forest devil Satyros, and some
drawn from life, like the false prophet Pater Brey.
He had planned a lofty ending for Mahomet. Muhammad was to be
cleansed and purified. With the satires of prophets, however, Goethe sought
to immunize himself against the corresponding dangers. Poetry is prophecy in
homeopathic doses. When Goethe writes in Poetry and Truth that he altered
the old robe of the Titans to fit my size, he did it also with the intention of
playing at something without having to become it.
He intended to present Mahomet (the eighteenth-century spelling of
Muhammad) as a religious genius whom divine inspiration transforms into a
new man. He exudes such power that his surroundings are also transformed.
The people he touches are drawn into his orbit. In an antiphonal passage
between Mahomet’s daughter Fatima and his son-in-law Ali, the inspiration
is expressed in the image of a river that absorbs all tributaries and, swollen
to a mighty stream, finally reaches the sea. But it was to be more than just the
epiphany of the inspired founder of a religion. By getting involved in the
earthly—ordinary humanity and everyday power relationships—he loses his
purity. The things of this world grow and proliferate, Goethe writes of his
plan for the play; the things of the next withdraw and are obscured.
Religion becomes a pretext for power and conquest. Atrocities are
committed and Mahomet orders people to be killed. He loses himself. In the
last, unwritten act there was to be a purification, and Mahomet would return
to the sources of his inspiration. Goethe gives a succinct summary of the
play’s intention: Everything that Genius is able to do with people by force
of character and spirit would be depicted, and what it thereby gains and
loses.
At the same time, as we have said, Goethe treated this theme in two farces,
the Shrovetide Play of Pater Brey and Satyros, or The Wood-Devil Deified.
Here the effects of supposed geniuses and false prophets are presented from
their comical side.
The Shrovetide play is a ribald farce. A priestling has wormed his way
into a community as a prophet. He plans to convert people, but is really just
out for himself, and is a skirt chaser to boot. Leonore has almost fallen for
him, but fortunately her betrothed, a robust captain, returns just in time. The
priest has caused much furor and set people against one another, but the
captain restores order and chases the nasty charismatic priest off to a pigsty.
In a final witty monologue, the captain settles scores with this pious swine,
but in it one can still detect the author’s serious critique of religion. He is
concerned with the unholy alliance between supposedly divine inspiration
and a lust for power, including sexual conquest, and the dangerous temptation
to want to heal a muddled world with a single idea:

He thinks the world would end today

If he weren’t here to make it stay.
He claims that he is heaven-blessed
And serves us up the queerest jests.
Says he’s here to save the world,
To make our earthly bliss assured.
Yet all of us are living still
As best we can, for good or ill.
He says it all depends on him,
The whole world’s weight upon him lies.
But meanwhile, let him catch our flies!
 The satire Satyros, or The Wood-Devil Deified is also about a false
prophet. In Poetry and Truth Goethe suggests that he had in mind not just a
type but a specific person, and there has been much speculation about who it
could be. Suggestions range from Lavater, Heinse, Leuchsenring, and Goué to
the educational reformer Johann Bernhard Basedow and even Herder.
Herder was certainly charismatic and attracted loyal adherents. He also
was mocked for his fondness for Rousseau, and even occasionally called
“Pan” or “Satyros.” Moreover, the satire was written in the summer of 1773,
when relations between the two men were strained. Even so, Goethe had so
much admiration for Herder that it’s unlikely his barbs were aimed directly
at his friend. However, one must also bear in mind that Goethe showed no
mercy even to people for whom he felt great esteem—for instance, in his
farce Gods, Heroes, and Wieland. He always insisted that his figures had
characteristics that, if they were not invented, were drawn from several
different persons. That was likely true for Satyros as well. There is probably
something of Herder in the ludicrous wood-devil who talks like a satirical
version of Herder the natural philosopher:

Hearken how confusion reigned,

In monstrous unbeing, unrestrained.
...
How primeval order then unfurled,
The power of light in a night-black world
Pervaded being’s deepest mire,
Provoked the onrush of desire
And all the elements, set free,
Are hungry intertwined to be,
All penetrating, penetrated.

The Pan-footed satyr berates his benefactor the hermit while the latter
feeds him, then puffs himself up: There’s nothing in the world as good as me
/ For God is God but I am me. He not only promulgates the onrush of desire
as a universal principle, but also practices it by ensnaring a tender maiden
who answers to the name Psyche (which is the main reason people connect
the satire to Herder, whose fiancée went by that name among the
Sentimentalists of Darmstadt). When he makes seductive speeches clad in his
loincloth, he succeeds for a while in casting a spell on people. And indeed,
he speaks with such passion that it sounds as if he really has been filled with
a higher spirit. He gushes about a burgeoning nature that one can feel both in
the universe and in oneself. People should divest themselves of their foreign
adornments and enjoy the earth at last. Goethe could have put this speech
into the mouth of Prometheus or some other true prophet. The satyr, however,
is soon unmasked and chased away, but the impression remains that religious
enthusiasm lies very close to religious delusion. In these matters, original
and forgery are difficult to distinguish. The satire leads the audience out of
the labyrinth of deceit. As rarely happens in real life, everything is cleared
up in the end. Here is the deceiver and there the deceived.
Goethe described these explorations of enthusiasm and seduction—some
impassioned and some satirical—as altering the old robe of the Titans to fit
my size. A true prophet has self-confident access to a higher world. He
brings mankind teachings that give life a direction. The prophet can say, You
must change your life! But not the poet. He gives only himself. That too,
however, can be a tremendous gift that lives on in the memory of mankind.

* Two modern translations are The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim, trans. Christa Baguss Britt
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), and The History of Lady Sophie Sternheim, ed.
James Lynn, trans. Joseph Collyer (Worcester: Billing & Sons, 1991).
 CHAPTER 9

Making poetic use of One’s Own Life. Paths to Werther.

Personal matters. The Weariness of Living.
Werther’s Love and the Fate of Imagination.
What Is Missing When We Are Absent from Ourselves.
Werther’s Impact.

....

IN FEBRUARY 1774, WITHOUT AN OUTLINE OR A FIRST DRAFT,

Goethe began to write The Sorrows of Young Werther. He wrote it in one
burst; the whole novel was apparently worked out and ready in his head.
Three months later, it was finished.
This was the period of his life when, as he says in Poetry and Truth, My
passion to create was boundless. New ideas and motifs were constantly
occurring to him. Poems, satires, and comic tales seemed to pour out of him:
Lumberville Fair, A Shrovetide Play of Pater Brey, Satyros, or The Wood-
Devil Deified. He didn’t seem to consider these works to be of special or
lasting significance, but in convivial company I and others recalled them
with pleasure, and then the urge to write more returned. The fact that Götz
had become known beyond his narrow circle of friends, causing a great
public stir that made Goethe suddenly an important literary figure, had no
effect on his method of production. His spontaneous passion to create was
unchanged. He turned to ambitious plans and worked simultaneously on his
plays about Muhammad, Prometheus, and Faust. Yet as he wrote in late 1773,
shortly before beginning Werther, he felt that his works were not yet close
enough to his own life to be regarded as the actual fruits of his experience. It
was in Werther that he would make poetic use of his recent life for the first
time.
The affair with Lotte in Wetzlar was now a year and a half in the past, and
its acute pain had subsided. Melancholy still obtruded from time to time, but
otherwise his recollection of the experience was calmer. His letters to the
Kestners no longer have the sound that will characterize Werther’s letters in
the novel. Goethe writes mostly to Kestner, but includes Lotte in his news.
The affectionate words he uses to explicitly address her remain within the
bounds of propriety. One can sense the delight he takes in expressive
formulations and witty turns of phrase. He also likes to tease, wondering for
instance whether Lotte still owns her blue striped bed jacket. He would be
very put out if she did not, for he loved it almost more than he loved her. If
he was worried about nothing more than Lotte’s bed jacket, she and Kestner
really didn’t need to be concerned about him.
The Lotte affair had receded in his mind; things had happened to him in the
meantime.
Poetry and Truth calls Werther a general confession. Goethe adds,
through this composition more than any other, I had rescued myself from a
stormy element.
On his return journey from Wetzlar to Frankfurt in the fall of 1772, Goethe
had paid a visit to Sophie von La Roche in Ehrenbreitstein and met her
daughter Maximiliane, to whom he felt an attraction. The eighteen-year-old
was engaged to the widower Pietro Antonio Brentano, a well-to-do Frankfurt
merchant twenty years her senior. They were married a few weeks before the
composition of Werther began. Goethe quickly fell in love with “Max.” He
came and went at the Brentanos’, again acting the part of a loving family
friend whose intention was to support the young wife. Maximiliane was
overwhelmed by her new status: suddenly she found herself in the role of
stepmother to the children of Brentano’s first marriage, who were about her
age. It was too much for her. The resourceful Goethe consoled her, played
music with her, brought her books, and read to her from his own manuscripts.
Merck made the wicked comment that Goethe also consoled Max for the
smell of oil and cheese that clung to her husband, and for his coarse manners.
The husband became jealous, and there were scenes. It’s unclear whether
Goethe was banished from the house or avoided it on his own. He wrote to
Sophie von La Roche, If you knew what went on inside me before I left the
house, you would not think of luring me back, dear Mama. I suffered
enough for all eternity in those terrible moments.
The goings-on in the Brentano house became a scandal in Frankfurt. For a
while, Goethe and Maximiliane met in secret. Goethe began to write Werther
while still in turmoil over the situation. Thus the stormy element that gave
birth to the novel is more likely to be found here than in the affair with Lotte,
by now a mellow memory. Yet the novel’s fluctuations between
tempestuousness and depression likely have yet other sources, to be found
not in external situations but in internal agitation.
As we have seen, Goethe surrendered himself to whims concerning
suicide and kept a dagger on his nightstand; but he banished such
hypochondriacal fancies and resolved to live. In retrospect, Goethe insists
that he had freed himself from thoughts of suicide before he began to write
his novel about a suicide. So the crisis had been overcome. Why write about
it then? The answer: so that instead of simply continuing to live, he could do
so with cheerfulness. Writing was an exercise in cheering himself up,
despite—or even because of—the fact that his subject matter had little in the
way of cheer. Jerusalem’s suicide and Kestner’s description of it supplied
him with a story around which he could assemble his thoughts and the moods
he had experienced and suffered through. He would take a bird’s-eye view.
From all sides, the whole thing coalesced and became one solid mass.
In his retrospective depiction, it is not the pain of love but rather
Lebensekel—revulsion at or weariness of living—that is at the center of the
novel. But what is so important about this revulsion? How serious an
existential threat was it to Goethe himself? At first, he distances himself from
it in Poetry and Truth and refers to the historical background, the mood of
the time. He mentions an English melancholy then in fashion—the cult of
Hamlet, the worship of Ossian. He credits English depression for being
grounded not in petty circumstances, as in Germany. Instead, he sees it as the
shadow cast by the possibility in England for great deeds and significant
action, as melancholy writ large: world-class depression. Such melancholy
could definitely be impressive. The gloomy aversion to life of young people
in Germany was something else altogether. Here we have to do with people
for whom life is actually spoiled by a lack of things to do, under the most
peaceful conditions in the world, by their exaggerated demands on
themselves. People allowed themselves to be tortured by experiences drawn
not from active life but from literature, which is why German melancholy
was nothing more than a literary fashion.
Was that also the source of Goethe’s own depression? Much later, in
conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann, he would deny it: What’s more, I
hardly needed to derive my own youthful melancholy from the general
influences of my times or the reading of particular English authors. On the
contrary, it was individual, personal matters by which I was so beset.
What personal matters? It was no longer his relationship with Lotte or
Maximiliane, nor the complications in the Brentano house, by which he was
so beset. Those were only the external catalysts.
He was, rather, possessed by Lebensekel, taedium vitae, as he wrote four
decades later to Karl Friedrich Zelter after the latter’s son had committed
suicide. Those who suffered from it were to be pitied, not berated. Werther
will leave no one in doubt that all the symptoms of that strange illness, as
natural as it is unnatural, once coursed through my innermost being.
So it was an illness, not a fashion.
Nor was it a metaphysical destiny, as Friedrich Gundolf claimed in 1916.
For him, Werther is a “titan of sentiment” caught in a “conflict between the
cosmically expansive fullness of life and the restrictions of the moment.”*
In Goethe’s retrospective self-analysis, the taedium vitae is presented
prosaically and almost clinically: the defect lies in the individual, not in the
world. Understood as an illness, weariness of living says nothing about the
worth of life, but only about a dissonance in the sufferer, an inability to find
an adequate access to life. Defined as an illness, taedium vitae cannot be
promoted to the status of an instrument of insight. According to a gloomy
philosophy and aesthetic, taedium vitae provides knowledge of the
supposedly true nature of life, namely, that it is worthless. In other words,
weariness of living is the correct attitude. And that is precisely a position
Goethe would refuse to accept in his later years. Anything but a
condemnation of life! And that is why in retrospect he calls his bouts of
taedium vitae an illness.
According to Poetry and Truth, contentment is found in the customary and
dependable recurrence of external things, the succession of day and night
and the seasons, the round of activities and people, familiar behaviors and
routines. All these things make relation to the world possible. But this very
repetition can also become a torment. What ought to provide support in
external life becomes instead repellent. One is inwardly unable to take part
in it, unreceptive to such lovely offerings and rhythms. Goethe writes that
there are people who hang themselves out of disgust that every day the sun
rises and sets and they must put on their clothes and then take them off again.
Love, which at first seems unique and unforeseeable, also suffers from
regular recurrence. By the second or third time, it has lost its significance.
What actually uplifts and supports love, the notion of something eternal
and never-ending, is destroyed. It appears transitory, like everything that
returns. Love is not infinitely rich, but a restricted repertoire. The love that
at first makes everything new becomes, in the end, a loving habit. The person
who finds that repellent refuses life’s offerings and shrinks into himself.
Everything becomes a burden. One must dare to leap outside the self and find
a foothold in life as it is. Thus the only antidote to taedium vitae is openness
to life.
But how does one open up? The Goethe of Poetry and Truth has two
answers. We should step outside ourselves and act according to what the
circumstances of the world demand by fulfilling the duties of the day. If we
make exaggerated demands on ourselves, we are merely preparing for
constant defeat and depriving ourselves of life’s pleasures.
In his later reflections on taedium vitae as an illness, Goethe places the
destroyed relationship to the world at its center. The individual, for all his
feelings, no longer sees real life and shuts himself off from the tasks and
opportunities of the day. The only defense against life-weariness is active
participation in life. For the late Goethe, taking part is key to self-therapy. It
means an approach to the world that strives to be objective; that is the only
way to gain vital strength from outside the self: To rejoice in your own worth
/ You must grant worth to life on earth. In 1814, this was the maxim he
wrote in the album of the young Arthur Schopenhauer. It was advice
Schopenhauer desperately needed.
Werther addresses taedium vitae in a different way. It doesn’t speak of it
but rather from within it. In his later meditations, Goethe introduces a
concept that leads us into the intellectual center of life-weariness, the
concept of paralyzing imagination.
Like his author, Werther is a young man whom children and women find
attractive. Like Goethe, he is eloquent and capable of sophistically making a
weak cause sound strong. He has a lot of free time and no strong connection
to bourgeois professional life. He indulges his feelings—“sentimentally,” as
Schiller would later say—and not only falls in love but falls in love with
love. He takes pleasure in pleasure and is sensible of sensibility. He is a
virtuoso at such doublings. With all that, he is a man of imagination.
Werther’s story, told as a monologue in letters to a friend (and to Lotte and
Albert), is a love story and, at the same time, a depiction of what his
imagination makes of circumstances and people.
In early spring, Werther arrives in a small town where, at the behest of his
family, the well-to-do young man is supposed to straighten out some matters
of an inheritance. He is also fleeing a complicated love affair. I intend to
enjoy the present and let the past be past, he writes in his first letter. The
main theme of taedium vitae is already touched upon, for in the same letter
he also cautions himself to keep his imagination in check. He must not dwell
on the past and give himself a bad conscience but, instead, turn to the present.
And at first he does. He takes delight in everything: the surrounding
countryside and its little villages, the blossoming trees and children at play.
He also reads Homer, which lends a golden nimbus to the scenes he
witnesses at the village well. He tries his hand at drawing and remarks that
unadorned nature itself is more beautiful than its likeness could ever be. At a
dance party in the country he meets Lotte, whom he knows to be as good as
engaged. A sudden spring downpour reminds the two of a poem by
Klopstock, which unites their hearts—for a moment in Lotte’s case, more
lastingly for Werther. Later he observes Lotte slicing bread for the younger
siblings crowding around her, an unforgettable image for Werther. He meets
her fiancé, Albert, and becomes his friend. They argue about infanticide,
madness, art, and suicide. Albert defends rules and reason; Werther is on the
side of strong feelings and individual cases. But inevitably, his rival slowly
begins to rankle him: when she speaks of her fiancé with all that warmth,
all that love, then I’m like someone who has been stripped of all his honor
and dignity and must surrender his sword.
Werther’s mood becomes gloomy, and finally he tears himself away, quits
the field, and accepts a diplomatic post in another town. Although there he is
liked by his superiors and also attractive to women, he is dissatisfied. For
the talented and spoiled young man, the thought of suicide is nearly constant.
He feels it as he carries out his dry official duties and again when he suffers
an insulting slight in a gathering of narrow-minded aristocrats. Later, it is no
surprise that Werther really does commit suicide, since the wish to kill
himself is always at hand, looking for an occasion. After wandering a bit
from place to place, he returns to the little town where Lotte and Albert have
since become husband and wife. A shudder passes through my whole body .
. . when Albert puts his arm around her slim waist, he writes, and yet he
still sits around in the couple’s house, cleaning vegetables and shelling peas.
Gradually, he becomes a burden to them, and Lotte says to him, I fear, I fear
it is only the impossibility of possessing me that makes that wish so
attractive.
Werther cannot have Lotte. But much worse is that now he is tortured not
by excessive passion, as one might imagine, but by the fear that his
imagination will become blunted, the imagination that has up to now served
him so well in his relationship with Lotte. He is terrified by the return to cold
dull consciousness. To be sure, Lotte draws back from him, but it is worse
that his imagination is drying up, that he is alienated from himself. I have no
power of imagination, no feeling for nature, and all books nauseate me.
When we’re absent from ourselves, we lack everything. That is of supreme
significance. It is not the beloved woman he lacks, but himself. What is
missing when one is absent from oneself? The sacred, animating power with
which I created worlds around me is lacking, and therefore he will choose
suicide.
The final events are reported by an anonymous editor. Before doing the
deed, Werther summons up strong emotions one last time. He shoots himself
with pistols he has borrowed from Albert. His burial is a hushed and private
affair.
Of course Werther is, among other things, a novel about doomed love, and
that is how it was read by most contemporaries. But it also tells of the power
and fate of the imagination, which Werther calls his heart, which on its own
is the source of everything—all power, all bliss, and all misery.
Goethe wrote to Lavater about the novel, And now I have lent my feelings
to his story, and it makes a wonderful whole. Obviously, the author is not
identical with Werther, although he is close to him by virtue of the letters in
which he writes not about him but from within him. If Goethe had adhered
directly to the form of the epistolary novel, hugely popular since Rousseau’s
Julie, or The New Heloise, he would have presented a correspondence that
showed the letter writers’ influence on one another, thereby objectifying the
action. But except for the final passage reported by the fictitious editor,
Werther consists exclusively of letters written by the eponymous central
character to a friend named Wilhelm, who does not appear in the novel, and a
few to Lotte and Albert. The reader feels directly spoken to and drawn
willy-nilly into Werther’s inner life.
Goethe explains in Poetry and Truth that he chose this monologic
epistolary form because he liked to conduct conversations with himself as a
dialogue. A dialogue? But there is no real interlocutor, so there must be an
imagined one. It isn’t Goethe’s way to turn inward and brood. Things that
pertain to him must be discussed, become the topic of a conversation. To put
something into words means discovering oneself. In language and then in
writing, he produces himself, presents himself to others, and to himself as
well. He will know who he is only when he has said or written it. We recall
the extravagantly expressive letters that Goethe wrote to Behrens during his
time in Leipzig. Back then, he was experimenting with writing as a power
that could generate reality and create the self. Those were real letters, but
also already literature. In Leipzig, he wrote to a real person, his friend
Behrens, about what he was experiencing. Werther’s letters are addressed to
an imaginary correspondent—and to the public at large.
The author creates a figure who reveals himself in what he writes. The
author writes and has his figure write. He hovers both above and within his
figure. Goethe is and isn’t Werther, for he always transcends him. At times,
that leads to paradoxical situations. He has Werther complain that when
looking at nature, he can no longer pump a single drop of bliss into my
brain, yet he has just expressed his impressions of nature in words. Werther
is left high and dry, but not the author, who makes Werther write what he
actually cannot write because of his paralysis: When I look out my window
at the distant hill and see the morning sun breaking through the mist above
it and illuminating the silent bottomland, and the gentle river meanders
toward me between leafless willows—oh, when this glorious nature stands
so numbly before me.
Such contradictions usually go unnoticed, but they point to an important
problem. An emotive description can actually express the corresponding
feeling, but it can also simply represent the feeling without its being there.
That is the case in the passage quoted above. Werther sketches the image of
the silent bottomland as if to say, “Just look how much one could feel at this
sight, but how sad it is that I now feel absolutely nothing.” The author has
Werther describe experiences that he has and also those he would like to
have but cannot because he is absent from himself. In Werther, Goethe speaks
of creation bereft of itself. What is missing when one is absent from oneself
has already been named: it is simply the animating principle, the imagination.
The imagination is powerful but not omnipotent. It requires external
reality. Things cannot go well in the long run when someone like Werther
paints the walls that imprison him with colorful figures and bright
prospects. Werther paints his walls not just according to his own ideas but
also according to patterns from literary tradition. He is a person with a rich
interior life, but he has also read a lot; lived experience and the fruits of his
reading intermingle, and what he thinks and feels and what he imagines
comes not only from himself but also from literature. The images of the
simple life are seen through the lens of Homer, the idyll in the house of
Lotte’s father through the lens of Goldsmith, and the spring storm through
Klopstock. At his last meeting with Lotte, they read Ossian together. In this
instance, it becomes especially clear that literature must come to his aid
when he is threatened by inner emptiness—literature as an antidote to horror
vacui. When he is at risk of being brought back again to dull, cold
consciousness, it’s best to reach for a book.
Werther has something of Don Quixote, the classic novel about the power
of literature. True, Werther doesn’t tilt at windmills, but armed with his
powerful impressions from literature, he does struggle against the
impossibility of his love. The novel is realistic because of its precise
description not just of a character but also of the cultural and literary
circumstances that have shaped him. Werther is a literary figure in two
senses. First, he is a figure in a novel, and second, he is a character who has
been shaped by literature. Werther is what he has read, a sentimentalist from
the school of an ink-stained epoch, as Schiller would call it in The Robbers.
It is a novel about the power of literary fashion, and it became in its turn a
fashion that intervened in the lives of contemporaries, who in their thoughts
and feelings began to imitate those they found in Werther. It was, however,
only a rumor that there were copycat suicides, a rumor that persists to this
day. As we have seen, Goethe referred to it in his autobiography vis-à-vis his
Sturm und Drang friends: But whereas I felt relieved and enlightened by
having transformed reality into poetry, my friends were confounded by
believing they had to transform poetry into reality, reenact the novel, and
if necessary shoot oneself. The philosopher Christian Garve had already
said all that was necessary about such rumors in 1775: “One hardly gets
seduced into suicide.”
 Even without copycat suicides, Werther was an overwhelming success
with the public, reaching essentially every contemporary reader in Germany.
It was immediately translated from one end of Europe to the other. In the first
year alone, there were seven printings in Germany, not including countless
pirated editions. There was a hail of rebuttals and parodies. The novel was
read by some as a defense of suicide, which called forth the churches and
other official defenders of morality. In Leipzig, the theological faculty of the
university caused the sale of the book to be banned, which only excited more
curiosity about it.
The leading literary authorities such as Klopstock, Wieland, and Lessing,
who had been rather restrained in their reception of Götz, were now full of
praise, even when they had some reservations. Lessing, for example,
expressed his “pleasure” in the book but criticized the character of Werther
as too soft—poetical, but without moral beauty.
The novel marked a new epoch like no other literary work before it. It
introduced a new tone into the world, and a new will for subjectivity. I turn
back into myself and find a world, writes Werther, and many imitated him.
Not everyone, however, found a world that was worth telling about. Goethe
had gotten something off his chest and, in so doing, revolutionized literature.
Previously, declarations about the state of one’s heart had been regulated by
the churches and public morality. Now there began a deregulation of talk
about the workings of the psyche. There was a desire to speak freely and
originally about everything, like Werther: about love, marriage, and child-
rearing; religion, art, and the state; about social conventions and madness.
People thought they should be able to talk about whatever was on their mind.
One’s inner nature, feelings, and individuality should be given a hearing.
People switched from reason in general to individual reason. Werther
declares that the individual is the seat of truth and continues, no argument in
the world upsets me as much as when someone comes up with a platitude
when I’m speaking from the fullness of my heart.
When reason is emancipated from its common form and becomes an
individual matter, it plunges into the living element of existence, into the
unconscious, the irrational, spontaneous—in other words, into the mystery of
freedom. Why mystery? Because freedom cannot be explained but only
experienced. Any attempt at explanation, and freedom disappears. What
remains is causality, sufficient grounds. That was already true in the
enlightened thought of Goethe’s time and is still true today. Freedom has to
be experienced. Figures like Werther set an example of freedom, and after the
novel appeared, people considered the author Goethe himself to be a genius
of freedom. They thought he did as he pleased. He provided an example of an
independence that seemed worth imitating. We have seen that there wasn’t
much to his independence. Werther is dependent on his reading. That’s why it
is, among other things, an expression of independence when he writes in one
of his first letters, You ask whether you should send me my books? Dear
friend, for God’s sake please keep them off my back. I don’t want to be led,
encouraged, spurred on anymore, for this heart is already humming
enough on its own. No books. But in this lengthy sentence he then describes
how he reaches for Homer. The will to be obstinate is there, and the public
took it as encouragement.
A taste for obstinacy was awakened. People discovered that things and
individuals had their own rights. It had to be gratifying for those who no
longer wanted to be just cogs and screws in a great machine, but yearned to
express their own ideas. Each person, Werther declares, has genius within
himself. Genius is not just the great individual, but the greatness in every
individual. However, it is suppressed by society’s rules. O my friends!
Werther cries, why does the flood of genius break forth so seldom, its great
waves so seldom rush in to unsettle your astonished souls. Genius is life,
powerful enough not to allow itself to be kept from growing, streaming out,
being expressed. For Werther, everyone has genius, at least at the moment of
love.
In Sturm und Drang, the intellectual and literary movement Goethe set in
motion with Götz and Werther, the cult of genius was so widespread that the
epoch has even been dubbed the Geniezeit, the Age of Genius. Later, Goethe
would look back on it fairly skeptically: This mutual agitation and ferment
that came close to debauchery was a welcome influence on each one in his
own way, and out of this whirl of activity, this live-and-let-live, this give-
and-take that so many youths ruthlessly pursued with an open heart and no
theoretical lodestar at all . . . there sprang up that celebrated, famous, and
infamous literary epoch in which a mass of young men of genius, with
much bravery and presumption . . . broke forth and by the use of their
powers produced some joy, some good, and by their misuse some vexation
and some evil.
Little remains of the works of this mass of young men of genius. The only
ones still known are those who had ties to the young Goethe, especially
Klinger, Wagner, and Lenz. But the total effect was profound and made a
change in the literature that followed. Herder and Johann Georg Hamann
provided the theoretical lodestar that had been missing, and a few years
later the young Schiller would continue the rebellious outbreak in his own
way with his play The Robbers. A generation later in the same tradition, the
Romantics would search for a new way to push the boundaries.
When genius became a synonym for the creative person or for human
creativity, it was inevitable that not only the work of art but, through and
beyond the work, the person who created it would become interesting. The
cult of the star author began with Goethe. The author outshone his work, and
the life of the artist was now considered a kind of artwork. Although this
idea was encouraged by Goethe’s charisma, it also proceeded from the
characteristic idea of the Sturm und Drang movement that creative potential
is superior to the forms in which it is realized. How magnificent the
possibilities remain when they don’t need to be put through the needle’s eye
of reality! In the case of the artist, this idea could be interpreted to mean that
the personality as the epitome of potential was to be regarded as even more
important than the work. The moment of the promising artist was at hand, as
was the rise of the cult of personality, whose vigor was compromised only
by the fact that there were too many who considered themselves geniuses.
Goethe, however, was a real genius, and no one could deny it, although he
was often envied. In communication with foreigners, people were even proud
of him. “Everything I have read of yours,” Christian Friedrich Daniel
Schubart wrote to Goethe, “delights me, swells my heart with noble pride
that we can show other countries a man whom they don’t have, and, addicted
as they are to fossilizing their greatest writers, will never have.”
Goethe was unsettled by his fame and found it uncanny that a novel written
in a state of internal agitation should agitate so many others. Inevitably, from
the time of its publication to the end of his long life, the general public
thought of him only as the author of Werther. Napoleon spoke to him about
the novel when they met in Erfurt in 1808, claiming to have read it seven
times. In Goethe’s poem “To Werther” (1824), there is a glint of unintended
irony in the line Predestined, I to stay and you to go, for Werther simply
would not leave him. Goethe could never get rid of his early stroke of genius.
He was also bedeviled by the countless curiosity seekers who read
Werther as a roman à clef. They found out who his models were, made
pilgrimages to Jerusalem’s grave, pestered the Kestners, and blamed Goethe
for still being alive. Goethe had foreseen that people would pounce upon
what they recognized from the novel. He both approved and disapproved. In
a letter to Charlotte that announced the book’s publication, he wrote, Very
soon I will send you a friend very much like me and hope you will receive
him well. On the other hand, he warned Kestner, probably also intending to
reassure him, that he would find familiar people in the novel, but they had
been patched together with passions foreign to them.
When the Kestners read the novel that fall, they were horrified and
outraged. There was too much in it that could not but point strongly to them,
and therefore the invented parts were also attributed to them. Lotte was
scandalized that in the novel she is presented as returning Werther’s love,
and Kestner felt insulted by Albert’s depiction as a narrow-minded, petty
philistine.
Goethe responded with guilt and contrition: The thing is done, it’s
published. Forgive me if you can. That letter was written at the end of
October 1774, when the book had just been shipped. In November, when
there were signs that it would be a huge success, he again wrote to Kestner:
If you could feel a thousandth part of what Werther means to a thousand
hearts, you would not count what the book has cost you!
No more contrition from Goethe, no more sense of guilt. On the contrary,
there is now an implicit criticism of Kestner for being self-centered; he’s
ignoring how the story enriches the lives of others. Werther must—must be!
—You don’t feel him. You only feel me and yourselves. In this way, he makes
clear to him that in the meantime Werther has become a public soul, and both
he himself and the Kestners have simply lost their proprietary rights to the
parts of his psychology they contributed. In a late edition of the novel,
however, Goethe did undertake a few touch-ups and changes to satisfy the
Kestners’ objections.
Werther had a huge effect on the public and enormous repercussions for
the author. The novel and its reception would steer Goethe’s life into new
channels.

* Friedrich Gundolf, Goethe (Berlin: G. Bondi, 1916), 169 and 163.

 CHAPTER 10

Cornelia’s Misfortune. Clavigo, the Faithless One. Lavater and

Basedow. Prophets right and prophets left, the World’s child
in between. A Summer Cruise down the Rhine.
Celebration of Friendship. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi.
An Invitation to Weimar. Lili and Auguste, an Amorous House
of Mirrors. Two Different Speeds. Journey to Switzerland.
Weimar, an Escape of Sorts.

....

IN WERTHER GOETHE WAS PROCESSING NOT JUST THE ROMANCE

in Wetzlar and the unpleasantness concerning Maximiliane Brentano; he was
also in turmoil about parting with his sister Cornelia. In late 1773 she
married Georg Schlosser and moved to Emmendingen, in southern Baden.
The relationship between Schlosser and Cornelia had its beginnings in the
summer of 1772, while Goethe was still in Wetzlar. He had not been aware
of what was afoot and was completely surprised when confronted with it on
his return. He said nothing against it but thought to himself that if her brother
hadn’t been absent, things could not have gone so far with his friend.
After an almost euphoric beginning, the story of Cornelia and Schlosser
would take an unhappy turn. Before the wedding in 1773, Cornelia had
written in her diary, “Although I have long rejected romantic notions about
marriage, I was never able to extinguish an exalted idea of wedded love, the
only love that in my judgment can make a union happy.”
She does not say clearly what kind of marriage would have been her ideal,
but the relationship with her brother was doubtless her touchstone. She had
taken an active and intimate interest in Goethe’s life and career, and he had
discussed his literary plans with her, taken her seriously as a critic, and
valued her taste. She had a decisive influence on the evolution of Götz, and
Goethe confided in her about his other literary projects as well. He wanted
to share with her the new world that revealed itself to him in the field of
imagination. Their intimacy also transcended literature. In Poetry and Truth
Goethe circumspectly suggests incestuous desire, and though what he says
applies to their early childhood, there remained an erotic edge to their
relationship, and she encouraged Goethe to plan a novel about this kind of
sibling love.
For Cornelia, the role of trusted adviser in literary matters was not just a
token of love. It also raised her self-esteem. However, that was the case only
in matters of art and literature, since she had little knowledge of anything
else. That turned out to be a calamity. The eighteen-year-old Goethe had
earnestly and somewhat precociously written to her from Leipzig, urging her
to acquire housekeeping skills for her future role as a wife and mother. She,
however, wanted to be acknowledged as an intelligent woman with literary
judgment and artistic talent. Nothing else interested her. Later, as a married
woman, she had to manage a large house and care for two children, and she
broke down under the burden.
Schlosser, who had known Goethe well since boyhood, had set out to find
a wife with his usual thoroughness, but at first without success. He would
have become a confirmed bachelor had not it occurred to him to seek out
Cornelia, whom he’d known for a long time. He courted her, and Cornelia
accepted him as a suitor, probably in part because he was her brother’s
friend.
The wedding took place on November 1, 1773. Schlosser had postponed it
until his appointment to the post of district president in Emmendingen by the
Grand Duke of Baden in Karlsruhe. As the duke’s official representative, he
had authority over the entire administrative district of twenty thousand
inhabitants. It was the highest-paid official post in all of Baden.
In Poetry and Truth Goethe admits to some jealousy, for Cornelia’s
departure in late 1773 was a painful loss. His sister, however, was close to
losing herself. Goethe foresaw that. In the second version of Werther,
revised after Cornelia’s death, he mirrors his sister’s drama in Lotte’s
feelings for Werther: [Lotte] was used to sharing everything interesting she
felt or thought with him, and his departure threatened to tear a hole in her
entire existence that could not be filled in again. Oh, if only she could have
turned him into a brother at that moment!
Cornelia never got over the separation from her brother. Schlosser was not
the man to make up for the loss of Goethe. In a letter to the naturalist and
revolutionary Georg Forster, Schlosser once complained about his own
“bashfulness and physical clumsiness” and “porcupine’s skin,” enough to
scare off any woman. He had made attempts to be more attractive and act
jolly for his fiancée, and perhaps actually did succeed in loosening up. He
was once seen wandering like a ghost through the vineyards at harvest time,
wearing wax candles on his hat. No one had never known “Doctor and Privy
Councilor Schlosser” to behave like that, as Goethe’s mother wrote Anna
Amalia in October 1778, probably referring to an isolated incident from the
time of the engagement.
The wedding took place in Frankfurt, and Cornelia asked Goethe to
accompany her and Schlosser as far as Karlsruhe to ease the pain of parting.
But he declined and holed up at home, nursing his own pain at their
departure.
In Emmendingen, the Schlossers moved into the stately, roomy official
residence. There was much to be done, but Cornelia, who was pregnant,
withdrew and took no part in the renovation and furnishing of the house.
Schlosser complained about her in a letter to Lavater, saying that she had not
been correctly educated. “Every wind, every drop of rain shuts her into her
room, and she is still too intimidated by the cellar and the kitchen.” She
passed her days in apathy and depression while the levelheaded Schlosser
rolled up his sleeves and devoted himself to his duties. He saw to the
improvement of agriculture, public education, and transportation, concerned
himself with skilled trades and crafts, and founded public lending libraries.
All of it, however, passed Cornelia by. She stayed in darkened rooms,
paralyzed by inactivity, and rarely left her bed. The capable and always
obliging Schlosser was unable to help her.
In the summer of 1774 came the difficult birth of her first child, from
which Cornelia took weeks to recover. Schlosser had settled into his job and
was running things as though he were the grand duke himself. He had hoped
for support from his wife, but there was no chance of that. Cornelia withdrew
more and more. “My love disgusts her,” he complained to his brother
Hieronymus. Goethe must have known about it, for he would later tell
Eckermann, The thought of giving herself to a man was repulsive, and one
can imagine that in their marriage, this peculiarity caused many an
unpleasant hour. Cornelia was withering away at the side of the
hardworking Schlosser. That’s how Goethe found her when he visited
Emmendingen for the first and only time, in May 1775. She did not recover
from the birth of her second daughter and died on June 8, 1777.
The year 1774 was Goethe’s first in the house on the Hirschgraben without
Cornelia and the daily conversation that meant so much to him. Three years
earlier, he had described the situation that had now come to pass in a
defiantly self-confident letter to Kätchen Schönkopf: We have an entire
house, and if my sister gets married, she must leave. I won’t put up with a
brother-in-law. And if I get married, we’ll share the house, I and my
parents, and I’ll get 10 rooms.
Cornelia was gone, there was no brother-in-law to contend with, and he
could spread out, if not into all ten rooms. However, there was no bride in
sight either: Kätchen Schönkopf was married by now, the abandoned
Friederike was mourning in Sesenheim, the sentimental ladies in Darmstadt
idolized him but were already promised to others or out of reach by virtue of
their social status, and Lotte in Wetzlar was also married and had given birth
to her first child. He had no real prospects. But Goethe was not even on the
lookout for anyone as seriously as his parents might have wished. He
continued to be satisfied with the marriage game cultivated by his friends in
Frankfurt. He had drawn the name of Anna Sibylla Münch as the partner with
whom he was to play at being married. Goethe’s father would have
considered her quite a suitable match.
For Goethe, she was at least the occasion for his next play, Clavigo. In the
spring of 1774, after finishing Werther, he had read her an episode from the
memoirs of Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais in which he writes about
Clavigo, the faithless lover of Beaumarchais’s sister, and Anna Sibylla asked
Goethe, somewhat flirtatiously, to make this faithless lover the central
character of a play. For Goethe it was a challenge to his skill as a writer. He
wanted to prove that besides writing plays in the “wild style” of Götz, he
could also produce ones in the traditional “controlled manner” and in record
time to boot. He promised to finish it in a week and indeed came calling with
it soon thereafter. Anna Sibylla liked it very much, but the more demanding
Merck dismissed it with the words you don’t need to write such rot anymore
as far as I’m concerned; others can do it just as well.
 Goethe himself didn’t think the play was rot, or he wouldn’t have
published it under his own name in the summer of 1774, almost
simultaneously with Werther. It was, in fact, the very first work to appear
under his name. It gave him joy and there was romantic, youthful power in it,
he wrote to Jacobi shortly after it appeared. In another letter, he explained
what particularly pleased him about it: he had succeeded in depicting a
mixed character, an indeterminate, half-great and half-petty person, a
character like Weislingen in Götz, a man who is not strong and steady enough
for love. Clavigo is talented and brilliant but inconstant, a ladies’ man on his
way to becoming a cynical courtier. The death of his beloved, however,
returns him to himself. This chamber drama of a faithless lover who in the
end contritely realizes his wrong, returns to his betrothed, and then dies at the
sword of his outraged brother-in-law found little approbation. As for Anna
Sibylla Münch, however, it was as if through an intellectual offspring, our
relationship was drawn closer and strengthened by this production.
As has been said, his father was pleased, for he considered Anna Sibylla a
socially appropriate match. He longed for his son’s indecisive roaming to
come to an end. All the hubbub about genius, the unending stream of friends
and acquaintances, the literary garrisoning, the ready generosity and loan
guarantees—Goethe was supporting several friends such as Lenz, Klinger,
and Wagner—began to be a financial burden, especially since neither
Goethe’s work as a lawyer nor his literary publications brought in much
money.
But his parents had to be patient. The relationship with Anna Sibylla
Münch did not turn serious, and the so-called genius cult still continued for
some time and even heated up, since the young author’s fame was growing.
Nor did the stream of visitors show any sign of letting up. Among them was
one guest who was to play a significant role in Goethe’s life.
On June 23, 1774, Johann Kaspar Lavater, on his way from Zurich to the
spa in Bad Ems, stopped in Frankfurt to pay Goethe a visit and stayed for a
week. Lavater, a pastor in Zurich and eight years older than Goethe, was
already famous. Well-known not just in religious circles, he excited public
notice everywhere he went. He was a talented preacher with social skills
and called himself a “fisher of men.” He traveled frequently and made
contacts wherever he went. He knew how to win people over to his many
projects, be they anthologies, serial publications, or edifying pamphlets.
Today we would call him a networker. People gathered around him, and
there was even a rumor that he possessed the power to heal. He spoke softly
and intensely and exuded an intense friendliness. People liked to accompany
him on his travels and to have him visit. Newspapers reported his doings,
including his first visit to Goethe. “Bischt’s?” was supposedly the first thing
he uttered—“Is that you?” in broad Swiss dialect—followed immediately by
an embrace.
Lavater had first made a political splash in 1762, when he and the painter
Johann Heinrich Füssli (who later settled in England and changed his name
to Henry Fuseli) mounted a public campaign against an unjust governor of
Zurich and forced his dismissal. The two men had simply refused to back
down. What was of greater importance to Lavater, however, was religious
expression in a contemplative and soulful key. In 1768 he published
Prospects of Eternity, reveries on life after death. Written in a spirit of
sentimentalism, the work became hugely popular in Germany. Goethe had
praised the book in the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen in 1772, but at the
same time distanced himself from it. Lavater’s discussion of forgiveness of
sins, he wrote, might reassure some people about this matter, but the
reviewer was not among them. After all, if one is not worried, one doesn’t
need reassurance. Goethe had already annoyed some of his acquaintances
among the Herrnhuters with similar remarks, and he raised the same argument
against Lavater—namely, that a sense of sin was foreign to him. He made
positive mention of the book’s engaging style, however. It was clearly not
meant for the brooding segment of Christianity, but rather for those who
found enjoyment in beauty, for Lavater conjures . . . before our eyes a
marvelous world, whereas usually one just becomes entangled in gloom and
confusion. In conclusion, the reviewer had recommended that the author
forgo theological speculation altogether and concentrate on observation, a
somewhat perplexing piece of advice, for what was there to observe in
“prospects of eternity”?
For his part, Lavater first became aware of Goethe in early 1773, through
his fictitious “Letter of the Pastor in *** to the New Pastor in ***.” Lavater
was quite taken by its advocacy of simple, heartfelt piety and opposition to
dogmatic theological quibbles. After reading Götz, he wrote to Herder, “I
know no greater genius among all the writers.” In August 1773, he initiated
an enthusiastic correspondence with Goethe. Goethe’s first letters in reply
have not been preserved, but despite his exuberance, he seems to have also
expressed what separated the two of them. I am not a Christian, Lavater
quotes from a lost letter of Goethe’s, a frank admission that Lavater struggled
with, but in the end overlooked out of love and admiration for the writer. It
was Lavater’s firm belief that he understood Goethe better than the younger
man did himself. Like many others, when Lavater saw genius in Goethe, he
saw nothing but God working within him without his knowing it. Lavater did
not expect to find traditional piety in Goethe, nor did he wish to convert him,
to “harass” him or “play the partisan.” He would take his chances with a
noble battle of intellects: “You shall become one [i.e., a Christian], or I will
become what you are.” The spirit bloweth where it listeth.
Lavater also wanted to win Goethe as a contributor to his new project, a
great work on physiognomy. He was collecting prints, silhouettes, and
portrait drawings of both well-known and unknown persons who would
provide material for physiognomic interpretation, partly by himself and
partly by friends and acquaintances he recruited. The Physiognomic
Fragments for the Promotion of Knowledge and Love of Mankind, the title
of the work in progress, was really intended as a group project. Lavater laid
no claim to special interpretive competence, but he prided himself on
drawing general attention to the physiognomic aspect of anthropology.
The basic idea was simple enough: it assumed a connection between
outward appearance and the formation of character. As was later true of
psychoanalysis, physiognomy was a mixture of serious scientific inquiry and
parlor game. It soon became fashionable to “physiognomize,” which both
flattered and annoyed Lavater, since it endangered the reputation of the entire
undertaking. He wrote to Goethe in November 1773, “By means of many
complete, robust observations, will you help me to confirm or disprove a
great, enormously important conjecture gathered from half, quarter, and one-
eighth observations?” Goethe was ready to help, especially since the basic
approach made sense to him: conclusions about the interior can be drawn
from the exterior, not just vice versa. The path from sensory perception to
inner spirit was one he had already trod.
In the first years, Goethe contributed frequent portraits and descriptions
for Lavater’s work in progress—of Klopstock, for instance: This gently
descending forehead indicates pure human intellect; its height above the
eyes, singularity and delicacy; it is the nose of someone who notices.
Beneath the silhouette of Charlotte von Stein, whom he had yet to meet, he
noted in the summer of 1775, It would be a wonderful spectacle to see how
the world is reflected in this soul. She sees the world as it is, and yet
through the medium of love. Thus gentleness is the general impression.
Lavater’s ideas were too rhapsodic and enthusiastic to be effectively
defended against his critics and skeptics. He therefore turned to Goethe, his
newly won-over physiognomic adept, for some fundamental remarks on the
subject, which Goethe willingly provided, since they offered an opportunity
to clarify his own thinking. Goethe wrote that in interpersonal relationships,
the web of effect and countereffect remains mostly unconscious. Without
being aware of it, we are constantly reading the face of our interlocutor and
accommodating to it. Everyone feels where he should approach or
withdraw, or rather, something attracts or repels him, and so there is no
need for investigation or explanation. We should not disturb this
unconscious or only half-conscious process. As a rule, it facilitates social
intercourse. In particular situations, however, physiognomic observation can
be helpful—when you want to know what exactly is attracting or repelling
you, what you expect of another person or what you have to expect from him.
You may want to understand the web into which you are woven. The art of
reading another person can be taught and learned.
Goethe accepted Lavater as his teacher, at least in this area. He treated
him with respect when Lavater arrived in Frankfurt on June 23, 1774. They
addressed each other as “brother,” and Goethe’s mother called her guest
“dear son.” Lavater immediately began to make physiognomic observations.
Goethe, he wrote in his diary, said surprising and wonderful things “with the
expression of a genius who feels himself.” The Swiss pastor paid a visit to
Susanna von Klettenberg, and they talked about the Lord Jesus and Goethe in
turn. Lavater waxed ecstatic about his friend: “I have never found such
harmonious sensitivity to nature.” Lavater remained in the house on the
Hirschgraben for a week and gave audiences to the streams of people who
came to see him. At the end of June, he left for Bad Ems, the goal of his
journey, where he hoped to cure his rheumatism and Goethe accompanied
him. For the time being, the two were inseparable.
Lavater noted in his diary that Goethe had recited to him some things from
an epic poem about the legend of the Wandering Jew that he was working on.
Therein were described the peregrinations of Ahasver in eighteenth-century
Germany. As Goethe imagines him, Ahasver has witnessed the primitive
Christian community. For him, present-day ecclesiastical Christianity is an
aberration by contrast. The risen Christ also appears in the poem and is
described thus: In a land to which He came / He was there—on a church’s
weather vane, / Aside from that (it was quite odd) / There was very little
sign of God. The message is that, whereas Ahasver once failed to recognize
Jesus, now it is the churches, priests, and theologians who sin against Christ.
“The Wandering Jew” was probably the fruit of the same mood we find in a
letter Goethe wrote to Herder, in which institutionalized ecclesiastical
Christianity is called either a Scheinding (an illusory thing) or a Scheissding
(a shitty thing)—depending on how one reads his handwriting.
The pious Lavater did not note down whether he liked the poem or not. He
was, after all, a man of the (reformed) church and would have heard the
satire of contemporary Christianity with mixed feelings, even if his own
belief in Christ was very personal, inward, and nondogmatic.
Goethe was scarcely returned from Bad Ems when he had another visitor
to welcome: Johann Bernhard Basedow. A clergyman determined to reform
the school system, Basedow was traveling to recruit financial backers for his
projects. He had also founded the so-called Philanthropinum in Dessau with
support from the local prince. Basedow attacked pedantry and rhetorical
windiness. He said that instruction should be made graphic and vivid, with
examples from real life. Pupils should learn the right way to learn, and doing
so should be fun. These were very sensible ideas, but Goethe found it hard to
be in Basedow’s company for any period of time. He was a fairly coarse
fellow who smoked cheap tobacco and drank. Goethe could only stand to be
with him outdoors.
Basedow was also on his way to Bad Ems, and Goethe, who seized every
opportunity to travel, accompanied him, although he had just come from
there. Basedow sat in the coach puffing on his pipe, while Goethe sat on the
coach box. Lavater and Basedow got on famously together, and both were
jawboning Goethe. The three friends continued by boat down the Lahn and
Rhine rivers as far as Koblenz, Goethe writing, As if to Emmaus we bumped
along / With stormy, fiery speed. / Prophets right and prophets left / The
World’s child in between. From Koblenz, now minus Basedow and his cheap
tobacco, Goethe went on to Düsseldorf. In the nearby town of Elberfeld, he
had his first encounter with Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and his brother Johann
Georg. On the basis of nothing but rumors that the Jacobi brothers were
sensitive pansies, Goethe had earlier composed satires about them. But
having met them in person, he was charmed, and in those bright, sunny
summer days he began a friendship with Friedrich that was to last a lifetime.
The younger of the two, he was six years Goethe’s senior. Goethe called him
Fritz.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi had taken over his father’s trading house in
Düsseldorf and was also a financial and customs official. A handsome man
with an elegant, winning demeanor, a competent and very well-to-do
businessman with a keen love of philosophy, he knew everyone and
corresponded with anyone who had made a name for himself—Lessing,
Wieland, Klopstock, Hamann, and Kant. Goethe was very impressed, and
they were soon on an intimate footing. For his part, Jacobi wrote Goethe
what amounted to love letters after their first meeting: “Walked up and down
all morning; my whole soul is yours alone, to do with as you please. How
powerfully you work within me!—You have probably never experienced
such a thing. Continue to do good and great things for me, on your own
account as well.”
A trip via Bensberg to Cologne, an overnight in the inn Zum Geist, a
conversation about Spinoza, Goethe’s reciting in the moonlit night—it all
made an overwhelming impression on Jacobi, an impression he would recall
later when their friendship was in one of its periodic crises: “I hope that in
this epoch you don’t forget . . . the arbor where you spoke so unforgettably to
me of Spinoza; the room in the inn Zum Geist where we watched the moon
rise over the hills of the Siebengebirge, where you sat on the table in the
twilight and recited the ballad ‘There was a beau, a cheeky lad’ and others . .
. What hours! What days!—At midnight you sought me out in the darkness—I
felt like a new soul. From that moment on I could never leave you.”
When they parted, Jacobi promised to visit Goethe in Frankfurt. On
December 12, 1774, Goethe was working on a painting in a darkened room
when he saw the outline of a tall, slim man approaching. He thought it was
Fritz Jacobi and rushed forward to embrace him—but it was Knebel.
That was the moment when Goethe’s Weimar story began. Karl Ludwig
von Knebel, a Prussian officer and lover of art and literature, had recently
been appointed military adviser to the court of Weimar. Knebel and Johann
Eustachius Graf von Görtz, tutor to Karl August, heir to the duchy of Weimar,
were accompanying the seventeen-year-old prince and his younger brother on
a trip to Mainz, where Karl August’s engagement to the Hessian princess
Luise was to be negotiated. After that, they planned to continue on to Paris.
The literature fan Knebel had intended to visit Goethe out of purely
personal interest, but he soon realized that he should also introduce this man
to the future duke. In a letter to Friedrich Justin Bertuch he called him “one of
the most extraordinary phenomena” of his life. That same day, Goethe met
Karl August for the first time in the Rotes Haus inn. They talked about
Werther and Justus Möser’s Patriotic Fantasies, which Goethe had just
reread. Goethe apparently repeated with great sympathy that book’s defense
of the traditions and political effectiveness of small states that had to fend off
the aggrandizing desires of larger states. It must have been music to the ears
of the future ruler of a small duchy. Görtz was the only one present who did
not at all like the much-admired genius: “This Goethe is a vulgar fellow. . . .
That’s for sure; Goethe and I will never find ourselves in the same room.”
The meeting happened at a time when Goethe was again embroiled in
romantic complications, this time with the seventeen-year-old Elisabeth
Schönemann, known as Lili. The Schönemanns were a well-to-do family who
owned one of the largest banks in Frankfurt. After the death of her father,
Lili’s energetic mother ran the business from their town house on the
Kornmarkt. The family had many close relatives and cultivated an elegant
social life. They belonged to the reformed community in which people were
fairly aloof, maintaining large households yet remaining quite private. Their
love of privacy would play a role in the affair between Goethe and Lili.
He fell in love with the young woman at some point in January 1775,
during a soirée where she had played some pieces on the piano. The carnival
season, with its parties, dances, and masquerade balls, was just getting under
way, and the couple met often and danced the night away. We know much
about Goethe’s state of mind at the time, since he had chosen another woman
to whom he could write and bare his soul. Countess Auguste zu Stolberg was
the sister of Christian and Count Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg, with whom
Goethe would take his first trip to Switzerland, in the summer of 1775. The
twenty-two-year-old Countess Stolberg, who belonged to the circle around
Klopstock, was so enraptured by Werther that she wrote an anonymous letter
to the author in early 1775. Goethe, in turn, was so charmed by the letter that
he fell a little in love with the writer, who at first remained only a phantom.
He sent her a silhouette of himself. In the meantime, he had learned her name,
and a lively correspondence began. He was soon calling her Gustchen (an
affectionate diminutive of Auguste) and overwhelming her with endearments,
once even begging her to save me from myself.
She had asked him whether he was happy, and in his first letter, he
answered, Yes, dearest friend, I am, and if I am not, at least all the deep
feelings of joy and sorrow dwell within me. That was at the end of January
1775, when his romance with Lili was beginning. He wrote nothing of the
affair in that first letter, but he did in his next. There he depicts the carnival
Goethe cavorting at balls, his identity concealed behind a mask, being gallant
to the ladies, and especially courting a dainty little blonde (Lili) and being
captivated at the gaming table by a pair of lovely eyes (Lili again, or
perhaps another girl). This carnival Goethe deems himself insufferable in
the eyes of Gustchen. He commends the other Goethe to her, that is, the one
who, always living, striving, and working within himself, attempts in his
own way to express the innocent feelings of youth in little poems, the
powerful spice of life in various dramas, the shapes of his friends and his
surroundings and his beloved household effects. Goethe uses Gustchen in
order to look through her eyes at Lili, that is, to peer from one romantic
relationship at another. He writes as if the real Goethe was with Gustchen
and Lili’s lover is the carnival Goethe. As his passion for Lili increases, the
tone of the letters to Gustchen becomes more passionate too: o dear friend,
how shall we find expressions for what it is we feel!
The correspondence with Gustchen lasted longer than his relationship with
Lili, and did not cease until he was living in Weimar. Almost four decades
later, in 1822, Gustchen, who in the meantime had married Count Bernstorff
and been widowed, contacted Goethe again, concerned about his eternal
soul. In his answer, Goethe bid this lover of his youthful self farewell; the
two never met in person.
In this phase, as Goethe divided his inner self between Gustchen and Lili
and sought emotional relief from the one for his entanglement with the other,
he wrote the play Stella in just a few weeks. About the love of a man for two
women, it ends with a three-way wedding, and caused a predictable public
scandal. He prepared Gustchen for that eventuality with the remark that he
didn’t ask what people will think of what he was writing.
The play would not have found an enthusiastic audience in the Schönemann
house either. Goethe was unable to make up his mind about Lili. Ought he to
marry into the financial aristocracy of Frankfurt? The Schönemanns (mother,
brothers, and other relatives) expected Goethe to get serious about a
professional career, either as a lawyer or in the bank. But such a prospect
filled him with horror: to float around in this pond in a gondola and go
hunting spiders and frogs with great affability. Faced with having to decide
on that path, he recognizes what he would later describe in a letter to his
mother as the difference between two speeds: The disproportion between
the narrow and slowly moving bourgeois circle and the breadth and speed
of my nature would have driven me mad. It is a topic to which we will
return.
While Goethe pondered whether to acquiesce to a high-class marriage, he
composed a farce entitled Hanswurst’s Wedding, or The Way of the World as
a bawdy antipode to the civilized behavior of respectable people. A tutor
named Brustfleck (“Breaststain”) is the advocate of social propriety. He
introduces what he considers his well-brought-up pupil Hanswurst (“Hans
Sausage,” the German equivalent of Punch), who is to be married.
Preparations for the celebration are under way. Brustfleck says, The greatest
names in Germany, / Believe me, are now on their way / To your house,
from north and west and east / To celebrate the wedding feast. But
everything takes too long for Hanswurst, who gets impatient: With these
boors I’ll have no truck / They want to gorge; I want to fuck. (Obviously
the poet of Werther can play different tunes.) Hanswurst is utterly shameless
and gets right to the point with no detour through civilized behavior. Although
the tutor Brustfleck boasts of his success, he has to admit, His lessons are
not quite complete. / He still likes shitting in the street. Goethe never
published this unfinished farce, and it’s unlikely he showed it to Lili, but the
carnival Goethe must have gotten a kick out of writing it.
Lili was a young lady of feeling, very pretty, with natural grace but also
coquettishness. She was smart, and courted by many men—all in all a very
good catch. When she appeared with Goethe—himself a handsome and
popular young man, after all—it was talked about in the great houses of
Frankfurt. And there was a lot of talk, so much in fact, that the pressure on
him grew greater and greater. We do not know the details of what went on
between them, but it was probably the wax and wane of emotions that Goethe
described in his letters to Gustchen. Soon the Schönemanns were no longer
so pleased to see Lili and Goethe together, since he still had not declared his
intentions. That is why the couple began to meet at the country estate of Lili’s
uncle in nearby Offenbach. A friend of Goethe’s, the composer Johann
André, also lived in Offenbach, and there they spent cheerful, at times even
carefree summer days. A poem composed in Offenbach depicts Lili feeding
animals in the park and leading by a silk ribbon a bear that is devoted to her
—the lover she has tamed. / Up to a certain point, of course!
 But the vexatious question still remained: was all this going to result in
marriage? A poem dedicated to Lili’s uncle says, I’ve no use for tolling
bells in the steeple / and rattling coaches and chattering people. / And I
don’t take the church’s advice / For I’ve already been in Paradise. Goethe
was still wary of a long-term commitment, but he didn’t want to lose Lili
either. Lili was endearingly, urgently real, unlike Gustchen, who existed only
in her letters and in his imagination. Of course, his imagination was also at
play in the relationship with Lili. There is some evidence that the two were
hatching romantic plans to elope: a coach waiting in the predawn twilight,
and off they would go, perhaps even to America. Goethe suggests such a
thing in Poetry and Truth, and late in her long life Lili, by then Frau von
Türckheim, told an acquaintance that Goethe was the “creator of her moral
existence” because he did not take advantage of her willingness to sacrifice
her “duty and feeling of virtue” to him.
It came as a relief that Gustchen’s brothers, Friedrich Leopold and
Christian zu Stolberg, invited Goethe to join them on a trip to Switzerland.
The two youthful counts belonged to the circle around Klopstock and to a
literary group known as the Göttingen Grove, which lived by the principles
of sentimentalism. Fritz zu Stolberg was an especially handsome youth with a
self-assured manner. He was always the center of attention, idolized by both
men and women. Goethe allowed himself to be persuaded to go, not only to
get away from romantic complications but because the trip could be
combined with a visit to his sister in Emmendingen. His parents had been
urging him for a while to finally visit Cornelia, about whom they were
receiving sad reports, especially since she had given birth to her first
daughter. Goethe felt it to be his duty, although he would have preferred to
avoid his sister’s emotional troubles.
In mid-May 1775, the traveling companions set off. In Strasbourg, Goethe
paid a visit to Salzmann and met with Lenz, who had been longing to see him.
Since they had last seen each other, Lenz had begun a relationship of his own
with Friederike Brion and also with Cornelia. Thus he was following in
Goethe’s footsteps. He accompanied him from Strasbourg to Emmendingen,
where they spent some happy days, bringing some measure of cheer to
Goethe’s sister. They took long walks and stayed up till all hours; Cornelia,
who had hardly left her bed for months, seemed briefly transformed.
Goethe’s enjoyment was overshadowed by his sister’s obvious unhappiness,
and he left Emmendingen with a heavy heart. He was dismayed to hear
Cornelia speak dismissively of Lili, but this was familiar territory for them,
for Goethe had also been jealous of Schlosser. He wrote laconically in
Poetry and Truth that he intended to give the reader only an inkling of his
serious feelings during the visit to his sister.
The trip to Switzerland took them first to Zurich, where Goethe was
Lavater’s guest for a while, met his circle of friends, and began a lifelong
friendship with Barbara Schulthess, his most loyal reader, as he once called
her. From Zurich they continued to Lake Lucerne—Wilhelm Tell territory—
and from there to the Gotthard Pass in the high Alps. At the top of the pass he
felt tempted, as he would on later visits, to simply keep on going, down into
Italy. But in the end, they turned around. On the return trip, he again tarried
awhile with Lavater and his other new friends and acquaintances in Zurich.
At Lake Zurich they got into trouble with residents who objected to the young
men’s swimming naked and threw stones at them. It was a different story in
Zurich and Basel; there people were eager to meet the author of Werther.
Some were disappointed by Goethe’s reserve. Some found him arrogant,
vain, and in love with paradoxes. “I admire the genius of this man in the
highest degree—although I do not at all love the use he puts it to,” noted the
Basel town clerk Isaak Iselin.
After two months, they started home. Again, they traveled via Strasbourg,
where Goethe spent time with Lenz, as he had on the way to Switzerland. “I
have enjoyed divine days with Goethe,” Lenz wrote. Together they visited
friends and taverns from Goethe’s Strasbourg days. Again they climbed the
cathedral steeple and made excursions to their favorite places in the
countryside. But Goethe did not ride over to Sesenheim to see Friederike;
nor did he pay a second visit to Cornelia in Emmendingen.
At the end of July, Goethe returned to Frankfurt. The first letter after his
arrival went to Auguste zu Stolberg: Whenever I’m feeling really low, I turn
to the north. . . . Last night, my angel, I longed so much to lie at your feet,
to hold your hands . . . I have so often betrayed the female sex—Oh
Gustchen, if I could only look into your eyes!
His relationship to Lili was still unresolved. The trip had had no effect on
matters. Goethe sought her company and, at the same time, shied away from
commitment. Once, in Lili’s absence, he sat down at her desk and got his
troubles off his chest—with a letter to Auguste: Here in the room of the girl
who is making me unhappy through no fault of her own, with the soul of an
angel, whose happy days I—I!—darken. Lili returns, is surprised to find him
in her room sitting at her desk. She asks whom he is writing to, and he tells
her. Goethe depicts all that in minute detail, but says nothing about Lili’s
reaction. At the same time, he wrote to Merck: I’m stranded again on a
shitty sandbar and feel like giving myself a thousand slaps for not going to
the devil when I was afloat. Lili and Goethe agreed not to see each other for
a while. But it didn’t help. Goethe wrote to Gustchen, Unfortunately, her
distance from me only makes stronger the enchanted bond that ties me to
her.
We have a contemporary account in which it was Lili’s mother who finally
put an end to the indecision. A certain Herr von Bretschneider, no friend of
Goethe’s, reported the events—or were they only rumors?—in a letter to the
writer and publisher Christoph Friedrich Nicolai. Goethe had finally asked
for Lili’s hand, but “her mother asked for time to think about it, after a few
weeks invited Goethe to dinner, and in the presence of a large company,
answered Goethe’s offer by declaring that the marriage was not proper
because of the difference in religion. Of course, Goethe had to have taken
this rudeness quite badly, because she could have told him the same thing in
private, but the woman says she wanted to put an end to the matter once and
for all and knew no better means, and had feared an argument from him if
they had a tête-à-tête.” This last remark is so characteristic that one is
inclined to believe the rest as well.
In September 1775, Karl August, who had reached his majority and was
now a duke, traveled to Karlsruhe to marry Princess Luise. On the way, he
stopped in Frankfurt and invited Goethe to travel to Weimar with his
chamberlain, Johann August Alexander von Kalb, who was to arrive with a
coach in Frankfurt in mid-October.
Since the spring of 1775, when a visit to Weimar was first broached,
Goethe had had some time to think about the invitation and had been toying
with the possibility. But now he had to decide. About the same time he began
to think seriously about it, he wrote to Auguste, Will my heart finally feel
something in true, poignant pleasure and suffering . . . and not always be
driven up to heaven and down to hell . . . on the waves of imagination?
What one’s imagination projects is one thing, but deciding on a particular
reality is something else again. Forced through the needle’s eye of decision,
his many possibilities became a single reality; early in October he decided to
go to Weimar.
 In Poetry and Truth Goethe says that a decisive motive was needed to flee
from Lili, but that was not quite all. At the time, he declared to Fritz zu
Stolberg that he was going to Weimar not for the sake of anyone, for I’m
piqued by the whole world. It was not just Lili. It was the entire situation—
the whole world—that he wanted to escape. It is important to note that there
was nothing he found overpoweringly attractive about Weimar. A much
stronger motivation was the desire to just get out of Frankfurt! Besides, he
didn’t yet know what would only slowly emerge: that going to Weimar was a
life-changing decision.
For now, it was merely a more extended journey, a provisional sojourn at
a court. Why shouldn’t he try that out, too? He borrowed money from Merck,
for as yet there had been no talk of an appointment to a post or an income.
His father had to contribute money as well—grudgingly, since he did not like
to see his son going to a court, especially such a small one. Weimar did not
yet have the reputation it would acquire once Goethe got there. Wieland was
there of course, and the duke’s mother supported a Musenhof, a “Court of the
Muses,” that had achieved some fame, but that was about all. The palace had
just burned down. It was yet to be proven how effective the eighteen-year-
old duke would be. As far as population was concerned, compared with
Frankfurt, Weimar was a small, provincial backwater with a ducal residence.
So Goethe was also traveling from a metropolis to a provincial town,
although one with ambitions. In Weimar’s favor, it was far enough away to
promise a life that would be somehow different. It would remain to be seen
whether this was only a moratorium or a new beginning. While waiting for
the arrival of the duke’s coach, Goethe wrote to the author Gottfried August
Bürger, The first moments of composure . . . the first since the most
distracted, confused, completest, fullest, emptiest, most powerful, and most
foolish three-quarters of a year I have ever had in my life.
But the coach did not arrive. He waited more than a week, with no coach
and no news. He had told all his acquaintances in Frankfurt that he was
leaving. He was considered as good as gone, and thus it was embarrassing to
show himself. So he stayed home. He sat in his room and worked on the play
Egmont.
Finally, he lost patience. What now? He had decided to leave Frankfurt,
and he was not about to change his mind. As his anger at having to wait grew,
he made a snap decision to change plans. He decided to make up for what he
deprived himself of in Switzerland by going to Italy. On October 30, he set
off and wrote in his travel diary, I packed for the north and am heading
south. I acquiesced and will not come. I declined and I come! The first stop
was Heidelberg.
There a courier arrived with the message that Kalb had finally reached
Frankfurt with the coach and was waiting to carry Goethe to Weimar. Goethe
could have continued on to Italy, but he turned back instead.
 INTERMEDIATE REFLECTION

Unbearable Lightness

W HEN WE LOOK AT THE WAY GOETHE DESCRIBES HIMSELF IN

poetry and truth and at the early biographical evidence, we see a child who
was expected and wished for. From the very beginning, he received
recognition and encouragement, stimulation and approval. He was the family
darling, a boy who had no problem with his own identity and could devote
his energy entirely to discovering the world. He had an enormous thirst for
knowledge and was quick to grasp how things were done and then to imitate
them: foreign languages, rhythms and rhymes, pictures, puppet plays, fairy
tales, solemn religious services, and biblical stories. Hugely self-confident,
he was loved and at peace with himself. He thought of himself as a fairy-tale
prince, someone who could make a present of himself to others. He explored
his surroundings without misgivings or fear. Then he fell in love for the first
time—with a girl named Gretchen—and he and she attended the coronation
of the new emperor hand in hand.
His life was bathed in the warm glow of friendliness and enticing mystery,
until this first shadow fell across it. Partly through the girl, the boy gets
involved with bad company. An alien side of life is revealed to the sheltered
son, who is also alienated from himself for the first time. He loses some of
his directness and lack of self-consciousness. He goes to study in Leipzig,
and the young man—still a boy in some ways—is strong enough to recover
his natural spontaneity. But from then on, a certain amount of calculation is
always in play. No longer so insouciantly full of himself, he now wants to do
something unheard-of, to outdo himself. He plans to be a poet, and in his
letters he practices creating a reality on the page through which he can
intervene in and change the rest of reality. But this can lead to confusion. Life
becomes mysterious when the imagination gets involved, but it also becomes
labyrinthian. It’s not always easy to separate actual and imagined experience.
And his new friend Behrisch, that brilliantly odd fellow, contributes to the
confusion.
The student Goethe made a somewhat blithe conquest of Leipzig and even
began a promising love affair, but it soon ran into trouble. After his first
success, the young man began to meet with obstacles, as he had at the end of
his childhood in Frankfurt. There was an inner dissonance before Leipzig and
again after Leipzig.
He falls seriously ill and experiments with religion among the Herrnhuters,
but without success, for he lacks the necessary consciousness of his own
sinfulness. Feelings of guilt are foreign to his nature, and he has no need of a
heavenly savior. When the poetic urge is upon him he feels completely
unconstrained. A new, unheard-of lyrical language takes possession of him;
he is overpowered by it. In Strasbourg he becomes the whiz kid later
referred to reverentially as “the young Goethe.” Overflowing with ideas he
cannot write down fast enough, he can seem possessed at times. Verses come
wherever he happens to be—during long country rambles, under sunny skies,
in rain and snow. He claims to have composed some of the early, defiant
hymns while battling wind and rain.
He not only lived poetry, he poeticized life. In hindsight, his affair with
Friederike seems like an idyllic novel. But the enchantment is not merely
retrospective. The young man himself could enchant friends with poetry, had
read Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield and replayed the novel. Life springs
from literature before literature can be reborn from life.
As for fame as a writer, Goethe had achieved everything possible before
he left for Weimar. Practically overnight, Götz and Werther had made him the
voice of his generation. As a rule, turning points in intellectual history are
seen only in hindsight, but in the case of Götz and Werther, it was already
clear that a new era had begun. Goethe became an instant cult author (as he
would be called today): admired and envied, he was also respected, if at
times reluctantly, by older authority figures. He clearly recognized his own
importance. He had not sought such notoriety; it simply came to him, but not,
he thought, undeservedly. Talented people hit the bull’s-eye even when they
aren’t aiming for it.
 Because others were astonished, he ended up being astonished himself at
the playful ease—as if it were a matter of course—with which he produced
new works. He called his lyrics occasional poems, and the best do seem
inspirations of the moment, poems developed on their own rather than made.
And it is true that the young Goethe did not labor over his works. Either he
succeeded on the first try, or he abandoned the effort until a more propitious
moment. Some things were never completed; others were, even if they took a
lifetime, as would be the case with Faust. If he ran out of steam, he started
something new. In general, he was fond of beginnings—a notorious beginner.
Goethe was bursting with ideas. He could not make something out of all of
them, because there were simply too many. That is why it was easy for him to
destroy earlier attempts. He could be certain that something new would
follow. He could burn his bridges behind him because he was always moving
blithely forward. We live looking forward and understand looking back. The
time for understanding would come; later, his father’s pedantic influence
would awaken, and he would begin to collect everything relating to himself.
His early self-confidence was like sleepwalking. He couldn’t even
imagine himself on the wrong track. He intended to follow the necessity he
sensed within himself. Adjusting yourself to your own nature, he called it. He
was certainly advantaged by his family’s wealth. With that security at his
back, he did not have to tailor his life to making money or to a professional
career. He devoted himself to education, not just training. He didn’t want to
become a professional man, and although he did end up practicing law, he
did it in his own talented way, with playfulness and imagination—too much
imagination, according to his colleagues and clients. He made a brilliant
impression, but also an unreliable one. His legal briefs were well written but
failed to have the hoped-for effect on the court. He himself, not wanting to do
anything as a profession, suspected that he lacked the necessary thoroughness
in legal matters, but also in general. Hence his strange striving to prove
himself a poet who could break the rules but also master them to the point of
perfection and pedantry. His later projects in natural science should be
understood as a lifelong attempt to prove his thoroughness for fear that
people would think him incapable of it.
There were moments when the young and still insouciant Goethe doubted
himself. But it was not others who made him uncertain. Instead, it sometimes
happened that this young man with such a rich imagination was absent from
himself, as he calls it—given to moments of depression and emptiness. He
called it an illness, and it is what Werther is about. Looked at closely, it is
not so much love that makes Werther unhappy, but the feeling of emptiness
that seeps in when his large emotions fade away. That was the real crisis
Goethe himself experienced, as he admits in Poetry and Truth. He calls it
taedium vitae, the weariness of living. Which arises not from life’s burdens,
entanglements, or acute disasters but from monotony and emptiness. What
threatens is not superfluity but nothingness. There is no wildly gesticulating
despair, only paralyzing boredom. Goethe depicts how he escaped such
emptiness by working himself up to the melodramatic gesture of keeping a
dagger handy and taking the suicides of great historical figures as his models:
Emperor Otto falling on his sword or Seneca slitting his wrists in the bathtub
—textbook acts of desperation. But they were active individuals, and he
accuses himself of despairing from a dearth of action. The remedy was to
force himself to write the novel Werther. By writing of Werther’s
hypochondriacal fancies, he rid himself of his own and resolved to live, as
he says in Poetry and Truth. But perhaps something of the weariness of
living and its emptiness survived in his later unease, which he combatted
with a love of order and a dose of pedantry.
There is actually no need to explain periodically recurring taedium vitae,
for it is part of being human. It would need explanation if he had never felt it.
But there is another sort of weariness: caused not by emptiness but by excess
—a weariness that everything he puts his hand to succeeds so effortlessly. It
was already true of Goethe as a boy. He could not hear a story without
spinning a continuation and making it into a new story. He wrote his own
Bible. He was enchanted by a puppet show and immediately set out to
enchant others. Too impatient for entire systems of thought, he would pick out
a few thoughts from them and make something of his own. He did that, for
example, with Spinoza and Kant, whom he never read thoroughly. Even in
philosophy, he had an overpowering urge to play. From that same urge came
the pleasure of disguise. He first encountered Friederike in Sesenheim in the
disguise of a poor theology student. He played parts not just for others but for
himself. If you were playacting, you had no need to deceive yourself; a
person at play has gone beyond truth and falsehood.
He didn’t feel weary of playing, but sometimes the unbearable lightness of
his creative being made him weary. Almost all of his life, all his activities
had something playful about them, especially the creative ones. Well into his
years in Weimar, he could never regard his writing as work, even when he
pursued it with exhaustive devotion. It was simply too easy for him. That’s
why there was something unresisting at play, even when the theme was
psychological stress and strain, as in Werther. The urge to play makes even
stress and strain into something all too easy.
The impression of ease also came from the way in which everything
seemed expressible in words. There was language at hand for everything.
The young genius had the feeling he could master anything he encountered.
There was something carefree and easygoing about it, something almost
childlike. Herder condescendingly called the approach
“spatzenmässig”—“sparrow-like.” And it’s true that the young man could
bubble over, indulge himself, juggle ideas and inspiration. That’s how it was
in the first years, the years of genius. But even before Weimar, one
occasionally notices his efforts to restrain himself, even an intentional
stiffness. He had been touched by an odd weariness brought on by having too
much. Whatever is so easy to produce has not yet really been born—born
into a world that puts up resistance. That was the world now sought by
Goethe, the darling of fortune who succeeded so easily at everything. And
that was why he followed the call to Weimar. He wanted at last to have a
relationship for which he was unprepared on every side.
As he made his way to Weimar, he was already famous throughout Europe.
But he felt that, so far, he had done and accomplished nothing.
 CHAPTER 11

Complications at Court. The Wieland Affair.

Charlotte von Stein. Wild Antics at First.
Klopstock Rebuffed. Herder Receives the Call.

....

GOETHE REACHED WEIMAR ON NOVEMBER 7, 1775, IN THE

company of the young chamberlain von Kalb, who would soon succeed his
father as Kammerpräsident, the director of the duchy’s finances. They
followed part of the same route Goethe had traveled ten years before on his
way to study in Leipzig. Back then, Goethe’s mother had wrapped her son in
blankets like a little child. When an axel broke, he had been eager to lend a
hand to get the coach moving again and had injured a ligament in his chest
that continued to plague him for a long time. That had been his first real acid
test.
Ten years earlier he had been at the beginning of a phase in life during
which he came to regard [his] intrinsic poetic talent as completely natural.
He was able to write poetry as easily as sleepwalking. But that was also
precisely why he didn’t like to take credit for it. For him, it was part of his
vitality seeking expression, but he never thought of it as work. Through field
and wood I tramped along / Piping out my little song, / And passed the day
away.
Having given free rein to his imagination, Goethe was now embarking on a
different journey that would possibly test his capacity for the business of the
world. So I encountered . . . the thought: shouldn’t I . . . employ the things
that were humane, rational, and sensible about me for the use and
advantage of myself and others? He did not know exactly what awaited him
in Weimar. The invitation had been urgent but vague, its intended purpose
unstated.
The young duke, who had assumed the reins of government from his
mother, Anna Amalia, on September 3, 1775, was in need of a capable
administrator and adviser, for the little duchy was again threatened with
bankruptcy. The court budget of the ministate, with its eighty thousand
inhabitants, was being financed on credit because its revenues were
insufficient. Agriculture consisted of small holdings and craft production was
only for personal consumption. A textile factory in Apolda was in decline,
unable to compete with products from the lower Rhine and England. The
grain trade was crippled by the high cost of transport. There were few if any
exports, but local production and yields were not enough for self-sufficiency.
Even salt had to be imported despite a number of saltworks in the duchy, for
they were poorly managed.
And this state with its meager economic power had to support a bloated
administrative apparatus and a lavish court, regularly leading to large
indebtedness. It tried to cope by counterfeiting coinage, keeping false books,
and raising taxes. At the time Goethe arrived, the tax rate was 30 to 35
percent, compared with about 20 percent in Prussia and 12 percent in
England.
But as yet, the new arrival had no eye for Weimar’s social misery, only for
his own shortness of funds. He was not being paid, and it did not look as if
he had been invited for an extended stay. And thus he had to ask his father for
money. He found it unpleasant to approach him directly, so he chose “Aunty”
Johanna Fahlmer, a relative of the Jacobis and a friend of Goethe’s mother,
as a go-between. He wanted the two women to find out whether Johann
Caspar would show his appreciation for his son’s reflected glory by making
a financial contribution.
Reflected glory after only two months? That could only be the effect of his
personality, for as yet he had done nothing at court or for the state. His status
in Weimar was that of a private person, a visitor and new friend of the young
duke’s. But he was a brilliant figure and attracted much attention. Goethe was
enjoying himself. My life is going along like a sleigh ride, off with a bound
and a jingle and promenading up and down.
In fact, the first real innovation he introduced was ice-skating. The great
Klopstock had celebrated the activity in a poem, and while the duke’s
courtiers considered it beneath their dignity, now one could see Goethe
showing Karl August and his chamberlains Einsiedel and Kalb how to cut
figure eights on the frozen water meadows of the Ilm River. The ladies soon
followed. Older people sat on benches equipped with runners. The effect of
their new visitor lay chiefly in the new amusements he beguiled them with.
For reasons of protocol, he was not yet permitted a place at the ducal table,
but he held sway over social activities. He told such witty and vivid stories,
could improvise poems on the spot, and at every opportunity was asked to
read from his works, even—or especially—from ones still in progress:
Faust, for instance. Whether he took all the parts himself, assigned roles to
members of the court, or staged an improvisation, Goethe was always master
of ceremonies.
He brought a new dynamic into the tangled web of relationships at court,
playing the game and receiving his share of hard knocks. His letters are full
of dark hints: I’m certainly having a pretty wild time here, he writes to
Merck in early 1776. I hope you’ll soon hear that I’ve been able to stage a
tragic something in the theatro mundi and play my fair part in all the
tragicomic farces. Or: Every day I learn to steer better on the waves of
humanity. I’m far out at sea. Or: I can’t tell you anything about my state of
affairs. It’s too complicated.
The situation at court was indeed complicated. The young duke was crazy
about Goethe. The two were almost always seen together, taking rides in the
woods or to the surrounding villages, at evening gatherings, and sometimes
even standing in the square and competing to see who was best at cracking a
whip. There wasn’t much talk yet about the business of governing, although
the duke energetically asserted his sovereign authority over his mother, Anna
Amalia, who had no intention of retiring completely from public life. So for
the time being there were two centers of power at the Weimar court: the
youthful duke and the dowager duchess. Caught between the two was the
young duchess, feeling neglected by her new spouse and repulsed by the
newly lax behavior of his circle. The duke’s former tutor Count Görtz, now
the duchess’s chamberlain, drew back resentfully and cultivated his ties to
the Prussian court. He even went to Berlin for a time, where he would later
enjoy much success. His wife, who stayed behind in Weimar, kept him
abreast of the goings-on at court. Her letters provide a glimpse into the web
of intrigue in which Goethe found himself entangled. Both Görtzes disliked
him intensely. The countess always calls him “the postscript.” She writes that
he behaves arrogantly, “but he is coddled and people run after him.”
 Görtz had accompanied Karl August to Frankfurt and was present at his
first meeting with Goethe in December 1774. He considered the poet’s paean
to small states pure flattery intended for the ears of Karl August, and had
harbored a deep distrust of him ever since. He took pride in his nobility and
felt superior to the bourgeois man of letters—Goethe was nothing more to
him than that—especially with regard to political and diplomatic skill and
social polish. Goethe was not really his competitor; Görtz’s ambitions
exceeded any reward that such a small dukedom could offer. All the same,
his dislike soon developed into downright hatred: “This Goethe is a boy, a
boy in need of daily improvement with the rod,” he wrote in March 1775, a
comment triggered by Goethe’s behavior toward Wieland, still Weimar’s
intellectual in chief.
Provoked by Wieland’s adaptation of Euripides’s Alcestis, Goethe had
composed the farce Gods, Heroes, and Wieland on a single October
afternoon back in 1773—with the help of a bottle of burgundy, according to
Poetry and Truth. Wieland is shown in his nightcap, appearing before
Euripides and some mythological heroes from Alcestis. He had reinterpreted
them as virtuous and sensitive figures and called it an improvement on the
Greek original. That is what irritated Goethe. It has also been taken amiss in
Hades. Hercules in particular, whom Wieland presents as a paragon of
virtue, proves instead to be an antique muscle man who blusters away at the
man in the nightcap.
In Poetry and Truth Goethe denies having had the text published; he says
it was Lenz who did it. Personally, he would not have bothered with this fruit
of a momentary whim. But the farce got printed and it caused a great stir.
Wieland felt insulted, even though he reviewed it sympathetically in his own
journal, Der Teutsche Merkur, calling it a “satirical masterpiece,” an act of
generosity that had the intended effect of shaming Goethe.
The matter was discussed during Goethe’s first encounter with Karl
August in Frankfurt and a few days later in Mainz. If Wieland was insulted,
all Weimar was insulted—at least that’s how Görtz saw it. Goethe gave
voluble assurances of his great respect for Wieland and wrote him a
conciliatory letter on the spot, to which Wieland wrote a friendly reply.
These letters have not survived, only Goethe’s report of them to Sophie von
La Roche. There one finds no trace of contrition, only mild regret at having
allowed himself to be persuaded to apologize in the first place. That’s the
damn thing about it, that I’m not getting into any more misunderstandings
with anyone. Knebel had recognized this characteristic of Goethe’s early on:
“He has an intellectual need to make enemies he can quarrel with . . . . He
spoke to me about all the people he had attacked with especially deep
respect. But the lad is combative. He has the spirit of an athlete.”
A few weeks after his conciliatory letter, Goethe’s belligerence was
reawakened when he read remarks made by Wieland about so-called genius
societies and took them as a personal attack. In a March 1775 letter to
Johanna Fahlmer, he had given vent to his anger: Wieland is and will always
be a sh——head. May eternal enmity reign between his seed and mine.
At about the same time, another farce appeared anonymously, entitled
Prometheus, Deucalion, and His Reviewers. “Prometheus” stood for Goethe
and “Deucalion” for his creation Werther. The reviewers were not named,
but introduced as physiognomic caricatures. Wieland is again the target of
derision. He humbly approaches the great Prometheus: “Since last you made
the trip to Mainz / The sun upon our friendship shines. / Am I allowed to kiss
your spur?” To be depicted as abasing himself before the great Goethe was
even more insulting to Wieland than the first satire.
Goethe was thought to be the author of this farce, too. Someone was even
found to testify that Goethe had brought the manuscript to the printer. Goethe
denied writing it and distributed a printed declaration that it was his friend
Heinrich Leopold Wagner who had written the farce and had it printed
without my knowledge or support. But he didn’t go so far as to completely
deny some participation—albeit involuntary—in the undertaking. He
admitted that his jokes were being imitated.
It was Prometheus, Deucalion, and His Reviewers that raised Görtz’s ire
and prompted his remark that Goethe was in need of the rod. Karl August
himself took the matter less seriously. Perhaps as early as December 1774,
but certainly by May 1775 after his return from Paris and before traveling
home, he invited Goethe to Weimar for the first time; the official invitation
followed in September. It was an invitation to pay him a visit; there was no
talk of a permanent move.
During the following months, Countess Görtz kept watch on the doings at
court with the eyes of Argus. In a letter of November 1776, she reports a rift
between Anna Amalia and the young duchess: “the two women are
completely sick of each other.” And of the duke she writes, “It is certain that
he no longer wants his mother to attend to anything.” She describes the
depression of the young duchess, who blamed her husband’s neglect on
Goethe’s influence and had insisted that the latter not be permitted a seat at
the ducal table. Anna Amalia, however, drew Goethe into her circle, among
other things because she hoped to learn from him what was going on with
Karl August.
The matter had a political aspect as well, if not in the first months after the
duke’s accession to power, then later. In the struggle to preserve the duchy’s
autonomy and independence, Karl August leaned toward Prussia. He had a
passion for military life and had assumed the command of a contingent of
Prussian troops as a major general. Anna Amalia, although—or perhaps
because—she was a niece of Frederick the Great, believed it was instead
best to seek protection from the empire, and so was a proponent of closer
dependence on the Habsburgs. Goethe’s letters from his first years in Weimar
make no mention of this political background. When tensions developed
between Prussia and the Habsburg Empire a few years later, Goethe, like
Anna Amalia, would incline toward the imperial side. In other respects, too,
Goethe found himself in a tricky position between the duke and his mother,
since instead of playing politics, he wanted to remain open and trusting
toward both of them—toward Karl August in any case, but also toward Anna
Amalia. He felt genuine affection for her, as she did for him. When he arrived
in Weimar, Anna Amalia was still a very pretty woman of thirty-six who
liked to dance, paint, compose music, and put on amusing entertainments. She
read the newest literature, gathered about her a circle of readers, admired
Goethe’s Werther, and had Wieland teach her about ancient and modern
philosophy.
Many at court assumed that she and Goethe had more than a close social
relationship. Countess Görtz called Goethe Anna Amalia’s “favorite” and
kept a log of his calls upon her, indeed of both parties’ comings and goings.
She also observed—or thought she had—that Goethe once spent an entire
evening alone with Anna Amalia. The little town, the ducal seat where
nothing stayed hidden, buzzed with rumors, which the Countess Görtz
promptly passed on. “Maman [Anna Amalia] is on a better footing with the
genius par excellence [Goethe] than ever before, and despite his caution in
public, it is being slanderously talked about.” She reports that Herder thought
that there was something fishy at court: “He is constantly sad and regrets the
unfortunate fate of Weimar, the aberrations of the master [Karl August], the
situation of his wife. He disdains the mother [Anna Amalia] more than ever
and blames the favorite.” Countess Görtz wrote this several years later than
1776; matters continued to be murky for some time. Wieland called himself
“merely an observer” of the “comedy of state,” and the chamberlain Sigmund
von Seckendorff professed to be irked by the commotion Goethe had helped
to stir up: “The whole court is divided into two parties, of which that of the
duke is noisier, the other quieter. In the first one, they run, hunt, shout, lash,
and gallop and, strangely enough, think they’re doing it with style because of
the aesthetes who participate. There is no wantonness they deny themselves.
The second party”—presumably young Duchess Luise’s circle, which was
fairly stiff and very class-conscious—“is usually bored, sees all its plans
confounded by the first, and the pleasure they seek usually vanishes.”
It was to the second party that Charlotte von Stein belonged. She had been
a lady-in-waiting to Anna Amalia and remained loyally devoted to her now
that she was a companion to Duchess Luise. Goethe wrote her effusive
letters; even as he thus sought her out, she expressed grave concern to her
fatherly friend the renowned physician Johann Georg Zimmermann that
Goethe was corrupting the morals of the young duke. She said that she
avoided contact with Goethe, who deserved a severe reprimand: “There is
an astonishing amount on my mind that I need to tell that monster. It is
impossible that he will make his way in the world behaving as he does! . . .
Why does he always lampoon everyone? . . . And now, his indecent behavior
with his swearing and using vulgar, low expressions . . . he ruins others. The
duke is astonishingly changed. Yesterday he was with me, asserted that
anyone with propriety, with manners, didn’t deserve the name of an honest
man! . . . That’s why he can no longer abide anyone who isn’t a bit rough
around the edges. That all comes from Goethe. . . . I feel that Goethe and I
will never be friends.” Goethe, for his part, thought that he had found a friend
in her.
Frau von Stein was thirty-three years old and married to the head equerry,
Josias von Stein. The couple had had seven children, of whom three
survived. Frau von Stein came from a noble family, the von Schardts, and had
been reared in a strict courtly setting. She moved among her peers in perfect
form and saw to it that others did the same. She read widely, liked to quote
from what she had read, and had strong opinions. Her social equals
considered her a scholar. She had a petite, slim figure and despite her
numerous pregnancies seemed almost girlish. There was something
Mediterranean about her brownish complexion, glossy black hair, and dark
eyes. In public she was self-confident but reserved, often serious but
sometimes also ironical. And she always kept her distance. Her laconic
judgments of others were feared. There was nothing effusive about her. Some
thought her melancholy. Without being a great beauty, she was extremely
elegant.
After a long conversation by the fireside during his first visit to
Grosskochberg, Frau von Stein’s country estate, a few hours from Weimar,
Goethe scratched his name and the date onto a tabletop: December 6, 1775.
In the letter he wrote to her shortly thereafter—the first of what would
eventually be fifteen hundred letters to Charlotte, Goethe writes, And just as
I can never tell you my love, I can never tell you my joy. The tone of the
early letters is flirtatious, linguistically playful, even coquettish. There is
constant talk of love, but the mood is rococo, touched with irony. But God
only knows where all my foolishness and all my wit have gone to! he writes
in one, and then follows up with a cascade of witticisms. In a letter from late
January 1776, he suddenly switches from the formal pronoun Sie to intimate
second-person forms: Dear lady, permit me to love thee [dich] so much. If I
can love anyone more, I shall tell thee [dir]. Perhaps she forbade him to
speak in that way, for the following day he is contrite: I’m trying to make up
my damn mind and heart whether to stay or leave. He had probably also
spoken to her about his unfortunate sister and his own guilty conscience, and
had found some sympathy, for he writes, Oh, if only my sister had a brother
the way I have a sister in you. In one of his first letters, he calls her a
soother. In her he expects to find not excitement but lovely, soothing peace of
mind. Sometimes, however, he finds that she overdoes the soothing peace of
mind, in particular whenever she simply avoids him. With bitter irony he
remarks, You are right to make me into a saint, i.e., to remove me from your
heart. . . . And here is an urn, if it should ever come to pass that only relics
of the saint remain. The next day he reverts to the formal second-person Sie
to add, But since my love for you [Sie] is one continual resignation. . . .
And so it goes, back and forth between agitation, reassurance, and being left
alone. His desire is coquettishly expressed; he makes an advance and then
retreats. He is voluble, occasionally laconic, sometimes fresh, and now and
then he breaks into poetry. In any case, he cannot leave her alone and finds in
her an opportunity to pull out all the stops of his expressive capabilities.
He is so preoccupied by the relationship that news from Frankfurt barely
affects him. Upon learning from Johanna Fahlmer that Lili has become
engaged, he answers, No more about Lili; she’s been written off. That same
day he writes to Auguste zu Stolberg, My heart, my head—I don’t know
where to begin, my circumstances are so multitudinous and new, and
changing, but good.
However, his circumstances are also such that the feeling of intimacy with
Charlotte seems almost spooky. In mid-April 1776, he confides to Wieland, I
cannot account for the importance—the power—that this woman has over
me except by way of metempsychosis.—Indeed, we were once man and
wife!—Now we know it of ourselves—in a veiled way, in a spectral haze. I
have no name for us—the past—the future—the universe. During the same
period, he asks Charlotte to make him a copy of a poem of his that he no
longer has: I’d like it in your hand—and then I won’t bother you anymore.
Goethe never published this poem:

Fate, why did you grant this deep perception

So that we can see what is to come,
And never, blissful, trust in the deception
Of love and earthly happiness, like some?
Why did you grant us feelings, intuitions,
so that we see into each other’s heart,
And through all the strange crush and confusion
Discern the truth we shared in from the start.

The verses were written at about the same time Charlotte was writing the
letter to Zimmermann quoted above. Obviously, Goethe was not yet able to
see into [her] heart the way he wished he could. The poem suggests the
feeling of a curious transmigration of souls between the two of them that
Goethe had confided to Wieland: Tell me then, What does fate have in
store? / Tell me how it yoked us in this life. / Ah, in times gone by we were
together, / And you were my sister or my wife.
He would continue to cast Charlotte in the role of soother.

Drop by drop you cooled his heated blood,

Gave direction to his errant ways.
In your angel’s arms his ravaged breast
Could at last find peace and healing rest.
With a gentle hand you kept him tethered,
 Dandling days away for his delight.
Unparalleled the hours of sunny weather
When, grateful, he would stretch out at your feet.
Feeling his heart swelling next to yours,
Feeling in your eyes that he was good,
He felt the brightening of all his senses
And the calming of his racing blood.

We don’t know whether the role suited her or whether she found his poem
indiscreet. There were rebuffs. Again and again, Charlotte had to remind him
of the bounds of propriety. Once he writes her after a meeting, Whenever I
want to close my heart toward you, I never feel good about it.
As a wife, mother, and lady-in-waiting to the strict and proper duchess,
Charlotte was very concerned about her reputation. Her city residence was
not far from the garden house in a park along the Ilm River that the duke had
given to Goethe as a present, but she avoided visiting him there alone. She
received him in her house in the presence of her children and other visitors
though without her husband, who was rarely home. Often she withdrew for
months at a time to her country estate in Grosskochberg. For Countess Görtz,
the reason was obvious: “They say that Lotte will spend the entire winter in
the country to put a stop to the malicious gossip.” But it may have had exactly
the opposite effect.
Goethe often combined a visit to Charlotte with one to Anna Amalia, as if
trying to maintain a kind of balance. There is some evidence that Charlotte
was not pleased about the arrangement. Once when he had been with Anna
Amalia at her summer residence in the Ettersburg castle, he wrote to
Charlotte, I see now how my presence bothers you, and notes in his diary,
below the sun symbol that stood for Charlotte, eclipse. But he also wrote, of
one of his visits to the Ettersburg castle, Marvelous night. We do not know
(although there were those who thought they did) whether Charlotte had any
grounds for jealously; was Goethe maintaining an amorous relationship with
Amalia at the same time?
Gossip also swirled around Corona Schröter, the beautiful actress whom
Goethe and the duke had persuaded to leave Leipzig for Weimar. She was
protective of her reputation and had a chambermaid with her who acted as a
kind of duenna. The duke courted her assiduously but had no success as a
suitor. Goethe was also attracted to her and later wrote the title role in the
play Iphigenia in Tauris expressly for her. In it, she could be as he saw her:
beautiful and passionate, but also modest and pure. He had difficulty
mastering his infatuation with Schröter. His diary records a visit to her on
January 2, 1777, and then a feverish night. On January 6 after another visit:
Didn’t sleep. Pounding heart and hot flushes. Corona excited him. On May
8, he took advantage of Charlotte’s absence and spent an entire day with her
in his garden house. Perhaps Charlotte got wind of it; a few days later, she
met him there, a very rare occurrence.
While his ties to Charlotte grew gradually stronger despite occasional
setbacks, Goethe was also living through the first, passionate phase of his
friendship with the duke. Merck, who knew the duke well, wrote about the
relationship between the two in a letter to Lavater: “The duke is one of the
most remarkable young people I have ever seen. . . . Goethe loves him as he
does none of us, perhaps because no one needs him as much as the duke, and
so their relationship will last forever—since Goethe cannot leave him, or he
would no longer be the person he is, and the duke will no sooner break with
him than would one of those who are Goethe’s friends.”
The duke had been raised and educated in the spirit of the Enlightenment.
He loved Voltaire above all other writers and revered his granduncle, the
Prussian king Frederick the Great, who had brought the French writer to his
court. Like Frederick, Karl August wanted to have a famous intellectual and
writer at his side as adviser and companion. But since falling instantly under
the spell of Goethe’s personality at their first meeting, he also wanted him as
his friend. The duke was a decisive, roll-up-your-sleeves young man with an
unerring talent for sizing people up. His insight into human nature was said to
be his strongest talent. Animated by the new ideas of the Sturm und Drang, he
prized candidness, naturalness, and occasionally even crudeness. He
considered sentimentalism ridiculous. Religion didn’t mean much to him
beyond its usefulness in the task of governing. He had a natural sense of
sovereignty and had been impatient to reach his majority and take over the
reins of government completely from his mother. He intended to rule the
duchy rationally, on the model of his granduncle, without yet knowing exactly
what that would entail. He loved commanding and leading his soldiers
around, riding hell-for-leather in great hunting parties, and making conquests
of local girls.
When Merck met the duke, he understood at once why Goethe liked him.
“I’ll tell you honestly,” he wrote to Nicolai, “the duke is one of the shrewdest
and most respectable people I ever saw—and just think, he’s also a prince
and twenty years old to boot.” Karl August was mature for his age, but not
precocious. He’d retained something of his carefree, rash youth. People
worried about his health because he loved to brave wind and weather, ride
recklessly through the woods, climb trees, and sleep in hay barns or in the
open air. In the first crazy weeks, Goethe was with him in almost all his
exploits, but not without expressing to his ducal friend his concern about the
all too great heat, with which you are always in danger of doing something
if not unjust, then unnecessary—and of straining your own powers and the
powers of your nearest and dearest for nothing. One time, Karl August fell
out of a tree. Another time, he dislocated his shoulder while wrestling with a
chamberlain. Another, he spent a half-frozen night with peasants, having
taken refuge from a blizzard. He longed for adventures and danger and
mocked the “artificial gentlemen,” as he called some of his over-sensitive
courtiers. He gathered around him men who wanted to be part of the action:
Einsiedel, Bertuch, Otto Joachim Moritz Wedel, the painter Georg Melchior
Kraus, and—above all—Goethe.
The duke would have gladly spent the first Christmas after Goethe’s
arrival with his friends, but he had been invited to the court of the Duke of
Saxony-Gotha, and so his friends trooped to a remote, snowed-in Waldeck
forester’s lodge near Bürgel without him. The letters Goethe wrote from
there to the duke give us a taste of what must have been the usual, carefree
tone of this all-male society. Goethe sits in his room after a drinking spree
and scrawls his letter. They’re still sitting downstairs after supper’s been
cleared away, smoking and jabbering so I can hear it through the floor. On
their pub crawl they come upon pictures of the duke in the taverns. They pay
him their respects, bow and scrape, and realize how much we love you. They
are snug in the snow-covered, quiet house while outside the wind howls and
the stars glitter. Goethe’s thoughts stray to the duke, who is constrained to sit
through a gala reception in honor of his accession to power:

Behave yourself amidst all those sconces

Shining upon you
And all those faces
Swarming around you
And singing your praises.
True joy and peace can only be found
 Where trusty, loyal souls abound.

The duke sends a messenger to say he misses Goethe so much that his
friend should come over to Gotha and keep him company, especially since
people are curious to see him. Goethe sets off and puts in an appearance at
the court of the Duke of Saxony-Gotha, where he makes a strong impression.
He makes an even bigger splash a few days later in the house of the von
Keller family, to whom Wieland had sung the praises of the new resident of
Weimar. Wieland had forgotten all his anger at Goethe’s satire and now
praised him to the heavens. He wrote to Jacobi that he was “quite in love”
with him, and he asks Lavater “to destroy” his last letter, in which he had
spoken ill of Goethe. And in a letter to Johann Georg Meusel, he simply
declares, “Goethe, whom we’ve had here for nine days, is the greatest genius
and the best, most likable person I know.”
So now, lured by Wieland, Goethe arrives at the Kellers’ in Stedten, near
Gotha. Wieland had not promised the assembled company—especially the
daughters of the house—more than he could deliver. Goethe was in a good
mood and in splendid form. He sparkled with wit, read aloud, told stories,
and played pranks. Wieland memorialized his impressions of the evening in
the poem “To Psyche,” in which his irony melts away in the sun of adulation:

It is a wizard who arrives,

With a pair of jet-black eyes,
Eyes divine that cast a spell
With power to delight or kill.
He walked among us, a lord sublime,
Monarch of spirits, in his prime!
And no one asked, who might he be?
At once we all felt, It is He!
That truth invaded all our brains,
We felt it coursing through our veins.
Never before on God’s green earth
Had son of man possessed such worth.
...
All nature encompassed by his might
So deep he delves in every creature,
And is alive in every feature!
 That’s what I call a real magician!
...
What power he has to move our souls!
Who blends together joys and woes?
Who tortures with such gentle art,
With such sweet music melts our heart?
Who can awaken from depths so deep
And with such boisterous delight
Feelings that without him might
Stay hidden, lost in darkest sleep?

Karl August, also present on that memorable evening, felt proud of the
“magician” who was, after all, his first conquest for Weimar.
Goethe’s repertoire extended to dubious pranks. In the summer of 1776 the
duke and his friends were in Ilmenau, exploring the possibility of reopening
the silver and copper mines there, and made an excursion to the nearby
Stützerbach. The mining official F. W. von Trebra was in the party and writes
in his memoirs of that “lively circle” in which apparently “everything was
permitted.” “Here, unobserved, acting boisterous was, if not encouraged, at
least not frowned upon, probably even expected.” In their cups, they decided
to cut off their hair. Goethe advised against it with a play on the two
meanings of machen: one could do (machen) it, but not so easily undo it by
“making (machen) it grow back.”
Trebra wrote his account many years later and was obviously at pains to
give the “amicably presiding genius” credit for trying to mitigate their wilder
ideas. Frau von Stein, who at first deplored all the genius business, came to
terms with Goethe’s behavior in the same way: “Goethe is causing a great
revolution here; if he is able to restore order, so much the better for his
genius! His intentions are certainly good, but too much youth and too little
experience—however, let’s wait and see!”
Goethe was a bit uncomfortable at the thought that his parents in Frankfurt
might hear too much about the goings-on in Weimar. In the spring of 1776,
Josias von Stein, Charlotte’s husband, was to travel to Frankfurt on business,
and while there he planned to pay a call on Goethe’s parents. As a
precautionary measure, Goethe sent “Aunty” Fahlmer some instructions. They
should give the honest fellow a warm welcome but be prepared to hear some
unpleasant things about the situation in Weimar. It would be best not to make
further inquiries but to remain reserved. You just shouldn’t seem too
delighted about my status here. Moreover, von Stein, like almost the entire
court, is not completely satisfied with the duke because he doesn’t dance to
their tune, and I am both secretly and openly blamed. If he should let drop
something of the sort, you must also ignore it. In general, ask more than
you tell, and let him talk more than you do.
The rumors, however, were reaching not just his parents in Frankfurt but
the public at large. Goethe’s move to Weimar had attracted attention, and
now people were curious to know how it was turning out. His friendship
with the duke was frequently compared to the alliance between Voltaire and
Frederick the Great; people had anticipated that the intellectual and the
prince were joining forces for the sake of the larger good. Yet now they were
hearing of a wild “state of affairs in Weimar” and, as the classicist and
translator Johann Heinrich Voss reported from hearsay, the duke was
traveling through the villages with Goethe like a “wild fellow. He gets drunk
and, like a brother, shares the same girls with him.” Klopstock had heard the
same gossip, and since he considered himself the head of the “republic of
letters,” he wrote Goethe, whom he had won over with his poem about ice-
skating, in a tone of reproach and admonishment: “what will be the unfailing
result, if the duke continues? If he continues to drink to the point of illness,
instead of—as he says—thereby strengthening his body, he will succumb and
not live long. . . . Until now, the Germans have justifiably complained that
their princes want nothing to do with their learned men. Currently, people are
happy to make an exception of the Duke of Weimar. But what will other
princes, continuing in their same old way, not be able to adduce in their
defense if that will have happened which I fear will happen?”
Goethe left the letter unanswered for two weeks to allow his outrage to
cool, devoting himself instead to his asparagus bed, among other things. Then
he wrote a reply: You can feel yourself that there is no answer I must give. I
would either have to intone a pater peccavi,* or make some sophistical
excuse, or defend myself like an honest fellow, and in truth, perhaps in the
end it would be a mixture of all three, and to what end?—So not another
word between the two of us about this affair! Do you think I would have a
single moment of existence to myself if I were to answer all such letters, all
such admonishments? Klopstock answered by return mail: “Your
misconstruction of what I wrote was as great as my intention that the letter be
a token of my friendship . . . and so I hereby declare that you were not worth
giving it to.” That was the end of their relationship.
The duke was eighteen when he chose Goethe as his friend and exercised
all his powers of persuasion to bring him to Weimar. He wanted him nearby,
but had no further plan as yet. However, in order to keep him nearby, after
three months he held out the prospect of an official position, against the
opposition of some courtiers and officials. He also showed Goethe extreme
generosity, such as making him a present of the garden house. On March 16,
1776, the duke wrote a will that stipulated a lifetime pension for Goethe, for
the time being without offering him an official position. From time to time in
the first months, Goethe toyed with the idea of leaving Weimar. It was
important to him to know that if he felt like it, he could go at any time. In that
way, he remained free. He had also chosen freely to be with the young duke.
The next few years would prove the strength of Goethe’s attachment to him.
He often spoke quite openly about it. In a later letter to Charlotte von Stein,
there is a strangely idealized, highly stylized image that encapsulates the
significance of the friendship: Then . . . the duke came, and without being
devils or the sons of God, we scaled high mountains and climbed onto the
parapet of the temple, there to view the realms of the world and their toils,
and the danger of suddenly plunging into the depths . . . and we were
enveloped in such an apotheosis that the past and future hardship of life
and its difficulties lay at our feet like dross, and we—still in our earthly
garb—could already feel through the still dull quills of our wings the
lightness of a blissful fledging to come.
He was quite a bit more succinct in a letter to the duke four months after
his arrival in Weimar: And thus you can never cease to feel that I love you.
At this point, Goethe had decided to stay, at least for the time being. He
writes to Merck, My situation is advantageous enough, and the duchies of
Weimar and Eisenach are always a stage where one can see how a world
role suits one . . . although more than ever, I’m in a position to recognize
the thorough shittiness of this temporal magnificence.
Even before Goethe himself assumed an official position, he pulled all the
strings he could to have Herder appointed to fill the vacant post of
Generalsuperintendent (church administrator), as his friend no longer felt
satisfied in Bückeburg. He won over the duke, but there was resistance from
the local clergy and officials. Dear Brother, Goethe writes to Herder, we’ve
always had bad relations with the shitheads, and the shitheads hold all the
reins. The duke wants you, wishes to have you, but everyone is against you
here. Herder had a dubious reputation as a freethinker. That didn’t frighten
the duke, but, on the other hand, he didn’t feel like quarreling with the church
council. He was going to order an expert assessment by an orthodox
theologian, but at Goethe’s urging, he forwent it and appointed Herder by
fiat. It fell to Goethe to see to the renovation of his friend’s office and living
quarters.
This affair stiffened the government officials’ resistance to Goethe. When
he was appointed privy councilor with a salary of 1,200 taler and a seat on
the privy council, its chairman, the long-serving Jakob Friedrich Baron von
Fritsch, announced his resignation. There were, he wrote, other and more
experienced experts whose loyal service qualified them and whom one ought
not to pass over. He implied that he considered Goethe’s appointment to be a
case of favoritism. The duke stuck by his decision and called Fritsch’s
judgment of Goethe an insult to his friend. He did not want to lose the
experienced civil servant, however, and urgently requested him to stay at his
post. With help from Anna Amalia, Fritsch finally allowed himself to be
persuaded. For his part, Goethe was wise enough to work at getting along
with him.
By the summer of 1776, Goethe was well established in Weimar.
Something useful had become of the author of Werther after all—that was the
spirit in which he informed the Kestners of his advancement: I shall stay
here and can enjoy life where I am and, after my own fashion and in many
circumstances, be of use and service to one of the noblest of men. The
duke, to whose soul I have now, for almost 9 months, felt the most genuine
and heartfelt connection, has at last attached me to his government, from
our love affair has come a marriage, and may God give it his blessing.

* Latin: Father, I have sinned.

 CHAPTER 12

My writing has become subordinated to life.

Genius Doesn’t Protect You from Being a Dilettante.
Against the Literati. The Disastrous Case of Lenz.

....

ROAMING THE DUCHY, SPENDING NIGHTS IN BARNS AND

foresters’ lodges and then in palaces and castles, camping, ice-skating,
flirting with country girls (known as Miesels in the local dialect), attending
balls at court—such were the diversions Goethe enthusiastically pursued. He
enjoyed them not least because the young duke did too. Karl August longed to
experience the wild student life, or what passed for it at the time. Goethe
encouraged the duke but also served as a moderating influence. Wieland
wrote that Goethe had the knack of “trampling on convention yet always
being smart and circumspect enough to see how far he dared go.”
He had mood swings as well. Of course, I’m leading a pretty wild life
here, he wrote to Merck at the beginning of 1776; a little more than a week
later he sent Frau von Stein the poem “Wanderer’s Night Song” with the lines
Ah! I am so tired of striving, / Why all this passion and unrest? / Peace,
sweet quiet / Come! Come dwell within my breast. But such weariness was
only temporary and soon gave way to restlessness: I’ve sampled the court
and now I intend to sample the regiment too, and on it goes. He no longer
wanted to be a mere guest, a visitor, the personal companion of the duke. He
wanted to take part in the serious business of governing.
Artistic endeavors were put on the back burner for the time being. He
painted watercolors and made sketches, but most were hasty experiments
given away as presents, mailed to distant friends, or simply tossed out.
Goethe kept only a few. He did write poems—indeed, some of his most
beautiful ones. They, too, were inspirations of the moment, most coming in
letters to Frau von Stein. More ambitious projects under way—works like
Faust or Egmont—remained untouched. During a visit to Leipzig in the
spring of 1776, an old acquaintance, the playwright Christian Felix Weisse,
asked when they could expect another work from his pen. Goethe’s brief
answer left no doubt: he would turn [his] literary career over to Lenz, who
will soon present us with plenty of tragedies. When Goethe made this
declaration in March 1776, he had no idea that Jakob Michael Reinhold
Lenz, his anointed successor, was already on his way to Weimar. Finding him
there upon his return from Leipzig, Goethe would give him a warm welcome,
but in the long run he found Lenz’s visit unpleasant. His fellow writer was a
reminder of the problematic aspects of a literary existence—precisely what
he had hoped to escape in Weimar.
Goethe had taken a step whose full import he only gradually came to
realize: My writing has become subordinated to life, is how he would put it
later.
That life in his first few months in Weimar was playful and eccentric,
guided by whim and fancy. Something of the literary still clung to it, if in a
form largely free of serious occupation and responsibility—precisely why it
became problematic, as he’d come to Weimar ostensibly to engage with
reality in a different way. He hadn’t simply been looking for new territory in
which to live out his impulses; he was seeking firmer footing. In retrospect,
the imaginative excesses, the surrender to every mood, and the lack of
attachments came to seem empty and unstable. He referred to his last months
in Frankfurt as the idle life at home, where I can do nothing with the
greatest pleasure. Of course, he had done a great deal of writing. But writing
now seemed to him pointless, negligible. He needed the heavy lifting of
action, and as he looked back on his life, it seemed to him a wheel that spun
faster and faster only because it had lost contact with the ground. The things
that set him apart and of which he was still proud—his rich inventiveness
and supple empathetic power, his enduring sensitivity, his mood swings, all
the fireworks of his soul—were now showing their problematic aspect. He
suffered from the two different speeds, his inner life now too fast for external
reality.
While Goethe made a proud and self-confident impression and was the
instant center of attention whether at court or among bourgeois company, he
was inwardly unsure of himself. He was not unaware that there were still
many things he needed to know in order to be able to play an effective role in
real life. Goethe the quick study, the imaginative genius, now took pleasure in
things that were solid and basic. He had a sense of what he was lacking, and
that was what he intended to work on. The free flights of fancy would come
of their own accord, no need to worry about that. He had to concentrate on
how to shape real life. Producing art is easier than making one’s life a work
of art, and he recognized that he still had much to learn; genius did not protect
him from being a dilettante at life. A writer’s presumption of moral
superiority was particularly suspect to him, Klopstock’s behavior being a
cautionary example. With no insight into the actual circumstances, Klopstock
had assumed the role of moral judge of Goethe and the young duke. The poet
of the biblical epic Messiah might have some knowledge of conditions in
heaven, but he knew nothing of what was going on in Weimar. Treating great
themes doesn’t automatically make you a great human being. While the
literati made literature the measure of man, Goethe had become convinced it
should be the other way around, for truth emerges from the practice of life,
not from literature. Writerly arrogance toward people with practical skills
was out of the question. It’s fine to strike poetic sparks from real life, but not
to confuse poetry with life. Life has its own purposefulness, as does poetry.
Goethe intended to be an expert in both.
His decision to subordinate literature to life was also a protest against the
overvaluing of literature still in vogue among his Sturm und Drang friends.
He would write later that literature had led them to undermine themselves
through their exaggerated demands on social reality, the unsatisfied
passions to which they gave ever-renewed hypochondriacal expression, and
even through imaginary suffering. In a fit of this mistrust of literature, he
once wrote to Jacobi that he had always had an uncomfortable feeling when
things that preoccupy an individual mind under particular circumstances
are distributed to the public.
Just as Goethe had decided to subordinate literature, Jakob Michael
Reinhold Lenz came to his doorstep, on April 4, 1776, like an emissary from
his own youthful impulses. The young man Goethe had once called the son
whom I love as my soul now seemed like a messenger from the world of
inept and emotionally unstable scribblers. And indeed, Lenz had arrived in
Weimar a broken man, seeking refuge and support at the court and from his
friend and brother—the two had referred to each other thus in the past and at
times still did.
Two years earlier, Lenz had attained some literary fame with his comedy
The Tutor, or Advantages of a Private Education and his Observations on
the Theater, an ambitious attempt at a new theory of drama on the
Shakespearean model. Both The Tutor and Observations had appeared
anonymously and been attributed to Goethe, an expression of high regard that
could have had advantages for Lenz. But the young man, whose behavior
veered between bashfulness and bursts of cockiness, seemed almost to attract
bad luck. When he identified himself as the author of the two celebrated
works, he was promptly dubbed a Goethe imitator.
In The Tutor, Lenz depicted the humiliations he himself had suffered as a
tutor in noble houses, an unlikely theme for Goethe—all the more reason to
be surprised by the misattribution. That probably owed more to the great
virtuosity with which Lenz’s figures are characterized by the way they speak,
as in Götz. Lenz was an imaginative and witty author of great talent who
could improvise satire, poetry, and puns on the spot. None of that bolstered
his self-confidence, however, for he regarded it merely as the expression of
his nature and nothing to be proud of. His central problem was that he was
plagued by guilt for having torn free of his authoritarian father, a high church
official in Livonia (today’s Latvia), abandoned a career as a theologian, and
embraced the uncertainty of a writer’s life, which held little prospect of
success at the time. His father refused to support him, and Lenz went into
service for miserable wages as the companion to the young barons von
Kleist. Accompanying them to Strasbourg, where they joined a French
regiment, Lenz lived among them essentially as a well-educated stable boy. It
was a humiliating life, which he eventually drew on for his play The
Soldiers.
Short and of delicate build, Lenz looked almost like a child. Goethe called
him the odd little thing. Not just physically small, he constantly reduced
himself, to the point of self-abasement. “We’ve spoken enough . . . about my
scribblings,” he wrote Goethe, “—now let me begin again with the little
muck heap of myself and—find you.” In a satirical sketch about the literary
scene entitled “Pandaemonium Germanicum,” Goethe appears—spirited,
carefree, and full of energy—and climbs a steep mountain, leaving everyone
else behind, Lenz following at his heels, tediously “creeping.” When they
reach the top, the critics approach, calling out from below, condemning Lenz
as an “imitator” who doesn’t really belong up there. Lenz sent the manuscript
to Goethe; embarrassed, he advised against publishing it. Lenz took that as a
command, just as he forwent publishing other manuscripts because Goethe
recommended against it or simply didn’t return them. Conversely, there had
been a near falling-out in 1774, when Goethe sent Lenz his satire Gods,
Heroes, and Wieland and Lenz turned it over to a publisher without Goethe’s
permission—or so the latter would later claim.
More often, the two friends exchanged manuscripts in a spirit of
intellectual kinship. For Goethe, Lenz was like a struggling younger brother
who needed to be taken under his wing. For Lenz, Goethe was a mirror
image of himself, but successful, enlarged, and radiant with everything, an
image in which pain and suffering seemed to dissolve into beauty and grace.
Lenz watched the girls and women who treated him as a plaything—or so he
thought—melt with love and devotion for Goethe. He nonetheless tried to
follow in his friend’s footsteps in matters of love. After Goethe left
Sesenheim, Lenz courted the abandoned Friedericke and wrote her poems,
which she kept with Goethe’s. When the packet of mostly unsigned poems
was later discovered, it was very difficult to tell which were by Goethe and
which by Lenz. All were infused with the same spirit and mood.
Goethe’s friendship both inspired and depressed Lenz, for no one made
him feel as small as Goethe did. Those who knew Lenz well and had sound
literary judgment were free with praise and recognition. Lavater, Sophie von
La Roche, Fritz zu Stolberg, and Merck all wrote him letters full of praise.
Herder, as a rule sharply critical and disinclined to enthusiasm, asked him to
send a copy of The Soldiers: “You are the first person for whom I write, and
you have such wonderful insight, forgiveness, comprehensive understanding,
advice. Please send me the play.”
In the fall of 1774, Lenz had resigned from the service of the barons von
Kleist and made a second attempt to support himself as an author. He had
written numerous dramas, comedies, and individual scenes in the two years
since, as well as essays on moral philosophy, theology, dramaturgy, and
philology, many of which remained unpublished. He lived for months at a
time in a flurry of happy creativity, if also weighed down by financial
worries: Lenz, who could not pay the rent on his living quarters in
Strasbourg, often didn’t know where his next meal was coming from. He
borrowed money, paid his debts by borrowing still more, and became
involved in an unhappy love affair that cost him dearly: a girl kept him
waiting until she got a better offer. You have to fight your way “through
excrement,” as he wrote to Herder; he was always painfully aware “that we
are still animals and only Klopstock’s angels and Milton’s and Lavater’s
angels ride on sunbeams.”
In the spring of 1776, he decided to seek refuge with his friend in Weimar,
hoping Goethe could secure a position for him. He wanted to be of use. In his
baggage was a draft plan for reforming military training, the result of
reflection on his depressing experience of military life in Strasbourg. In that
position paper, he presented his ideas on the humane treatment of soldiers to
the duke. “What does our soldier fight for?” he asks. “For the king? For the
fatherland? Ha, if he is to fight vigorously for them, he must be able to love
them, must have received good things from them . . . prosperity, self-defense:
there you see the only remaining seeds of the valor that is dying out. If you
stifle them, all is lost. The soldier must fight for himself when he fights for
his king.”
The working and living conditions of the soldiery were as important to
him as if his own life were at stake. “I am working on an essay on married
soldiers that I would like to read to some prince,” he’d written Herder as he
was leaving Strasbourg, “and after its completion and discussion I—will
most probably die.” Lenz did not intend to come to Weimar as a supplicant;
he wanted to be able to give something back to the powers that be. And
although he didn’t want to burden Goethe, this undertaking did in fact task his
famous friend, to whom Lenz seemed an example of those ivory-tower
writers who think they can cure the world with ideas but are incapable of
taking care of themselves. The defects of that profession [the military] were
described fairly well, Goethe would write in Poetry and Truth; the cures,
however, were laughable and impractical. Repelled by the public flogging
of soldiers on the Marktplatz, Goethe nonetheless advised Lenz to be
cautious in the matter. A few years later, as chairman of the military
commission, Goethe had his own struggles with the state of the army; not
until 1782, when he was head of the finance commission, was he able to push
through a drastic reduction in the size of the little army in order to lessen the
state’s horrendous deficit. It was an alternative way to realize humane
reforms: the need for frugality forced the issue.
Having arrived in Weimer, Lenz sent Goethe a note with the verse “The
lame crane has reached the town, looking for a place to lay its head.” Goethe,
newly returned from Leipzig, had not yet moved into his garden house and
was staying near the ducal palace with the court treasurer König. Unable to
take Lenz in, he found him another place to stay for the night, introducing him
the day after to Frau von Stein and at court. Lenz’s reputation as a playwright,
however, had already traveled to Anna Amalia’s literary circle. Wieland,
eager to meet an author who had written satires about him, was immediately
fond of the lad, as he wrote after their first meeting, surprised to find such a
gentle and bashful person. Lenz was handed around to general approval,
though four weeks later some half-annoying and half-ridiculous incident led
Goethe to write Charlotte von Stein: Lenz’s asinine behavior last night
caused a gale of laughter. I haven’t recovered yet.
Though the exact reference is unclear, it may have been the incident that
the writer Johannes Daniel Falk related many years later. According to him,
Lenz had arrived at a masked ball at court in a domino costume. He either
didn’t realize the exclusive nature of the ball or simply refused to be deterred
by it. It caused a scandal. Women retreated when he asked for a dance, and
the men stood and sat in stony silence. Goethe finally ushered him out.
At first, the trouble caused was soon forgotten, and Lenz continued to be
popular at court. “Here I am engulfed by the whirl of the court, which barely
allows me to get my thoughts in order,” he wrote to Lavater. Courtiers like
Kalb and Einsiedel took him along when they went riding and introduced him
into the wild gang around the duke and Goethe. Even Frau von Stein took a
fancy to him. They called him a “nice boy” and treated him as such,
somewhat patronizingly. Sometimes they buffeted him around a bit when they
played blindman’s buff. They took him seriously as well, allowing him to
read from his manuscripts and tutor Anna Amalia in Greek. The duke
supported him from his privy purse but could not or would not hold out any
hope of a permanent position, and after the initial weeks of euphoria,
disappointment set in. Goethe spent a good deal of time with him at first, then
gradually pulled back. Lenz, who had begun to feel the center of the social
whirl, felt suddenly abandoned. He made an abrupt decision to leave, but
remained in the vicinity. He wrote to Goethe, “I’m going to the country since
I can do nothing with you.”
At roughly this moment, Goethe was appointed to the privy council with
the title of Legationsrat against the opposition of long-serving officials who
were annoyed that the duke was favoring an “aesthete.” This was grounds for
Goethe to want to put some distance between himself and the dubious
aesthete Lenz, who’d found lodgings in Berka, a little town not far from
Weimar. There he wrote “The Forest Brother,” a story about a complicated
love affair that was a variation on the Werther motif and even copied its
epistolary form. The central character is a sensitive youth named Herz
(heart), whose adversary is the narcissistic but otherwise sober and almost
cynical Rothe, a figure clearly modeled on Goethe. One clearly sees Lenz’s
disappointment, perhaps even a feeling of betrayal, in this story. Rothe is a
total “epicurean” whose “narcissism” has left little room for virtue. He is a
conformist, seeking to gain an advantage, who never becomes discouraged,
never gives of himself or reveals himself, but plays the people around him
like marionettes. Disoriented, realizing painfully that he lacks social skills,
Herz considers emigrating to America and entering military service, leaving
it up to fate whether that will save him or mean throwing himself away. Full
of bitterness and revenge, he writes in his last letter, “Rothe is a traitor . . .
he will not escape my hands.”
Lenz never finished the story. It can no longer be determined whether he
entrusted the manuscript to Goethe or it was found among the papers he left
behind in Weimar and given to Goethe. In either event, the draft and other
manuscripts were in Goethe’s possession twenty-one years later, when
Schiller asked about them, hoping to publish something by the then long-
forgotten author in his journal Die Horen (The Horae). Goethe turned the
Lenz manuscripts over to him in 1797, and Schiller wrote to him, “As far as I
have been able to see, the Lenziana contain very crazy stuff, but the
reappearance of this way of feeling at the present time will surely not be
without interest, especially since the unhappy life and death of the author
have extinguished all envy, and these fragments must always have a
biographical and pathological value.” The two friends decided to publish
“The Forest Brother”—a great concession for Goethe, who until then had
refused to allow any of the manuscripts to be printed. It was even forbidden
to mention Lenz’s name in his presence. Goethe retained painful memories of
Lenz that he did not want to revive. Not until decades later was he able to
write in a tranquil tone about this friend of his youth.
When Lenz left Berka and returned to Weimar, there must have been some
dramatic incident between him and Goethe. We have no direct evidence
about it except for Goethe’s diary entry of November 26, 1776—in which the
ominous phrase Lenz’s asinine behavior is used again—but whatever it was,
it prompted Goethe to ask the duke to expel Lenz forthwith. The duke
hesitated, but then gave the order for Goethe’s sake. Through Herder, Lenz
requested a one-day reprieve, which was granted, and on the following day,
he departed. All the parties involved—Goethe, the duke, Anna Amalia, Frau
von Stein, Herder, and Kalb—maintained complete silence with regard to
what actually happened. It may have involved a satire, or “pasquinade,”
containing suggestive material about Goethe and perhaps Frau von Stein or
Anna Amalia as well. In a farewell letter to Herder, Lenz writes that he felt
himself “expelled from heaven as a vagabond, a rebel, a pasquin. And yet
there were two passages in this pasquinade that Goethe would have liked
very much. That’s why I have sent you a copy.” The envelope addressed to
Herder that may have contained the pasquinade is preserved in the Goethe
and Schiller Archive in Weimar, but it is empty. Lenz’s remark in his letter to
Herder suggests that Goethe had not seen the fatal satire at the time of Lenz’s
expulsion. As Lenz writes in the same letter that he hoped Goethe would not
misunderstand the “purity” of his intentions, “despite how much I have
insulted him,” it seems likely there must have been some other insult, of a
nature so severe all those involved never spoke of it.
Frau von Stein had invited Lenz to give her English lessons at her country
estate in Grosskochberg after his stay in Berka. That went very well, as Lenz
wrote to Goethe: “Frau von Stein finds my method better than yours.” His
visit to Frau von Stein came at a time when there was tension between her
and Goethe. In early September 1776 Goethe had written her, We can be
nothing to each other and mean too much to each other . . . I do not want
to see you again . . . . Anything I could say is stupid. A few days later, when
Lenz, coming from Berka, turned up in Weimar again and received the
invitation to Grosskochberg from Goethe’s hands, Goethe wrote Charlotte a
curious letter: I’m sending you Lenz. I’ve finally overcome my opposition.
Oh, you have a way of torturing me like Fate. . . . He should see you, and
in your presence his troubled soul should sip the balsamic drops for which
I envy anyone. He should be with you—He was quite affected when I told
him of his good fortune: to be in Kochberg with you, walk with you, teach
you, draw for you. You will draw for him, be for him. And I—we’re not
talking about me, however, and why should we?—He was completely in a
dream when I told him, asks you only to have patience with him, asks only
that you allow him to be the way he is. And I told him it would be so even
before he asked. . . . Adieu. You’ll hear nothing more from me now. I forbid
you to send me any news of yourself or Lenz. He did nothing with the letter
at first, but mailed it two days later with the postscript, I hesitated to send
you the foregoing page, but you should see how things sometimes look in
my heart, and how unjust I can be toward you.
Either Goethe was really jealous or he was playing the jealous admirer.
Charlotte’s wish to offer Lenz lodging for a while tortures him. He torments
himself by dwelling on Lenz’s good fortune, pictures to himself the other two
in cozy togetherness, and pictures himself as one no longer worth talking
about. If that is how things stand, then he doesn’t care to hear any more about
them, and forbids her to send any news. In the postscript, he admits that he
may be unjust toward her. What did that mean? He knew very well that he
had no grounds for jealousy. In this letter, Lenz appears as his creature: I’m
sending you Lenz, he writes and reports how he told him of his good fortune,
waved away his self-doubt, and encouraged him. Encouraged him to do
what? Obviously, to grasp the chance presented to him. He practically incites
him to it. Charlotte must have felt insulted by the way Goethe acted tortured
by jealousy but at the same time played the matchmaker in his letter.
Did Lenz see through this game? After only a few days, he writes Goethe
in an ecstasy of happiness and optimism: “I am too happy, dear friend, not to
disobey your order forbidding me to tell you anything about myself; . . . I
would have to be more of a poet than I am to describe the fairy tale in which
I now exist.” A “fairy tale” with Charlotte? That made Goethe restless. His
remedy was a cold bath. I got into the water and drowned the Old Adam of
my phantasies, he writes to Charlotte.
In November, Lenz returned to Berka. He had bid Charlotte farewell with
a poem: “Where into my heart the heavens sank, / From her eyes—how
blissful!—and from the glimmer of / Divinity upon her cheek I drank.” He
was firmly resolved not to let himself be made a fool of or treated like a
plaything. In “The Forest Brother” he quotes Rousseau: “Man must not desire
what is not within his power, or he remains eternally useless and weak, a
half person.” Charlotte had held out the prospect of a position with the
duchess, possibly as a reader, something he could do.
While Lenz was again living by himself in Berka, making plans, devoting
himself to his prospects, and then again falling into despondence and despair,
Goethe’s mood had brightened. How much has sprung to life again! he
writes to Charlotte on November 8, 1776. Ah, those eight weeks buried
many things in me, and I still remain a very sensuous person. Happily
devoting himself to the still unfamiliar business of governing, he rode the
countryside, made frequent visits to the court, and called regularly on Frau
von Stein, the duchess, and Anna Amalia. He worked in his garden, planted
linden trees and all sorts of stuff, and in his free moments worked on the
play Brother and Sister for Weimar’s amateur theater. Rehearsals began in
mid-November.
Amid this activity, the grave incident of November 26, 1776, occurred.
Lenz likely came to Weimar, clashed with Goethe, and returned to Berka.
According to Goethe’s diary, he rode to Berka the following day, probably in
an attempt (which proved unsuccessful) to have it out with Lenz. A day later,
Goethe requested Lenz’s expulsion. This demand must have seemed
exaggerated to the court official Einsiedel, for Goethe wrote him brusquely:
Lenz will leave. I have become accustomed to let my actions follow my
heart, without considering disapproval or consequences. My existence is
as precious to me as anyone else’s to them. However, I shall just as little
change anything in my behavior in deference to you.
As we have said, the reason for Goethe’s abrupt decision—the actual
insult—remains a mystery. In view of Goethe’s sour mood during Lenz’s time
with Frau von Stein, we can conjecture that it had something to do with this
triangular relationship. Perhaps she had also complained about Goethe to
Lenz, and he had mentioned it to Goethe during their dustup. It must have
been a romantic wound, because he says so defiantly that in this matter he can
do nothing but follow my heart. He writes as if the decision to have Lenz
expelled was a question of his very existence: him or me.
Lenz’s life was now truly ruined. He was offered financial compensation,
but refused it. He wanted not mercy but “justice”; he rejected the suggestion
that he “admit to a crime I am not aware of having committed.” In great
despair, he left Weimar and headed for Strasbourg. But he could not seem to
free himself from Goethe. He stopped in Emmendingen and the Schlossers
took him in. There were intimate conversations between him and Cornelia.
He remained with them for half a year. Later, he wandered restlessly through
Switzerland and Alsace, dogged by bouts of madness. In the Alsatian village
of Waldersbach, he found refuge with the pastor and philanthropist Johann
Friedrich Oberlin, after whom Oberlin College in Ohio is named. Two
generations later, Georg Büchner would treat this episode in his famous story
“Lenz.”
Early in 1778, Lenz returned to Emmendingen, where Cornelia had died in
the meantime. For a while, he found help and care there. That ended in the
summer of 1779, when his brother Karl came to take him back to Livonia.
But he could not bear to stay in Riga with his father, the church official. He
went on to Russia and eked out a living as a private tutor and translator, first
in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow. There were episodes of insanity. He
wrote philosophical essays, sketches for plays, exposés, and proposals for
reforms, none published. For the literary world he had long been as good as
dead. On April 22, 1792, he was found lying in the snow on a Moscow
street, frozen to death.
Goethe knew nothing of all this. Nor did he seek to find out anything. No
one mentioned Lenz in his presence. Shortly after Lenz’s expulsion, he wrote
to Charlotte von Stein, The whole affair tears me up so much inside that
only thereby do I feel again my inner strength and what it can put up with.
 CHAPTER 13

More Sturm und Drang Visitors: Klinger and Kaufmann.

Goethe’s Wards. A Lesson in Behavior.
Pegasus and Red Tape. Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission:
Dictated, Not scribbled down. December 1777:
“Winter Journey in the Harz” and a Trial by Ordeal.

....

GOETHE FELT INSULTED BY LENZ AND REACTED HARSHLY.

When Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, also a friend from former days, showed
up in Weimar in the summer of 1776 hoping that Goethe would do something
for him, he too was sent packing, although he was not expelled like Lenz.
Klinger with his rough eccentricity is a thorn in our flesh. He’s festering
and will fester his way out, Goethe wrote. In the same letter, Lenz is
described as a sick child. But Klinger was a tougher nut. Physically imposing
and extraordinarily self-confident, he was well liked by women. With a
resonant, booming bass voice, he radiated decisiveness and was well
mannered without being subservient. His play Sturm und Drang had given a
name to the entire movement. The talented son of a poor widow, he had been
a frequent guest in Goethe’s house in Frankfurt. Both Goethe and his mother
had supported him financially. He had studied law, was earning his keep as a
private tutor, and gave the strong impression that he could look out for
himself.
Anna Amalia, who had a soft spot for robust, manly beauty, tried to find
Klinger a military post in a country other than Germany, and in fact he later
had a brilliant career as an officer in the tsar’s army, culminating in his
position as a highly decorated lieutenant general and trustee of the University
of Tartu (today in Estonia). Ennobled and rich, he wrote several
Erziehungsromane—novels of development and education—in which he
remained faithful to the ideals of his youth: sincerity, directness, naturalness,
and pride. He followed the German literary scene from afar, occasionally
making critical remarks about Goethe’s works. Goethe remained in touch
regardless, sending him cool but respectful letters, and after Klinger’s death
wrote, He was a loyal, earthy fellow like no one else. In former years, he
also caused me a good deal of trouble because he was one of those
geniuses of strength who didn’t really know what he wanted.
Christoph Kaufmann, a peripatetic, charismatic apostle of the Sturm und
Drang, arrived in Weimar with Klinger in the summer of 1776. A former
apothecary’s apprentice, then surgeon, faith healer, and, finally, an itinerant
preacher of “natural humanity,” Kaufmann attracted the notice of intellectuals
like Lavater, Hamann, and Herder. Even the skeptical Wieland was
impressed by this odd fellow who traveled around in a green kaftan with a
fur collar, his hair flowing and his shirt open at the neck. Rather than a
literary genius of strength, he was an apostle of strength and a fisher of
souls. People in Weimar marveled at this bizarre apparition—for a while,
though they were relieved when Kaufmann moved on. Many would later
recall with horror the feasts he presided over. Karl August Böttiger—later
director of the Weimar gymnasium (high school)—tells of a “genius banquet
which began with throwing all the drinking glasses out the window and
making a couple of filthy urns that had been taken from an old grave nearby
into drinking vessels.” Klinger supposedly distinguished himself at this event
by eating raw horse meat, while Kaufmann ate flowers from the park. I
praise the gods, wrote Goethe when the whole appalling episode was over.
If Goethe wanted to rid himself of these friends as soon as possible, it
wasn’t because he was stingy. He could be very generous indeed, as when he
found an orphaned Swiss shepherd boy named Peter im Baumgarten at his
door. Baron von Lindau, whose acquaintance Goethe had made in
Switzerland, had taken the boy as his godson, but then emigrated to America
and left him behind, penniless. Goethe took him in for some time, looked
after him, and gave him lessons, but with no success. The lad smoked a pipe
all day and chased the girls every chance he got. Goethe then put him into
foster care with the head forester in Ilmenau, but Peter didn’t prosper there,
either, and disappeared a few years later. Goethe had expended much care,
energy, and money and, in the end, thought he had achieved nothing.
 Another beneficiary of Goethe’s generosity and helpfulness was Johann
Friedrich Kraft, a name this man of unknown origins had adopted as a
pseudonym. He was a failed official in hopeless circumstances who had
applied to Goethe for help. The unfortunate man’s plea had so impressed
Goethe that he supported him for over ten years with an annual stipend of 200
taler, a sixth of his own initial salary. He also gave Kraft small
administrative jobs in Ilmenau and Jena (the university town within the duchy
of Weimar), which were performed satisfactorily if pedantically. Kraft
remained bitter and despairing. Goethe’s letters to him show impressively
how steadfast and sensitive he was in seeing to the needs of his ward. When
he offered him a position in Jena, for example, he wrote, But act completely
according to your heart, and if my reasons do not reach your heart, if
along with conviction they do not also hold out the promise of peace and
hope in Jena, then remain in your present tranquillity. He explicitly
promised Kraft support even if he turned down the offer. Goethe avoided
anything that could be construed as humiliating. He wanted Kraft to feel as
little dependent as possible, so he especially thanked him for the services he
had rendered—for example, seeing to the education of Peter im Baumgarten,
as Goethe had asked. He encouraged him to write down his life story; it will
also be a distraction and I shall enjoy reading it. Another time, he writes, I
would so much like to be able to brighten up your gloomy condition and
keep you in continuous cheerfulness. When Kraft suffered bouts of
melancholy and complained about his “worthlessness,” Goethe reassured
him: You have neither sunk in my estimation, nor do I have a worse opinion
of you, . . . nor has your way of thinking become blemished in my eyes.
At the time when Goethe was proving his readiness to help poor Kraft as
well as the Swiss boy with his pipe and incomprehensible dialect, he set
down in a letter to Charlotte von Stein some maxims he promised to be
guided by: We should do what we can to save individuals from ruin—That
is little enough, however, for there are innumerable steps from misery to
prosperity.—The good one can do in the world is a minimum, etc.
There is no good unless one does it, and does it in individual, concrete
cases. He rejects the high-flown rhetoric of improving humanity typical of the
Sturm und Drang, whose ambassadors now stood on his doorstep. From 1779
on, Goethe carried out the tasks he was assigned: road construction, swamp
drainage, tillage of the fields, improving fire prevention and the working
conditions in the copper and silver mines of Ilmenau, organization of flood
relief. He also attempted to reduce expenses at court in order to provide tax
relief, put the brakes on the duke’s excessive passion for hunting (which was
ruinous to the farmers), decrease the number of soldiers, and insist on their
more humane treatment. In all these endeavors, he went beyond individual
cases and thought of the larger good. We should do what we can, where we
happen to be, and do it without bombast—that was his policy. But he had no
illusions. He understood the bounds of his influence—knew, really, how little
he could do. All the same, it was better to try than not to act at all.
Goethe certainly did not lack empathy, and it was clear to all that he was
eager to help. If he was brusque with Klinger and Lenz, it was in a spirit of
the new pragmatism he was learning. He had come to abhor the
grandiloquent, rebellious posturing of the literati he had so recently been a
part of; anything that reminded him of them was now anathema to him. A few
years later, contemplating the consequences of the French Revolution, he
would angrily disparage writers who made political pronouncements as the
excitable ones. Goethe’s pragmatism stood in opposition to dilettantish
political opinions, a contempt that was not confined to aesthetics. He had
nothing against amateurism, but it should be aware of its own limits, in both
art and politics. In political matters, too, people should stick to good, solid
craftsmanship. He notes in his diary, Every work of man has what I would
call a smell. As, in a rough sense, a rider smells of horse, a bookstore a
little of mildew, and a huntsman of dog, it is true in a finer sense as well. .
. . A master does not dream in generalities. . . . When the time comes for
him to act, he takes hold of whatever is needed now. Thus, the sense for the
correct intervention means in the political realm that all arrogance must
wither away. Only then can beautiful strength prove its worth.
Friends and acquaintances began to notice a gradual change in Goethe’s
behavior. He was becoming more reserved, sometimes monosyllabic,
especially in initial encounters. But then, once the formalities were relaxed,
he could open up and be as delightfully eloquent, approachable, and devoted
as ever. He contained himself and gave of himself at his own speed: I’m
adapting myself to this world without deviating a hair’s breadth from the
character that preserves me inwardly and makes me happy. He separates
his inner from his outer life more sharply than he used to, but with a sure
feeling for his own character that preserves me inwardly.
Some were quite offended and disappointed by this new behavior.
Wieland, for example, who had been so enchanted in the first few months,
complains in a letter to Merck, “Now it’s as if . . . his genius had deserted
him entirely; his imagination seems extinguished; in place of the all-
enlivening warmth he used to emanate, he’s now encased in political frost.”
At first, Merck repudiates this point of view. Goethe has “not cast off the
least bit . . . of his former poetic individuality, but instead, like a man, he
hungers and thirsts to learn more about human nature and worldly
transactions, and for the intelligence and wisdom that results.” A year later,
however, Merck too was vexed by Goethe’s behavior. Goethe met him “with
such dryness and coldness, as if I had changed from his old friend into a
subaltern servant and supplicant.”
Merck wrote those words after a visit to Weimar in the summer of 1779.
Goethe’s experience of the visit was quite different, for he noted in his diary,
Good effect on me of Merck’s presence. It didn’t shift anything in me, but
only sloughed off some withered husks and reinforced me in the old
goodness . . . showed me my actions in a marvelous mirror, since he is the
only person who completely understands what I do and how I do it, and yet
sees it differently than I do, from another point of view, producing a lovely
certainty.
In the first two years, Goethe did not yet have the lovely certainty that his
decision to come to Weimar had been the right one. One can see him trying to
convince himself. He had something to prove to himself. And he went about
it energetically and systematically. Step by step, he assumed responsibilities
and got deeper into the business of governing. But he also calls it an
experiment to see how a worldly role suits him and how it will affect his
poetic nature.
One expression of this inner balancing of inclinations—the pull toward
poetry and art, on one hand, and the other toward the affairs of the world—
was Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission, his second novel’s earliest
version, which remained unpublished during his lifetime. He began to dictate
it in early 1777 and continued throughout the year, completing the novel’s
first book. Then he put the manuscript aside and did not take it up again until
the early 1780s. The fact that he did not draft the novel in his own hand, as he
had done with Werther, betrays a certain distance. You write differently
when you dictate; you’re not alone with what you are writing, and it loses
some immediacy—some pure, heartfelt expressiveness—through the
intermediacy of the scribe. Thus the text no longer draws the reader into the
fictive intimacy of expressively scribbled-down letters, as does Werther.
Instead, the predominant tone is that of an authorial narrator who begins with
the childhood of the protagonist. It is the narrative of a passion for the stage
that begins with a puppet theater: With them he was by turns a hunter, a
soldier, a horseman, whichever the characteristics of the plays required,
but he always had this advantage over the others: that he was able to
properly construct the necessary props.
To slip into a role and display himself in it—for Wilhelm that is a
heightened existence. But he is also willing to learn the mechanics of acting.
He is enchanted by being onstage but also wants to know his way around
backstage. Gripped by the play himself, he enjoys his ability to grip the
audience as well. He believes in what he performs for others. His mood
depends on the approbation he receives. Soon he realizes that the world of
the theater is a fragile construction, kept in balance only by the enthusiasm
with which those involved infect each other. A source of disruption is robust
realism that doesn’t accept make-believe. He feels that such bourgeois
sobriety is like pitch that limed the wings of his spirit; he sees in it ropes
that tethered the lofty momentum of the soul.
Wilhelm’s first attempts as an artist, as well as his romantic entanglements,
are depicted with gentle irony. The narrator always lets the reader know that
Wilhelm never really reaches the heights he thinks he does. His poetic and
romantic enthusiasms are filtered through the eyes of an external observer. In
contrast to Werther, the primacy of feeling is disrupted. While the
sentimental Werther has adversaries, they have no voice of their own; what
we know of them we learn through his letters. In Wilhelm Meister there are
numerous adversaries, weighty ones with their own specific points of view.
It is through them that the novel succeeds in constituting a world. A real
world opens up only when things are not delivered in a single voice; when
there are shifting perspectives, and when there is opposition.
One adversary is Werner, Wilhelm’s friend and future brother-in-law. He
is a realist, but quite capable of enthusiasm. Although he is slow to flare up,
his passions are lasting and consequential: Werner was proud of apparently
getting Wilhelm’s excellent, although unfortunately sometimes excessive,
talents under bit and bridle. Werner has nothing against Pegasus, but he
wants his friend to be able to ride the horse of poetry without getting thrown.
He embodies a reality principle that is not hostile to poetry but accepts it
within its own boundaries and tries to give it the necessary grounding.
 In the same way, Goethe himself wished to make the tension between his
connection to the real world and his poetic nature tolerable. It was not easy
for him. How abruptly the draft horse of office routine could turn into
Pegasus, and vice versa! In life, it was Charlotte whom he assigned the task
of making sure he wasn’t thrown. In the novel, it is Werner.
Sometimes Wilhelm lacks the words he needs: thus speech often stuck in
his throat when he wanted to relate his feelings vividly. He could never
find enough great words to express what he felt. As such, he can’t tell his
story; that is left to the narrator, who occupies a space somewhere between
Wilhelm and Werner. The narrator has the required distance, and a sense of
reality; and he has enough imagination and sentiment to put into words
everything that longs to be expressed. Wilhelm is all life with too little
structure; Werner has a lot of structure and too little life. The narrator
manages to create a living structure. Significantly, then, the world is
unpacked by a narrative voice that is at some remove and not, as in Werther,
by a person who gets lost in himself and thus lost to the world.
Goethe began Wilhelm Meister in January 1777 without knowing what
course it would take. In a letter to Knebel on November 21, 1782, he floated
the subtitle “Theatrical Mission,” which suggests that the story would end not
with Wilhelm’s departure from the theater—as does the final, published
version, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship—but with the vision of a firmly
established, purified, reputable theater, saturated with both reality and
idealism. It would be a theater that spoke from heart to heart, that retained the
childlike joy of play, and that was yet adult—without becoming sclerotic.
Goethe may have dreamed that the story of the growth and development of his
hero would anticipate the development of a thriving theater in Germany. The
German stage, reflects the narrator, was at that time in crisis. It had thrown
away its baby shoes before they were worn out and in the meantime had to
go barefoot. Out of this could come a theater of which one need not be
ashamed when one had advanced from poet to privy councilor. But such
perspectives were still only aspirational; for now, Goethe was satisfied to
direct and provide inspiration to the amateur theater company in Weimar,
which consisted mostly of courtiers. It was not to be expected that a reform
of the theater could begin with him or, for that matter, in Weimar. At the end
of 1777, he laid the manuscript of the novel aside.
The big event of 1777 was his journey to the Harz Mountains in December
and the ascent on horseback of the Brocken, at 3,750 feet the highest peak in
the range. It was an event that took on the significance of a private myth and
produced the great hymn “Winter Journey in the Harz.”
The story of his solitary ride through snow and hail began on June 16,
when the news of his sister Cornelia’s death reached Goethe in his garden
house. Dark, disrupted day, he wrote in his diary. Cornelia had never fully
recovered from their separation, and Goethe’s fear that Schlosser was not the
right husband for her seemed to have been borne out. Probably no man would
have been, except her brother. She lay down in bed, pulled the curtains shut,
and seldom got up again. She became animated only when visitors arrived
who were connected to her brother and brought news of him. That’s how it
was when Lenz appeared in Emmendingen. Three weeks before her death on
June 8, she had given birth to a second child, another daughter, and never
recovered. Schlosser wrote to Lavater, “I cannot tell you the story of her
suffering! It hurts too much!” By the time he wrote to Goethe on June 14, he
had recovered his composure: “I will not complain. It is unmanly. . . . This is
my first true misfortune, and thank God it struck me when my body and my
soul still have some strength. Now nothing else can break me.” Thus
Schlosser, capable and diligent, closed the chapter and turned toward his
future life. Nine months later, he married “Aunty” Johanna Fahlmer.
Goethe hadn’t written to Cornelia since the trip to Emmendingen in the
summer of 1775. He had found the visit difficult, a real ordeal. There was no
quarrel. He had seen how miserable she was. By the time he left, he had
reached the bitter conviction that she lacked vitality and was beyond help,
and he suffered under the knowledge. Because he couldn’t help her, he did
everything he could to keep Cornelia, and his own pain, at arm’s length. The
news of her death stunned him, jolting him out of circumstances he frankly
described as happy. The stark contrast between his happiness in Weimar and
her fatal misery in Emmendingen pained him deeply. He would surrender
himself to nature, he wrote, which allows us to feel tremendous pain only
for a little while, but lets us mourn for a long time. A month later, his
mourning produced a poem he sent to Auguste zu Stolberg: To their favorites
the gods gave everything, / The immortal ones, / All our joys unendingly, /
All our pains unendingly—all of them.
The letters from these weeks speak of his joys, but then he is seized by
something that throws him off balance. He writes to his mother in mid-
November, Ever since, my heart and mind are used to being a ball for fate
to play with. . . . With my sister, such a strong root anchoring me to the
earth has been chopped off that the branches above, which were nourished
by it, must also die. To Johanna Fahlmer he writes laconically, I am very
much changed.
Something had happened to him. Two weeks later, he set off alone on
horseback, through wind and snow flurries, toward the northern Harz. He
told no one he was leaving, neither the duke nor Charlotte von Stein, for
whom he left a note: My thoughts are in wonderfully dark confusion. Listen
to the wind, it will be blowing hard about me.
Goethe later gave two reasons for what seemed to his friends to be a very
abrupt departure. He had made efforts to put the mines in Ilmenau back in
operation and wished to gather information about the mines in the Harz. And
he wanted to call on a man who had written to him in great distress after
reading Werther. His name was Victor Leberecht Plessing, and he lived in
Wernigerode. Goethe had not replied to Plessing but wrote later that it was
the most wonderful thing in the self-tormenting vein that I had ever laid
eyes on, and that he felt a sense of responsibility. Perhaps Goethe felt guilty
about his sister. He had not helped her, and now he had received another cry
for help, so he set off.
But there was a third reason, one he talks about in his diary, in letters to
Charlotte von Stein, and in “Winter Journey in the Harz.”
The entire trip was staged with intentional obfuscation. Goethe left on
November 29, under heavy snow clouds, in the direction of Sondershausen
and Nordhausen. In his letters to Frau von Stein, he avoids mentioning towns
or even the area in which he finds himself. He traveled under the name
Weber and claimed to be a lawyer or a painter; other times, he gave no name.
It’s a curious feeling to travel unknown about the world; I seem to feel a
much truer relationship to people and things. On the day of his departure,
he wrote in his diary, pure peace in my soul. The snow flurries and
hailstorms diminished and toward evening, he got the first glimpses of sun
over in the direction of the Harz. The following day, almost everything was
frozen solid, the sun rose with the most magnificent colors, and in the
distance he saw the summit of the Brocken. Then the weather darkened again
and it began to rain. Night arrived quietly and sadly. The inn at Ilfeld was
already full, but they offered him a tiny chamber next to the pub room.
Through a knothole he watched the convivial wine-drinking company next
door—some officials on an inspection trip. He didn’t announce his presence
but remained in his hiding place. He liked observing without being observed.
In retrospect, he paints a cozy scene: I saw the long and well-lit table from
the foot to the head. I surveyed it as one often sees in paintings of the
Wedding at Cana . . . in short, it was a jolly, large meal which I was able to
observe at leisure in its particulars by the brightest candlelight, just as if
the limping devil were standing by my side and favoring me with the direct
observation and understanding of a completely foreign state of affairs. . . .
Sometimes it seemed to me quite spooky, as if I were watching lighthearted
spirits diverting themselves inside a cavern in the mountains.
He prepared for a visit to the famous Baumann’s Cave on the following
day. He had guides show him around, lighting the way through the dark cave
with torches. He crawled on all fours down the narrower passages. To be
sure, all the fantasy images it pleases a gloomily active imagination to
create from formless shapes disappeared before my calm gaze, and in their
place, my own, true vision remained, and I felt myself well rewarded.
Thus rewarded, the man who had just fought his way through wind and
weather and darkness made a note in his diary: Like the vulture. And with
those words begins the poem “Winter Journey in the Harz”:

Like the vulture,

Winging on heavy morning clouds
Softly, at ease,
On the lookout for prey,
Let my song float.

For a god has

Ordered for each
His path,
Which the happy man
Swiftly runs to its
Joyful finish.

He had accomplished his first goal: to gather information about the mines.
Now he set his sights on the second. The opening passage of “Winter Journey
in the Harz” quoted above is followed immediately by a reference to Victor
Plessing and the next station of Goethe’s journey:
 But when misfortune
Has shriveled a heart,
It struggles in vain
Against the restraints
Of adamant thread
That the bitter shears
Cut only once.

Two strophes later, the unhappy person is again recalled:

But off to the side, who is it?

In the bushes his path peters out
Behind him the branches
Spring back together
The grass straightens up,
The wasteland swallows him.

Alas, who can heal the pains

Of him whom balsam has poisoned,
Who drank misanthropy
From the fullness of love?
First despised and now despising,
He consumes in secret
His own merit
In selfish dissatisfaction.

Goethe had to overcome some reserve to initiate this encounter with

Plessing. In a letter to Charlotte, he calls it an adventure that he has survived
intact. He describes the details of what happened in the autobiographical
work Campaign in France, 1792. The proprietor of the inn where he stayed
in Wernigerode had shown him the way to Plessing’s house. He was
completely like his letter, and like his writing, he aroused my interest
without exerting any charm. Goethe introduced himself as an illustrator
from Gotha. Plessing remarked that Gotha was near Weimar and asked
whether he knew any of the famous people who lived there. Goethe,
maintaining his incognito, reeled off a few names, from Bertuch to the
pedagogue and philologist Johann Karl August Musäus. The young man
interrupted impatiently: and the great Goethe, surely he’d met him too?
Goethe replied that he knew him, and had received some support from him in
his painting. The young man now demanded with some vehemence that he
depict that curious individual about whom there was so much talk. And then
Goethe described himself. Plessing did not guess that the man he was talking
to was Goethe himself. He lacked clear vision, Goethe writes. Plessing’s
attention was directed wholly inward.
It was an odd encounter. Goethe had to listen to Plessing read the very
long letter he already knew so well and hear the young man’s complaints that
he had not received an answer. Plessing asked him what he guessed Goethe
might have thought about the letter, and why he didn’t answer it, and what he
could have answered. Goethe replied that Goethe would probably have
urged him to consider that one would rescue and free oneself from a painful,
self-tormented, gloomy state of the soul only by observing nature and
taking heartfelt part in the external world. Even the most general
acquaintance with nature, no matter from what angle, an active
engagement—whether as a gardener, plowman, hunter, or miner—draws us
out of ourselves; the direction of our intellectual and spiritual powers
toward real, genuine phenomena will gradually yield the greatest pleasure,
clarity, and instruction.
Plessing was having none of it. He continued to complain of his
disappointment with people and places he had expected more of. That was
just the problem, replied Goethe. He should allow reality to surprise him and
not try to force it to fit his own ideas. But Plessing refused to be dissuaded
from defending his gloomy phantom against the value of clear reality. His
suggestions rejected, Goethe felt certain that he had done his duty. He felt,
furthermore, released from any further obligation.
And not just toward Plessing. It had now been a year since he had spurned
Lenz. In visiting Plessing, he was also seeking to salve his conscience vis-à-
vis Lenz and Klinger. The remark that introduces his recounting of the
Plessing episode is striking: I was already burdened . . . with a number of
young men who, instead of accompanying me on my path toward a purer,
higher development, persisted along their own path, were not any better
for it, and were hindering me in my progress. So one reason Goethe had set
out for Wernigerode was to confront Plessing and free his conscience of a
matter that had begun to weigh on it. Plessing, who realized with whom he
had been speaking only after Goethe was gone, stubbornly maintained the
connection, even paying Goethe a visit and writing him more letters. Now
and then Goethe would reply, noticeably at pains to play down his
comfortable circumstances: I can assure you of this much, that in the midst
of happiness I live in persistent austerity.
In the end, Plessing managed to achieve some professional success. He
became a professor in Duisburg, wrote a few books and numerous letters to
famous people, ran around in threadbare clothes, and now and then went off
into the forest, disappearing for weeks without a trace. Behind him the
branches / Spring back together, as in “Winter Journey in the Harz.”
The third reason for the trip to the Harz was revealed in the poem:

And for him the snow-shrouded

Crown of the dreaded peak
Becomes an altar of sweetest thanks,
Which an ancient people’s presentiments
Bedecked with hosts of spirits.

The altar of sweetest thanks is the summit of the Brocken. In those days, it
was unusual to attempt the climb during a snow and ice storm, but what was
important to Goethe was not the mountaineering feat but the sign of
confirmation that reaching the summit sent. I want to reveal to you (don’t
tell anyone else) that my trip was to the Harz, Goethe wrote Charlotte von
Stein, and that I wanted to climb the Brocken.
If he succeeded in reaching the summit, he would take it as a sort of trial by
ordeal. But confirmation of what? What is man, that thou art mindful of
him? he wrote in his diary after the climb. This much is clear: it was to be a
sign that the gods—fate—continued to wish him well. A confirmation that his
decision to go to Weimar was the right path to take? That is Albrecht
Schöne’s conjecture, and it is likely correct.*
Goethe had spent the weeks before his departure for the Harz in the
Wartburg, a castle on a hill overlooking Eisenach, while down below the
duke and his boisterous retinue were out hunting. He had once again been
plagued by doubt, sensing how foreign this society was. There is a
noteworthy diary entry: however, am surrounded by much alienation where
I thought there was still a bond. These people seem very distant from him.
But not the duke. He feels connected to him, and that gives him support. The
duke grows closer and closer to me, & rain and raw wind draw the sheep
together. And then, underlined and followed by two exclamation points,
Govern!! There were also storms raging around the Wartburg; it was again
the mood of the “Wanderer’s Storm Song,” the defiance of wind and weather,
the self-confidence of He whom, Genius, you do not forsake. Now he
foresees defying all adversity and governing with the duke. Yet what did
governing mean in this small duchy? Wasn’t there more at stake? Wasn’t it a
decision of even more consequence?
In any event, his decision to remain in Weimar was more lasting than any
other. Goethe would spend his entire future life and career there, together
with the duke. Weimar was to be and remain his world, one into which he
was able to draw many other worlds. After his ascent of the Brocken, he
writes proudly, God deals with me as he did with his old saints.
As far as the actual climb is concerned, Goethe provided a vivid, almost
sacramental description of it in a letter to Charlotte von Stein. Early in the
morning, he had arrived at the so-called Peat House at the foot of the
Brocken, where he found the forester at his morning sip. The man assured
him that in this snow and fog, climbing the mountain was out of the question.
He himself, at any rate, had never tried it, and he knew what he was doing.
They looked out the window, but the mountain was invisible in the fog. I was
silent and asked the gods to change this man’s mind—and the weather—
and was silent. Then he said to me, Now you can see the Brocken. I stepped
to the window and it stood before me, as clear as my face in the mirror.
Then my heart rose and I cried, And I’m not to get to the top? Don’t you
have a servant, no one—and he said, I will go with you.—I scratched a
sign into the window pane as a testimony to my tears of joy, and I’d think it
a sin to write about it if it weren’t to you. I didn’t really believe it until we
were on the highest cliff. All the fog lay below, and on the summit it was
marvelously clear.
The last strophe of “Winter Journey in the Harz” addresses the mountain
itself in describing the clear view,

You stand, with unfathomed breast,

A mysterious revelation
Above the astonished world,
Gazing down from the clouds
 At its realms and their riches,
Watered by the veins
Of the brothers surrounding you.

On the one hand, these veins signify mineral deposits and are a mining
metaphor. On the other, a motif is sounded here that Goethe had already
richly elaborated in “Mahomet’s Song”: the way a spring emerges, swells
into a river, irrigates and makes fruitful the surrounding country, absorbs
thousands of other streams, and finally empties into the sea. It is an image for
the fertility—the genius—of the spirit. That too is implied by his experience
on the summit: a heightened self-confidence, not just for governing but surely
also for poetry.
During the descent from the Brocken, he and his guide witness an
unforgettable display of colors. In the caves and mines of the Harz, Goethe
discovered the geologist and mineralogist in himself, and now the play of
light and shadow awakens his appreciation for the peculiarities of color. In
his 1810 Theory of Color, he recalls the moment almost as a primordial
event: On a winter journey in the Harz I was descending from the Brocken
toward evening. The broad expanses above and below me were covered in
snow. . . . If during the day pale violet shadows had already been
noticeable against the yellowish tone of the snow, one would now have to
call them deep blue, as an intensified yellow was reflected from the sunlit
areas. When the sun at last began to set, however, and its beams, very
much moderated by the stronger mists, bathed the entire surroundings with
the most beautiful purple color, the color of the shadows was transformed
into a green which, in its clarity could be compared to a sea green, in its
beauty to an emerald green. The spectacle grew more and more vivid. I felt
I was in fairyland.
Three adequate reasons for the winter journey in the Harz: practical on-
the-spot observation for the future director of mines, expiation of his guilt
feelings through wind and weather, and the oracle on the Brocken: Govern!
And then, the magic of evening colors, a gift to the future theoretician of
color—all in all, they were enough to create a wonderfully poetic
mystification.

* Albrecht Schöne, Götterzeichen—Liebeszauber—Satanskult (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1982), 44.

 CHAPTER 14

A Farce on the Sublime: The Triumph of Sentimentalism.

Christel Lassberg’s Suicide. A Political Mission.
Weimar’s Self-Assertion and the League of Princes. In Berlin.
“Govern!” The Blended and the Pure.
Conscripting Soldiers and Iphigenia.
The Temple Precincts of Art.

....

W HAT IS MAN, THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM? GOETHE had

written this highly emotive sentence—an expression of the sublime—in his
diary on the day he climbed the Brocken. In the wake of those lofty feelings,
he took aim at shallow, sham sentiment. In just a few weeks back in Weimar,
he finished the farcical comedy The Triumph of Sentimentalism, first
planned as a comic opera but now called a “dramatic fancy.” On January 3,
1778, it was performed by the amateur theater group with Corona Schröter in
the leading role of Queen Mandandane and Goethe himself playing King
Andrason.
Goethe had climbed the Brocken to consult the oracle of fate; in the farce,
he makes fun of the court’s addiction to oracles. King Andrason must
compete with a traveling prince, a rival for his wife’s affections. Andrason
has asked an oracle for help: what should he do? The king brings back an
enigmatic reply no one can understand. Rather than continue to puzzle over it,
he solicits help from the ladies in waiting. They are to ensnare the prince and
keep him from the queen.
The prince is a caricature of sentimentalism. He loves nature, but not
mosquitoes and ants. So he has an artificial nature constructed for himself,
with all the comforts that steel springs and coils can provide. He even
brings it along when traveling, packed up in crates and boxes and with a
portable arbor. In the blink of an eye he can set up an appropriate natural
scene, complete with grassy banks, flowers, and bushes. Clockworks
provide birdsong and smoke, and wind machines produce the fragrance of
spring. Only the interior of the arbor remains a secret. During the prince’s
absence—he, too, is here to visit the oracle—the inquisitive ladies open the
arbor, where they find a doll stuffed with chaff and fashioned to look like the
queen, as well as a sack of books containing the entire sentimentalist canon,
from Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse to The Sorrows of Young Werther. Thus
it’s revealed: the prince’s outpourings of feeling are secondhand and
addressed to a lifeless dummy. Everything is fake, both nature and the
sentimentalisms. In the end, they make a fool of the prince: presented with
the genuine Mandandane and the dummy, he is so entangled in artificiality
that he can’t tell them apart.
The play was performed on the duchess’s birthday and did not excite
universal admiration. Some thought the author of Werther not only mocked
himself but showed a lack of gratitude to his sentimental readers. The author
Emilie von Berlepsch wrote to Herder, “Tell me something about this strange
new play Goethe has written! Presumably a satire on the unfortunate girls and
young men he used to make dizzy with his writings, and now he’s laughing at
them. An odd person! . . . I find him quite distasteful with his everlasting
vacillation between wit and feeling, weakness and power. And it’s proving
more and more difficult to get a clear idea of him from the things I happen to
know about him.”
Goethe’s ridicule of Werther-like sentimentalism could surprise only those
who hadn’t read Werther closely. For the novel presents Werther as a young
man who has read too much of such literature, and whose feelings come more
from books than from life. We hear the rustle of paper not only in the
emotional outpourings of the prince in The Triumph of Sentimentalism but in
those of his predecessor Werther. Enthusiastic fans of Werther had simply
failed to notice. The Triumph of Sentimentalism makes fun of this confusion
of literature and life at the very moment when the still active Werther cult had
apparently produced another fatal result.
One of the daughters of Colonel von Lassberg took her own life on the
evening of January 16, 1778. She was embroiled in an unhappy love affair
and had jumped from a pontoon bridge into the icy waters of the Ilm and
drowned. It was the bridge Goethe always crossed on his way from the
garden house into town. The next day, while Goethe was ice-skating with the
duke on Schwansee Pond, the girl’s body was discovered and carried to the
nearest house. It happened to be Frau von Stein’s, and Goethe was
immediately summoned. Why him? Was it Frau von Stein who ordered it, or
Goethe’s servant, one of the party that found the dead girl? Did it have to do
with the rumor that immediately circulated, that Christel von Lassberg had
jumped into the water with a copy of Werther in her coat pocket? In any
event, Goethe rushed to the scene and that evening paid a call to the
Lassbergs to console and support them. The following day, he met with the
palace gardener to plan construction of a small memorial in a quiet spot near
the bridge, a grotto in which a bust or urn could be placed. Goethe himself
wielded a pickax and shovel. We worked into the night, he wrote to
Charlotte von Stein, in the end I continued alone until the hour when she
had died; that’s the kind of evening it was. Orion stood so beautifully in
the sky. . . . There is something dangerously attractive and inviting about
this grief, like the water itself, and the reflection of the stars of heaven that
shines from both beckons to us.
Did Goethe take such an active role because he felt a certain share of
responsibility? Or was there simply an alluring melancholy emanating from
the event, as the letter suggests? It took some time for him to regain his
composure. He wrote in his diary, A few days in quiet mourning,
preoccupied with the scene of the death, afterwards forced back to
theatrical frivolity. The next entry refers to the performance of The Triumph
of Sentimentalism. These were abrupt transitions: from a touch of Werther
melancholy to satirizing it.
After these mood swings, a curious calm set in, one so remarkable to
Goethe that he wrote an extensive diary entry about it, something he rarely
did: This week, often out on the ice, always in the same, almost too pure
mood. Beautiful enlightenment about myself and our household, quiet and
premonition of wisdom. Always continuous joy in economy, savings,
making ends meet. Lovely peace in my domestic affairs compared to last
year. More confident feeling of austerity, and thereby genuine expansion.
This calm he found in the retreat to his garden house was disturbed at the
end of February by the visit from Plessing, who had in the meantime
discovered the identity of the “Herr Weber” who had sat with him two
months earlier in Wernigerode. I didn’t get comfortable with him, the diary
says.
In these weeks, Goethe was again overtaken by the impact of Werther,
both on Fräulein von Lassberg and then on this unhappy man, he too a
desperate reader of the novel who finally showed up on his doorstep. He
stayed for two days. Goethe gave him money for his return journey and,
considering that an inadequate response, also sent the departed Plessing a
letter.
He had been enjoying the feeling of peace, but now his mood darkened
again, and he composed rhymed epitaphs, one of which he sent to Auguste zu
Stolberg:

I was a young lad, warm and good,

And then a youth of flesh and blood,
With promise of a man.
I suffered some and loved some too
And laid me down, my life is through
I’ve done all that I can.

Of course, there was still official business, work in his garden in the
spring, and early flowers and vegetables for Charlotte von Stein. He sent
Gottfried August Bürger fifty-one louis d’or for the continuation of his
Homer translation, drafted a few more texts to accompany Lavater’s
Physiognomic Fragments, finished work on the first book of Wilhelm
Meister’s Theatrical Mission, and made a few revisions to a draft of a play
about the Count of Egmont. In mid-April, he and the duke paid an official
visit to the mines in Ilmenau. In the nearby village of Stützerbach, they
suddenly relapsed into their wild behavior of earlier days. They were dining
at the house of a well-to-do merchant named Glaser, who was proud of a
handsome oil portrait hanging above the dining table in his best room. Goethe
cut the face out of the life-size head of the canvas and “through the opening
created thereby,” as the mining official Trebra later recounted, “stuck his
own manly, tanned, intellectual face with its fiery black eyes—now framed
on both sides by a heavy powdered wig—sat down in an armchair, placed
the painting in its gilt frame on his knees, and concealed his legs under a
white cloth.” After the meal, they went on to take Glaser’s wine barrels out
of the cellar and roll them down the hill. Tom foolery during the day . . .
teased Glaser, Goethe wrote in his diary.
There was a change of mood a month later when, for the first time, Goethe
accompanied the duke on a diplomatic mission. They traveled via Leipzig—
where they met with the duke’s friend Prince Leopold von Anhalt-Dessau—
to Berlin and Potsdam. War was looming between Prussia and Austria, and
the little duchy of Weimar was at risk of being caught between the fronts.
The prince-elector of Bavaria had died in December 1777 without direct
descendants. His successor, Karl Theodor from the Palatinate-Sulzbach line,
already possessed the Electoral Palatinate and the duchies of Jülich and Berg
and kept residence at Mannheim. He had made a pact with Vienna to trade his
Bavarian inheritance for the Habsburg Low Countries (today’s Belgium), and
Prussia was alarmed. Frederick the Great was not willing to accept a
Habsburg expansion into the territory of the Holy Roman Empire. He
declared himself the protector of Protestant interests in the empire and sought
to win over the small and midsized principalities to his side. It was to be
feared that in preparation for possible hostilities, Prussia would conscript
soldiers on Weimar’s territory with or without consent of the duke, making it
difficult for him to stay neutral in the conflict.
Preparations for war were in full swing when the duke and Goethe
traveled to Potsdam and Berlin in mid-May 1778. Arriving at the park in
Wörlitz, halfway between Leipzig and Berlin, Goethe took pleasure once
more in peaceful surroundings. He fully expected that things could soon
change and they would arrive in the clamor of the world arming for war.
And I seem to get closer and closer to the goal of dramatic events, since I
am more and more involved in how the powerful play with the people, and
the gods play with the powerful.
Goethe’s impressions of Berlin were such that he would never go there
again, not even later to visit his dear friend Zelter. The life of the city seemed
to him like a clockwork that Frederick (whom he admired) had constructed to
execute his program; it reduced the people to puppets kept in motion by
hidden gears. He found no self-confident personalities: No dirty joke or
foolishness in a farce is as disgusting as the behavior of the great, the
middling, and the little people all together. I have beseeched the gods to
let me keep my courage and uprightness to the end and rather make the
end sooner than have me crawl the last stretch like a miserable louse.
 Anything but becoming a toady of the powerful—that was his firm
resolution. He acted buttoned up and unapproachable. In the long run, it was
a strain, because he realized that the flower of public trust, of devoted love,
was fading away day by day. He felt himself becoming standoffish and
thought it was diplomacy. It was difficult terrain in which to operate and
prove himself—for example, during a meal with Prince Heinrich, the brother
of Frederick the Great (the latter had already left for Bohemia, where the
hostilities were expected to begin). Goethe and the duke needed to sound out
Prussia’s intentions vis-à-vis Weimar and at the same time not reveal their
own plans, which were still inchoate. At official occasions, Goethe wrapped
himself in an icy silence, which the sleek, experienced diplomats found
inappropriate.
Berlin’s writers and academics, on the other hand, took it amiss that he
paid no attention to them at all. Men like the publisher Nicolai, the poet and
philosopher Carl Wilhelm Ramler, the pastor Johann Friedrich Zöllner, the
historian Jean Pierre Erman, and the theologian and pedagogue Friedrich
Gedike expected at least a courtesy call. Goethe’s only visit was to Moses
Mendelssohn, the great Enlightenment figure and friend of Lessing, but he
arrived so late that Mendelssohn refused to receive him. In these circles, too,
Goethe was considered too proud.
At the end of his visit to Berlin, he registered a strange change in himself,
and it isn’t entirely clear whether he regretted it or considered it an increase
in worldly wisdom: My soul used to be like a city with few walls and a
citadel on the hill behind it. I defended the castle and left the city
defenseless in peace and war. Now I began to fortify it as well, if for the
time being only against lightly armed troops. If nothing else, his first and
only visit to Berlin found him successful in scaring off the lightly armed
troops of the literary world.
Goethe’s increasing involvement in government forced profound changes
in attitude regarding both himself and his environment. In late fall 1777,
shortly before his journey to the Harz, he had already been aware of what
would be expected of him. Just prior to urging himself to Govern!! he wrote
that he felt himself destined for much alienation. His relationship with the
duke was all the more important. Goethe could count on him and felt sure of
himself in his company. Other than that, however, diplomacy and
international politics remained minefields where he didn’t know his way
around and where events were almost entirely out of his control. He had to
act with caution and suspicion rather than intuition and spontaneity. It was
amazing how skillfully he ended up going about it.
The quarrel over the Bavarian succession came to a head in the summer of
1778. Prussia declared war on Austria and invaded Bohemia. What they had
feared now occurred: Prussia asked the duke to make volunteers available,
which meant either sending the troops himself or allowing Prussian recruiters
free hand in the duchy. The duke declared himself against Prussian recruiting
and tried to string the matter out. He was indeed in a dilemma. If Weimar
voluntarily provided troops, it would forfeit its neutrality and be drawn into
the Prussian camp against Austria. If it refused Prussia’s request, it was in
danger of losing its integrity as a sovereign state. In this tense situation, the
duke chose to appoint Goethe, of all people, as the director of the military
commission in early 1779 and, shortly thereafter, as director of road
construction as well; roads were important militarily as well as for civilian
use.
As a member of the privy council, Goethe composed a policy brief for the
duke on February 9, 1779. He outlined the alternatives for action as well as
their possible ramifications and long-term consequences.
If Prussian recruiters were allowed into the duchy and found no
enthusiasm among the populace after a certain grace period, they would
begin to use force. In that event, they would settle in and put down roots
everywhere, and the duchy would never get rid of them. It was a threat to the
independence of the state.
If the duchy instead decided to carry out conscription for Prussia itself, it
would be an unpleasant, hateful, and shameful business. Moreover, some
of the conscripted men would desert, whereupon Prussian soldiers would
enter Weimar territory to catch them or find replacements for them. There
would also be no end of trouble; Austria would not tolerate a ducal
conscription of soldiers for Prussia, and would either undertake its own
conscription in the duchy or count it as part of the enemy coalition, with the
dire consequence that Weimar would then really be at war. What was to be
done?
Goethe encouraged the duke to temporize and recommended using
whatever time he gained to come to an understanding with the other small and
medium-sized principalities of Hanover, Mainz, and Gotha and establish a
closer bond with them in order to protect themselves as much as possible
from the hardships of the war next door. That would be profitable even if
Weimar could not fend off the current impositions of Prussia. The
overarching recommendation of Goethe’s brief was a confederation of the
small states lying between the two major powers of Prussia and Austria.
He had thought it out well, with arguments anchored in the possibility of
survival for the smaller states. He finds order in a balance of power among
multiple political units, rather than in adherence to a hegemonic order. In his
inclination for cooperative diversity, he proved himself still a student of
Justus Möser.
What he had hoped for and wanted to participate in did not come to pass.
It would be another twenty years before the Confederation of the Rhine, a
league of small and medium-sized powers, came into being, and then not as a
defensive pact against the great powers but rather as the instrument of a
single great power: Napoleonic France.
For the moment, however, Goethe’s idea gained traction. In its meeting of
February 21, 1779, the privy council adopted his argument and decided to
seek contact with other courts that wanted to remain neutral and in the
meantime to protest the forceful conscription of Weimar inhabitants and
strengthen Weimar’s military presence.
The duchy was lucky: on May 13, 1779, the War of the Bavarian
Succession was ended by the Treaty of Teschen. Throughout a bitterly cold
winter, combatants had spied on each other, gone hungry, and scrapped over
a few frozen potatoes.
In the early months of the year, however, this happy ending was not yet in
sight. As chairman of the military commission, Goethe traveled around the
duchy to oversee the precautionary conscription of recruits. During these
months, he wrote the first prose version of Iphigenia in Tauris, the play that
he would later describe to Schiller as diabolically humane.
In previous years, the lightweight pieces Lila and The Triumph of
Sentimentalism had been performed on January 30, the birthday of the
duchess. This year, the duchess was pregnant and due to go into labor shortly.
On February 3, 1770, she gave birth to a daughter. She was expected to
recover by March 14 and to attend church. When Goethe began work on the
manuscript of Iphigenia, the thought was to have the play performed by the
amateur theater company on that day or shortly thereafter. This time, given the
occasion, the play was to be more serious and edifying, and it was
correspondingly planned as an uplifting entertainment that would not cause
any excitement. In that sense, it was an occasional work. The performance
was well received, partly because Corona Schröter played Iphigenia and
Goethe himself played Orestes. Corona’s Junoesque figure and her carefully
draped silk costume went with the court’s taste for classical antiquity, and
Goethe showed himself to such advantage that the physician Christoph
Wilhelm Hufeland was still reveling in the memory as an old man: “We
thought we were seeing an Apollo. I’ve never seen such a union of physical
and intellectual perfection and beauty in a man as I then saw in Goethe.”
After two performances, Goethe took the play out of circulation, allowed
only a few friends to read it, and made sure no copies were made. He wrote
to the Catholic bishop and statesman Karl Theodor von Dalberg that it was
much too carelessly written to leave the amateur theater and venture out
into the wider world. It was performed again, if to less effect, for the
duchess’s birthday in 1781. Goethe filed away at it, making improvements.
The work had a hold on him. He thought he would be able to finish a version
in iambic pentameter before he left for Italy in late 1786. It remained
incomplete until he was living in Rome and even then its structure and
content were little changed. It is possible that Goethe wanted to make
something very different out of it, but the power the first draft had over him
was too great.
The first version of the play was composed in the six restless weeks he
spent traveling the duchy to oversee the conscription of recruits. At first, he
tried to get into the necessary mood by having musicians play in the adjoining
room while he wrote. Little by little, through the lovely tones, my soul frees
itself from the fetters of reports and documents. A quartet next door in the
green room, I sit quietly and call the distant figures to me. One scene ought
to be completed today, I think.
The spiritual territory he opened up with Iphigenia lay very far removed
from the importunate realities of his immediate present. From Apolda he
wrote to Charlotte von Stein, Here, the drama simply refuses to progress. It
is cursed. The king of Tauris is supposed to speak as if there were no
starving hosiers in Apolda. Two days later, he describes to the duke what
it’s like when the young fellows get measured and inspected for
conscription. Once that’s out of the way, he continues, I enter my old castle
of poesy and cook away at my little daughter [i.e., Iphigenia]. On this
occasion, I can also see that I treat this good gift of the gods a little too
cavalierly, and I once more have time to become a better caretaker of my
talent if I ever want to produce anything again.
 Goethe himself is surprised at the progress he is able to make on the play
despite the adverse conditions. He feels his genius, his good gift, stirring
again and resolves to take better care of it in the future. He is obviously able
to compartmentalize things: Now I am living with the people of this world—
eating and drinking and even joking with them—but I’m barely aware of
them, for my inner life unerringly follows its own path. Deep within, his
thoughts play a lovely concert.
And in fact, this muted chamber drama is a beautiful concert—if for some
of Goethe’s contemporaries, one all too beautiful—with only gentle
dissonances and a reconciliation at the end. The world of ancient horror has
left only faint traces.
The mythological story of Iphigenia in Tauris as Goethe knew it from
Aeschylus and Euripides and in the later adaptations of Ovid and Hyginus is
lurid and violent. Orestes avenges his father, Agamemnon, by killing his
mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus, who together have murdered
the king upon his return from Troy. Now the matricide Orestes is pursued by
the Erinyes, the female Furies of vengeance. To free himself from the curse,
he visits the oracle at Delphi, where he is directed to steal the sacred image
of Artemis from Tauris and return it to Greece. He does not know that the
guardian of that image, the priestess of Artemis, is his sister, Iphigenia,
brought to Tauris by Artemis herself, before Agamemnon could sacrifice her,
his own daughter, to gain favorable winds for the voyage to Troy. So Orestes
and his friend Pylades arrive in the land of the Taurians, which we are to
imagine as a country of “barbarians” somewhere on the Black Sea, where it
is the custom to slaughter strangers landing on the coast. This is to be the fate
of Orestes and Pylades as well, with Iphigenia, as priestess, to carry out the
sacrifice. Euripides achieves great effect with the scene of the two siblings
recognizing each other, in which Iphigenia invents the plot to trick King
Thoas and flee with the image of Artemis. The second half of Euripides’s
play is almost a comedy, full of scorn and ridicule for the slow-witted
barbarians who let themselves be duped. Cruelty at the beginning, mockery at
the end, and in between a dramatic high point—that was the style of the
ancients.
Goethe made something very different out of the story. Later he realized
that while it might conform to Winckelmann’s image of classical antiquity’s
“noble simplicity and quiet greatness,” it was otherwise very un-Greek. He
told his secretary Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer in 1811, Inadequacy is
productive. I wrote my Iphigenia based on a study of Greek material, but
my study was inadequate. If it had been exhaustive, the play would have
remained unwritten. Like his Iphigenia, Goethe had been seeking with my
soul the land of Greece.
His Iphigenia differs most in its presentation of the barbarian king Thoas,
whose character and behavior make a completely new play of the traditional
material. The moral focus now lies in the relationship between Iphigenia and
Thoas, which is where it proves to be diabolically humane. Thoas is
courting Iphigenia, his noble prisoner. He desires her and, having lost his son
in war, wants her to bear him a successor. But he also admires her, or he
would not have agreed to her request to do away with the tradition of human
sacrifice in the temple of Artemis. Iphigenia gives him much credit for that
but is unable to return his love and, without loving Thoas, cannot enter into
the marriage he desires. In this respect, Iphigenia is quite modern; she
requires that spouses love each other. Anything else goes against her concept
of purity. What? The king would do a thing no noble / Man . . . would ever
dare? He thinks by force / To drag me from my altar to his bed? She turns
him down, and to scare him off, recounts her own ominous genealogy,
relating the atrocities of her ancestors in the house of Atreus. The story
begins with Tantalus, who still eats at the tables of the gods but is damned for
his insolence. One of his descendants, Atreus, kills his brother’s sons and
serves them to him at a banquet. The horrors continue down to her father,
Agamemnon. Artemis has rescued her from him, and now she hides behind
the goddess. Within the temple precincts, she intends to serve Artemis and
remain free of any other ties. Her only desire is to return home. She too is
seeking with my soul the land of Greece.
Thoas is insulted by the rejection. He does not take her by force, but lets
her feel his wrath. He reinstates the cruel tradition Iphigenia has done away
with: strangers will again be sacrificed. Iphigenia is to begin the practice
with two men who have just been apprehended. Neither Iphigenia nor Thoas
knows at this point that they are Orestes and his friend Pylades. If Thoas’s
order is carried out, Iphigenia will be killing her own brother.
Orestes has come here to absolve himself of guilt. He is at the end of his
strength, longs for death, and is even prepared to be sacrificed. But then the
siblings recognize each other:

IPHIGENIA Oh hear me! Look at me! My heart is opening

 After all these years of being shut,
Opening to bliss, that I can kiss the head
Of the most precious man upon this earth,
And clasp you in these arms that have stretched out
To nothing but the empty, soughing winds.
Oh, let me hold you! . . . Orestes! Dearest brother!
ORESTES . . . Lovely nymph,
I cannot trust in you or your cajoling.

Then Orestes, who includes his sister in his death wish: . . . and my advice
is: do not / Love the sun too much, nor yet the stars; / Come, follow me
down into the dark realm! / . . . / Come, childless, without guilt, come down
with me! Madness envelops him, he sinks into a numbed sleep, awakens in
Iphigenia’s arms, and—is healed.

My heart is telling me: the curse is lifted.

The Furies are returning—I can hear them—
To Tartarus, slamming the brazen gates
Like distant, booming thunder, closed behind them.
The earth is steaming with refreshing smells,
Inviting me to roam its lovely surface
In search of the joys of life and noble deeds.

This scene is not unique in Goethe’s oeuvre. Faust falls asleep after
Gretchen’s death and awakens guilt-free and ready for action. Egmont
overcomes his fear of death—while asleep. Schiller, for one, would never
have stood for such a device. When Goethe asked him to adapt Iphigenia for
the professional stage in 1802, he took exception to this scene. He did not
like people sleeping through crises instead of overcoming them through
freely chosen action. But Goethe was in favor of the sleep of forgetfulness,
the merciful operation of nature. For Goethe, man is rooted in his past, but
still capable of opening himself to the demands and opportunities of the
present. When the past possesses too much power, as with the fury of the
Erinyes, it can overwhelm and extinguish life in the present. To make
conscience the inner representative of the absolute, as does Kant, seemed to
Goethe like an excess of Protestantism. Even in old age he praised the art of
forgetting, writing to Zelter at eighty, Just consider that with every breath
we draw, an ethereal Lethean stream suffuses our entire being, so that we
recall our joys but moderately, our sorrows hardly at all. I have always
known how to treasure, use, and augment this great, divine gift.
So Orestes is healed and the Furies have no more power over him. All
that’s left is to free Iphigenia from the hands of Thoas. Euripides makes her
the inventor of a clever ruse to escape. Goethe has Orestes and Pylades hatch
the plan while Iphigenia hesitates. That is the moment that reveals her
extraordinary humanity. And even she must struggle to achieve it. Within the
temple precincts, her refuge, it would be easy for her to remain pure and
abstain from devious methods. A beautiful soul loath to demean herself, she
fears having to leave this place.

Oh my soul, be calm, be calm!

Would you give in to wavering and doubt?
You must abandon now the solid ground
Of solitude and board the rocking ship!
The waves beleaguer you. In gloomy fear
You will misjudge the world, misjudge yourself.

Orestes and Pylades’s plan to trick Thoas calls for Iphigenia to have the
image of Artemis taken to the seashore, allegedly to purify it, but in fact to
get it aboard a ship waiting to take her and the image to safety. In a dialogue
between Iphigenia and Pylades, the idea of purity clashes with the usual way
of the world, humanitarian idealism with skeptical realism:

IPHIGENIA I call that worry noble when it warns

Me not to deceive the monarch who became
My second father, not to betray and rob him.
PYLADES You flee a king who’d butcher your own brother.
IPHIGENIA The very man who treated me with kindness.
PYLADES Necessity absolves you of ingratitude.
IPHIGENIA Pardoned by need, it’s still ingratitude.
PYLADES Pardoned, surely, before gods and men.
IPHIGENIA Yet my own heart is still dissatisfied.
 PYLADES Too strict demands conceal a hidden pride.
IPHIGENIA I do not analyze, I only feel.
PYLADES Feel rightly and you will revere yourself.
IPHIGENIA My heart must feel itself unsullied.
PYLADES Thus you preserved yourself within the temple;
Life teaches us, however, to be less strict
With others and ourselves; you’ll learn it too.
The race of men’s so wonderfully constructed,
So manifoldly linked and intertwined,
That none of us can ever remain pure
Within himself and unconfused with others.
Nor are we meant to be our own accusers.

The argument advanced by Pylades was one Goethe himself often subscribed
to, for example, in the late verses The days of man are oft congested, /
Things of beauty oft contested, / Even the clearest eyes grow dim, or in the
laconic declaration In our actions we are always without conscience. No
one has a conscience except in contemplation. Societal conflict demands
compromise of us and sometimes the use of questionable means—up to and
including force—to defend and assert ourselves and protect our loved ones.
There are many reasons not to judge too harshly. For a moment, Iphigenia
herself is tempted to adopt this point of view. I am almost convinced that
you are right, she says. But face to face with Thoas, after initial hesitation,
her will to purity wins out. She does not want to deceive him. She reveals the
cunning plan of escape to him and thereby places herself, Orestes, and
Pylades in the greatest peril. She risks much with her appeal to the nobility of
the barbarian king, asking that he let them leave. She wants to break through
the vicious circle in which mistrust begets mistrust and hostility is answered
by hostility, and replace it with the reciprocity of good will. She trusts Thoas
and hopes he will reward that trust. She treats him like a human being and
seeks to be treated humanely in return. Yet in the reciprocity of good will on
which Iphigenia bets, there is a hidden imbalance. Iphigenia and her brother
gain freedom and the return to their homeland, but Thoas will suffer a painful
loss. Iphigenia argues that the consciousness of having acted well will
compensate him for it. She appeals to his self-esteem and, in the end, depicts
the situation as if it provided Thoas an opportunity to ennoble himself, a
chance he must absolutely not pass up. It is almost a sophism when Iphigenia
tells him, Look at us! It is not often that / You have the chance for such a
noble deed.
In the end Thoas agrees. He feels a challenge to his pride and wants to
prove that even a barbarian can hear the voice of truth and of humanity. But
in the certainty of her triumph, Iphigenia is not satisfied with his command So
leave! Thoas must not simply grudgingly allow them to leave; she wants his
blessing so that, in the future, mutual hospitality, good will, and faithful
recollection will reign between her world and his. Thoas struggles to that
concession as well, leaving it to her to construe his Farewell! as a blessing.
Both his final word and the last word of this play, it is consecrated to an
elevated ideal of humanity.
The idea of purity dominates the entire work. Iphigenia wants to enjoy an
unsullied heart, which is why the pure temple precincts are so significant for
her. Pylades responds that in human affairs no one can remain pure . . . and
unconfused with others.
The question of purity would continue to evolve in Goethe’s thought—
particularly its tension with the rich diversity of the world, where variety and
conflict are the norm. Actually, nothing is pure in the world or in nature. It
requires some effort and artificial adjustments to produce purity. What is
needed is some method to separate out or at least define what does not
belong or is inappropriate, as purity is not self-evident. It is not simply there;
instead, one must have decided, a priori, what to regard as the actual element
that needs protection or liberation from contamination. Goethe later
borrowed from Schelling the term selfish principle for this actual element:
the power of the individual to preserve his uniqueness even—or especially
—when exposed to a multiplicity of influences and complications. Purity thus
also means the preservation of uniqueness. Only the individual who
preserves and asserts himself as such becomes a self.
That self, however, understood as such, is constantly dependent on contact
with the world. Everything therefore hinges on becoming involved with the
world without losing oneself to it. The tension between self and world can
fail in two ways: by becoming rigid, hard, and narrow; or by dissolving. By
becoming a blind egotist or by frittering oneself away. Pure intermediate
effect in accomplishing what is right and good is quite rare; usually we see
pedantry, which seeks to retard, or temerity, which seeks to go too fast. By
pedantry he means in this context narrow self-referentiality and by temerity,
a diffuse relation to the world.
If Iphigenia wanted to preserve her purity by staying in the temple
precincts, she risked losing connection to the world. This is the danger of a
beautiful soul, as powerfully described in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Such a being “lives in fear of staining the glory of its interior life by acting
and being; and in order to guard the purity of its heart, it flees contact with
reality and remains in stubborn powerlessness . . . its action is yearning,
which . . . merely finds itself to be lost; in this transparent purity of its
moments, an unfortunate so-called beautiful soul flickers out within itself
and disappears as a shapeless mist that dissipates in air.”
But this is not the case with Iphigenia. She wants to preserve her purity of
heart not merely within the enclosed temple precincts but with Thoas as well.
She preserves her self-esteem by esteeming Thoas, who is also an adversary
she must fear. This epigram from the collection of satirical verses entitled
“Tame Xenias” emphatically does not apply to Iphigenia: In silence
maintain your purity, / Let others rant and scream; / The more you feel
your humanity / The more godlike you will seem. She cannot keep herself
pure in silence; she wants to prove her worth outside, in the bustle of the
world, but without deception or deceit. The play would have become a
tragedy if the noble candidness with which Iphigenia approaches the king
was not rewarded but, instead, punished by the completion of human
sacrifice. It is rewarded, because the beauty of her soul is infectious. The
abyss of possible horror closes, and the scenery of cruelty turns into a
utopian vision of humanity.
Iphigenia leaves the temple precincts, but the entire play was a sort of
temple precinct, screened off from the real world of impending war, the
conscription of troops, and the starving hosiers of Apolda. That’s why
Goethe, as we have seen, had music played in the adjoining room while he
worked on the play. The temple precincts of pure writing were thus
protected, and his inner life could develop unhindered.
Now we can see why Goethe was dissatisfied with the first version in
prose and found it carelessly written. It was not pure enough. The rhythms
had not yet been smoothed into blank verse, and he would keep working on it
until his departure for Italy in 1786. He did not complete this temple of
beauty—with a rich interior but poor exterior life—until he was in Rome.
In the interior life of the play, one can discern shadowy autobiographical
elements. For one, the brother-sister relationship: Orestes finds peace in the
arms of Iphigenia. In Goethe’s life it was the other way around. There his
sister sought peace in her brother’s company. For another, Goethe had to
struggle like Orestes with guilt—toward his sister and toward Lenz and
Klinger, friends he had rebuffed. On the other hand, the loving depiction of
the friendship between Orestes and Pylades is colored by Goethe’s
friendship with the duke. And finally, Iphigenia’s enchanting and soothing
influence is reminiscent of Charlotte von Stein.
Thus the play, set in a remote time and place, echoes Goethe’s life in the
present. Yet at times it seemed foreign to him, and he was unable to find in
himself the necessary purity. When he accompanied the duke on a military
expedition against revolutionary France, they made a stop at the Jacobis’ in
Pempelfort, and his friends asked him to read from Iphigenia. It wasn’t at all
to my taste, however, he writes in the Campaign in France, continuing, I felt
alienated from the gentle spirit. What does he mean by the gentle spirit?
Probably the feeling of purity, which did not fare well amid the tumult of a
military campaign. What he noted about the audience after the first
performance applied to him as well: Performed Iph. to quite good effect,
especially on pure persons.
It was only rarely that he felt close to the play again, however. It was, after
all, so diabolically humane.
 CHAPTER 15

The Idea of Purity. Goethe’s Tao. The Crucifixion

of Woldemar. Jacobi Insulted. The Second Journey to
Switzerland. Friederike and Lili: Two Wrongs Righted.
The Beautiful Branconi and Confusion: Peace lies over all
the peaks. Goethe and Lavater: Religion on Trial.

....

THE GENTLE SPIRIT FROM WHICH IPHIGENIA WAS BORN—THE

IDEA of purity—had existential importance for Goethe. On August 7, 1779,
shortly before setting off on his second journey to Switzerland, he reviewed
his life in one of the longest passages in his entire diary. He reveals how
much his present life is dominated by the idea: Straightened up at home,
went through my papers and burned all the old husks. New times, new
concerns. Tranquil review of my life, of the muddle, bustle, thirst for
knowledge in my youth, how the young roam everywhere in search of
something satisfactory. How I took special delight in secrets and dark,
abstruse relationships. How I only halfway came to grips with anything
scientific and soon let it drop, how a sort of abject complacency runs
through everything I wrote at the time. How narrow-mindedly I cast about
in matters human and divine. How there was such a dearth of
accomplishments and of purposeful thought and writing, how many days
and hours were wasted in sentiment and shadow passion, how little of that
was useful to me, and now that half my life is past, I have covered no
ground along its path, but rather am just standing here like a drowning
man who has pulled himself out of the water and whom the benevolent sun
begins to dry off. I cannot yet venture to survey the time I have spent on
the activities of the world since October ’75. May God help me to continue
and provide light so that we don’t get in our own way so much. May he
allow us to do what is proper from morning to night and give us a clear
idea of the consequences of things. May I not be like people who use the
entire day to complain about a headache and every evening drink too much
wine. May the idea of a purity that extends even to the bite I put into my
mouth become clearer and clearer within me.
It is a remarkable passage. Before his departure, Goethe takes stock of his
life, surveying what he has done up to his move to Weimar. He cannot
venture to survey the most recent years. As far as he can summarize it, his
life up to now has not been pure. What does that mean? In order to answer
that, let us see how he characterizes the presumed impurity of his life. It was,
he writes, devoted to muddle, bustle, and taking delight in abstruse
relationships, not to purposeful thought and writing but to time-wasting
sentiment and shadow passion. Based on this distinction, the purity he has in
mind is the ability to turn his actions and thoughts toward the real world. It is
clarity, purposefulness, and a practical sense of reality. Certainly passion is
still involved, not for abstruse shadow beings but for reality, whatever that
may mean in practice. He has rescued himself from the water—where he had
no solid ground beneath his feet—onto dry land, where a benevolent sun is
drying him off. Ungroundedness is impurity, and it is associated with an
alcoholic stupor from which he awakes with a headache.
Is this emphasis on purity an attack on the creative power of the
imagination and the confusions it causes? Does purity mean looking reality in
the eye and satisfying its demands? Does it perhaps come down to being
purified of poetry? That is hardly credible, especially when one considers
that he had just been working on and producing Iphigenia, a play consecrated
to an elevated ideal of humanity.
It is difficult to imagine that it is meant as a general attack on the
productive power of the imagination. Instead, the idea of purity demands that
one make a clear distinction between the two spheres—reality here, poetry
there—and have the prudence not to confuse the two realms but rather do
justice to the claims of each as separate areas of life. For example, there is
one kind of tenacity in governing and quite a different kind in poetry. The art
of such distinctions may be what Goethe meant with the formulation May he
allow us to do what is proper from morning to night and give us a clear
idea of the consequences of things.
 Such a clear distinction of the spheres to which the idea of purity applies
means that it can reach into any field but has a unique significance in each.
Behavior and action in the practical sphere should be pure even to the bite I
put into my mouth—a way of life so prudent it included one’s diet: well-
regulated and punctual. It means earnestly completing each task, confronting
the day’s duties, and always with emphasis on what one is doing at the
moment. It was this attentiveness, this almost Taoist daily discipline, that
Herder found so admirable in a letter of 1784: “Recently, he read to us from
a new, very beautiful volume of his Wilhelm Meister, and another time the
beginning of a new, very excellent work [the treatise on the intermaxillary
bone]. Such work and the hours he devotes to it are probably the only ones
that restore the splendid man to himself, although he also dwells on the
minutest and even the most hateful occupations with utter calm, as though that
were his only true nature.”
This basic discipline was not a given for Goethe, but something he had to
make an effort to learn and practice. This is how he expressed it later in
Maxims and Reflections: Whoever desires or needs to act must only think
about what is proper for the moment, and then he will get through it
without circuitousness. He does not give up the lyrical longing that reaches
beyond the moment, but he ties it to the problems of daily life and its
demands in such a way that it must make the detour via the activity at hand. In
Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, Leonardo declares that yearning
vanishes in productive activity. But it doesn’t disappear without a trace; an
unsatisfied residuum remains that nourishes new action and liberates fresh
imagination. Purity in the realm of action thus means devotion to the tasks of
the day. Only thus is practical mastery possible.
Poetry demands a different kind of purity, a different mastery. Though
different from the purity of practical affairs, it has similar characteristics—
precisely what Goethe is pondering in his diary when he formulates his
imperatives of purity. He writes that one must have the confidence to grasp
what is appropriate to the matter at hand like the English agronomist George
Batty, then traveling the duchy. There is an approach appropriate to every
activity, including poetry. That approach will reveal the inner wealth of its
object and allow it to emerge. Every theme, every material, every idea has
its inner entelechy and requires a certain way of developing. The mature
artist senses what is appropriate for that entelechy. He is pure, free of
personal caprice. He brings work to fruition—serves the work and is
essential to its creation. In art, too, there is a craft to master, like the potter at
his wheel, according to whose will there emerges now a jug, and now a
bowl, and yet one has the impression that jug and bowl have achieved visible
existence on their own. Goethe also thought about the cabinet maker Johann
Martin Mieding, the factotum of the theater in Weimar. With his carpenter’s
skill, Mieding was able to fashion anything needed to make the stage
approximate the world: scenery, costumes, lighting, and mechanical devices
to produce the illusion of reality. When Mieding died in 1782, Goethe wrote
him a tender epitaph:

Whatever touched a lovely, tender soul

He copied faithfully. That was his role:
The green of grass, a cascade’s silvery wonder,
The songs of birds or a loud clap of thunder,
A bower’s shadows and the moon’s pale light—
Not even a monster could put him to flight.

There is an ironic edge to this praise for the craftsmanship that is the
prerequisite of poetic effects, an irony against the pretentions of people who
are proud of their inspiration. There is a purity of craft that the poet needs in
his own way to prove his worth.
It is against this background that we can best understand the aggressive
ridicule Goethe unleashed, shortly before leaving for Switzerland, upon the
recently published novel Woldemar, a Rarity from Natural History, by his
friend Fritz Jacobi. Here too, it was a question of dubious purity. In August
1779, at a festivity in the Ettersburg Palace, north of Weimar, people had
read from Jacobi’s novel. Goethe had recited some parodistic verses,
climbed into a tree, and nailed the novel to its trunk to scare off birds and
readers. There is no eyewitness report of this incident, but Goethe later
confirmed it in a letter to Lavater. An immediate topic of gossip (the
“crucifixion of Jacobi”), it caused him to break off his friendship with
Goethe.
In his letter to Lavater, Goethe explained what had bothered him about the
book. He calls it the whiff of pretension. The book was only half successful,
it lacked mastery, but it had pretensions to being a masterpiece. Its claim to
that status was not supported by any corresponding moral, aesthetic, or
psychological substance. In Goethe’s vocabulary, this too is impurity.
Moreover, the novel had a certain moral vanity. The eponymous hero
Woldemar is a paragon of virtue and chastity. He lives with Henriette in an
unconsummated union. He allows her to marry him off to a friend of hers,
upon which the three of them form a league of love and friendship in which
there is much apparently disembodied sentiment. They are all noble and
good. Goethe found Woldemar’s smugness unbearably irritating. You needed
only to alter a few lines, he later told Johanna Fahlmer (a relative of
Jacobi’s), and it is inevitable and no different than if the devil would have
to come fetch him.
To be sure, there is some reason to doubt that Goethe’s outrage at the
novel’s moral pretentiousness was entirely pure itself. A completely
different motivation may have been in play. It isn’t difficult to read the
depiction of an unconsummated union as a reflection of his own relationship
to Charlotte von Stein. Perhaps that was another source of anger driving his
ridicule.
The resolution to make purity a lifetime goal was made at an important
juncture: his impending departure on a lengthy journey. Another act of
purification was his destruction of letters and notes on August 7, 1779.
Traveling was a risky business in those days, and precautions had to be taken
in case one did not return. It was an auto-da-fé in that sense, but also one of
the inner changes he usually referred to as moltings, when he cast off things
he had outgrown. A visit to Lavater in Zurich would also play an important
role because, at this point in Goethe’s life, Lavater was still a credible and
revered apostle of purity.
On September 5, 1779, just a few days before his departure, Goethe was
named privy councilor. He writes to Charlotte von Stein, it seems
miraculous to me, like a dream, that at the age of thirty, I have reached the
highest honor a bourgeois in Germany can achieve.
On September 12, a traveling party—the duke, the head forestry official
von Wedel, Goethe, and several servants, among them Goethe’s manservant
Philipp Seidel—set off. Their official destinations were Frankfurt, the Lower
Rhine, Cologne, and Düsseldorf, and so people in Weimar were surprised
when they learned that the group had headed south toward Switzerland. The
duke assured everyone that it was the same for him; he too had been
surprised by the change in plans. He wrote to his mother, Anna Amalia, “I am
sorry that you don’t believe me and think I made a secret of the long journey;
so I must repeat, it was only between Friedberg and Frankfurt, just at the
halfway point, that it was decided; that’s when I and the others learned of it
through the inspiration of the angel Gabriel.” Which would mean that Goethe
had been given the authority to determine their goal. That is hard to believe,
since it would not have been permissible for Goethe to act so high-handedly
toward his duke. The two probably hatched the scheme together.
Goethe had an educational plan for this journey with regard to the duke,
who considered it a sort of belated grand tour. For that reason, they traveled
incognito, although their true identities did not remain concealed at the courts
they visited along the way. Goethe wanted to draw the duke into his program
of self-purification, and that’s why he put so much stock in a meeting with
Lavater in Zurich. From Emmendingen, he wrote to Charlotte von Stein, to
see Lavater and to know that he is closer to the duke is my greatest hope.
He hoped that Lavater’s gentle nature and unbigoted, cordial piety would
soothe the duke’s impetuous nature and give him a taste for the inner harmony
of which the Zurich preacher was such an outstanding exemplar. Lavater did
indeed make an impression on the duke, at least for the moment: “There’s
something uniquely soothing about Lavater’s presence,” Karl August wrote to
his wife, “I make use of it as much as ever I can . . . I cannot better express
how he seems to have affected me than with the words ‘cleaning up my
mind.’ ”
If the duke found Lavater “soothing,” for Goethe he was like taking the
waters. One felt refreshed when one sees again such a completely true
person. The attributes of purity pile up in Goethe’s description of Lavater: I
am with Lavater here, in the purest mutual enjoyment of life; in the circle
of his friends there is an angelic stillness and peace . . . so that everyone . .
. has a pure human existence even with just the basic necessities. Goethe
here accentuates the curative effect of the visit, which he hopes it will also
have on the duke. Only here do I clearly realize what a moral death we
usually live in together, and where the shriveling and freezing of the heart
comes from, the heart that in itself is never arid and never cold. May God
grant that, among many other great advantages, this one may also
accompany us home, namely, that we keep our own souls open and are also
able to open the good souls of others. If I could depict for you how empty
the world is, we would hold tight to one another and never let go. However,
I am prepared for the sirocco of dissatisfaction, dislike, ingratitude,
carelessness, and pretention to blow our way again.
 This sirocco had not yet had the feared effect on the duke or on Goethe, for
back in Weimar people thought they could detect a changed attitude in both of
them. The duke seemed somehow chastened and ennobled, with “behavior
that won one’s heart,’ and Goethe seemed “good as a child.” Since Goethe
was regarded as the guiding spirit of the entire enterprise, he was also
credited with the success of the trip. This Swiss journey, Wieland said, was
“one of Göthe’s most masterful dramas.”
The journey enabled other settlings of accounts. On their way south, they
passed through Strasbourg, and it was probably Goethe’s intention from the
beginning to visit lovers of former years, lovers he had felt guilty for
abandoning. Here too, there were things that needed clearing up.
On September 25, 1779, he rode from Strasbourg over to Sesenheim—a
route teeming with memories—and found the parsonage outwardly unchanged
and the Brion family still together, as if he had only just parted from them.
Since I am now as pure and calm as the air, the breath of good, quiet
people is very welcome. In a long letter to Charlotte he provides a vivid
description of his reunion with Friederike: In former days, the second
daughter of the house had loved me more than I deserved and more than
others on whom I expended much passion and devotion. I had to leave her
at a moment when it almost cost her life. She passed over that quietly and
told me about what still remained of her illness from that time, behaved in
the dearest way, with so much friendly cordiality from the moment I
appeared unexpectedly on her threshold and we almost bumped noses with
each other, that I was quite content. I must also acknowledge that she
never undertook by even the slightest suggestion to awaken an old feeling
in my soul. She led me to that arbor, and I had to sit there, and I was
content. But a note written twenty years later describes it differently. There
he writes that the largest part of the conversation with Friederike was about
the annoying behavior of Lenz and how he had pestered her and pretended to
be in love with her, but only to gain access to Goethe’s letters. Goethe
presents it not as his conjecture, but as Friederike’s judgment of what
occurred: She explains to me that it was his intention to do me harm and
destroy me in public opinion and otherwise. By this account, it wasn’t just a
tranquil conversation in the arbor. Old wounds were touched upon, but in
such a way that Friederike’s emotional damage and Goethe’s guilty
conscience could be transferred onto poor Lenz. The next morning, Goethe
was able to ride off in the nostalgic but cheerful certainty that I can now
think about that little corner of the world with satisfaction and live at
inner peace with the spirits of these reconciled friends.
The next settling of accounts came the following day in Strasbourg. He
paid a call on Elisabeth (Lili) von Türckheim, née Schönemann. There too I
was met with astonishment and joy. Lili, the good creature, seemed to be
happily married. Her husband was a well-to-do man with a beautiful house
and impressive social position. Lili had everything she needed. Goethe hints
at Lili’s need for luxury and fashion, which could now be adequately
satisfied, but would have become a problem if their relationship had
continued. Lili had what she needed, and so he didn’t have to burden himself
with guilt. On this evening, too, the moon was shining as it had at
Friederike’s house the night before. He found life at the wealthy Türckheims’
a bit prosaic, but not displeasing. The feeling of having cleared something
up, purified it, was far stronger: and so there is a quite ethereal delight in
the feeling of continuous, pure good will, and in the way I have, as it were,
recited a rosary of the most staunch, reliable, inextinguishable friendship.
Now my relationships with the people who remain can enter my soul
unclouded by a limited passion.
It was important to him then to be unclouded by passion. But that would
not prove so easy when he encountered the beautiful Antonia von Branconi in
Lausanne. Charlotte von Stein must have taken some offense at the way he
wrote of this woman: She seems so beautiful and pleasant that, in her
presence, I have several times asked myself if it’s possible she can be so
beautiful. She invited him back. In the end, one must say of her, he writes in
the letter to Charlotte, what Ulysses reported about the rocks of Scylla:
“Without an injured wing no bird can pass them by.” Frau von Branconi
was a celebrated beauty. At Lavater’s house, Goethe had seen a silhouette of
her that piqued his curiosity, and he paid her a visit in Lausanne. She had
been the mistress of the hereditary prince of Braunschweig, which according
to the mores of the time did nothing to damage her reputation in society. She
lived part of the year in Lausanne and part at her country estate near
Halberstadt, where Goethe would later visit her again. He had to work hard
to resist falling under her spell. It was a great challenge to his resolve to
remain pure, both during this first encounter in Lausanne and during her
return visit to Weimar a year later, in 1780. In a letter to Lavater from this
time, Goethe writes, I cannot answer your question about that beauty. I
behaved to her as I would to a princess or a saint. And even if it were only
an illusion, I would not like to sully such an image by connecting it to a
transitory desire. And God save us from a serious attachment, in which she
would wrest the soul from my body.
To Charlotte von Stein, Goethe presents his struggle for purity and
freedom from transitory desire in a somewhat different light. The thought of
her, he wrote on the day Frau von Branconi visited him, protected him from
that beauty: The beautiful lady will take up my whole day today. . . . She is
always beautiful, very beautiful, but it is as if you, my beloved, would have
to be taken away if another being were to touch me. But of course, he is
touched nevertheless. There must have been some inner turmoil, for he had
difficulty maintaining his composure. When the beauty had taken her
departure, he sent her some lines that were telling but also left much untold:
Only now do I feel that you were here, the way one feels the wine only a
while after drinking it. In your presence one wishes for better eyes, ears,
and spirit just to be able to see and find it believable and comprehensible
that it has pleased heaven, after so many unsuccessful attempts, to try—
and succeed—at making something like you. I would have to continue on
and on with this apparent hyperbole . . . and because not even that is, as
they say, proper, I must break off and keep the best to myself.
Soon thereafter, Goethe went to Ilmenau with the duke on mining business.
There he climbed the highest peak in the area, the Kickelhahn, and spent the
night in a hunter’s cabin. From there he writes to Charlotte von Stein,
indulges in tender memories of her, and describes how he has bedded down
in solitude in order to avoid longing, the incorrigible perplexity of
humankind. He did not mention that a letter from Frau von Branconi also
reached him there; he would later write to her, Your letter could not have
reached me at a more beautiful and solemn moment. It seemed to him like
seeing a comet.
Perplexity? Perhaps it was the feeling of being pulled back and forth
between Charlotte and Frau von Branconi. It was that restless evening on the
Kickelhahn that inspired his incredible evocation of the calming effect of
nature:

Peace lies over

All the peaks.
In all the trees
You sense
 Hardly a breath;
The little forest birds fall silent.
Wait, and soon
You too will rest.

But now let us return to the visit to Switzerland in the preceding year.
The sublime peace above the peaks was also an echo of his mood in the
high Alps. He described the sight of the mountains in a letter to Charlotte von
Stein: The sublime gives beautiful peace to the soul, which is completely
filled by it and feels itself as great as it is possible to be. The sublime
grants pure feeling. From Basel they traveled southwest via Bern and Lake
Geneva into the Savoy Alps and the glacial regions in the canton of Valais,
encouraged by a sunny late autumn in November. Several natives of the area
had advised against it—as the onset of winter could be expected at any
moment—but others, including the famous alpine explorer Professor Horace-
Bénédict de Saussure, had urged the band of travelers to continue. They set
off along the sometimes difficult high route, west to east, via Chamonix and
the Furka to the Gotthard. Goethe, though eager to climb as high as possible,
was concerned about the young duke, who tended to be a daredevil. It was
his older friend’s job to restrain him from time to time. If I had been alone,
he writes to Charlotte, I would have gone higher and deeper, but with the
duke I have to do what is moderate. This time Goethe did not feel the lure of
the South, as he had on his first trip to Switzerland. Because he felt
responsible for the duke, he knew that he needed to turn around. Even now,
Italy doesn’t tempt me, he writes from the top of the Gotthard Pass. The fact
that going to Italy would be of no use to the duke at this time, that it would
not be good to stay away from home any longer, that I will see you all
again—everything turns my eye away from the Promised Land for the
second time—the land I hope to see before I die—and leads my spirit back
to my poor roof, where I will have you at my hearth, as jolly as ever, and
will serve you up a good roast.
There would, however, be one more peak experience: a second meeting
with Lavater in Zurich. As we have seen, part of Goethe’s plans for his
journey with the duke was to introduce him to Lavater. Goethe had great
expectations of bringing the two together, and they were fulfilled. Neither in
Israel nor among the heathen is there such truth, faith, love, patience,
strength, wisdom, goodness, diligence, integrity, diversity, serenity, etc.,
Goethe writes about Lavater, and he is the flower of mankind, the best of the
best. The two weeks at the end of November 1779 were a high point in their
relationship. A high point, but also a turning point, for from then on, a gradual
alienation began that would finally end in a rupture.
Even before their reunion in the fall of 1779, Goethe had indicated that he
was more interested in Lavater’s person than in his religion. The Swiss
pastor was truly devout and clung fervently to the word of God, in both the
Old and the New Testament. For him, the Bible was literal truth, the revealed
word of God, and possessed living, authoritative power. For Goethe,
however, it was poetry and, at most, evidence of inspired wisdom. Goethe,
too, speaks of God when he expresses his joy at the imminent reunion with
Lavater: My God, to whom I have always remained faithful, has secretly
given me a rich blessing, for my fate is completely hidden from others.
They can neither see nor hear it. I am happy to lay in your heart whatever
can be revealed of it.
What Goethe here calls “God” is the power of fate, which he feels is well
disposed toward him. Goethe speaks of God the way Socrates spoke of his
daimon. This power of fate is something that everyone can experience for
himself. It remains hidden from others, although the effect of the life-shaping
power of such inner certainty can unquestionably be noticed by others. One
cannot proselytize this personal power of fate as God, much less force it on
others through preaching, persuasion, or admonishment. Everyone must sense
and find their own God, which means nothing more than grasping the guiding
principle of their life. Nor can one invoke any supposedly sacred texts to
back up the certainty of being led by one’s own daimon.
However, the inspiration drawn from such experiences of being led by an
inner force can flow into texts of one’s own. People who believe in the Bible
believe in a history of salvation for everyone, but Goethe believed only in
his personal history of salvation, which seemed possible (as he wrote to
Lavater) only as long as he remained true to himself and thus to his personal
God. The same letter to Lavater also contains a hidden warning. Lavater
should not hope that they will ever reach agreement on the subject of belief.
What Goethe admired in Lavater was something else, namely, his style of
life. Goethe calls it the purest mutual enjoyment of life. What he meant was
a cordial openness that overcame artificial barriers and separations.
Precisely because one is firmly anchored elsewhere, one can feel free to
enjoy life here. That enables a carefree spontaneity that frees us from narrow,
calculating behavior. It was this higher carefreeness, after all, that had led
Goethe to perceive Lavater as naïve, undaunted, in harmony with himself,
and therefore inwardly free. It was a higher, not a limited naïveté. Goethe
was attracted by the pious man’s imperturbability even—and especially—in
earthly affairs. In general, his friendship with Lavater promised a relaxing
and loosening up of his own being, which he saw endangered by the
shriveling and freezing of the heart at the court in Weimar. What he
appreciated about Lavater’s religion were not the individual articles of faith
but rather its influence on how he shaped his life.
In the world of religious belief, however, Goethe appreciated only what
possessed poetic color, imagination, and feeling. He writes to Lavater that
what gave him pleasure in the pastor’s epic poem based on the Book of
Revelation and entitled Jesus the Messiah, or The Future of the Lord were
the passages where the promise of eternal life was beautifully illustrated by
sheep grazing under palm trees or the triumphant feeling of the angels. In
such figures and similes, he writes, you have done well, and then continues,
but for me, your monsters dissipate too quickly in allegorical steam. In
other words, Goethe sees the matter aesthetically, not theologically. Thus, he
thinks little of the revelation of damnation when it doesn’t succeed
poetically.
Although flattering to the poet, Goethe’s characterization of his friend’s
commentary on Revelation was actually blasphemous for the believer. The
burden of his remarks is that Lavater’s poem is no more or less a revelation
than the biblical text on which it is based. In the final analysis, both are
poetic works, expressions of an excited soul: for my taste, your portrayal
makes the same impression as the original sketch. It is a poetic advantage
when one finds the reflection of a soul in a text, but faith depends on seeing
in such texts more than what a soul has put into them. The believer sees in
them a higher power, not just the soul of a fellow man. Even before their
reunion in the fall of 1779, Goethe had clearly staked out the limits of their
agreement; perhaps their personal relationship succeeded so well because
they remained conscious of what separated them. Over and above that, they
agreed to disagree.
For that, however, physical proximity was indispensable. When they were
apart, the power of their differences grew. It didn’t take long after they parted
before that distance began to exert its alienating influence. Lacking the belief
in each other that personal contact fosters, one’s other beliefs and thoughts
have greater and greater weight. Two friends cease to understand each other
aright, and in the end, they no longer want to. That is what happened to
Goethe and Lavater.
For a while after Goethe’s departure from Zurich, a cordial bond
continued, a bond that made Goethe feel called upon to reflect on his own
life’s plan in contrast to Lavater’s. It was as if he needed to prove to this
friend, who had placed himself under the guidance of a higher power, that he
was sufficiently guided by himself. In his letters to Lavater soon after his
visit to Zurich, Goethe expressed the design of his life in memorable images:
The daily work assigned to me, which every day becomes easier and more
difficult, demands my presence, waking and dreaming. This duty grows
more precious to me every day, and in its performance I would wish to be
the equal of the greatest men, and in nothing greater. This desire to raise
up as high as possible the pyramid of my existence—whose basis and
foundation were given to me—outweighs everything else and can hardly be
forgotten even for a moment. I dare not tarry. I am already at an advanced
age, and perhaps fate will break me in the middle of life and the Tower of
Babel will remain an incomplete stump. At least they should be able to say
it was a daring attempt, and if I live, my strength, God willing, should be
enough to complete the tower.
Goethe admits to Lavater, the man of God who presents himself as humble,
that he has the presumption to construct his own life like a Tower of Babel—
reaching for the stars, but with a firm foundation. It is founded not on the
promise of eternal life, as in Lavater’s case, but on the belief in his own
worth and on the trust in the power of his personal destiny. There are distant
echoes of his defiant Promethean tone: You must leave my earth / Just as it
is / And the hut / That I built, not you.
More and more often in his letters to Lavater, which continued to be full of
praise and avowals of cordiality, there were also pointed and even facetious
remarks, as when he mentions the masques composed for the New Year’s
celebration at the Weimar court and then says, As you beautify the
celebrations of godliness, I beautify the parades of foolishness. Another
time he teases Lavater when the pastor intends to “put on Jesus,” as the pious
were wont to say. Goethe remarks, every day the scales and fogs are falling
from my spirit, so that I think in the end it will stand there, stark naked.
Goethe grew skeptical about Lavater’s faith when it became
indistinguishable from banal mysticism. In January 1781, Lavater paid a visit
to the adventurer Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (whose real name was
Giuseppe Balsamo) in Strasbourg, where he had arrived from Italy. Lavater
was taken in by the swindler and wrote to Goethe that Cagliostro was
“strength personified.” Goethe regarded this as an example of how easily
noble willingness to believe could tip over into credulity: And yet, a fool
with strength is so closely related to a rascal. There’s nothing I can say. In
fact, he had not only said but written a few things about it—for example, in A
Shrovetide Play of Pater Brey and in Satyros, or The Wood-Devil Deified,
where false prophets and their foolish followers are mocked. The fact that
Lavater himself was threatening to succumb to a similar swindle provided
Goethe an opportunity for a sharp attack on spiritualistic mumbo jumbo. He
writes Lavater that he can very well understand how one could feel the need
to expand the narrow limits of the self into a Swedenborgian spiritual
universe. For him as a poet, it was in fact a matter of course—but only as a
poet. What does the poet do with such a thing? He purifies such upsurges of
anything silly and disgusting and makes something beautiful of them. Beauty
may ensnare and seduce, but there is nothing coercive about it. Beauty
proceeds from free play and is addressed to the free person. It requires no
subservience, unlike hocus-pocus, which makes people stupid and
submissive. Goethe becomes outraged: What can I say to minds that obey
such people, propound such nonsense, and commit such acts?
He wrote this only a few years before Cagliostro was implicated in the
Diamond Necklace Affair, an event which even before the revolution led
Goethe to fear the collapse of the ancien régime. Already, he fears the
consequences of Cagliostro’s meteoric rise. Believe me, he writes to Lavater,
our moral and political world is, like a great city, honeycombed with
subterranean passages, cellars, and cloaca . . . except that, for the person
who has some knowledge of it, it is much more understandable when here
the ground collapses, there smoke rises from a crevice, and there strange
voices are heard.
On account of Lavater’s credulity, Goethe felt justified in using heavier
artillery against his religious faith. About the pastor’s love of Christ, Goethe
wrote how marvelous it was that an image has remained to us from ancient
times into which you have transported your all and, mirroring yourself in
it, can worship yourself. That was laying it on a bit thick. Lavater, who acted
so humble, was accused of fooling himself. Which wouldn’t be so bad,
according to Goethe, if only he would admit it to himself. Then everyone
could revere himself in his own bird of paradise, but he should allow others
their birds of paradise and not try to pluck the most beautiful feathers from
them. Everyone can create his own image of a deified self, and it befits the
truly pious to respect creative freedom in religious matters, too, and
acknowledge a whole world of various birds of paradise. No need for envy.
Goethe thus advocated more tolerance, something Lavater himself had
displayed in abundance. It was not for nothing that Goethe had repeatedly
praised his liberality. But it was not the tolerance of others’ beliefs that
Goethe increasingly found lacking, for in that regard Lavater was blameless.
What annoyed Goethe was a condescending tolerance that sees itself in
possession of the truth and others on a false path. That irritated him to the
point that he finally burst out: Exclusive intolerance! Forgive me for these
harsh words.
For Goethe, Jesus was an exemplary human being, worthy of love in the
highest degree, a genius of the heart and of devotion, but not a god—and
divine only to the extent that a divine spark exists in everyone. A human
being, nothing more. Goethe did not doubt that he was a historical figure
whose continuing influence arose from his image in the Gospels. And he
attributed their effect not to an act of revelation but to their power as
literature. When Lavater writes so grippingly about Jesus, that too is only
literature and as such—but only as such—admirable.
But mere literary acknowledgment was not enough for Lavater. Jesus
existed not as a character in a novel. He was not a fictitious carrier of
meaning. Lavater insisted that Jesus did not merely symbolize the idea of a
son of God. He was the son of God, as real, for example, as the real Goethe
in Weimar. But if he was the son of God, then miracles such as walking on
water, feeding the five thousand, and the Resurrection were true not merely in
a metaphorical sense but factually. For Lavater it all boiled down to the
existence of the supernatural as an expression of divine power. Goethe
protested. For him, nature was what reveals itself empirically to our five
senses; all the rest is speculation and poetry, admirable as an expression of
the human spirit, but not part of a realistic image of the world. To regard the
supernatural as an actual manifestation of the divine was a blasphemy
against the great God and his revelation in nature.
Therefore, to the extent that Jesus with all his miracles was supposed to
have really existed as the son of God, Goethe declared himself to be
decidedly not a Christian. That sounds very definitive, and it was meant to.
He no longer wished to be importuned by Lavater playing the prophet, and he
attempted to lay down the rules for their continued correspondence: So, let
me hear your human voice so that we can stay connected on that side,
since it doesn’t work from the other side.
Nevertheless, their conversation about religion continued. Goethe may
have been annoyed at Lavater, but their disputes were also important in
consolidating his views on religion. Goethe was feeling his way toward an
understanding of religion as natural history and cultural anthropology. Nature
also deserves great thanks, he writes, for placing so much healing power
into the existence of every living being, so that if it be torn at one end or
the other, it can patch itself back together again; and what are the
thousands of religions but the thousandfold expressions of this healing
power. My sticking plaster doesn’t work for you, nor yours for me. In our
Father’s pharmacy are many prescriptions. Thus religion is a spiritual and
at the same time natural means of healing man’s inwardly riven nature. That
means we have no need of a transcendent God; it is the better nature in us that
comes to our aid. This better nature takes on the form of a religion. This is
the conclusion that Goethe reached, anticipating a future anthropology that
would culminate in the twentieth century in Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth
Plessner’s thesis that man is a deficient being, by nature dependent on
culture. That culture includes what Goethe called healing power.
So much for the anthropological line of thought. In the same letter, Goethe
develops a psychological perspective as well. Belief—any belief—is in and
of itself opaque. Whoever believes doesn’t really know what it is within him
that believes. In any event, it is something else than what the believer—
believes. Especially in questions of belief, man finds himself in his own
blind spot. What man notices and feels about himself seems to me the
smallest part of his existence. Consciousness is not the same as consciously
being. It is always lesser than one’s own being. It was a brilliant insight,
stated here almost offhandedly, but later more emotionally formulated. In the
essay Morphology he declares, I hereby confess that the great and so
weighty-sounding adage “know thyself” has always seemed suspect to me.
In the letter to Lavater, he was already saying that one shrivels up in the
attempt to fathom oneself. Why? Because you are more likely to notice what
you lack and what causes pain than what you possess and are supported by. It
is above all our deficiencies that we are conscious of, not our riches. The
ordinary, popular religions are fantastic compensation for the deficiencies
we are conscious of, and that is why they are superficial. Religion would
reach deeper if it was the expression of the experience of plenitude. If
Goethe feels empathy for a religion, it is—as we will later see in the
collection of poems West-Eastern Divan—a religion of fullness, abundance,
and affirmation.
After the long letter of October 4, 1782, the correspondence gradually
petered out. The very last letter is again a remarkable one. In December
1783, Goethe wrote to Zurich that his friendship with Herder had been
repaired. One amicable bond comes undone and another is stitched back
together again. From then on, Goethe discusses religious issues primarily
with Herder and Jacobi, with whom he had also been reconciled, while
Lavater disappears from his life.
On July 21, 1786, Lavater visited Goethe for the last time in Weimar. They
had little left to say to each other. Goethe wrote to Charlotte von Stein, We
exchanged not a single cordial, intimate word, and I am free of hate and
love forever. . . . I have also drawn a large line under his existence and
now know what remains of him on balance. Lavater sensed the alienation as
well and wrote to an acquaintance, “I found Goethe older, colder, wiser,
stiffer, more incommunicative, more practical.”
Ten years later, in the fall of 1797, there was a last encounter—which
wasn’t really an encounter at all. During Goethe’s third journey to
Switzerland, he saw Lavater approaching down a street in Zurich. Goethe
crossed to the other side to avoid a meeting. Lavater passed by without
recognizing him. His gait was like a crane’s, was all Goethe had to say about
it.
 CHAPTER 16

Peace and Granite. Reconciliation with Jacobi.

Reading Spinoza. Spinoza, Lessing, Jacobi, and the
“Prometheus” poem: tinder for an explosion.
Naturalism and Idealism: Opposing or Merging.
Jacobi’s Philosophy of Religion and Goethe’s Nature Study.
The Intermaxillary Bone. Reconciliation with Herder.

....

BACK FROM SWITZERLAND, GOETHE AGAIN THREW HIMSELF

into his official duties. In April 1780, Kalb left the mining commission and,
as its chairman, Goethe assumed responsibility for the silver mines in
Ilmenau. He began to study minerology to increase his technical expertise—
thus at first for purely practical reasons—but he soon fell under the spell of a
world that proceeded with steady, slow persistence in contrast to the surging
fluidity of inner experience. Thousands and thousands of thoughts rise and
fall within me. My soul is like an everlastingly restless firework, he wrote
to Charlotte von Stein. But in nature, in the world of minerals and especially
of granite, he believed he had found peace, even if, as he wrote in the draft
essay “Granite I,” some poets foolishly claim to see in it an image of
discordantly raging chaos. When we descend into the self, we lose our
grounding. Nothing is stable; everything is moving. The granite we find in the
earth, however, provides a reliable base, a foundation.
The 1784 text on granite gives ample evidence of the desire that motivated
Goethe’s nature study: And thus anyone familiar with the allure that the
secrets of nature hold for us humans will not be surprised that I have left
the sphere of observation that I formerly inhabited and, with a quite
passionate inclination, have turned to this one. I do not fear the reproach
that it must be the spirit of contradiction that has led me from the
contemplation and depiction of the human heart—the newest, most diverse,
mobile, changeable, and fragile part of creation—to the observation of the
oldest, firmest, deepest, most immovable son of nature. . . . I, who suffer
and have suffered much from the vagaries of human sentiments, their rapid
fluctuations within myself and others, I ask for the sublime peace granted
by the solitary, mute proximity of great, soft-spoken nature, and let
everyone who has an inkling of it join me.
The rapid fluctuations of his mind have been a source of suffering, he
writes. But they have also caused suffering in others as did, for example, his
public ridicule of Fritz Jacobi’s novel Woldemar shortly before the journey
to Switzerland. Jacobi had written him as soon as he got wind of the
“crucifixion of Woldemar” and asked for an explanation, since he didn’t want
to rely on rumors. Goethe did not answer the letter, although his friend had
written that he would have to regard silence as a confirmation of what he had
heard. What was Goethe to write? He could not and would not deny what he
had done. The novel had displeased him and still did. Would he lose a friend
on that account? He found himself in a dilemma that might have been less
painful if he had known what Jacobi told “Aunty” Johanna Schlosser. The
entire affair, he wrote her, had “made the character of this pompous dandy a
good deal more loathsome and contemptable. I shall turn my back on him
forever, as almost all upright men of our country have long since done. . . . I
thank God that our friendship is at an end.” If Goethe had learned of this
condemnation, it would likely have caused no dilemma but destroyed his
inner tie to Jacobi for good.
As it was, there was no contact between them for the next three years,
when Goethe’s conscience was awakened by the Schlossers and his mother
reminding him that Jacobi had lent him money for the move to Weimar and
had never been repaid. Because of this debt, Goethe broke his silence and
asked for forgiveness: When we get older and the world closes in, then of
course we sometimes painfully recall the occasions when, to pass the time,
we forfeited friendships and in reckless high spirits could not feel the
wounds we caused or think of healing them.
Jacobi’s wound was healed the instant he received Goethe’s letter. He
promptly replied, “I always interpreted to your advantage the fact that you
hadn’t paid me back yet. What I had recognized in you was deep and
inextinguishable.” This ushered in a renewal of their correspondence and
their friendship blossomed again, but within limits that Goethe described in
retrospect: we loved each other without understanding each other. I could
no longer grasp the language of his philosophy.
At first, after their reconciliation, he grasped it quite well. When Jacobi
visited Weimar for a week in September 1784, they talked about Spinoza.
Jacobi, who was preparing a publication about the Dutch philosopher that
would later cause great public furor and some private irritation between the
two friends, now reawakened Goethe’s old love for Spinoza. They had
already spoken about him during their first lengthy time together, in 1775.
Jacobi had never forgotten Goethe’s enthusiastic comments during those
discussions, in which Lavater had participated. Lavater later wrote down
Goethe’s remarks; they had less to do with Spinoza’s philosophy than with
his person. Goethe called him a homo temperatissimus, an extremely fair,
honest, poor man. Inspired by Jacobi, Goethe studied Spinoza’s Ethics with
Charlotte von Stein, whom he talked into the difficult undertaking. In the long
evening hours, they read Spinoza together, sentence by sentence. Whenever
Goethe wanted to understand something thoroughly, he needed to talk about
it. Learning by teaching was also his method in this case; now he felt very
close to Spinoza, although his mind is much deeper and purer than mine.
Thus it was Jacobi who led Goethe back to Spinoza in the fall of 1784.
Less than a year later, Goethe would have to defend the rediscovered
Spinoza against Jacobi in the great controversy stirred up by the latter’s
publication on the philosopher.
When Goethe first read him in 1773 and 1774, Spinoza was considered an
infamous, dangerous atheist, a heretic of the worst kind. People didn’t read
him; they merely cited him as a cautionary example. Goethe had not yet read
him either when, in 1770, he dismissed his philosophy as vile heresy even
though he himself was moving toward a pantheism that made him almost an
unconscious Spinozist.
The seventeenth-century philosopher, a descendant of Jewish merchants in
Amsterdam, equated God with nature. For him, revelation occurred in nature,
not in some sacred text. God was not outside the world, he was in the world
—the world’s “substance,” as Spinoza calls it. Humans themselves are part
of this substance, although they do not want to acknowledge it. How can one
achieve conscious participation? By following the path of rigorous thought
and not by a pious acceptance of supernatural inspiration. Thinking “more
geometrico”—in a geometric manner—as Spinoza calls it, is an ascetic
discipline. Rigorous, free of vanity and showmanship, the thinker merges
with the object of his thought in order to do it justice. You must first
disregard yourself in order to see things aright, and only then can you return,
enriched, to yourself. Without being religious, this ascetic thinking has a
religious aspect. It was likely this piety of thought that held such a strong
attraction for the young Goethe when he called Spinoza a homo
temperatissimus. Spinoza himself had clearly enunciated the character of his
philosophizing at the beginning of his essay “On the Improvement of the
Understanding.” Experience had taught him, he wrote, that everything making
up the usual contents of life is vain and worthless. Therefore he had decided
to investigate whether there was some true good through which a person
could experience lasting, complete joy. For him, wealth, honor, and sensual
pleasure were not part of this true good, for they are transitory, ephemeral,
unstable, and make us dependent. Stability is achieved only by perceiving the
unity that joins the mind to all of nature.
It was a daring thought, for the traditional intellectual edifices that Spinoza
opposed were not self-supporting structures. If the premises of Christianity
or Judaism cease to be felt as reality, everything collapses. In both traditions,
belief has universal received truths, which human reason then reproduces.
Stability is found in belief, but also in the institutions, traditions, and rituals
by which the entire collective history of faith is reinforced. The old belief
was an experience of communal, mutual self-reinforcement, not isolated,
solitary introspection. Spinoza forwent the support of communal belief and
religious community. The Jewish congregation of Amsterdam persecuted him
as a heretic and threatened his life. He withdrew and earned his living as a
lens grinder.
Is the perception of the unity of mind with all of nature really capable of
supporting one’s life and lending it peace and even happiness? Goethe asked
this question. It can probably be answered only by trying to understand
Spinoza’s views. For him, thought and perception have the power to free us
from fear. In Christian metaphysics, there is no such trust in the redemptive
power of thinking. In Christianity, only love can overcome the fear of the
world; the Creator’s love is the basis for trust in the world. Just as divine
love created the world out of nothingness, the experience of being loved and
affirmed protects us from nothingness. In comparison with such a belief, trust
in thought is secondary. Spinoza, however, puts his complete trust in thought.
To be sure, love is also involved. But he does not believe in a transcendent
source of love. For him, the perception of the world, the reflection of its
entirety in the human mind, is in some sense an act of love. “Divine love,” of
which Spinoza also speaks, is nothing more than the act of perception. In
perception, consciousness merges with being. That is the great confluence in
which the essence of “substance” becomes clear: substance comprehends
spirit and matter, the two sides of a single nature. Mind does not stand in
opposition to nature. One could say it is the other condition of nature; it is
that part of nature that is conscious of itself. Except for this substantial
nature, which is at the same time extensive and thinking, there is nothing.
How could there be? God is not beyond or outside the world. He is all
nature. “Deus sive substantia sive natura” in Spinoza’s formulation: God or
substance or nature.
It all depends on how we regard nature—as a realm of freedom or of
necessity. Creationism sees nature as a product of freedom, for God created
it voluntarily, not because he had to. And nature is not a self-perpetuating
mechanism, but remains dependent on the inflow of God’s grace. Man,
himself a part of creation, can and must behave accordingly. Human freedom
can respond to divine freedom.
But that’s not how things work for Spinoza. For him, nature is a universe
of necessity. The consciousness of freedom is an illusion. He declares that it
is as if a stone would believe it fell to earth of its own free will. Everything
happens from causality. Even what happens within and between men is
determined by it, without exception. The causal nexus is not based on a goal.
There are no final causes, processes that happen because they have a goal in
mind. That is why it makes no sense to ask what the purpose of nature is. But
it is also misleading to believe that humans act with intention and have a goal
in mind. Superficially, it looks as if they do, but in reality, people have
intentions because causality is urging them on behind their backs. The thirty-
second theorem in part 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics (probably the only work of
Spinoza’s that Goethe ever read) states, “Will cannot be called a free cause,
but only a necessary cause. . . . therefore . . . no volition can exist, nor be
conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned by some cause other than itself,
which cause is conditioned by a third cause, and so on to infinity.”*
The denial of final causes and the idea of the world as a mechanism would
become powerful sources of the nineteenth century’s materialistic image of
nature. Supplemented by some dynamic components, it has remained the
dominant image of the world to the present day, a world that gets along with
no God at all. Even the act of cognition is no longer, as it still was for
Spinoza, in the service of God, but follows practical considerations of
usefulness and domination.
Although it still includes some residual religious warmth, the image of
nature into which Spinoza thinks his way functions like an inanimate
mechanism. It is a place where we can feel at home, because we are made of
nature’s material and function in the same way. If we “purify” ourselves, free
our consciousness from the illusions of imagination and discipline the
emotions that prevent a free overview, then we can act in accord with reality
and will not be plagued by superfluous fears and worries.
But before the image of nature as an inanimate mechanism became fully
solidified in the nineteenth century, Spinoza’s residual religious warmth had
inspired a pantheism that arose around 1800. One can see this connection in
Herder, Goethe, and Schelling. They were all influenced by Spinoza, but
needed to restore to the concept of nature a creative life that Spinoza had
taken away even though he himself had spoken of the difference between
natura naturans and natura naturata (approximately, “creative nature” and
“incarnate nature”). But for Spinoza, everything is already completed, a
compact whole. The pantheistic currents in Herder, Goethe, and Schelling
emphasize the aspect of development. For them, being is a constant
becoming. For Spinoza, becoming is actually a rounded being, nothing more
than the temporal unfolding of what is always already collected in substance.
Let us see what Goethe takes from his reading of Spinoza. During their
joint study of Spinoza’s Ethics in the late fall of 1784, Goethe dictated some
thoughts to Charlotte.
First, he records the idea that eternity does not belong to the sphere of
some divine, transcendent paradise. No, it begins with every concrete object
and state of affairs: if we become involved in it, we are transported without
transition into the eternity and enormity that unfathomably surround and
enclose us. Each object and living being, however, has its restricted place
therein. That is obvious, of course, yet Goethe emphasizes it, apparently
because he is especially eager to assert the existence of limits within infinity.
Instead of one great intermingling, everything should retain its own center
and particular outline. Everything that exists is, on the one hand, determined
from within and, on the other, limitlessly determinable from without. Goethe
is interested in the balance between inner formative powers and the
susceptibility to formation from without. Spinoza is concerned with universal
laws, but Goethe emphasizes the law of the individual. We cannot think that
a limited being exists in and of itself, and yet everything really does exist
in and of itself, although its circumstances are so interlinked that one
person must develop from others, and thus it seems that one thing is
produced by another, which however is not the case, but rather one living
being gives another the occasion to be and, in a particular condition,
compels it to exist. Goethe takes up Spinoza’s idea of the “deus sive natura”
(God or nature) but directs our gaze from the whole back to the individual.
The individual being or thing, with its distinctive significance, must not be
drowned in the whole. This insistence on the distinctive significance of the
individual distinguishes him from Spinoza, of whom he says, in his view all
individual things seem to disappear.
The second thought that Goethe emphasizes from his reading of Spinoza
proceeds from this reflection on the topic of limits in the midst of
limitlessness. In his text, he states that there is a danger that someone will
close the circle around himself and in defiant modesty let it be known that in
the truth he has found a security transcending all proof and
understanding. Here Goethe is thinking of the pious who explain the world
to themselves from a few articles of faith and think they can dispense with the
effort of cognition by claiming that one needs only to become more and more
simple and renounce all multifarious, confusing conditions. One should not
withdraw into one’s faith when much still remains to be done in order to
understand. Such self-restriction is unworthy of a thinking being. In a final
ironic remark, however, he notes that perhaps it is a blessing that nature has
made limited people content with their narrowness.
Goethe places no special emphasis on the idea of necessity, which governs
Spinoza’s work. He said all he needed to say on that subject in a letter to
Knebel: Nature’s consistency compensates beautifully for man’s
inconsistency. He does not get entangled in a tedious discussion of the
problem of free will. The stoic composure Spinoza derives from the concept
of necessity is enough for Goethe. He admires the calm that comes with it and
wishes some would rub off on him. That is why he sometimes reads Spinoza
with the greatest edification as my bedtime prayer.
As already mentioned, it was Jacobi who put Goethe back onto Spinoza.
Goethe knew that his friend was preparing to publish something on the
philosopher. What he didn’t know was that he himself would make an
involuntary contribution to that publication with his previously unpublished
ode “Prometheus” (Cover your heaven, Zeus). Goethe describes the effect of
the Prometheus poem in book 15 of Poetry and Truth, where he writes that
this innocent poem served as tinder for an explosion that opened to
discussion the most private relations of worthy men, relations they
themselves were not conscious of, although they slumbered in an otherwise
highly enlightened society. The disruption was so powerful that, because of
accidental occurrences, we lost Mendelssohn, one of the worthiest of our
men.
Jacobi’s On the Teachings of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses
Mendelssohn appeared in the fall of 1785.
The work had a complicated genesis, but the salient point was that in the
summer of 1780, Jacobi had had an extensive conversation with Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing shortly before Lessing’s death. In it, the playwright had
declared himself an adherent of Spinoza. According to Jacobi’s report,
Lessing had said, “The orthodox concepts of the divinity aren’t for me
anymore. I cannot enjoy them. Hen kai pan [One and All]! That is all I
know.” Jacobi replied, “Then you would be pretty much in agreement with
Spinoza.” Lessing: “If I must call myself after someone, I know of no other.”
Jacobi had heard that Mendelssohn intended to write a work about the
character of his deceased friend Lessing, and sent him an inquiry asking
whether he knew that in his final days, Lessing had been “a decided
Spinozist.” Mendelssohn, himself an avowed deist and strong opponent of
pantheism, was extremely upset and asked Jacobi for more information.
Jacobi composed a report of his conversation with Lessing and sent it to him.
Jacobi then heard from people close to Mendelssohn that it would be better
to “conceal” Lessing’s Spinozism as far “as the sacredness of truth allows.”
For Spinoza was still regarded as a dangerous heretic, an atheistic wolf in
pantheistic sheep’s clothing. Until then, the sole German translation of
Spinoza’s Ethics could appear only disguised as an anti-Spinoza polemic by
the philosopher Christian Wolff. And now Lessing was supposed to be a
Spinozist! Among the educated public it caused a sensation—even a scandal.
Of course, Lessing was known as a free spirit and original thinker with his
own understanding of Christianity, but he was assumed to believe in a
personal God. At least Mendelssohn assumed it. But whoever declared his
allegiance to Spinoza was denying God’s existence as man’s counterpart, a
transcendent, personal power one could pray to and who could be merciful
or not. God in the Spinozist sense is nothing more than the epitome of
everything that is and works through causality.
Mendelssohn had reacted to Jacobi’s letter with hesitation and
temporizing. He had promised an extensive answer and clarification of the
matter, but failed to deliver. So Jacobi finally published his own work in
1785. Only then did Mendelssohn compose a long response entitled “To
Lessing’s Friends,” in which he defended his deceased friend against what he
considered the slanderous accusation of Spinozism—for him the equivalent
of atheism. Before the work was published, Mendelssohn died—from anger
and distress, it was said. It was also said that Jacobi had him on his
conscience. That is what Goethe is alluding to in Poetry and Truth. In
reality, Mendelssohn had contracted a bad cold when he took his manuscript
to the publisher in January 1786, and that was what killed him.
Lessing’s profession of Spinozism had been a spontaneous reaction to
Goethe’s unpublished poem “Prometheus,” which Jacobi had shown him.
Lessing’s declaration that the orthodox concepts of divinity were no longer
for him was an expression of agreement with the poem, whose daring self-
empowerment is a defiant rejection of the gods in heaven: You’ll have to
leave my earth / Alone. . . . / I know nothing so pitiful / Under the sun as
you gods.
Jacobi had published his work on Spinoza, and included the poem without
Goethe’s permission. It irritated Goethe all the more because the overly
cautious Jacobi explicitly mentioned the possibility of censorship and
therefore had the poem inserted as a loose, unbound sheet along with a set of
instructions: “The poem Prometheus . . . has been printed separately so that
anyone who would prefer not to have it in his copy of the book does not need
to. . . . It is not entirely impossible that in one place or another, my work will
be confiscated on account of Prometheus. I hope that in such places, people
will be satisfied to remove only the culpable sheet.”
“The culpable sheet”? Goethe was outraged by the phrase even if he
understood his friend’s tactical calculation. At first, however, he was at
pains to look on the lighter side of the affair. Herder finds it amusing that on
this occasion, I’m to sit on the same funeral pyre as Lessing, he writes to
Jacobi.
In his book, Jacobi had not only developed his own religious philosophy
but presented Spinoza’s philosophy in such a comprehensible way that the
reading public was not quite sure that Jacobi wasn’t a Spinozist himself. The
work not only made the poem “Prometheus” known but also restored
Spinoza’s philosophy to a wider public. From this point on, it represented the
significant intellectual possibility of a spiritualized naturalism, an
indispensable source for the creative development of philosophy in the
following decades. With the appearance of Jacobi’s book on Spinoza, the
year 1785 became an important date in the history of German idealism.
On the one hand, there was natural philosophy’s way of seeing things. Its
starting point was nature, and from there it sought to comprehend the entirety
of the perceptible world. Some viewed nature as a blindly functioning
mechanism; others like Herder and Goethe saw it as a universally animating
principle, a vital, dynamic nature as opposed to a mechanical nature.
Common to both views, however, was their point of departure in objective
reality, a nature accessible to external observation.
In contrast to these partisans of objectivity were others who sought their
starting point in the self-awareness of the subjective mind. The extreme case
was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. For him, the model for the inner dynamics of the
world and natural processes was the free creative will that revealed itself in
self-consciousness. But starting with the subjective mind could also lead in
different directions. Jacobi, for example, sees the experience of faith as
central, while for Fichte it is thought and reflection on it. Nevertheless, their
common starting point is in subjectivity, not in nature.
So that is the great divide. Some begin with nature and, if they escape
naturalism, end up at the subjective mind. Others begin with mind and, if they
don’t get lost in the world of ideas, end up at a nature suffused with mind. Put
another way, some fetch the mind into nature, others fetch nature into the
mind. But things develop that way only if the two directions do not become
rigidly opposed to each other, with the result that some get stuck in a
naturalism remote from the spirit and others get stuck in an idealism remote
from reality. This definitive opposition, however, is what Jacobi expects:
“There are only two philosophies that are essentially different from each
other. I will call them Platonism and Spinozism. One can choose between
these two, i.e., can be gripped by one or the other, so that one must adhere to
it alone, consider it the sole spirit of truth.” Fichte formulates the alternatives
in a similar way: “These are the only two philosophical systems . . . possible
. . . . Neither of these two systems can directly refute its opposite . . . each
rejects everything about its opposite, and they have no point in common from
which they could agree and unite with each other.”
 That is not the way it would play out, however. The stimulating intellectual
activity of the following decades would be aimed at precisely such a union
of nature and spirit. Schelling and Hegel, particularly, would search for
syntheses wherein nature could be understood as unconscious mind and mind
as conscious nature. Goethe, too, was part of this great movement toward
unifying mind and nature.
Jacobi, however, put no stock in such a union. He was convinced that the
reckoning, measuring mind, proceeding with strict logic and empiricism,
would never cross the boundaries of immanence. He argued for an expanded
concept of reason. He asked whether reason was identical to the logical and
empirical operations of the mind, and he answered: no. For reason contains a
component of being able to hear. Every day—and especially as children—
we depend on what we receive and believe on faith. Faith is the main thing.
Since we know so little ourselves, we must have faith in the knowledge of
others. As a rule, we are believing confidants. We even have to believe in
our own knowledge if it is to have the power to determine our lives.
Knowledge not connected to the power of belief is pale, disappears quickly,
and is forgotten. Faith is fundamentally vital. We cannot dispense with it,
even in matters of knowledge, much less in all other areas of life. Jacobi
challenges the idea that faith plays a role only in the realm of religion—in
our relation to God—as a great misunderstanding. Faith is at work in every
personal relationship. Not only does faith connect us to what is utterly other
—i.e., God—but only in faith can we adequately encounter what is familiar
but other: our fellow human beings. We call it trust. Jacobi’s philosophy is an
attempt to designate faith as the basis for experience, knowledge, and
thought. Spinoza, who represented a completely different type of thought, was
for him an opponent of the very first order, which is why Jacobi could follow
his thought with such great understanding. He did not want to make it easy for
himself. He intended faith to stand its ground against a truly great adversary.
In the battle of faith against the pretentions of knowledge, Jacobi found no
ally in Goethe, however. At first, the latter restricted himself to a few
trenchant remarks: Spinoza does not prove God’s existence. Existence is
God. And, Forgive me that I prefer to remain silent when there is talk of a
divine being, which I recognize only in rebus singularibus.† But Jacobi
pressed him, and so he expressed his opinion at last: Forgive me for not
writing more to you about your little book! I don’t mean to seem either
lofty or indifferent. You know that in this matter, I am not of your opinion. .
. . Nor can I approve of how you use the word “faith.” I cannot allow you
to get away with this manner; it’s only suited to sophists of faith, whose
greatest interest must be to obscure and wrap in the clouds of their wobbly,
breezy realm all certainty of knowledge, since they are unable to shake the
foundations of truth.
As he wrote this letter to Jacobi, Goethe was discovering the foundations
of truth in the study of natural history, to which he now diligently devoted
himself. In a later conversation reported by Goethe’s friend Friedrich von
Müller, who became chancellor of the grand duchy in 1815, he described this
development: I came to Weimar quite ignorant of all nature study, and only
the need to give the duke practical advice in his various undertakings—
construction projects, parks—drove me to study nature. Ilmenau cost me
much time, trouble, and money, but in exchange I also learned something
and acquired a conception of nature that I would not trade at any price.
In the Sturm und Drang period, we recall, the concept of nature was a
watchword, a confession of faith. Werther vacillates between fervent
immersion in nature and repellent coldness. In the hymn “Ganymede,” nature
is Enfolding enfolded, but the poem “Divinity” declares, For nature / Is
unfeeling. Now Goethe attempts to overcome this emotional fluctuation and
arrive at a sober, objective, and pragmatic attitude. But that does not mean
that he keeps nature at arm’s length like some foreign object. It is the organs
of sensation—the nature of his own body, if one will—that are expected to
connect him to external nature. He wants to enter into a living exchange with
it. In so doing, he is quite prepared to discipline his use of those organs
through empirical research. Observation, perception, is everything, but it
must be controlled observation and verified perception. He is suspicious of
speculation and abstraction that have become unmoored from a grounding in
empirical experience. That is what he meant when he wrote to the duke of
Saxony-Gotha in late 1780 that the observing concept is vastly preferable to
the academic one.
Goethe wrote this letter at the first stage of his nature studies and still
drew a stark contrast between the observing and the academic concept. As he
worked his way into the individual disciplines, however, he no longer
divorced himself so strictly from academics, but advocated a science
supported by observation. His ideal was the careful observer. In the same
letter he wrote, May neither legend nor history, neither theory nor opinion
keep him from looking. One should not approach nature with too many
preconceptions, or the clear view will get lost. But having no idea doesn’t
work either, for then one sees nothing at all. For him, the idea of development
is a guiding principle—the notion that nature too has a history. At the time,
that was by no means self-evident. He is fascinated by the fossils he finds
imprinted in rocks. He digs them up and collects them. He investigates
geologic layers in the Harz and the nearer surroundings of Weimar, and they
tell him the history of the earth. Later he would become an adherent of
Neptunism, the theory that rocks were formed gradually by crystallization
from the waters of a primeval sea, but now he was quite open to the drama of
Plutonism, the theory that rocks such as granite were formed by solidification
from the molton state: Now if one assumes that the volcanoes continue to
the right up to Cassel and then farther to the left to Frankfurt and even
Andernach, it would then be most interesting to investigate whether and
how the enormous volcanic fury of this large stretch of country was broken
by the unshakable bedrock of the Thuringian Forest, which resisted it like
some enormous dam. Typical Goethe—his home country around Weimar is
presumed to have played the geologic role of finally arresting all that
volcanic activity! A very energetic genius loci was obviously at work.
Goethe also pursued studies in the field of comparative anatomy. That was
the specialty of the physician Justus Christian Loder, for whom Goethe
obtained an appointment to the University of Jena in order to have him
nearby. From November 1781 to January 1782, Goethe delivered a series of
lectures at the Weimar Academy of Art on human skeletal structure, in which
he treated the bones as a text to which all life and everything human can be
attached, as he wrote to Lavater. Here too, the guiding principle was history,
the idea of the great chain of being. More precisely, it was the question of the
steps by which man developed out of the animal kingdom. In order to
complete the progression of forms, he was still missing the intermaxillary
bone found in the apes but apparently not in humans. Goethe surmised that it
regressed in the human fetal stage. In March 1784, he was sent the skull of a
human embryo, on which he found a barely visible suture that he interpreted
as the trace of an intermaxillary bone. I feel such joy that all my innards are
in turmoil, he writes to Charlotte, and to Herder, I have found—neither gold
nor silver, but something that gives me untold joy—the os intermaxillare in
a human! . . . You will be heartily pleased as well, for it is like the capstone
to man. Experts were skeptical at first, although another researcher in France
had already postulated the existence of an intermaxillary bone in the human
fetus. Only Loder included Goethe’s discovery in his Manual of Anatomy.
Subsequently, Goethe investigated the rhinoceros’s horn and even had an
elephant skull sent to him. He hid it in his room so the housekeeper didn’t
think him mad.
If nature had a history, it also meant that nature was by no means complete.
History continues, in both nature and mankind. That man can open his eyes
and recognize that fact is the latest chapter in human history. Nature has
created within us an organ of cognition so that it can see and perceive itself.
This act of perception is almost a love affair for Goethe. Hence his
insistence on the use of the senses. I think a scholar by profession is
capable of denying his five senses. They are seldom interested in the living
idea, but only in what has been said about it, he writes to Merck.
Knowledge of nature is part of the whole person and therefore remains
connected to other inclinations and skills such as drawing and writing poetry.
Goethe used his drawing talent to sketch and classify landscape forms, types
of minerals and flowers, and anatomical relationships in humans and
animals. In his letters from 1782 on, he talks of plans to write a novel of the
universe. Perhaps the text about granite, quoted above, was to become a
chapter of such a novel.
For Goethe, poetry and cognition were not as separate as they would
become in later academic culture. As both a poet and a naturalist, he strove
for truth that was grounded in the evidence of the senses. Later, while
working on the Theory of Color, in which he quarrels with Newton, he
would bluster against apparatuses that refract light: it was necessary to free
phenomena . . . once and for all from the gloomy, empirical-mechanical-
dogmatic torture chamber. And he would write to Zelter in 1808, Man on
his own, to the extent that he makes use of his own healthy senses, is the
greatest and most precise physical apparatus there can be. For the time
being, however, he was happy for the support of observational prosthetic
devices such as telescopes and microscopes. A microscope enabled him to
observe protozoa, which he was at times very keen on. Some people made
fun of this new passion, but he gave back as good as he got. What are you up
to, you old metaphysician? he asks Jacobi, and continues, If you needed any
protozoa I could supply you with a few million. And another time, he writes
him ironically, However, God has also chastised you with metaphysics like
a thorn in the flesh, me on the other hand he has blessed with physics, so
that I find comfort in the contemplation of his works.
 As Goethe became more absorbed in the study of natural science, he again
drew closer to Herder. He had brought Herder to Weimar in 1776, then
became increasingly alienated from him. Although Herder had a well-paid
position as the highest ecclesiastical official in the duchy, he was dissatisfied
with it. His connections to the court were not as close as Goethe’s, nor did he
cultivate them, retreating instead into lofty resentment. He was hurt that both
the duke and Goethe hardly ever attended his church services and scarcely
concerned themselves with or budgeted enough money for the Weimar
schools, which Herder supervised. For instance, the establishment of an
academy for teacher training had long since been approved, but Herder’s
frequent reminders to begin the project were to no avail. He felt personally
insulted. Moreover, he had expected the position in Weimar to be more of an
honorary sinecure that would leave him ample time for his writing. Goethe
had made him promises to that effect, but things had not turned out that way.
Herder was overwhelmed with official duties, and his literary production
ground to a halt. He was embittered and feared that his best years were being
squandered. He regarded with envy the career of Goethe, a man whom in the
past he had patronized and treated like his pupil.
For a while, Goethe had accepted that role and allowed Herder to play the
“master.” But with the younger man’s breakthrough as a writer in 1774, their
positions began to reverse. In Weimar, Goethe was dominant and Herder felt
he had been demoted. In 1782, he wrote bitterly of Goethe to his friend
Hamann, “So now he is really a privy councilor, finance director, chairman
of the military commission, supervisor of construction down to the level of
road building, and in addition director of recreations, court poet, the author
of pretty festivities, court operas, ballets, masquerades, inscriptions, works
of art, etc., director of the academy of graphic art where during the winter he
delivered lectures on osteology; is himself everywhere the first actor, dancer
—in short, the factotum of Weimar and, God willing, soon the major domo of
the entire Ernestine branch of the House of Wettin, among whom he circulates
in order to be idolized. He has been made a baron, and on his birthday . . .
his ennoblement will be announced. He has moved from his garden into the
city and maintains a noble household, gives readings that will soon turn into
assemblies, etc. etc. In the face of all that, official business here has to look
after itself. My presence is almost useless and becomes more irritating to me
every day. Whoever knows of a position elsewhere longs to leave . . .”
 Goethe made overtures to Herder in the summer of 1783. As he had before
leaving for Switzerland, he felt the need for purification and clarification of
personal relations—as when, a few months earlier, he had reestablished
contact with Jacobi and written to the Kestners after a long silence, once
again apologizing for the trouble he had caused them with Werther. Now it
was time to renew his friendship with Herder.
Herder was ready for reconciliation. Dissatisfied with himself, he felt his
creative powers stagnating, and he was contemplating a large work on
cultural anthropology and natural history. It was a great aspiration, for there
had been nothing of the kind since Giambattista Vico. He had hesitated, but
now felt that he could accomplish such a thing. He had overcome his crisis of
confidence and was able to write fluently again, and so could confront his
old friend with self-confidence. Goethe, in devoting himself to the study of
nature, was interested in the material that also absorbed Herder. He read the
great work, Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, as it was
being composed, chapter by chapter, so filled with the work that he shared
his enthusiasm with Charlotte von Stein. She in turn told Knebel, “Herder’s
new book makes it probable that we were first plants, then animals; how
nature will mold us in the future will likely remain unknown. Goethe is now
ruminating deeply on these things, and everything becomes extremely
interesting once it has passed through his imagination. That’s how he made
me feel about his ugly bones and the dreary world of stones.”
Both Goethe and Herder were exhilarated by their renewed friendship.
They had much to say to each other and devoted themselves without envy to
conversation about works and deeds. Herder wrote to Jacobi, “Goethe visits
me often and I find his company a refreshing balm.” And Goethe wrote to
Lavater, One of the most outstanding joys of my life is that Herder and I no
longer have anything standing between us to divide us. If I weren’t so
adamantly reticent, it would all have been resolved sooner, but now it will
last.
But it was not to be forever. The friendship lasted ten years, then Goethe
met Schiller and another great friendship began.

* Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics (Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata), trans. R. H. M. Elwes,
available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm.
† Latin: individual things.
 CHAPTER 17

Should He Stay in Weimar? Difficulties of a Double Existence.

The Origins of Tasso. Ineffectual Offices. Crisis.
The Complete Works: A Graveyard of Fragments?
Goethe Wants to Change His Life. The Escape to Italy
as a Test of Self. The Risks. Departure in Secret.

....

IN SEPTEMBER 1780, GOETHE WROTE THAT HE WANTED TO RAISE

up as high as possible the pyramid of his existence. Though he was
confident he could do that in the service of the duke, complaints about the
latter accumulate over the following year in his letters to Charlotte von Stein.
The duke was a good fellow, he wrote, cordial and open, but lacked
refinement. His interests—hunting, skirt chasing, traipsing through the woods,
playing at soldiering, giving orders, political scheming in Berlin—were far
from Goethe’s own. He remained loyally devoted to the duke because he
valued him as a human being who, in his own way, knew what was right and
did it; yet he sometimes doubted that Weimar was the right place for him.
Goethe may have only wanted to alarm Charlotte and make her beg him to
stay. And perhaps she wrote him such a letter, but since her side of the
correspondence was destroyed we shall never know.
Other friends had the impression that life in Weimar didn’t particularly suit
Goethe anymore. Wieland thought he was losing weight, to Herder he seemed
dissatisfied, and people found him stiff and frosty at court. Some who thought
they had been prevented from advancement wished him gone.
Merck in Darmstadt, who had last visited Weimar in 1780, was also
convinced that his friend had held out at court long enough. Instead of
confronting him directly, Merck voiced his concerns to Goethe’s mother in
Frankfurt, who, greatly worried, wrote her son that Merck had told her to do
everything possible “to fetch Him back here, the Infamous climate there is
certainly not healthy for Him—He has accomplished the main thing there—
the duke is now as He should be, and somebody else can do the rest of the
dirty business. Goethe is too good for that etc.”
Goethe sometimes called Merck his Mephistopheles, and he was quite
irritated by his friend’s solicitude this time. In July 1781, he wrote to
Charlotte, an evil genius . . . depicts the most troublesome side of my
condition and advises me to save myself by fleeing. Goethe seems to have
had no intention of actually leaving and was incensed when others suggested
he might. In the same letter, he even told Charlotte that she and he were as
good as married and how could he think of flight under those circumstances?
Five weeks later, he summed up his earlier and current life in a momentous
letter to his mother, explaining why he was so determined to remain in
Weimar: I ask you to have no concerns on my account and not let anything
mislead you. My health is much better than I previously could think and
hope, and since it will be sufficient to do at least the greater part of what
weighs upon me, I certainly have reason to be satisfied with it. As far as
my situation itself is concerned, despite great difficulties there is also
much therein that is desirable to me. The best proof is that I cannot think
of another situation to which I would rather go at present. For I don’t find
it very seemly to yearn with hypochondriacal discomfort to exchange one’s
skin for another. Merk [sic] and others assess my condition quite wrongly;
they see only what I’m sacrificing and not the benefits I’m gaining, and
they cannot understand that I am daily enriched by daily giving so much of
myself.
He goes on to elaborate those benefits. He doesn’t mean good income or
creature comforts. They were a matter of course. The benefits are in the
development of his personality. You recall the last time I spent with you
before coming here. If such circumstances had persisted, I would certainly
have gone to the dogs. The disparity between the narrow, slow-moving
bourgeois circle and the range and speed of my nature would have driven
me wild. Despite my vivid imagination and intuition for human things, I
would still have been unacquainted with the world and would have
remained in an everlasting childhood which—mostly through conceit and
all related errors—becomes unbearable to oneself and others.
 Frankfurt, the free imperial city with a robust economic life, the city where
the emperor was elected and crowned—Frankfurt was narrow compared
with Weimar? That was news. What he must have meant was that everything
in Frankfurt was too familiar and his path in life predetermined. At any rate,
Frankfurt lacked real challenges, and so Goethe’s quick and capacious nature
was driven . . . wild. His imagination displaced his sense of reality. Inwardly
rich but unacquainted with the world, he ran the danger of conceit. The
move to Weimar rescued him from all that. How much more fortunate it was
to see myself placed in circumstances for which no part of me was
prepared, where frequent errors of comprehension and haste gave me
plenty of opportunity to get to know myself and others, and where, left to
myself and fate, I went through so many tests that I was sorely in need of
for my education, although for hundreds of others they might not be
necessary. And even now, given the way I am, how could I wish for a
happier situation than one that for me has something unending about it.
For even were I to develop new skills every day, . . . I would find
opportunities every day to apply all those qualities in ways both large and
small.
He had been able to develop in Weimar because his duties and tasks
forced him to take in and process more of the world. That is why he was
reconciled with himself and his environment. It would be irresponsible, he
writes, at a time when the trees I have planted begin to grow and when,
come harvest time, one can hope to separate the wheat from the weeds, if I
were to go away out of some sense of discontent and deprive myself of
shade, fruit, and harvest.
That was how he had worked things out, and that was how he tried to
reassure his mother about his present condition. All rumors to the contrary,
he told her, he was not unhappy, though he saved the decisive reason for the
very end of the letter: Believe me, however, that a great part of the good
humor with which I bear up under my work flows from the thought that all
these sacrifices are voluntary, and that I would only need to have post-
horses harnessed up in order to rediscover in the absolute peace of your
house life’s necessities and pleasures.
While he had talked earlier of internal and external growth, now he writes
of sacrifices, albeit voluntary ones. Yet sacrifices they remained. He thus
articulated the disparity between his spirit and his official duties, and his
confidence in being able to live with the disparity, keeping his duties and his
thoughts and writing clear and distinct. I follow my nature, as you can well
imagine, he wrote to his friend Merck, who had put his mother into such a
state, and gradually reconcile myself more and more to my onerous duties.
I buckle on my armor to fit my frame and whet my weapons in my own way.
My other hobbies continue on the side, and I always keep them up by
paying one fee or another, just as one does not like to shut down a
practicable mine as long as there is still some hope of future advantage to
it. The disparity is bearable when everything apart from his official duties is
defined as a hobby, a word that would take on a negative connotation only
much later. I’m adapting myself to this world without deviating a hair’s
breadth from the inner essence that sustains me and makes me happy.
It amounted to a double existence. Just as in my father’s house it never
occurred to me to connect the appearances of spirits with my legal
practice, I now keep the privy councilor just as separate from my other
self, without whom a priv. couns. can get along just fine. Goethe took pride
in his ability to lead this double existence. As he confessed to his friend
Knebel, by exaggerating the amount of work he had, he could fend people off
and gain time for his own interests. Or he relates how he holds a big tea once
a week, thereby fulfilling his duties to society in one go. And his double
existence did not mean the two spheres were entirely separate. Only in the
innermost reaches of my plans and resolutions and undertakings do I
remain true to myself in a mysterious way and thus tie my social, political,
moral, and poetic life back together again in a hidden knot.
That hidden knot was best found in the creative realm of poetry, so it is
not surprising that, at a time when he was acutely conscious of his double
existence, he began work on Torquato Tasso, a play that divides his inner
state between the poet Tasso and a court official (named Antonio in the final
version of the work). There is no reconciliation between these two
characters. They envy each other; and each rejects and fights within himself
what he sees completely realized in the other. Antonio is a realist, a seasoned
diplomat. He is well educated and partial to the arts, but appreciates them
only as decorative ornaments that do not even remotely approach the more
weighty business of life. He is insulted and resentful of the success at court
of a man like Tasso, who, after all, is capable only of making beautiful
words. When the Duke Alfonso of Ferrara has his sister the princess crown
Tasso with a laurel wreath, Antonio’s envious commentary is: I have long
known that Duke Alfonso is / Immoderate in rewards. Tasso seeks Antonio’s
friendship although he senses the gulf that separates him from this man.
Antonio rejects his advances, and Tasso draws his sword. Alfonso
intercedes, reprimanding Antonio and confining Tasso to his quarters, a mild
and well-intentioned punishment.
That is about as far as the draft had progressed before Goethe’s departure
for Italy. Reminiscences of Charlotte von Stein can readily be found in the
princess’s cautious behavior: her precise observation of courtly conventions
and repressed, disciplined feelings of love for the master of the word. She
says to Tasso,

And shall I tell you of another virtue

Your song appropriates, although unnoticed
We listen, and step by step we are beguiled.
We listen, and hearing, think we understand,
And cannot censure what we understand,
And in the end, your song has won our hearts.

The princess allows herself to be captivated by the magic of the words, and
she knows it. Antonio knows it too and disapproves. For his part, he remains
immune to such enchantment. And Tasso, in turn, knows he does, which is
why he explains in dialogue with the princess,

. . . He possesses—
How shall I put it?—everything I lack.
And yet, did every single god contribute
To the heap of gifts beside his cradle?
Ah no, it was the Graces who were absent,
And he who lacks a present from those fair ones,
For all that he possess, all he gives,
You cannot rest your head upon his breast.

He puts it with much beauty and grace, but to no avail: the princess does
not allow herself to be coaxed out of her reserve. She advises Tasso to get on
Antonio’s good side by maintaining decorum, whereupon Tasso gushes out a
utopian fantasy in which all that counts between two people are the pure
tones of the heart: permitted is what pleases. The princess responds:
permitted is what is proper.
That principle, Tasso objects, benefits only those who pursue their own
advantage behind a veil of decorum, like Antonio. The princess cannot
accept that and launches into an extended defense of propriety in which one
can almost hear the voice of Charlotte von Stein:

Would you know exactly what is proper,

You’ve but to ask of any noblewoman
Because they have the greatest stake in seeing
That all that happens here is right and proper.
Propriety encircles with a wall
The gentle sex, so easily offended,
and where they reign, propriety holds sway,
If insolence prevails, then they are nothing.
And if you would inquire of both the sexes,
The man seeks freedom, the woman morality.

Tasso is insulted by Antonio and put in his place by the princess. He is

permitted to feel loved, but it is a love that lacks the palpable life Tasso
longs for. He remains just as dissatisfied as Goethe was in his relationship
with Charlotte von Stein, despite all their intimacy. It was something of
which he became fully, sharply aware only in Italy. He writes to her from
Rome, employing the familiar second-person du: Ah, dear Lotte, you don’t
know how much effort it has cost and still costs me to control myself, and
that the thought of not possessing you—no matter how I twist and turn it
about—basically wears me down and consumes me. I want to give my love
for you the forms that I choose, always always—, and there he breaks off.
He would express himself more clearly only when, upon his return from
Italy, he found erotic satisfaction in his relationship with Christiane Vulpius,
a relationship he defended to Charlotte with the explanation that she herself
had laid no claim to such feelings. Charlotte behaved like the princess. When
Tasso embraces the princess with the words You’ve conquered me entirely
and forever, / So take possession of my entire being, she pushes him away
and rushes off.
Humiliated and desperate, facing the abyss, he throws himself into the
arms of his opponent Antonio. We must not forget that Antonio represents a
fundamental challenge to Tasso’s existence. He is the embodiment of the
counterprinciple that undermines Tasso’s self-confidence. Yet now, in his
breakdown, Tasso goes for support straight to Antonio, of all people, as if
this opponent represents the other, unrealized side of his being. Another
courtier, Countess Leonore Sanvitale, describes the thorny relationship
between the two: I’ve felt for quite a while: here are two men, / Enemies to
each other because nature / Could not make of them a single man.
When he began to write Tasso, Goethe felt he was just such a person,
uniting the Tasso and Antonio aspects within himself. His efforts had not
resulted in the peaceful coexistence he led his mother and many friends to
believe existed; rather, the relationship was as tense and conflicted as that
between his two characters. In Tasso he attempted to create a counterpart, in
the poetic world, to his own existence. But work on the play halted after the
first two acts—outwardly because official duties kept him from the right
mood, though possibly because he doubted that these contradictions could be
balanced. He felt torn between the demands of his literary and official
existences.
Though repeatedly assailed by doubts, Goethe had striven to fulfill the role
of an Antonio before the journey to Italy. There was discontent and irritation
and at times; the burdens of his offices were great. Yet he managed to
suppress all his troubles or meet them with good humor. He writes of one
inspection tour to the Ilmenau mine, Today, in the bustle of business, I
compared myself to a bird that for some good purpose has plunged into the
water, and as he is about to drown, the gods change his wings little by
little into feathered fins. The fish who come to his rescue cannot
understand why he is not immediately comfortable in their element. In the
same letter, he plays with another metaphor that expresses at least the hope
that it is sometimes still possible to live the right life within the wrong one: I
extract as much water as possible from these fountains and cascades [of
poetry] and divert them to the mills and irrigation canals, but before I
know it, an evil genius pulls out the stopper and everything spurts and
sprays. And just when I think I’m astride my nag and riding dutifully on
business, suddenly the jade beneath me takes on a magnificent shape,
sprouts wings, uncontrollably takes to the air and carries me away.
It was a happy event for Goethe when his jade was transformed into a
Pegasus. Some at court saw Goethe in a different light and made jokes about
him. A courtier named Karl von Lyncker wrote, “Amusingly enough, the court
horse on which Goethe . . . rode around had been given the stable name
‘Poesy,’ and they say that wherever this horse appeared with its brilliant
rider, prodigious events took place.”
By 1782, Goethe was at the peak of his bureaucratic career. He had
accomplished everything a commoner could achieve in Weimar. More
Antonio was not possible. His title was Wirklicher Geheimer Rat—“real” or
“actual” privy councilor—the highest possible title for a civil servant. He
had been ennobled and was thus officially privileged to dine with the court.
As a permanent member of the council, he had charge of military affairs and
road construction as well as the mine in Ilmenau. After the retirement of the
chamberlain von Kalb, he also supervised the duchy’s finances. He was the
director of the academy of graphic art and—as a sort of master of ceremonies
—saw to the decorations for festive events. Since June 1782, he had been
renting a large house on the square called the Frauenplan.
There was a limited amount Goethe could accomplish in his official
capacity, however. His greatest success came in the area of military affairs.
The duke had built his army to more than 500 men by 1778, naming himself
supreme commander, and drilling the troops regularly. Early in the 1780s,
with the duchy on the verge of bankruptcy, Goethe pushed through a massive
reduction of troops to only 136 men, restoring the public purse to health.
Having lost his martial toys, the duke turned his attention to foreign policy,
energetically pursuing the creation of a league of the princes of small and
medium-sized states. Goethe had himself been in favor of such an alliance in
1779, but now drew back from the plan as Prussia came to dominate the
alliance and strove to exploit it in its own interests in the struggle against
Vienna. Now the duke could indulge his passion for the military in Prussia’s
wake. Given the rank of major general and permitted to command a
contingent of Prussian troops, in 1787 the duke was sent on a political
mission to Belgium and Holland, where the citizens had risen against their
Habsburg rulers as they had in the days of Egmont. It was exactly at that time
that Goethe, in far-off Italy, was completing the play Egmont. In Goethe’s
version of the story, Egmont stirs the hearts of women more than those of his
soldiers. That’s why the duke, who otherwise was himself devoted to the
hearts of women (he contracted gonorrhea on the mission to Holland), was
dissatisfied with the play. He wanted his Egmont to be a brave soldier.
Although Goethe succeeded in downsizing Weimar’s military, he was less
effective in carrying out his other plans. Although Weimar was considered
the capital of German culture, it continued to be a backwater as far as the
condition of its roads was concerned. Goethe wanted to change that. He
ordered plans set in motion to upgrade the roads connecting Erfurt to Weimar
and Jena. Beyond that, a new road was to be built from Weimar to Naumburg.
The plans were ambitious, with multilayered paving the equal of English
standards. But the work did not proceed well. When Goethe left for Italy,
after four years of construction, nothing had been completed, but they were so
far over budget that, for the time being, further work was out of the question.
For the director of road construction, that amounted to a failure.
The Ilmenau mine, whose reopening was dear to Goethe’s heart, proved a
fiasco. The sinking of a new shaft had begun in February 1784 amid official
celebration. Goethe had made a speech that was printed in the literary
periodical Deutsches Museum that same year. It happened to be the first text
of any kind he had published in eight years, which was why the editor noted,
“It has been a long time since our readers have had anything new from their
favorite author Göthe, but he laid down his pen in order to be active.”
Goethe had surely imagined a different return to the reading public, but the
occasion did have great significance for him: And so let us not look upon the
humble opening we shall make in the surface of the earth today, with
indifference. . . . This shaft, which we open today, will become the door
through which men will descend to the hidden treasures of the earth,
through which those deep-lying gifts of nature will be brought into the
light of day. We ourselves will yet be able . . . to see and examine with the
greatest joy that which we can now only imagine in our minds.
There was a curious interruption during Goethe’s speech, an interruption
vividly recalled by an eyewitness almost fifty years later. “[Goethe] seemed
to have his speech firmly in mind, for he spoke completely fluently for a
while, with no stumbles whatever. Suddenly, however, he seemed to take
leave of his senses. It was as if his train of thought had been cut off and he
seemed to have completely lost the overview of what he had left to say. This
would have thrown anyone else into great consternation, but not him, not at
all. Instead, for at least ten minutes, he gazed calmly around the circle of his
audience, who were as if spellbound by the power of his personality so that
during the almost laughably long pause, everyone remained utterly quiet. At
last he seemed to regain the mastery of his material, he continued the speech
and brought it very handily to a conclusion, without stumbling, and did so
with as much ease and cheerfulness as if nothing at all had happened.”
 This lapse, however, was perhaps a harbinger of misfortune. Even before
his departure for Italy, the mine operators needed another injection of capital.
Goethe had to mollify the existing investors and gain new ones, which was an
additional blow to his optimism. In Italy, he waited in vain for good news
from Ilmenau. Not until 1792 did they finally reach the first ore-bearing
seam, but it soon proved to be of inferior quality. The opening to a new seam
was prevented by a catastrophic influx of water in 1796 in which several
miners lost their lives. But they still didn’t give up. One shaft remained open
until 1812, and only then was the mine finally closed for good. The
undertaking had been an economic disaster, consuming enormous amounts of
money and producing no results. For Goethe, who had discovered his
passion for mineralogy by way of the project, the end of the Ilmenau mine
was a personal defeat. In a 1797 “Self Portrait” in the third person, he wrote,
he is useful in business if the business needs a certain outcome and, in the
end, a lasting work somehow arises from it. Goethe had stubbornly pursued
the business in Ilmenau, but no lasting work had resulted.
In other areas as well, his official activities lacked much success. In his
letters, he uses the mythological images of Sisyphus, who rolls his stone up
the mountain in vain; of Ixion, who keeps his fiery wheel constantly spinning;
and of the Danaides pouring water into a sieve. In one of his letters to
Knebel, he writes that he thought he would only have to steer the boat, but
now he knows he has to tow it upstream.
He was not even spared small annoyances and needling. Goethe had
managed to establish a polite relationship with Baron von Fritsch, the former
chairman of the privy council who had initially opposed Goethe’s
appointment and probably served as a model for the figure of Antonio. But
the old animosity kept resurfacing. For example, Fritsch objected when
Goethe addressed his colleagues in the chamber of finance as meine Herrn
Cameralen (my dear councilors). If anything, they were the duke’s dear
councilors, not Goethe’s. In a long and schoolmarmish letter, Goethe
defended himself by referring to customary usage: One uses the word
“mein” to indicate a relationship to persons with whom and things with
which one is connected by inclination or duty, without thereby arrogating
to oneself mastery or possession of them.
Here he defended normal usage against officialese. On other occasions,
however, he stood up for official usage against relaxed colloquialism. The
language of bureaucrats was justifiably pedantic, he declared, for it forced
official business to slow down, which was good, because Haste is the
enemy of order.
Goethe grappled with such questions and also with more weighty ones—
questions of finance, misappropriation of tax monies, the conviction of a
woman for infanticide. At the same time, he hoped to find time to write—to
finish the chapter in Wilhelm Meister in which literature is defended against
those who would make of it merely a lovely pastime for idle hours. Wilhelm
tells his sober, hardworking friend Werner, How mistaken you are, dear
friend, to believe that such work, whose conception fills one’s entire soul,
could be produced in interrupted, cobbled-together hours. No, the poet
must live for himself, completely engrossed in his beloved object. He whom
heaven has endowed with the most precious inner life, who has received
from nature indestructible wealth, must also live inwardly, with his
treasures, in undisturbed bliss.
He wrote to Charlotte von Stein that he had spent a good hour with
Wilhelm Meister. Really, I was born to be a writer. And shortly thereafter, I
was created to be a genuinely private man and cannot conceive how it has
pleased fate to patch me into a government administration and a princely
family.
Goethe held on for a while longer and in his letters repeated formulaic
assurances that, on the whole, he was living quite happily. But he was
plagued by melancholy thoughts. His mother reacted with concern to such
letters, and he tried to reassure her: it is natural that serious things make
you serious, especially when one is pensive by nature and wants the world
to be just and good. Then he falls back into a melancholy key: Enjoy my
present existence, even if I should leave the world before you do. I have not
disgraced you with my life, I leave behind good friends and a good name,
and so your best consolation can be that I shall not die entirely.
In his official capacity, Goethe had contact with many people, but shut
himself off in his personal life. There were periods when he was on intimate
terms only with Charlotte. He wrote her (in French) that she had isolated him
from society and he had absolutely nothing to say to anyone. The only reason
he still talked was so as not to fall silent. And then he became tight-lipped
even with her. She complained, and he replied with long, voluble letters in
which he assures her of his love. In August 1785, Charlotte’s husband was
relieved of his duty—or the privilege—of dining, as head equerry, at the
ducal table. For the first time, he began to lead a normal domestic life with
Charlotte. That had a near-catastrophic effect on her relationship with
Goethe, as there were now far fewer opportunities for intimate association.
Goethe flooded her with reproaches: Just now I intended to complain that
you can leave me so alone, for with all these people I am alone in the end,
and my heart burns with yearning for you. Less than a year later, while
rereading Werther in preparation for a new printing, he wrote to her in a
similar mood of despair that he always finds that after finishing his work,
the author did badly not to shoot himself. One gets the distinct impression
that Goethe was not exaggerating when later, from Rome, he wrote to the
duke that he had been so beset by physical and moral afflictions before
leaving for Italy that they had at last rendered me useless.
In the summer of 1786, through the mediation of F. J. Bertuch, the publisher
Georg Joachim Göschen approached Goethe with a proposal to issue a
complete edition of his works. No new work of his had appeared since 1775.
Göschen guessed that after such a long time, Goethe would have some
completed manuscripts in his drawer and thought there was some profit to be
made. Goethe thought it over and then agreed to the plan, if only to have
something with which to counter unauthorized reprints and pirated editions.
As he made preparations for the new edition, he realized with a shock that
—except for Iphigenia and a few playlets and singspiele—in the last ten
years he had brought nothing to completion. Faust, Egmont, Wilhelm
Meister, and Tasso—all started but still unfinished. He had barely begun
work on the long, ambitious nature poem that he called a novel of the
universe. He would write the duke from Rome, When I undertook to allow
my fragments to be printed, I considered myself dead. How happy I shall
be when I can legitimize myself as alive by completing what I began.
While Goethe felt himself to be a writer when engaged on one of his
works, as he surveyed his collected fragments, it seemed to him that he no
longer was. In the summer of 1786, he resolved to force a decision. Either
the complete edition would be a graveyard of buried projects, or he would
complete the works he had begun. He would either become a living privy
councilor but a dead author, or he would prove to himself and his public that
the artist within him was still alive and perhaps even reborn. He would not
be able to carry out this test of himself under ordinary circumstances. He
would need an extended leave of absence from his duties.
His determination to reach a decision about being an author merged with
his old dream of going to Italy. Beneath the southern sun he intended to bring
his works to completion. That being his main goal, his luggage contained,
above all, manuscripts on which he worked wherever possible, so
intensively he sometimes feared the pleasures of the Italian paradise would
elude him. His father had been happy in Italy. Goethe recalled the pictures
and other mementoes he had brought back. And so he decided, as he wrote to
the duke, to travel a long, lonely road to seek the objects I was drawn to by
an irresistible desire. For in recent years, it became a sort of sickness that
only their sight and presence could cure me of. Now I can confess that in
the end I was unable to look at any book written in Latin, any drawing of
an Italian landscape. My lust to see this land was overripe.
He was determined to reawaken the poet and artist in himself, finish half-
completed works, and free himself up for new things; and he simply yearned
to be in Italy. In addition, he desired an interval of distance from the affairs
of state. And from—Charlotte: this separation will give you more than my
presence often did, he writes in his first letter to her from Italy.
The exact date when Goethe set his sights on Italy is uncertain, though he
seems to have made up his mind by the time he posted a July 12, 1786, letter
to Jacobi in England: when you return, I shall be removed to another side of
the world. He made his preparations in secret; only his secretary Philipp
Seidel even knew the name Goethe intended to travel under: Johann Philipp
Möller. It was also the name he used to receive the remittances he had
arranged to be sent to him along his route. Why the clandestine preparations,
and why travel incognito?
Goethe was running a risk by taking off without requesting a leave of
absence from the duke. He was expecting to be gone a few months (and had
no idea that would stretch into almost two years). He was reluctant to ask the
duke’s permission beforehand, as that would have made the trip dependent on
the duke’s favor. He wanted to decide by himself and for himself, create a
fait accompli. He would have to run the risk that the duke would be
displeased and perhaps even call him back. By giving no locations in the
letters he wrote while en route, he hoped to avoid a recall that could reach
him before he was in Rome. Only then would he feel safe because he would
be far enough away. Such was his thinking, and he carried out his plan.
A recall to Weimar was not the only risk he ran. The duke could have
withdrawn his trust in Goethe altogether and dismissed him. There is no
evidence in his letters of the time to friends and acquaintances nor in his later
writings that he ever seriously considered that possibility or its disastrous
consequences, in particular for his financial situation. That possibility was
hinted at only in a letter to the duke three months after his departure, triggered
by the latter’s silence: Do not deny me a testimony of your thoughts and
your love. Alone and cast adrift in the world, I would be in worse shape
than a beginner. Goethe seems otherwise to have been fairly certain of the
duke’s trust, esteem, and loyalty, just not certain enough to forgo the almost
obsequious tone of his first letters from Italy. One senses his hope to make
the duke forget his insubordination.
There was an irrational component to the secrecy, however, as there had
been to his journey to the Harz in the winter of 1777. Then too, he told no one
about what he had long been planning, his secretiveness tied to an inner
perplexity, for climbing the Brocken was a sort of trial by ordeal to induce a
decision about staying in Weimar. Secrecy protects the magic circle of higher
significance. And so it was with the journey to Italy. Goethe hoped Rome
would cure him, body and soul. And he kept superstitious guard for fear that
premature discussion would destroy the miraculous power of the place. At
last I can open my mouth and send you joyous greetings, he writes the duke
when he reaches Rome. Forgive the secrecy and my almost subterranean
journey here. I hardly dared admit to myself where I was headed.
Having made himself independent of the duke until he got to Rome, he
placed his fate in the ruler’s hands again once there: The length of my
present sojourn, he writes in his first letter from Rome, will depend . . . on
the signal of your assent. In constantly varied phrases he stresses that he
will return a transformed man; he begs the duke to preserve his love so that
returning, I can enjoy with you the new life I have only here learned to
treasure.
Though of course annoyed by Goethe’s secretiveness, the duke didn’t hold
it against him in the long run. Indeed, as Goethe had hoped, the trip built a
new basis for their relationship. Charlotte, however, would never forgive
him for his escape to Italy and the breach of trust it represented. Her first
reaction was to demand that he return her letters.
The practical side of his secrecy included the pains he took to remain
incognito. If he didn’t travel under his real name, he could not be recalled. In
Goethe’s secretive schemes, his pseudonyms also always had a deeper
meaning. In his first visit to Friederike Brion’s house in Sesenheim, he had
worn a disguise and introduced himself under an assumed name. And again
on his winter journey to the Harz, when he wrote to Charlotte, It’s a curious
feeling to travel about the world as a stranger. It’s as if I felt a more
genuine relationship to people and things.
As a rule when putting on disguises and assuming false names, Goethe
descended the social ladder in hopes of arriving at certain truths: not only
would others perhaps be more open and frank in their encounters with him,
but he might open up and discover facets of himself that he would not have
otherwise been conscious of. In a later letter to Schiller he would speak of
the tic by which I find it comfortable to shift my existence, my actions, and
my writings out of people’s sight. Thus I shall always like to travel
incognito, choose more modest over finer clothes, and—in conversation
with strangers or casual acquaintances—prefer unimportant topics or
rather, a less weighty way of expressing myself. I act more frivolous than I
am and thus occupy a place between myself and my own appearance, so to
speak.
And so he set off for Italy as the painter Johann Philipp Möller. The
ennobled privy councilor made himself almost ten years younger, and in
Rome he would immerse himself in a community of artists below his station,
where he then felt like a fish in water.
His departure had been well planned. He had even circumspectly
reshuffled his official responsibilities and done it so unobtrusively and
effectively that he could write the duke, In general, at the moment, I am
certainly dispensable, and as for particular tasks that have been assigned
to me, I have arranged them so that they can go along for a while without
me; in fact, I could die and it wouldn’t cause a ripple.
He left in July 1786, stopping, as he had the year before, at the spa in
Carlsbad. The Herders were already taking the waters in Carlsbad, and soon
the duke and Charlotte von Stein joined them. To everyone who saw Goethe
in the weeks he spent there, he seemed jolly and carefree. The waters were
taken in the morning; there were long rambles during the day and soirées in
the evening. Goethe read from the manuscript of Faust and had long
conversations with the duke. One evening, Goethe surprised Karl August—
and even himself—by giving the duke a rough account of his life, as if
leaving him a bequest. He did not reveal his imminent departure, however.
At three o’clock in the morning on September 3, 1786, he set off. The
company he had kept right up to the previous day felt duped. The canoness
Amelie von Asseburg wrote to the duke, “Herr Privy Councilor von Goethe
is a deserteur whom I would like to subject to the full force of martial law.
He seized his opportunity without bidding us farewell, without the least hint
of his intention. It was really quite nasty! I almost want to call it à la
françoise [sic]. No! we Prussians deceive our enemies but never employ
deceit against our friends.”
 CHAPTER 18

The Italian Journey: No Forwarding Address.

Beginning to Relax. Palladio.
I’m studying more than enjoying myself. Rome.
Iphigenia Completed. Among the Artists. Moritz.
Naples and Sicily. The Enchantment of
the Phaiakians. Second Sojourn in Rome.
Egmont Completed. Faustina. Farewell to Rome.

....

FOR THE FIRST PART OF THE TRIP—VIA REGENSBURG, MUNICH,

Innsbruck, and Bolzano to Trento—Goethe urged his coachman to hurry. They
made fewer stops than usual. In his Diary of the Italian Journey for Frau
von Stein, 1786, he noted, What all am I not leaving behind to realize a
Single Idea that has grown almost too old in my soul? That single idea was
to get to Rome. And yet, following his plan, he also took time to collect
fossils and do some botanizing. Charlotte, who was waiting for an
explanation of his secretive departure, had to be satisfied with tedious
descriptions of the climate, rocks, and vegetation. The only thing that
prevented his tarrying anywhere too long was his drive and restlessness to
get to Rome.
Goethe had other intentions as well. In fact, everything he did on his
journey was very deliberate, as his letters from the road confirm. He writes
to his mother, I shall return as a new person; to his friends in Weimar, For a
new life . . . is beginning; and to Herder, One must be born again, so to
speak.
 But is being born again something one can plan, like an assignment? And
how would the new Goethe like to be? Of course he didn’t know exactly, but
he hinted at a few things, for example, in a letter to Herder a week after his
arrival in Rome: But what I can say and what gives me the deepest pleasure
is the effect I already feel in my soul: it is an inner solidity with which my
spirit is, as it were, stamped; earnestness without dryness and a steady
character, and joyful.
Earnestness and a steady character—surely these were qualities already
well developed in the privy councilor. No change was necessary in that
regard. But he was aiming at earnestness without dryness; the stiffness some
had complained about was supposed to relax under the southern sun, and his
steady character to be combined with joy. He wanted to give of himself
without compromising himself, to loosen up while remaining securely
centered. He calls it inner solidity, and with it, he didn’t have to feel shy
about immersing himself in the picturesque life of the people. In my dress,
which usually includes wearing linen stockings (by which I immediately
slip down a few pegs), I stand in the market square, converse about every
subject, ask them questions, see how they behave to one another, and I
cannot praise enough their naturalness, free spirit, good nature, etc.
After such immersion in the crowd, he was aware of what was missing in
Weimar: I cannot tell you how much humanity I have already gained in
such a short time. But also, how I sense what miserable, lonely people we
are forced to be in our little sovereign states, because— especially in my
position—there is almost no one you can speak to who doesn’t want or
wouldn’t like to get something from you.
Sometimes Goethe spontaneously surrendered himself to a situation,
pursued some attraction down a byway, or was even led astray. He needed to
get used to such freedom again, for he had become more methodical than he
used to be. He had armed himself with guidebooks to places and works of art
and was determined to work his way through them. Most important for
travelers of the day was Johann Jakob Volkmann’s Historical and Critical
Notes on Italy. Later Goethe would pedantically direct Charlotte to please
read up on his itinerary in Volkmann, and he assigned himself a minutely
detailed sightseeing program. He did not want to be taken for some
Englishman on a grand tour, however. In Verona he bought himself some
clothes of the kind Italians wore and was also glad he could speak the
language, which he had secretly boned up on before leaving Weimar. He
mixes with the common folk: I talk to the people I meet as if we were old
acquaintances. It gives me great pleasure. He likes the colorful life of the
streets and piazzas. The people walking up and down remind you of the
loveliest pictures. The braids wound up on the women’s heads, the men’s
bare chests and lightweight jackets, the most splendid oxen they drive
home from market, the little donkeys laden with packs. . . . And then when
evening falls and in the mild air, a few clouds clinging to the mountains.
By contrast, the region from which he came seemed cold and gloomy, and
he himself felt like a Nordic bear. On another occasion he writes, but we
Cimmerians scarcely know what day is. In eternal fog and darkness, it is
all the same to us whether it’s day or night, for how often can we really
ramble and regale one another beneath a clear sky? The thought of the foul
weather that awaited him at home among the North Germans would haunt him
throughout his entire time in Italy.
Powerful descriptions of the life of the common people fill the early pages
of his travel diary, more succinct and inventive than his more verbose
depictions of paintings and sculptures. He writes of the ancient amphitheater
in Verona, When you . . . stand up at the top edge, it is a curious sensation
to be seeing something grand and yet, really, to be seeing nothing. For it is
not made to be seen empty, but filled with people. . . . Because actually, an
amphitheater like this is made to impress the people with themselves, to let
them make fun of themselves. . . . Since people are otherwise only
accustomed to seeing one another running around in a disorderly,
undisciplined crowd, the many-headed, many-minded, fluctuating beast
now sees itself united into a whole . . . and animated into a form as if by a
single mind.
He tarried a few days in Vicenza, where the buildings of Andrea Palladio
kept him. I simply keep walking around and around, exercising my eye, he
writes. Palladio’s Old Town Hall and Olympic Theater, with their free use of
antique architectonic elements, are for him majestic examples of the creative
expansion of a sublime tradition. One’s soul is raised up, he writes, and one
is made to feel the glory of a great, authentic existence.
Goethe had already acquired and closely studied some copper engravings
of Palladio’s buildings. Now he could compare them with the originals and
was overwhelmed by their reality. It was probably due to this experience of
Palladio that Goethe never abandoned classicism as his ideal. The Gothic
style that had attracted him in the Strasbourg cathedral now faded into that
distant, foggy region, and three decades later, in the final version of the
Italian Journey, he would dismiss it mercilessly: Of course, [classical
architecture] is different from our saints in the Gothic manner, hunkering
on their little corbels and stacked on top of one another, different from our
tobacco-pipe pillars, sharp little steeples, and spiky flowers. Now, thank
goodness, I’m rid of those forever!
Traveling along the Brenta River, he is again impressed by Palladio’s
buildings. Then came Venice. He entered the city in a mood of reverent awe
and also feeling relieved of a certain pressure of expectation: And so, thank
God, Venice too is no longer simply a word, a name that has so often
frightened me, always the mortal enemy of bombast.
He encountered beauty at every step—in churches, palazzos, paintings, the
picturesque street life, the gondolas, and in the singing—and was almost
overwhelmed by it. For a change of scene, he paid a visit to the workers in
the Arsenal and then made the following surprising entry: On this journey I
hope to calm my mind by way of the arts, to really impress their sacred
image into my soul and preserve it for quiet, pleasurable contemplation.
But then to turn to the craftsmen, and when I return, study chemistry and
mechanics. For the era of beauty is past; our times call only for the urgent
necessities.
Clearly, Goethe had not yet gotten far enough from Weimar, either in
distance or time. He was still in thrall to its circle of duties, the urgent
necessities of his bureaucratic activities still obtruding. Perhaps he was also
plagued by a guilty conscience; after all, not only was his salary still being
paid, but he had burdened his fellow officials with extra work. Perhaps that’s
why he was so strict in denying himself the simple enjoyment of the beauty
around him. So that even the encounter with beauty should look like work, he
repeatedly affirms that he is studying more than enjoying myself.
For days, Goethe wandered the labyrinth of streets and canals, observing
daily life and work. His respect grew as he came to see that not merely the
brilliance of individual artists and architects, rulers and financiers, had built
this miraculous city: It is a grand, admirable work of collective human
ability, a splendid monument, not of a single ruler but of a people. He
loved to hear people singing, not only in church but in the streets, and he
observed how much the Italians love public life—their understanding of how
to be open and expansive coming directly from the fact that so much of their
life took place in the streets, including such encounters as this: Today for the
first time, a woman of the streets accosted me in broad daylight in a little
alley near the Rialto. He doesn’t record whether she was successful.
Goethe stayed in Venice for seventeen days. The first phase of my journey
is finished. May heaven bless the ones to come. He continued on through
Ferrara and Bologna, his impatience to get to Rome mounting so steadily that
he didn’t slow down for Florence, speeding through the city in three hours. I
take no pleasure in nothing [sic] till that primary need is met. Far too
slowly, the trip wound through the Apennine valleys, their lovely landscapes
inviting him to linger. I will control myself and wait. If I’ve been patient
these thirty years, I can survive another two weeks.
For many attractions there is only a laconic We’ll take a closer look on
the return trip. He hurries toward Rome and can hardly wait. I don’t even
get undressed anymore so I’m all ready to go in the morning. Two more
nights! And if the Angel of the Lord doesn’t strike us down on the way,
we’ll be there. And a day later: Now good night. Tomorrow evening in
Rome. After that, I have nothing more to wish for, except to see you and my
nearest and dearest again, and in good health.
On October 29, 1786, he is there at last. Now I begin to live for the first
time, and I pay homage to my genius. In the later version of the Italian
Journey, the arrival is depicted more sedately. The exhilarating
breathlessness that characterizes the diary letters is no longer in evidence.
His arrival in Rome followed two false starts. The first was in 1775,
when he headed south in irritation that the coach that was to take him to
Weimar had not arrived on schedule. They’d caught up with him in
Heidelberg and brought him back. In 1779, on the trip to Switzerland, Goethe
would have gladly continued on to Rome, but refrained out of consideration
for the duke. This time, his success felt like a victory. I’m counting it as a
second birthday, a true rebirth, from the day I set foot in Rome, he writes
Charlotte on December 2; two months later, to the duke, I’m living a new
youth.
His circumstances in Rome really did have a touch of the student life.
Goethe had found lodging with the painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm
Tischbein, whom he had known and encouraged in the past. It was a roomy
apartment on the Corso, only a few steps from the Porta del Popolo. The
main tenants of the apartment were a former coachman named Collina and his
wife, who supported themselves by subletting some of their rooms. In
addition to Tischbein, two other young German painters lived there, Johann
Georg Schütz and Friedrich Bury. Tischbein, who already had a reputation as
a talented artist, sublet three rooms for himself, and he let Goethe have the
smaller guest room. The painters among whom Goethe found himself were
all much younger than he and not remotely as famous, circumstances that
forced him into a youthful role he was happy to adopt. There is a drawing by
Tischbein that shows Goethe sitting at his ease and reading, his chair tipped
comfortably back against the wall on its rear legs. Another shows him and
another man lounging on a sofa, Goethe on his back, thrashing his legs in the
air. They had a good deal of fun together, although his letters reported little of
it and the later Italian Journey even less. In the latter, Goethe is at pains to
be serious, and descriptions of his encounters with works of art verge on the
tedious.
He was constantly on the go, looking at what Volkmann’s guidebook
recommended. Since I’ve been in Rome, he writes to Charlotte, I have been
tirelessly looking at everything worth seeing and have really filled my
spirit to the brim with it. Occasionally, he lets a remark slip suggesting he
was finding the pursuit of art tiresome. He confesses to the duchess that it is,
namely, easier and more comfortable to observe and appreciate nature
than art. The most insignificant product of nature has the circle of its
perfection within itself, and all I need is eyes to see it. . . . An artwork, on
the other hand, has its perfection outside itself, the “best” in the artist’s
conception, which he seldom or never achieves. . . . There is much
tradition in works of art; the works of nature are always like a first word
uttered by God.
Making that tradition his own—that is, learning what one ought to know
before seeing a work of art—required special effort. It would have been
easier if all he had to do was look, and if looking alone was enough. If only
one didn’t have to talk about art all the time, he sighs in a letter to Karl
August. The longer you look at objects, the less you trust yourself to say
something general about them. I would prefer to express the thing itself in
all its parts or remain silent. He kept at it for hours at a stretch, gazing at art
and architecture. In one letter he says he feels like Orestes—not pursued by
the Furies, but harried through the city by the Muses and Graces. He knew
pretty much what he wanted to see and what one ought to see, and made no
unexpected discoveries. He was impressed by the works that any educated
visitor of the time would have named: the façade of the Pantheon, the
Belvedere Apollo, Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, the
colossal bust of Juno Ludovisi. He had a huge plaster cast made of the latter
and set it up in his room, his first amour in Rome, and now I possess her.
He worked on Iphigenia whenever he was not walking the city or
spending time with his artist friends in the first weeks after his arrival. He
was determined to finish the play. He began to feel pressure to free himself
of that sweet burden so that he could devote himself completely to the
marvelous present of the Eternal City. It was done just as the new year of
1787 arrived.
As Roberto Zapperi has discovered, during those weeks of work on the
noble, exceedingly pure Iphigenia, Goethe was also flirting with Costanza
Roesler, the daughter of a Roman innkeeper with family ties to Germany.* A
note she wrote (or had written for her) has survived in which she asks for the
gift of a fan. Her “dearest friend” should please get one for her
“immediately” and thereby prove “that there are other and perhaps even more
beautiful fans” than the one she has previously been given. All we know is
that there must have been something between the two. There is a drawing by
Tischbein, “The Accursed Second Pillow,” in which Goethe is apparently
hastily removing an extra pillow from his bed. The right half of the picture is
taken up by the gigantic bust of Juno, who sternly surveys the scene. It could
be Tischbein’s joke about a failed attempt at a tryst. To the duke, Goethe
wrote, The zitelle (unmarried girls) are more chaste than elsewhere. . . .
For either you should marry them or marry them off, and when they have a
husband, that’s the end of the story. Costanza may have been such a case. At
first, she was involved with “Filippo Möller,” but when no proposal was
forthcoming, she drew back or was reined in by her parents. In any event, by
the summer of 1787, the pretty Costanza (a picture of whom survives) had
been led to the altar by someone else.
It was proving harder than he’d hoped to find girls to flirt with. The duke,
to whom he had written of it, must have recommended painters’ models; as
Goethe answered, The girls—or rather, young women—who come to model
for the painters are sometimes extremely sweet, and willing to let
themselves be admired and enjoyed. In this way, it would be a very
convenient pleasure, if only the French influences didn’t make this
Paradise unsafe as well. The fear of contracting syphilis, the “French
disease,” would later crop up in his cycle of poems entitled “Roman
Elegies.”
 Goethe made many new friends from the beginning of November 1786
until the end of February 1787. One was the painter Angelika Kauffmann, a
few years older and well-known for her productivity. Her pictures reflected
the reigning taste for classicism and had made her wealthy. She had been
living in Rome for a few years with her Italian husband, also a painter, and
so was able to introduce Goethe to Italian artists. He spent Sundays with
Angelika, they went on excursions into the surrounding country in her coach,
he read to her from his manuscripts, and she gave him drawing lessons. She
painted a portrait of Goethe, but he didn’t think it was particularly good: He’s
a handsome fellow all right, but without a trace of me. When Goethe left
Rome, she wrote, “The day of your departure was one of the saddest days of
my life.”
He grew closer to Tischbein, who later accompanied him to Naples. I’ve
hardly ever seen such a pure, good, and yet wise, educated person, Goethe
writes about him to the duke. When Tischbein later decided to withdraw
from a trip to Sicily they had planned together, Goethe was out of sorts. He
was annoyed when people who were important to him had other
commitments. Unlike the well-off Goethe, Tischbein had commissions to
worry about and thus was not always the master of his own time. Still vexed,
Goethe wrote about Tischbein, It was otherwise a good life with him, and
there was only one tic that caused difficulty in the long run, namely, he left
everything he had to do in a sort of vagueness which, without any bad will
on his part, often caused harm or displeasure to others. Their friendship
had cooled by the time Tischbein finished a large oil portrait, Goethe in the
Campagna. The portrait pleased Goethe, and he took it home to Weimar with
him.
There was also Karl Philipp Moritz, who had made a name for himself as
the author of the autobiographical novel Anton Reiser and as the publisher of
the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Journal of Experiential
Psychology). He had worked his way up from poverty, fulfilled a long-
cherished dream to travel to Rome on foot, and was delighted to hear that
Goethe had also recently arrived in Rome. He did not dare look him up, but
they met in the circle of German artists in Rome and developed a cordial
relationship. “I feel ennobled by my contact with him. The most beautiful
dreams of years long gone are coming true,” Moritz wrote to a friend. Since
he had just published his Essay on German Prosody, he was able to be of
immediate service by helping Goethe recast Iphigenia in iambic pentameter.
In late November 1786, Moritz fell from his horse during a joint excursion
and suffered a badly broken arm, which gave Goethe the chance to show his
gratitude. He organized the care of the invalid, scheduled his artist friends to
provide nighttime care and regular visits, and himself spent many an hour at
Moritz’s bedside. He wrote to Charlotte von Stein, Moritz, who is still in
bed with his broken arm, told me bits of his life when I was with him, and I
was astonished at their similarity to mine. For me, he is like a younger
brother, with the same character, except neglected and damaged by fate
where I am favored and preferred. It gives me a curious retrospect on
myself. Especially at the end, when he confessed that he was causing his
heart’s beloved distress by being so far from Berlin.
It was not just Moritz causing his heart’s beloved distress with his
journey to Rome; Goethe had greatly offended his own heart’s beloved
Charlotte. She had had no word from him for three months, and he was taking
his sweet time with the travel diary meant for her. She could interpret his
secret departure and subsequent long silence only as a rupture in their
relationship and in her first letter to him, she was hurt and disappointed and
demanded he return all her letters.
At first Goethe was unable to see his behavior as the reason for her harsh
and bitter reaction. He even reproached her, writing, So, that was all you
had to say to a friend, a beloved who has yearned so long for a good word
from you, who has not passed a single day or hour since he left without
thinking of you. But a few days later he came to his senses: Your note pained
me, but most because I have caused you pain. Though the relationship
seemed somewhat patched up when she received a few packages of his
travel diary manuscripts (the greater part of which still lay unopened in his
house on the Frauenplan), there was an irreparable breach between them.
Charlotte writes him a bittersweet letter, which he answers with the wish
that their correspondence will not be interrupted again as long as we live
and that such faltering times in their relationship will never return again.
He has changed, he writes, has become a good deal freer. Every day I cast
off another husk.
In this letter full of promises and expectations for their future together, he
also makes plans for the rest of his journey. If those in Weimar wished it, he
would return as early as Easter. I have looked my way through Rome, he
writes Herder on February 3, 1787, and it is time for me to take a break. He
had drawn up a catalog of what he had seen in Rome and things he still hoped
to see, the latter growing steadily larger. If he really wanted to be back in
Germany by Easter, he would have needed to spend the remaining weeks in
Rome, but he decided to continue on to Naples. On clear nights, flashes of
fire from Vesuvius could be seen from the hills of Rome, an all too tempting
sight. Goethe tarried in Rome until carnival was over, then headed south with
Tischbein.
Naples was overwhelming in a different way. While it was the art in
Rome, it was nature and the picturesque Neapolitan street life that enchanted
him. Just as in Rome everything is serious, here everyone is merry and
lighthearted. That lust for life was infectious. I forgave all the people who
lose their mind in Naples and was moved to recall my father, who had
preserved an inextinguishable impression, especially of the things I saw
today for the first time: the view of the bay, the shore, Vesuvius, the gardens,
the harbor, the bustling city, the Castel Nuovo, the ridge of Posillipo, and the
grottoes. You could never again be completely downcast, he wrote, once you
had seen Naples, for you could always think back on it. I am in my own way
quite still now, and when things get too madcap, I just become more and
more wide-eyed. He was constantly on the go, exploring the rich natural
environment, hammering on rocks to examine their volcanic origin, and
climbing Vesuvius, where he gazed into the bubbling crater and walked
across the hot ground, singeing his shoes. In the botanical garden the idea of
an Urpflanze—a primordial plant—first occurred to him. Although he didn’t
actually see one, he believed it must be there somewhere in the midst of all
that lush vegetation. Along the shore he collected dried sea creatures, shells,
and stones.
Whereas in Rome he’d lived in relative seclusion and spent time mainly in
the company of German artists, in Naples he let himself be drawn into the
best society. He was a frequent visitor to the home of Sir William Hamilton
—the English envoy and a famous collector of art and antiquities—
especially on account of his beautiful mistress Emma Hart, whom Hamilton
would marry in 1791. Emma was famous for arranging tableaux vivants in
which she herself participated, usually in rather scanty attire. In the decades
that followed, the fad for arranging groups of people into live imitations of
paintings would sweep Europe.
Goethe frequented other aristocratic houses as well. In Rome, Tischbein
had opened doors for him; in Naples, it was the German painter Philipp
Hackert, who had made a brilliant career and knew everybody. He worked
for the Neapolitan royal house and introduced Goethe to the intellectual and
artistic elite of the city. Goethe now rarely bothered with the pretense of an
assumed name. By the end of his first period in Rome, he had already
stopped using it. Even at the court in Vienna, they had heard of his presence
in Rome and suspected he was on some sort of secret diplomatic mission. A
spy had even approached Tischbein and tried to sound him out.
Whether under his real name or incognito, Goethe lived free and easy in
Naples and enjoyed himself. Naples is a Paradise. Everyone lives in a kind
of drunken abandon. I’m the same way. I hardly know myself. I seem a
completely different person. Yesterday I thought: either you used to be
mad, or you’re mad now.
Until the last minute, Goethe was undecided whether he should continue by
boat from Naples to Sicily. At the time, it was a long voyage and not without
perils. The doubts about whether I should go or stay made part of my
sojourn here unsettled. Now that I’ve decided, things are going better. For
my disposition, the journey is salubrious, even necessary. Sicily portends
Asia and Africa, and it is no small thing to stand at that wondrous spot
where so many radii of world history converge.
Goethe had followed his father’s route as far as Naples. His father had not
made it to Sicily. Outdoing him was a powerful motive. Goethe boarded a
ship for Palermo with his companion, the painter Christoph Heinrich Kniep,
on March 28, 1787, and though seasick during the voyage, he worked on
Tasso in his cabin. It was the only manuscript he had brought along on this
trip. He felt he was in the belly of a whale. It was his first long sea voyage.
If you have never found yourself surrounded on every side by the sea, you
have no idea of the world and your relationship to it.
He went for long walks through Palermo and its surroundings, looked at
artworks, enjoyed the lively street life, and kept an eye out for the Urpflanze
in the lush gardens. The news of Goethe’s presence got around in the town’s
better circles. He was invited to visit the viceroy, who asked him how much
of his real life was contained in Werther. He wrote that such questions made
him want to flee to the seaside, listen to the surf, and smell the seaweed. The
blackish waves on the northern horizon, their advance toward the curves
of the bay, even the distinctive smell of the misty sea—all that conjured up
in my memory the island of the blessed Phaeacians. I hurried off to buy a
Homer in order to read that episode with greater edification.
 Goethe was turning over the idea of writing a tragedy about Nausicaa. The
daughter of the king of Phaeacia would fall madly for Odysseus and then
perish from that hapless love. In retrospect, he would write about the plan,
There was nothing about this composition that I would not have been able
to depict naturally, from my own experience. Even as a traveler, even when
in danger of arousing affections which, although they do not end
tragically, still are sufficiently painful and can become dangerous and
destructive—even in the case . . . of being taken for a demigod by the
young and for a braggart by more staid persons, of receiving many an
undeserved favor, encountering many an unexpected obstacle—all that
made me so attached to this plan, this resolution, that I dreamed away my
sojourn in Palermo, and in fact the greater part of the rest of my journey to
Sicily.
In four weeks in Sicily, Goethe wrote some text for the plan, the words
Nausicaa speaks to Odysseus, for example, revealing feelings she does not
yet recognize in herself but that hint at disaster to come:

You are not one of those deceiving men,

The strangers who come singing their own praises
And uttering smooth words . . .
You are a man, a man one can rely on.
Your lovely words have sense and context.
To my ear they sound like a poet’s song.
They fill my heart and ravish it away.

The enchanting Mediterranean atmosphere informs the story of Nausicaa: A

radiant whiteness rests on land and sea / And fragrant ether floats in the
cloudless sky. Goethe was never again able to conjure these days flooded
with sunlight and shimmering with heat, and the work remained incomplete.
He learned that the confidence man Cagliostro, known throughout Europe
and recently involved in the Diamond Necklace Affair in France, was a
Palermo native by the name of Giuseppe Balsamo, infamous in his hometown
for various nefarious escapades. Goethe, seeing the Diamond Necklace
Affair as a symptom of the disintegration of society, had quarreled with
Lavater about Cagliostro a few years earlier. Thrilled that the land of
Homeric dreams was also the home of an imposter and fraud, he paid a visit
to the family of Giuseppe Balsamo with a local lawyer familiar with the
town and to his surprise found poor but honest folk. Once back in Weimar,
uncomfortable that he had gained admission to their house with a made-up
story, he sent the family a large sum of money to salve his guilty conscience.
Goethe and Kniep crisscrossed the island, visiting Agrigento, Catania,
Taormina, and also Messina, which had been destroyed a few years earlier
by an earthquake. The desolate sight was so depressing that they resolved to
seize the next opportunity to return to Naples, and on May 11, 1787, the two
friends embarked for the mainland on a French merchantman. It was a rough
voyage of four days in which they almost ran aground on the rocks near
Capri. Goethe relates with some pride how he talked the passengers and
crew out of their panic and restored calm and confidence. By quieting the
others’ fears, he overcame his own.
They landed in Naples on May 14, and Goethe stayed another three weeks.
He had seen his fill of artworks and ruins, but not yet of the colorful bustle of
the streets. He was wary of having too romantic notions about it, however,
and looked for opportunities to really understand the people and their way of
life, so different from his own. Then one would perhaps note that, on the
whole, the so-called lazzarone [Neapolitan dialect: beggar, loafer] is not a
hair less active than all the other classes. But at the same time, one would
perceive that no one works simply to live, but in order to enjoy life—each
in his own way—and that they aim to enjoy it even while at work.
He finds this zest for living every moment to its fullest very sympathetic,
although he surmises that it is not particularly conducive to economic
progress. People are more industrious in the Nordic lands, but also slave
away at their work. They pursue their business with less cheerfulness, but
more effectively. And yet, isn’t it better to make a joke out of business
instead of allowing it to plague you, merely so that, in the end, you can make
a profit or secure an advantage? The love of life will not suffer
postponement; if you wait until you’ve reached your goal, you will have lost
it along the way.
It was in these weeks that friends reminded him of the still unfinished
Wilhelm Meister and urged him to resume work on it. After some
consideration, it became clear to him that beneath this sky, it will probably
not be possible. Why? Is it that Wilhelm is a Meister aus dem Norden—a
master from the north? Doesn’t he amble through life like a lazzarone, get
involved with women and theater troupes when he pleases, and lack any real
bourgeois ambition? Isn’t Mignon’s song Knowst thou the land where
lemons are in bloom a hymn to the South? All that would argue that the
southern sky might actually suit the Wilhelm of the Theatrical Mission quite
well. But what Goethe had in mind for his hero by that time didn’t blend so
well with the Italian atmosphere, for he wanted to make him serious and
hardworking. Mignon and her entourage would disappear and the enticements
of the South be resisted. In Naples he began to have second thoughts about
that conception: perhaps something of this heavenly atmosphere can be
imparted to the final books, he writes in a letter from Naples.
Goethe left Naples for Rome on June 3, 1787. At first, he intended to stay
only four more weeks, work through his list of sights still to be seen, and then
set off north and return to Weimar by the fall. On May 29, shortly before
leaving Naples, he wrote as much to the duke. This letter is especially
important, since for the first time Goethe clearly formulates his wishes and
plans vis-à-vis his future duties in Weimar. He writes that the court officials
Johann Christoph Schmidt and Christian Gottlob Voigt have proved their
worth in office and have taken excellent care of Goethe’s duties as well as
their own, and could continue to do so even after his return, couldn’t they?
Freed of his previous duties, without disadvantage to the running of the
duchy, for the duke he could become more than I often was before, if only
you permit me to do what no one but me can do and assign the rest to
others. And he imagines his future life side by side with the duke, what he
expects of his sovereign, and what Karl August can expect of him: I already
see how this journey has benefited me, how it has enlightened me and
gladdened my existence. As you have supported me up to now, continue to
care for me and do more good for me than I can myself, or than I can wish
or demand. Give me to myself, to my fatherland, give me back to yourself,
so that I can begin a new life with you! I trustingly place my entire fate in
your hands. I have seen such a large and beautiful piece of the world, and
the result is that I want only to live for you and in you. If I can do it less
loaded down with details—for which I wasn’t born—I can live to be a joy
to you and many others. Modesty was clearly not Goethe’s strong suit. Only
rascals are modest, he once said. If they permitted him to be what he was, he
could become a gift to others—to the duke, the fatherland, and not least, to
himself.
Six weeks after this letter, Goethe changes his mind. He asks the duke to
let him stay in Rome until Easter of 1788. And he also reimagines his future
activity in Weimar. After his return he would like to travel around the duchy
like a stranger who needs to get an overview because everything is new to
him. His intention is to qualify myself anew for every kind of service . . . if
heaven will second my wishes; then I will devote myself for a time
exclusively to the administration of the duchy, as now to the arts. I have
long groped and experimented, now it is time to take hold and have an
effect.
Once the duke granted him an extension of his unpaid leave of absence,
Goethe never again mentioned this proposal to devote himself completely to
administration. He had gotten what he wanted. Instead, he now stresses his
intensive pursuit of practical artistic skills: Art is serious business when you
get right down to it. . . . This winter I still have plenty to do, not a day or
even an hour to waste. In fact, his efforts were entirely systematic during this
second sojourn in Rome. He engaged a series of artists to teach him
perspective, use of color, and composition for his drawings and paintings.
He studied anatomy, now considering the human body the greatest work of
art. The more he immersed himself in the techniques of visual art, however,
the clearer it became that he was not a born painter. He knew his limits in
this regard, yet he now also knew that his practical exercises—even if they
were only imitative in character—would help him attain a better
understanding and a lively perception of art. When Goethe writes the duke at
the end of his time in Rome that he has found myself again; but as what?—
As an artist!, he certainly doesn’t mean the painter, but the poet.
In Rome in the late summer of 1787, Goethe felt at the pinnacle of his
newly revived creative power as a poet. He completed Egmont by early
September. It was an unspeakably difficult task that I never would have
completed without unlimited freedom of mind and body. Just think what it
means to take up a work written twelve years earlier and finish it without
revision.
He had been working on the play in the fall of 1775, in the weeks before
moving to Weimar; he closes the final book of Poetry and Truth, in which he
depicts the end of his years in Frankfurt and his departure for Weimar, with
the bold and fateful words of Egmont: As if lashed by invisible spirits, the
solar horses of time bolt off with our fate’s flimsy wagon, and there is
nothing left for us but to calmly and bravely keep hold of the reins and
steer the wheels clear of a stone on the right, a precipice on the left. Where
are we going? Who knows? We hardly know whence we’ve come.
 These words of Egmont’s at the end of the autobiography suggest the
author’s strong identification with his figure. The play had remained a
fragment for so long and Goethe had undertaken so many attempts to
complete it, not because he had lost emotional touch with it but because he
was still too close to it. In one letter to Charlotte, he called it a wonderful
play. In it he could see himself—almost too clearly—sowing his wild oats. I
only intend to try to delete all that is too much like an unbuttoned, rowdy
undergraduate in its manner.
Egmont is a man of great vitality and lust for life. Spontaneous, passionate,
hedonistic, free and easy, reckless, amicable, and energetic, he knows how to
live and let live. Goethe writes in Poetry and Truth that he gave Egmont
immeasurable love of life, unbounded trust in himself, the gift of winning
over everyone (attrattiva) and hence, of gaining the favor of the common
folk, the silent affection of a princess, the explicit affection of a child of
nature, the sympathy of an able statesman—and even endearing himself to
the son of his greatest antagonist.
Well aware he possessed this attrattiva himself, Goethe lent it to his
favorite Egmont in such an exaggerated form it bordered on the daemonic.
The description of Egmont in Poetry and Truth, quoted above, is followed
immediately by the famous reflection on the daemonic. In modern parlance,
daemonic means more or less “charismatic.” Whichever word one uses,
there is always something mysterious about the magnetism of the life force
that charismatic people emanate, for good or evil. Goethe writes that they
project an enormous strength, and they exercise unbelievable power over
all creatures.
Egmont has this charisma but is too amiable to use it in a calculated way.
He lives and embodies it, and it’s not so much what he does but what he is
that is attractive and even overwhelming. Egmont is not just the darling of
women—especially Klärchen—but of the common people as well. In their
struggle for independence from Spain, the Dutch have chosen him as their
hero and liberator. In Goethe’s drama, he is not really a political figure; he
stumbles into politics and in the end pays with his life. The Duke of Alba is
advancing. William of Orange, the politician, sees through the Spanish plans
to eliminate the untrustworthy Netherlandish nobility. Orange warns Egmont
and urges the count to join him in fleeing to safety in order to wait for a more
favorable moment to mount a rebellion. But Egmont throws caution to the
wind and ignores the warning; he puts his trust in the king, the people, and,
above all, in himself. He despises clandestine plans, intrigue, and calculation
and is thus caught in the trap Alba has set for him. That happens in act 4, the
turning point of the play. Here Alba proves to be another grandiose
character: cold, calculating, and rational, the incarnation of the daemonic in
politics. He emanates a different kind of power. The source of Egmont’s
power is his personality, while Alba embodies a system of power—
embodies it literally, which means more than just representing it. These are
the antipodes of power, personal versus suprapersonal.
Goethe struggled mightily with the contrast between his two figures,
getting hung up in the play’s fourth act all the years he worked on it. As late
as 1781, he wrote to Charlotte, My Egmont is almost finished, and if it
weren’t for the exasperating fourth act, which I hate and need to revise, I
would finish this play as well, which has dragged on for so long. On August
1, 1787, the fourth act was completed and the greatest difficulty thereby
overcome. But what did that difficulty actually consist of?
Goethe did not want to take the easy way out by reducing Alba to a
political villain. On the contrary, Alba was supposed to represent the sphere
of state power and policy in a dignified and necessary—though from
Egmont’s point of view, terrifying—way. On the basis of his own position in
Weimar, Goethe felt himself duty-bound to make him so. Although his own
official duties were utterly undaemonic and rarely a matter of life and death,
Goethe had experienced a logic at work in the realm of public policy that
was different from that in the private realm of poetry, a logic that demanded
practical actions to get things done. The poetic sensibility, for example,
values life in its uniqueness and approaches it on an individual basis; state
policy is governed by general rules, where the interest of the individual must
defer to the general interest. Poetry is anarchic; it tolerates no domination,
even by morality. Politics, on the other hand, means control and the creation
of order. Above all, government policy is dominated by a spirit of concern.
After all, that’s why the state is there: to care for the security and welfare of
the body politic in the perilous turmoil of the times. That is why, when
Goethe fled to Italy, he hoped he would be happy when finally rid of such
concerns for a while. As he wrote to Charlotte, when I banish from my mind
what I for so long regarded as my duty and really persuade myself that
man should accept the good that happens to him as lucky booty and
concern himself neither with right nor left, much less with the fortune or
misfortune of the whole.
 Goethe does not make Egmont an anarchic poet in his great dialogue with
Alba, but he does present him as sympathetic, full of insouciant vitality.
Since he is self-confident, he has confidence in his fellow man as well and
refuses to dominate others. It is easy for a shepherd to control the
movement of an entire flock of sheep, he tells his antagonist Alba, the ox
pulls his plow without resistance; but if you want to ride a noble horse,
you must learn to read his thoughts. You must never ask anything foolish of
him. Alba responds that people do not know what is good for them. They are
like children, and that is why it is the king’s intention to restrain them for
their own good, to impose well-being upon them if necessary, to sacrifice
the pernicious citizens so that the rest can be at peace. This is the voice of
absolutism, and in opposition to it, Goethe has Egmont argue like Justus
Möser, the author whose Patriotic Fantasies Goethe admired for its defense
of the rights and freedoms of the traditional estates. Like Möser, Egmont
declares that a citizen wishes to keep his old constitution, to be ruled by his
compatriots, because he knows how he is led, because he can hope from
them disinterestedness and a shared destiny. For Egmont, leadership
springs from habits and customs, insinuating itself into life instead of, as
Alba would have it, confronting life abstractly and subjugating it. Egmont is
arguing politics, but it is also clear that politics is not his real element.
Egmont is not an artist, but he is a master of the art of living, although in
the end, he pays for his insouciance with his life. But should he have allowed
his life to be spoiled sooner, spoiled by concern? In prison, shortly before
his execution, Egmont bequeaths to Alba’s son Ferdinand the words I have
lived, and you too should enjoy life. Take pleasure in it and do not dread
death. Egmont does not dread it at this moment, because earlier he has
suffered such an agony of fear that the Duke of Alba thought it unbefitting for
a nobleman and called it womanly.
During a walk in the park of the Villa Borghese, Goethe drafted the closing
scene with its dream sequence: Sweet slumber! You come as purest
happiness, most willing when unbidden, unimplored. You loosen the knots
of heavy thoughts and blend together all the images of joy and pain. The
circle of inner harmonies flows without impediment, and enfolded in
accommodating illusion, we sink down and cease to be. Goethe was
relieved when the play was completed and he could allow Egmont to
blissfully disappear. He had almost stopped believing it would ever be done.
He owed it, he wrote, to the freedom of mind he had gained in Italy.
 There is some supposition that Goethe had a love affair during his second
stay in Rome. If he did, he likely also owed it to that same freedom of mind.
The name of the beloved in “Roman Elegies” is Faustina, who is not
mentioned in the Italian Journey. However, when the Italian Journey
reports on the events of January 1788, a poem from the singspiel Claudine
von Villa Bella is inserted without transition: Cupid, wanton and capricious
boy, / You asked if I could put you up an hour! / How many days and nights
you’ve hung around, / And now you’re lord and master in this house. In the
remarks that immediately follow the poem, Goethe explicitly attempts to
quash any suspicion that erotic references are intended, but that attempt only
excited more curiosity. The same is true of a remark reported by Eckermann:
the king of Bavaria had been pestering Goethe to tell him how much of the
story [of Faustina] was factual because it appeared to be so charming in
my poems, as if there was really something to it. But it seldom occurs to
people that a poet usually knows how to make something good out of minor
occasions.
In a letter to the duke of February 16, 1788, however, there is a striking
hint. The duke had told him about a venereal disease from which he had
halfway recovered, and Goethe makes a little joke at his expense, writing
that at first, he had thought it was hemorrhoids and of course, I see now that
the damage was in the same neighborhood. The duke had probably
described the pretty girls responsible for infecting him, and Goethe responds
that he too could tell of some charming strolls. This much is certain . . . that
such exercise, taken in moderation, refreshes the mind and brings the body
into delightful balance. And as I have experienced the same more than
once, I have also, on the other hand, felt the inconvenience when I wanted
to direct my steps off the broad highway and into the narrow path of
abstention and security. These remarks would seem to support the
suggestion of a love affair in the Italian Journey’s report on the month of
January 1788.
There is other evidence adduced by Roberto Zapperi,† such as a remark in
a letter to Herder. The latter had asked for the manuscript of Goethe’s travel
diary, but he withheld it, citing the pudenda‡ he was reluctant to make
public. The bills for food, submitted by Goethe’s landlords the Collinas, may
also provide some clues. On a number of occasions, they mention an
unnamed guest who has had supper with Goethe, and this may have been his
lover. A more persuasive clue, however, is a love letter found among
Goethe’s Italian papers. Poorly spelled and ungrammatical, it says, “I fear
you are angry with me, but I hope not. I am all for you. Love me, if you can,
as I love you.” It may refer to a jealous scene like the one that plays a role in
the “Roman Elegies.” Discovered among Goethe’s papers, the letter,
problematically, is addressed to Tischbein. But as Goethe, hoping to maintain
his alias, had people write letters to him addressed to Tischbein, this love
letter could have been meant for him. Be that as it may, when Karoline
Herder told her husband that Goethe had said he had wept “like a child”
every day for the two weeks before leaving Rome, it could also have to do
with a lover who then is given the name Faustina in the “Roman Elegies.”
There had been some acrimony between Goethe and the duke in the fall of
1787, the latter having expressed a wish that Goethe be prepared to act as a
sort of tour guide for his mother, Anna Amalia, then planning her own trip to
Italy in the near future. The duke had made this request after they had already
agreed that Goethe would return by Easter of 1788. Goethe took a dim view
of having to leave his circle of artist friends for the courtly sphere while still
in Italy, and let the duke know as much. However, he still signaled his
willingness to prepare for Anna Amalia’s visit and, if necessary, to
accompany her. He was relieved, however, when the duke canceled the
entire undertaking. Goethe wrote him on March 17, 1788, I answer your
friendly, cordial letter with an immediate, joyous “I’m coming!”
On April 24, Goethe set off from Rome. A few days earlier, on a clear,
moonlit night, he had taken leave of the city by walking once more along his
often traveled route down the Corso, then up the Capitoline, which stood
there like a fairy palace in the desert, and from there to the ruins of the
Forum Romanum and to the noble remains of the Colosseum. I cannot deny
—he would write in the Italian Journey—that I was overtaken by a shower
that hastened my return.
At the very last, he recalls the elegy Ovid wrote when he was banished
from Rome to the distant Black Sea: Since that night the sorrowful image
hovers before me / Which for my soul was its last glimpse of the city of
Rome.
That was how Goethe felt at the moment: like someone going back into
exile.
* See Roberto Zapperi, Das Inkognito: Goethes ganz andere Existenz in Rom (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1999).
† In Das Inkognito: Goethes ganz andere Existenz in Rom (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999).
‡ Latin: things of which one ought to be ashamed.
 CHAPTER 19

Return to Weimar. Charlotte von Stein and Christiane Vulpius. Erotica.

“Roman Elegies.”
Meeting Schiller. Moritz and a New Concept
of Art’s Autonomy.
Art and Other Vital Forces. Tasso and Antonio Again.
Familial Bliss in the Hunting Lodge.

....

GOETHE LEFT ROME ON APRIL 24, 1788, ACCOMPANIED by the

composer Philipp Christoph Kayser, whom he had known since his days in
Frankfurt. Goethe had encouraged Kayser, made plans to write singspiele
with him, and hoped he would compose incidental music for Egmont.
Nothing much came of all that, but Kayser proved a good traveling
companion.
En route, Goethe’s letters to the duke—and he wrote mostly to him—no
longer have the melodramatic tone of the March 18 letter in which he had
expressed his willingness to return: Lord, here am I. Do with your servant
as you will. Instead, they scarcely concealed a bitterness bordering on
cynicism. His irritation also emerged in ill-tempered comments about art and
architecture, as if his eager enthusiasm was finally exhausted. He accuses the
builders of the Milan cathedral, for example, of forcing a whole mountain of
marble into the most vulgar forms. He speaks bitterly not only of many
works of art but of himself. For by the way, he writes to the duke on May 23,
I have gone terribly to seed. To be sure, I never amounted to much my
whole life, so my consolation is that you won’t find me so very different.
 He doesn’t seem particularly bothered that such a remark blatantly
contradicts earlier assurances he would return a changed, a transformed, a
purified person in order to be able to serve the duke even better than before.
Instead, a depressive tone creeps in. Bidding Rome farewell has cost me
more than is right and proper for my years, he says in the same letter to the
duke. He bought himself a hammer for the Alps and wrote to Knebel that he
would tap on the rocks to drive out the bitterness of death.
As expected, bad weather set in on the other side of the Alps: rain, wind,
cold, and low-hanging clouds. He had arrived in the foggy regions and
wondered how people could stand living here and why the devil they settled
here in the first place. If he had his druthers, he would turn around on the spot
and go back. As he rode in a carriage somewhere on the northern edge of the
Swabian Alps, between Biberach and Giengen, he wrote down some good
resolutions for living in Weimar: he would have to keep his discontent in
check.
On June 18, 1788, Goethe arrived home in Weimar. The first thing he did
the following morning was to summon his ward Fritz von Stein, and then he
called on the duke. The first person he encountered at court was Kornelius
Johann Rudolf Ridel, the tutor of the duke’s son, who described him thus:
“He has gotten leaner and was also very brown from the sun—I didn’t even
recognize him at first!”
Initially Goethe’s good resolutions bore fruit. He was more approachable
at court than before. “He proved more talkative than usual, and had really
brought back with him encouragement and contentment.” But people also
noticed that he was holding something back; that he “dwelt on details in
order to avoid main points he did not want to hold forth about.”
One point he did not want to hold forth about among his acquaintances and
at court was his relationship with Charlotte von Stein. He could not talk to
others about it, but he couldn’t talk to her either. She was unwilling to air her
grievances, and he couldn’t find the right tone; nor did he know where things
stood between them. So they tiptoed around each other and failed to clear the
air. Charlotte found fault with the situation and demanded more. Goethe
fended her off. I am happy to listen to everything you have to say to me. I
must only ask you not to be too much of a stickler for details about my
state of mind, which is so preoccupied—not to say inwardly torn—right
now. You are one person I can tell that my inner self is not like my outer
self. It was indeed so, for he was preoccupied with an event he did not want
to reveal to Charlotte.
On July 12, 1788, he had been approached by the twenty-three-year-old
Christiane Vulpius, seeking help for her brother Christian, who had been
unable to find a position after studying law. Goethe and Christiane would
always remember this date, for it marked the beginning of their relationship.
Christiane’s parents were dead, and she was living with her sister and an
aunt in Weimar in impoverished circumstances. Their father, a minor official,
had been dismissed because of irregularities in his work. A “girl of the
people,” in the language of the day, Christiane earned her keep in Bertuch’s
workshop for artificial flowers, and in Goethe’s several drawings of her, she
looks self-confident and natural. Her full, wavy hair falls freely to her
shoulders. She was not as slim as Charlotte, but more compact and
pleasingly plump. Once Goethe’s mother had had a look at her, she always
called her his “bedmate” and meant it as an affectionate compliment.
They kept their relationship secret the first few months, the only one in
Goethe’s house in the know being his faithful manservant and secretary
Philipp Seidel. Christiane was admitted through the rear entrance. Things
became less inconvenient once Knebel moved out of the garden house, which
he had occupied during Goethe’s absence. As always, the duke was the first
person Goethe informed of this “men’s business,” and the affair was treated
as private for the time being. Goethe gives a first hint of it in a little poem he
called an Eroticon about the worries of love that help drive away all other
worries, verses that would become part of the “Roman Elegies.” He wrote
that he wanted to recommend erotica to tender hearts, and continued, I do
not deny that in private I am addicted to them. And then this ambiguous
defense: I haven’t done anything I could take pride in, but much I can
enjoy.
By the spring of 1789, half a year later, the affair had become an open
secret. Karoline Herder wrote to her husband, who had since embarked on
his own Italian journey, “Now I have it from Frau von Stein herself why she
is no longer very fond of Goethe. He keeps the young Vulpius woman as his
Klärchen [Egmont’s lover in Goethe’s play], often has her come to his house,
etc.” Herder answered from Rome, where he had come into contact with
Goethe’s acquaintances, “What you write about Goethe’s Klärchen
displeases me more than it surprises me. A poor girl—I wouldn’t permit
myself such a thing for all the world! However . . . the certain way he lived
here among crude—but good—people, could have had no other outcome.”
Charlotte must have seen it in something of the same light: Italy had
corrupted Goethe. He had become “sensual,” she coolly put it once she had
gained some perspective, but in the first year after Goethe’s return, she
lacked the composure for such a characterization. She was scandalized and
wounded by his desertion. Almost fifty years old, she had one grown-up son,
Karl, and another approaching maturity, Fritz, whom Goethe had as good as
adopted. Her husband had suffered a stroke and threatened to be a permanent
invalid. She didn’t want to lose Goethe, but her pride didn’t allow her to
compete for his attention. And if she fought, she was at war with herself.
Normally poised and comme il faut, she lost her balance for a time.
Initially, she tried to avoid being in Weimar whenever possible, instead
traveling or staying at her estate Grosskochberg, near Rudolstadt. At the end
of May 1789, as she set off on a trip, she left a letter for Goethe that, to judge
by his response, must have contained a damning summary of the past few
months—a reproachful letter that forced him to defend himself. I hesitated to
answer it, he writes, because in such a case, it is hard to be honest and not
to cause injury. But he does become injurious, even as he tries to justify his
relationship with Christiane in cautious wording. What kind of relationship
is it? Whom does it injure? Who lays a claim to the feelings I grant to the
poor creature? To the hours I spend with her?
Which can only mean that Charlotte has fended off his physical desires,
and so nothing is being withheld from her when he now satisfies them with
Christiane. Of course, he doesn’t express it quite so harshly, but makes it
clear enough. And since he’s already letting off steam, he continues, But I
freely admit that I cannot tolerate the way you have treated me up to now. .
. . You oversaw my every expression, my gestures; criticized the way I
behaved. He writes himself into a fury and feels so justified that he can slip
into completely inappropriate warnings about her coffee consumption:
Unfortunately, you have long scorned my advice concerning coffee and
introduced a diet that is highly detrimental to your health. She ought not to
be surprised at her unhappiness, for coffee has reinforced her
hypochondriacal tendencies. In the next letter, of June 8, 1789, which was to
be the last for a long time, Goethe retracts his scolding tone and instead
expresses self-pity. He begins with the weather and ends with the miserable
condition of humanity. The whole business was insufferable and it took much
self-control, he wrote, not to make a plan that could little by little set one
free. These remarks are in sharp contrast to the cheerful tone that
predominates in other letters; things seem to have been going quite well with
Christiane. Another indication of his contentment are the erotic poems that
originated during this “honeymoon” period with Christiane. For the time
being, however, only his closest friends knew about these works—Knebel
and the duke, as well as Wieland, who had a lively appreciation for
everything gallant, risqué, and erotic. Women were not considered an
appropriate audience for erotica.
The secrecy surrounding these poems had a direct effect on the editing of
the final volume of his collected works being published by Göschen. Goethe
wrote to the publisher on November 6, 1788, There are reasons why I do not
want the last two poems of the first collection—“Pleasure” and “The
Visit”—printed.
Although the poem “Pleasure” was written in 1767 and had already
appeared in print, it seemed advisable not to republish it for the time being; it
is about lust being greater when one doesn’t have to pay for it, and he feared
people might connect it with Christiane. “The Visit,” on the other hand, had
really been written in the first weeks of their relationship and depicts the
beloved asleep. Her lover lets himself into her chamber, leaves two
pomegranates on the night table, and slips out again without waking her.
Although it contains nothing more suggestive than that, for Goethe it was
apparently enough that people might recognize Christiane in the charming
portrait of the beloved, presented as a child of nature. Another eroticon, the
poem “Morning Complaint,” which Goethe sent to Fritz Jacobi on October
31, 1788, slipped past his self-censorship although it alludes more clearly
than “The Visit” to his love affair with Christiane. Here, the lover is waiting
for an assignation with his mistress. He hears the cat and the mice and the
creaking of the floorboards, but unfortunately, the expected beloved never
shows up. The rising sun, usually a welcome sight, is now utterly hateful,
and the only thing left to the frustrated lover is to mix my hot and yearning /
breathing with the cool, sweet air of morning.
“Morning Complaint” and “The Visit” were the beginnings of an attempt to
capture the erotic feelings of these weeks. His pleasure was even greater
when he was able to connect his lovemaking with his memories of romance
in Rome. Having read Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius, he realized that he
could ennoble the subject by deploying forms and motifs from Roman
antiquity. Throughout 1789 his friends received bulletins about eroticis or
entertainments in the style of the ancients.
He continued to work on them until the spring of 1790. On April 3 he
wrote to Herder, I believe my elegies are finished; there is almost no trace
of this vein in me anymore. And no wonder, since at the time he was in
Venice, far from Christiane. The “Roman Elegies” were finished, but Goethe
had no intention yet of publishing them. Herder advised against it, as did the
duke, who was certainly no prude. He feared there would be talk, and it
would be better to avoid trouble. Such things were only for the cognoscenti,
not the general public. The “Roman Elegies” were not published until four
years later, at the urging of Schiller, who was looking for something engaging
for his cultural journal Die Horen. Goethe sent a version that deleted two of
the elegies, and they were finally published in 1796.
The elegies tell the story of a little love affair with a beautiful widow.
They begin with Goethe ironically making fun of his own assiduous appetite
for cultural enrichment: Tell me, oh stones, and speak to me, lofty palazzos!
/ Streets too, utter a word! Genius, not yet astir? / . . . / Certainly you are a
world, oh Rome, but unless there be love, / Then were the world not a
world, Rome then would not be Rome. Not until his Roman lover joins him
in bed does Rome come alive. First, however, her vigilant mother must be
propitiated with generous gifts: Mother and daughter enjoy their guest from
the northern lands / And the barbarian rules Romans, body and soul. The
third elegy is devoted to the theme of the unexpected. It is beautiful when
things go quickly—not the lovemaking itself, but the preliminaries: Do not,
Beloved, regret that you surrendered so quickly. / Know that I think
nothing low, think nothing mean of you. Christiane is discernible behind the
portrait of the beloved, especially in the description of her hair: Once she
appeared to me, a nut-brown maiden. Her hair / Fell, a cascade rich and
dark over her brow and down. / Shorter locks made ringlets round her
delicate neck. / Waves of unbraided hair fell from crown to shoulders. And
then the famous fifth elegy. Goethe’s contemporaries were surely asking
themselves if the subject of the poem was a fictitious Roman lover or the
very real Christiane. The question remains unanswered.

All the night long, however, it’s Amor who keeps me busy.
If I only learn half, I am doubly amused and
Do I not learn, after all, by tracing the lovely breasts’
 Forms, by running my hand down the beautiful hips?
Only then do I grasp the marble aright, I think and compare,
See with a feeling eye, feel with a seeing hand.
If my beloved steals a few hours from my day, she
Gives me hours of the night—compensation enough!
Kissing is not our sole occupation. We talk and reason,
And if she falls asleep, I lie awake with my thoughts.
Many’s the time I’ve lain in her arms and made poems,
Counting hexameter’s feet, fingers quietly tapping them
Out on her sleeping back.

Goethe deleted two elegies—originally the second and sixteenth—because

they contained, as the duke said, “a few too lusty thoughts.” One follows a
disrobing scene to its inevitable conclusion: We delight in the joys of the
genuine, naked Amor / And in the rocking bed’s charmingly creaky tones.
The other describes at great length the fear of venereal disease.
Though their publication was delayed, the “Roman Elegies” were intended
for a broad readership from the first. Some poems were shown only to the
duke and a few other intimates. They were erotica—“men’s business”—
commentaries on priapic poems from late antiquity that Goethe wrote in
Latin. Their main topic is Priapus, the god of gardens, usually depicted as a
short, stocky, bearded man with a huge, erect, openly displayed penis almost
as large as himself. Goethe’s commentaries ponder jokingly the question of
all questions, how the desired stiffening can always be made to succeed and
whether it could be of possible help to apply a searing iron to one’s pubic
hair and curl them with a curling iron. There is also a spoof of Saint
Augustine in this collection of texts written for the duke. In the City of God,
Augustine criticizes Roman polytheism for “filling the bed chamber, where
the bridesmen themselves withdraw, with a swarm of deities.” Goethe
appends a fictitious continuation he attributes to Augustine in which the
responsibilities of individual deities during foreplay and copulation are
minutely prescribed. It offered an opportunity to go into salacious detail. The
goddess Virginensis, for example, will help to untie the girl’s waistbelt . . .
remove uncomfortable clothes, will make you lustful and will spread her
thighs when you lie down upon her. And the god Subigus will not be absent
at this union . . . while you seek entry, applying your belly tenderly to the
body beneath you. Other gods and goddesses give aid until the seed has been
led to the right place and perhaps engenders new life.
Goethe wrote these texts in the weeks he was preparing to become a father
himself for the first time. Christiane was pregnant. Goethe acknowledged
paternity and was willing to take his lover into the house on the Frauenplan.
The duke was of the opinion that they could not expect Weimar society to
accept this arrangement and offered to give to his friend and Christiane,
whose pregnancy was already far advanced, two hunting lodges outside the
city walls as residences. They wouldn’t be on public display there. Although
the lodges were practical and pleasant places to live, as Goethe assured the
duke several times, the move there meant a demotion in social status. His
letters do not mention that, but it was obvious how decisively and happily
Goethe later seized the opportunity to return to his house on the Frauenplan.
For the time being, however, he put the best possible face on things. He sent
the duke a witty report on his move: I’m maneuvering into my new quarters
with great care. The heavy artillery is in the vanguard, the troops are
moving, and I cover the rear guard. The heavy artillery must be the
pregnant Christiane, the troops her entourage of aunt and sister-in-law, and
the rear guard the house servants.
The baby, a boy they named August, was born on December 25, 1789.
Two days later, on the day he was baptized, Goethe wrote to a man named
Christian Gottlob Voigt, with whom he worked in court, A sacred rite,
completed this very moment, reminds me again of the kindness with which
you promised, six months ago, to assist me in re incerta.* It has been
conjectured that this thank-you was for Voigt’s willingness to spare him and
Christiane the unpleasant bureaucratic aspects of an illegitimate birth. By the
laws in force at the time, Christiane ought to have been punished with a fine,
a public warning, and public penance. In special cases, fathers were even
called to account. So arrangements had to be made in order to avoid a
possible scandal.
In the fall of 1788, when Christiane was still visiting the house on the
Frauenplan in secret, Goethe had acquired a new neighbor who was unaware
of all this. Friedrich Schiller had come to Weimar in 1787 to investigate the
possibility of moving there. Since the duke had made him an honorary
councilor a few years earlier, he had hopes of a paid position, although of
course one as lucrative as Goethe’s was beyond his expectations. Schiller
was ambitious enough to measure himself against Weimar’s local “gods and
idolaters.” After initial meetings with Herder and Wieland, he noted, “I have
considered myself too small and the people around me too great.” His real
yardstick was Goethe, still in Italy at the time. Like others in Weimar,
Schiller was now waiting for Goethe’s return and had taken rooms not far
from the house on the Frauenplan.
Their first encounter took place in the home of the Lengefeld family, in
Rudolstadt. Schiller was visiting Charlotte von Lengefeld, his future wife,
who orchestrated the meeting of the two writers. She had an almost familial
relationship to Goethe, being a goddaughter of Charlotte von Stein. On
September 7, 1788, Goethe visited the Lengefelds with Charlotte von Stein,
her sister, and Herder’s wife. For Schiller, this first encounter with Goethe
was a disappointment. “Of course, the party was too large and everyone too
eager to talk to him for me to be able to spend much time alone with him or
talk about anything other than generalities,” he wrote to the dramatist
Theodor Körner. Goethe made no note of the meeting. He had preconceived
notions about Schiller; as he later confessed, he had been shocked at the great
celebrity Schiller enjoyed. He had hated Schiller’s first play, The Robbers,
and Schiller was for him nothing more than its author, a powerful but
immature talent who had just poured out over the Fatherland in a full,
irresistible gush the ethical and theatrical paradoxes of which I have
striven to purify myself.
Schiller sensed this disapproval at the Lengefelds’ and was more hurt than
he cared to admit to himself. In the following months, he could not avoid
observing how guests came and went at Goethe’s house, while he was kept at
arm’s length. His resentment grew until he finally gave vent to it in a letter to
Körner: “It would make me unhappy to be around Goethe very much: even
toward his closest friends there is never a moment of heartfelt effusion.
There is no way to get a handle on him. In fact, I think he is an egotist to an
unusual extent. He has the talent of captivating people . . . but he always
knows how to maintain his own independence. He makes himself known as a
charitable person, but only like a God, without giving of himself. . . . People
should not allow such a being to gain prominence among them. I find him
hateful on that account, although I love his spirit with all my heart and think
highly of him. I regard him like a proud, prudish woman whom you must get
with child to humble in the eyes of the world.” Schiller loved Goethe’s work
but hated what he saw as the privileged circumstances under which it came
into being: “This man, this Goethe, stands in my way, and he reminds me so
often that fate has treated me cruelly. How easily his genius was supported
by his destiny, and how I must struggle right down to the present moment!”
Schiller’s resentment of Goethe was not softened by the offer of a chair in
history at the University of Jena, made at Goethe’s initiative. On the contrary,
he felt himself “duped” when he learned that it was an unpaid position.
Should he consider it an honor or an insult? Körner warned him off it: “I
must tell you this much,” the playwright wrote, “that the title of professor is
not an asset for you; you are an asset for Jena.” Körner had hit the nail on the
head, for Goethe had indeed written to the privy council that they should
appoint Schiller, especially since this acquisition can be accomplished at
no expense.
Schiller moved to Jena in the summer of 1789. He tried to come to grips
with his ambivalent feelings for Goethe—so that envy would not poison him.
He had to find a way to overcome it, and that would be possible only if he
believed in himself and unswervingly followed his own path. So he put
together a strategy: he would remain in Jena, where he came to enjoy an
extraordinary reputation as a teacher, and look forward to a time when he and
Goethe might collaborate on plays for the same theater. He would avoid
expressing his intentions in the latter regard; you hit the mark best when you
don’t take aim.
Goethe was gradually realizing the extent of the younger man’s talents. For
example, he was so taken by Schiller’s poem “The Gods of Greece” that
during a coach ride he recounted it, stanza by stanza, for his female traveling
companions, if in a rather pointedly didactic recitation. He praised Schiller’s
History of the Succession of the United Netherlands from Spanish Rule for
its powerful historiography and brilliant style. And he wrote to the duke
about Schiller’s review of Egmont (which was positive, although the ending
of the play was criticized as a “salto mortale into the realm of opera”): the
moral part of the play was very well analyzed. As far as the poetic part is
concerned, the reviewer may have left something for others to do.
Though Goethe could hardly ignore the outstanding role the younger writer
played in literary life, he still kept his distance. Indeed, he kept his distance
from people in general, even more than before. It was not what had been
expected. His letters from Italy had promised a relaxation in his social
interactions. Instead, he was more cautious and reserved than ever. Some
part of this was due to his initially clandestine relationship with Christiane,
which resulted in a kind of double life. Karoline Herder had the impression
that Goethe was “wary of making any remark from which conclusions could
be drawn.”
There was another contributing factor, again noted by the sharp-eyed
Karoline Herder. “It’s just a shame that he always has his armor on.
Sometimes I see through it anyway!” Somewhat later, she intimated to her
husband, still in Italy, what she thought she had discovered: “I’ve had really
a great insight about Goethe. It’s that he lives like a poet with the whole
world, or the whole world within him. . . . He feels he is a higher being. . . .
Since I have discovered what a poet and an artist is, I don’t ask for a closer
relationship.”
She may have been right; in retrospect, Goethe himself connected this
withdrawal into my inner self, which made him seem brusque, with a mature
artistic self-assurance. In the Campaign in France he wrote, In Italy I felt
myself torn away little by little from petty thoughts, relieved of false
wishes, and my longing for the land of the arts was replaced by a longing
for art itself; I had become aware of it, and now I wanted to penetrate it. . .
. By filling our inmost being with great objects and sentiments, art
supplants all wishes for what is outside ourselves, . . . we feel less and less
need to communicate.
Thus, in retrospect, he asserts that his newly rekindled devotion to art
made him withdrawn, unapproachable, and, above all, taciturn in accordance
with the maxim Artist, don’t talk! Just create! In the first months after his
return from Italy, it was especially Tasso that he wanted to finally finish. The
duke had agreed to extend the leave from his official duties until he did so.
And a visit from Karl Philipp Moritz for several weeks in the winter of
1788–89 proved to be of great importance. His essay “On the Plastic
Imitation of the Beautiful,” which Moritz and Goethe had worked on together
in Rome, had just been published. For Goethe, it was so much a part of his
inner transformation in Italy that he later even included excerpts of the text in
the Italian Journey. He called the work the real result of our association
and stressed its share in my Tasso.
In his essay, Moritz developed an incisive and compelling argument for the
autonomy of art. His central idea is to apply Spinozism to art. Spinoza had
declared that the entire universe is God. Therefore nature—the world as a
whole—was not to be reserved for some transcendent purpose. It cannot be
of use for anything that lies beyond itself. All significance is contained within
it and is not to be found outside of it. That is, Moritz models his concept of
art on Spinoza’s concept of the world as a whole, as a self-enclosed totality
in miniature. Like the world as a whole, art is defined by the fact that it is not
subordinate, not useful, not tied to a purpose. It is a rich but self-enclosed
nexus of meaning that reveals itself only to the person who—whether as
creator or audience—seeks everything that is within it and nothing outside of
it. An artist can create only if the focus of his activity lies completely within
the work, and if he has no other considerations. If he wants to be
accommodating or make money, to satisfy political demands or conventional
morality, it will tear him away from the center of his creation and he will
lose the source of his creativity. Something analogous happens to the
audience—“recipients” of the work. Art will speak to them only if it is the
work itself that attracts; if there are no other considerations or interests.
Following Moritz, Kant would later call this lofty lack of practical purpose
“disinterested pleasure.”
The idea of the autonomy of art acquired great significance for Goethe
after his return from Italy. Could it be the way to preserve the artistic life of
Rome in the midst of prosaic, everyday life? Before Italy, the art of living
consisted of his double existence as an artist and a government official, and
Goethe recognized how important it was to keep the two separate. While one
could strike poetic sparks from life, one could not allow poetry to dominate
life.
What was new was that the idea of autonomy establishes from within art
itself the reason why it, and by extension the artist, should be allowed to
exist unto itself, a “disinterested whole” in its own self-contained world.
Previously, the separation of artist and official was imposed by the external
circumstances of life. Now it is required by the inner nature of art, and in
such a way that art is elevated, with its inner value enhanced, rather than
relegated to the status of an attractive side issue. Previously, art had been
seen to be a useless undertaking. That charge vanishes in the face of the
autonomy of art. Art is a closed circle, meaningful within itself, and for
precisely that reason not subservient to any other purpose. All possible
purposes are collected within it. Lines of intentional force lead into art, not
out of it. Where there had been insult, there would now be pride: art is no
one’s subject! Knebel, who knew Goethe very well indeed, notes with
astonishment, “Art has completely occupied his mind; he sees it as the goal
of all human advancement.”
 For the completion of Tasso, the conviction that the artist embodies the
higher man and, implicitly, may be useless in the business of life means that
both the artist Tasso and the man of the world Antonio can coexist in a way
other than as originally imagined by Goethe. Since the artist in his work
belongs to a higher, autonomous sphere, he doesn’t threaten the rights and
wisdom of worldly affairs. They are no longer competing for the same ideal.
The artist is simultaneously empowered and disempowered. Antonio says of
Tasso,

I’ve known him for years. To know him is so easy

Because he is too proud to dissimulate.
He sinks into himself as if the world
Within his bosom were enough and he
Complete in his own world, and everything
Around him simply vanished. He ignores it,
Or rejects it, lets it go, and is content—
But suddenly, as when some random spark
Ignites a mine—be it joy, or sorrow,
Anger, or a whim—he then bursts out:
And now he wants to grab and hold it all.
Whatever he thinks up has to happen now;
Something that takes years of preparation
Must now be realized this very instant,
And in an instant that must be abolished
Which years of weary work would scarce undo.
From himself he demands the impossible
So that he can demand the same from others.

In poetry anything is possible, even the impossible; politics and other

areas of life, however, deal with the art of the possible. Antonio is shown to
be right to the extent that Tasso’s incursions from poetry into other areas of
reality do not respect the inner logic of those areas. That is true not just for
politics but also for love. The princess loves Tasso, but in an incorporeal
way. Those are the rules of the game. As long as she is the unspoken heroine
of his poems, everything is in order. But once Tasso gives in to his physical
desire and actually touches her, it is an invasion from poetry into life in the
flesh. It happens in the next-to-last scene. Tasso says to the princess, I feel
myself relieved of all affliction, / Free as a god, and owe it all to you! He
feels empowered by his feelings; he overflows: My heart drives on,
unstoppable, toward you. He falls into her arms, and she pushes him away.
By the final scene, Antonio is quite prepared to acknowledge Tasso’s genius.
After Tasso’s declaration And if a man’s struck dumb by misery, / A god
gave me power to say how much I suffer, Antonio approaches him and gives
him his hand. Antonio is given more than just the opportunity to show his
magnanimity; he also gets to show that he is the wiser one who can survey
both spheres—of poetry and of practicality—unlike Tasso, who is always in
danger of becoming obsessively absorbed in poetry. Antonio tells him, And
when you seem to lose yourself entirely, / Compare yourself! Realize what
you are! Tasso is still more than just his poetic existence, as Antonio reminds
him: You’re not as miserable as you think. / Pluck up your courage! Don’t
indulge yourself. The poet in Tasso is whole and complete, but he is not the
whole Tasso. Real life is more comprehensive than the life of poetry. And
that is why, in the end, Tasso seeks stability from his opponent with the
words (they are his last), Just so the drowning sailor clasps his arms /
Around the rock he thought would be his ruin.
The autonomy of art that Goethe and Moritz found so useful is a formula
for empowerment in the sense that it enhances artistic self-confidence. It is
effective as long as the spell of art is unbroken. Then all intention and
significance are enclosed within it—Spinoza’s All is One. If the spell is
broken and the circle opened, however, what made sense and had
significance a moment ago may collapse in on itself. And then everything
depends on whether one is anything more than just a poet. Then a Tasso
needs his Antonio and the poet his privy councilor.
Goethe returned from Italy with heightened self-confidence as an artist, but
without Tasso’s illusions. He intends to be both things: Tasso, the poetic
genius, and Antonio, the wise man of the world. For his erotic life, that no
longer means just the disembodied Platonic friendship with Charlotte von
Stein, to whom, as he once wrote her, he was reciting his inner novel.
Perhaps he would have continued that friendship for a while longer in the
same way, but he needed an additional, sensually satisfying partner.
Fortunately, he found Christiane. In the end, he writes in the Campaign in
France, he might have been left alone with his poetic passion in that strange
period, if a happy domestic relationship had not known how to sweetly
refresh me.
 In 1790, at the request of the duke, Goethe set out for Venice to accompany
Anna Amalia on her return from Italy. Eager to get back to his domestic
relationship, he found little pleasure in the journey, confessing to the duke,
confidentially, that this journey has dealt a fatal blow to my love for Italy .
. . the first bloom of inclination and curiosity has fallen. . . . In addition,
there is my proclivity for the erotio I left behind and for the little creature
in diapers.
Without any lengthy journeys in the year 1791, able to devote himself
fairly uninterruptedly to his new life, he found contentment with Christiane in
the hunting lodge outside the town walls. He wrote to Knebel on March 20,
My life on the whole is pleasant and good. I have every reason to be
satisfied with my situation, and I can only wish this state to continue.
Böttiger, just beginning his post as principal of the Weimar gymnasium, left a
not terribly flattering portrait of Goethe’s circumstances at the time: “Nothing
is simpler than his current domesticity. In the evening he sits in an armchair
in a well-heated room with a white carter’s cap on his head, wearing a
flannelette jacket and long fleece pantaloons, in down-at-the-heel slippers
and drooping stockings, while he rocks his little boy on his knees . . . on the
other side, Donna Vulpia with her darning. This is the family group.”

* Latin: a doubtful matter.

 CHAPTER 20

The Revolution, this most terrible of all events.

Against Pervasive Politicizing. Goethe’s Praise of Restraint.
In the War. Goethe’s New Realism. Back in Weimar.
Revolution as Farce: The Citizen-General and The Agitated.
Atrocities in Mainz and Reineke the Fox.

....

GOETHE HAD RETURNED FROM ITALY TO VERY

ADVANTAGEOUS terms. The duke allowed him to continue to enjoy all the
privileges of office while releasing him from some of its responsibilities and
even raising his salary. He retained his seat on the privy council, was free to
attend its meetings or not, and for a while continued as pro forma chairman of
other commissions, their day-to-day business conducted by professional
bureaucrats. There was no longer much work for him to do, and he restricted
his involvement to occasional inspections. It was what he found most
congenial: getting an overview of a situation, understanding it, intervening,
planning—and then watching things develop and prosper. His one added
obligation—as principal director of the newly founded court theater—didn’t
feel like a burden. At first, it was more a hobby than a duty.
Goethe now had more time to devote to science and art, a wish he had
expressed in a letter to the duke from Rome: Accept me as a guest. Let me
fill out the entire measure of my existence and enjoy life at your side; thus
will my strength, like a hilltop spring now opened, concentrated, and
purified, be easy to channel in this direction or that, according to your
will. Asking the duke for the security and appropriate elevation for the
development of his powers placed the emphasis on the individual aspect, the
entire measure of my existence. He didn’t want to slog away at things others
could likely do better—routine administrative tasks, for example. Instead, he
wished for the space to do what he was best at. In filling out his own life, he
would at the same time enhance the life and environment of the duke—a sort
of self-realization as public service.
The societal order that enabled Goethe’s individual development in the
first place soon found itself in turmoil and under threat, however—if not in
Germany, for the time being, then across the border in revolutionary France.
Day after day, week after week, this was written about, discussed, and
vociferously trumpeted everywhere: the Tennis Court Oath on June 20, 1789,
when the deputies of the Third Estate organized themselves as the National
Assembly and, in the words of the great Mirabeau, confirmed their intention
to remain together until the new constitution was passed; the rumor of
counterrevolution and the subsequent storming of the Bastille on July 14; the
outbreak of lynch law with the first aristocrats swinging from lampposts; the
formation of a National Guard; the king bowing before it and accepting the
cockade; Federation Day on the Champ de Mars in 1790 (the largest
assemblage of people in history up to that time). And then the revolutionary
storm that swept through the country: the revolt of the peasants; the “great
fear” that had the country holding its breath; the beginning of aristocratic
emigration, with the cream of the ancien régime slogging along muddy roads
toward Germany; the king’s attempt to flee; his imprisonment, trial, and
execution; the Jacobins’ Reign of Terror; the military mobilization of the
masses; and the wars in which the revolution first defended itself against the
allied forces of the old powers, then went on the counteroffensive.
Most of Goethe’s contemporaries were immediately convinced that what
was happening in France was of world-historical importance and would
continue to evoke horror or admiration for generations to come. These events
possessed a mythic aura even as they occurred, and were interpreted as the
birth of a new age. They moved hearts and minds in Germany—in Weimar,
among Goethe’s friends and associates, Wieland and Herder were the most
sympathetic—until people began to feel their practical consequences. In
retrospect, Goethe noted that it had taken him many years to get a literary
grip on this most terrible of all events in its causes and consequences. He
couldn’t get free of it, not even when he took refuge in his plants, bones, and
color theory. And worse yet, the preoccupation with this vast subject had
unnecessarily almost sapped my poetic capabilities.
 Though he found the revolution terrible, he empathized with the
overwhelming passion driving it. In Hermann and Dorothea, his epic poem
about the revolution’s refugees, he wrote,

Who could ever deny it? Our hearts beat higher and stronger,
Beat with a pulse more pure in breasts that breathed more free
Then, when the first bright gleam of a new morning arose,
When first we heard of the Rights of Man, common to all,
Felt the thrill of freedom and sang in praise of equality!
Everyone hoped to live as he chose, and it seemed to us all that
Now the bonds in which many a land was ensnared would loosen,
Bonds that were held in the hands of idleness and self-interest.
In those teeming and urgent days all nations looked toward the
City long since become capital of the world.
Did it not now, more than ever, deserve that glorious name?

What made the revolution so terrible for Goethe? He was well aware of
the flagrant injustice and exploitation that surrounded him even in the duchy,
for which he bore some responsibility. He wrote to Knebel a few years
before the revolution, But you know that when the aphids sit on the rose
boughs and have sucked themselves nice and fat and green, then the ants
come along and suck all the filtered juice out of their bodies. And so it
goes, and we have come to this pass, that in the upper region, more is
eaten in one day than the lower region can gather / organize (ad alia)* in
one day. The greed, extravagance, and capriciousness of the aristocracy
were for him the real causes of the revolution, and so his opposition to it
could not have been founded on a simple defense of the ancien régime. In The
Agitated, his comedy about the revolution, there is a judicious countess
whom Goethe later described to Eckermann as what an aristocrat should be:
She has persuaded herself that one can put pressure on the people but not
oppress them, and that the revolutionary uprisings of the lower classes are
a result of the injustices of the upper class. In Goethe’s view, when things
come to a revolutionary pass, problems are not solved but made more acute.
Instead of selfishness from above, selfishness from below holds sway, even
more calamitous, as it is paired with pent-up fury and envy and a barbarous
lack of culture. For Goethe, the revolution was a terrible, elemental event, a
sort of natural disaster in the political world, a volcanic eruption. It was
likely no accident that, in the months that followed it, he was preoccupied
with volcanism and Neptunism and the controversy about the relative
importance of fire and water in the formation of the earth’s surface. Goethe
was an adherent of Neptunism, which claimed that the oceans slowly effect
change in the surface. He was attracted by the gradual nature of that change
and repelled by the sudden violence of volcanic change, in both nature and
society. He was on the side of evolution, not revolution.
It was not just the forced aspect of revolution that dismayed Goethe.
Revolution was terrible because he had also no illusions about its possible
consequences for himself. He feared that in Germany, too, the social order
that had protected and privileged him could be undermined and, in the end,
destroyed. The possibility awakened panicky thoughts, as it had a few years
earlier during the Diamond Necklace Affair in France, which had made an
unspeakable impression on him; revealing the decadence of the aristocracy
and monarchy, it foreshadowed a breakdown of the existing order. As he
wrote in the Annals (a chronological record of his works) for 1789, he
reacted in such a way that, to his friends, he seemed almost to have lost my
mind.
Goethe resented sympathizers with the revolution who lived well under
the old order but did not feel they owed loyalty to those who had granted
them privileges. He wrote self-ironically and provocatively to Herder, who
intermittently counted himself among the friends of the revolution, I shall
now adopt the principles of my gracious lord. He feeds me and therefore I
am obliged to be of his opinion. Even many years later, Goethe was still
irritated that people in the Fatherland amused themselves by making light
of sympathies which, after all, held a similar fate in store for us. Because
the revolution threatened his own social and material existence, it was a truly
serious matter for him—too serious to be an object of frivolous political
discussion. That pervasive politicizing engendered by the revolution was the
second aspect of the fear it instilled in him.
Politics had always been the business of the aristocracy. Whether there
was war or peace, whether you were poor or passably well-off, it was all
accepted as fate, like the weather. Now the masses were becoming
politically mobilized, and Goethe found that sinister: The masses have to
smash things / To make themselves regarded, / Their judgment is retarded.
Political opinions that went beyond one’s own experience and
responsibilities were of no use to him. You shouldn’t trust them even if they
were your own: Our part in public affairs is mostly just philistinism.
The extremely well-read Goethe could make fun of the makers of public
opinion who merely read a lot and were quick to pass judgment without much
judgment of their own. He disapproved of idle curiosity and thought that if
one seeks nothing but oneself, the search will not succeed. Active
engagement with the world was necessary, unhurried, and thorough
observation: Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world.
. . . Carefully examined, every new object opens up a new organ within us.
The emphasis is on carefully examined, indicating a relationship to reality
that encompasses more of the world than mere opinion mongering.
Although Goethe could not remain entirely uninfluenced by the politicized
spirit of the times (he bought a toy guillotine for his son, August, after all), he
was determined to seek refuge from the pressure of current events in calm
observation of natural phenomena. Meanwhile, I become by the day more
attached to these sciences [optics and color theory] and I can see that they
will perhaps eventually become my sole activity.
That wasn’t entirely so. In addition to his studies of nature, art and
literature proved a bulwark against the agitated spirit of the day. Undeterred
by the restless, politicized times, Goethe kept to his goal: the individualistic
cultivation of his personality. In Wilhelm Meister, on which he resumed
work, his protagonist writes a letter to his friend Werner reflecting on
whether it is possible for a bourgeois person to attain the harmonious
development of his personality. Aside from some exceptions, he writes, that
is really possible only for the aristocracy, whose self-assurance is founded
not on their property or their achievements but is inherent in their very being.
That self-assurance gives their lives and actions a style that never seems
strained or rehearsed, but always natural and spontaneous. Aristocratic
manners become liberated manners, and, as if without effort, a balanced
demeanor is produced. Ordinary matters are treated with ceremonious
grace and serious matters with carefree delicacy.
For the bourgeois individual, by contrast, everything is always external to
himself. He strives for possessions, develops his talents, gets things
accomplished. The aristocrat has an effect, the bourgeois provides a service.
The bourgeois is never sufficient unto himself, but always out doing things
and fulfilling obligations. And if he wants to count for something in and of
himself, it always seems pretentious. You sense his calculation and it puts
you off. It is the way society is constituted, however, that makes the
bourgeois a bourgeois and the aristocrat an aristocrat, not just externally but
from within; whether that state of affairs will change sometime, and how it
will change, Wilhelm Meister’s letter continues, doesn’t worry me much; it
is enough that, as things now stand, I have to think of myself and how I
will preserve myself and achieve what I feel to be an imperative
requirement. I quite simply have an irresistible propensity for that
harmonious formation of my nature that my birth has denied me.
At a time when the trumpets were sounding an attack on the aristocracy,
Goethe professed his esteem for aristocratic style. He knew all too well that
the bourgeois awkwardness described in the novel was his as well; we have
numerous contemporary reports of Goethe’s stiff, formal, awkward behavior
on official court occasions. It was obviously acquired rather than natural,
hence officious and forced. He lacked what he found admirable in those born
into the nobility.
Goethe abstracted a model aristocrat from the impression made on him by
the Countess von Werthern-Beichlingen: This small person has enlightened
me. She is worldly-wise, or rather she has the world, knows how to manage
the world (la manière). She is like quicksilver, at one moment dividing into
a thousand fragments and in the next running back together into a single
ball. Confident of her own value and rank, she acts with simultaneous
delicacy and an aisance† one has to see to believe. . . . She simply lives her
life among other people, and that’s exactly the source of the beautiful
melody that she plays by touching not every tone, but only select ones. She
does it with such lightness and apparent insouciance that one might think
her a child who only fools around on the piano without looking at the
music, and yet she always knows what and for whom she is playing. What
is genius in any art form—she has it in the art of living. While everywhere
else people are thinking passionately about changing the world, Goethe is at
pains to change himself. He knows that in art he is a genius, but what he
would like to learn better is the art of living.
In those politically turbulent years, Goethe was torn between his longing
for peace and privacy—for a place where I can lock up my house and
garden—and his curiosity and even lust for adventure: of being in attendance
at, and standing his ground against, historic events. On the one hand, he was
looking for a refuge from history. On the other, something drove him out into
history, but not with the expectation of finding progress, like so many of his
contemporaries. He was not seeking some grand meaning in history but rather
to bear witness and to assert himself in it. History attracted him because he
wanted to prove himself in relation to it, to wrest from it his unmistakably
individual life. On the battlefields of the wars of revolution, the defiant spirit
of his Sturm und Drang free-verse poem “To Chronos the Coachman” lived
again:

Get a move on, Chronos,

Rattle us off at a trot!
Downhill glides our road
...
Briskly bumping over
Sticks, roots, stones we trot
Hastening into life.
...
Drunk on the sun’s last rays
Pull me—a sea of fire
Foams in my eyes—
Me, blinded, staggering
Up to the night-dark gate of hell.
Blow, coachman, thy horn
Clatter the echoing hoofs
So Orcus may hear: a prince is arriving.

The first war of the Prussian-Austrian alliance against revolutionary

France began in the spring of 1792. The French National Assembly must
have seen danger in the overt preparations of the Prussians and Austrians and
the activities of the French émigrés in German territory and decided to steal a
march on them by declaring war on Austria and its ally Prussia. War was
finally at hand for Duke Karl August, who had since become a major general
in the Prussian army. He took the field at the head of his regiment of
cuirassiers and expressed the urgent wish that his friend and minister Goethe
accompany him. It was a request Goethe could not have evaded, nor did he
wish to. After Italy, he felt he owed the duke a debt of gratitude, and he was
also excited to venture out into the world, convinced as everyone that the
French troops would be easily overrun: that they would be as chaotic and
disorganized as their political situation. In one of his first letters from the
field, Goethe wrote that he counted on being in Paris soon. He promised
Christiane to bring her back one or two notions from the capital.
It didn’t turn out that way. The French army was indeed poorly prepared,
and the Prussian and Austrian troops could have seized the opportunity for a
swift offensive. Instead, they took their time, partly from arrogance. When
they finally did advance, the French were well positioned. The coalition
troops Goethe joined up with in late August 1792 had advanced via Longwy
to Verdun when heavy rains set in. Everyone is complaining that Jupiter
Pluvius has become a Jacobin too.
In Campaign in France, 1792, written thirty years after the event, Goethe
depicts the utter misery of this army train stuck in the mud. A column with
provisions could not get through, and food became scarce. The soldiers slept
in puddles. Goethe was better off; his cot was in the duke’s tent. They came
under heavy artillery fire outside Verdun but advanced to Valmy, where a
cannonade lasting several days began. Now Goethe was no longer the idle
observer he was still claiming to be on September 10. Despite the warnings
of officers, he mounted his horse and ventured out into a hail of bullets,
defying death. Later, he would describe the inner experience of this extreme
situation in the calm and objective style of the optical research he was also
conducting during the campaign: Under these circumstances, however, I was
soon able to notice that something unusual was happening inside me; I paid
close attention to it, and yet the feeling could only be conveyed in a
metaphor. It seemed as if one were in a very hot place, and simultaneously
completely permeated by the same heat, so that one felt utterly united with the
element in which one found oneself. The eyes lose none of their strength or
clarity; however, it is as if the world had a certain brownish tint that makes
one’s condition even more perceptive, as well as objects more perceivable. I
was not able to observe any agitation of my blood. Instead, everything
seemed to be swallowed up in that blaze. This makes clear in what sense one
could describe this condition as a fever. Meanwhile, it remains remarkable
that the dreadful anxiety is conveyed to us only by our ears; for the thunder of
the cannons, the howling, whistling, whirring of the bullets through the air is
the real cause of such feelings.
The cannonade continued throughout the night, as did the rain, and he dug
himself in with only a greatcoat to cover him, a premature burial. In
Campaign in France, 1792, Goethe claims that during this barrage he uttered
the famous sentence here and today a new era of world history begins, and
you can say you were there. Though there is no other witness to that, he did
write a letter to Knebel directly from the field that echoes the sentiment: I’m
very happy to have seen all this with my own eyes, and that when people
talk about this important epoch, I can say, et quorum pars minima fui.‡
They were unable to advance farther on Valmy. The coalition troops did
not even try to break through. The retreat began and turned into a disorderly
rout. Supplies were disastrously short, and they slaughtered their exhausted
horses. Dysentery was widespread. Goethe fell ill himself. The roads were
muddy and jammed, and they came under fire from pursuing French troops. It
was an inferno. And so here I also want to add that, in my misery, I made
the playful vow that if I could see us delivered and myself back home, no
one would ever again hear a word of complaint from me about my
neighbor’s gable restricting the open view from my room; on the contrary,
it’s a gable I now yearn to see. Moreover, I would never again complain of
being disgruntled or bored in the German theater, where one can always
thank God for the roof over one’s head, whatever may be happening on
stage. Via Luxembourg, Goethe reached Trier with the retreating troops,
where for the time being he was in safety. He wrote to Voigt in mid-October,
This campaign, one of the most unfortunate of undertakings, will cut a sad
figure in the annals of the world.
So much for contemporary events. For Goethe, it was like death and
resurrection. He felt as if born again. Again he was just starting to realize
that I am a human being, he writes in mid-November. After most of his
trials were over, he even permitted himself a feeling of quiet triumph: In
these six weeks we have seen and survived more trouble, adversity, anxiety,
misery, and danger than in our entire life. The duke is quite well and I too
have acquitted myself well.
His original plan was to travel home via Frankfurt. A visit he had paid his
mother on the outbound trip had been too short; they hadn’t seen each other
for thirteen years. And there were other things to be discussed in Frankfurt.
He had been honored when asked whether he would be inclined to accept a
position as town councilor. In the meantime, however, Frankfurt had been
occupied by the French, and it was impossible to travel there. At the moment
that was convenient, for the inquiry was easier to answer by letter than in
person, and once back in Weimar, he would write a letter to his mother meant
to be shown to others. In it he says that as a native of the republic of
Frankfurt, he feels extraordinarily honored by the offer, and that while it
would actually be a pleasure to assume such a responsibility in stormy times,
that desire is in conflict with another great duty: His Highness the duke has
treated me with such distinguished favor for so many years, and I am so
much in his debt, that it would be the grossest ingratitude to leave my post
at a moment when the state has most need of loyal servants. It was another
emphatic decision to stay in Weimar.
Rather than Frankfurt, he traveled down the Rhine to Pempelfort, near
Düsseldorf, to the idyllic country estate of his friend Fritz Jacobi, there to
recuperate from the bad dream he had just lived through in the cozy company
of old friends and acquaintances who quickly gathered at the news of
Goethe’s arrival. There was a palpable sense of alienation at the gathering,
however. In retrospect, it struck Goethe as so severe that, at that point in his
narrative in the Campaign in France, he recapitulates the changes he has
gone through in order to explain the present disagreement, which he reduces
to the concept of realism. It had always made him uncomfortable, he writes,
when his realism came to the fore but didn’t particularly edify his friends.
What does he mean by realism in this context? His yearning of years gone
by had given way to a partly sobering, partly satisfying fulfillment. The
longing within me—which I may have cultivated too much in earlier years
and which I strongly strove to combat as I grew older—no longer seemed
befitting and adequate for a man, and so I looked for complete and final
satisfaction. He had longed for Italy, the land of art. He had gone there; his
longing had become reality. He had found art and, through it, had educated
and reshaped himself. His brilliant élan had been coupled with a degree of
competence and knowledge. For the Göschen edition he had brought to
completion works that had remained unfinished for years. That too meant a
gain in reality, for a fragment represents only the possibility of a work. He
had also abandoned the enthusiast’s lyrical encounter with nature and had
instead begun to study and investigate it. In other words, Goethe now felt
himself to be someone who had not only gained a more realistic attitude but
also become more real himself.
Perhaps even too real. The hostilities he had just lived through had
hardened his mind for the present. His friends in Pempelfort had asked him
to read from Iphigenia, but he could not bear to do so: I felt alienated from
the sense of tenderness.
Goethe remained there for four weeks and then paid a visit to Princess
Adelheid Amalie Gallitzin, the daughter of a Prussian field marshal and wife
of a Russian diplomat, and her circle of friends in Münster. In this group of
aristocratic, spiritual Catholics, the sense of tenderness was actually the
order of the day. The princess reminded him of Fräulein von Klettenberg, and
the enchantment of those youthful recollections helped him to fit in now. The
princess and her friends were pious and he behaved accordingly, which was
made all the easier by the fact that these believers were convivial, clever,
and not narrow-minded. They got along well with one another and were in
agreement that any admiration for a worthy object is always accompanied
by a religious feeling.
Goethe returned to Weimar shortly before Christmas 1792. He informed
Christiane of his imminent arrival with the words Be cheerful, my dear
child. Enjoy your peace and quiet while so many thousands of people have
been driven from house and home and all their possessions and wander the
world without knowing where to go. Kiss the little fellow and love me. My
only wish is to soon possess you once more.
Home at last with Christiane and his son, Goethe felt like a drowning man
who had made it to shore. This experience of love in a cozy nest far from the
affairs of the great world played a part in Goethe’s first play directly
addressing the consequences of the revolution. In only three days, from April
23 to 26, 1793, he wrote the one-act comedy The Citizen-General as a
sequel to a popular French comedy about a rascally barber by the name of
Schnaps. Goethe also borrowed other characters from the French play,
quickly supplying something current to the Weimar theater where the Schnaps
comedy had been a hit. He called the play a testimony to my annoyingly
good mood. He was annoyed by the popularity of the revolution in German
public opinion and sought to maintain his good mood by making fun of the
revolution through grotesque exaggeration.
Schnaps has taken the uniform, liberty cap, cockade, and saber from a
French prisoner of war. Thus costumed, he declares himself to be a
representative of the revolutionary government and orders the gullible
peasant Märten—whose mind has been damaged by reading too many
newspapers—to give him a free breakfast of sour milk and bread as a
patriotic contribution. Märten’s son-in-law Görge, smelling a rat, comes in
from the fields and gives Schnaps a thrashing. The commotion brings the
village judge running, and the entire house is suspected of being a nest of
Jacobins. In the end, the prudent estate owner restores order and contentment.
Schnaps is just sent about his business, not even punished, which would only
excite alarm and distrust in a peaceful country. The play ends with the wise
estate owner’s summation, where all classes treat each other fairly, where
no one is prevented from working at his own job, where useful insights and
skills are generally disseminated . . . but rebellious attitudes of entire
nations will have no influence. We will give quiet thanks that we see a
sunny sky above us, while elsewhere storms of misfortune hail down over
vast tracts of land.
Despite this sententious ending, the play’s witty, succinct dialogue makes
for a brisk tempo. In the background, the revolution threatens to be a
calamity, but in the foreground, it is a farce. In the end, other things count for
more here, for example, that Görge and his bride Röse have already been
married for twelve weeks and are still in love. He tells her, People say that
as husband and wife, you don’t love each other as much as you used to. It’s
not true, Röse. How long have we had each other already? Here Goethe
was speaking from the heart. He’d been living with Christiane for almost
three years now, and they still loved each other.
In its day, The Citizen-General was one of Goethe’s most successful
plays, a fact he later sought to suppress. He claimed it had had an unpleasant
reception. In fact, the lightweight farce was performed more often than
Iphigenia or Tasso—fifteen times in the first few years. Goethe did not care
to acknowledge the play, and it was not included in the occasional series
entitled New Works, issued by the Berlin publisher Unger.
Encouraged by its popularity, however, Goethe immediately began work
on a new play that would also treat the consequences of the revolution in
Germany. He had apparently become convinced that it would occur twice: in
France as tragedy, then in Germany as farce. He never finished he work,
entitled The Agitated, but thirty years later he told Eckermann that one could
to a certain extent regard it as my political creed at that time.
The play is considerably more serious than The Citizen-General. A
protest movement arises out of the oppressive conditions of peasant life
which are the backdrop of the play. Only the spokespersons of that protest
appear onstage. They are the supposedly educated peasants, that is, those
who can read the newspaper and think they know what’s going on in France.
They are eager to replay the great scenes of the revolution and to bask in its
reflected glory. Breme von Bremsfeld, the ringleader of this agitated group,
declares, How often these valiant heroes have been painted and etched in
copper! And we will enjoy that honor as well. We will go down in posterity
in that pose.
The imposter citizen-general Schnaps wore a disguise. The disguise of the
agitated peasants is ideological and rhetorical, but the fraudulent effect is the
same. As in The Citizen-General, it is the sensible aristocrats who reassert
order and justice. The spunky young countess holds a rifle on a treacherous
bailiff while demanding a document that justifies the actions of the peasants.
The young countess’s mother embodies wisdom and virtue, and Goethe puts
his political creed into her mouth: Ever since I perceived how easily
unfairness builds up from generation to generation, and how most
generous acts are merely personal gestures and apparently, only self-
interest is hereditary; ever since I have seen with my own eyes that human
nature can be beaten down and humiliated but not crushed or destroyed, I
have made a solemn resolution to strictly avoid every single action that
seems unfair to me and to express my opinion about such actions to my
family, in company, at court, and in town. I will no longer keep silent about
any injustice, nor accept any petty tyranny for the sake of some apparent
greater good, even if I should be labeled with the hated name of democrat.
The response of a bourgeois privy councilor in the play can be considered
part of Goethe’s political creed as well. He declares that what the countess
has said is right, and upholds the principle that Each of us is able to judge
and reprove only his own class. Any critique of one’s superiors or inferiors
is always contaminated by peripheral concepts, for example, envy of the
former or contempt for the latter. Everyone should keep his own house in
order—and that should go for contact between social classes as well. What
remains unsaid is that pressure from below was necessary to produce the
countess’s laudable sentiments, something she indirectly admits: I used to
take it too lightly when some property owner was unjust.
Goethe soon put the play aside without finishing it. Even though it was
important to him to articulate some of his political convictions, he realized
that a farcical chamber drama was incommensurate with the enormous events
in France: the September massacres, the arrest and execution of the royal
family, the bloody insurrections in the provinces, the carnage, and finally the
beginning of Jacobin terror. The play was more suited to the tone of the
student unrest in Jena, which featured fistfights on the market square,
wrangles with the police, stone throwing, nocturnal caterwauling, and a
protest march out of the town. Since students were an important source of
income for Jena, this unrest was enough to keep the privy council busy for
days. Even Goethe took his council seat for the deliberations.
Then the duke called upon him to be his battlefield companion one more
time. From May to August 1793, Goethe took part in the allies’ siege and
capture of Mainz. Under the protection of French troops, friends of the
revolution in Mainz—among them Georg Forster, whom Goethe had visited
only the year before—had proclaimed a republic. An end was to be put to
that and the insubordination punished. Atrocities were committed on both
sides. The French drove noncombatants out of the city, including old people,
women, and children. The besiegers—with equal cruelty, as Goethe noted—
left the helpless civilians to their fate, without supplies or shelter. For three
weeks, the town was attacked with explosives and incendiary bombs, mostly
at night. There were fires everywhere, and during the beautiful summer days
heavy smoke lay over the city. People from the surrounding countryside
gathered to watch the bombardment. On one lovely Sunday morning, the
thunder of cannon was mixed with more delicate tones as oboists played for
a party of officers. The duke and Goethe were present, and the latter wrote to
Jacobi, On the one hand, we’re having a jolly time, and on the other, it’s
sad. We’re actors in a real historical drama (cf. Shakesp. As You Like It or
The Friends), in which I represent Jaques in my own way. In the
foreground, pretty women and wine jugs, in the background flames, just
like a depiction of Lot and his daughters.
The city endured terrible things, and it was not even the victorious troops
who acted with particular cruelty. Worse were the inhabitants who were in a
mood to take revenge on the revolutionaries. At first, Goethe found it to be in
order that the French soldiers were granted free passage but not the
“clubbists,” Mainz’s home-grown revolutionaries. They should have to
answer to those who had suffered under their administration. The misery
these people have caused is great, he wrote to Jacobi. As the mood of the
furious crowd grew more ugly, however, Goethe (as he later claimed) tried
to intervene and calm things down. But perhaps he was not as calm and
commanding after all. His letters of the time, at least, speak a different
language. What he was forced to witness in Mainz affected him so deeply
that he was almost paralyzed: In my present situation I am befallen by a
sort of stupor and I find that the trivial expression “my brain is numb”
exactly describes the situation of my spirit.
 Work on the epic poem Reynard the Fox, a translation and reworking of
the medieval fable that mirrors in the animal world the cruel acts of humans,
helped him overcome his stupor. While the real world became more and
more bloody and bloodthirsty, he found it helpful to devote himself, half
despairingly, to the inevitable reality of savagery, deceit, and malice he
found so vividly portrayed in Reynard the Fox.
In the Campaign, he wrote of his prevailing mood of those days, But I
sought to save myself even from this dreadful misery by declaring the
whole world to be base.

* Latin: among other things.

† French: ease.
‡ Latin: and of these things I was a small part.
 CHAPTER 21

Goethe Gathers His Circle around Him.

Love, Friendship, Science, and Art Keep Life Going.
Fichte in Jena. Goethe’s New Interest in Philosophy.
The Friendship with Schiller Begins with a happy event.
The First Exchange of Ideas.

....

SHORTLY BEFORE RETURNING TO WEIMAR, GOETHE WROTE to

Jacobi, My vagabond life and the political mood everyone is in are driving
me home, where I can gather around me a circle that nothing can enter
except love and friendship, art and science. His domestic arrangement with
Christiane made him happy. In “To a Woman,” a series of aphorisms in
distichs (couplets of one hexameter and one pentameter line), he writes,
Knowst thou the marvelous poison of love unsatisfied? / It can enliven and
scorch, suck and restore thy marrow. / Knowst thou the wondrous effect of
love at last fulfilled? / Loving bodies it joins when it frees their spirits.
Goethe felt looked after but not tied down by Christiane. He was proud of his
little family, but could continue to live like a bachelor, connected to his home
but intellectually independent. The love affair had become a loving routine:
Difficult to tame is already the mere inclination. / If thou add habit thereto
it is invincible. Nor was it necessary to keep his little family hidden
anymore. They had moved out of the hunting lodge outside the town wall and
back into his imposing, newly renovated house on the Frauenplan in the
center of town. In the summer of 1794, the duke had made Goethe a present
of the house in gratitude for his company on the military campaigns. After a
stillbirth in 1791, Christiane gave birth to a daughter, Karoline, on November
21, 1793. “Since a few days ago, Goethe has a little daughter as well,”
Charlotte von Stein informed her son Fritz. “He is terribly happy about it, for
he’s as amiable as a little earwig.” But the child died two weeks later.
Goethe could not bear the pain, falling to the floor and thrashing about in
grief.
His return from the war saw him cultivating friendships more deliberately.
He wrote more frequently to Knebel and Jacobi and paid more heed to social
occasions, especially with Herder and Wieland. When it’s storming outside
you have to stick closer together, he said. Johann Heinrich Voss, the
translator of Homer, visited Weimar in the early summer of 1794 and was
positively enchanted by Goethe’s conviviality. “Goethe turned to me,” he
wrote to his wife, “and asked why I had to leave so soon; he asked me to
give him another day. . . . I went with Herder to smoke a pipe together in his
study. . . . We were called to tea and found the Wielands, Goethe, Böttiger,
and von Knebel. They gathered around me and wanted to hear this and that
about my studies of Homer, . . . Goethe came, pressed my hand, and thanked
me for such a Homer. Wieland did the same. . . . At table the conversation
about Homer’s poems and his era continued. . . . I had to describe the
Homeric house. Everything seemed new and gratifying. We became
boisterous and jolly. The biblical patriarchs were critiqued with
irrepressible laughter, while Herder undertook a comical defense of them.
We did some serious quaffing: Würzburg wine and punch. Goethe sat next to
me; he was much more jovial than people say. We parted after midnight.
Wieland embraced and kissed me on my way.”
The science in which Goethe was absorbed never failed to give him
pleasure. When people spoke to him of the latest political news or their
opinions, he would change the subject, telling them about a frog’s intestines,
a snail’s anatomy, or the muscles of a goat’s head. He drafted plans for a
large-scale treatise on the morphology of plants and animals, studied the
characteristics of monocotyledons, carefully dissected the seed membranes
of flowers, and pressed the duke to approve the creation of a botanical
garden and institute in Jena. The biologist Karl Batsch was appointed
director, and Goethe oversaw the garden, at times seeming more enthusiastic
about it than about the theater he directed.
He had also developed a new interest in optics and color theory. He had
already formulated what would be the guiding principle of his Theory of
Color during the siege of Mainz, and it remained unchanged in the published
version of that great work: 1. Light is the simplest, most indivisible, most
homogeneous entity that we know. It is not composite. 2. In particular, it is
not composed of colored lights. Every light that has taken on a color is
darker than colorless light. Brightness cannot be composed of darkness.
Thus it could not contain the spectrum within itself, as Newton had taught.
For Goethe, light was an ur-phenomenon: colors do not develop out of it but
rather in contact with it, wherever it encounters another medium.
But most academics to whom Goethe sent his essays did not agree with
him, including the Göttingen physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, to whom
he sent a paper on “Colored Shadows.” Lichtenberg sent him a deferential
and witty reply insinuating that he considered Goethe a naïve empiricist. “We
always believe,” Lichtenberg wrote, “we perceive something that we
actually only infer.” Lichtenberg praised Goethe’s observations but went on
to describe other observations that led to different conclusions, and
mentioned some titles Goethe should consult. Goethe thought a great deal of
Lichtenberg and at first forgave him his reservations about the theory of
color: I wish very much that this man will remain a friend of my
undertaking, even if he was not able to persuade himself of the truth of my
opinion. When Lichtenberg later made no mention of Goethe’s research in his
textbook on optics, Goethe had no more time for him.
In his investigations of the natural world, Goethe had to rely on his own
instincts. Outwardly, the scientific community paid him respect, but they
didn’t really take him seriously. As with love and friendship, here too he
drew that dubious circle around himself to spare himself vexation. The
experts could not spoil the phenomena he thought he could see with his own
eyes.
And as for art—that fourth pillar of his existence—Goethe resumed work
on Wilhelm Meister. On December 7, 1793, he wrote to Knebel, Now my
thoughts are bent upon deciding what I want to begin in the coming year.
One must force oneself to be attached to something. I think it will be my
old novel, a project that had been in the works for almost two decades.
To press himself, he signed a very lucrative contract with the publisher
Johann Friedrich Gottlieb Unger in early 1794, agreeing to deliver four
volumes, each containing two of the novel’s eight books, for 600 taler per
volume. That Goethe could command such an exorbitant fee for a novel was
a vote of confidence in his market value, and put the complaints in some of
his letters that he was as good as forgotten in perspective. He either didn’t
believe it himself, or counted on winning readers back with this great novel.
And a great, or at least long, novel was what he had in mind. Much remained
to be done. When he signed the contract with Unger, only four and a half of
the planned eight books were finished, and those were of the original draft,
entitled Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission. With the year 1794 to be
devoted to the novel, he became more attached to the university town of Jena,
where he could work in peace, without the distractions of family and court.
He set up a snug study in Jena’s Old Palace.
The town had become more important to him for other reasons as well.
There were new friends, especially Wilhelm von Humboldt, who had moved
to Jena early in 1794, drawn by Schiller. Humboldt did everything possible
to persuade Goethe to look favorably on Schiller, then in Swabia. Wilhelm’s
younger brother, Alexander, a natural scientist and mining official, was
visiting Jena, and Goethe was deeply impressed by the young man’s
comprehensive knowledge. He said that a single hour of conversation with
Alexander gave him food for thought for a whole week. Goethe would have
happily appointed him professor on the spot, but Alexander had other plans.
Goethe now took a lively interest in university affairs. In addition to
establishing the botanical institute, he worked on expanding and recataloging
the library’s holdings, and kept an eye out for ambitious young academics
like the historian Karl Ludwig Woltmann, whom he recruited for the
university.
After the departure of the Kantian philosopher Karl Leonhard Reinhold, he
was particularly proud of bringing to Jena Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a rising
star in the philosophical firmament. Within weeks after a visit to Kant, Fichte
had written Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, which drew the
consequences of Kant’s thought for the philosophy of religion more clearly
than the master himself had done. Morality, he wrote, is not based on religion
but rather creates religion: there are no revelations except those of the
conscience. Kant was impressed by this work, and not only invited Fichte to
lunch but found a publisher for him. The book by the thirty-year-old appeared
anonymously in the spring of 1792.
The publisher hoped it would be attributed to Kant because it was so much
in his spirit, which is what happened; the Attempt was regarded as Kant’s
long-awaited final word on the subject of religion. Kant felt obliged to
correct the mistaken attribution, and in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung,
published in Jena, informed readers that the honor of being the author of this
work did not belong to him but rather to the previously unknown Fichte. It
made Fichte instantly famous, and there was no stopping him now: he dared
to revolutionize all previous philosophy, radicalizing Kant’s concept of
freedom in his Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, lectures
given in the summer of 1794 in Jena. He abstracts from Kant’s statement
“The ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations,”* the
concept of an all-powerful self that experiences the world either as sluggish
resistance or as possible material for its actions. At first blush, this might
seem an extravagant and quite abstract claim, but Fichte’s talents as a
captivating lecturer thrilled and inspired his listeners, even if they didn’t
understand everything he said. Fichte didn’t just talk about thoughts; he
wanted to force his listeners to think. Thinking should be taking place in their
heads—right now, this minute—the thinking self grasping itself. Fichte was
famous for using a wall in his demonstration: listeners should first think of
the wall and then think of themselves as that which is different from the wall.
That was his way of shaking listeners loose from customary, fossilized
thought processes. The most comfortable path—especially for scientists—is
to treat yourself as a thing. Reification of the self is the secret principle of
materialism. But Fichte wanted to make the living self tangible. He often said
that it was easier to make people think they were a piece of lava from the
moon than living selves.
Fichte’s powerful performances were like bolts of lightning. It was a
matter of course that the French Revolution (he published two essays in its
defense) was part of the intellectual background to his radical philosophy of
freedom. Thanks to Fichte, the word Ich (the subject pronoun “I” as well as
“the self”) gained enormous significance, comparable only to that later given
the Es (the neuter pronoun “it” as well as “the id” in Freudian psychology)
by Nietzsche and Freud.
It is remarkable that Fichte found such favor with Goethe, for the young
philosopher’s revolutionary sympathies could hardly have appealed to him.
But Goethe simply ignored them, for which the duke would later reproach
him when Fichte had to be dismissed under the charge of being an atheist.
What Goethe liked about Fichte’s philosophy was its energetic emphasis on
activity and aspiration, the strength of the will and the impulse to create form.
What was most effective were not subtle and abstract deductions, but a
daring enthronement of the creative self. Goethe was prepared to integrate
into his thought the idea that perception may be qualified. The first traces of
that appear in his color theory, where he paid more attention to the
physiology of color perception and declared his adherence to the principle
that one always had to ask, Is it the object that is expressing itself here, or
is it you? He had the printing office send him the first signature of the
Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, read it immediately, and
wrote to Fichte that it contained nothing that I did not understand or at least
thought I understood, nothing that does not easily connect to my usual way
of thinking. . . . As far as I am concerned, I shall owe you a great debt of
thanks if you can finally reconcile me to the philosophers, whom I could
never do without, but with whom I could never be at one. Fichte did not
take it as a polite compliment. He truly felt that Goethe understood him. He
wrote to his wife, “Recently he described my system to me so clearly and
concisely, that I couldn’t have done it more clearly myself.”
Goethe’s new interest in philosophy also laid a path to the epoch-making
event of that summer, the beginning of his friendship with Schiller. Thanks to
Fichte, it was Schiller’s philosophical bent that now attracted Goethe.
Since their first, unsuccessful encounter in the fall of 1788, the two writers
had had only infrequent contact. Although Goethe had promoted an
appointment for Schiller in Jena, Schiller could not be especially grateful,
since the remuneration was humiliatingly modest. Nevertheless, Schiller
made the most of his professorship in Jena. His inaugural lecture in the
summer of 1789 became legendary. No other professor had ever attracted so
many listeners. The rise of the University of Jena really began with Schiller.
By the end of the eighteenth century, it was briefly the capital of German
Idealism and Romanticism. (A few years later, Napoleon would consider
raising Jena to the status of the major university of the Confederation of the
Rhine.) Schiller’s self-confidence was strengthened, and he no longer felt it
necessary to awkwardly court Goethe. Though he remained interested in
making fruitful contact after his initial failure, he waited for it to happen in an
unforced way, on some specific occasion, and without any pretentiousness.
As he wrote his sister-in-law Karoline, he had been determined to stop
looking at Goethe in sidelong envy, which only hindered his own
development. “If someone puts his entire strength into his work, he will not
go unnoticed by another. That is my plan.”
It worked. Goethe had kept track of Schiller and came to appreciate him,
no longer regarding him merely as the author of The Robbers. In his capacity
as artistic director of the theater, Goethe could not help wanting to win over
such a talented playwright for the Weimar stage. In the meantime, he had also
discovered Schiller’s philosophical poetry, which attracted him precisely
because it was so far removed from his own lyric style. He also considered
Schiller’s historical writings masterpieces in both content and style. He was
still ambivalent, however, about Schiller’s aesthetic theories. While Fichte
had given him a better approach to the philosophical element in Schiller’s
works, there were nonetheless certain harsh passages—in Schiller’s essay
“On Grace and Dignity,” for example—which he took personally. He must
have been thinking of the passage where Schiller criticizes so-called natural
geniuses. Which is more admirable, asks Schiller, the power of a free mind
that triumphs over its own resistant nature, or a born genius who has no need
to wrestle his works into existence? Schiller favors the mind that builds its
body. In intellectual matters, too, he thought that merit should count more than
innate privilege. Goethe, who was often called a favorite child of nature and
thought of himself as such, could easily infer that Schiller’s remark applied
to himself. Perhaps he also took umbrage at Schiller’s assessment of poetic
geniuses, whose entire talent, he said, lies in their youth. “But when that short
spring is over and one asks after its promised fruits, they prove to be spongy
and often stunted things engendered by a blind, misled impulse to create.”
While we don’t know the exact passages that offended Goethe, it is certain
that the essay “On Grace and Dignity,” which Goethe in other respects
admired and made use of, at first stood in the way of a rapprochement.
But then in June 1794, he received an invitation, signed by Schiller, to join
the editorial board of the newly founded periodical Die Horen. Schiller had
already assembled a group of editors that included Wilhelm von Humboldt,
Fichte, and Woltmann. They hoped to win over Goethe as well. On his trip to
Swabia in 1793, Schiller had planned the journal with the publisher Johann
Friedrich Cotta. It was an ambitious undertaking, meant to become the voice
of Germany as a cultural nation in response to the political nation of
revolutionary France, an idea articulated in the letter inviting Goethe to join:
“The culture of the Germans has not yet reached the point that what is
pleasing to the best among us finds its way into everyone’s hands. If the
nation’s most outstanding writers now enter into a literary association, they
will thereby unite the public that has been previously divided.” This
invitation to share a prestigious platform was the exact unforced approach to
Goethe that Schiller had hoped for.
 Schiller’s intention was that the journal might bring his ideal of grace and
dignity to fruition; its literary offerings were to be entertaining and tasteful,
its learned articles brilliant. Mere diversion or stuffy academic essays would
be excluded. It must have been especially appealing to Goethe that Schiller,
as tired of politicizing as Goethe, intended to open Die Horen to all topics
except politics. Although Goethe’s own contributions to Die Horen would
not always adhere to that principle, and Schiller’s On the Aesthetic
Education of Man, first published there, also had a political orientation, at
the moment both thought that abstention from politics would benefit
intellectual life.
Goethe did not respond immediately, although he instantly recognized the
opportunity to give new impetus not only to literary life in general but to his
own output. He could see the advantage for himself if a man like Schiller, a
professional writer with widespread connections and influence, was willing
to pilot him out of the quiet harbor of the fairly unsuccessful Göschen edition
of his works and back into the open seas of popular literary life. It was a
publicity campaign that would perhaps benefit the soon-to-be-published
Wilhelm Meister even if, by contract, an excerpt in Die Horen would not be
possible. Yet Goethe held off on his answer for a little while, perhaps
because he sensed that this was the beginning of what he would call a new
epoch in his life. With great care—several drafts of the letter survive—he
formulated his answer with a mixture of diplomacy and confession: I shall
be heartily delighted to become one of the company. Should there be
anything among my unpublished works that would be suitable for such a
collection, I shall be happy to let you have it; what is certain, however, is
that a closer association with men as stouthearted as the participants will
put new life into the course of works of my own that have become bogged
down.
This was Goethe’s first letter to Schiller. The younger man was happy to
have secured such a prominent colleague for his project, but he didn’t yet
dream he was about to make an incomparable friend as well. Schiller wrote
to Körner about Goethe’s acceptance, “It is turning out to be a very select
society, the likes of which has never come together in Germany before.” At
the same time, Goethe commented on the new connection with pleasure, but
still with some reserve, I must add that since this new epoch, Schiller too is
becoming more friendly and trusting.
 Then came an encounter that Goethe would later call a happy event. His
later depiction of it, in the Morphological Notebooks, comes in the context
of his theory of the Urpflanze. The primal scene of the friendship with
Schiller, amid discussion of the primordial plant—what a perfect
conjunction! A passage from the Annals lays particular emphasis on this
organic-metaphoric correlation: for me it was a new spring in which
everything was sprouting happily together, emerging from opened seeds
and branches.
It happened on July 20, 1794, a Sunday. Goethe had come to Jena to
consult with the editors of Die Horen—Schiller above all, of course—during
the coming week. He had not counted on meeting Schiller beforehand on this
hot afternoon, however, at a lecture for the Society of Naturalists in the cool
rooms of the palace. Schiller did not often attend such events, and the
surprise added to the effect. After the lecture, as groups of people left the
hall chatting with one another, by chance—according to Goethe’s description
—he suddenly found himself standing next to Schiller and they fell into
conversation. Schiller was critical of what they had just heard. The lecturer
had treated the world of plants in a fragmentary way, with no inner coherence
or life. It was no way to inspire public interest in natural science. Goethe
agreed, but pointed out that there had certainly been other attempts to explore
and portray the interconnectedness of natural phenomena. Schiller conceded
the point but stressed that it was possible only with the aid of the ideas one
brought to observation. In and of themselves, observations were always
isolated and yielded no context.
They had stumbled unwittingly into contested territory, as that was exactly
what Goethe was then slaving away at: a synopsis of phenomena that yield a
direct, unforced, natural experience of interconnection, the metamorphosis of
plants being a prime example. He was convinced that one needed only to
observe in order for it to become obvious that the leaf was what recurred in
all the various plant forms and thus constituted both their variability and their
constancy. For I had realized that in the organ of a plant we usually call its
leaf, the real Proteus lies hidden, which can conceal and reveal itself in all
configurations. Forward and backward, a plant is always only a leaf. He
formulates it that way in the Italian Journey, and he must have depicted the
leaf as the ur-phenomenon of plant life to Schiller in similar terms. What was
ineluctable about this ur-phenomenon, however, was that one could see it.
The leaf as a prodigious Proteus was something utterly ostensive and not a
mere idea. From that conviction, Goethe went on to ask, could it not be that
there was a sort of exemplary incarnation of a plant that had developed from
a leaf, some Urpflanze? In the Italian Journey he remarks, There must be
such a thing! Otherwise how would I know that this or that object was a
plant if they weren’t all formed according to a single pattern?
Spurred on by Schiller’s questions, this is the line of thought Goethe must
have developed. In his depiction of the happy event, he says merely, I
propounded the metamorphosis of plants in a lively manner. So lively, in
fact, that he lost track of everything and suddenly found himself in Schiller’s
house. Schiller himself had remained conscious enough of their surroundings
to steer his enthusiastic interlocutor in that direction. And there they sat, side
by side. Perhaps Schiller’s wife, Charlotte, brought them something cool to
drink, to slake their thirst and because the discussion was heated. Goethe got
up a head of steam, grabbed pen and paper, and with some characteristic
strokes, I made a symbolic plant emerge before his very eyes. Schiller,
however, returned to their point of departure, namely, the question of whether
it is an idea or a concrete, intuitively accessible object that vouches for inner
cohesion. For Schiller, it could only be an idea, and pointing to Goethe’s
drawing of the symbolic plant, he said, That is not an experience, it’s an
idea. With that, writes Goethe, the point that divided us was most precisely
identified. And although Goethe had the presence of mind to retreat with the
witty remark I find it so nice that I have ideas without knowing it, and even
see them with my eyes, their difference remained: neither of us could
consider himself the victor. We both thought we were unassailable.
How could this encounter, largely the passionate articulation of a
difference of opinion, become the primordial event of their friendship?
Perhaps it was for that very reason, as it was a difference in which the two
poles had powerful attraction for each other, as though each could find in the
other the complement needed for its own completeness. That is certainly how
Goethe later interpreted his relationship with Schiller. It is, however, rare
that two people constitute, as it were, half of each other, do not repel but
attract and complete each other. If everything seemed to push the one
toward ideas and the other toward intuitive accessibility, each would be able
to give the other something of what he had. The ideal becomes more sensuous
and the observable more cerebral.
On that warm summer afternoon in 1794, their latent mutual attraction was
finally able to blossom freely. It was hastened by other favorable
circumstances, which Goethe does not fail to mention: his long acquaintance
with Schiller’s Charlotte, née Lengefeld, and Frau von Stein’s goddaughter;
their mutual interest in Die Horen; and the encouragement of other friends.
Here Goethe means above all Wilhelm von Humboldt, who had pleaded
Schiller’s case to him.
Their second meeting two days later was in fact at the Humboldts’. For
Schiller, it was the more important encounter. He dated their friendship from
that day. On Sunday, they had discussed nature. On Tuesday at the
Humboldts’, it was culture. If their differences dominated the first meeting,
there was more agreement about culture, even if they approached it from
different directions. Schiller wrote to his friend Körner about it a few weeks
later: “We had . . . spoken at length and breadth about art and art theory and
told each other our main ideas, at which we had arrived by different paths. . .
. Each had something to give that the other was missing, and each got
something in return. Since then, the ideas sown on that day have put down
roots in Goethe, and now he feels a need to join me and in my company
follow the path he had been treading alone and with no encouragement. I very
much look forward to an exchange of ideas that will be so fruitful for me.”
That exchange got off to a powerful start with Schiller’s famous first, long
letter to Goethe. It came over a month later, on August 23. Schiller had held
back at first because he knew Goethe would be spending the next few weeks
on a diplomatic mission with the duke. In his moving reply, Goethe wrote that
he could not imagine a more beautiful birthday present than this letter, in
which with a friendly hand you draw up the sum of my existence and
through your interest, encourage me to make more active and lively use of
my abilities.
The sum of my existence—the phrase indicates emphatic agreement and is
a flattering compliment for Schiller’s skill as a portraitist. Goethe found
Schiller’s image of him to be accurate. He portrayed him as someone who
can trust his powers of observation, who thinks with his eyes and is guided
by a strong “anticipation” of possible connections between things; he is not
led astray into idle speculation, however, because he always keeps in contact
with genuine experience, beginning with the simplest facts and elements of
life and then mounting step by step to the complex forms of human
experience, thus undertaking to develop spirit from elemental nature. The end
point could be a perfected image of spiritual nature, but an individual life is
too short to reach that goal. “But even to have set out on such a path is worth
more than to complete any other.”
These remarks apply more to the scientist. Goethe the poet had a unique
formative power that, according to Schiller, drew its best from unconscious
sources. “In your authentic intuition, everything that analysis tediously
searches for is present, and much more completely so, and your own riches
remain hidden from you only because they reside complete within you.” In
short, unconscious genius is at work in Goethe.
At this point, Schiller brings himself into play. He presents himself as a
complementary figure, but also as someone of genius. If Goethe proceeds
from the particular and concrete to the general and conceptual, Schiller seeks
a concrete embodiment of the conceptual idea. One operates inductively, the
other deductively. And both run into problems. A thought can fail to achieve
concrete experience and evaporate into abstraction; experience and intuition,
conversely, do not always achieve the necessary clarity and transparency.
But if such different minds listen to and help each other, they can achieve
happy moments of complementary enrichment. Schiller’s letter is propelled
by euphoric confidence in the success of this friendship: Goethe will use
Schiller as a mirror of his consciousness, and Schiller will learn from
Goethe how to trust in the powers of the unconscious and intuition. Then they
would be in fact the two halves of a circle, as Goethe would later regard the
friendship.
Goethe accepted this interpretation. In the letter he sent in answer there is
a remark, however, that is not without irony: You will soon see for yourself
what a great advantage your participation will be for me, when you know
me better and discover a sort of darkness and wavering in me that I cannot
control, although I am very well aware of it. Thus Goethe already hints that
he will make use of Schiller’s penetrating intellect with a proviso. Too much
transparence and consciousness can also prove harmful. He will know how
to safeguard his darkness, for he needs it, as a plant sinks its roots into the
dark earth.
This first exchange of ideas put Goethe into a state of eager anticipation,
and on September 4 he invited Schiller to Weimar for a longer visit. The
court was removing to Eisenach for a while, and they would have quiet and
time for each other. After some hesitation, Schiller accepted the invitation,
but with the warning that he would not be able to follow the ordinary
schedule of the house, “since unfortunately my cramps usually compel me to
devote the entire morning to sleep, because they leave me no peace at night . .
. . I ask only for the tedious freedom to be sick at your house.”
Schiller stayed in Weimar from the fourteenth to the twenty-seventh, two
densely packed, unforgettable weeks. They told each other their life stories,
described the various intellectual paths they had taken, and spoke of plans for
the future: Schiller’s Wallenstein project and a new philosophy of aesthetics
on which he was then at work, later entitled On the Aesthetic Education of
Man in a Series of Letters. Goethe expounded on some of his nature studies,
including optics, anatomy, and color theory. They also discussed possible
topics for Die Horen. After a few days, they had become quite intimate, and
Goethe read aloud from the not yet published “Roman Elegies.” As
mentioned before, Schiller found them “although lubricious and not very
decent,” nevertheless among the “best things” Goethe had done. Goethe
declared himself willing to publish them first in Die Horen. They also talked
about how best to promote the Weimar theater. Goethe asks Schiller to edit
Egmont and tried to convince him that it was high time to put on a new
production of Fiesco or Cabal and Love.
With each passing day, as if their attachment had been of long duration,
their conversations became friendlier and it seemed they would never end.
“A few days ago,” Schiller wrote his wife, “we were uninterruptedly
together from 11:30, when I got dressed, until 11:00 o’clock at night.” When
the weather was fair, Goethe persuaded his guest to go for walks, and the two
of them were seen in the park and on the paths along the Ilm River. They
walked to Goethe’s garden house or to the construction site of the new
palace. Goethe always had something to show Schiller, and his tall friend
eagerly stepped forward to take a closer look. One gestured animatedly and
the other walked with a slight forward lean, his hands clasped behind his
back.
The two together were the talk of Weimar. It was considered an important
event. They were delighted themselves to have laid the groundwork for a
promising future during these golden days of September 1794.

* Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 246, single quotation marks added.
 CHAPTER 22

Writing for Die Horen. Two Ideas against

the Evils of the Times: Schiller’s Aesthetic Education
and Goethe’s sociable education. The centaur.
The “Xenia”: Joint Attacks on the Literary Establishment.
Schiller as Midwife to Wilhelm Meister.
An Anti-Romantic Work? The Peaceful End of Die Horen.

....

GOETHE HAD PUBLISHED ONLY SPORADICALLY IN MAGAZINES,

supplying a few poems to short-lived journals in his Sturm und Drang days
and later publishing some work in progress in Wieland’s monthly Der
Teutsche Merkur. It was new to be an active contributor to a journal like Die
Horen. Owing mainly to his friendship with Schiller, it also evinced a
willingness to adjust to the growing importance of the literary establishment
and the reading public. Goethe had learned how to sell himself, as proved by
his contract for Wilhelm Meister, and now he began to study literary
periodicals he had previously ignored. While he did not see himself as a
professional writer like Schiller, he acted like one at times.
Goethe was reacting to what Schiller dubbed the “ink-stained epoch,” an
age of social transformations produced by prolific writers and readers eager
for more. Literature had gained public influence. The number of literate
people had doubled between 1750 and 1800, to about a fourth of the
population by century’s end. Reading behavior had also changed. People no
longer repeatedly read a single book—usually the Bible—but many books
only once, often into the wee hours. The market was soon flooded with books
intended to be not so much read as devoured. That raised a moral concern:
was an abyss of decay opening beneath the cloak of a supposedly educational
medium? Even youngsters barely out of school could now experience thrills
and take part in fantasies unimagined by their parents and teachers. With
Werther, Goethe had gotten a taste of the power both of literature and its
moralizing opponents. He had sown the wind and reaped a whirlwind.
Despite all supervision and admonition, the joy of reading spread like an
epidemic.
The German fever for books ran an even higher temperature than in other
countries. The German lands lacked a metropolis, a great social center like
Paris or London. With no real high society, people in small, out-of-the-way
places sought imaginary sociability in books. The English could hear true
stories of adventure on the high seas, the French had the accounts of
witnesses to great historical events, but Germans could experience such
things only in the ersatz form of literature. Already in 1780, Goethe had
remarked succinctly that the honorable public is familiar with the
extraordinary only through novels. He has Wilhelm Meister sigh about the
mania for writing, One can’t even imagine how much people write. And it
didn’t have to be genuine novels: mere letters and diaries could be turned
into novels of sorts. People wanted to get into print. It was the most
impressive proof of their existence. In the sphere I inhabit at the moment,
Wilhelm continues, people spend almost as much time writing to their
relatives and friends about what they are doing as they spend doing it.
The increase in reading and writing was bringing life and literature closer
together. The sentimentalism of the 1770s had already begun to transform into
literature what touched the heart in life. Conversely, readers searched
literature for traces of the author’s life. The cult of celebrity began in the Age
of Genius. Authors acted a role, their life was now part of their work and
was itself a work of art. People acclaimed Goethe as a real-life Werther and
were a bit disappointed that Schiller had so little of the robber about him.
Readers imitated the feelings they had read about in books. They fell in love,
were jealous, struck up friendships, and got involved in politics according to
the book. Literature had become a medium of existential guidance. Life
gained value in the mirror of literature, became more concentrated, had more
drama and atmosphere. The second generation of Romantics was particularly
aware of this and already bemoaned the fact. Ludwig Tieck sighed that they
were completely made of literature, and Clemens Brentano was convinced
that reading novels determined one’s behavior. The living power of literature
and the theater is also the great theme of Wilhelm Meister, which for that
very reason would soon be regarded as the representative novel of its age.
At a time when literature was becoming a leading medium, the editors of
Die Horen wanted to improve literary taste and raise the intellectual level of
the public rather than conform to it. Great things were expected from its
contributors: Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Fichte, Woltmann, and now
Goethe as well. Two thousand subscribers had already been enrolled, an
impressive number for the time. Cotta, the publisher, paid the highest fees,
which encouraged other well-known authors to contribute. It promised to be
a successful undertaking that would add to the prestige of its writers.
Goethe opened the first number of Die Horen with a kind of poem of
welcome, two “Epistles” in dactylic hexameter. Schiller had asked him to
write it, but was not completely satisfied with the result, which was
somewhat ironic about the lofty standards of the project, pointing out that the
ink-stained epoch included its critics as well:

Now that everyone reads and so many readers only

Leaf through the book with impatience . . .
You’re asking me, my friend, to write for you something on writing
and
Thus, by writing, to add to the mass and make known my opinion,
So that others can form an opinion about what I’ve written and
Thus the tottering wave rolls on into all eternity.

The same number contained the first of Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic
Education of Man in which he develops the idea that the free play of art
leads to human improvement. Goethe’s introductory poem makes reference to
that as well: Noble friend, you who wish the welfare of human kind . . . /
Shall I tell you what I think about it? I think that / What forms the man is
only his life and words mean but little.
It wasn’t what Schiller wanted to hear, for he put great faith in the power
of the literary word. “Humanity has lost its dignity,” he writes in Aesthetic
Education, “but art has rescued it. . . . Even before truth has beamed its
triumphant light into the depths of the heart, the power of poetry has captured
its rays and the peaks of humanity will glisten when damp night still covers
the valleys.” Goethe was moved by Schiller’s sublime emotionalism. I read
the manuscript you sent me at once and with great pleasure, quaffed it
down in a single gulp. But upon reflection, he was not able to share
Schiller’s belief in the possibility of art’s extravagant social effects. His
point of view was that Schiller expected too much from art, nothing less than
the inner transformation of man, who could thereby achieve the ability to be
free. According to Schiller, art should initiate a revolution of thought and
feeling and thereby improve what the political revolution had failed to
achieve. The latter had revealed only man’s barbarity when all restraints
were cast off.
Goethe and Schiller were in agreement in their diagnosis of the negative
results of the revolution, but not about the necessary therapy. In his first
“Epistle,” Goethe implies their difference of opinion, and in the
Conversations of German Émigrés, his first prose contribution to Die
Horen, he makes it even clearer, but still indirectly.
Schiller had hoped to start the journal’s first number with a bang, but
Goethe supplied only the beginning of the frame narrative for a series of
stories yet to be delivered. The frame depicts a party of aristocratic refugees
who have fled over to the right bank of the Rhine to escape the advancing
troops of the revolution. They are engaged in a lively debate about its merits
and drawbacks, although all are suffering its effects. They fall into vehement
argument, showing that among those agitated by politics, good manners and a
polite tone are soon abandoned. People surrender to the irresistible
temptation to wound one another because they all believe their personal
views represent the best interests of humanity in general. A privy councilor,
the spokesman for the old order, gets so worked up he declares that he would
like to see all the Jacobins of Mainz hanged, whereupon his adversary, the
young Karl, replies that he hopes the guillotine would be blessed with a
good harvest in Germany, too, and not miss a single guilty head. This
blowup almost fractures the little group of aristocrats, but with some
difficulty a fragile peace is restored. Telling stories is supposed to help heal
the breach, but first they are admonished by a baroness: while they are
together, they must keep their passionate convictions to themselves. She calls
for consideration and sparing one another’s feelings. Self-righteous anger is
out of place when people with different points of view must exist in close
proximity, and so the baroness urges moderation, not in the name of virtue,
which would be too lofty, but in the name of the most common courtesy.
 Here Goethe shows that what is called for in situations of political unrest
is not Schiller’s “aesthetic education” but elementary sociable education that
has no need for highbrow theory. It simply reminds us of the healing power of
courtesy and consideration. Goethe agrees with Schiller, however, that it
depends on the culture of “play” that Schiller formulates so concisely in the
fifteenth letter: “For—to say it once and for all—a human plays only when he
is human in the full sense of the word, and he is fully human only when he
plays.” Goethe’s model of sociable education is also play, a party game if
one will, in which people act “as if.” Civilized manners are called for, not
uncompromising authenticity, not the tyranny of intimacy or the blunt
protestant candor of Luther’s “Here I stand, I can do no other.” In society you
have to be able to “do other.” What is needed are measured doses of the
words and actions that allow us to slide past one another and float over
chasms of difference. We who depend on society must educate and adjust
ourselves to society’s example. The sociable person brings along his shell of
good form as a guard against chaos, anarchy, and disintegration.
Perhaps Goethe made all too many concessions to sociable education in
the stories that are told by the little circle of refugees: You will at least want
to recite your stories with some delicacy, won’t you? asks one of their
number. His stories of harmlessly thumping poltergeists and creaking
furniture, or of beautiful but all-too-loyal women, turned out to have too
much delicacy. Readers thought they could have been a bit more exciting.
Not even the final story, entitled simply The Fairy Tale and later celebrated
by philologists as the model for all such literary tales, could salvage this—
on the whole—rather dull collection. The Fairy Tale is an excessively
calculated construction of symbols and allegories, a kind of higher
crossword puzzle. If you weren’t a puzzle fan, you found it boring, as
Humboldt reported sardonically from Berlin. Others made a sport of trying to
interpret the story, turning it into a kind of treasure hunt. Like a parlor game,
it passed the time and at least kept readers occupied. Goethe was pleased as
Punch by all this, and when Prince August of Gotha asked for a definitive
interpretation, Goethe replied that he would not provide one until I see 99
predecessors in front of me giving their interpretations.
Die Horen was not off to a good start, because its first features were not
hits. Readers found Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man difficult
and Goethe’s Conversations of German Émigrés boring. The journal needed
something more exciting; the time had come for the “Roman Elegies.” Goethe
had long since promised them to Die Horen. He weeded out the explicitly
priapic ones, to Schiller’s regret, although he agreed that they had to be
sacrificed. All the others were to be published, however. But since Goethe
still hesitated, Schiller proposed making some cuts, likely the undressing
scene in the second elegy, and the verses about the marriage bed as a source
of venereal diseases in the sixteenth. Goethe was opposed to deletions and
preferred to simply leave out the two offending elegies altogether, which they
agreed to do. In the fall of 1795, the most commercially successful number of
Die Horen appeared, and Goethe called it a centaur: Schiller’s theory in the
Aesthetic Education constituted the head and Goethe’s elegies the body of
the beast. Herder joked, “Die Horen will have to be printed with a u from
now on”: Die Huren (the whores). We have already seen that the duke did
not approve of the publication of the “Elegies” and found “a few thoughts that
were too lusty.” Frau von Stein’s reaction was no surprise: “I have no
appreciation for this kind of poem.” Humboldt wrote a letter to Schiller
about a rumor circulating in Berlin: Goethe was said to have been consorting
in Carlsbad with “two baptized Jewesses” and telling them in minute detail
about the individual incidents that had inspired the elegies, especially the
verse And the barbarian rules Romans, body and soul.
Die Horen was more talked about than actually read, except for the
scandalous “centaur” number. The big names, the money, and the self-
important manner of the editors (who gave the impression that they were
intending to educate the entire literary establishment) provoked resentment
and then schadenfreude when the journal’s demise loomed after only a few
issues. Goethe and Schiller were vexed by the difficulty of elevating public
taste and by the malicious criticism of competing periodicals. It was Goethe
who had the idea of composing “xenia,” satirical jibes at the literary scene
written in distichs modeled on Martial’s epigrams. On December 23, 1795,
he sent Schiller the first of these couplets, asking his opinion, and Schiller
was immediately and enthusiastically on board. The two could swear like
troopers when it came to the public and the critics. Why not set off some
literary fireworks against the rise of mediocrity? They found the work greatly
amusing. As they composed their couplets in Schiller’s lodgings in 1796,
they sometimes laughed so loud that Schiller’s Charlotte closed the windows
as a precaution.
Both men were inspired by a boisterous feeling of success. In Schiller’s
case, there was an additional kick; back when his love for Goethe still had a
blatant admixture of hate, he had fantasized about treating him like a “proud,
prudish woman” you had to “get with child to humble . . . in the eyes of the
world.” Now he could write in triumph to his friend Körner about himself
and Goethe making babies together: “The child whom Goethe and I have
begotten together is becoming a bit naughty.” Goethe was also having fun;
later he would declare that Schiller helped him enjoy a second youth as a
poet.
They had a collection of several hundred couplets by early summer 1796.
The arrangement they had first agreed on, in which polemical and aphoristic
ones would be mixed together, pleased Goethe but not Schiller, who thought
it made the whole endeavor look too harmless. He suggested separating out
the critical distichs and collecting the others under the title “Innocent Xenia.”
He didn’t want to dilute the strength of the polemical tribunal with sweeter
notes. Goethe, who had begun with disputatious glee, now wanted to show
some mercy, but his objections came too late. The Muses’ Almanac for the
Year 1797, edited by Schiller and containing the polemical “Xenia,” was
already in print. It sold out quickly, making a second printing necessary. The
publisher Cotta would have liked the “Xenia” to appear in Die Horen, but
for Schiller it was a matter of genre. He did not want to burden his proud
flagship with material that was too satirical and topical.
Die Horen, however, was barely limping along. Schiller had great hopes
for prepublication installments of Wilhelm Meister, but that did not come to
pass. Nevertheless, the completion of the novel in 1795–96 was an
auspicious event and a high point in the friendship between the two writers.
Goethe, who usually played his compositional cards close to his chest, had
done something extraordinary. With great confidence in Schiller’s literary
judgment, he’d asked his friend’s help in completing the novel. The first two
books had already gone to the printer in early 1795, but he decided to send
Schiller the manuscript of the books that followed, urging him not to spare
criticism and suggestions for improvement. Goethe also wanted to discuss
the further structure of the novel with an eye to possible changes. He hoped
for extensive input from his friend, and he was not disappointed. Schiller put
his heart and soul into the novel in progress and promised to devote months
to the project. “It is one of the greatest joys of my life,” he wrote, “that I
experienced the completion of this product, that it occurs in the period when
my ambitions are still powerful, that I can still draw from this pure source;
and the beautiful relationship between us makes it a sort of religion for me to
make your affairs my own, to develop every reality within me into the purest
play of the spirit.”
Schiller had high praise for the first packets of manuscript, and by late
June 1796 Goethe sent him the final pages and Schiller read the entire novel
once more straight through. The series of long and detailed letters that
analyze and comment on the novel opens with the famous sentence “How
vividly this opportunity makes me realize that, confronted with excellence,
there is no freedom except love.” Seven years earlier, Schiller had told
Körner he hated Goethe. Now he was bound to him in friendship. But how
does one fend off incipient envy in the face of excellence? The answer
Schiller could now give was: by loving that excellence.
Schiller’s pithy sentence was so precious to Goethe that ten years later he
adopted it in slightly altered form for Ottilie’s diary in the novel Elective
Affinities: There is no escape from the excellence of another person except
love. At first glance, there’s not much difference in meaning. But it is
characteristic that where Schiller writes “no freedom” Goethe writes no
escape. For Schiller, everything revolved around freedom. Thus, he struggled
for freedom from envy and resentment, which in the end are nothing but self-
poisons. Love frees him from them, and freedom chooses love. For someone
like Schiller, it’s almost a strategy. Love as an escape in the face of
excellence, as Goethe would have it, is more about not having a negative
effect on one’s own nature. Thus Schiller defended his freedom with love,
while Goethe defended his better nature via love, returning to congruence
with himself. It is a difference that Goethe later summed up in the
formulation: Schiller preached the gospel of freedom; I wanted to make
sure the rights of nature didn’t come up short.
When Goethe began working on Wilhelm Meister again in 1793, he hadn’t
known how it would continue or end. This uncertainty persisted even when
he was already deeply immersed in the work and ought to have been able to
foresee the end of the novel. As late as June 1796, just four weeks before its
completion, he wrote to Schiller, The novel goes along quite well. I find
myself in a truly poetical mood, for in more than one sense I don’t really
know what I want or should do.
Schiller couldn’t believe it, since his own working method was so very
different: unable to simply entrust himself to a poetical mood like Goethe, he
needed to have a work precisely mapped out before he began to write. While
Schiller had to have command over poetry, Goethe allowed it to seduce him.
Like my other things, he would admit two decades later, he had written this
little work as a sleepwalker.
At this point, all he had decided was that, contrary to what the Theatrical
Mission of the original title suggested, it would not end with Meister’s
success in the theater. The more Goethe became enmeshed as director of the
day-to-day operations of the Weimar theater, the less attractive a theatrical
career seemed for his protagonist. So what sort of mastery were Wilhelm’s
years of apprenticeship leading to? Schiller asked this when the first two
books of the novel appeared at the beginning of 1795, and Goethe wasn’t
able to answer. Hadn’t Schiller emphasized the playful character of art in his
letters on aesthetic education? Goethe found the idea persuasive, and he took
it as permission to try out various plot lines with poetic nonchalance. He
even has Wilhelm expressly declare to his son, Felix, that he is devoted to
play as a maxim for life: “You are a true man!” Wilhelm exclaimed. “Come,
my son! Come my brother! Let us play in the world without purpose, as
well as we can.”
This declaration occurs in the final book of the novel, at a point when
Wilhelm has overcome his inclination to be an actor but obviously not the
playfulness in his character. Looking back from the end of the novel, it
becomes obvious that he has actually never done anything but play. The
novel’s plot begins with Wilhelm as a young boy, playing with a set of
wooden puppets that to him represent the world. Later, his lover Mariane
introduces him to the world of the theater, which he remains connected to
even after they separate. Instead of collecting receivables for his father’s
business, he collects a troupe of unemployed actors and intends to become an
actor himself. Through acting, he hopes to become acquainted with himself
in the gentlest way, and better than in real life. What was there to object to
about playing in order to discover oneself? Nothing, except that it’s no way
to become a good actor, for if you only play yourself, you’re a bad one. That,
however, is Wilhelm’s case exactly, and the reason he takes his leave from
the theater, but not from play. It continues, since he discovers that others are
playing with him while he believes he is playing himself. In the realm of
Baron Lothario, Wilhelm is introduced to the Society of the Tower, which
has obviously been supervising and steering him from afar. He meets the
abbé, the mastermind of the society who likes to play destiny a bit. With its
network of connections, the Freemason-like Society of the Tower constitutes
a world of play in which Wilhelm has unwittingly had a role. Even if they
have by no means played him a dirty trick, his initiation into the secret
society is a disappointment. Had all the fateful events of his life been simply
concocted, manipulated, and steered? So you are merely playing with these
worthy symbols and words? Wilhelm asks one of its leaders. One could ask
the author the same question. Why all this machinery in the background?
It was a question Schiller asked, if reticently at first. After all, his The
Apparitionist was a novel about a secret society, and he knew that such
“machinery” was a hit with the public, and that authors bet on that
fascination. “I think I see,” he writes to Goethe, “that you were led astray by
a certain condescension to the public’s weakness.”
The matter is so important to Schiller because it touches on the problem of
freedom. If Wilhelm has found his way out of the theatrical world and into
the active world of Lothario, how does he do it? Has Wilhelm Meister made
something of himself, or has he been made into something? From without (by
the Society of the Tower) or from within (through his own good nature)?
Schiller didn’t beat around the bush, but openly declared that he would like it
best if Wilhelm Meister were a protagonist of freedom, if his destiny was
due to his own plan and determination. He concedes that there is such a thing
as a “healthy and beautiful nature” that does not need to force itself to be
moral, but takes the right path from its own inclination. But Wilhelm cannot
be considered to have such a nature as long as he is being pushed and pulled
by the Society of the Tower. Its background machinations, according to
Schiller, deprive Goethe’s hero of both the freedom to steer his own course
and the beautiful nature that does not need to be steered. What remains is a
fairly pitiful figure who has had the good fortune to be coddled by fate in the
form of the Society.
We see a flash of the old resentment of Goethe in Schiller’s critique of the
figure of Wilhelm Meister. “How easily his genius was supported by his
destiny,” he had once written to Körner, “and how I must struggle right down
to the present moment!” Isn’t Wilhelm Meister but a darling of fate who has
no need to struggle and so doesn’t know what freedom is? Once, this
resentment was aimed at Goethe, but Schiller had learned to love the
excellence in the man; Wilhelm Meister gets the rod his creator is spared.
What Schiller has trouble accepting is that Goethe wields the background
machinery—the Society of the Tower—so casually. He doesn’t really take it
seriously. As Jarno tells Wilhelm, Everything you have seen in the tower is
actually merely the relics of a youthful enterprise that most of the initiated
took very seriously at first, but about which now they all just smile from
time to time. It is explicitly not the Society of the Tower that bestows the
necessary powers when apprenticeship is completed; nor are they bestowed
by the apprentice’s freedom. Rather, it is by benevolent nature. It is solely
because Wilhelm Meister has become a father in the meantime and
consciously accepts and resolves to fulfill that role that his apprenticeship is
completed.
The result of this inner growth is a certain rootedness: He no longer
regarded the world like a bird of passage, no longer thought of a building
as a hastily knocked-together bower that dries out even before one is done
with it. Everything he intended to lay out would develop along with the
growing boy and everything he produced would last for several
generations . . . with the feeling of being a father he had also acquired all
the virtues of a citizen.
Sometimes Goethe wondered whether the novel had to end at all, or
whether he shouldn’t simply continuing spinning it out without a real
conclusion. Wilhelm settling down with a wife and son—that could have
been a real ending. Since a marriage to the dry and diligent Therese does not
come to pass, fortunately for Wilhelm, and Natalie still seems unattainable,
Goethe kept prolonging the story like a sleepwalker, as was his custom. As
soon as Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship is over, he decides to escape into
an unfinished and provisional future. The decision to leave, take the child
with him, and divert himself with the things of the world was now his firm
intention. Events then take a new turn. Wilhelm is given hope that he can
marry Natalie after all. Yet a wedding is still postponed, and Wilhelm again
intends to head south across the Alps. At the same time, with Mignon’s
failing health, the land where lemons are in bloom has lost some of its
magic. Schiller had criticized the way Goethe removed this envoy of the
South and symbol of Romantic mystery at the end of the novel. Mignon dies,
and Wilhelm is in a great hurry to prepare her body, with the physician’s
help, for embalming—as if the symbol of longing were now going to be
stuffed. Schiller was offended by the irreverent haste of it all; the sentimental
demands of the readers had to be taken into account, and Mignon should be
mourned a little. Goethe was quick to agree, and Wilhelm is permitted to
weep out his pain on Therese’s breast.
It was enough to satisfy Schiller, but not the Romantic critics, who refused
to accept that he would demote a miraculous being to a mere oddity. It’s true
that at the end, the stage is swept clean, riddles are solved, and secrets
revealed. Mignon and the harpist become pathological cases with obscure
pasts involving superstition, incest, and everyday madness. For the arch-
Romantic Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote under the pen name Novalis,
the end of the novel is proof that here poetry has been betrayed: “Aesthetic
atheism is the spirit of the book.” The theme of the novel was not an
apprenticeship but “a pilgrimage toward a patent of nobility.”
Seen in that light, Wilhelm Meister’s history of apparent success would
also have to be read as a story of curtailment and loss, and not only from the
author’s perspective. Wilhelm himself cannot help but feel a loss in the
encounter with Therese: when I led an easy and even frivolous life—
without purpose or plan—friendship, love, inclination, and confidence
came to me with open arms and even forced themselves upon me; now that
things are serious, fate seems to be taking another course with me. There
are numerous indications that Wilhelm’s story can also be regarded as a rise
to true fulfillment, because prosaic, ordinary life is simply closer to common
understanding than is poetry.
Be that as it may, the work remains bathed in a kind of odd twilight.
Goethe had his reasons for writing to Schiller, who urged more clarity, There
is no question that the apparent results—results I explicitly state—are
much narrower than the content of the novel. This more comprehensive
content of the novel would then be the poetic medium in which Wilhelm
Meister’s prosaic descent should be seen as the narrower result. Looked at
in this way, the spirit of the novel is more than Novalis’s infamous
“pilgrimage toward a patent of nobility” after all.
It likely would not have helped Die Horen much if Wilhelm Meister had
appeared in installments in advance of publication, as Schiller had hoped.
The novel would later be regarded as a milestone, but its immediate
reception was negligible. The reading public had expected something with
the passion of Werther and was disappointed and bored by the new novel.
The philosopher Christian Garve joked that if Wilhelm’s lover Mariane falls
asleep when he tells her stories, what made the author think that readers who
were not in love with Wilhelm would react any better? Though Goethe had
written Schiller that he had refrained from pouring more water of reason into
the novel, there was still too much for his readers. All those endless
discussions of God and the world and the theater! If people weren’t bored,
they were offended by the immorality of the theatrical world, whose
depiction makes up most of the novel. “Moreover, the women in it all behave
indecently,” Charlotte von Stein wrote to her son, “and when he now and then
introduces noble feelings in human nature, he smears them all with a bit of
excrement, so as to leave nothing heavenly in human nature.” Nor was
Charlotte mollified by the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” in book 6,
where heaven certainly gets its due. She simply didn’t buy that much
religious edification coming from her former beloved and suspected that he
inserted those chapters “because those sheets also earn him money.”
There were others, however, who read only about the Beautiful Soul in
book 6 and were so shocked by the indecency of the rest of the novel that
they actually burned it, as Schiller reported to Goethe in a letter of July 25,
1796. Goethe’s brother-in-law Schlosser didn’t go that far, but in a letter to
his son-in-law he remarked, “I cannot yet stifle my displeasure that Goethe
assigned this pure soul a seat in his bordello, which should serve only as an
accommodation for vagabonds and riffraff.”
Die Horen was able to struggle along, without Wilhelm Meister, for a
little while longer. After Schiller’s falling-out with the brothers August
Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel—August Wilhelm had been an especially
frequent contributor—the enterprise lost an important pillar of support.
Fichte, Herder, Humboldt, Garve, Bürger, and even Kant had promised
articles but either failed to deliver or sent in only slight pieces. Goethe,
meanwhile, continued to be a prolific contributor. Following the
Conversations of German Émigrés and the “Roman Elegies,” his translation
of Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography appeared serially until early 1797. It
would be his last piece for the journal. Die Horen limped along for another
year and a half, its promise having evaporated. Schiller’s sister-in-law
Karoline von Wolzogen, Louise Brachmann, Friederike Brun, Amalie von
Imhoff, Sophie Mereau, and Elsa von Recke all published in the dying
publication; Goethe spoke mockingly of its feminine epoch. On January 26,
1798, Schiller told Goethe that the periodical under whose banner their
friendship had begun was about to fold. “It is understood that we will not let
its end become a scandal,” he writes. Half ironically and half in earnest, the
playwright so versed in theatrical fireworks continues, “Otherwise, in this
twelfth issue we could have printed a mad politico-religious essay that
would have provoked a ban of Die Horen, and if you know of such a thing,
we still have room for it.”
 Apparently nothing of the kind occurred to Goethe. Schiller didn’t mention
it again, and in the end Die Horen died a peaceful death.
 CHAPTER 23

Herrmann and Dorothea. Living Despite History.

Looking for Real Estate. The Treasure Hunter.
The Summer of Ballads.
Return to the path of mist and fog. At Work on Faust.
Travel Preparations. An Auto-da-fé.
An Encounter with Hölderlin. The Third Trip to Switzerland.
Overcoming Terror at the immensity of the world.

....

A LITERARY QUARREL CAN BE LIKE A REFRESHING SUMMER

thunderstorm, and may even be the occasion for beginning a new work. Just
as often, however, the squabblers cling to their positions and need a chance
to get everything off their chest, or they’ll never stop. Whoever has some
claim to posthumous fame must force his contemporaries to come out with
whatever they silently hold against him, and he will always erase that
impression by his presence, life, and influence. Goethe wrote this to
Schiller after he had finished three cantos of the verse epic Herrmann and
Dorothea, a work that, second only to Werther in popularity, might once and
for all erase the impression made by hostile criticism.
Goethe had discovered the material for his epic three years earlier in a
chronicle of the expulsion of Protestants from Salzburg in 1731: the story of a
young man who comes to the aid of a girl, one of the refugees, and then takes
her as his bride after having overcome his shyness and the opposition of his
father. Goethe transposed this story of an unusual courtship into the
contemporary situation of refugees fleeing the wars of revolution. He made
use of several details from the chronicle, for example, the girl’s
misapprehension that she is only being employed as a maidservant. As in the
Conversations of German Émigrés, these refugees are fleeing their homes on
the right bank of the Rhine before the advancing French army. They pass a
rural town fortunately still untouched by the war. Curious and ready to give
aid, its inhabitants come streaming out, among them Herrmann, the
industrious but bashful son of the proprietor of the Golden Lion Inn. The
lovely young Dorothea catches his eye.
In distress herself, her only concern is to help her fellow sufferers, and
Herrmann is so moved he falls in love. In his father’s eyes, Herrmann is too
modest. He lacks any sense of honor and simply has no ambition. Herrmann
is insulted and goes off to sulk. His mother goes after him and finds him
weeping beneath a tree at the far end of the garden. He is resolved to
volunteer as a soldier, but his mother dissuades him and encourages him
instead to be more energetic in wooing the girl he has chosen. Mother and
son return to join their neighbors, who are still sitting together.
It is Herrmann’s mother who begins to talk about the girl he has fallen for,
thereby again angering his father, who wants no refugee as a daughter-in-law.
But the mother is practiced in such matters and breaks down her husband’s
resistance. The apothecary and the doctor are sent out to learn what they can
about the young woman’s reputation. They hear nothing but good of Dorothea.
With a pistol in her hand, for instance, she has defended the children
entrusted to her from plundering soldiers. Herrmann can now propose to her,
but shy as he is, he leaves her with the impression that she is only being
offered work as a maidservant. When she finds herself treated like
Herrmann’s betrothed, Dorothea thinks they are making fun of her. In the end,
all misunderstanding is transformed into delight. The couple confess their
love for each other, and Herrmann’s father agrees to the match. Dorothea,
who has lost her first fiancé, a revolutionary, to the Parisian guillotine, still
feels the tremors of history in Herrmann’s arms: Thus to the sailor, landed at
last, / The solidest ground, the safe terra firma still seems to be swaying.
Herrmann, matured to manhood in just a few hours through genuine
inclination, utters the emotional closing words: Let then our union,
Dorothea, be all the stronger! / In the general convulsion we shall hold
firm and survive, / Stand by each other and cling to the beautiful things
that are ours.
The idyllic story of a courtship in evil times—could one make an epic
poem modeled on Homer out of such material? Goethe accepted the
challenge. He said he wanted to prove that you didn’t need a large theme to
produce a great work. Schiller’s elegy “The Walk,” published the preceding
year, ends with the line “And Homer’s sun—behold!—it smiles upon us as
well.”
It was a coincidence that the philologist Friedrich August Wolf had just
published the results of research purporting to show that the Homeric epics
were not the work of a single author, but rather represented a collection of
numerous epic songs by various authors. So there was no Homer, only
Homeridae. Goethe otherwise had great respect for Wolf, but felt, once
again, that the assiduous philologists were not content until they had broken
everything down into its smallest components. He sensed that they did it out
of resentment of works that were sublimely great, and for him, this belittling,
tearing down, making everything equal and collective, fit with the rising
spirit of democracy. That said, the new theory also offered an advantage—
though one couldn’t hope to compete with Homer, one could with the
Homeridae—and he exploited the belittling business by setting to work as
one of them. With Luise of 1795, Voss had attempted a bourgeois-idyllic
verse epic in the spirit of Homer, and Goethe now hoped to outdo him. In
mid-1796, he wrote Schiller that he had begun the project because I need to
have done something of this sort too. The remark may have struck him as
too offhanded; he deleted it in a later edition of their correspondence.
Reading Herrmann and Dorothea, one can sense Goethe’s pleasure in
dressing up bourgeois situations and characters in Homeric language. The
Muses are invoked even though he was writing about farmers and
apothecaries rather than Hector and Achilles. His revelers sit in the hot
afternoon sun before the inn on the market square as if on Olympus. From a
distance, the somewhat choleric father resembles the easily irritated Zeus,
and the pastor is like a jovial Tiresias. Herrmann whips up the rearing,
foaming pair that pull his curricle like some Achilles, and at the end supports
with an increased feeling of manhood the heroic greatness of this woman—
Dorothea, who has twisted her ankle. The charming young woman is like a
rural Helen. The reader is to recall Homer at every step in the familiar world
of a German country town. Nearby things are illuminated by a distant light
and the faraway, ancient world is brought close. Goethe indulges in ironic
play with the classical antiquity he so revered.
The writing flowed easily, and he was never less than cheerful at the
work, to Schiller’s amazement. The latter wrote to the Swiss painter Johann
Heinrich Meyer, “While the rest of us must laboriously collect and examine
in order to slowly produce some tolerable thing, he only has to gently shake
the tree and the loveliest fruits fall down, ripe and heavy. The ease with
which he now reaps the fruits of a well-spent life and continual learning is
unbelievable.”
He was fairly certain that this work would please the public. Convinced of
success, he delivered to his publisher, Johann Friedrich Vieweg, a sealed
envelope in which, on a slip of paper, he had written the fee he expected. If
Vieweg offered less, Goethe would break off negotiations. If he offered
more, he would have to pay only what Goethe was asking. He wanted to find
out how much he was worth to the publisher and whether Vieweg’s judgment
matched Goethe’s own estimate of his value, which was hardly modest. He
was asking a thousand taler in gold, twenty times what Friedrich Hölderlin
had recently received from Cotta for his novel Hyperion. Vieweg, annoyed,
nonetheless offered exactly the amount Goethe had requested in his sealed
bid, got the work, and made a handsome profit from numerous special and
deluxe editions. The book became a favorite wedding present among the
educated bourgeoisie. In Herrmann and Dorothea, Goethe wrote to Schiller
in early 1798, for once I gave the Germans what they wanted and now
they’re extremely satisfied. The work pleased not only his dear Germans; he
was extremely pleased himself. For many years to come, he never read it in
private or public without being greatly moved.
In the last canto, Dorothea recalls her former betrothed, who has lost his
life fighting for freedom in revolutionary Paris. She repeats the impassioned
legacy he left her. These verses, which Goethe composed in the spring of
1797, show how far he had by then distanced himself from a merely
polemical attitude toward revolution. He had begun to see something else in
it: an elementary fate, an all-leveling earthquake, a human and superhuman
force of nature that dismantles everything and reassembles it anew.

. . . for now all the world is in

Motion and now, everything once conjoined is detached,
Basic laws of the mightiest states are coming undone.
Those who once possessed are detached from their possessions,
Friend separated from friend, and love cut off from love.
...
True is the saying that man is but a stranger on earth.
 Now more than ever, everyone has become a stranger.
We no longer possess the land. Its treasures are mobile;
Gold and silver are melted down from their ancient forms.
Everything’s moving, as if our structured world were sliding
Back into night and chaos, to shape itself anew.

As Goethe wrote these lines, he was keeping an eye out for real estate. He
expected inflation to follow the wars of revolution, and going into debt to
purchase a country estate seemed a rational bet: inflation would reduce his
indebtedness, and at a time when revolution was making the solidest ground,
the safe terra firma tremble. He was interested in the estate of Oberrossla,
eleven miles northeast of Weimar and not far from Ossmannstedt, where
Wieland had already purchased land. The estate had been up for auction
since 1796, and for a short time in the spring of 1797 it looked as if Goethe’s
bid would be accepted, but the matter dragged on for another year. In March
1798 he was at last able to acquire the estate for 13,125 imperial taler, and
he immediately leased it out to a tenant. Five years later, after much
aggravation, he was glad to be able to get rid of it at a loss.
While still negotiating the purchase of Oberrossla, Goethe bought a
hundred-taler ticket for the Hamburg lottery in May 1797. First prize was a
country estate in Silesia. It was another way to acquire real estate, he
thought. But he came up empty-handed, despite having spent some time
thinking about what lottery number to choose. He had calculated it using his
own and Schiller’s birthdates. Three days later, on May 23, 1797, he sent his
first ballad, “The Treasure Hunter,” for a cycle of ballads he and Schiller
had agreed to compose for the Muses’ Almanac that would appear the
following year. Schiller, who knew about Goethe’s flyer in the lottery, made
an amicable reference: “By the way, I was amused to notice in this little
poem an allusion to the intellectual atmosphere in which you may be living
now.” The ballad’s opening lines are Penniless and sick at heart, / I was
dragging out my time. / Poverty’s the greatest crime, / Wealth the only goal
to strive for. The treasure hunter then deploys tried and true magic practices
—circles of fire, selling his blood and his soul, offerings of herbs and bones.
But no treasure chest opens, no vein of gold is discovered. Instead, a
beautiful boy appears with a message meant for both the treasure hunter and
the lottery player: Dig no more, it’s all in vain. / Workdays—friends as
compensation, / Bitter weeks, then celebration: / Let them be your magic
spell.
“The Treasure Hunter” was the first salvo in a ballad competition between
the two friends. Schiller found it easy to write ballads. In quick succession
he turned out a series of them, including “The Diver” and “The Pledge,”
which would later gain great popularity, as well as “The Cranes of Ibykus,”
perhaps the most beautiful of all his ballads. Goethe had given his friend the
idea for the subject, the fantastical story of the young singer murdered while
on his way to the great singing competition in Corinth. The only witnesses
are some cranes flying by. During the competition they reappear, and one of
the murderers takes fright and inadvertently reveals himself. Goethe, who
wanted to see everything play out naturally, would have preferred a more
gradual unmasking, but Schiller always aimed for the dramatic surprise. The
result met with Goethe’s approval.
Schiller’s ballads seemed to him the perfect realization of the ideal
narrative poem. Goethe thought his own contributions—especially “The
Bride of Corinth” and “The God and the Bayadère”—didn’t truly fit into the
genre. They were too mysterious and also too morally ambiguous. “The
Bride of Corinth” tells of a young man from Athens on a visit to family
friends in Corinth. The daughter of the house had been promised to him as a
bride. The youth enters a world foreign to him, for in the meantime, this
family has converted to Christianity, an ominous sign: When new faith
germinates, / It often extirpates / Love and loyalty like some noxious weed.
The daughter has been sent to a cloister and has died there, but the youth does
not know it. The girl appears to him in a dark room, and they spend a night of
love together. When her mother bursts into the room at dawn, it all becomes
clear: the girl is undead and will carry the young man off with her in a
liebestod. She wants to be cremated with him: When the sparks are blowing
/ With the ash still glowing / We shall hurry toward the gods of old. It is a
moving lament for the fall of the ancient gods, who were better disposed
toward Eros, a complaint against the monotheistic demystifying of the world:
And of the ancient gods, that lively swarm, / The quiet house was in an
instant cleared. / Now only one, invisible, was the norm, / As savior,
hanging on a cross, revered. It is reminiscent of verses from Schiller’s elegy
“The Gods of Greece”: “Fallen now are all those lovely flowers, / Brought
down by the north wind’s wintry blast. / In order to increase the one god’s
powers, / The others had to die, they could not last.”
 Goethe ironically called “The Bride of Corinth” his vampire poem. When
the ballads of that summer appeared in the Muses’ Almanac for the Year
1798, almost all were praised, especially those by Schiller, while “The
Bride of Corinth” provoked heated debate. “Nothing occasions more
difference of opinion,” reported Böttiger, “than Goethe’s ‘Bride of Corinth.’
While one party calls it the most disgusting of all bordello scenes and
regards it as a desecration of Christianity, others call it the most perfect of all
Goethe’s shorter works.”
The critics also claimed they had already discovered “bordello scenes” in
Wilhelm Meister and the “Roman Elegies,” but it was not enough to
particularly annoy Goethe. The benefit of the summer of ballads was also that
it provided an opportunity to once again unpack his prodigious packet of
notes and drafts for Faust. He wrote to Schiller, Our study of ballads has
brought me back to this path of mist and fog.
The unfinished play, begun in the early 1770s, constantly preoccupied him.
He took it up to salve his artistic conscience, and when important life events
were in the offing: in 1775, before he moved to Weimar; in 1786, before the
Italy trip; now again in the early summer of 1797, when he thought he might
be able to leave for a long-planned third journey to Italy. Everything was to
be thoroughly planned and organized this trip; there was to be no question of
dashing off into the unknown. Goethe had even sent the painter Johann
Heinrich Meyer in advance to scout out places and sights to be visited, and
the two were going to coauthor a great work on the cultural history of Italy
from the material gathered.
Even if existential renewal was not the foremost goal as it had been on the
first Italian journey, the feeling of a turning point in his life was strong
enough to prompt Goethe to write a will and choose Schiller and his
colleague Voigt as editors for his posthumous works. Continued hostilities in
southern Germany and Italy were causing unrest, making travel there
perilous, and it therefore seemed prudent to put his house in order. Goethe
was now a family man who had to provide for a wife and child. A recent
survey of his personal finances also troubled Goethe, who found he had run
up considerable debt.
An auto-da-fé also marked this as a turning point: on the first two Sundays
of July 1797, Goethe burned most of the letters he had received up to 1792.
He did not mention it to Schiller, whom he had just appointed as one of his
executors. Apparently, there were very personal matters as well as some
official business he wanted to keep secret, even from the eyes of his friend.
While it was another instance of molting—a mood of leave-taking, of
stocktaking, of housecleaning—that induced Goethe to take out the Faust
manuscript again, this was not another impatient attempt to finally finish the
unwieldy work. Instead, in an elegiac mood, he was seeking contact with his
past life and with the story of his obsessions. That mood emerges clearly
enough in the stanzas preceding the drama, entitled “Dedication,” stanzas
composed during these weeks of sweeping up and the search for lost time:

Once more, you wavering figures, you draw near me,

I glimpsed so long ago through murky haze!
Shall I hold you fast this time, and will you hear me?
Will my heart still follow you on tangled ways?
You throng about! Well then, I’ll let you steer me.
You rise from mist and fog to meet my gaze.
I feel a youthful stirring in my breast
And by your magic breeze I am caressed.

To whom are these verses “dedicated”? To some future, sympathetic

audience? He doesn’t say so. It is the entire imaginary world of figures
populating the play that is directly addressed: Once more, you wavering
figures, you draw near me! But they do not merely entice him back into that
magic realm, the lost world of his early productivity when he wrote the first
scenes of Faust. This created world also brings with it the real world of
those times, the scenes of happy days when he read those early drafts of
Faust aloud and discussed them with friends and lovers.
That circle of listeners had been long dispersed. Some, like his sister
Cornelia and his friend Merz, have died. Others, like Herder, are still nearby
but have become less intimate. And still others, like Lenz, have dropped
completely out of sight. No longer will they hear the songs to come, / Those
souls for whom I sang in long years past, / That friendly crowd, now
scattered, deaf, and dumb, / Their fading echoes dying out at last. Once the
work in progress belonged to his circle of friends, where it originated. They
have been replaced by an anonymous reading public: Nameless now the
hearers of my woe. Thus we get the impression that the “Dedication” is
addressed to that scattered or deceased circle of former boon companions
whom this work will remind of their own youthful years, as if in the play’s
orbit their fellowship could be brought back to life. In the meantime,
however, that fellowship is just as imaginary as the play itself.
The last strophe of the poem takes a surprising turn. Even if the earlier
reality in which Faust originated and made an impression has disappeared
and thereby become imaginary, the opposite is true of the work itself. In it,
everything is at first imaginary, but if you give it your attention, it draws you
into its spell and becomes more and more real. Past reality becomes a
shadow of itself, and the shades in the play become real: A shudder grips
me, I begin to weep. / My heart, so often stern, grows mild and soft. / The
things I have seem far away, asleep. / Awake and real is what I thought I
lost. The poem is likely a double dedication—to the friends of old who have
disappeared and to those wavering figures from the work who are forcing
their way into reality.
As distant things drew near in these early summer weeks of 1797, Goethe
was working on the portals that lead into Faust. After the “Dedication”
comes a “Prelude at the Theater” and then a “Prologue in Heaven,” three
gates opening into three different intellectual spaces. The “Dedication” is the
mostly intimate chamber drama between memories and the shadowy figures
of the work. The “Prelude at the Theater” is concerned with a work for the
“boards that signify the world,” as Schiller would later call the stage, a place
where profit and loss are also at play; here, it is Goethe the theater director
speaking. And finally, the “Prologue in Heaven” gazes down from on high at
the theatrum mundi and at a Faust who is, as in Spanish baroque drama, a
piece in a game between God and the devil.
In those momentous weeks before his departure for Italy, the various
dimensions of the play opened up for Goethe; it struck him as even more
roomy than he had thought, but also more labyrinthine. That brought a state of
creative restlessness, Goethe sensing that without his being fully aware of it,
the play had grown into a monstrous hybrid of stage play, closet drama, folk
play, and mystery play, slapstick and metaphysics—a divine comedy. It made
his head spin, and he appealed for help to Schiller’s cooler judgment: Now,
however, I wish that you would have the goodness to spend a sleepless
night thinking through the matter and presenting me with the demands you
would make on the entire business, thus recounting to me my own dreams
and interpreting them like a true prophet—Goethe as Pharaoh, dreaming an
entire world, and Schiller as his Joseph, interpreting his dreams. Schiller
knew he had nothing to lose; he slept little, in any case, and quickly helped
his friend by providing insightful remarks: Faust, an accident of nature,
embodied the “duplicity of human nature,” between God and beast; he was an
expression of the “unsuccessful attempt to unite the divine and the physical in
man.” One consequence, for Schiller, was that the work could get out of
hand, turning into either slapstick comedy or solemn abstraction. Both
extremes had to be avoided. Of course, life should be presented as bursting
with powerful sensuality, but it must also submit “to the service of a rational
idea.” Schiller’s momentous suggestion was that Faust should not just appear
as a learned man and seducer but also be “led to a life of activity.” Famously,
Goethe would seize on this and make Faust into an industrious globetrotter in
the second part of the play.
This flood of ideas in the weeks before Goethe’s planned departure took
him by surprise. It would now only be a matter of a month of quiet and the
work would spring from the earth like a huge family of mushrooms, to
general astonishment and horror. If my trip comes to nothing, I have
placed my entire trust in these capers.
He calls his Faust stories capers—we will need to keep that in mind. In
any case, Faust again disappears among the shades: after the tense political
and military situation postponed the departure for Italy several times, a
definite date was scheduled. On July 5, 1797, Goethe writes to Schiller,
Faust has been postponed for the time being; the northern phantoms have
been pushed back for a while by southern reminiscences.
In the midst of travel preparations, Goethe received two poems from
Schiller, who asked for his opinion without telling him the name of the poet.
They were the hymn “To the Ether” and the elegy “The Wanderer” by
Friedrich Hölderlin, who had submitted them to Schiller for the Muses’
Almanac. Hölderlin venerated Schiller, and Schiller had a high regard for his
younger colleague and fellow Swabian. Goethe, however, had barely taken
notice of Hölderlin, although the remarkably handsome young man had spent
several months in Jena. In fact, they had even encountered each other in the
winter of 1794–95, in Schiller’s house, where Hölderlin had committed a
faux pas. In the excitement of waiting for Schiller, he had ignored a stranger
in the same room who turned out to be Goethe. “May heaven help me,”
Hölderlin wrote to a friend, “to make up for . . . my misfortune when I get to
Weimar.” He was tormented by the feeling that he could not do so, for Goethe
remained reserved toward him.
 Now Goethe had the two poems in front of him and was asked to render an
opinion; he gave them some muted praise: has the makings of a poet, which
by themselves, however, don’t make a poet. Nevertheless, he recommended
printing them and gave the unknown poet some advice, Perhaps it would be
best if he once chose a very simple idyllic event and presented it. Then it
would be easier to see how well he succeeded at depicting people, which is
what everything comes down to in the end. Schiller did not pass this
critique on to Hölderlin, for he knew that to recommend a smaller form and
the idyllic depiction of people would be an insult to this author of highly
emotional hymns. That was exactly how Hölderlin reacted, several weeks
after Goethe’s departure from Weimar for Italy, when the young poet paid him
a visit in Frankfurt and heard from Goethe’s own lips the advice that Schiller
had wisely suppressed: he should restrict himself to a simple idyllic event. It
was a heavy blow to Hölderlin’s poetic self-confidence, and it took him a
long time to recover.
On the night before leaving for Italy, Goethe—who had been wrapping up
work for weeks and making thorough travel preparations—was suddenly
seized by a reluctance he was at a loss to comprehend. I’m already dreading
the empirical immensity of the world, he wrote to Schiller on July 29. He
was afraid of being swallowed by the million-headed Hydra of empiricism.
He had never felt anything like this before. He had always had an unlimited
curiosity and the conviction that he could assimilate anything that seemed to
him worthwhile. Whatever failed to make an impression on him was casually
or summarily brushed aside; it didn’t concern him, and he couldn’t be
persuaded otherwise. He would decide for himself what was important and
meaningful. But now he came to feel it possible to be overwhelmed by the
wide world. The unconcern of earlier years had disappeared, and he came up
with a new strategy. He would not flee the crush of reality by retreating like a
bad poet to the phantoms of his inner life. He wouldn’t allow himself that
luxury. He wanted to remain open, but it had to be a controlled openness. If
social reality distracted and beleaguered him, it was important to behave just
as he did when botanizing: keep a cool head and devote himself to
observation even in the middle of the jungle.
Goethe proceeded systematically, with nothing left to chance: Therefore, I
have made myself folders in which I file all sorts of public documents I
encounter at present—newspapers, weeklies, excerpts from sermons,
regulations, comedy programs, price lists—and then I also record both
what I see and notice as well as my immediate evaluation of it. Whereupon
I talk about these things when in company and advance my opinion, and
then soon see to what extent I am well informed and to what extent my
judgment coincides with the judgment of well-informed people. Whereupon
I again record and file my new experience and what I’ve learned, and so I
have material that will remain of sufficient interest to me as a history of
things external and internal. His initial dread at the immensity of the world
is transformed into this oddly pedantic processing of the world. For example,
while gazing at the lofty mountains surrounding Lake Lucerne, he notes, these
enormous rocks must not fail to be a rubric in the chapters about my
journey. I have already accumulated some hefty bundles of papers. . . . In
the end, one enjoys something when one feels one can absorb much of it.
By way of such pedantry, Goethe had rediscovered his lust for the world and
was now enjoying his reconstituted lightness.
Frankfurt was his first lengthy way station. He had brought Christiane and
August along that far to introduce them to his mother, who welcomed and
doted upon her grandson and her son’s “bedmate.” In Frankfurt he was less
interested in seeing old acquaintances than in inspecting the traces of recent
history. He stood before the ruins of his grandfather’s house, which had been
destroyed in the last French bombardment. The French had cut a wide swath
of destruction through the city and its bourgeois culture. That too was an
effect of the revolution. Rubble and ruins were everywhere to be seen, and
yet he knew that it all would be purchased and restored by some new
entrepreneur. The speculators were already lying in wait. Frankfurt would
rise again, but in a way that would make it unrecognizable. For the time
being, everything was still full of reminiscences: here was where he played
as a child and the emperor had passed in grand procession on his way to be
crowned.
He had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he was attracted to the
enchantment of a vanishing world that still preserved the atmosphere of his
youth. There were moments of great emotional intensity that awakened his
creative energy. In the ruins of the city of his childhood, Goethe thinks of
Faust. Poetically inspired by the town, he could resume work on it at once.
Yet Frankfurt is also a place of fatal distraction. People here lived in a
constant whirl of buying and consuming . . . I even think I have noticed a
kind of dread of poetic productions—or at least, to the extent that they are
poetic—which strikes me as quite natural for exactly the same reason.
Poetry needs, nay demands, composure. It isolates someone against his
will, obtruding itself repeatedly, and in the wider world it is . . . as
uncomfortable as a loyal lover. The city as a place of temptation, then. In the
world of business sense and distraction, it wasn’t easy to remain true to
poetry.
From Frankfurt, Christiane and August returned to Weimar while Goethe
continued south. First he had to reassure Christiane, who had a thousand
fears that she might lose him to Italy. You surely know, he wrote to her on
August 24, and you saw on the last trip, that I am careful and cautious in
such undertakings, . . . and I can certainly reassure you that this time, I’m
not going to Italy. Forgoing Italy was a result of the military and political
state of affairs, for late in the summer of 1797, hostilities had broken out
again in northern Italy. It was simply too dangerous to go.
In Stuttgart, his next way station, Goethe made contact with Schiller’s
Swabian friends and acquaintances. They remember you with much love and
joy, indeed, I can say with enthusiasm, Goethe wrote his friend. Schiller
was touched and fell to daydreaming: “What would I have given 16 years
ago to encounter you in that place, and how wondrous it seems to me when I
think about the circumstances and moods that place recalls to me and put
them together with our present relationship.” But Goethe had other feelings.
He was meeting people who enthusiastically recalled the Schiller of The
Robbers, and so he writes his friend, I think it was an advantage for both of
us that we met later and at a stage when we were more mature.
Goethe continued on via Tübingen and Schaffhausen to Zurich, where he
met the painter Meyer, who was returning from Italy. In contrast to his
previous visits, this time he took no pleasure in Zurich, where the encounter
with a haggard, stooped Lavater occurred in a narrow street. At one time,
Goethe had traveled to Zurich just to see him, but now he avoided a meeting.
Fortunately, Goethe had put on weight and Lavater failed to recognize him; he
slipped past. It was the end of their story.
There was bad news from Italy. Goethe and Meyer learned that General
Bonaparte was shipping off to Paris works of art that they had intended to
study. If Goethe had not already canceled his Italian plans, he would have
done so now. He still wanted to retrace his steps up to the Gotthard Pass,
however. It was the best place to bid farewell to the South he would not
reach again. He recalled his first journey to Switzerland in 1775, and it
seemed to him now it had marked the end of his youth. I felt, he writes to
Schiller, a strange longing to repeat and rectify those experiences. Of
course, he had become a different person, but he was proud that at his age he
could still climb to the top of the pass. At the foot of the Gotthard, in Uri, he
wrote a poem in distichs that he enclosed in a letter to Schiller on October
17:

Yesterday your head was still brown as the locks of your lover,
She whose lovely face beckons from far away.
Silvery gray now, the early snow covers the summit,
Snow that in stormy nights powdered your aging head.
Ah, so near to age is one’s youth; linked together by life,
Just as a lively dream mixes present and past.

The proprietor of the inn at the summit of the pass was the same person
who had been there twenty years earlier. After descending, they reached their
starting point, Stäfa on Lake Zurich. It was Wilhelm Tell country they were
walking through. They had passed the Rütli meadow, where the legendary
oath against tyranny is supposed to have been sworn, the beginning of the
Swiss Confederacy. They stopped at the chapel commemorating Wilhelm
Tell’s leap to freedom and visited Uri, his reputed birthplace. Here Goethe
had an idea for a work about Tell—not a drama but an epic poem. He wrote
to Schiller that it was a poetic theme that instilled much confidence in him.
Goethe’s idea caught fire in Schiller. “How much I wish,” he wrote to
Goethe, “to be reunited with you soon, also because of this poem.” Goethe
would hold on to the idea for four more years before finally surrendering it to
Schiller.
On a rainy, windy November 20, 1797, Goethe returned to Weimar.
Christiane was relieved and celebrated his return with champagne. Two days
later, after distributing gifts and stowing away his acquisitions, paintings, and
rock specimens, he was already attending the theater again. The trip had not
been the turning point he had hoped for, as always when the goal was Italy.
Not much had changed in his absence. But it was also very good to keep hold
of what he had.
 CHAPTER 24

The Clogged Springs of Poetry. Thinking about Genres:

Drama and Epic. Propyläen Classicism. The Collector and
His Circle. Contra Dilettantism and False Proximity to Reality.
Theatrical Reform. Weimar Dramaturgy. Translating Voltaire’s
Mahomet: A Reparation. Fichte and the
Atheism Scandal. Back to Faust.

....

HAVING SET FAUST ASIDE BEFORE LEAVING FOR SWITZERLAND,

Goethe had other plans in mind upon his return to Weimar: an old idea for an
epic continuation of the Iliad relating the death of Achilles, and another epic
about Wilhelm Tell. He had not yet written a word of the latter but had talked
about it.
In his letters to Schiller, who was then in the midst of an burst of inspired
work on his Wallenstein trilogy, Goethe complained that in Weimar his
productive self is constrained in so many pleasant and unpleasant ways.
He would come over to Jena as soon as he could. He would even leave
behind his artistic adviser Johann Heinrich Meyer, who had taken up
residence in Goethe’s house: I can work only in absolute solitude . . . , it is
not just the conversation, but even the very presence, of loved and
esteemed persons in the house [that] completely diverts my poetic springs.
Goethe was unable to escape Weimar in the coming months, however, and his
poetic springs clearly were not flowing. He began to ponder the
idiosyncrasies of his productivity.
In an exchange of ideas with Schiller, he hoped to gain clarity. Schiller
had told him how mentally exhausting the work on Wallenstein was and how
for him, working on a tragedy always had something “aggressive” about it,
despite aesthetic distance. In his reply, Goethe reflected on his own
relationship to tragedy: I don’t know myself well enough to know whether I
could write a true tragedy, but I am terrified to even undertake one and am
almost convinced that I could destroy myself by the mere attempt. At this
time, Goethe was brooding over how he could help his protagonist Faust get
beyond the tragedy of Gretchen, for everything within him resisted ending the
play with the prison scene. Schiller was skeptical that his friend was really
so averse to tragedy “because of its emotional violence.” Might it not be
external and more technical demands that put him off instead? For instance,
Schiller said that tragedy demands a strict structural consistency, a logic that
Goethe found abhorrent since his poetic talent “wants to express itself with
relaxed freedom.” Goethe’s talent was more narrative than dramatic.
Moreover, the writer of tragedies must also keep in mind the effect or
impression he’s making on the audience and that, according to Schiller,
“embarrasses you.” So Goethe’s aversion was not to tragedy itself but to the
genre’s dramaturgic demands.
Goethe’s comments on his relation to tragedy had spoken to its existential
aspects, and it was Schiller who shifted the problem to the practical level.
That was fine with Goethe, who did not wish to continue exploring his
feelings about tragedy—apparently a subject he preferred to hint at but not
pursue in depth. As he had warned in one of his first letters to Schiller, one
had to expect a sort of darkness and wavering in him. Goethe suggested that
they continue the conversation about literary genres they had begun before his
trip to Switzerland. It was less sensitive and yet of great interest to him. He
was especially attracted by the distinction between epic and dramatic modes.
It was a question raised by his Achilleid project; he had begun to feel that the
death of Achilles might be better suited to a drama than his planned epic
poem. To get the conversation about genre going, Goethe sent his friend a
summary of the ideas they had already discussed. A quarter century later, he
would publish the revised text under his and Schiller’s names as “On Epic
and Dramatic Poetry.” He had always felt that the ideas developed there
were their mutual work.
They agreed on the precept that the epic poet recites an event as
completely past and the playwright depicts it as completely present. In
their correspondence, they draw consequences from this precept that go
beyond what was contained in the later essay.
 The past-time character of an epic creates distance. One can, as it were,
stroll around the narrated events and view them from different angles. By
keeping his distance, the epic poet allows his hearers to maintain distance in
their turn. With control of the event and of time, the epic poet can go forward
or backward, digress or make temporal leaps. Epic distance also provides
opportunity for reflection. One can shift to a higher plane. The narrator
enjoys a triple sovereignty: he stands above the action, is the master of time,
and rises intellectually above his protagonists.
Schiller saw this triple sovereignty as increased “freedom.” The narrator
is free vis-à-vis the world he presents, and the recipient—who is able to
move to the proffered plane—is equally freed. He is given space in which to
play. However, he has a demand placed on him, namely, he must first imagine
the narrative played out on his inner stage. Theater is different: the action
comes to the audience from without, already complete. According to Goethe,
the theater or the sets make it easy and comfortable for the recipient. Instead
of putting in the effort to read an entire novel, people want the story
presented on the stage, short and exciting. The theatrical performance saves
them the trouble of imagining something for themselves. It boils down to this
distinction: epic demands more individual participation from its recipients,
while drama spares them the effort. As Schiller formulated it: “The dramatic
action moves before me. I myself move around the epic action.”
With regard to freedom and individual participation, then, the epic would
rank higher. And Goethe, whose plays show a tendency toward the epic in
any case, seems to accept this evaluation when he writes to Schiller, Why are
our epic works so seldom successful? Because there is no one to listen to
them. Schiller replies, “If drama really needs to be defended on account of
the negative propensity of the times (of which I have no doubt), then you’d
have to begin by reforming the drama, and suppress the common imitation of
nature to provide more light and air for art.”
Refining theatrical art by suppressing the “common imitation of nature”—
thus Schiller formulates the goal of a theater reform that the friends saw from
then on as their mutual task. Schiller thought that it was precisely because of
its immediacy and lack of distance that the theater was inclined to
“naturalism,” which both men liked to call the “common imitation of nature.”
For both, it was crucial to transform mere natural truth into aesthetic truth,
which involved both alienation and intensification. These were the same
ideas that Goethe had made the programmatic underpinnings of Propyläen
(Propylaea), the journal he had just founded with Meyer. At stake here, as in
the planned theater reform, was a deeper understanding of artistic truth as
opposed to naturalistic tendencies.
In the fall of 1797, with the end of Die Horen clearly in sight, Goethe had
made a plan to bring out a new periodical that would be more monograph
series than journal. It was Meyer who suggested the title Propyläen, after the
entrance gate to the Acropolis. Here the reading public was to be instructed
in the spirit of Winckelmann’s classicism about what aesthetic truth was and
how it was founded upon but transcended natural truth.
As for natural truth, it provided Goethe with the opportunity to publish
his essays on anatomy and optics in Propyläen. They were meant to be an aid
to painters and sculptors, who were expected to school themselves first in
natural objects according to the principle that one needs to know reality
before one can cross its boundaries into idealism. If the world of natural
scientists barely took notice of Goethe’s scientific publications, at least they
could be useful to artists and those interested in art.
Goethe based aesthetic truth on the model of classical antiquity. In
antiquity, he wrote in an essay on Winckelmann, people understood that man
as a natural being is placed at the peak of nature, and that he has an
obligation, to produce another peak in his turn. . . . He can raise himself up
to that point by saturating himself with all perfections and virtues,
invoking selection, order, harmony, and significance, and finally uplifting
himself to the production of a work of art that will assume its radiant place
alongside his other deeds and works. Aesthetic truth is thus not simply an
imitation but an enhancement of nature. Ancient works of art that Goethe had
become familiar with in Italy, works that corresponded to this idea of an
enhanced nature, were to be made known through descriptions, illustrations,
and explications. Propyläen promulgated an ideal art, but at the same time
intoned an elegy for what had been lost. Although Napoleon was plundering
Italy’s artistic treasures before their eyes, people still had not realized what
the world is losing in this moment, since so many parts of this great and
ancient whole have been torn down.
The first issue of Propyläen appeared in October 1798, followed by four
more in January, April, June, and December of the following year. Owing to
poor sales, the last issue did not appear until a year later. As compensation
for the publisher Cotta’s financial losses, Goethe offered him options on his
next longer works, and so Cotta uncomplainingly printed the last and all but
unsellable issue in the fall of 1800.
From his conversations with Schiller about natural and aesthetic truth,
Goethe developed the novel-like text The Collector and His Circle, a
lengthy contribution to Propyläen that he called a little family portrait in
letters. Its theme was the various directions that artists and connoisseurs
can take, from an objectivity totally lacking in imagination to a fantastical
imagination lacking any concrete object. His publisher was pleased—at long
last, not another didactic monograph but an entertaining epistolary novella
full of wit and charm! Its premise is that an art collector writes letters to the
editors of the Propyläen about how his father, his uncle, and he have
acquired their paintings.
It is a hodgepodge of very divergent tastes. Some painters strive for
realistic imitation of nature. For others, nothing is too fantastical. And in
between are the composite characters: the sketchers who only ever do
studies but never finish a painting; the dotters who are obsessed with detail
and lose sight of the whole; the drifters and foggers, wrigglers and
undulators who prefer decoration, playfulness, and portentousness. On the
other hand, there are the skeletists and rigorists who seek the essence in
emaciated abstraction. Schiller had helped put together this typology. At the
time, he was particularly annoyed at the circle of young Romantics around
Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, so he made sure they got what was
coming to them as well. They were the imaginators who try to appeal to the
imagination without worrying about giving it something vivid to imagine.
This epistolary story had grown out of Goethe’s and Schiller’s
schematizing, one of their favorite occupations. The text was barely
completed before they were at it again. The two friends were collecting and
ordering the reasons why artistic dilettantism represented a great danger for
art. Both were convinced, where art is concerned, that the antonym of “good”
is “well-meaning,” which there was far too much of for their taste. It is true
that, at the end of the eighteenth century, there was a great increase in artistic
activity by aristocratic and bourgeois amateurs. In Weimar, it was the court
circles, in Jena, the middle class. Everywhere people were painting
watercolors, cutting silhouettes, writing stories and poems, singing, and
playing instruments. Acting was especially popular. People wanted to appear
onstage and play themselves. When Goethe’s Iphigenia premiered at the
Weimar amateur theater, even the young duke participated. Taking the
directorship of the theater in the early 1790s, Goethe became intent on
professionalizing the performances. He knew that dilettantism can bring one
closer to art—as with his experience with painting, at which he remained an
amateur—but was useful only when not confused with genuine art. Goethe
liked to compare himself to a gardener who prunes and waters and weeds.
Schiller, on the other hand, defended his honor as a professional writer.
Goethe preferred to teach the dilettantes; Schiller wanted to repudiate them,
especially when they had the gall to assume they were his colleagues. In that
sense, Schiller considered many of the Romantics nothing but dilettantes.
Lacking a pulpit from which to rebuke them after the demise of Die Horen
and Propyläen, however, Goethe and Schiller never got beyond a “General
Schema” on the topic of dilettantism.
Their next projects were theater reform and a new dramatic theory, which
they had been discussing for some time. Schiller had moved to Weimar, and
they intended to apply the principles of natural truth and aesthetic truth to
practical work in the theater, drawing both on their discussions and actual
plays, especially those by Schiller. Their first principle was that theatrical
art should stick to nature, study it, imitate it, and produce something that
was similar to natural phenomena, as Goethe had written in his introduction
to Propyläen. Theater should orient itself to nature.
Secondly, this orientation should follow the formal laws of art, which
shapes its own particular context of meaning, a realm of its own order. Thus
natural truth becomes aesthetic truth. Goethe had formulated the principle
in the introduction to Propyläen: Once the artist has taken up some natural
object, it already no longer belongs to nature. In fact, one can say that the
artist creates it at that moment by extracting from it what is significant,
characteristic, interesting. Or rather, the artist first introduces a higher
value into it. By way of the free play of imagination, aesthetic truth becomes
playfully heightened natural truth.
The third principle, pertaining to artistic technique, is that the work of art
must not deny its aesthetic character. Ideal art is not achieved when birds
peck at trompe l’oeil grapes. The true stage, writes Schiller, is like

. . . the barge of Acheron

Which transports but the shadows of the dead,
And if raw life would book a seat thereon,
The craft would cease to float, capsize instead.
 The riders are spirits, ephemeral, soon gone.
Illusion must not turn real in a play.
If nature triumphs, art must fade away.

To prevent a false victory of nature, Goethe bets on the alienating effect of

explicit artificiality, already present in poetic meter. Schiller adds that the
work of art lays claim to “nothing but a story, / Confident that its deeper truth
will move us. / The false Muse pretends she’s real to bemuse us.” The most
urgent task for the reform of the art of theater was a battle against naturalism.
Their attempt to establish verse on the stage encountered a naturalistic
critique in its most straightforward form: the objection was that people don’t
talk in such an artificial way. Why not let them speak as they do in real life?
But Goethe and Schiller insisted on language enhanced by rhythm and rhyme
precisely because of its artificiality, for it thereby breaks the illusion of
realism. Figures on stage should not talk as people do in life. The
unaccustomed language of verse imposes the discipline needed to bring out a
work’s significance. When Schiller was in the process of drafting
Wallenstein in blank verse, he wrote to Goethe, “One should really conceive
everything that needs to rise above the common level in verse, . . . for vacuity
is never as obvious as when it is spoken in verses.” In his reply, Goethe
makes Schiller’s remark into a principle. He declares that the public wants to
have it easy and therefore demands prose, while a truly independent work
requires verse. In any event, we are obliged to forget our century if we
want to work according to our convictions.
Measured against ordinary life, verse is as artificial as everything else
about the theater, from sets to lighting, from makeup to action compressed in
time. One should learn from opera, Schiller thought. It was popular though
entirely antinaturalistic. Its audiences accepted the lofty, bizarre, or magical
without trying to measure them against reality. Only a died-in-the-wool
philistine would be surprised that the actors go to the trouble of singing
instead of just talking to each other. “In the opera people really waive such
servile imitation of nature,” Schiller wrote. That was exactly the opinion
held by Goethe, then working on a libretto for a sequel to Mozart’s
Zauberflöte. Schiller also used operatic elements in his tragedy The Bride of
Messina with great artistry, if less public success.
Naturalism was one potential danger for art; the other was affectation.
The former had too little form, the latter too much. A cautionary example was
the classic French tragedy Lessing had once fought against. Schiller was
deeply surprised when, shortly before he moved to Weimar, his friend
Goethe began to translate Voltaire’s Mahomet, one of the prime examples of
the genre. The premiere of Goethe’s translation was performed on January
30, 1800, in honor of the duchess’s birthday. Goethe asked Schiller to help
with the preparations. It was the first work Schiller had done in Weimar, a
favor for his friend that brought him little satisfaction.
Goethe himself had not undertaken the Voltaire translation entirely
voluntarily, but at the request of the duke. Until then, Goethe had been his
own master at the court theater, but the duke was intent on having something
after his own taste for once. As a favor to Goethe, he had agreed to the
latter’s cultural innovations—the newest philosophy of Fichte, for instance,
who would soon cause him trouble; the new art of the theater; and Schiller’s
Wallenstein, which he was not wholly satisfied with. As he wrote to Goethe,
“The character of the hero, who in my opinion also needs improvement,
could certainly . . . be made more steady.” In fact, all the new activity was
hardly to his taste. Class conscious as he was, he preferred the great court
theater of France with its awe-inspiring sublimity, clear contours, and sharp
contrasts between high and low, good and evil, not the vacillating,
mysterious, brooding, complicated characters modeled on Shakespeare. The
duke had also chosen Voltaire’s Mahomet because the play seemed to fit
well into the present political landscape.
Voltaire’s Muhammad is a fraud who inspires terrible fanaticism in his
followers. This motif could be read as a parallel to the Jacobin ideologues
and rabble-rousers, and even to Napoleon, risen like a comet into the skies of
European politics and rushing from one victory to the next, dragging an entire
nation into irrational passions. It was the duke’s idea that this project would
set the classic theater of the French against the newer French troublemakers,
and Goethe had no desire to beg off. He stated frankly that it was gratitude to
the duke that had persuaded him to take on the assignment. Goethe felt
particularly in the duke’s debt at the time, because he had to make amends for
a scandal that the duke partly blamed Goethe for, which had caused an
aggravating ruckus and ended with Fichte’s dismissal.
In December 1798, the philosopher Friedrich Karl Forberg’s essay
“Development of the Concept of Religion” appeared in the Philosophical
Journal, which Fichte edited. Forberg explicitly rejects the God of
revelation and declares that religion is founded solely on ethics. His
argument was no different from that of his teacher Kant, but, fearing the
worst, Fichte had prefaced Forberg’s essay with a brief one of his own, “On
the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine World Order,” intended to ward off any
accusations of atheism. In it, he denounces the orthodox belief in a God of
rewards and punishments as deeply irreligious. One cannot calculate God’s
intentions, Fichte explained, as God exists only in our absolute moral
decisions. This explanation, however, only made things worse. In Electoral
Saxony there appeared an anonymous brochure accusing Fichte and Forberg
of atheism. On the strength of this denunciation, Saxony forbade the
dissemination of Fichte’s journal and demanded that the “conservators” of
the University of Jena—including Duke Karl August—confiscate the essays
and punish their authors, or else Saxon students would be prohibited from
attending the institution.
This came at an extremely inopportune moment for Karl August. Intending
to marry his son and heir to a daughter of the tsar, he had to keep his
reputation as an opponent of the revolution unsullied. He wanted to avoid
unwelcome attention and dispose of the affair as quietly as possible—with a
reprimand and an injunction to be cautious in the future about discussing
religious questions. The duke, hardly devout himself, was most concerned
with caution. He thought religion useful for the lower classes, while educated
men could talk to one another about whatever they liked as long as they
didn’t put it all in print. Fichte, however, was not about to agree to the duke’s
distinction between an esoteric critique of religion and exoteric conformity.
He replied with the passion of a Luther: here I stand, I can do no other—
writing a letter to the duke’s minister Voigt threatening to request dismissal if
he were reprimanded, adding that other colleagues would follow him. It was
decided that Goethe would announce the reprimand and accept Fichte’s
proffered resignation.
The affair had an embarrassing denouement when Fichte withdrew his
threatened resignation and requested reinstatement. In the eyes of the duke, he
had thereby unmasked himself as a blowhard and coward. The duke wrote
that Fichte was one of those people who “with all their talk of eternity” were
“a very limited race clinging to their post and income.”
Goethe himself found Fichte’s blustering out of place and, while regretting
the whole affair, agreed to his dismissal. As for Fichte, he writes Schlosser
on August 30, 1799, I’m still sorry that we had to lose him and that his
foolish arrogance cast him out of a life that he will not find again . . . in
the whole wide world. . . . He is certainly one of the most outstanding
intellects, but as I myself fear, lost to himself and the world. Goethe later
destroyed the written records of this incident in his possession.
Goethe knew that the duke was indeed dissatisfied with him this time. Karl
August had made it clear that the entire direction things had taken in Jena did
not suit him. He already considered Fichte an out-and-out Jacobin and
blamed Goethe for recommending his appointment. He went on to criticize
Goethe in general for consorting too frequently with questionable people at
the university. The duke wrote to Voigt and wanted the scolding passed on to
Goethe: “I must have been vexed ten times nearly out of my mind by Goethe.
He’s positively childish about that foolish critical philosophy, and has such a
taste for it that he’s almost spoiled his own taste thereby. He views the thing,
and the whole academic business, so carelessly that he neglects all the good
he could do by being in Jena so often; it would be easier for him than for
anyone else to know what those rogues are teaching, advise us of it, and have
a word with them himself from time to time and keep them in line with
reproofs. . . . Instead, he finds the dirty fellows charming, and the people then
think that we approve of them when they throw anything so-called positive . .
. out the window. . . . I can’t talk to Goethe about these things at all anymore,
for he immediately loses himself in such a verbose and sophistical
discussion that I have no patience with it.” Goethe, he continues, has allowed
himself to be flattered by those people and therefore does their bidding. It
was time to put a stop to it.
Goethe’s reaction to this dressing-down, delivered to him in writing by
Voigt, was outwardly calm—Serenissimi philippic* . . . is well thought-out
and well written—but he clearly felt it his duty to further oblige the duke.
The translation of Voltaire’s Mahomet came at a time when he was
bemoaning his lack of feeling for my own production. It was not easy going,
for his image of Muhammad was very different from Voltaire’s.
For Goethe, Muhammad was not the fraud Voltaire makes him out to be but
a great man, an example of powerfully infectious inspiration and worth
studying. His admiration stood in stark contrast to the polemical tradition of
Voltaire’s play: the mostly hostile eighteenth-century European literature on
the founder of Islam. It took Enlightenment figures like Leibniz, Lessing, and
later Herder to promote a fairer appreciation of non-Christian religions, but
their voices remained in the minority. As we have seen, in his youth Goethe
composed “Mahomet’s Song,” a poem celebrating Muhammad’s spiritual
leadership as a river swelling from tiny sources into a gigantic stream and
finally emptying into the ocean, the symbol of all-encompassing divinity:
Muhammad as a divinely inspired genius of humanity. At seventy, in the
West-Eastern Divan, Goethe would confess provocatively that he was
thinking of celebrating that sacred night when the entire Koran was brought
to the Prophet from above. All his life, Goethe found it tempting to think of
himself in the role of a prophet; he perhaps at times even thought he truly was
one, in the sense expressed in the paralipomena to the West-Eastern Divan:
Miracles I cannot do, thus says the Prophet, / The greatest miracle is that I
am. That’s pretty close to his own self-assessment. Naturally, there were also
critical differences. Goethe’s gentle devotion to nature was far removed from
Muhammad’s rigid devotion to the law. Goethe was repulsed by Islamic
religious patriotism as he was by all narrow patriotism. He hated fanaticism
as much as Voltaire did.
In his translation and adaptation, Goethe was not able to soften Voltaire’s
Muhammad as he would have liked. The Prophet remains a dark and dubious
figure. Although no longer the fraud and criminal of the French original, he is
still a demonic presence. It is his passionate love that ignites the demonic
fury within him. To win the young Palmire, he plunges whole nations into
ruin: My consolation is her love and it alone / Is my reward, my effort’s
only goal. Goethe’s Muhammad stops at nothing for the sake of passionate
love, not because of lust for power, as in Voltaire’s original. The translator
lent his characters a certain warmth and suppleness of speech, replacing most
of the French alexandrines with more flexible German iambic pentameter. In
the end, he was satisfied with the work, finding it particularly useful for the
new Weimar dramaturgy. In Propyläen he wrote, The necessity for our
tragic theater to distance itself from comedy and drama through
versification will become more and more evident.
The court was delighted with Goethe’s translation and celebrated it as it
had no other dramatic work of his. Goethe read aloud from the work at
several important soirees. That was how the aristocracy commemorated the
revival of classical French cultural supremacy. Like Fichte’s recent
dismissal or the prohibition of the bourgeois amateur theater in Jena, which
also occurred at this time, the Mahomet readings had the ostentatious
character of a restoration of princely authority.
Onstage, the play was not a brilliant success. The bourgeois audience,
keen on verisimilitude, grumbled as much as the patriots who hated anything
French and the Romantics who had little patience for what the novelist Jean
Paul called the “unpoetical ceremonial stage.” When Goethe began another
translation in the summer of 1800, of Voltaire’s Tancred, again with a lack of
feeling for my own production, Schiller badgered him with his oft-repeated
exhortations to get back to work on Faust. This time, Schiller deployed the
publisher Cotta as his vanguard, recommending that he lure the author back to
his manuscript by offering the absurdly large fee of four thousand taler for
Faust. The maneuver worked. Goethe, who felt indebted to Cotta for the
failure of Propyläen, set to work on Faust again. He expressed his thanks to
Schiller for having orchestrated the whole thing.
In the summer of 1800, Goethe wrapped up some scenes from the
Walpurgis Night episode and then turned to the act about Helen of Troy,
befitting his preoccupation with Propyläen. He reported triumphantly to
Schiller, My Helen has really appeared, referring to the scene from the
second part of Faust set in ancient Sparta. Helen, whom Paris had abducted
to Troy, has been liberated and returns home. Her husband, Menelaos, has
sent her ahead to take possession of the palace once again. But instead of her
servant girls and assistants, she finds within its deserted walls Phorkyas, a
hideous creature with the head of a Gorgon. On his search for absolute
beauty, Faust is meant to encounter an absolute monstrosity. And here Goethe
hesitates. Now I am so much drawn to beauty in the situation of my heroine
that I am saddened to have to transform it first into a hideous face. This
refers not only to Phorkyas, behind whose mask Mephistopheles lurks, but
more generally to the problematic connection between antique classicism and
the demonic Faust, between formal perfection and formlessness along the
path of mist and fog.
Alarmed by Goethe’s hesitation, Schiller writes a letter of encouragement
containing the first known mention of a plan to divide Faust into two parts:
“Don’t be unsettled by the thought that when the beautiful figures and
situations come, it’s a shame to barbarize them. This could occur often in the
2nd part of Faust, and it would be good to silence your poetic conscience
about it once and for all. . . . It is a very significant advantage to consciously
move from the pure to the more impure instead of seeking an uplift from the
impure to the pure, which is, by the way, the case with us barbarians. So
everywhere in your Faust, you have to assert your Faustrecht.Ӡ
Goethe was delighted by his friend’s pun. He would make use of his
Faustrecht several times, especially when people pestered him with the plea
to finally finish his play. Before breaking off work on it again in the spring of
1801, he drafted an “announcement of discontinuation” in which he strongly
asserted a Faustrecht to be fragmentary: To connoisseurs this play is
recommended! / . . . / Resembling the life of man’s this poem’s lot: / It has a
beginning and an end, / But a completed whole it’s not.

* Latin: the philippic of His most serene Highness.

† See page 81 above.
 CHAPTER 25

Among the Romantics. Schelling. Gravely Ill.

Return to Life. Drawing the Balance of
the Revolutionary Epoch: The Natural Daughter.
Partisan Quarrels. Trouble with Kotzebue.
Alienation from Schiller and Friendship Restored.
Schiller’s Death.

....

A NEW RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CIRCLE OF YOUNG

ROMANTICS around the Schlegel brothers developed after Goethe’s return
from Switzerland. The two Schlegels had a considerable reputation as
sensitive and sharp-tongued literary critics. Schiller recruited August
Wilhelm, the older brother, for Die Horen, introducing him to Goethe. But
then he broke with him in the summer of 1797 when August Wilhelm’s
brother Friedrich published a mordant review of Die Horen. With their
connection to Schiller severed, the brothers intensified their courtship of
Goethe, who was very flattered by the attention. Friedrich declared that the
French Revolution, Fichte’s Foundations of the Entire Science of
Knowledge, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister represented the greatest trends of
the century. Despite such encomiums, Goethe didn’t care much for the
restless, feisty Friedrich, once calling him a stinging nettle. He had less
personal contact with him than with August Wilhelm, who spent several
years in Jena, where his wife, Karoline, presided over a lively salon that
became the center of the first circle of German Romantics. Tieck, Fichte,
Schelling, and Novalis were frequent guests. Friedrich Schlegel was a
hothead, while August Wilhelm played the part of judicious scholar and
accomplished man of letters with a reputation as a virtuoso of rhyme and
prosody. Goethe sought his counsel on metrical questions and praised his
translations of Shakespeare. In the Annals for 1799, he wrote about his
contact with August Wilhelm, Not a moment was idly spent, and one could
foresee common intellectual interests for years to come.
Goethe did not tell his friend Schiller that he was acting as an adviser to
Athenäum, a periodical the Schlegels had founded in 1798 and which
Schiller denounced as “cheeky” and “one-sided.” Goethe attempted to
mollify his friend. What would remain to be said in favor of the Schlegels
we shall leave for a face-to-face negotiation. Goethe also met the young
Ludwig Tieck, who read his tragedy Life and Death of Saint Genevieve
aloud to him in the winter of 1799, an unforgettable experience, as Goethe
would later write: When he began it was striking eight, when he ended,
eleven. I didn’t even hear it strike nine or ten.
In the fall of 1799, the Romantic circle had to decide whether Athenäum
should publish Novalis’s essay “Christianity or Europe”—provocative
because of its sympathy for Roman Catholicism and idealization of the
Middle Ages. Unable to resolve a difference of opinion among themselves,
they appealed to Goethe, who advised against printing it: he did not wish to
see the journal provide a pretext for defamatory attacks. The brouhaha
around Fichte’s atheism still fresh, it was preferable, he said, for them not to
expose themselves to possible charges of obscurantism. Goethe dreaded that
specter as much as he dreaded the specter of revolutionaries. Novalis’s essay
did not appear in Athenäum.
Friendships among the Romantics began to fray after this debate. Karoline
Schlegel, who played such an essential part in keeping the group together,
fell in love with Schelling, twelve years her junior, and powerful tensions
ensued. On one side were Friedrich Schlegel and his companion Dorothea
Veit, who resented her sister-in-law Karoline’s dominant role. They attracted
Novalis, Tieck, and Friedrich Schleiermacher to their party. On the other
side were Schelling, Karoline, and her highly gifted daughter from her first
marriage, the sixteen-year-old Auguste, who was a little in love with
Schelling herself. In the middle was August Wilhelm Schlegel, who was not
passionate enough to be jealous and more inclined to be an intermediary.
There was much gossip in Jena about these tangled relationships, confirming
suspicion of crazy goings-on in the Schlegel household. The affair turned into
a full-blown scandal when Karoline, having recovered from a grave illness,
went to the spa in Bad Bocklet, near Kissingen, with Schelling and her
daughter in May 1800. Auguste suddenly fell ill and died in just a few days.
The rumor circulated in Jena that Schelling had caused Auguste’s death with
dilettantish attempts at a naturopathic cure and that Karoline had intended to
pair her daughter off with Schelling to keep him nearby. That was too much
for Karoline. She suffered a breakdown and did not dare to return
immediately to Jena. At first, she withdrew from Schelling, who became
depressed and considered suicide. Karoline recommended that he seek
Goethe’s help: “He loves you like a father, I love you like a mother—what
marvelous parents you have!”
Goethe and Schelling had become increasingly intimate since Schiller had
introduced them in 1796. Goethe was impressed by the powerful, self-
confident young man, whom he recommended to his colleague Voigt for an
unpaid professorship with the words, He has a very lucid and energetic
mind, organized according to the newest fashion; nor have I been able to
discern the slightest hint of a sansculotte turn of mind in him. On the
contrary, he seems moderate and educated in every sense. I am convinced
that he would do us honor and be useful to the academy. When Goethe
called his mind organized according to the newest fashion, he meant to
characterize him as a philosopher of Fichte’s school, a so-called
transcendentalist who was investigating the subjective prerequisites for the
possibility of perception. While that would not have particularly attracted
him, Schelling showed definitive signs of moving toward natural philosophy:
he was searching for a transition from the principle of the ego to the creative
powers of nature, which pleased Goethe, who was eager to get involved in
discussions with him. Mind is unconscious nature, and nature unconscious
mind: this was a key statement of Schelling’s that Goethe found very
sympathetic. He secured Schelling’s latest writings on natural philosophy and
not only cut the pages but read them too. At first, however, he kept his
distance. He summarized his feelings about what he had read in a letter to
Schiller. He found both the natural philosophers, who wanted to direct us
from above to below, and the ordinary natural scientists, who wanted to
direct us from below to above, unsatisfactory. He discovered his own
salvation in observation alone, which stands in the middle.
His reserve vanished as he felt his proximity to Schelling’s thought more
clearly: clarity of perception, the overcoming of mechanistic thinking, a
sense and feeling for the creative power in nature. For Goethe, Schelling was
the triumphant culmination of a train of thought that led from Kant to Fichte.
He wrote to Schiller, We intend to do our utmost to enter the new century
with this third wonder. To Schelling himself, he wrote, Ever since I tore
myself free of the traditional kind of nature study and, like a monad thrown
back on myself, had to float around in the cerebral regions of science, I
have seldom felt a pull in one direction or another; the pull toward your
teaching is decisive. I wish for a complete confluence, which I hope to
effect by studying your writing or, even better, by personal contact with
you.
Karoline Schlegel’s advice to the despondent Schelling to pay Goethe a
visit—and the remark, he “loves you”—was exactly the right thing. If not
exactly love, it was certainly great admiration and personal sympathy for the
young philosopher who found himself in such a difficult spot. On December
26, 1800, Goethe picked him up in Jena in his equipage and took him to
Weimar, where he remained as a guest in the house on the Frauenplan until
January 4. They spent New Year’s Eve in lively conversation with Schiller.
Three days later, Goethe came down with a serious case of shingles. His
face, eyes, neck, and other parts of his body badly inflamed, he went
temporarily blind and suffered choking fits. His brain was affected; he was
disoriented, delirious, and drifted in and out of a coma, battling for his life.
Later he said he felt as if he was dissolved into a landscape: completely
awake and perceptive but without consciousness of himself. Schiller was
with him every day, and the duke was a frequent visitor to his bedside. The
entire court and citizenry of Weimar was deeply concerned, and while
unaware of everything that was happening, Goethe was moved to hear of it
later. At least I can flatter myself that people have some fondness for me
and attribute some significance to my existence, he wrote his mother after
the crisis had passed.
Within two weeks, he began a translation of Theophrastus’s color theory
and was able to receive visitors and dictate letters. He called it his
reentrance into life. With Schiller, Schelling was among those who first
received word of Goethe’s recovery. The young philosopher had been
present when Goethe fell ill. Goethe wrote him on February 1, 1801,
Unfortunately, when we parted, the illness had already set in quite
forcefully and soon thereafter I lost consciousness of my condition. Even
while you were still here, I felt that I was no longer in complete command
of my mind.
 Goethe regained strength with astonishing speed, but the recollection of his
brush with death was not quickly forgotten. Conscious of a turning point, he
put his affairs in order. He wanted to free himself of liabilities and so looked
for someone who might want the estate in Oberrossla, which had brought him
nothing but trouble and worry. He pursued the legitimation of his son, August,
so that he would be recognized as his heir. He showed his gratitude to those
who took part in his care during his illness by founding a “Wednesday
Circle,” a cour d’amour where one could take pleasure in relaxed
conversation, brief performances and readings, light refreshment, and simply
the fact that one was alive. He spent almost three months at the spa in Bad
Pyrmont and the nearby university town of Göttingen, where he spoke with
professors of natural science and students—the poet Clemens Brentano
among them—gave him a cheer and wished him long life. Everywhere he
was received like a man risen from the dead.
His poetic work was at a standstill, particularly difficult to bear with
Schiller then enjoying an extraordinarily productive phase. Following the
Wallenstein trilogy, Mary Stuart and The Maid of Orléans were completed
in rapid succession and performed to great acclaim on stages all over
Germany. When Schiller visited Leipzig, there was a mob scene with fathers
lifting their children in the air to catch sight of the poetic miracle worker.
Goethe did not begrudge his friend his productivity and fame, but it did make
him dissatisfied with himself.
After the existential crisis of his grave illness, Goethe felt a strong urge to
gain a true understanding of the social and political turning point that ten
years of revolution had wrought, which seemed to have culminated with the
rise of Napoleon. Since 1795, peace had reigned north of the border
represented by the Main River. Though Prussia and a few other states,
including the duchy of Weimar, remained neutral and enjoyed a measure of
quiet in a Europe torn by conflict, the war continued further south, and the
great commander was keeping Europe in suspense. We shall wait and see,
Goethe writes to Schiller on March 9, 1802, whether Bonaparte’s
personality continues to please us with that marvelous and dominant
appearance. The marvelous appearance Napoleon could present was as the
man who had prevailed over the revolutionary epoch. In the same letter,
Goethe summed up the revolution in the grandiose image of a natural
disaster: As a whole, it is the prodigious sight of brooks and streams
tumbling together according to natural law from many heights and valleys
and finally causing a great river to rise and flood its banks. Those who
saw it coming perish therein as well as those who had no idea. In this
monstrous empiricism, one sees nothing but nature and nothing that we
philosophers are so pleased to call freedom. Only Napoleon would be able
to give shape to and breathe his own spirit into this monstrous empiricism.
Goethe wrote this while at work on The Natural Daughter, a play that, as
he said in his Annals, became the vessel for everything he had thought and
written about the French Revolution. The idea had come to him at the end of
1799, but Goethe began serious work on it only after his illness, at first with
great effort and under a blanket of secrecy, even Schiller learning nothing of
it. It was his old superstition that he must not reveal a project if it was to
succeed. He planned to write a trilogy, but never got beyond the first play,
completed in March 1803 and performed on the Weimar stage on April 2—
still under the title Eugenie and with very modest success.
Goethe had been inspired by a work billed as the memoirs of Stephanie de
Bourbon-Conti, natural daughter of the Prince de Bourbon-Conti. The tale of
a noblewoman brought low by a court cabal and of the difficulties of
maintaining her nobility of heart in hard times, it was already known to be a
forgery. Goethe liked it and used this “fairy tale,” as Schiller called it, as the
basis for his play.
Eugenie, the illegitimate daughter of a duke, is robbed of her claims and
social rank and learns self-denial. She is given the choice of spending her
life in fruitless isolation and the bitter but proud consciousness of her lofty
birth, or accepting the hand of a bourgeois man and leading a productive if
obscure life. She chooses bourgeois obscurity and preserves the nobility of
her heart, at first only inwardly, but with the prospect that a new external
order might one day emerge. She must endure and persevere until then: For if
a miracle occurs on earth, / It’s through the loyalty of a loving heart. As in
Iphigenia, humaneness is preserved in secret, shielded by the form of her
elevated nature. And as in Iphigenia, the solemn rhythms of highly stylized
pentameter—and a thoroughly worked-out web of motifs and symbols, which
lend it a sedate quality—make the play a formal alternative to the chaos of
revolution and corruption.
The Natural Daughter is written completely in the spirit of the Weimar
dramaturgy that Goethe and Schiller had developed in the preceding years.
Much as Eugenie preserves her morale amid the fall of the old order, the
strict formalism of the drama opposes the classicist ideal of art to the muddy
tide of banality (the party of the playwright August von Kotzebue, whom we
shall soon encounter) and wild eccentricity (the party of the Romantics). The
most important thing for Goethe was to remain above partisan endeavor:

At home, securely ruled by a husband,

Is where peace reigns, a peace that you will seek
In vain out in the world far and wide.
Not restless envy, not malicious slander,
Nor echoes of some partisan endeavor
Have any impact in that sacred sphere!

As with Iphigenia, the play itself is rounded into a sacred sphere. Goethe
refused to adapt The Natural Daughter for actual performance. It’s a play
like a closed oyster, a talisman whose magical powers one uses but doesn’t
actually display. No wonder the play had little success on the stage. The
public marveled at its craftsmanship and stayed away. Madame de Staël, then
visiting Weimar, attended a performance and felt nothing but “noble ennui.”
For Goethe, The Natural Daughter was a refuge from the upheavals of
history and from partisan strivings of all kinds. Partisan squabbles in the
duchy were at their height. August von Kotzebue, who had started it all, was
the most successful playwright in Germany at the time. Goethe staged his
plays often for a public that wanted to see them, though they seemed to him
the epitome of the banal naturalism he and Schiller were campaigning
against.
Kotzebue had just returned to Weimar from an eventful trip to Russia. At
the border he had been arrested as a spy and deported to western Siberia.
The author had a substantial following in Russia and was released a short
time later at the intervention of the tsar, brought to St. Petersburg, and, for the
injustice he had suffered, given an honorary pension and a country estate with
six hundred serfs. Returning to Weimar a rich man and the talk of the town,
Kotzebue purchased a house, where, since he wasn’t invited to Goethe’s
Wednesday Circle, he founded a circle of his own. The atmosphere was more
relaxed and entertaining than at Goethe’s and the food was better. Goethe
was annoyed at Kotzebue’s social success and very susceptible to his
needling. Although he produced Kotzebue’s play Small Town Germany, he
deleted passages he considered a slur against his protégés the Schlegels,
whereupon Kotzebue withdrew all his plays from the Weimar theater. Goethe
brought August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Ion to the stage in January 1802 and
Friedrich Schlegel’s Alarcos in May 1802; both were unsuccessful, and it
was generally surmised he did it only to antagonize the Kotzebue faction.
There was a scandal during a performance of Alarcos, when laughter
drowned out the dialogue of the ambitious tragedy. Goethe turned around in
his raised seat in the orchestra and commanded, “No laughing!” He
considered it a plot by Kotzebue.
In 1802, Kotzebue attempted to drive a wedge between Goethe and
Schiller. People were already beginning to compare the two “Dioscuri” and
discuss who was the greater. Factions formed for one or the other, and
Kotzebue looked to exploit the squabbling. He planned an ostentatious
celebration of Schiller’s name day, March 5. Scenes from Schiller’s plays
were to be presented and his poem “The Song of the Bell” recited in the
festively decorated council chamber of the town hall. At the end, Kotzebue
was to appear as the master bell caster and smash a papier-mâché bell
revealing a bust of Schiller, which a circle of virgins in flowing white robes
would dance around and then crown with a laurel wreath. All Weimar talked
about the event before it took place, and far more did so when it didn’t come
off. Everything had been carefully rehearsed, but on the night of March 4, the
library custodian refused to lend the bust of Schiller, claiming he had never
gotten a plaster bust back from a celebration undamaged. Worse was to
come. When workmen went to erect the stage in the council chamber, they
found the town hall locked. People suspected Goethe’s machinations. It may
simply have been the mayor’s preemptive solicitude. Whatever the truth, a
group of young women who had intended to make a splash at the celebration
stopped attending Goethe’s Wednesday Circles. The affair was an
embarrassment for Schiller, who later indicated that he had wanted to plead
sickness and fail to report. Goethe had made a timely withdrawal to Jena,
and from there obtained eyewitness reports of the proceedings as they
unfolded. When it was all over, Schiller wrote him, “March fifth passed
more happily for me than the fifteenth did for Caesar. . . . I hope you will find
tempers cooled upon your return.”
They were not. Pockets of insult, envy, enmity, and schadenfreude
remained, and the affair had even done some damage to their friendship.
There was tension between them. By summer, Goethe was worrying about the
financial stability of the theater and a dearth of plays appealing to his
audience; he tried to spur Schiller on with the fairly brusque remark that he
shouldn’t spend so much time conceptualizing but should work more rapidly
and with more concentration, so you can supply more—and, if I may say so,
more theatrically effective—productions.
Schiller took umbrage at being accused of lack of effectiveness at a time
when The Maid of Orléans was conquering stages all over Germany. He
replied on the very next day, “If I ever succeed in writing a good play, it can
only be via the path of poetry, for I can never make my goal an effect ad
extra,* which occasionally succeeds for someone with a common talent and
mere cleverness. Nor, even if I wanted to, could I achieve it. Here I am
talking only about the highest endeavor, and only a fulfilled art will be able
to overcome my individual tendency ad intra,† if it is to be overcome at all.”
Schiller declared that in no case would he lower his high artistic standards,
and he accused Goethe of recommending precisely that for the sake of
audience appeal. It amounted to inciting him to betray his art.
During this nerve-racking time, Schiller turned down a lucrative offer from
Berlin, for which Goethe gave him great credit. After their temporary
altercation, productive, amicable intimacy was soon reestablished, one
expression of it being that Goethe relinquished the material for a work about
Wilhelm Tell to Schiller, who turned it into his most popular play. Goethe
had the satisfaction that it premiered not in Berlin, which had lobbied
intensely for it, but in Weimar, and he devoted a great deal of time and effort
to its staging and took almost childish delight in the brilliant success of what
they had concocted together. Their collaboration was again as close as in the
first three years of their friendship.
Schiller had received a manuscript of Diderot’s as yet unpublished
dialogue Rameau’s Nephew. He asked Goethe to translate it, and Goethe
enthusiastically threw himself into the task. They discussed Schiller’s plans
for new plays. Goethe thought that Demetrius was especially promising, and
occasionally remarked that it would probably become his friend’s best play.
After Schiller’s death, he would try to complete it, but never did. Goethe
worked for Schiller and snowed Schiller under with work, too, even when
his friend fell seriously ill in early 1805. He gave him the Diderot translation
complete with annotations and asked him to edit it. He also gave him the
manuscript of the Theory of Color to study. He didn’t want to publish it
before he heard what Schiller thought of it. He expected a lot of his friend,
but was only treating him the way he was used to treating himself when he
was weak or sick, encouraging him to keep busy. One should not grant death
any power over one’s life as long as it lasted. Yet Goethe sensed that he
would soon lose his friend. He wrote him a New Year’s greeting at the
beginning of 1805 with the words On our last New Year’s Day. Shocked, he
tore up the page and began a new one, again writing On our last New Year’s
Day. He visited Frau von Stein that same day, told her what had happened,
and said he had “a premonition that either he or Schiller would pass away
this year.”
On February 8, 1805, Goethe was tortured by shingles, as in 1801. This
time, it affected his eyes but was not life-threatening. Schiller, himself
plagued by illness, was worried. He wept. Goethe began to recover and
wrote his friend, By the way, I feel well as long as I go out riding every
day. Schiller thereupon acquired a horse for himself, but never got to ride it.
The friends met for the last time on May 1 on their way to the theater. They
exchanged only a few words. Feeling unwell, Goethe turned around and went
home again. The early resumption of theater attendance was also not good for
Schiller, who suffered another breakdown. Goethe had sent him a letter on
April 27, 1805, with a schematic overview of the Theory of Color and
commentary on Rameau’s Nephew, and Schiller read some of it. He suffered
through a few more days and died on the evening of May 9.
The news reached the house on the Frauenplan within an hour. Meyer, first
to hear it, couldn’t muster the courage to tell Goethe and left the house
without saying goodbye. Goethe was restless, noticed that something was
being kept from him, and perhaps wanted it that way. Christiane had been
informed and pretended to be asleep so as not to make Goethe suspicious.
She told him the following morning. He covered his eyes with his hands and
withdrew. When they asked whether he wanted to see the dead man once
more, he cried, Oh no! Destruction!
Pleading illness, Goethe did not attend Schiller’s funeral on May 11. He
could not stand death. Unannounced and without fanfare he came to
Weimar, Goethe said later, and without fanfare he departed from here. I
have no love for the parades of death.
Three weeks later he wrote Karl Friedrich Zelter, I thought I would lose
myself, and now I lose a friend and, in him, half my existence. At the death
of his beloved friend, fortunately another friend stood ready to take his place:
Zelter, the composer and master mason from Berlin. He would become
Goethe’s most important confidant in his last years.
* Latin: on the outside, externally.
† Latin: on the inside, internally.
 INTERMEDIATE REFLECTION

Red Tape and Pegasus

GOETHE, THE BRILLIANT HIGHFLIER, GOES TO WEIMAR as if he

needed to take a chance on finally settling down on solid ground. You learn
by teaching, he used to say later on. But what can he teach Karl August, the
young duke? Goethe doesn’t know how official business is conducted. He
doesn’t know how to administer a state. All he had done was read Justus
Möser and embrace his liberal-conservative recommendations: preserve
tradition and develop and preserve what is characteristic of a particular
country, its so-called local wisdom. Those were the few principles he hoped
would help him find his way in this new situation. He had actually intended
to try leading a realistic and industrious life, but at first he was drawn into a
wild and boisterous one. The early years in the duke’s orbit were full of
tempestuous, youthful high spirits, what with hunting, camping in the woods,
skirt chasing, drinking bouts, and nights spent in hunting lodges. Goethe was
always in attendance as a friend and master of ceremonies, but also as an
older brother, ensuring a modicum of common sense and propriety. It was
what the court expected of him, but there were those who didn’t think he
could do it. The teacher needed teaching himself, they said; with his
ingenious pranks, the genius was only infecting the duke. Goethe encountered
suspicion, and he himself was still not clear about what role he should play
—or, more importantly, wanted to play.
He no longer wanted to be just a writer. Friends like Lenz and Klinger
who visited Weimar were reminders of his former life, and he kept his
distance from them. Literary life with its insouciant bombast he now found
suspect. Poetry was all well and good, but not for leading one’s life. People
who knew only about literature knew too little about life. He couldn’t stand
the agitated enthusiasts of the Sturm und Drang, but also refused to accept
moral admonishment from an unctuous, sententious poet like Klopstock.
Goethe put literature aside for the time being, although he did continue to
lard his letters—especially those to Charlotte von Stein—with poems, poems
of the moment and for the moment. Mainly, however, he wanted to learn the
business of governing. He had pledged himself to the task during the Harz
journey in winter, on the snow-covered summit of the Brocken. He threw
himself into official business, and little by little, he gained experience in
almost all departments, from road building, school administration, and
finances to the military. He also tried out foreign affairs, pondering how
Weimar might maneuver between its two large and powerful neighbors,
Prussia and the Habsburg Empire. On his first and only visit to Berlin, he
wore the mask of the cool diplomat. But his favorite hobbyhorse was mining,
which he pursued during the early years with passion, if no economic
success.
It was mining that first awakened his interest in natural science. Attracted
by the history of the earth, he collected earth’s mineral and fossilized
remains. He studied anatomy and collected bones and skeletons.
For a while he quite enjoyed being both a bureaucratic draft horse and a
poetic Pegasus, so long as the two didn’t get entangled in each other’s traces,
as happened when he tried to work on Iphigenia while traveling through the
duchy recruiting troops. He had been captivated by the idea of purity, and the
different spheres were to be purely, cleanly separated: art here and the active
life over there. Each sphere had its own logic and required its own skills and
commitments. The idea of purity applies to the conscientious fulfillment of
assignments—to the proper way of doing things. In his personal life, it has an
ascetic aspect: discipline, self-control, self-denial, being honest or keeping
silent.
After eight or nine years in Weimar, Goethe saw that while he had learned
to meet the daily demands of his position, his poetic vein was in danger of
petering out. He sought a decisive answer: did he still have a future as an
author, or only a past? Did he still have it in him to complete something, or
could he only collect his fragments? In escaping to Italy, he wanted not only
to visit the land of art but also to discover whether he was still an artist. To
his delight, he rediscovered the artist in himself: a poet, not a painter, which
would also have pleased him. But the poet not as a Man of Sorrows, a victim
in despair among the worldly, like Tasso—but one who rises above the
dichotomy between the artist Tasso and the man of the world Antonio, who
understands the differences but does not allow them to tear him apart. Goethe
returns from Italy with the idea of being a sovereign human being.
Whether in his official duties, his scientific endeavors, or his art, he was
intent upon achieving the best possible results and combining his various
activities so that they were mutually beneficial. He had lost this inner
balance shortly before his Italian journey, when it was no longer clear where
his primary focus should be. He rediscovered it in Italy: he was an artist. He
stuck by that decision after his return, but was still faced with the task of
keeping it in balance with other activities. Crucial help was provided by his
friendship with Schiller, who not only energetically steered him toward art
but gave him a certain consciousness of self that he hadn’t yet achieved. Until
then, poetry had been almost a hobby. Spurred on by Schiller’s profound
aesthetic judgment, he wrote with professional seriousness and hard-nosed
technical skill. Questions of form and technique were now matters of
reflection. The two friends each developed a self-confidence that in the end
allowed them to play the role of preceptors to German literature. Schiller’s
contribution was the concept of powerful mastery of their material, Goethe’s
the concept of natural purity.
The epochal phenomenon of the French Revolution was the background for
their determination to make art at the highest level. At a time when everything
is in turmoil, art must provide orientation and cohesion. Schiller emphasized
cultivated freedom; Goethe, refined naturalness. Both set great store on the
play of art, with Schiller thinking of humanity at large and Goethe of a small
circle of connoisseurs. His expectations and hopes with regard to the social
effectiveness of art were more modest than Schiller’s. Against the course of
the world, he thought there was little the delicate empiricism of art could do.
Schiller’s death marked a turning point. For Goethe, it meant bidding
farewell to a period of artistic endeavor, a golden age of short duration in
which art belonged not just to the most beautiful but also to the most
important things of life.
 CHAPTER 26

Mourning Schiller. Flirtation. Faust Again.

A Long Conversation about Faust with Heinrich Luden.
The Disaster of October 14, 1806: Weimar Plundered
and Occupied. Goethe in Fear and Happiness.
Life Changes. Meeting Napoleon in 1808.

....

GOETHE WAS NUMB IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING SCHILLER’S death

on May 9, 1805. He was again tortured by a case of shingles, and mostly kept
to his study. In defiance of death, he got himself through the crisis by
improvising his own personal dialogue with the dead: he resolved to
complete Schiller’s last, unfinished play, Demetrius, intending to make it a
posthumous joint project. Goethe wanted to preserve the atmosphere of
collegiality, to feel as if his friend were still alive. His loss seemed
compensated for by my continuing his existence. Goethe imagined a
production of Demetrius at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin that could be the
most marvelous funeral. He saved himself from despair in the enthusiasm
of feverish planning and was for a moment able to dream away his friend’s
death. This mood, however, was not conducive to the artistic
levelheadedness necessary to bring Schiller’s monumental plan into
narrower focus. In Demetrius, the fascinating story of a false tsar in the
sixteenth century, Schiller completely shattered the unities of place and
action. The gigantic spaces of Eurasia were the setting for a bewildering
plot, which, in its unfinished state, remained incalculable. Individual scenes
that Schiller had finished emerged as if from under a gigantic blanket of snow
—or perhaps a shroud. Schiller had sometimes felt the same way about the
play.
Lovely early summer weather set in after Schiller’s death, but Goethe
stayed in his back room, immersed in a work full of the wintry crunch of ice
and snow. He didn’t keep at it very long, however, before abandoning the
attempt. In his diary from that time there is nothing but empty white pages.
Later he would say that they indicate the hollowed-out mood he was in.
With the failure of the Demetrius project, the atmosphere of continued
collaboration that enveloped him evaporated, and his friend’s death sank in
in all its irrevocability. Only now did he begin to decompose for me. Seized
by a pain greater than any he had known before, he also felt guilty, as if he
had at last unceremoniously locked up Schiller in his tomb. He suffered
another twinge of regret when the manuscript of the Theory of Color, which
Schiller had studied in his final days, was returned to him. His friend’s
underlinings gave him the impression that Schiller’s friendship still
continued from beyond the grave, while Goethe himself had not been able to
remain awhile with his friend after his death.
His next plan to commemorate Schiller, a memorial celebration including
performances of scenes Goethe would write, also fell flat. Zelter had
promised to compose accompanying music, but could not begin since Goethe
never got beyond a few sketches. He felt paralyzed. The only thing he
completed was the “Epilogue to Schiller’s ‘Bell’ ” for a memorial
celebration in Lauchstädt on August 10, 1805. Some scenes from Maria
Stuart were played, followed by a scenic reading of “The Song of the Bell.”
Goethe’s “Epilogue” combines the lofty tone of official mourning with the
language of personal emotion, intensely present in lines like His mind forged
on at its accustomed pace / Toward beauty, truth, and never-ending good, /
Leaving behind the vulgar, commonplace / That hinders us from being what
we could. Verses about Schiller’s infectious enthusiasm are themselves
enthusiastic and affectionate: Now his cheeks were glowing, red and redder,
/ Bright with youth, a deathless flag unfurled, / Aglow with the courage
which, sooner or later, / Conquers the dull resistance of the world. The
actress Amalia Wolff, who recited the “Epilogue,” later recounted that while
she was rehearsing some striking passage, Goethe had interrupted her, taken
her arm, covered his eyes, and exclaimed, I cannot . . . cannot forget the
man!
 Schiller’s death marked a turning point in Goethe’s life. He really ought to
begin a new way of life, as he wrote to Zelter, but he was probably too old to
do so. What great plans he had made with Schiller! What would they not
have tackled: reforming the theater, criticizing and improving the literati,
instructing the artists, and, in general, elevating and refining the culture!
Suddenly, all that seemed very far away. So now I only see each day directly
ahead of me and do the next thing without thinking about its consequences.
Even more than before, Schiller now became for him a touchstone in his
dealings with others. That was already evident in the case of his first visitor
after Schiller’s death. The classical philologist Friedrich August Wolf, a man
Goethe regarded highly, and his daughter stayed in the house on the
Frauenplan for two weeks in early June. There were lively conversations,
jolly entertainments, and new things to be learned. However, when
differences of opinion arose—for example, about the inner unity of ancient
texts, which Wolf’s philological erudition regularly picked apart—they soon
proved oppressive conversation stoppers. Wolf would not stand for any
contradictions to his professional opinion, especially not from so-called
dilettantes. Schiller had been another story entirely. Disagreements with him
were always stimulating. Schiller’s idealistic tendency, Goethe wrote in his
Annals, was able to nourish my realistic one very well, and since neither
tendency reached its goal by itself, in the end the two coalesced in a vivid
sense. Wolf was an especially difficult case and notoriously argumentative. If
one accepted his opinion and then repeated it to him a few days later, it could
happen that he treated it like the greatest absurdity. Goethe joked that once
he had prompted Wolf to depart on the day before his birthday, because I was
afraid that on my birthday he would deny that I had been born. Although
Wolf was such a difficult person, the visit at least distracted Goethe from his
grief.
The aftereffects of Schiller’s death lasted a long time. In the winter of
1807–08, for instance, Goethe would connect a little crush he had on Minna
Herzlieb, the ward of the Jena publisher Friedrich Johannes Frommann, with
the death of his friend two years earlier. In an unpublished note for the
Annals, he writes of his longing for the deceased and that the recurringly
painful loss of Schiller required compensation. Thus he explained his
suddenly ignited passion for Minna Herzlieb. He added that the only reason
it did not have a pernicious effect was that he was able to redirect his
excitement into sonnets composed in competition with Zacharias Werner,
famous as the author of religio-Romantic dramas and infamous as a lothario:
In order not to bore us, poets tend / To stir up all their deepest wells of
feeling; / However, their own wounds they treat with healing / Powers from
the magic words they’ve penned.
Minna Herzlieb was a pretty eighteen-year-old. Goethe had watched her
grow up, and, as he aged and she came of age, he succumbed to her charm. It
was said of Minna that she was refreshingly free of coquettishness but a little
slow on the uptake. She was the epitome of a naïve beauty and everyone
liked her. They called her the “loveliest of all the virgin roses.” She was
talkative but elusive, which only increased her attractiveness. There was
something mysterious about her. Goethe had fallen in love with her, and
Zacharias Werner was courting her too. The dalliance lasted only one winter
but left enough of an impression to have influenced the figure of Ottilie in
Elective Affinities, Goethe’s third novel. Minna’s end was as sad as
Ottilie’s. She languished in an unhappy marriage and succumbed to mental
illness.
The immediate consequence of Schiller’s death was that Goethe took up
work on Faust again. Schiller had always urged him to do so, and Goethe
now felt duty-bound to finally finish the work, if only for the sake of his
deceased friend. To be sure, there was external pressure as well. The eighth
volume of Cotta’s edition of Goethe works was supposed to contain the
complete Faust. Hoping for a financial success, Cotta had specified as much
in the contract. The publication date for this volume was now approaching,
and with the help of his secretary Riemer, at the end of March 1806 Goethe
began once again to go through the scenes of the fragmentary version of 1790.
He was under significant time pressure since Cotta was to be given the
completed manuscript, ready for printing, on his way back from the Frankfurt
book fair. A few things needed to be supplemented from the supply of
unpublished scenes so that the play would at last have some sort of ending,
for the version in the Göschen edition of 1790 was really only a fragment that
broke off before the Walpurgis Night and the scene of Gretchen in the
dungeon. Even the 1808 version, however, would be unfinished. He called
the play “Part One of the Tragedy,” thereby lending special weight to the
“Prelude at the Theater,” the “Prologue in Heaven,” and also the
“Dedication,” for they apply to the entire drama. At this point, it was still
uncertain whether Part Two would ever be completed. In any event, Faust
would continue to be the author’s constant companion.
 As he was completing Faust I, Goethe embarked on a long and memorable
conversation about the play with a young historian named Heinrich Luden,
who had just received an appointment in Jena. Luden immediately wrote
down what had been said and later published it. He had given his notes to
friends and acquaintances to read, and they were preserved only because he
had lent them out; all the other manuscripts in his house were destroyed
during the plundering that went on after the battles of Jena and Auerstedt in
the fall of 1806.
Luden’s published account begins with a summary of the interpretations—
still largely accepted today—that were circulating after the publication of the
Faust fragment in 1790. As Luden describes people’s expectations, “When a
complete version of this tragedy appears, the spirit of world history as a
whole will be presented; it will be a true picture of the life of mankind,
comprising the past, the present, and the future. In Faust, mankind is
idealized; he is the representative of mankind.” Luden continues that Faust
strives for the absolute but finds his connection to it painfully severed. Ever
since, Faust has been filled with a yearning for reintegration, which he seeks
first with his intellect and insight, but then with his body, his life, and his
love. In so doing, he loses his way on false paths that lead only to crime and
guilt. Yet the fragment is not without hints that Faust will eventually be
purified and united with the spirit of the absolute.
In Luden’s telling, Goethe interrupted after a while: that was all very well
and good, but what did Luden himself think? The young man squirmed at first,
but then got to the point: there was no basic idea in the play, he replied, nor
was anybody the representative of humanity. Either everybody was a
representative, or nobody. There were only individuals and particulars, and
Goethe’s play was rich in impressive individuals and particulars worth
thinking about. He had only begun to enjoy Goethe’s play, he wrote, “[o]nce I
decided to enjoy particular things and completely gave up the search for a
basic idea or central point, which had destroyed my pleasure.”
This was very much what Goethe himself sometimes said when readers
who discerned a higher significance in the play would get on his nerves. But
he was not so pleased to hear these remarks from the mouth of a brash young
man. His brow darkened even more when Luden trotted out his conjectures
about how the play came to be in the first place, namely, not as a single
conception but rather “haphazardly.” Scenes were “written like a shot in the
dark,” and then these “separate pearls” had been threaded onto a string to
keep them “from being scattered.” The scene in Auerbach’s cellar was
probably written first, during Goethe’s student years in Leipzig, for it was
fresh and youthful, free and lively; then the scene with Mephisto and the
pupil, which was also something like a rarefied sophomoric prank. But then
the Faust from Auerbach’s cellar had to be brought together with the
Mephisto from the scene with the pupil, and that resulted in the scene
between Faust and Mephisto. And out of that meeting developed the dynamic
that turns the learned scholar into a seducer. And so Faust grows and
develops and only at the end is the opening monologue, so pregnant with
meaning, written. At this point, Goethe declares the conversation at an end.
Meanwhile, he says, we will break off for now and not take up the topic
again until the whole tragedy is finished. And we will follow the same
advice, adding only that in his diary, Goethe does note down Luden’s visit,
but not the topic of their conversation. Was he put out? In any event, he is
very precise about the topic of another conversation on the same day, in
which the harmful effects of potatoes were discussed.
Another lasting effect of Schiller’s death was Goethe’s increased
readiness to view his own life historically. Since the great breach that was
opened in my existence by Schiller’s death, he wrote in April 1806 to the
painter Philipp Hackert, a friend from his Italian journey, I am more vividly
aware of the need to remember the past, and I feel quite passionately the
duty to preserve in memory what seems to have disappeared forever. This
is an early hint of the beginning of an autobiographical period in Goethe’s
work. Shortly thereafter it would be powerfully manifest as he started work
on Poetry and Truth.
But other things had to occur first, significant events perhaps even more
decisive to Goethe than Schiller’s death: Prussia’s disastrous defeat by
Napoleon at the battles of Jena and Auerstedt on October 14, 1806, and the
occupation and plunder of Weimar by the French. Goethe was in danger of
losing everything in those days: his property, his office, his duke, and even
his life.
Since the beginning of the new century, Weimar—under the wing of its
powerful neighbor Prussia—had enjoyed peace in neutralized northern
Germany. Karl August, related through his mother, Anna Amalia, to Frederick
the Great, held the rank of major general and had commanded a Prussian
contingent in the War of the First Coalition against revolutionary France. He
knew that he could preserve his little duchy’s independence only by
exploiting the differences between his big neighbors. He cleverly arranged a
match between his heir, Karl Friedrich, and the tsar’s sister Maria Paulovna
in 1804, which made Russia his backup against Prussian presumption and
Napoleonic aggression. Goethe supported Karl August’s cautious policy of
maintaining a fragile neutrality, but differences also emerged. Goethe was not
as enthusiastic about Prussia and bet more on the good will of France, but
during the period of neutrality that made hardly any difference. For both of
them, the old Holy Roman Empire had by then lost any significance as a
guarantor of stability. Goethe had no illusions about that. After the
Reichsdeputationshauptschluss (Principal Decree of the Imperial Deputation)
of 1806, the empire lay in ruins and there was no point in having any
political hopes to the contrary.
The news that Francis II had solemnly abdicated the throne of emperor of
the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation on August 6, 1806, accepted
the title of emperor of Austria, and thereby officially sealed the end of the
old empire, reached Goethe en route back to Weimar from Carlsbad, where
he had spent the summer. The fall of the empire could no longer stir up any
passion, because its fate had long since been sealed, as Goethe noted in his
diary: Dispute between the servant and the coachman on the box that
excited more passion in us than the split-up of the Holy Roman Empire.
Nevertheless, Goethe took an active interest in political developments. As a
court official, he could hardly help but do so. His diary from Carlsbad and
on the return trip records frequent political conversations, which is not
surprising given the tense atmosphere of those weeks. At stake was whether
Prussia (and thus Weimar too) could maintain its neutrality or would be
provoked into a war. Rumor had it that Napoleon intended to give Hanover,
which he had promised to Prussia, back to the English. Would Prussia
answer this affront by declaring war on France? Reflections and
discussions, Goethe writes, noting down the departure of Prussian troops in
the direction of Hanover.
For the moment, however, the argument on the coach box really did force
itself into the foreground: on the return from Carlsbad, Goethe’s manservant
Johannes Gensler had a fistfight with the coachman that left the vehicle
driverless, swerving and almost tipping over. Goethe turned Gensler over to
the police in Jena the next day. His manservant had been extremely rough,
obstinate, coarse, and irritable. Since I now saw myself in the position of
losing the entire benefit of my completed spa treatment from anger and
annoyance and was also on the point of being forced into an unseemly and
wanton act of taking the law into my own hands, there was nothing left to
do but to have the fellow put into military detention. His tone suggests that
he himself had almost gotten into a fistfight with his man.
This aggravation distracted him only briefly from grave political concerns.
What Goethe feared had now come to pass. Since Austria and Russia
remained passive for the time being, Prussia abandoned its neutrality and
declared war on France on its own. Goethe thought it too risky a step. The
duke, appalled by Prussia’s rash act, would have preferred to forge an anti-
Napoleonic alliance. Family loyalty requiring him to remain on Prussia’s
side, he took leave on September 17, 1806, to fight with the Prussian army
against France. Goethe’s colleague Voigt ran the administration of the duchy
and was best informed about developments. Goethe turned to him with the
words I am most obliged to you for being willing to give me a hint of
external conditions, since in the midst of such volatile tempers it is very
difficult to keep one’s balance. He would later write about the levelheaded
Voigt, who bore the primary political responsibility during those weeks, It
would be difficult to describe what anxious conferences I had at the time
with my loyal and unforgettable colleague, State Minister von Voigt.
Voigt’s political ideas were similar to Goethe’s: to maintain neutrality as
long as possible and at all costs avoid making enemies of France and
Napoleon. But now it had happened. It was war.
As often when in the midst of external tension and extreme danger, Goethe
immersed himself in the study of nature. He worked on the Theory of Color,
and in the evenings there were concerts at the residence of the duchess’s
mother in Tiefurt. Kapellmeister Hummel was present and people made
music with heavy hearts. From the middle of September, Prussian soldiers
were billeted in Jena, and Goethe vacated his room in the Old Palace for
Prince Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, commander of a Prussian infantry corps.
Undeterred, Goethe cataloged the collection of granite he had brought from
Carlsbad and sent selected stones to Professor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach
in Göttingen, who was surprised that Goethe apparently had nothing better to
do in the situation.
Goethe met with Hegel, who was working on the final chapter of
Phenomenology of Spirit, for a philosophical discussion despite the gloomy
outlook. A Prussian colonel named Christian von Massenbach had had a
patriotic pamphlet printed whose first words were “Napoleon, I loved you!”
and whose last words were “I hate you!” The pamphleteer confided in
Goethe, who was horrified. He believed that such a provocation would
necessarily bring down ruin on the city when the French army entered it.
They must prevent publication at all costs. Goethe discovered he was dealing
with a tenacious author. But I remained just as tenacious a citizen, . . . so
that he finally gave in. Some professors and students departed Jena as a
precaution. People hid their money and other valuables. Courage was ginned
up at patriotic events. At one such gathering, Goethe recited the completely
inappropriate poem “Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!” whose first line is I put my
trust in nothing! Even Wieland was outraged at such a lack of patriotism.
The Austrian writer and statesman Friedrich Gentz, in Weimar on a visit, was
also irked by Goethe’s attitude. “He is shamefully egotistical and
indifferent,” Gentz wrote later. “I will never forget the moral situation I
found him in 2 days before the Battle of Jena in the year 1806.” Even on the
eve of the battle, Goethe had his theater perform. Fanchon the Hurdy-Gurdy
Girl was on the playbill, and in her fury at Goethe the female lead—the
singer Marianne Ambrosch—is supposed to have said, “It’s really horrible
how much we’re tortured by this man Göthe. We should be holding prayer
vigils and we have to play comedy.”
The battle on October 14 ended with the devastating defeat of the Prussian
army, its final skirmishes reaching the eastern edge of Weimar. People heard
the thunder of cannon all day long. In the house on the Frauenplan, they
nevertheless sat down to the midday meal as usual, but were frightened by
louder cannon fire and cries of “The French are coming!” Friedrich Wilhelm
Riemer, Goethe’s secretary and his son’s tutor, wrote down the following
events in great detail. Goethe himself merely noted in his diary, At five
o’clock in the evening, cannonballs fell through the roofs and at five-
thirty, arrival of the chasseurs. At seven o’clock fire, plundering, terrible
night. Our house preserved by steadfastness and luck.
These few words conceal perhaps the worst ordeal Goethe had ever gone
through. For the first time, the foundations of his existence had been shaken.
Aside from his taste of war in the campaign of 1792–93, he had always
managed to create a homogeneous space around himself, a world that was his
or soon would be, thanks to his personal charisma. He was able to keep
foreign or disturbing influences at bay or to somehow incorporate them into
his world. But the Battle of Jena, the plundering, the catastrophe for the
duchy—these were disruptions against which it was impossible to defend
himself.
Goethe had also been lucky. For one thing, it was fortunate that one of the
French hussar officers he encountered on the market square—a Baron von
Türckheim—was the son of his former beloved Lili Schönemann. The man
made sure that the best possible soldiers were billeted in Goethe’s house:
Marshal Ney and his entourage. But the marshal kept them waiting, and in the
evening the “spoon guards,” as the simple foot soldiers were called, forced
their way in, demanded wine and food, ran riot, made a racket, and insisted
on seeing the head of the household. Riemer records the following scene:
“Although already undressed and wearing only his voluminous nightshirt—
which he used to call in jest his prophet’s mantle—he descended the stairs,
approached them, and asked what they wanted from him. . . . His dignified
appearance commanded respect and his spirited countenance also seemed to
infuse them with respect.” But it didn’t last long. Late at night—the marshal
had still not arrived—they burst into Goethe’s bedroom with drawn
bayonets. Riemer learned only the following morning that Goethe had been in
mortal danger. Goethe himself said nothing about it, as if ashamed. Even
later, he would only allude to the incident, as in a letter of mid-December to
the duke: But I suffered something . . . also something physical, that still
touches me too closely to be able to express it.
In this situation, with marauding soldiers threatening Goethe’s life,
Christiane proved especially brave and quick-witted. She began to scream,
and that persuaded several stalwart citizens who had taken refuge in
Goethe’s house to push the armed and drunken fellows out of Goethe’s
bedroom. As long as the threat lasted, Christiane possessed the oversight
necessary to maintain at least some order in the house. The man of the house,
however, was for the time being a nervous wreck. As Heinrich Voss
reported, “In those sad days, Göthe was the object of my heartfelt pity; I saw
him shed tears and exclaim, ‘Who will take my house and home so that I can
go far away?’ ” His entire way of life was indeed at risk, and the fate of the
duchy also hung by a thread as Napoleon considered destroying the town
entirely. Goethe had already been preparing himself to be dependent in the
future on author’s fees and advances. At the worst moments, he wrote to
Cotta, he had been hoping for the publisher’s willingness to help.
How lucky Goethe was in the end became apparent the next day, when they
learned how others had fared. Some houses had been burned to the ground,
and their inhabitants had fled into the woods. A wagon full of gunpowder
was parked in front of the painter Meyer’s house, and the sensitive fellow
was atremble all night long for fear it would explode. Because the soldiers
had found nothing worth stealing in the house of Herder’s widow, they had
rampaged through his manuscripts. All the Ridels’ furnishings had been
destroyed except for one dresser and a silver tea urn. The aged municipal
treasurer had been watching over the cash box. Johanna Schopenhauer, the
mother of the philosopher, had recently moved to Weimar, and Goethe told
her that he had never seen a greater image of misery than this man in an
empty room, all around him torn and scattered papers. He sat on the
ground, cold and as if petrified . . . he looked like King Lear except that
Lear was mad, and here it was the world that had gone mad. The painter
Georg Melchior Kraus, a friend from Goethe’s youth, had his entire house
burned down with all the precious paintings it contained. The old man died
in despair soon afterward as a result of the roughing up he had suffered at the
hands of the soldiers.
What a turning point in Goethe’s life these events represented can also be
gathered from the fact that, following the catastrophe of autumn 1806, he
implemented the “legal and social modernization of his personal life” in
three respects, as Gustav Seibt has shown.* First, the status of his property:
although the duke had given him the house on the Frauenplan, the property
was not entirely his. Remnants of feudal dependency remained: the duke paid
the property taxes and, in exchange, claimed the building rights associated
with the property. Now Goethe wrote a letter to the absent duke asking that
those old obligations be dissolved so that he might own the house free and
clear. It will be cause for celebration by me and my family when this
particular property becomes, in its foundation, firm beneath our feet after
many a day when it has trembled above our heads and threatened to
collapse.
Not until his next letter did Goethe reveal the other piece of news, which
also pertained to the bourgeois normalization of his circumstances: he had
married Christiane Vulpius. He actually ought to have included the duke in
this decision, not only because it would affect Christiane’s status at court and
in the upper echelon of society but also because the duke was his friend. He
was very well aware of this, as one can see in the clever way he informs the
duke of the marriage in a letter of December 25, 1806. He congratulates the
duke on the recent birth of a son to his mistress, the actress Karoline
Jagemann. Then he turns to the subject of August, his own illegitimate son,
thereby allowing the transition to the real news: He is still making good
progress and I could promise myself Your Highness’s consent from afar as,
at these most insecure moments, I gave him father and mother by means of
a legal bond that he has long deserved. When old bonds are dissolved, one
is thrown back on domestic ones, and in general, one now feels only too
well the need to look inward.
The marriage was decided upon and performed fairly precipitately. Three
days after the battle, on October 17, Goethe wrote to the court chaplain
Günther, In the last few days and nights, an old intention of mine has
matured; I want to fully and officially acknowledge my little friend—who
has done so much for me and also lived through these hours of trial with
me—as my wife. He wanted the wedding to take place as quickly and quietly
as possible and, with his faithful colleague Voigt speeding up the
bureaucratic formalities, it happened two days later, with their son and
Riemer as witnesses, and no wedding feast. Later the same day, Goethe went
to court—without Christiane, it goes without saying—and spent his time
there largely with French officers, Weimar being now officially under French
military administration. He took Christiane into polite society only once, to
tea at the house of the newly arrived Johanna Schopenhauer. She wrote her
son Arthur that he “introduced his wife to me. I received her as if I didn’t
know who she had previously been. If Göthe gives her his name, I think we
ought to be able to give her a cup of tea.” Such liberality would benefit the
salon she had just founded: if Goethe was pleased to be seen there, others
would be as well. As a rule, his behavior was especially free and easy in her
house. He sat in a corner, sketching, reading from his works, declaiming, and
sometimes inducing the ladies to sing together. Johanna proudly reported all
this to her son, Arthur, whom it made very envious—probably less of the
choral singing than of Goethe’s conversation, which he would have liked to
hear.
Goethe was now a married man. In the letters he wrote to friends and
acquaintances summing up the dark days he had lived through, he says not a
word about his marriage. The newspapers, however, were quick to pick up
the story, sometimes in a quite suggestive and malicious way. One could read
in the widely circulated Allgemeine Zeitung (General Newspaper) on
November 24, 1806, “Amid the thunder of cannon from the battle, Göthe got
married to his longtime housekeeper Demoiselle Vulpius, and so she alone
drew a winner, while many thousand others drew a blank.” Goethe was
furious. He wrote Cotta, who published the paper, a long, sharply worded
letter that he ended up not sending—sending instead only a note that he had
felt treated very inappropriately and indecently. Not looking to break with
Cotta, with whom he had agreed to a new and very well-remunerated edition
of his works, he ends the note very engagingly: If you feel the beauty of our
relationship in its entire extent, then put an end to this unworthy gossip
that must very soon destroy our mutual trust.
In addition to clearing up the ownership of his house and domestic
arrangement, the collapse of the old order—the about-face of things—also
engendered a new conception of his role as an author. Even more strongly
than before, Goethe now began to act with determined professionalism. In
the worst hours, when we were worried about everything, the fear of losing
my papers was the most painful, and from then on, I have been sending
everything I can to the printer. Indeed, from then on he was less hesitant to
turn his manuscripts over to publishers. He first sent the Theory of Color to
the printer, though it was still unfinished. Later he would separate the text of
Elective Affinities from the manuscript of Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman
Years, where it had first been conceived as a novella, and have it rather
speedily published as a novel, something he would hardly have considered
before.
Contemporaries were quite surprised at how quickly Goethe made his
peace with the new political situation. For German patriots and opponents of
Napoleon, it was altogether too quick. Goethe vexed them by remarking in
conversation that the Germans had simply succumbed to a greater power and
that only a childishly egotistical spirit of contradiction would deny it. In
most people, the spirit of freedom and love for the fatherland that are
thought to derive from the ancients becomes a caricature, he told Riemer,
who wrote it neatly down, as he did an offhand remark about the pride of the
professors, which was utterly laughable because they had it all out of books.
Instead of using up one’s energy in a pointless spirit of opposition, it would
be better to most jealously preserve the still untouched palladium of our
literature. There one could accomplish something and prevent the person in
whose hand Germany’s fate now lies from losing the esteem we command
from him by our intellectual preponderance.
They were indeed dependent on Napoleon’s esteem, for Weimar’s fate
hung in the balance. Napoleon had taken angry note of the duke’s having
fought on the Prussian side, and intended to punish him for it. In the end,
however, he decided not to divide the territory and terminate the duchy,
perhaps primarily because of the ducal family’s connection to the tsar. His
sister was now Karl August’s daughter-in-law. Napoleon wanted no trouble
as yet with Russia.
Thus the duke was able to return to Weimar in February 1807 and take up
the reins of a Weimar that was now one of the states in the Confederation of
the Rhine and subject to French oversight. France demanded contributions
that totaled more than two million francs. Voigt filed an appeal, pointing to
the duchy’s meager annual income of 150,000 francs. At first, there was
almost no cooperation from the French. Nor did it help when Weimar’s
ambassador (and later chancellor) Johannes Müller adduced the scientific
and literary accomplishments of the duchy as reasons to treat it less harshly.
Goethe had hoped that Weimar’s culture and intellectual preponderance
would command the victor’s esteem. But while Wieland and Goethe enjoyed
renown among French officers, and even with Napoleon himself, it didn’t
lessen Weimar’s required contributions and obligations.
The duke accepted the situation with inner reservations and regularly
alarmed his privy councilors by telling dirty jokes about Napoleon in the
relaxed atmosphere of Carlsbad or Marienbad. Goethe, however, was
thoroughly satisfied with the new situation. He was ready to acknowledge
Napoleonic hegemony for the sake of peace. In a conversation with Riemer,
he declared, When Paul says to obey the authorities because they are God’s
order, it’s an expression of enormous culture . . . a rule which, if all the
conquered would obey it, would deter them from all arbitrary and
unreasonable actions that only result in their own undoing.
One should accept the given and not waste time in futile opposition. This
was especially important for the development of culture. In a letter to Zelter
of July 27, 1807, he directed harsh sentences against the patriots whose
numbers were on the rise among educated Germans during the Napoleonic
hegemony: When someone complains about what he and his surroundings
have suffered, what he has lost or fears to lose, I listen in sympathy. . . .
But when people bewail an entity that has supposedly been lost, an entity
that not a soul in Germany has ever seen in his life, much less bothered
about, then I have to conceal my impatience so as not . . . to be thought an
egotist. A few sentences later, he explains his understanding of the
individual’s relationship to the whole. For him, what is important is one’s
ability to develop in a unique way. To identify too much with a political
entity is to run the risk of collectivism. In his view, that applied to the newly
awakened nationalistic movement, as he considered Germany’s traditional
lack of political unity a strength. It had been an advantage that Germany . . .
in its old form allowed the individual to develop as far as possible and left
everyone to do whatever they considered right, but without society as a
whole ever evincing any particular sympathy for it.
This lofty indifference of the whole toward the individual can thus be
understood as an opportunity. As long as people exist in the shadow of this
indifference, everything depends on what they make of themselves for their
own sake. That was Goethe’s conservative liberality. As a cultured citizen,
he wants to be left in peace by that dubious entity the patriots were so
enthusiastic about. He kept his distance from it, for art and science constitute
an entity separate from politics. As the citizen of a state and even a servant of
that state, he was of course willing to render unto the state what was the
state’s. But no more than that.
The new entity Goethe now had to deal with in the overpowering person
of Napoleon was, however, something that began to fascinate him beyond
purely political considerations. In a letter to Knebel in early 1807, he calls
Napoleon the highest phenomenon possible in history, at the summit of this
so highly—even too highly—cultivated nation.
Europe had breathlessly watched Napoleon’s meteoric rise. It was almost
incredible how this powerful ego had come to dominate world history. That
the philosophy of German idealism, especially in Fichte’s work, was capable
of assigning such a key role to the ego is unthinkable without this monumental
Napoleonic ego, now both so far away and so near. For Napoleon’s
European campaigns of conquest and plunder invaded the everyday life of
many Germans. Napoleon was more than a political reality; already in his
lifetime he was a mythic figure, for both those who adulated and those who
loathed him. Some saw him as the embodiment of the world spirit, others as
an anti-spirit, a monster from hell. Everyone, however, had the lively
perception of a power not sanctified by tradition or convention but rather
created by a charismatic personality. Napoleon’s career was the exemplar of
a political rise from nothing. The representatives of the old powers regarded
him as a swindler even as he defeated them. It was no accident that parallel
to Napoleon’s rise, intellectual Europe was bewitched by fads of animal
magnetism, somnambulism, and hypnosis. Napoleon seemed a great
mesmerizer who, holding sway over the unconscious, turned things upside
down and inside out. In that sense Goethe called him a Prometheus who had
ignited a light for mankind, a light that made things visible that otherwise
would have remained hidden. He had drawn everyone’s attention to himself.
Then came the moment when Napoleon’s own attention turned to Goethe.
On October 16, 1806, the Weimar privy councilors were required to appear
before Napoleon, but Goethe had excused himself on account of illness.
However, when Napoleon convened a congress of European princes in Erfurt
two years later—from September 27 to October 14, 1808—the duke brought
Goethe along in order to impress the assembly. Napoleon then summoned
Goethe to a private audience. Goethe probably saw Napoleon for the first
time on September 30 during a gala performance of Racine’s tragedy
Britannicus by the Comédie française, performed before the crowned heads
of Europe at Napoleon’s command. The famous actor François-Joseph Talma
played Nero. Was this play about usurpation of power supposed to be
suggestive? At any rate, Napoleon himself had chosen the plays to be
performed. The entire congress was calculated to make an impressive show
of his power—then at its height—especially for Tsar Alexander, who was
meant to be courted or intimidated. Two days after the performance of
Britannicus, on Sunday, October 2, Goethe was summoned to an audience.
Goethe himself never published a report of the meeting. In the Annals he
notes only that the congress in Erfurt is of such enormous significance, and
also the influence of this epoch on my situation so important, that a
separate depiction of these few days should probably be undertaken. Such
a depiction never came to pass, and only two drafts survived, later cobbled
together by Eckermann. Even in conversation, Goethe revealed little about it,
although some pointed hints of his were immediately circulated. They also
reached Karl Friedrich von Reinhard, a French diplomat of Swabian
extraction who had made Goethe’s acquaintance a year earlier. He wrote
Goethe on November 24, “The emperor is supposed to have said about you:
Voilà un homme! I believe it, for he is capable of feeling it and saying it.”
Whereupon Goethe replied, Well, so the wonderful words with which the
emperor greeted me have also reached your ears! You can see from that
what a real, outright heathen I am, since the Ecce homo was applied to me
in the opposite sense.
It’s not clear whether this remark of Napoleon’s was intended to be
emphatic or was merely offhanded. The version that Goethe recounted in an
unpublished note speaks for the latter. There, as the emperor gestures for
Goethe to approach, he says “vous êtes un homme,” which could be
understood as much less emphatic. In fact, several people had been
summoned to an audience at the same time, and there was a lot of coming and
going. Napoleon was eating breakfast and very busy, but also probably
making a show of governing. Daru and Talleyrand were present as well.
According to Goethe’s notes, the conversation began with Voltaire’s play
Mahomet, which Goethe had translated. The emperor said it wasn’t a good
play because Voltaire had put a world conqueror on the stage who gave such
an unfavorable depiction of himself. Then Napoleon brought the talk around
to Werther, which Goethe describes Napoleon as having studied very
thoroughly. He immediately gave proof by referring in detail to a passage he
thought worthy of criticism, then asked, Why did you do that? It’s not
natural. Goethe, quite at ease, gave a cheerful smile and replied that the
emperor was right, but that a poet should of course be forgiven for making
use of a device that was difficult to detect.
When Goethe later revealed a bit about this part of their conversation,
people wanted to know exactly what Napoleon had criticized. Goethe never
said. He let Eckermann try to guess, but his efforts were in vain. Wilhelm von
Humboldt, to whom Goethe presumably gave a hint, wrote to his wife that it
must have been that the true story and the fiction had been sewn together in an
inconsistent way. That fits Goethe’s word device better than Chancellor
Müller’s conjecture that Napoleon had criticized the combination of erotic
passion and frustrated professional ambition. Device refers to something
technical, a narrator or editor revealing something about his protagonist he
could not possibly know, for example, and such passages are in fact present
in Werther.
After Werther, the conversation returned to the theater. Napoleon objected
to the popularity of dramas of fate. It must have been in this context that
Napoleon made the famous remark What . . . has fate got to do with it?
Politics is fate. Then Napoleon began talking to other people for a while,
giving Goethe an opportunity, here in the center of power, to gather his
thoughts and recall the past. The audience was being held in the Erfurt
governor’s office, where he had passed happy hours with Schiller and
Bishop Dalberg. Then Napoleon returned to Goethe and inquired about his
personal circumstances. He also wanted to hear something of the duke and
his family, which may well have been what Napoleon really hoped to get out
of the encounter. Goethe’s notes, however, deal with this point very briefly.
He summarizes by saying that Napoleon’s manifold expressions of
approbation were admirable.
Goethe could thus return to Weimar confident he had received the highest
possible recognition from Napoleon. He had two more opportunities to speak
there to Napoleon, who visited the duchy after the close of the congress of
princes, though it was noted that Napoleon spoke to Wieland longer than to
Goethe this time. On October 14, 1808, both were awarded the order of the
Légion d’honneur.
At the beginning of December, Goethe wrote to Cotta, I’m happy to admit
that nothing higher and more gratifying could happen to me in my whole
life than to stand before the French emperor in such a way. Without going
into detail about our conversation, I can say that no superior has ever
received me in that way, by allowing me with special confidence to be—if I
may use the expression—myself, and clearly stating that my character was
in accord with his . . . so that in these strange times, I at least have the
personal assurance that wherever I may encounter him again, I will find
him to be my friendly and gracious lord.
Cotta had hoped to hear about the progress of Goethe’s literary work.
Instead he was informed, it is unfortunately probable that all my literary
work as well as all other business has been disrupted by these events. I’m
attempting to get back to work on this and that, but as yet, nothing seems
to be flowing.

* Gustav Seibt, Goethe und Napoleon: Eine historische Begegnung (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2008), 36
ff.
 CHAPTER 27

Pandora or Goethe’s Double Mask: Diligent Prometheus

and Dreaming Epimetheus. Theory of Color Completed.
On the Deeds and Sufferings of Light. Contra Newton.
In Praise of the Observable. Nature as a Sense
of Life and Object of Research. Encounter with
Schopenhauer: The Pupil Who Would Be Master.

....

ONE WORK THAT DID NOT CONTINUE TO FLOW AFTER THE

encounter with Napoleon was the drama Pandora. Goethe had begun drafting
it in November and December 1807, continued until June 1808 in Carlsbad,
and then abandoned it. Calling it a somewhat abstruse little work, he
nevertheless had it printed in its unfinished state, saying that he believed it
would only be effective if read out loud. The Viennese periodical
Prometheus had persuaded him to write a play in which the Prometheus
motif would play a role, a motif that had already attracted him on two
previous occasions. This time, however, Prometheus is not the daring, defiant
creator of men who tangles with Zeus, but a paragon of solid industriousness,
a spur for the plucky, loyal, hardworking people. This Prometheus requires
commitment to useful enterprises, unlike his brother Epimetheus, a dreamy,
meditative soul who dwells on melancholy memories of his vanished lover
Pandora and hopes for her return. Goethe departs from the Pandora of myth
and makes her something of his own invention. The box his Pandora opens
contains not calamity but mirages of beguiling beauty, and it is Epimetheus
who allows himself to be enchanted by them. He becomes an otherworldly
figure, pining away over ecstatic memories, becoming thereby the patron
saint of poets. By contrast, Prometheus appears as the tough-as-nails
representative of reality, under whose aegis tools are produced for peasants
and shepherds, as are weapons of war. His followers sing a song into which
Goethe wove his recent impressions during the plundering of Weimar:

We set off boldly

On a march,
And what we find
Belongs to us,
And you won’t get
It back again.
But what is yours
We’ll gobble up.
If someone’s rich
And still wants more,
Our rowdy troop
Will rob the store.
We fill our sacks
And torch the house
And grab the spoils
And get out fast.

Prometheus and Epimetheus remain lofty background presences; the

foreground is occupied by a complicated plot. Epimeleia, a daughter of
Epimetheus, is in love with Phileros, Prometheus’s son, who has inherited
his father’s love of action but not his levelheadedness. He thinks he has
grounds for jealousy and almost kills his presumed rival and with him his
beloved. His father, Prometheus, angrily commands his son to throw himself
off a cliff into the sea. The goddess Eos, however, rises from the sea and
saves Phileros and his lover.
This final reconciliation comes quickly and unexpectedly, before the play
has had any real development. Goethe had obviously lost patience with it and
wanted to get the project off his desk. A few notes for a sequel, Pandora’s
Return, have survived. Apparently the contrast between the spirit of poetry
—the gift of transforming the past into an image—and the ethos of useful
work was to be made even more drastic.
 In this mythical setting, one senses the image of Napoleon behind the
ominous and yet fascinating Promethean age that is beginning. The dominant
spirit of the present is political, practical, and useful; poetry is suspect:
endearing to be sure, but also likely to have a weakening effect and perhaps
even superfluous. For the time being, Pandora and her blithe phantasmagoria
will not return. Goethe broke off work on the play. In June 1811 he wrote to
Zelter, Alas, I seem to myself a double herm, one of whose masks resembles
Prometheus, the other Epimetheus, and neither of them . . . able to smile.
The struggle between Prometheus and Epimetheus remained unresolved.
Another work, the Theory of Color, overshadowed them and demanded
completion.
Goethe had begun to note down observations and conduct modest
experiments with color almost twenty years earlier. Though his notebooks
bulged with manuscripts, color charts, and sketches related to the topic, and
he’d had a large paper sack made in which to store everything, he’d
published only two small essays in the early 1790s. He had discussed some
of it with Schiller, who helped him sort through all the material and put it in
order and in early 1798 had written Goethe that it was still not clear whether
he was talking about light and its effects or about the operation of the eye. He
prompted Goethe to make a distinction between subjective and objective
color, between the independent, physiological operations of the eye and the
physical and chemical properties of colors themselves.
Goethe often took refuge in his studies of color at moments of external
turbulence or inner turmoil. On the battlefields of France and during the siege
of Mainz in 1793, he recorded his observations of color phenomena. He
often said that there was something calming about nature’s wonderful
consistency. Over the years, so much material had accumulated that he finally
began a general revision in 1803, destroying things that were outdated or
otherwise of no use. You must have no mercy with the dross if you want to
finally extract the metal, he wrote to Schiller, who had encouraged him to at
last subject his Theory of Color to the light of public opinion. After
Schiller’s death, Goethe began to publish sections even though he had not yet
completed the entire work. He wanted to force himself to finish. Now it was
the thankless duty of the Jena publisher Frommann to put pressure on the
tardy author. Goethe had written Schiller that he had no other wish than to
be delivered from chromaticism. When the work finally appeared in two
octavo volumes of text and a quarto volume of illustrations on May 16, 1810,
it was a day of liberation, as he would later write in the Annals—with an
ironic undertone, since the subsequent victory over Napoleon, officially
described as a “liberation,” was no such thing for him. While all around him
patriotic fervor reached fever pitch, Goethe devoted himself to his peaceful
reflections on the ur-phenomena of light, darkness, and the mixture of the
two: the opacity that appears to our eyes as color.
In sharp contradiction to Newton’s color theory, the central idea of the
Theory of Color is that colors are not—as Newton maintained—contained
within light and capable of being made visible as spectral colors through
refraction. Light, Goethe says, cannot contain something darker than itself.
Instead, color arises when light collides and mixes with darkness, or when
light penetrates a darker medium. Closest to light, the color yellow is
created; it is shadowed light. Closest to darkness, the color blue is created; it
is illuminated darkness. The combination of the two primary colors blue and
yellow produces green. And so one begins with an inverted color triangle,
with blue and yellow at the top and green at the bottom point. The array is
rounded out to a color wheel only when the two primary colors blue and
yellow are transformed—enhanced, Goethe calls it—by further admixtures
of darkness. Blue thus becomes purple and yellow becomes orange.
Enhancements of purple and orange yield red. Thus one has the polarity of
the primary colors yellow and blue, then their enhancement leading to red
and their mixture leading to green. The circle of colors is closed via polarity
and enhancement—blue on the left, yellow on the right, red on top, green on
the bottom—and the transitions in between: greenish yellow, brown, bright
red, etc. Always at play are shadings or brightenings, superimpositions and
admixtures of the primary colors. In all cases, the basic principle is
unchanged: light is an ur-phenomenon that cannot be dissected or traced
back to something else.
But what is light itself? The question of its essence, its substance, doesn’t
really concern Goethe, who, in an almost scientific sense, isn’t exploring the
essence of a thing but its effects. And why is that? Because in principle, we
cannot know anything about a thing’s essence, but only its effect, which in the
final analysis means its effect on us. The location of these effects is the
totality of our sensory and intellectual impressions, and not merely in
isolated individuals, but in the exchange and correlation of multiple
perspectives and experiences. If the individual is an organism apprehending
the nature he encounters, mankind at large is also—at least potentially—a
superorganism for the comprehension of both human and nonhuman nature.
Goethe once wrote in a letter to Schiller that nature cleverly conceals itself
by not allowing men to work together at perception. If it were possible,
humanity would really unite as a perceiving subject. Then all veils would
fall, and nature would be for us the open book it is not at present.
Even if we cannot survey and understand the entire text, perhaps we can at
least read from it. To read from the book of nature, however, means
registering its effects on us, refining our appreciation, sharpening our
judgments, relating effects to one another, and so on. These effects on us
constitute our reality as a whole. One cannot transcend their perimeter. In the
foreword to the Theory of Color, Goethe emphasizes this: For in truth, it is
a vain undertaking to express the essence of a thing. We are aware of
effects, and a complete account of those effects would in any case
encompass the essence of that thing.
That is why Goethe’s Theory of Color does not address the so-called
essence of light, but rather its effects when it interacts with impeding,
refracting, and darkening elements. Colors arise from these interactions. The
subject of Goethe’s work is not the essence of light but its effects, or as he
puts it pointedly in his foreword, the deeds of light, its deeds and its
sufferings. Rejecting the question of essence and restricting himself to
effects, he forgoes metaphysical speculation. What spectacle! but alas! the
merest show! . . . Thou, spirit of the earth, art closer to me, Faust declares
when taking leave of the realm of Neoplatonic ideas in his great opening
monologue. The spirit of the earth to whom he then turns, however, is too
all-powerful, although Faust is on the right track—the track of earthbound
effects—and is also liberated to new effectiveness. The question of why he
needs Mephisto’s help will concern us later.
While restricting himself to the world of effects, and rejecting
metaphysical speculation, Goethe also rejects the temptation to step outside
the circle of the directly observable. Objecting to the mathematical
attenuation of reality as well as to the metaphysical, he thus contradicts both
venerable Platonic tradition and the spirit of modern science to which
Newton gave impetus, a spirit that strays into realms not accessible to direct
observation. Goethe could have had no idea of the enormous consequences of
modern science making its way into phenomena that are not directly
observable. He was, however, well aware that operating in the realm of the
unobservable and acting on the basis of what one discovers there can become
untenable, incalculable, and ruthless and can lead to demoralization and a
loss of orientation. He sensed the Promethean shame at one’s own
fabrications and machinations, the shame that one is no longer able to
imagine all the things one is capable of.
At first, Goethe had no intention of picking a quarrel with Newton. The
turning point came in a sort of primal scene that he describes in the
“Historical Section” of the Theory of Color. The year was 1790. The
scientist and privy councilor Christian Wilhelm Büttner had lent him some
prisms. Goethe had not made use of them, and the time came to return them.
At the last moment, he finally unpacked one and peered through the glass onto
a whitewashed wall. It was a revelation, like Saint Augustine’s depiction of
his conversion when he follows the commandment “Take up and read!” [A]s I
placed the prism in front of my eyes, with Newton’s theory in mind, I
expected the entire white wall to be colored in various stages and the light
returning from there to my eyes to be split into as many colored lights. But
how amazed I was that the white wall, seen through the prism, remained
white as before, and that only where a darker area touched it did a more or
less definite color appear. . . . It required no long consideration to realize
that a boundary was necessary to produce colors, and as if instinctively I
told myself out loud that Newton’s theory was false.
Goethe never allowed himself to be persuaded otherwise about what his
eyes had seen. He remarks derisively in the “Polemical Section” of the
Theory of Color that no one had succeeded either in reuniting colored rays
into white or in mixing something white out of colored particles. When
Newton tried it, the result was something that looked mouse-colored, ashy,
stone-colored perhaps, or like mortar, dust, or horse droppings and such.
One wishes, he continues, that all Newtonians had to wear similar
undergarments so that one could thereby tell them apart from other,
sensible people.
So white is not a synthesis, but the beginning of all syntheses. White is the
fountainhead along with darkness, the other original power. From their
polarity derive the blurrings, mixtures, enhancements—the whole world of
color. And that’s why our lives are so colorful.
Colors open a way for Goethe to understand basic human states. In the text
of the Theory of Color itself, he is reticent about this; in paragraph 920, for
example, he writes, But it is better here at the end not to allow ourselves to
be accused of rhapsodizing. In the reflections that followed the Theory of
Color, Goethe expressed this idea more directly, as in a diary entry of May
26, 1807: Love and hate, hope and fear are also only different conditions
of our murky inner life through which our spirit looks either toward the
light or toward the shadows. If we look through these murky organic
surroundings toward the light, then we love and hope; if we look toward
the darkness, then we hate and fear.
Since the Theory of Color aspires to be an important, fundamental work,
its author, who had just had his encounter with Napoleon, liked to compare
himself to the great emperor. Just as Napoleon had to accept and clarify the
dark inheritance of the French Revolution, Goethe had inherited an equally
dark legacy, namely, the error of the Newtonian theory, which he had to
clarify—as he expressed it to Eckermann. And, like Napoleon, he had had to
knock some heads together, as he later said, apologizing for the combative
attitude with which he had set to work. This bellicose tone is audible in the
foreword to the Theory of Color: Thus we are not talking about a
wearisome siege or a questionable feud. Instead, we find that eighth
wonder of the world [i.e., Newton’s Opticks] already an abandoned
antiquity threatening to collapse, and without further ado, we immediately
begin to dismantle it from the roof and gables down, so that the sun can
shine into the old rats’ and owls’ nest at last.
Goethe sees and dramatizes himself as the defender of light against the
obscurantists of modern science. I perceived light in its purity and truth, he
told Eckermann, and I considered it my duty to fight for it. That party
sought in earnest to obfuscate light, for they claimed that shadows were a
part of light.
Modern science recognizes the legitimacy of most of Goethe’s
observations of physiological colors, particularly the discovery of so-called
afterimages. When presented with a certain color, the eye’s own physiology
elicits its complementary color according to the color wheel: yellow elicits
purple, orange elicits blue, and crimson elicits green. This can be proved
with a simple experiment. If one looks for a long time at some color and then
turns one’s gaze onto a white surface, the complementary color appears for a
moment. These phenomena are of supreme importance because they point
us to the laws of seeing. . . . The eye actually demands totality and
completes within itself the circle of colors.
From the subjective aspect of seeing color to the description of the
emotional effect of the colors, all this is explained with a wealth of subtle
observations that refer to the phenomenon in the literal sense—the “thing
appearing to view,” the apparent reality of the colors. Goethe wanted the
science of nature in general understood as phenomenology—how he
practiced it himself. Let no one search behind the phenomena; they are
themselves the science, as one of his maxims declares. Theoretical
constructs that distort observation were to be avoided. One should open
one’s senses to the phenomena and let them have their effect. Theories are
mostly the hasty result of an impatient intellect that wants to be done with
the phenomena. To be sure, man—himself a natural creature—must be in top
form to function as an organ for the perception of nature. Thus the perception
of nature is nature’s perception of itself. It opens its eyes within the human
being and perceives what it is. For Goethe, the requisite top condition that
man has to achieve does not mean the assistance of artificial apparatus
(although he also enjoyed using prisms and telescopes), but rather careful
observation, trained senses, precise memory (to enable comparisons),
judgment, exchange of experiences, and, last but not least, reverence for the
mysterious. Another maxim says, The greatest happiness of the thinking
man is to have explored the explorable and to calmly revere the
unexplorable.
Goethe’s nature study restricted itself to what could be observed. He
preferred to look at the morphology and typology of things. Morphology
inquires into interconnections in a series of forms, their transitions and
developmental stages; it asks how one thing develops from another. Typology
inquires into the order and comparison of types, their similarities and
differences, as well as the forms of their linking and blending.
With phenomenological apprehension and description, the work of
perception is basically done as far as Goethe is concerned, if only
provisionally: the circle that we pace out by living and perceiving remains
forever limited and—measured against the whole of nature—provisional. Yet
within that circle, what our senses have taken in can claim the value of truth.
In other words, Goethe adheres to a science in which we can trust and
believe our eyes and ears. His model is an individualized whole, a whole
that is not understood as a theoretical construct behind natural phenomena,
but within them. Just as each of us is a whole within ourselves—as, for
example, the eye seeing colors and completing the totality of the entire color
wheel on its own—everything strives toward and responds to such
completeness. Each individual thus appears as something that is a whole
within itself. At the sight of a rare sea creature on the beach of the Lido,
Goethe exclaimed, What a precious, marvelous thing is a living creature!
How well fitted to its condition, how true, how alive! The way Goethe
devoted himself to nature and pursued his studies of it was central to his
understanding of himself and the world.
Let us take a brief look back over his life. For the Goethe of Sturm und
Drang, nature was the epitome of subjective, highly emotional, and self-
granted authority—what was, in Rousseau’s sense, alive in contrast to social
conventions and rules. At stake was this subjective nature’s unimpeded
outpouring, which could engender conflict. The waves of natural spontaneity
could break on social reality. Thus nature was primarily creative natural
power in man himself, making free verse therefore pure nature and not mere
clumsy workmanship. As for external nature, he regarded it much as he
experienced his own nature: as creative, wild, rich.
As he grew into the duties of office in Weimar and took on social
responsibilities, his life became more objectified and nature as an objective
power came more clearly into view. The brilliant poet, so happy to follow
his own nature, became schooled in reality and his interest in nature changed.
Although Goethe’s journey to the Harz in the winter of 1777 was a path to his
inner self, he was also on an inspection tour of the mines. Both were now at
stake: reencountering his own creative nature and useful work on external
nature. It is striking that the mineral realm—petrified nature, if one will—
attracted him more and more in the years just before he set off for Italy. This
was a troubling symptom of his growing sense of paralysis and lifelessness
in everything, from which he had to escape before the possible conflicts
came to a head. Through the pleasures of Italian life and art, he recovered the
balance between his sense of reality and his poetry, a balance in which his
interior life did not damage his exterior life or vice versa. This struggle for
harmony can be read in Torquato Tasso as well. Goethe had conceived the
drama at a time when he had not yet found the middle voice between the
world and poetry; only after he returned from Italy was he able to finish the
play. Although Tasso is still a poet who suffers in his surroundings, the real
world in the person of Antonio is also given its due. Goethe the author
thereby rose above his figures; on the one hand he is Tasso the poet, but he is
also Antonio, the man of the world. He intended to embrace both the poetic
and the realistic in his relationship to the world.
 Goethe wanted to hold together what powerful tendencies of the age were
tearing apart: analytical intelligence and creative imagination, abstract
concepts and sensuous observation, artificial experiment and lived
experience, mathematical calculation and intuition. In the tension between
poetry and natural history, he wanted to preserve poetry’s right to exist in the
realm of truth. Delicate empiricism was not to be ousted by the robust,
heartless, pragmatically successful methods of modern science. In that
defensive war he felt obliged to wage, however, he did not want to become a
Tasso, making what was bound to be a last stand against the men of the
world. He had no wish to defend his borders against science but rather to
transport the poetic spirit into science. He wanted to contest science’s claims
to dominance on its own terrain—claims made on the basis of its epoch-
making modernization. He did not want to defend anything, but with his own
phenomenology, to carry the fight into the heart of his opponent. He was
guided by his own ideal of personality. Perception should be integrated into a
unity of man’s multifarious endeavors and abilities; sensuality and reason,
imagination and intellect should work together. These abilities are originally
in balance. Although discoveries can be made by the use of perceptual
prostheses—a telescope or a microscope—the person who does so runs the
risk that in the process his outward sense is put out of balance with his
inner judgment.
Goethe here anticipates something that would fully emerge only in the age
of modern media, namely, the disproportionate reactions when artificial
means confuse what is near and far, for example, when a distant danger
reported is experienced as an imminent threat. In order to ensure that distant
events kept their distance, Goethe would leave newspapers lying around for
a while before he read them. For him, it was still obvious that lives lived at a
spatial distance from one another are simultaneous only in an abstract sense.
People lived in different times when they lived in different places, and what
one learned about distant places was always already past by the time one got
news of it. Goethe was already warning of the dissolution of personal
boundaries that we are experiencing today.
A physicist gave Goethe an expensive, modern polarimeter that was
capable of confirming Newton’s theory about the origin of colors, for it
polarized light into the colors of the spectrum. Goethe stubbornly refused to
use the apparatus, just as the Inquisition had spurned Galileo’s telescope two
hundred years earlier. As a rule, Goethe rejected information about nature
that was arrived at by the use of perceptual aids rather than by the five senses
we were born with. Equipped with his normal senses, he declared, man was
the greatest and most precise physical apparatus there can be. As we have
seen, however, when he felt like it he would not hesitate to use instruments in
order to investigate micro- or macrocosmic relationships, and would surely
have made wise use of modern means of communication in the service of
life.
His great work on color appeared in May 1810. Weeks and months went
by, and, aside from dutiful praise from friends and acquaintances, there was
no reaction to speak of. Goethe looked on with growing ire. He had labored
on the huge work for twenty years, and the public acted as if a mouse had
been born. A few painters, especially Philipp Otto Runge, felt inspired by it,
but the scientific world dismissed it. “Experts will find nothing new,” wrote
the Gothaische Gelehrte Zeitung (Gotha Learned Journal). The reading
public regretted what were considered unnecessary digressions, and the
political world had other things to worry about. People asked reproachfully
why Goethe was not addressing the burning questions of the day. Goethe took
it all as a conspiracy of silence.
In fact, his publisher had been extremely cooperative, although he had
feared he would lose money on the opulently produced and expensive
volumes. That didn’t happen, however, since it was at least an elegant
ornament to one’s library. Success in the scientific world, however—
Goethe’s main ambition—eluded him. At best, as mentioned above, the
chapters on the physiological colors received some recognition, but in a way
that was bound to displease him. He had wanted to inject poetic spirit into
natural science, but the Theory of Color was seen as a document of aesthetic,
not scientific, experience. The book might be intellectually stimulating, well
written, profound, and heartfelt, but unfortunately it disregarded reality—at
least in a scientific sense. That was how it was judged. Contemporaries were
not as harsh as was Professor Emil du Bois-Reymond a few decades later,
when he called Goethe’s Theory of Color the “stillborn bagatelle of a
dilettantish autodidact,” but that’s how it was regarded in scientific circles.
Goethe was so angry he defiantly downplayed his poetic accomplishments to
extol his scientific ones: I take no pride . . . in anything I have
accomplished as a poet. Excellent poets have lived at the same time as I,
even more excellent ones lived before me, and there will be more of them
after me. However, I am very proud of the fact that in my century I am the
only one to know the truth in the difficult science of color theory, and that
is why I am conscious of my superiority over many others.
Let us jump ahead a bit to the winter of 1813–14. Polite silence continued
to surround Goethe’s work on colors, and he had adopted the role of the
keeper of an open secret. He once said that he had to make proselytes. And
then just such a proselyte showed up on his doorstep: the young Arthur
Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer had just finished his dissertation On the Fourfold Root of
the Principle of Sufficient Reason and was living for a while with his
mother, whose Weimar salon was enjoying great success. They were at
loggerheads because she would not allow him to play the ersatz paterfamilias
since his father’s death. Their power struggle ended with a falling-out;
Arthur left her house in a fury in the spring of 1814, and, appropriately
enough, Goethe wrote in Schopenhauer’s album, To rejoice in your own
worth / You must grant worth to life on earth.
Before that happened, while Arthur was still living with his mother, a
lively discussion about the Theory of Color had sprung up between him and
Goethe. Schopenhauer would later count these weeks among the most
important of his life. They also thrashed out their differences, which had no
negative effect on Schopenhauer’s admiration for Goethe. The privy
councilor had drawn the young philosopher into a discussion for the first time
in Johanna Schopenhauer’s salon in November 1813. Young Schopenhauer
presented himself to me as a remarkable and interesting young man, was
his low-key commentary to Knebel. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, could
hardly contain his enthusiasm, “Praised be his name in all eternity!” he wrote
in a letter after their first meeting.
Goethe had no interest in an easy, conventional relationship with
Schopenhauer, which would hardly have been possible in any case.
According to Schopenhauer, Goethe once told him that with others, he
conversed; with him, the young Dr. Arthur, he philosophized. The
philosophizing referred to the Theory of Color. Goethe went through some
passages with the young man and elucidated a few things, Schopenhauer
commenting and contributing epistemological insights. They organized some
experiments, consulted plates from the Theory of Color, and got out a prism.
After a few weeks of working together, Goethe wrote down a couplet he
later included in the Tame Xenias: Teaching’s a chore, but could be a
downright boon / If pupils didn’t turn teacher so soon. But so it was:
Schopenhauer didn’t have a modest bone in his body, and soon set himself up
as a know-it-all. Agreeing with Goethe’s physiology of color, but not
convinced that his illuminating observations were a comprehensive theory
yet, he set out to develop a complete theory of the origin of color in the eye.
A few weeks after leaving Weimar, he worked up his theory and considered
it a success. While Goethe’s work is about the deeds and sufferings of light,
one could say that Schopenhauer’s is about the deeds and sufferings of the
eye. He concentrates completely on the subjective, physiological aspect, the
question of how color originates in the eye, not what it is in and of itself. For
Schopenhauer, the phenomena of light are the result of different activities of
the retina occasioned by modifications of the incidence of the light. It is in
this context that he adopts Goethe’s notion of a complete whole. Since in
each case the incident light only partially activates the potential of the retina,
the retina strives to optimize its potential, engendering the seeing of
complementary colors and the accompanying feeling of harmony. Here
Schopenhauer followed Goethe closely, but he preferred not to treat other
aspects, or left them to the physicists and chemists. And he got involved in
color theory in the first place only in order to be close to his revered master.
It is certain he was wooing Goethe, but he was unwilling to tell him merely
what he wanted to hear. In fact, a covert struggle between them began.
The story of that struggle began when Schopenhauer, in Dresden in July
1815, sent Goethe the manuscript of his completed treatise “On Vision and
Colors” and asked him to be its editor and make it available to the public.
Goethe was traveling at the time and did not respond immediately.
Schopenhauer became impatient and wrote him a reminder, saying that he
realized that, for Goethe, literary business was of secondary importance
compared with his other activities. In his case, however, the opposite was
true. “What I think, what I write, is of value and importance to me; my
personal experiences and what happens to me is of secondary importance.”
After a few weeks in which Schopenhauer almost lost hope, he received a
cordial but brief reply that held out the prospect of a more complete letter
that would address the manuscript. But another good month went by until
Goethe wrote on October 23, 1815, that at the moment, he was too far
removed from the Theory of Color to want to thrash out differences—which,
after all, were what was at stake. In the meantime, he said, Schopenhauer
should get in touch with Professor Seebeck, who was an ally in their
investigation of colors and to whom he was turning over the manuscript.
 Schopenhauer felt he was being pawned off on one of Goethe’s domestics.
His wounded pride set the tone of an enormous letter to Goethe on November
11, 1815. In terms of his image of himself, it is probably the most important
letter Schopenhauer ever wrote. With a self-confidence bordering on
brashness—and yet with great respect—he squares off against the man he had
chosen as a substitute father. He pays Goethe obeisance but also openly and
massively denigrates the Theory of Color. Goethe, who understood his work
as a new type of theorizing, is given to understand by Schopenhauer that all
he had done was collect excellent observations, but not develop a real
theory. “If I compare your Theory of Color to a pyramid, my theory
represents its peak, the indivisible mathematical point from which the entire
great edifice extends, and which is so essential that without it, there is no
more pyramid, while from below, one can always cut something off without
its ceasing to be a pyramid.” Schopenhauer could assume that Goethe knew
his Aristotle and that the essence (idea) of a thing (material) lay in the
entelechy of its form. The image of the pyramid was basically a suggestion
that Goethe regard his work as material that gets brought to life only by
Schopenhauer’s theory. Schopenhauer’s self-confidence was just getting
warmed up, with sentences like the following flowing from the pen of the
young philosopher: “I know with absolute certainty that I have provided the
first true theory of color, the first in the entire history of science.”
Recall that Goethe thought the Theory of Color was the work with which
he had gained superiority over many others, that made him feel like a
Napoleon of the intellectual empire. And now an unknown philosopher still
in his twenties claims to be the one who first elevates this work to the level
of a theory and also—the height of impertinence!—claims that to do so was a
minor matter. Goethe had been working on the Theory of Color for half his
life and this young philosopher had the gall to write, “Except for a few
weeks, I too always treated it as a minor matter, and carry around in my head
theories entirely different from that of color.”
Goethe’s reply is remarkable in its amiable equanimity and sovereign
irony. Alluding to Schopenhauer’s philosophical subjectivism, he writes,
Whoever is himself inclined to construct the world out of the subject will
not dismiss the observation that the subject, in its appearance, is always
only an individual, and therefore needs a certain amount of truth and error
to maintain its singularity. There is nothing, however, that divides humans
more than the fact that the portions of those two ingredients are mixed
according to various proportions.
Schopenhauer was unwilling to accept that, with this sentence, Goethe’s
judgment of the entire matter had been pronounced and nothing more was to
be said. But what did Schopenhauer expect? Did he think Goethe would
write him and say, Yes, you have elevated my scattered observations into a
genuine theory. It is astonishing, young man, the way you’ve managed to
crown my life’s work in just a few weeks. I shall hasten to make your work
—which for the first time allows the full sun to shine upon my work—
available to the public?
Perhaps Schopenhauer really did hope for some such reply. At least, he
hoped that his treatise on colors would receive the blessing of his ersatz
father. Goethe did not accept the proffered role. But he respected this pupil
even though he was too eager to appear as the teacher. And so he sent the
manuscript back with a request that Schopenhauer summarize the views
expressed there briefly so that Goethe could quote them when occasion
arose. He had responded with benevolent nonchalance to this young man
whose head was teeming with such enormous thoughts, and Schopenhauer’s
treatise on colors appeared without Goethe’s blessing.
In the Annals, Goethe recalled that Dr. Schopenhauer sided with me as a
sympathetic friend. We debated and agreed about many things, but in the
end, a certain parting could not be avoided, as when two friends who have
been walking together shake hands: One intends to go north, the other
south, and then they very quickly lose sight of each other.
 CHAPTER 28

Theater Squabble: A First Clash with Karoline Jagemann.

Work on Elective Affinities. The Novel as the second part of
the Theory of Color. The Chemistry of Human Relations.
How Free Is Love? Consciousness is not
an adequate weapon. Inner Nature as Fate. A Split with
the Romantics. The Physics and Metaphysics of Sexual Love.
Nature as an Abyss. Renunciation.

....

EVEN WHILE HE WAS STILL SENDING THE THEORY OF COLOR

chapter by chapter to the printer, Goethe allowed himself a small digression
that he once called the second part of the Theory of Color. On April 11,
1808, he began to write what he planned as a relatively short novella to be
interpolated into Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years. It would eventually
grow into the novel Elective Affinities, which Goethe sometimes described
as the best thing he had ever written. His letters tell how proud of it he was.
He made a special point of telling Zelter that this work was really only meant
to allow him to once again converse at length with distant friends. It was a
novel for riddle solvers that needed to be read at least three times to be
properly understood. I put a lot into it, he tells Zelter, and hid some things.
May this open secret give you joy.
He dictated the first part of the novel and worked out its entire plot at the
spa in Carlsbad in the summer of 1808. The events surrounding his meeting
with Napoleon caused a first interruption, and, at the end of 1808, a crisis at
the Weimar theater led to a second. Both the Theory of Color and Elective
Affinities had to be laid aside, for something had happened that demanded
Goethe’s full attention and entire energy.
The actress Karoline Jagemann, who had become the duke’s mistress,
ventured to start a power struggle in November 1808 with the director
Goethe. An elaborate production of an opera by Ferdinando Paer was
scheduled for a repeat performance on the Weimar stage. The tenor Otto
Morhardt submitted a doctor’s note certifying that he was suffering
hoarseness that would prevent his appearing in the production. For
Jagemann, a talented and thoroughly professional actress and singer, it was
one more example of the sloppiness that had invaded the theater owing to
what she considered the unfortunate directorship of Goethe, whom she
considered a dilettante. Jagemann persuaded the duke to make an example of
Morhardt. He punished the singer with house arrest and then required Goethe
to fire him on the spot and expel him from the duchy without paying him the
fee he was still owed. Goethe refused to obey. He had no intention of being
ordered around behind his back by an actress, no matter how talented. On
November 10, 1808, he asked the duke to release him from a business . . .
that will turn my otherwise so desirable and gratifying position into a hell.
Karl August, however, would not relent.
The duke had other reasons for dissatisfaction with Goethe: his old friend
was decidedly too fond of Napoleon. Karl August joined the Confederation
of the Rhine and placed the duchy under Napoleon’s dominion only with
inner reservations, and he was waiting for the first opportunity to switch
sides again. He placed great hopes in the tsar, to whom he had familial
attachments, and he was confident that the Russian monarch would someday
put an end to Napoleon’s hegemony in Europe. Goethe, who was quite
content with the peace Napoleon’s power had imposed, wore the cross of the
Légion d’honneur at every appropriate and inappropriate moment and called
the man who had awarded it my emperor. The political disagreement
between Goethe and the duke played into the dustup about the theater.
It was Duchess Luise who intervened and calmed the angry waves. Goethe
remained in his post, his prerogatives and responsibilities precisely laid out
to exclude future infringements of his authority, but his relation to the duke
remained troubled. It was no accident that in these weeks of acute conflict,
Goethe was particularly emphatic in his praise of the emperor; one can hear
the undertone directed against the duke. Goethe still felt he owed allegiance
to the duke, but it was good to know that he had a sort of kindred spirit in the
emperor, who had given him an open invitation to come to Paris. While
working on Elective Affinities, it was easy to toy with the notion of giving up
the old obligation in favor of a new one. At any rate, in these weeks he did
procure a practical grammar book to brush up on his French.
At the beginning of 1809, once the theater matter had been settled, Goethe
resumed work on the Theory of Color and Elective Affinities. Over long
stretches, both works advanced in parallel, one reason why the novel seemed
to him the second part of the Theory of Color. However, there was a deeper
connection between the two works. Goethe was at work on the chapter
entitled “History of the Theory of Color” and writing about the theme of
natural magic when he got his first inspiration for Elective Affinities. A
passage about the sixteenth-century naturalist Johann Baptist Porta, written
shortly before he began work on the novel, declares, There are so many
connections between the specified entities that are real and yet miraculous
enough, as for example, between the metals in galvanism. . . . Let us recall,
in a cruder sense, effluvia, odor; in a more delicate sense, connections
between bodily form, gaze, and voice. Recall the power of the will, of
intentions, wishes, prayers. What never-ending and unfathomable
sympathies, antipathies, and idiosyncrasies intersecting one another!
People at the time imagined such connections to be modeled on magnetism
or the chemical attraction of elements that separate from old bonds and join
in new ones. Since about 1780, these chemical processes were called
“elective affinities,” and Goethe adopted the phrase for the first time in 1796
in a lecture on comparative anatomy. He explained that such processes of de-
and recomposition looked like a kind of inclination . . . which is why the
chemists attribute to them the honor of choosing to enter into these
relations. In reality, however, it was not a question of choice but of
determination, he continued, with the pointed addition although we by no
means wish to deny them the tender part they play in the general breath of
life.
If organic nature can thus have a part in the breath of life, then we can
sometimes conversely see the breath of life between people from an organic-
chemical perspective. In chemistry, the expression “elective affinity” is a
metaphor that anthropomorphizes nature, whereas the novel Elective
Affinities attempts to do the opposite, to connect what is human to natural
processes. In the first case, one attributes freedom—at least metaphorically
—to the elements. In the second case, human freedom appears as unconscious
necessity.
How free is love? How much natural compulsion does it involve? These
are the challenging questions the novel sets out to answer. Goethe explained
his title in the advertisement released by the publisher: It seems that the
author’s continued exploration of physical nature caused him to choose
this strange title. He would like it noted that in natural history one often
makes use of ethical similes in order to bring closer something far
removed from the circle of human knowledge; and so, in this story of a
moral crisis, he was pleased to restore a chemical simile to its spiritual
origin.
What does it mean in this case when a chemical simile is restored to its
spiritual origin? The chemical elements that form new bonds have no choice
in the matter. And yet it looks as if they do. When humans form new bonds,
they choose to do so. But does it only look that way in their case too? That
would then be the origin of the simile. Both times—in the chemistry of the
elements and in the chemistry of human interactions—there is necessity and
what at most appears to be freedom, freedom as a simile, not as reality.
The novel’s figures themselves discuss this problem. Charlotte protests
against absorbing the human world into the natural realm. But after all, man
is so many levels above those elements, and if in this case he was
somewhat generous with the lovely words “choice” and “elective
affinities,” he would do well to look inside himself and reflect on the value
of such expressions on this occasion. For Charlotte, to reflect on their value
means to reserve the expression “choice” for the human sphere and remove it
from the realm of nature. But that is not what Goethe thinks. He says in a
letter that he wants to show how traces of murky, passionate necessity are
constantly infiltrating the realm of cheerful freedom and rationality and
can be completely extinguished only by a higher hand, and in this life
perhaps not at all.
The novel is set up as an experiment to examine the relative power of
freedom and necessity in erotic interaction. It begins with a mature couple,
bound together by a gentle love and living a withdrawn and protected life in
their manor house and garden, free of all obligations and in a situation that
allows—but also constrains—them to find satisfaction in themselves and
each other. The story begins at the moment that this previously idyllic, closed
world is opened up. Eduard, the husband, wants to invite an old friend for a
visit, a captain who has resigned his commission. Charlotte, the wife,
hesitates and warns of unwelcome and unforeseen changes. Eduard seeks to
dispel her concerns: That could well happen . . . to people who live gloomy,
introverted lives, but not to those who have been enlightened by experience
and are more conscious. Charlotte responds with an ominous sentence
whose significance will be revealed in the course of the story:
Consciousness, she says, is not an adequate weapon, and is sometimes even
a dangerous one for the person wielding it. The sentence points early on to
the ambiguity of the action. What unconscious desire is hidden behind the
rational decision to invite the captain? People exchange ideas and talk
reasonably with one another. It all seems to be directed by consciousness,
but, in reality, there are unexpressed feelings and desires. In any event,
Eduard stubbornly insists on his plan, and they finally agree that they will
invite both the captain and Ottilie, Charlotte’s foster daughter. And so the
elective affinities—at first felicitous, then disastrous—can begin.
What sort of powers are these that apparently assert themselves behind
and against the conscious will of the participants? They are the divine or
demonic powers of a fate that operates not from without but within and
between people. For Goethe, they are natural powers that leave their murky
trace in the realm of cheerful freedom and rationality, where people think
that they are falling in love of their own free will, and that love in general
proceeds from freedom.
Politics is fate. That’s what Napoleon told Goethe in October 1808 when
he was already at work on the novel. One’s inner nature is also fate. That’s
what it comes down to in Elective Affinities. Politics plays no role in Eduard
and Charlotte’s garden landscape. It’s true that Eduard rushes off to war at
the end of the first book, but he does it to be able to bear the separation from
Ottilie and not for the sake of politics. Eduard yearned for external danger
to keep his internal danger in balance.
It is not just the fateful power of politics that is excluded but also the
transcendent power of divine providence beloved by the Romantics as it
appears, for instance, in the tragedies of Zacharias Werner. It is no accident
that at the same time Goethe was working on the novel, he was voicing
especially strong criticism of Romantics like Tieck, Schlegel, and Joseph
Görres, whom he regarded as fishing in troubled waters by giving free rein to
their sympathies for Roman Catholicism. Although he had once been flattered
when the Schlegel brothers praised him to the skies, he had since soured on
the whole movement. One annoyance was an article that appeared in the
Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Kunst (Magazine for Science and Art) in
early 1808, ranking the Romantics, especially Novalis and Friedrich
Schlegel, above Goethe as poets. It said that only Romantic poetry was
“idealistic, i.e., like Christianity, it transfigures the dualism of heaven and
earth into a spiritual unity in the idea of the divine and holy; on the other
hand, Göthe’s poetry, like pagan poetry, is realistic.”
With angry defiance, Goethe took what was meant as criticism for praise.
In March 1808 he wrote to Jacobi, What’s more, I am only too honored by
what those gentlemen say about me. I had wished but not hoped to receive
such praise, and it shall now be extremely pleasant to live and die as the
last pagan. Not long thereafter, Goethe stormed against the Romantics at a
gathering in Johanna Schopenhauer’s salon. Each season, he said, a new
literary emperor was declared. Now it was the Romantics’ turn. It reminded
him of the end of the Roman Empire when any canteen cook or foot soldier
could become a Caesar. Today Friedrich Schlegel was the crowned head,
and it could just as well have been Novalis if he were still alive. The poor
fellow was in too much of a hurry to die. As demanded by the speedy
progress of our newest literature, you should clothe yourself with fame as
quickly as possible and with earth as slowly as possible. Goethe harbored a
particular grudge, having discovered a disparaging remark about Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship in Novalis’s literary remains, which Tieck had
edited and published.
Goethe’s witty diatribe against the new poetasters soon made the rounds
in Weimar. He also said that the literary emperor lived in complete safety,
thank God. Each one dies peacefully in his bed instead of being strangled
like most of the Roman Caesars. And at least he was glad to wake up in the
morning with his head still on his shoulders, even though he wasn’t emperor
anymore. All this wouldn’t bother the Romantics very much, he continued,
since they had one foot in the hereafter anyway. Romantic piety? He couldn’t
take it seriously. It was nothing more than a search for interesting material.
The common topics writers usually chose to treat had been exhausted and
made contemptible. Schiller had still hewed to what was noble; to surpass
him, they had to reach for what was holy.
In the summer of 1808 came news that Friedrich Schlegel had converted to
Catholicism. To Reinhard, who had told him about it, Goethe replied,
Schlegel’s conversion, however, is very much worth the trouble of
following step by step, both because it is a sign of the times and also
because at no time has such a remarkable case ever occurred: that such an
outstanding and highly educated talent, in the brightest light of reason,
intellect, and broad outlook, gets misled into veiling itself, playing the
bogeyman—or if you prefer another metaphor—with shutters and curtains
closing as much light as possible out of our common house, producing
quite a dark room, in order to later allow in through a foramen minimum*
only as much light as is necessary for hocus pocus.
All of these comments occurred while he was working on the novel. They
clearly reveal that although Goethe was fascinated by the unconscious
chemistry of human relationships—the monstrous aspect of nature—what he
calls the hocus pocus of supposedly extraterrestrial powers did not interest
him. All the more surprising, then, is his occasional intimacy with Zacharias
Werner during this year of the Elective Affinities. Werner was a genuinely
sanctimonious author, but at the same time very sensual. For Goethe, he was
an example of a suspect salaciousness in which pining after holiness is
connected to sexuality rather than morality. He called Werner’s life and
activities a lascivious masquerade ball and quasi-bordello. Yet, he called
Werner an outstanding talent as a dramatist who had an especially powerful
effect on the ladies. As theater director, Goethe needed attractions and
Zacharias Werner was one.
The son of a professor of elocution, Werner had grown up in Königsberg
in the same building as E. T. A. Hoffmann, who was a few years younger.
After his father’s early death, he had fallen into the hands of his half-mad
mother who believed she would be giving the world a second Christ in her
highly educated son. Hoffmann later told of the piercing shrieks from the
woman on the top floor who thought she was the Virgin Mary. Werner was
already a successful dramatist by the time his restless life brought him to
Weimar in 1808. He had scored a huge hit in Berlin with his play Martin
Luther, or The Consecration of Power, under the direction of August
Wilhelm Iffland. It ran for weeks. The Protestant Berliners couldn’t get
enough of a Luther who was simultaneously saintly, berserk, and a ladies’
man. “The general impression is repugnantly religious,” Zelter reported. The
success went to Werner’s head and when Schiller died, he immediately felt
called upon to take his place. As a celebrated dramatist, Werner could now
pursue chambermaids and countesses with even more success. He fobbed off
his third wife—a Polish beauty—on a Berlin privy councilor in exchange for
a post in the ministry in Potsdam from which he had already resigned by the
time he got to Weimar, where he was now a frequent guest in Goethe’s house.
For the duchess’s birthday on January 30, 1808, Werner’s play Wanda,
Queen of the Sarmatians—the bizarre story of an Amazon who wages war
on an enemy prince whom she loves but kills in the end—was performed.
Goethe must have felt besieged by raging Amazons. Not long before, he
had received several acts of a play called Penthesilea, sent to him by a
certain Heinrich von Kleist “on the knees of my heart,” as he wrote in his
cover letter. Penthesilea was another of those hysterical women Goethe
couldn’t stand. On February 1, two days after the performance of Werner’s
play, Goethe wrote to Kleist, I cannot warm up to Penthesilea yet. She is
from such a prodigious race and moves in such a strange region that I need
time to familiarize myself with both. He was repelled by the emotional
extremism and absolutism in Penthesilea. He did produce Kleist’s comedy
The Broken Jug, but deprived the more moderate play of any success by an
incorrect division of the acts and lukewarm directing. It remains a mystery
why he rejected Penthesilea on the one hand but esteemed the no less
murderous virago Wanda on the other. Perhaps it was Werner’s gesture of
enlightenment after Wanda kills her beloved (“You poor souls whom love
now blinds, / Calm yourselves and clear your minds”) that pleased him more
than Penthesilea’s frenzied rage.
Whatever the case, Goethe counted Kleist among the Romantics from
whom he wanted to distance himself. In his diatribe against the new
poetasters in Johanna Schopenhauer’s salon, he also went after Kleist. He
called Penthesilea an unintended parody and made fun of the scene in which
the Amazon declares that all her hard feelings have moved from her left
breast, which she cuts off so it won’t interfere with her shield, into the
remaining right breast. Goethe said things like that belonged in an Italian
comedy and even there would be disgusting.
Thus at the same time Goethe was writing Elective Affinities, there was a
craze for bizarre erotic enthusiasms in contemporary literature, spurred on by
the Romantic spirit. Yet Goethe tells his story, which itself has no lack of
bizarre amorous complications, without any exalted Romantic feelings but
rather in the observant and distanced posture of a natural scientist.
Let us examine the situation at the beginning of the novel in more detail. In
their youth, Eduard and Charlotte had fallen in love with each other but were
not strong and determined enough to follow their true feelings. Each entered a
conventional marriage of convenience with someone else. The deaths of their
respective spouses finally leave them free to marry, and they withdraw to the
isolation of Eduard’s country estate to enjoy their yearned-for happiness at
long last.
They think that now they will be able to follow their real inclination, but
here begins a first ambiguity. How strong is their inclination? Is it still love,
or only the memory of love, a sort of postlude? Charlotte had an inkling of
this, for she hesitated before agreeing to marry Eduard. Eduard had pressed
his suit with the feeling that his wishes were to be fulfilled at last. And yet
now, from time to time, a suspicion of boredom steals over him, although he
won’t admit it to himself. That is why he is so eager to invite the captain, his
friend who is having some trouble, for a visit. Charlotte is surprised by his
sudden haste. Why not take more time to think it through? But Eduard,
threatened by boredom, cannot take more time. Impatience and irritability
suggest that the couple no longer satisfy each other but cannot acknowledge
it. They lay out paths in the park, graft slips onto young branches, make
music, and read to each other, but under the calm surface of their lives,
emptiness yawns.
With the arrival of the captain and Ottilie, the situation changes. New force
fields are formed as Charlotte is attracted to the captain and Eduard to
Ottilie. The participants react in different ways. The captain and Charlotte try
to resist their growing attraction, while Eduard surrenders himself to his
feelings for Ottilie, who for her part attaches herself to her lover like a
sleepwalker, without really being clear about her feelings. Even her
handwriting begins to look like his. A turning point, when they grow
conscious of their feelings, comes in a famous scene in which the married
couple commit adultery with each other. Charlotte and Eduard lie in bed
together, but their minds are elsewhere: Eduard held only Ottilie in his
arms; the captain hovered, nearer or more distant in Charlotte’s soul, and
so wondrously enough, absence and presence were woven charmingly and
blissfully together.
The next morning, the spouses encounter the others as if in shame and
remorse and confess their love to the recipients of their respective elective
affinities, Charlotte to the captain and Eduard to Ottilie. Nevertheless,
Charlotte is ready to abjure her love in order to uphold her marriage vows.
Eduard is not willing to continue living with Charlotte or to give up Ottilie.
He departs, leaving Ottilie in Charlotte’s care for the time being. Nine
months later, Charlotte gives birth to the child of their double adultery, and
miraculously the little boy has the facial features of the captain and Ottilie’s
eyes. For Eduard, however, the child is nothing but an obstacle to his union
with Ottilie. In despair, he volunteers for the army and goes off to war,
hoping to die in battle.
He survives and takes it as a sign that he has earned the right to Ottilie,
who in the meantime has been caring for Charlotte and Eduard’s child. He
returns and importunes her, and the young woman, who seems to come from
some vanished golden age and is already half turned toward the things of
heaven, agrees to marry Eduard, provided that Charlotte forgoes him, which
now seems likely. The story is about to end happily when disaster strikes.
Ottilie is rowing across the lake in happy anticipation when the little boy
who is with her falls into the water and drowns. The death of the child seems
at first like a deliverance from their problems. For Eduard, it is an act of
providence, the removal of the last obstacle to his marriage with Ottilie, and
even Charlotte agrees to a divorce because she too believes the child’s death
is a sign of fate: I ought to have made the decision sooner; it was my
hesitation and resistance that killed the child. There are certain things that
fate adamantly undertakes to do. Reason and virtue, duty and all that is
holy try to block its course in vain; fate wants something it deems right to
happen, although it doesn’t seem right to us; and so in the end it asserts its
will no matter how we act.
What kind of fateful power is it that overrides everything and even
sacrifices a child? It is the attraction between the lovers that nothing can
resist, a power of nature stronger than any culture of duty and reason,
stronger even than freedom.
This power of attraction perhaps affects Ottilie most purely. For Eduard, it
takes the form of desire, but in Ottilie it is almost a somnambulistic
enchantment. She wants to tear herself away from Eduard but cannot do it,
not even when she is tortured by feelings of guilt, because for Ottilie the
child’s death is not the removal of an obstacle, as it is for Eduard, but the
establishment of a new obstacle. Yet toward the end, when it is clear that
they will not marry, the two of them still remain caught in love’s force field,
whose gentle might Goethe describes as follows: They still exerted an
indescribable, almost magical power of attraction for each other. They
lived under the same roof; but even at moments when they were not
thinking of each other but were busy with other things, pulled hither and
thither by the company of others, they drew nearer to each other. If they
found themselves in the same room, it didn’t take long before they were
standing or sitting next to each other . . . it required no glance, no word, no
gesture, no touch, only the purest proximity. Then they were not two
persons, it was only a single person in unconscious, utter contentment,
satisfied with itself and with the world. Even if someone had forced one to
remain at the farthest end of the house, the other would have found the way
there, little by little, without intending to. For them, life was a riddle
whose solution they found only in each other.
Eduard and Ottilie get headaches at the same time, she on the left side and
he on the right. The power of attraction is so great because only together do
they constitute a single person, an allusion to the Platonic image of the
original complete person whose separated halves have been seeking each
other ever since.
Is this the riddle of life, this yearning for completion in purest proximity,
when desire finds peace in fulfillment? Is this desire, which can defy
conventions, institutions, and laws, our inner nature operating as fate? Is this
nature’s way, this search for the great complement which, once found, makes
the individual for the first time complete and whole again? It would seem so.
In Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections, assembled after his death from his
literary remains, we find the sentence Whoever makes a serious descent into
his inner self will always discover that he is only a half; it is all the same
whether afterwards he takes a girl or a world in order to constitute a
whole. Seen in this light, the individual would not be indivisible, but what
has been divided and now seeks its proper other half. Elective affinity
reveals a stronger or weaker affiliation; the divided parts can regroup and
fuse, not always in a peaceful process, but sometimes with pain and weeping,
for what seems to some a unifying power can appear to others as destructive
violence.
Thus ambivalent powers are at play, powers Goethe also refers to as the
tremendous, importunate forces. Ottilie seeks refuge from them by devoting
herself to holiness. Yet since she lingers on in the magnetic field of
proximity, she cannot complete an external renunciation by returning to the
boardinghouse where she had previously lived. What remains is her inner
renunciation, the only way she can forgive herself for the death of the child.
But what does it mean to renounce but at the same time be tied to the force
field of love? An inner dying is all she has left. And so she declines, refusing
food, and Eduard quietly follows her in death.
The power of attraction between people is no mere metaphor. For Goethe,
it is a fact. We are not talking about a metaphysics of sexual love but about its
physics. A natural coercion unites Eduard and Ottilie. What Charlotte tells
Eduard in the first dialogue of the novel is applicable here: Consciousness is
simply not an adequate weapon. And since consciousness is connected to
freedom, freedom also reaches its limits. To be sure, it is not completely
overpowered everywhere. In the end, Charlotte can control her longing, as
can the captain. But Eduard cannot master his passion and is destroyed. In
him, almost every trace of freedom is erased. Ottilie’s decline, meanwhile, is
not simply natural but also the consequence of her decision to stop eating.
She thereby escapes Eduard, even though the attraction continues in full
force.
In the end, their deaths are elevated to the level of a saint’s legend: Peace
hovers above their resting place, cheerful, familiar images of angels look
down on them from the ceiling, and what a happy moment it will be when,
one day, they awake together.
Although those are the last sentences of the novel, they are surely not the
narrator’s actual commentary. It is to be found a few pages earlier, in
reflections on Ottilie as she lies on her bier. The narrator observes that she
embodied so many quiet virtues only recently called forth by nature from
its capacious depths and quickly extinguished again by its indifferent hand
—rare, beautiful, lovable virtues whose peaceful influence the needy world
at every moment embraced with joyful satisfaction and whose absence it
longingly mourns.
At this point the reader tends to balk. Ottilie and Eduard don’t really
perish from their feelings for each other but rather from the fact that the
institution of marriage and the marriage vows—i.e., culture and morality—
have erected barriers. Seen in this light, it is not nature’s indifferent hand but
the clash between nature and culture that brings them down.
It is necessary to see nature and culture together, as a single nature, as
Goethe does in his preface to the novel, to grasp the conflict—which in
certain circumstances can be deadly—as a tension between two aspects of
nature: a first, original nature in collision with a second, cultural nature.
Customs and laws, made by men, would then be what human nature requires
to commit itself to this nature. Only when we assume a single nature that
also includes culture does nature appear in all its ambivalence, an
ambivalence that can lead to tensions in which man is torn apart. Then we
cannot wholly embrace either desire or law and order, but rather see with a
certain shudder how the two necessities collide. And only then is the
meaning of the above passage clear: from its capacious depths nature brings
forth figures and then extinguishes them with its indifferent hand. Heraclitus
described nature functioning similarly, like a child who builds something in
play and then knocks it down again.
It is possible to mistake the apotheosis of the lovers in the image of
holiness for the author’s final word. Yet his reference to nature’s horrible
ambivalence remains, and wise readers of the time understood it as Goethe’s
point. Karl Friedrich von Reinhard wrote him on February 10, 1810, after a
first reading of the novel, “Of course, your characters and actions are not
spiritualistic . . . however, if we ever achieve deeper knowledge of the
mysteries of our nature, so that we are in a position to give an account of
them, it is possible that your book will then be revealed as a wonderful
anticipation of truths of which we now have only a dark inkling.”
At issue is the complex nature of man, as Reinhard rightly sees. Man
creates moral ways of living, but the inscrutable passions remain. At times,
they may have no moral justification, yet we sense that they represent life at
its most vivid.
Goethe was writing a novel neither in defense of marriage—which he was
accused of by some—nor in defense of the passions. The latter might have
been expected; Goethe had once stood at the center of the Sturm und Drang,
and passions lend themselves to poetry. But must they be defended? The
answer provided by the novel was that they need no defense, and that it was
foolish to come to their aid with rationalizations. Just as foolish, however, is
the stance of Mittler, a theologian and acquaintance of Eduard’s and
Charlotte’s whose name means “mediator.” He is almost a caricature of a
defense of the moral principle. He comes when they don’t need him and is
absent when they do. He’s called mediator but can’t mediate, as all he knows
is the moral realm. He ignores the passions because he fears them. Thus he
cannot defend moral culture, because he understands too little of life.
Let us take a last look at Ottilie. She never stops loving Eduard, but she
renounces love, and thus forgoes its actualization. This renunciation,
however, will kill her in the end. To actualize her love would have meant
living with guilt, which would also have ended up killing her. She becomes a
tragic figure in the conflict between the nature of desire and the nature of
morality.
The theme of renunciation would play a great role in Goethe’s works from
now on. Yet Ottilie as saint is not his final word of wisdom. Goethe would
be on the lookout for more survivable forms of renunciation.
A beginning was made with the poem “The Diary,” which he wrote shortly
after the novel, read aloud only occasionally in all-male company, and never
gave to anyone in written form. It was not published during his lifetime, not
even in the last edition of his works that he supervised. It is a comic,
burlesque reply to the tragedy in Elective Affinities. The magnetism of sexual
love is the theme as well, but here in a more physical and physiological
sense, and with a different course taken:

We’ve often heard, and must at last believe

No one has ever fathomed the heart of man,
And, however much we bob and weave,
Christian or heathen, we’re all prone to sin.
We know the rules and follow them when we can,
For if a demon tries to make us stray
Virtue’s safe if higher powers hold sway.

The poem goes on to explain exactly what it is that keeps virtue safe. A
traveler eager to return home is held up by an accident with his coach. In an
inn, he is drawn into a ticklish situation, for the charms of a pretty
chambermaid are all too tempting. All this is depicted with relish in broad
and witty strokes. At last, the two are lying in bed together. But unlike the
adultery in the marriage bed in Elective Affinities, this one finds Master
Iste† on duty only when the traveler, in order to get himself excited, thinks
about his wife and the stormy passions when they first fell in love: And then
at last he’s there: all of a sudden / He rises up and stands in all his glory, /
Ready to do whatever he is bidden. Now the traveler has lost his desire for
the pretty servant girl. He wants to rush back into the arms of his wife as fast
as he can. And so virtue is rescued by physiology.

* Latin: small hole.

† Latin: this thing.
 CHAPTER 29

Leave-Takings: Anna Amalia and Goethe’s Mother.

An Occasion to Look Back. Work Begins on the
Autobiography. Self-Reflection. How Much Truth Is Possible,
How Much Poetry Is Necessary? Narrated and Narrative
Time. Recollections of the Old Empire and Thoughts on the
New Power Structure. Pondering the Demonic. Another
Farewell: the Death of Wieland. Thinking about Immortality.

....

W E KNOW THAT SCHILLER’S DEATH WAS ONE OF THE GREAT

leave-takings that led Goethe to look back on his life and give an
autobiographical account of himself. Other farewells that awakened the
feeling of a caesura were the deaths of the duke’s mother, Anna Amalia, on
April 10, 1807, and of Goethe’s own mother on September 13, 1808.
There was much that bound Goethe to Anna Amalia. Back in 1775, it was
she who turned his sojourn in Weimar—at first thought of as only a visit—
into a lasting connection to the place and the ducal family. Anna Amalia’s
“Court of the Muses,” over which Wieland initially presided as intellectual
focal point, had attracted Goethe from the first. Anna Amalia’s attitudes had
been shaped by French Enlightenment thought, and her aim was to connect the
aristocracy to the bourgeoisie under the banner of aesthetic and scientific
education. Her charismatic personality had long ensured that cohesive
sociability reigned, first in Tiefurt, then in the Wittum Palace and at her
summer residence in the Ettersburg castle, where Iphigenia and other
smaller plays by Goethe had their premieres, with amateur casts drawn from
Anna Amalia’s social circle.
 There, Goethe found his real audience in his early years in Weimar,
whereas for the reading public at large he had basically disappeared. Some
of his poems of the time first appeared not in print but in the Tiefurt Journal,
which was distributed in manuscript copies and sometimes edited by Anna
Amalia herself. She was very attached to Goethe. He inspired her with his
yearning for Italy, and she traveled south in his wake. In 1790, he came to
meet her in Venice and accompany her back to Weimar. He read her his
“Roman Elegies”—but obviously not all of them. He dedicated a selection of
his “Venetian Epigrams” to her with the distich Who should receive this
volume? The Princess who gave it to me. / Italy she still gives, even here in
Germania. This was laying it on a bit thick, but when he wrote it, he felt very
much obliged to her for giving him some letters Winckelmann had written to
her and permitting him to quote from them in his book on the art historian. In
that volume he thanks her once more and says that she has ushered in the
beginning of a glorious epoch.
Anna Amalia always backed up Goethe in his set-tos with arrogant,
conservative aristocrats at the Weimar court. Their relationship was so close
in the early Weimar years that there were even rumors of a love affair, which
made Charlotte von Stein a bit jealous. In a playlet of 1800 entitled
Palaeophron and Neoterpe and written for a belated celebration of Anna
Amalia’s birthday, he wrote of her, And it was she who founded our union in
this town.
For Goethe, Anna Amalia was the benevolent genius of an entire epoch of
his life. Her death compounded his elegiac mood and the feeling that times
were changing. Much was in flux after the Battle of Jena in October 1806—
militarily, socially, and politically. What was customary and reliable was
disappearing. The difference from earlier times, he wrote to Charlotte von
Stein a few weeks after Anna Amalia’s death, is simply too great. The old is
past and the new has not yet emerged. In Goethe’s eulogy for the dowager
duchess, which was read from pulpits throughout the duchy, he suggested that
Anna Amalia was not able to absorb the changes in the world. Her heart had
no longer held out against the press of earthly powers.
In September of the following year, Goethe’s mother died at the age of
seventy-seven. He learned of her death on September 17, the day he returned
from taking the waters in Carlsbad. His diary does not mention it. People in
his immediate entourage were surprised that he didn’t want to talk about it,
and his letters contain hardly a word. My dear mother’s death cast a dark
shadow over my return to Weimar, he wrote laconically to Silvie von
Ziegesar, and in a letter to a Frankfurt acquaintance he said that at her
advanced age, it was natural to fear the approaching end.
In Poetry and Truth Goethe always refers to his father as der Vater
(Father or the father) but to his mother as meine Mutter (my mother). The
autobiography presents Johann Caspar respectfully but critically, Goethe
accusing him of pedantry and stubbornness. However, he almost always
writes with love of his mother. Yet he seldom visited her—only four times
after leaving Frankfurt in 1775: in 1779 on his way to Switzerland, in 1792
and 1793 when he accompanied the duke on the campaigns against France,
and a last time in 1797 on his third trip to Switzerland. His mother gave no
hint of her disappointment at his infrequent visits and did not reproach him
with anything. Undaunted, she continued to write frequently, and he was so
delighted with her lively and vivid letters that he showed them to his friends
and on occasion even read them aloud. He once sent one of his mother’s
letters to Charlotte von Stein with the comment, With a “good morning” I
send my dear one a letter from my mother, to regale her with the life it
contains. He wrote to her less often, but then at length. In his letters to his
mother there are detailed self-characterizations such as the one quoted
earlier from 1781 about the breadth and speed of his nature. He would
remain in Weimar, the letter continues. He was of good cheer since he was
there voluntarily; he could leave whenever he wanted to find in your
company, in absolute tranquillity, the necessary and pleasant things of life.
His mother would have been happy to have him return. But neither then nor
later did she trouble him with her wishes and longings. Although she didn’t
like to travel, she would also have been happy to visit him in Weimar.
However, her son did not invite her to come except once, to offer refuge
during the turmoil of war, an offer she ended up not needing to accept.
People in Weimar who read her letters regarded her very highly. Anna
Amalia took the initiative to make contact with her, and Goethe was filled
with pride that the two maintained a cordial correspondence. Anna Amalia
and the duke also visited his mother from time to time. Katharina Elisabeth
Goethe kept a convivial house as long as she continued to live on the
Hirschgraben and was a gracious hostess to all Goethe’s friends and
acquaintances. Yet Goethe balked at inviting her to Weimar, to say nothing of
having her come to live in his house. Convinced she would lose the source of
her vitality if she were to be transplanted, he was able to keep her at a
distance with a clear conscience.
He did not immediately inform his mother of his marriage to Christiane or
of the birth of his son. She first heard about both events from others. And yet
she bore her son no grudges, and when she called Christiane his “bedmate,”
she by no means meant it disparagingly. She regularly sent large packages of
presents to her grandson and adhered to a principle she once described to
Charlotte von Stein: “I like people very much . . . never get preachy with
anyone —always try to find their good side—leave their bad side to Him
who created man and knows best how to file down their sharp corners.”
She took an active interest in Goethe’s literary works, read and
commented on them, and proudly gave them as presents to her Frankfurt
friends. She also kept him up to date on the Frankfurters’ opinions of their
celebrity son, and since she was out in society and often attended the theater,
there was much to tell. In one of her last letters, she calls the first volumes of
the Cotta edition of the complete works “heartwarming” and praises in
particular the ballads “The Bride of Corinth” and “The God and the
Bayadère.” She always liked his erotic works best and was not one to take
exception to the “Roman Elegies.” In her last letter, shortly before she died,
she put in a good word for August: they shouldn’t “plague” him with
demands to write letters to her. Young people had other things on their minds,
so please, no “thumbscrews” for her sake!
Goethe had the exact circumstances of her death described to him.
Katharina Elisabeth had proved to be as plucky and witty at the end as she
had been all her life. The coffin maker had appeared at her bedside to take
measurements, and she expressed her regret that everything had already been
arranged and he had made the trip for nothing. She slipped away quietly soon
thereafter.
During the two preceding years, the young Bettine Brentano, daughter of
Maximiliane (whom Goethe was once a little in love with), had tightened the
bonds between Goethe and his mother. She got Katharina Elisabeth to tell her
stories about Goethe’s childhood, wrote them down, and sent them to Goethe,
who assiduously collected them. Bettine was infatuated with Goethe and
after his death published a book entitled Goethe’s Correspondence with a
Child, which was more poetry than truth. However, Bettine’s original
transcripts of the stories his mother told served him well when he began to
assemble material for Poetry and Truth. They refreshed his memories of
childhood and adolescence, and he encouraged Bettine to have no qualms
about continuing to ask his mother questions: And now I’m hoping for some
news soon about how my dear mother seemed to you . . . and what kind of
conversations are in progress.
According to his diary, he began the first draft of a plan for his
autobiography in October 1809, a year after his mother’s death. He started to
dig out old notes and letters. He used his diaries mostly to simply record the
day’s events. The few passages of extensive self-reflection stand out, like the
following entry, previously quoted but worth repeating because of its
importance: Tranquil review of my life, of the muddle, bustle, thirst for
knowledge in my youth, how the young roam everywhere in search of
something satisfactory. How I took special delight in secrets and dark,
abstruse relationships. . . . How there was such a dearth of
accomplishments and of purposeful thought and writing, how many days
and hours were wasted in sentiment and shadow passion, how little of that
was useful to me, and now that half my life is past, I have covered no
ground along its path, but rather am just standing here like a drowning
man who has pulled himself out of the water and whom the benevolent sun
begins to dry off.
He wrote that in 1779, at a time he was resigned to admitting that his life
had been full of disorder, confusion, and profligacy. He had failed, and
rescue had come from without. When he begins his autobiography thirty years
later, he no longer sees his youth in such dark terms. He views it now more
as he had in a letter to Knebel, written three years after he drew up the
depressing balance quoted above. Confusion no longer reigns; he feels
himself inwardly supported and guided: At the core of my plans and
resolutions and undertakings, I stay true to myself in a mysterious way and
thus tie together my social, political, moral, and poetic life in a hidden
knot.
Goethe does not claim to know the details of this mysterious knot that
holds his life together, but he is sure it exists and must be found if one wants
to write an autobiography. In a letter to Zelter, he says that in biographies, as
a rule, the good and the bad, the successes and the failures, are simply set
down next to each other in hypocritical self-righteousness. Yet without
some spiritual bond, the personality is destroyed, which can be conceived
only in the living unification of such opposite qualities.
 Goethe lived his life from a productive center, but felt a growing need to
grasp more clearly the workings and sources of his productivity. He was in
search of the hidden knot. In this way, too, he was inspired by his friendship
with Schiller, who had been able to characterize him so brilliantly. He paid
the debt of gratitude to his friend with the remark that Schiller had drawn his
attention to himself. It was no accident that precisely in the years of their
friendship, Goethe made several attempts to characterize himself, in one of
which he noted, writing of himself in the third person, The center and basis
of his existence is a forever active, continuing poetic drive to develop
himself inwardly and outwardly; once that has been grasped, all the other
apparent contradictions are resolved. This drive to develop himself was
also effective in areas where he had no real gift, as in the visual arts. But he
identified shortcomings in other areas as well. For official business, for
instance, he didn’t possess enough flexibility and for natural science not
enough perseverance.
This analysis is from the year 1797, at a time when he was considering
where improvements might be possible. More flexibility in practical affairs?
He gets impatient too quickly when he meets with resistance or delay, so he
must learn to accept things that don’t submit to his creative will. But it is
difficult for him because he can put up with his official duties only when in
one way or another, they give rise to something lasting. That was decisive
for Goethe, who was unable to let official business simply take its course; it
had to result in something clearly delineated, to assume a shape. That is in
fact what he wished for all his activities. Everything should shape itself into
a work. But that is hardly possible in the hurly-burly of life, which is what
government has to deal with. And that is why, as he writes, he so often has to
avert his eyes so as not to despair at the amorphousness of day-to-day life.
As we have seen, Goethe devoted himself energetically and consistently to
his official duties in his first years in Weimar. Later, mindful of his inner and
outer limitations, he had slacked off and thereby gained more flexibility.
The problem with natural science was similar. There it was a question of
material that yields a complete work only with great difficulty. The stuff of
science is so heterogeneous that it can disrupt and dissipate your
concentration. How could one ever give coherent shape to this heterogeneity,
this inexhaustible empirical evidence? Here, Goethe finally discovers a
surprisingly simple answer. If the phenomena resist a unified form, then it
falls to the intellect to become unified in its perception of them. He writes,
Since he learned to accept the fact that the natural sciences depend more
on the development of the mind that engages in them than on the objects
themselves . . . he has not abandoned this intellectual enterprise but only
regulated it more and become more fond of it.
When Goethe identifies the poetic drive to develop himself as the center
of his existence, he uses the word poetic not only in a literary sense, but also
in the original sense of the Greek poiesis, from the verb meaning “make” or
“shape.” He writes that he cannot help responding to what he encounters by
shaping it. Everything that has an effect awakens in him the urge to respond
to it actively.
It is this will to effective activity that constantly pushes him beyond his
own limits—or better, out into the world—and thereby preserves him from
brooding self-absorption. For him, self-awareness occurs only via the world.
I hereby confess, he writes late in life, that the great and so weighty-
sounding injunction to “know thyself” always seemed suspect to me, like
the ruse of a secret society of priests to distract people by demanding the
unattainable and entice them away from activity in the external world and
into a false, inner contemplativeness. Man knows himself only to the extent
that he knows the world, and he becomes aware of the world only in
himself and of himself in it.
That means, first, that we know ourselves primarily from what we have
done, not from accompanying reflections and not at all from those inner,
mental worlds that never really take shape; and second, that we need the
reactions and insights of others. Self-knowledge develops in the mirror of the
knowledge of others. I recognize myself because I am recognized. But here
Goethe makes a notable exception. It is not every person who can act as a
mirror for him: Adversaries are out of the question, for my existence is
hateful to them. . . . I therefore reject them and ignore them, for they
cannot benefit me, and that is what everything in life depends on. This
point of view is of the greatest importance for Goethe.
Knowledge and self-knowledge deserve their names only when they
promote and serve life. The function of knowledge is to preserve and
enhance life. If it undermines the powers of life, it doesn’t deserve to be
called knowledge, for then it is only an expression of enmity and the
destruction of self and other in the guise of knowledge. The art of living
consists in repelling or keeping at bay these hostile powers. For Goethe, the
will to know is integrated into the art of living. That is why he could become
an exemplar for Nietzsche.
When someone with as little inclination for brooding introspection as
Goethe undertakes to write an autobiography, he will turn his attention to the
things about himself that have been realized, not to the mere shadows of
interior worlds. But what is truly real?
A reflection about the importance of what is individual comes from the
time he was beginning to write Poetry and Truth: Everyone is himself only
an individual and can really be interested only in what is individual.
However, we never cease to move in the supra-individual reality of nature,
culture, and society, where the individual can feel like a nonentity. Yet what
is individual remains connected to the strongest feeling of being, and that is
why we crave traces of individuality in the midst of that supra-individual
world of society and history. We love only what is individual; hence the
great pleasure we take in portraits, confessions, memoirs, letters, and
anecdotes of the deceased, even if they were insignificant. And that
includes biographies. One cannot hold it against the historian, says a
preparatory note, that he searches for results; but what is lost in that
search . . . is the individual human being. That is why people read
biographies, for we live with the living.
Yet despite all our curiosity about individual characteristics because they
are what is truly alive, our interest in biographies is not only peaceful and
friendly. Biographies also are read to learn about what is denigrating.
Goethe loathed biographies written in a spirit of resentment. He resolved not
to serve such interests, and thus decided not to continue his autobiography up
to the present. In his first outline from 1809, he had intended to do so. But he
changed his mind out of consideration for living persons such as the duke and
Frau von Stein. He did not wish to commit any indiscretions. He discussed
other reservations with Riemer on May 18, 1810, on the way to Carlsbad and
recorded them in his diary because of their importance: Anyone who writes a
confession is in danger of becoming lachrymose, because one is supposed
to confess only weaknesses and sins and never one’s virtues.
A course had to be steered between the Scylla of self-accusation and the
Charybdis of self-congratulation. There are two sorts of dishonesty: you
denigrate yourself or you boast. Both are to be avoided. Rousseau committed
both kinds simultaneously by boasting about denigrating himself. Nobody
could beat him at honesty, and he therefore indicted himself mercilessly and
yet concealed what was especially embarrassing, such as the fact that he
packed his children off to an orphanage. Rousseau’s Confessions were a
reminder to Goethe not to do as that genius of dishonesty had done. In
general, he found Rousseau’s emphasis on truth suspect. Goethe applies to
the truth about human beings the requirement of decorum, which is his
favorite word for it. Whereas with supposed truths you can offend, belittle,
or wound, decorum urges consideration for others. And caution is also
called for, as truths are always a matter of perspective. The consideration
and caution required by decorum and the relativity of truth produced the
attitude that Goethe in his diary called the ironic view of life in a higher
sense.
Goethe entitled his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit—Poetry and
Truth. How much truth is there in an autobiography, and how much poetry is
necessary? In a letter written late in his life (sent first to the king of Bavaria
and followed by an identical text to Zelter), Goethe explains the title. He
writes that his most earnest endeavor was as far as possible to present and
express the actual basic truth which, as far as I could tell, had prevailed in
my life. This basic truth is not primarily the outward facts. Reproducing
them as accurately as possible goes without saying. To help convey them,
Goethe drew upon chronicles and works of history, made inquiries, used
letters and diaries. But the basic truth is the inner logic, the inner coherence
of his own life as it appeared to him at the moment he was writing it. He also
calls it the results. It is the personality he now grasps as his own in the
course of a development determined by influences and counterinfluences.
The basic truth is the personality and what made it into what it is. But since
he approaches this development not from without—like a historian—but
from within, from the perspective of recollection, the imagination comes into
play. It is nothing but his poetic capacity. It awakens the past to life and
thereby allows one to see how much of it is truth.
To avoid misunderstandings, Goethe distinguished (in a conversation with
Chancellor Johannes Müller) between the poetry (Dichtung) of recollection
and mere inventing (Erdichten). Müller had asked if he would describe life
in Tiefurt in the days of Anna Amalia, and Goethe answered, It would not be
too difficult, . . . one would only have to quite faithfully depict conditions
as they presented themselves to the poetic eye at the time—poetry and
truth, but without any admixture of invention.
 Invention would mean being free to make things up. Poetry in this context
is reality reflected in recollection. What is past but continues to live in him is
discerned by the poetic eye. Sometimes, the truth of an experience is
revealed only in recollection. Some impressions and experiences need time
to develop, and only in this developmental period do they attain the status of
truth. What constitutes a person in experience and action, and how much of
that the poetry of recollection is able to make present, is thus the basic truth.
How the basic truth of the past is linked to the present, and how its
consequences sometimes become clear only in the present, is shown by
taedium vitae, the weariness with life that Goethe presents in the third and
provisionally last book of Poetry and Truth while discussing Werther. Not
until dictating the relevant passages in 1812 did Goethe fully realize that this
was a permanent if mostly subliminal motif of his emotional life, but also a
phenomenon of that entire epoch. It came from both within and without.
Goethe introduces the depiction of that gloomy period with an encomium
to poetry as a power that truly makes life easier. In chapter 8, we already
quoted the wonderful passage about poetry: Like a balloon, it lifts us and
the ballast that we carry into higher regions. It frees us for a time from
earthly burdens and allows us a bird’s-eye view of earth’s tangled paths.
Conversely, a crisis arises when a clear view is no longer possible.
Although the burdens of life are always there, they become oppressive only
when there is no inner flexibility to balance them out. However, such
constrictions and burdens, for which poetry can provide a counterweight, are
not the darkening of the mind that Goethe calls taedium vitae. Weariness of
living does not result from great pressures or labyrinthian complications. The
problem is not that things are complex and difficult but rather that they are
empty and monotonous. It is the threat not of too much but of too little. There
is no wildly flailing despair, only paralyzing boredom. In the midst of life, it
is anticipated death that makes suicide seem a mere matter of form. Here at
last, the weariness of living hits bottom. In Poetry and Truth, Goethe relates
how this happened to him, and how he pulled himself together and performed
grandiose, histrionic acts in order to escape the emptiness he felt, keeping a
dagger beside his bed and musing on the splendid suicides of great historical
heroes like Emperor Otho, who fell on his sword, and Seneca, who opened
his veins in the bath. Yet he knew that they were figures who had lived
active, meaningful lives and then had fallen into despair when they
encountered great adversity. Their despondency was based on specific
deeds. The weariness of living, on the other hand, was despair at a lack of
deeds. Those men had too much life, whereas he had too little. Goethe tells
how he pulled himself out of his depression by becoming active. He decided
to live, but in order to do so with good cheer, he needed to bring a poetic
task to completion. The way he presents this turning point suggests that any
other activity could have had the same effect of dispersing his
hypochondriacal fancies.
In November 1812, just as Goethe was developing his thoughts about
taedium vitae as both personal experience and a phenomenon of the entire
epoch, he received a letter from his friend Zelter, who was struggling
desperately to maintain his composure in the face of his stepson’s suicide.
Past and present, narrated and narrative time, were meshing.
A similarly significant conjunction occurred with religion. Religion shows
up in many passages of the autobiography, not just where it played a role in
the narrated life but also when Goethe feels himself challenged in the present
to ponder certain religious questions. In 1811, for example, he had long
conversations about the spiritual world of the Catholic Church with a new
young friend, Sulpiz Boisserée, a great collector of older German art and a
believing Catholic. They inspired him to read Chateaubriand’s The Genius of
Christianity, which led to a more sympathetic view of the sacramental order
of a Catholic’s daily life. He placed his critique of Protestant austerity—the
Protestant has too few sacraments—and his defense of the Catholic way of
life in the chapter about his time in Leipzig, where it doesn’t really belong. In
any case, these reflections articulate what he had to say at this point about
religion and its practice: if there had to be religion, then it should have
powerful visual images, vivid rituals and sacraments that were effective aids
for day-to-day living.
At the time he was writing Poetry and Truth, he was also involved in a
dispute with his old friend Jacobi, an additional spur to come to terms with
religion that also left its traces in the autobiography. Jacobi had sent Goethe a
copy of his book On Divine Things and Their Revelation, in which he
develops the thought that God cannot be comprehended from nature. “Man
reveals God by raising himself above nature with his mind,” writes Jacobi. It
was the polar opposite of Goethe’s position, and Goethe even had the
impression that his friend’s work was consciously directed against him. In
great annoyance he wrote to Knebel, another of his oldest friends, Whoever
can’t get it into his head that mind and matter, soul and body . . . were, are,
and will be the necessary double ingredients of the universe, . . . whoever
cannot rise to the level of this idea ought to have given up thinking long
ago. He went on to say that Jacobi had been tormenting him for years with
his religious ideas, and now it served him right if his old gray head sinks
sorrowfully into the grave.
The last time Jacobi visited Goethe had been in 1805, shortly after
Schiller’s death, and they hadn’t seen each other since. After his initial anger
about Jacobi’s pious book had cooled, Goethe wrote him a friendly letter
early in 1813 in which there is a succinct and effective description of his
relationship to religion: As for me, with the multifarious directions of my
character, a single way of thinking cannot be enough; as a poet and artist,
I’m a polytheist, as a natural scientist, however, a pantheist, and I’m the
one as decisively as the other. If I have need of a god for my personality, as
a moral person, that has also already been taken care of. In the posthumous
Maxims, that thought became the short and sweet: Investigating nature / We
are pantheists, / Writing poetry, polytheists, / Morally, monotheists.
These are the categories in which Goethe presents an account of his
relationship to religion in his autobiography. He relates how, as a boy, he
developed a pantheistic feeling for nature, how the polytheistic pantheon of
the ancients awakened his poetic enthusiasm, and how finally the severe,
monotheistic God of the Old Testament became the epitome of moral law.
Every account of the past, Goethe wrote to Zelter, brings with it something
of the time in which it was written. The link between present experience and
the presentation of the past applies, as we have seen, to the depiction of
moods like weariness with living. It also applies to the engagement with
religious matters. And it applies to history and politics as well.
Goethe worked on the first three books of Poetry and Truth at a time of
great political excitement. Part 1, with its recollections of a childhood in the
Holy Roman Empire, came in 1811, when Napoleon’s power in Europe was
at its zenith and Goethe, after his audience with the emperor, proudly wore
the cross of the Légion d’honneur, as we have seen. Part 2, covering his years
in Leipzig and Strasbourg and the idyll in Sesenheim, was written as Europe
held its breath during Napoleon’s Russian campaign; it was published after
that campaign had ended in disaster. Part 3, treating the creation of Götz and
Werther, was written in 1813, as the European allies were defeating
Napoleon and a nationalistic movement was being born in Germany.
Napoleon had been banished to Elba when this third volume was published
in the early summer of 1814.
At the peak of Napoleon’s power, and after the disappearance of the Holy
Roman Empire, Goethe depicted the splendid coronation of a new emperor
that he had witnessed as a boy in Frankfurt. That world had vanished as
completely as the world of his first boyhood love. Now it lived on only in
recollection, bathed in a fairy-tale beauty. But there are also flashes of irony,
for something was amiss in his attachment to the girl, the first Gretchen, as
there was in the old empire. That becomes clear when he tells of his time at
the Imperial High Court in Wetzlar. Goethe gives his readers a sense that the
old order had outlived its time, describing the monstrous condition of this
thoroughly sick body, which only a miracle was keeping alive. That is also
a jab at the Romantics’ historical sentimentality and at those patriots who
dreamed of restoring the old empire.
While people in Weimar and elsewhere were bemoaning the burden of
quartering French troops, Goethe was describing how the French were once
billeted in the house on the Hirschgraben in Frankfurt, how bitter it made his
father, and his boyhood delight at the opportunity it gave him to discover the
world of the theater. This section of Poetry and Truth is a love letter to
French culture, written at a moment in history when, all around him, anti-
French sentiment was on the rise.
Part 3 of the autobiography, which treats the youthful Sturm und Drang
movement, contains a covert commentary on the German wars of liberation
against the French. With a sidelong glance at the present, he writes of the
Sturm und Drang, The aesthetic spirit combined with youthful boldness
pressed onward. From it there arose a world of effect and countereffect,
half chimerical and half real, in which we later experienced the most
virulent boasting and indoctrination.
Both then and now, such a liberation movement struck him as the
rhetorical, bookish, secondhand excitement of schoolmasters, literati, and
journalists, not as a real-life power. His opinion of patriotism was the same;
he accused it of being merely rhetorical and abstract. In July 1807, after the
Prussian defeat, he wrote Zelter in a letter quoted above, But when people
bewail an entity that has supposedly been lost, an entity that not a soul in
Germany has ever seen in his life, much less bothered about it, then I have
to conceal my impatience so as not to become impolite.
 The reflections on the demonic, published only posthumously in part 4 of
Poetry and Truth, were written in April 1813 after Napoleon’s catastrophic
defeat in Russia. While in the narrated time of the autobiography, the
phenomenon of the demonic is linked to the figure of Egmont, in Goethe’s
narrative time it has to do first and foremost with Napoleon. Goethe sought to
trace his fascination with the demonic—part terror and part admiration—to
the figure of the Corsican.
His approach is cautious. He writes that the demonic emerges at the
borderline of what is monstrous, incomprehensible. It is religious in a
nonreligious guise. With the attraction it exerts on the masses, it reaches
down into the depths of irrationality, is stronger than all reason, and can be a
force for good or evil. It enters history suddenly, as if from nowhere. It looks
like pure chance, yet we discover its necessity. It resembles providence, for
it points to interconnectedness.
Those are his first attempts to adumbrate the phenomenon, and the
autobiography suggests that these observations probably don’t apply very
well to Egmont—whom it uses as an example—and should actually be
applied to someone else. And so, notes the author, I want to get ahead of
myself and—since I don’t know whether I will get back to the topic anytime
soon—will say something I became convinced of only much later, that is,
long after he had written Egmont. What then follows is a dense description
of the phenomenon of Napoleon, but without naming him: This demonic
quality appears most terribly when it emerges predominantly in some
person. . . . They are not always the most outstanding people, neither in
intellect nor in talents, and seldom recommend themselves by the goodness
of their hearts; but they exude enormous power and exercise unbelievable
force on all creatures. . . . All moral strengths combined can do nothing
against them; the brighter part of mankind tries in vain to make them
suspect as either deceivers or deceived: the masses are drawn to them.
Seldom or never is there a contemporary to equal them, and nothing can
overcome them but the universe itself that they have begun to fight; and it
is from such observations that the strange but prodigious saying may
derive: nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse.*
That a demonic person can be overcome from time to time only by the
universe itself is a clear reference to Napoleon, who was defeated not by his
opponent but by the Russian winter and the enormous distances. Later,
Goethe would explicitly reiterate to Eckermann that the demonic is not to be
regarded as only negative and of the devil. Mephisto, for example, is not at
all a demonic figure. The demonic individual has enormous energy—in a
positive sense as well. For that very reason, Goethe included the duke among
people with a demonic nature: he was full of boundless energy and
restlessness, so that his own realm was too small for him and the largest
would have been too small as well. In the conversation with Eckermann in
which he said that, Goethe also speaks to whether something demonic was at
work within himself. It is not in my nature, but I am fascinated by it. It was
an old man who said that, a man who at that moment perhaps could no longer
picture the bewitching magic of his younger self. As so often, it is still in the
eye of the hurricane.
By late 1812, Goethe had decided to end the autobiography with his move
to Weimar. It was clear to him that later autobiographical writings would be
detailed descriptions of only those periods that were particularly eventful—
such as the campaigns against the French on which he had accompanied the
duke—or in which he had succeeded in completely belonging to himself, as
during the Italian journey. After finishing part 3 of Poetry and Truth and even
before completing part 4, he was already beginning work on the Italian
Journey, which then continued the smooth progression of autobiographical
works: the first three parts of Poetry and Truth in 1811, 1812, and 1814 and
Italian Journey in 1816 and 1817. Cotta waited to distribute the third
volume of Poetry and Truth until the 1814 campaign in France was over;
despite the political turbulence of the time, however, they met with great
interest from the reading public. Perhaps it was precisely because people
liked to be reminded of old times, or of the days of their own youth. In any
event, that was the effect Goethe surmised they had on his readers. What
more can one hope for his book than a reader moved to read his own life in
its pages? Reinhard depicted some of his own youthful experiences after
reading Poetry and Truth, and Goethe wrote him, From the way I handle the
material, it had to have the inevitable effect that anyone who reads the
little book is powerfully led back to himself and his younger years.
The deaths of Schiller, Anna Amalia, and his mother had been the impetus
for retrospection and, in the end, for the autobiography. As Goethe worked on
the third part, another farewell marked the end of an epoch: the death of
Wieland. They had lived in close proximity for thirty-seven years, more than
half a lifetime. As a cocky youth, Goethe had written a satire poking fun at
Wieland—fifteen years older and already famous—as a decrepit fellow who
presumes to play the schoolmaster to tough guys from antiquity. Even before
the move to Weimar, he had made an abject apology, and once there, he
conquered Wieland’s heart in a trice. Wieland had called him a “splendid
man” and confessed that he was “quite in love” with him. While the ties to
Wieland were never as strong as those to Herder, there weren’t the same
dramatic ups and downs of closeness and alienation as with Herder. Wieland
and Goethe were equally fond of each other. Wieland admired Goethe
without envy, and Goethe respected Wieland and trusted him absolutely. He
saw in him a man of great liberality, liveliness, and sound principles. In a
long eulogy first read at an assembly of their Masonic lodge, Goethe
memorialized the deceased with the famous words This brilliant man liked
to make a game of his opinions, but—I can call on all my contemporaries
to bear me out—never of his convictions. And so he acquired many friends
—and kept them. This remark was directed against the prejudice that
Wieland was a frivolous, unreliable, and merely witty man of the world.
Wieland loved his freedom above all else and made creative use of it.
Goethe especially admired the fact that he didn’t envy others their success
but helped and promoted them, yet also had the courage to criticize even his
friends when necessary. Goethe had had personal experience of that, for
Wieland—who had the better head for politics—was unimpressed by
Goethe’s mediocre plays about the revolution and let him know it. In his
eulogy, Goethe explicitly praises Wieland’s strong grasp of politics. Full of
admiration, he had observed with what attention he followed the rapid
events of the day, and with what wisdom he always conducted himself as a
thoroughgoing German and a thinking, participating man.
He also singled out other qualities for praise, such as Wieland’s
meritorious promotion of elegant, literary German; the beauty, grace, and
charm of his verse epics; and his free and undoctrinaire philosophy. But what
Goethe esteemed above all else was Wieland’s generosity and the rare trait
of being able to take genuine delight in others’ accomplishments. It was
something only a wise person could do, someone who regards his fellow
man with cheerful benevolence. Goethe’s eulogy is appropriately elegiac, but
there’s also something sunny about it—perhaps a bit of the earnest
cheerfulness he praised in him.
This was another funeral Goethe did not attend, nor did he take final leave
of his friend at the bier. He told Falk on the day of the funeral, Why should I
allow my lovely impressions of the faces of my friends to be destroyed by a
mask? . . . Death is a very mediocre portraitist. As far as I’m concerned, I
want to retain more expressive images of all my friends . . . in my memory. .
. . I have no love for the parades of death. In this long conversation with
Falk, Goethe said things about eternal life not heard from him before: Under
no circumstances can there ever be talk about the extinction of such great
faculties of the soul in nature; nature does not treat its capital so
profligately. Wieland’s soul is by nature a treasure, a true jewel.
In a letter to Zelter, Goethe would later again allude to the idea of a great
soul’s indestructibility: Let us continue to act until—one before or after the
other—we are called by the world spirit to return to the ether! May the
eternally living one then not refuse to give us new activities analogous to
the ones in which we have already proven ourselves here below!
Goethe was convinced that the inner goal-directedness of active natures—
their entelechy—was not used up at death. If the world was as it ought to be,
then an unspent entelechy should be given a further field of action. Of course,
not everyone could hope for such a thing. You needed to have something
within you worth continuing.

* Latin: No one against God if not God himself.

 CHAPTER 30

Political Events Cast Long Shadows.

Napoleon’s Downfall and a Dubious Liberation.
Guarding the sacred fire. Paying Tribute to the Spirit
of the Times. Hafez and patriarchal air. West-Eastern Divan.
Goethe and Marianne. The Lyric Interplay of Love.

....

W HILE GOETHE WAS AT WORK ON THE SECOND AND THIRD

parts of Poetry and Truth, he was determined to remain stoic in the face of
the political events coming thick and fast. I’m not at all affected by the
burning of Moscow, he wrote to Reinhard. World history will now have a
tale to tell in the future. He was by no means so calm in reality, however. In
a draft of the same letter he wrote, Our imagination is incapable of
conceiving and our mind of understanding it [i.e., world history].
Goethe was inwardly shaken. After all, he had taken Napoleon’s side and
could not be indifferent to, much less triumph in, his catastrophic defeat. On
the dark and foggy night of December 15, 1812, as Napoleon passed
unrecognized through Weimar on his flight from Russia, he had the French
envoy in Erfurt convey his greetings to Goethe. The duke joked that Goethe
was now being ogled by both heaven and hell, since Empress Maria
Ludovika of Austria had also sent him greetings for the entertainment he had
provided her in Carlsbad.
After the disastrous Russian winter campaign, 1813 proved a year of
decision. Napoleon cobbled together a new army. Prussia switched sides and
declared war on France in the spring. For the time being, the duke was still
maneuvering. French troops were again quartered in Weimar, then Russians
and Cossacks, and then the French again. From east and west, misfortune
washed over Weimar. The West-Eastern Divan became Goethe’s refuge.
The war fought on German territory in 1814 had a new character. From
Berlin, the call had gone out to the inhabitants of Prussia and the states of the
Confederation of the Rhine to form irregular militia units. The spirit of
nationalism that had begun with the French Revolution was now spreading
into the countries rising against Napoleon. Patriotic mobilization and military
buildups driven by nationalistic fervor were turning what were once wars
between princes into wars involving entire peoples. Anticipated
intellectually by the Sturm und Drang, nationalistic consciousness took on a
political dimension. Nation, fatherland, and freedom were now values for
which men were prepared to die. The official announcement of the Prussian
defeat in 1806 called for calm as the first duty of a citizen. In contrast, an
1813 appeal was explicitly made to the new nationalistic feeling of being a
Prussian and a German. It was the voice of a new politics that demanded
active engagement and sought to woo people with the future possibility of a
constitution. Not only nationalistic emotions were being mobilized. There
was also at least a rhetorical gesture toward the demands for democracy that
the Prussian reforms had awakened but not satisfied. In the months of the war
of liberation against Napoleon, propaganda was used systematically for the
first time to mobilize the populace. The great Fichte, who first took up the
cause in his Addresses to the German Nation, went to the Prussian
headquarters and volunteered to be a military chaplain. If his offer had been
accepted, he would have become the very first political commissar, although
he did plan to keep open the option of retreating back into the world of pure
thought. Neither occurred, however, for in January 1814 the doughty
professor died of the typhoid fever introduced into Berlin by the wounded in
the war of liberation. These were weeks and months of more than mere
patriotic fervor; people acted by forming volunteer militia units. The
Freikorps of Major von Lützow, which would later gain great renown, was
one such, composed of volunteers from the German states and operating as a
band of partisans. Although the unit had little military significance, the black,
red, and gold of its uniforms became a powerful symbol that lives on today
on the flag of the Federal Republic of Germany.
In this eventful year, made especially difficult by the billeting of troops,
Goethe left—practically fled—Weimar in mid-April. As in the preceding
year, he traveled to the spa in Teplitz, not far from Marienbad. For reasons of
security, he had disguised himself but was still recognized by militiamen,
whose weapons he was compelled to consecrate with a verse. In Dresden, he
caught sight of Napoleon in the distance, inspecting the fortifications. He was
a guest in the house of the Körner family and there met their son Theodor, a
member of Lützow’s militia and already famous for his soldiers’ songs. The
discussion revolved around the present uprising and the strong emotions
elicited by the fight against Napoleon. Goethe remained silent at first and
then finally growled, Rattle your chains as you will, the man is too great
for you. You’ll never break them. They could hear the sounds of battle in the
normally quiet Teplitz, and at night saw the fiery signs in the sky . . . where
some unhappy village is burning. Since one is surrounded by refugees, the
wounded, the fearful, one tries one’s best to get away.
Goethe returned to Weimar in August, not wanting to leave Christiane
alone any longer. Something extraordinary happened in his study on October
16, 1813, the first day of the Battle of Leipzig, which ended with the defeat
of Napoleon. A plaster bas relief of the emperor that hung beside Goethe’s
desk mysteriously fell to the floor but suffered only minor damage. It was
rehung and continued to occupy its place of honor even after Napoleon had
been driven out.
Goethe didn’t trust the communal feelings of patriotism. When the
victorious coalition troops invaded France toward the end of the year,
Goethe wrote to Knebel that he’d never seen the Germans more closely
united than in their hatred of Napoleon. I just want to see what they’ll do
once he’s been driven across the Rhine. When the mass of people surrender
themselves to political and military passions, one must not neglect to call on
the friends of science and art who remain at home, that they may preserve
—if only under the ashes—the sacred fire that the next generation will
sorely need.
Goethe wanted his son, August, who had volunteered, to stay at home. He
persuaded the duke to see to it that August received an assignment as a
secretary at army headquarters in Frankfurt, far from the fighting. It was not
what August wanted; he feared it would make him look like a shirker and a
coward, which is exactly what happened. When he returned to Weimar from
Frankfurt, he was mocked and insulted. He almost got into a duel, and again
it was his father who intervened to stop it. All this deeply affected the son,
who never completely got over it, feeling he had been prevented from
proving his manliness. He would remain the son of an overpowering father
whose shadow he could never escape. Goethe, however, was relieved that
August had returned unharmed, and began to employ him as his secretary.
Even if he wasn’t happy about Napoleon’s defeat and deplored the entire
patriotic movement, Goethe was enough of a businessman to suggest, a few
days after the Battle of Leipzig, that his publisher bring out a pocket-size
edition of Herrmann and Dorothea. He suspected that Herrmann’s final
words would be very appropriate for this moment:

. . . and if our enemies threaten,

Now or tomorrow, then arm me, give me my weapons,
...
Ah, thus armed I will face our foes with calm assurance,
And, if every man thinks as I do then might will rise to
Counter their might and we all shall enjoy the fruits of peace.

His speculation proved correct. The verse epic Herrmann and Dorothea,
already a great success with readers when first published, found many buyers
in this new edition and a positive response from the public. Goethe was so
pleased about it that in conversation he suggested he might try his hand at a
continuation. But that plan came to nothing. In the spring of 1814, the theater
director Iffland wrote from Berlin to inquire whether Goethe would be
willing to write a festival play for the celebration of victory over Napoleon.
That same summer, the tsar, the Austrian emperor, and the Prussian king were
to meet in Berlin, so speed was of the essence.
Goethe demurred at first, but did not fail to mention that he had experience
composing occasional poems—he had for instance written something
suitable for the spa administration in Halle—an inappropriate remark, as the
Berliners wanted something lofty and not a comedy for a spa. A few days
later, Goethe decided he was interested in the offer after all. He said it was
much too flattering to turn down. He already had an idea he didn’t want to
reveal as yet. Iffland was overjoyed to have landed Goethe: “There is no
celebratory act more lofty than to have the first man of the nation write about
this great event.” For Iffland, it was the matchup of his dreams: the greatest
German poet writing for the greatest festival of the Germans.
Iffland was surely hoping for a play more closely linked to current events
than the one he received from Goethe a few weeks later, Epimenides Awakes.
It is a strange sort of play, quite unsuited to the occasion; instead of
celebrating the victory, the author brings his own problems to the fore. We
get private rather than official matters, and in order to present them
objectively, Goethe tricked them out in ancient costumes and presented them
allegorically. When the play was finally performed—after a year’s delay—
Berlin wits turned the title Epimenides into Ja-wie-meent-er-das (“What the
deuce does he mean?”). Goethe uses an ancient fable about a favorite of the
gods who is not punished although he sleeps through an entire epoch, and is
instead rewarded with an increase in his prophetic power. In the next-to-last
scene, Epimenides is contrite and full of self-reproach: I’m ashamed of my
hours of leisure. / To share your afflictions had brought more gain. / You
are greater by any measure, / For you have suffered greater pain. The
priest responds, Do not condemn the high gods’ will / Since it has bought
you many a year. / They have kept you sleeping, still, / So that your
feelings can be pure.
The performance of the play was delayed: first, the meeting between the
emperor, the tsar, and the king of Prussia did not take place, and then Iffland
died. It was finally performed in March 1815 on the anniversary of the
allies’ entry into Paris. Inaccessible, chock full of sententious statements, and
with little or no action, the play was not a hit with the public. Goethe was
nevertheless relieved to have done his duty and fulfilled an obligation, and
could turn to things that mattered to him.
In the spring of 1814, the allies marched into Paris and banished Napoleon
to the island of Elba. Goethe, who had admired Napoleon as the guarantor of
order but found him sinister as the embodiment of a warlike spirit, placed his
hopes for peaceful order in the new regime. Peace was what was most
important to him, and he felt an initial relief. In retrospect, he realized how
much outward events—the wars and billetings, the desperate public mood—
had weighed upon and distracted him. Relations with the duke also
improved, their difference over Napoleon now moot. Now he could write,
Here in Weimar we live peacefully enough and in tolerable contentment.
He could feel a spring ether, he writes to Zelter, and perhaps he would again
launch his sequel to Die Zauberflöte, which he had left unfinished. He got
out his notes from the Italian journey and started editing his diaries and
letters for publication. He felt invigorated recalling those beautiful months.
Work on Epimenides had torn him away from this work for a while, but in the
play, too, the theme is the awakening of the spirits of life. And all of us are
born anew, / Our greatest yearning has been stilled, Epimenides declares.
 It was not until a few weeks later, however, that he felt truly born anew. In
mid-May 1814, Cotta sent him a copy of the Divan by the fourteenth-century
Persian poet Hafez in a new translation by Joseph von Hammers. He already
knew of Hafez and had read translations of individual poems. Herder had
published some of them as early as 1773, and Goethe had familiarized
himself with Arabic and Persian culture for the Mahomet drama he planned
to write. For him, that world—along with the Old Testament—constituted a
single cultural sphere. He read the Old Testament as poetry just as he did the
Koran, which he had studied in the early 1770s. He saw no great difference
between the Song of Solomon and Hafez’s love songs, just as he saw no great
divide between the stories of Abraham and Jacob and the Thousand and One
Nights. Patriarchal air wafted through them all. As he refreshed his
memories of all this while working on Poetry and Truth, he wrote to Johann
Friedrich Rochlitz about the Asian beginnings of the world, as he called it:
The culture I have gained from there winds itself through my whole life and
still sometimes emerges in unexpected guises.
That is exactly what happened two and a half years later. In a creative
euphoria elicited by his reading of Hafez, by the summer of 1814 he had
already written over thirty poems, at first collected under the provisional
title “Poems to Hafez.” By the end of that year, as more and more poems
were added, Goethe wanted to call the collection the German Divan. By the
time he put together a catalog in the early summer of 1815, there were
already more than a hundred poems, which he divided into individual
“books” at the end of that year. They were the compartments into which to put
additional poems, whose number continued to grow right up to publication in
the summer of 1819. In the end, the West-Eastern Divan turned out to be
Goethe’s longest lyric cycle. He had prepublished some of the poems in
Cotta’s Taschenbuch für Damen auf das Jahr 1817 (Pocket Book for Ladies
for the Year 1817) to test the reaction to them. It was a disappointment, and
therefore he proceeded to write the “Notes and Essays toward a Better
Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan,” a work that not only contains
explanations of Persian and Arabian culture but also develops some
fundamental thoughts on religion and its relationship to poetry.
Looking back on his reading of Hafez from the early summer of 1814,
Goethe writes in the Annals that he had to react productively to his strong
impressions as he otherwise would not have been able to survive such a
powerful phenomenon. He entrusted himself and his creative urge to this
newly awakened lyric mood, because he wished to escape the real world—
which was a threat to itself both outwardly and inwardly—into an ideal
one. The cycle’s introductory poem takes up the motif of a world under
threat:

North and West and South are shattered,

Thrones are toppled, empires battered.
Flee to the pure Orient, there
To breathe the patriarchal air.
Love and drink and song in truth
At Kizr’s spring restore your youth.

In Arabian tradition, Kizr appears as a youth who has discovered the water
of life and sits at its source in a green robe with green fuzz on his lip,
wearing the color of spring growth and fertility.
As he worked on the West-Eastern Divan in the summer months of 1814
and 1815, Goethe experienced what he later described to Eckermann as a
recapitulation of puberty. He depicts his creative exhilaration: When . . . the
poems of the Divan had me in their power, I was often productive enough
to write two or three in one day; and it didn’t matter whether I was out in
the fields, in a wagon, or at an inn.
What attracted and inspired Goethe about Hafez was a light, playful tone,
palpable even in translation, in which the everyday and the lofty, the
sensuous and the spiritual, thought and imagination, wisdom and wit, irony
and devotion alternate and combine. Goethe writes in the “Notes and Essays”
that the Near Eastern poet liked to lift us from earth to heaven and then
plunge us back down, or vice versa. Love, song, drink, and prayer are his
inexhaustibly recurring themes.
Goethe particularly emphasizes certain aspects of Hafez in the “Notes and
Essays.” A teacher and serious scholar concerned with theological and
grammatical questions, Hafez obviously wrote poems in a way that was
different from the way he thought in other areas. Playful, ironic, erotic, and
sometimes frivolous, the poems are an example that the poet must not
exactly think and experience everything he expresses. We should keep that
in mind and not be tempted to separate the love story that began in the fall of
1814 at the Gerbermühle in Frankfurt and continued the following summer
from the literary masquerade in which it found expression. Like Hafez,
Goethe did not experience everything he said in the poems. Both Marianne
Willemer and Goethe were fully aware of that. He writes to Zelter that he
had discovered a kind of poetry that allowed him to be as foolish in
romantic matters as ever a young person was.
On July 25, 1814, Goethe left for Wiesbaden. Rather than going to the
Bohemian spas, he wanted this time to take the waters farther west,
inadvisable in the preceding year with the war still in progress. Zelter had
also decided to travel to the spa in Wiesbaden, and the two friends could be
together. Goethe intended to visit Frankfurt for a long-planned meeting with
his young friend Sulpiz Boisserée, who wanted to show him some things
from his collection of older German art, which Goethe had agreed to write
about. So several factors motivated the trip. He set off in especially high
spirits, and that very morning in his coach he wrote a poem of anticipation
and premonition. It would find its place in the first book of the West-Eastern
Divan under the title “Phenomenon”:

Where, with a wall of rain

Phoebus is mated,
There is an arc of light,
Colorfully shaded.

Second arc: from the mist

I see it beckon.
Though it be only white
It comes from heaven.

So you must not despair

Old man, be jolly.
For, although white your hair,
Love still is calling.

On August 4, Goethe received a visit in Wiesbaden from Johann Jakob von

Willemer and his foster daughter Marianne Jung. Willemer was a Frankfurt
banker, a patron of the arts and theater, and himself the author of plays and
works on moral philosophy. He was a large, imposing man, considered
handsome by women. As a young girl, Marianne Jung had been an
extraordinarily talented dancer. Droves of men fell in love with her,
including the poet Clemens Brentano, who wanted to marry her. In 1800, the
newly widowed Willemer had taken the lovely, black-haired fifteen-year-old
into his house, perhaps, as it was rumored in Frankfurt, having purchased her
from her mother, an unsuccessful actress. Marianne was raised alongside
Willemer’s own daughters. When she and Willemer visited Goethe in
Wiesbaden, she was twenty-nine.
The two men had known each other since their youth. Whenever Goethe
came to Frankfurt, he paid Willemer a visit, and the banker occasionally lent
him money. He admired Goethe, having once told Goethe’s mother that he
had never read anything as moving as Wilhelm Meister. Later, when he took
Marianne into his house, Goethe’s mother remarked sardonically that
Willemer was apparently emulating the theater addict Wilhelm. The
relationship between Willemer and his foster daughter is never mentioned in
the letters he exchanged with Goethe over the years, although Willemer was
otherwise quite candid. He wrote that although he had achieved success as a
businessman, “the wings of my spirit are clipped.” In the same letter, from
1808, is a remark that may refer to Marianne: “the future has been
squandered on a foolish hope—about which 8 years of experience have
taught me that it can never come to pass.” Exactly eight years earlier,
Marianne had come to live in his house.
Goethe visited Willemer in mid-September at the Gerbermühle, an old
mill on the Main River, upstream and outside the walls of Frankfurt. He
visited the Gerbermühle again in October, reporting to Christiane, In the
evening to Frau Privy Councilor Willemer, for our worthy friend is now in
forma* married. She is as friendly and dear as before. In a hurried
ceremony, the twice-widowed man had married Marianne on September 29,
1814. Did the visits with Goethe encourage him to hazard this step? Was he
inspired by Goethe’s unconventionality in such things? Did the three perhaps
discuss the matter together, and did Goethe advise in favor of it, causing
Marianne to agree? We know only that the marriage took place in haste and
shortly after Goethe’s mid-September visit to the Gerbermühle.
On October 12, Goethe was alone with Marianne, the brand-new Frau von
Willemer, for the first time since the wedding. The day meant so much to
Marianne that she used it to date a poem written later for Goethe’s album.
The poem plays with one of Goethe’s favorite turns of phrase, the length and
breadth:

Among the many I’m but one,

And you call me your Little One.
I’d be happy, you must know,
Would you always call me so.
I’d love you with all my strength’s
Length and breadth and breadth and length.

You’re a great man; people know you.

No pantheon would dare forgo you.
Your absence makes us feel bereft.
We wish that you had never left.
For now our sorrow knows no depth,
No breadth or length, no length or breadth.

Marianne was known for her talent at improvising songs on the guitar.
Goethe was enchanted, often referring in later letters to Marianne’s playing
and singing, and to unforgettable days spent at the Gerbermühle. On October
18, 1814, the anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, bonfires blazed on hilltops
far and near and wheels were set on fire and sent rolling down the hills.
Marianne gave him a map the next day on which the locations of the fires
were dotted in red. He wrote to Willemer, When I look at the red dots above
the mountains on the panorama, I fondly recall the dear hand that made
them.
On October 20, Goethe set off to return to Weimar. Once there, he wrote to
Christian Heinrich Schlosser, a younger relative of his old friend and former
brother-in-law, that a new light of happy activity had been lit. He had felt so
much at home in Frankfurt, so inspired, that he would like to live half there
and half in Weimar in order to become rejuvenated and reborn to my earlier
energy.
The next year he set off much earlier, on May 24. He stayed a few weeks
in Wiesbaden and from there took a trip down the Rhine to Cologne in the
company of Baron Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom Stein. Then he paid a lengthy
visit to Sulpiz Boisserée in Heidelberg. The high point of the summer,
however—and perhaps even one of the high points of his life—were the
weeks he spent at the Willemers’ city residence in Frankfurt and at the
Gerbermühle. When he returned to Weimar almost five months later, people
were astonished by his lively manner and rejuvenated appearance. “Goethe
is . . . happy and hearty,” writes Meyer, “as I have not seen him for ten years
and more.”
In the preceding months, he had written numerous poems for the West-
Eastern Divan, including the ones later collected in the “Book of Suleika.”
They are the results of an actual lyric dialogue, for Marianne had answered
his poems with verses of her own that Goethe later included in the cycle
without identifying them as hers.
As if he had foreseen what was to come, on the day of his departure for
Wiesbaden and Frankfurt on May 24, 1815, he had written the lines in which
the partners in the amorous dialogue are named. It was all still a lyrical game
—and remained so—but was also something more. However, so-called
reality is impossible to separate from the poetry. Both Marianne and Goethe
must have enjoyed precisely this sense of hovering between the two. It gave
them the exhilarating freedom to touch each other in love without needing to
possess each other. The amorous dialogue of the “Book of Suleika” is lived
literature—no more, but no less either:

Yet that you whom I’ve so longed for

Send me youthful, burning glances,
Love me, whom your love entrances,
May my songs your praises strike up,
You’re forever my Suleika.

Since Suleika has a name, then

I shall have to have one too.
If you’d sing your lover’s fame, then
Hatem name him who loves you.

Once in this charming, playful lyric dialogue, the name Hatem is inserted
where the proper rhyme word would be “Goethe”: Du beschämst wie
Morgenröte / Jener Gipfel ernste Wand, / Und noch einmal fühlet Hatem /
Frühlingshauch und Sommerbrand (literally: You put to shame, like the red
of dawn [Morgenröte], / The face of that mountain peak, / and once more
Hatem [but to rhyme, it should be Goethe] feels / the breath of spring and the
heat of summer).
The following exchange was also written that autumn at the Gerbermühle:

Opportunity makes thieves they say.

I think it is the thief itself,
The thief who stole my love away
And left my heart an empty safe.

And turned it over, all to you,

The love I’d saved up through the years.
A pauper now, I beg and sue
To have my life restored by yours.

Suleika responds,

What bliss it is to have your love!

I’ll not chide opportunity;
It was what broke into your trove,
And what a happy burglary!

Why is there any need to thieve

When we can give of our own free will?
But it is flattering to think
That it was me who robbed the till!

Each separate link in the cycle, Goethe wrote to Zelter in May 1815, is
steeped in the sense of the whole . . . and must be introduced by a
preceding poem in order to have an effect on the imagination or the
emotions. For instance, Suleika is made to proclaim the following maxim:
Greatest joy of the sons of earth / Is always personality. This piece of
wisdom, habitually quoted with approval ever since, appears in a different
light when Hatem’s response is taken into account:

That may be! Or so I’ve heard.

 By another truth I’m guided.
All the happiness on earth,
Is in Suleika now united.

When she spoils me with her charms,

Then I am a worthwhile person.
If she spurned my open arms,
I would lose myself for certain.

The pleasure of having a personality is often not sufficient. For when one is
in love, personality alone is not enough, because the lover is missing. It is
she (or he) who gives my personality its value. If the lover rejects me, I am
lost to myself. For lovers, personality is something best enjoyed together and
not separately.
At several points in the cycle, there is explicit reflection on the connection
between poetry and life. Suleika:

Could I stand to lose you? Never!

Love gives love strength in extra portion.
May you grace my youth forever
With your overwhelming passion.
Ah, how my desire is flattered
When they praise my poet’s merit.
Life is love. That’s all that matters.
And intellect’s the life of life.

The feeling of being in love is one thing, another is its reflection in the
mirror of poetry. Poetry makes something more of it: how my desire is
flattered. There is no question here of a diminution or evaporation of reality
in the intellectual sphere of poetry, no question of substitution or feeble
sublimation. Rather, it represents an enhancement of life, in this poem
expressed by the lovely formula intellect’s the life of life. That can both
signify intellect as the creative essence of life and refer to the prodigious
doubling expressed in the famous poem about a ginkgo leaf:

By the East this tree’s entrusted

 To my garden, and its leaf
Has an edifying secret
They can savor who can read it.

Is it a single living essence

That divides within itself?
Is it two that choose each other,
Whom we recognize as One?

I can answer such a question.

I’ve discovered its true sense.
Can’t you feel it in my poems?
I am double, I am One.

This alludes to the Platonic myth of love as being two halves that originally
belonged together and now must seek each other. Not just the unity of two
people is meant, however, but also the unity that is doubled within itself: the
part of me that writes poetry is different from the part of me that lives in
external reality. Thus the rhetorical question Can’t you feel it in my poems? /
I am double, I am One points to the fact that this love oscillates between
literature and life, suspended there during a few intense weeks in the late
summer and fall of 1815.
Marianne was brimming with ideas for Goethe’s birthday celebration at
the Gerbermühle. Boisserée described the festivities in his diary. Early in the
morning, musicians awakened Goethe with a serenade from a boat on the
Main River. Marianne had decorated the garden house in Divan style with
oranges, dates, figs, and grapes. Bundled reeds between the windows
represented palm trees, below which were wreaths of flowers in the order of
the color wheel. The ladies wore turbans of the finest Indian muslin. They all
dined at a long table. Willemer poured a 1749 Rhine wine. Marianne sang
Goethe songs she had set to music, accompanying herself on the guitar. There
were speeches both formal and playful. Marianne set a turban on Goethe’s
head, echoing the verse Come Darling, come, and wrap my head in muslin!
/ The turban’s only lovely from your hand. The company remained together
until evening, when the celebration culminated with Goethe reading his
“Oriental poems.”
 Goethe and Marianne also were in the habit of exchanging slips of paper
and letters with a series of numbers referring to pages and lines in
Hammers’s translation of Hafez. The result was an intimate conversation
made up of a collage of quotes. One of Goethe’s letters reads, decoded,

My wounded heart has a right to salt

From your soft lips.
But keep your rights. I’m going off,
May God preserve you.
For me you are an essence pure
From higher spheres.

One of Marianne’s:

I long to open my heart to you,

And I long to hear from yours.
...
I shall make the only business of my whole life
To care for his love.

One Divan poem explicitly refers to this game with encrypted messages:

My sweetest lady’s cipher

I hold here in my hand.
It makes me glad already
Since she thought up the game.
Within the sweetest precinct
Is love’s full measure found:
True thoughts and intentions
Between myself and her.

Willemer, who otherwise kept jealous watch over his beautiful and much
younger wife, was so proud of Goethe’s company that he never evinced the
slightest jealously—if he felt any at all. When Goethe later held back and left
numerous letters unanswered, it made Marianne ill, and Willemer earnestly
implored Goethe to visit them. He wrote that he had set aside an apartment in
their town residence for “whenever Goethe comes! So the eternal feelings
need not fall silent and love can give all it is capable of.”
After weeks in Frankfurt and at the Gerbermühle, Goethe again traveled to
Heidelberg to spend a few weeks with Boisserée and his art collection, and
Marianne and Willemer visited him there again from September 23 to 26. It
would be their last time together. On that occasion she gave him her two most
beautiful poems; their subject is the east and the west winds. She had written
the first on the ride down to Heidelberg: What’s the meaning of this
movement? / Does the east wind bring good news? / Fresh breeze rising
from its pinions / Cools and salves my heart’s deep wounds. And the final
strophe: Ah! the truest, heartfelt message, / Whisper of love and life
refreshed, / Come from his mouth, his alone, are / Given only by his breath.
Her farewell gift on September 26 was the poem on the west wind: West
wind, ah, how much I envy / You your pinions, moist with rain: / With them
you can bring him news of / How our parting causes pain. And its final
strophe: Tell him this, but say it gently, / Tell him that his love’s my life, /
And I can rejoice in both when / He again is by my side. Goethe included
both poems in the published cycle, without attribution.
On October 17, 1815, Goethe returned to Weimar. Sulpiz Boisserée, who
had been his almost constant companion during the previous weeks, traveled
along part of the way. Boisserée noted in his diary, “He is very affected,
didn’t sleep well. Has to flee.” That has often been interpreted to mean that
Goethe fled from Marianne as he once had from Friederike. But there was
probably a different reason for his sudden departure. The duke had paid
Goethe a visit in Heidelberg at the end of September, and Goethe had gone
with him to Mannheim, where the duke’s mistress Karoline Jagemann—now
Frau von Heygendorf—was staying. Then Goethe, accompanied by
Boisserée, had undertaken a visit to nearby Karlsruhe, where he had paid his
respects at court at the duke’s behest, subsequently returning to Heidelberg.
There he found letters that must have unsettled him. In his diary for October
6, he wrote only, Letters. Decided to leave. Boisserée’s diary gives a bit
more insight: “Suddenly, Goethe wants to leave; told me, I’m writing my will
. . . Jagemann rushed him out of Mannheim—and the other ladies—now he’s
supposed to come over for tableaux and poses. He fears the duke,” and then
the already quoted “Has to flee.” Thus he was avoiding another encounter
with the duke and Karoline Jagemann, although he gave the duke no reason
for his precipitous departure, writing only that his daemon had grabbed him
by the hair and led him home via Würzburg. He asks the duke not to be
angry. In the letters he opened in Heidelberg there must have been some
unpleasant reminder of the argument with Jagemann concerning the Weimar
theater; simmering since 1808, it would lead to Goethe’s dismissal as
director two years later.
Even now, despite the trouble on the day before his departure, he was still
preoccupied with his West-Eastern Divan, and he sketches out its division
into thirteen “books.” The farewell letter he wrote on that day was addressed
to Jakob von Willemer, but he especially has Marianne in mind when he
writes of his yearning and then continues, But that is too much for the state
I’m in, in which there is an undeniable rupture that I’m not going to
exacerbate, but would rather close. With the comment that he would rather
close the rupture, he explains his decision not to return via Frankfurt, which
had likely been agreed upon, leaving the Willemers disappointed in their
hope to see him again.
Boisserée accompanied Goethe as far as Würzburg and wrote in his diary
on their first day of travel, “He is visibly calmed by the assurance that the
duke and Jagemann can no longer reach him.” He may have been calm in that
regard, but in another his mood was melancholy. During the trip he wrote
down Suleika’s anxious question to Hatem: Hardly do I once more have you,
/ Kiss you, comfort you with song, / When you suddenly fall silent— / What
constricts you? What is wrong? And Hatem answers, Ah, Suleika, shall I
tell you? / I lament instead of praising.
From Weimar, Goethe sent three more Divan poems to Frankfurt—rather
painful and gloomy ones. The first is entitled “Relief” and evokes the Greek
god of the sun. Helios . . .

In splendor rides across the heavens

As master of the firmament,
And gazing forward, gazing downward,

He spies the lovely goddess weeping,

The daughter of the cloudy skies.
For her alone he seems to shine,
And blind to other, sunnier realms,
 He plunges into suffering, showers.

The poem “Resonance” follows “Relief” in the final order of the cycle: It
sounds so splendid when the poet / Compares himself to sun or kaiser; /
But he conceals his sadder visions / When skulking through his gloomy
nights. And finally, in the reflective poem “Primer,” a certain distancing is
already evident. It begins,

Strangest book of all the books

Is the book of love;
With attention I have read it:
A few joyful pages,
Chapters full of suffering,
One whole section is for parting.
Meeting again? a little chapter,
Fragmentary.

It never came to that little chapter. Goethe had planned another trip to the
southwest in 1816, but the destination was Baden-Baden, with a stop in
Heidelberg. For the time being, there was no talk of revisiting the
Gerbermühle. But before the plan could be carried out, something happened
that had been anticipated for months. On June 6, 1816, after days of agonizing
cramps, Christiane died.
For the past few years the couple had lived next to more than with each
other, and yet Goethe had kept Christiane informed of many—if not all—of
his activities, as letters to her show, with their extensive descriptions of
where he is and whom he is visiting. He had written about his journeys of the
preceding year, but not of his feelings for Marianne. The tone of the couple’s
letters to each other is always loving. Christiane had taken care of him, run
his household, and kept him company when he asked her to. Only after her
death did he fully realize how indispensable she was. She had been a
devoted caregiver and domestic manager but had also known how to live her
life in her own circle of friends. She had a gregarious nature, was a good
cook, enjoyed good food, and was very fond of wine. Theater was her
passion, and Goethe respected her judgment about plays. He once joked that
he put himself through the torture of directing the Weimar theater only for her
sake. He explicitly urged her to enjoy herself.
 Her final illness had begun in the early summer of 1815 with fainting
spells, stomach cramps, and coughing up blood. Its last stages occurred the
following spring. As with Schiller’s death, Goethe took to his bed when
Christiane died. My wife in extreme danger, he wrote in his diary on June 5,
the day before her death. My son a helper, adviser, the only thing I can cling
to in this chaos. On the next day: Slept well and much better. My wife’s end
near: final, terrible struggle of her being. She passed away toward midday.
Emptiness and deathly silence within and around me.
Yet the very next evening he asked Riemer to come and help him with
some experiments with color: activity was the only antidote to pain and
despair. A few weeks later, on July 20, 1816, he set out on a trip west,
accompanied by Meyer, now planning to visit the Willemers on the way to
Baden-Baden. The journey ended two hours in, however, when their coach
broke an axel and tipped over. Goethe was unhurt but Meyer’s forehead was
injured. Goethe took the accident as a bad omen and returned home. It would
prove a turning point, as he forwent lengthy trips from then on. The only
exceptions were a few years of regular visits to spas in Bohemia.
He and the Willemers exchanged a few more letters, in which he yearned
for the Gerbermühle and Marianne yearned for her Hatem. In one, she quoted
a couplet she had found in his collected works: Have you not yourself been
thoroughly ruined? / Nothing has come of all your hopes! Invitations to the
Gerbermühle grew more urgent, almost pleading, but his letters contain only
occasional, fleeting Near Eastern reminiscences. For now, that source
seemed to have run dry. In October 1817, there was a letter from Goethe with
a melancholy recollection of his first visit to the Gerbermühle in the fall of
1814. Then he fell silent for more than a year. “Dearest friend, what hostile
genius (whether a daemon of indifference or disinclination) is the reason no
friendly word of yours reaches us anymore?” Willemer wrote in some
desperation. In the meantime, Marianne had composed melodies to twenty of
Goethe’s poems. She sang them to the guitar at family gatherings. She was so
upset by Goethe’s silence that her health began to suffer and she temporarily
lost her voice. Willemer wrote to Goethe somewhat reproachfully. At last, in
November 1818, Goethe responded. The recollection of the emergence of the
West-Eastern Divan from their lyrical game of love had powerfully returned,
for the work was finally being prepared for publication in the summer of
1818 and, while correcting the proofs, he once again fell deeply under its
spell. That gave rise to even more Divan poems, and when he finally
responded to the Willemers, he was able to include the first clean sheets.
“How much joy for me,” wrote Marianne. “Ennobled by your spirit, each
event however small, each spontaneously uttered word, enters upon a more
elevated existence. I am amazed at the familiar and am intensely happy that it
belonged to me, nay, that I may in a certain sense dedicate it to myself.”
Goethe would never see Marianne again, but from then on, they wrote each
other more often. Her letters are no longer effusive but open, clear, and more
elegiac in tone. She writes, “I was a riddle to myself; both humble and proud,
embarrassed and entranced—everything seemed like a blissful dream in
which you recognize an image of yourself that is more beautiful, indeed,
more noble.” Goethe sometimes answered in the manner of a lover, and with
one poem after another. He included a manuscript of the first poem in this
new series in a freshly printed copy of the West-Eastern Divan:

Dearest, ah! between stiff covers

Have been forced our freeborn songs.
In the purest fields of heaven
They flew back and forth between us.
Time’s the ruin of all things,
Only they remain unscathed!
Every line shall be immortal,
Live forever, like our love.

For quite some time, they sent each other Near Eastern talismans and
good-luck tokens: silk scarves, essence of roses, ginkgo leaves. She sends
him a pair of slippers embroidered with the name Suleika and suspenders
with a pattern of spring flowers, he thanks her with a poem, and so on. Only
in later years does the tone of their correspondence become more sedate and
serious. They begin to write about what is going on around them, rather than
what is within. Going through his correspondence the year before he died,
Goethe wrote to her, and so certain special pages shine out at me,
reminding me of the most beautiful days of my life. He bundled them
together and sent them to her with the request that they not be opened until
after his death. Included in the package was this poem:

To the eyes of one I cherish,

To the fingers that composed them—
 Once, with the most ardent soul I
Waited for their prompt arrival—
To the breast from which they sprang,
All these pages now shall wander,
Always loving, always ready,
Testaments to a glorious time.

* Latin: formally.
 CHAPTER 31

West-Eastern Divan and Poetry as a Life Force. Islam and

Religion in General. Poet or Prophet? What Is Spirit?
Belief and Experience. The Acknowledgment of the Sacred.
Indirect Divinity. Critique of Plotinus:
Spirit Beset by Reality. Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years
Put to the Test. Yearning vanishes in productive activity.
The Conflict between Prose and Poetry.
To What End Renunciation?

....

TO BE SURE, THERE WAS MORE TO THE WEST-EASTERN DIVAN

THAN just the marvelous erotic role-play in the “Book of Suleika.” In his
announcement in advance of publication, Goethe wrote, Even here [i.e., in
the “Book of Suleika”], a spiritual significance sometimes makes itself felt,
and the veil of earthly love seems to disguise more exalted relationships.
The playful suggestion of higher significance is present not just in the
theme of love but also at other points of the journey, as he called the cycle.
The poet regards himself as a traveler, the advance announcement declares;
a traveler seeking freedom more than journeying toward some goal: Leave
me in the saddle, I’m content! / Stay inside your cottage and your tent! /
And I’ll ride to foreign lands afar, / Above my head there’s nothing but the
stars. He is a traveler investigating the customs and practices of the Near
East with curiosity and amazement as he becomes better acquainted with
them—and with himself.
The poet imagines the Near Eastern world as the land of poetry, where he
presumes poetry pervades daily life. After love, poetry as a life force is the
West-Eastern Divan’s second great theme. Poetry’s exuberance, / Let no one
rebuke me! / May your blood be warm like mine; be / Glad and free as I
am. It is exuberance when it celebrates and praises and when it loves, but
also when it hates. For you need to know your enemies—the enemies of
freedom. They are the dogmatists, the apostles of morality, the small-minded
who have no sense of beauty but appreciate only what is useful: One thing
more is necessary: / Some things must be loathed by poets. / Allow to live
what’s cheerful, lovely. / Don’t permit what’s grumpy, ugly. An entire book,
the “Book of Displeasure,” is devoted to hating. The displeasure refers
above all to envy—resentment at everything that is more beautiful, more
successful, more noble, richer, happier, braver, and stronger than oneself.
The poet expresses his displeasure in order to get his own bad feelings off
his chest and then proceed calmly on his way. But first, it needs to be
expressed, for example,

Anyone who’s vexed that in His goodness

God has kept Mahomed safe and wealthy,
To the strongest rafter of his dwelling
Let him tie a rough and sturdy rope,
String himself right up! It will support him.
Soon he’ll feel his anger ebb away.

In short, his displeasure is aimed at all feelings and attitudes that stand in
the way of poetry. Envy cannot write poems; for that, one needs freedom—
candor, as the Divan poet calls it. Candor and envy are mutually exclusive.
Envy suppresses life, poetry enhances it. Poetry is the expression of
powerful moments, and it refreshes our vital spirits—even when we are in
pain and mourning—by giving sound and shape to both elevating and
oppressive things. Poetry is like life, without goal or purpose, circling within
itself: Your song revolves, just like the starry vault, / Beginning, ending,
always just the same. Poetry is an imitation of this life that circles within
itself, but an enhanced imitation because it overflows into beauty. There is
something triumphant about the beauty of poetry, even when it comes from
grief and despair.
But poetry is often closer to exhilaration, ecstasy, intoxication. The last
also gets its own book in the West-Eastern Divan, the “Tavern Book,” which
celebrates inebriation both spiritual and profane—and contrary to the
Prophet’s prohibition, of course. Proof enough that for Goethe, the poet
sometimes—especially when intoxicated—stands above the prophet. We
touched upon this theme in chapter 8. The drinker, however it may be, /
Looks God more freshly in the eye. Why more freshly? Because the poet
sees in God not just the legislator of morality: My glass of wine / Solo I’m
drinking. / No one sets me limits. / For myself I do my thinking. It’s all said
playfully, ironically, frivolously. All weighty subjects, even the serious
theme of religion and the significance of the Koran and the Prophet, are
infected by poetry in the West-Eastern Divan.
How seriously, then, does the poet take religion and especially Islam? The
advance announcement of the cycle’s publication declares that the poet does
not repudiate the suspicion that he himself is a Mussulman. Is he just
teasing? The young Goethe once wrote, Prophets right and prophets left /
The World’s child in between. In the Divan he’s still a child of the world.
The difference is that now, in both the cycle itself and the “Notes and Essays
toward a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan,” he specifies
which aspects of Western and Eastern religiosity are close to his heart.
Basically, it is not the content, which must be revealed and believed, but
rather what touches his own immediate experience. As mentioned in chapter
3, Goethe had formulated such immediate experience two years before
beginning work on the Divan, when he wrote of his childhood in the fourth
book of Poetry and Truth: General, natural religion actually has no need
of faith, for the conviction that behind nature was concealed, as it were, a
great, productive, ordering, and directing being, in order to make itself
concretely comprehensible—such a conviction is obvious to everyone.
It is a basic conviction, beyond all question, and vague enough not to be
touched by doubt. So-called revelation is another matter. It is not part of
anyone’s own experience, so your choice is only to believe in it or not. Such
belief extends to specific occurrences like Jesus’s death on the cross,
resurrection, walking on water, and awakening the dead. Belief in such
beatific happenings requires constant defense against doubts and doubters. It
is necessary to have a homogeneous group of fellow believers who can
support one another and are thereby immunized against doubt. Since the mere
existence of nonbelievers or doubters threatens the faithful, their belief
pushes them toward proselytizing and even fanaticism.
None of that is necessary in what Goethe calls natural religion. Its
convictions are on the one hand much too vague to provoke doubt and on the
other so self-evident that doubt can have no effect on them. His religion is not
distinctive, but elementary. He speaks only of a great being that is concealed
behind all nature and is definitely not manifest in a single person or a limited,
unique event, to say nothing of a written document of revelation.
The Bible and the Koran were for Goethe poetic history books,
interspersed here and there with wise sayings but also with the follies of
their time. Within them there is a spirit that can give wings to poetry. But for
an observant believer, that poetic spirit is suspect because it is free and takes
liberties with dogma. The more strictly the faithful submit to moral
regimentation, the more the free spirit of poetry is a thorn in their side. Airy
poetic spirits must be dragged back down to earth; that is the demand of the
faithful, who like to discipline others as compensation for what they deprive
themselves of.
Islam for Goethe is really something poetic. But that is not what it intends
to be. It is out to establish a moral regime, and Muhammad—a genuine poet
with his spiritual tales—wants only to be a prophet. And so the prophet
becomes the enemy of the poet, because he actually is one himself. In his
dislike of poetry, Mahomet also acts with great consistency in banning all
fairy tales. How could he not! The last thing his teaching needs is to be seen
as a fairy tale. It must be the absolute truth, and therefore cannot be poetic. It
must deny the dangerous fact that it springs from the same root as poetry.
Through its mere existence as an inventive art, poetry undermines religion’s
claim to absolute truth; religion does not like to be reminded of its own
invented character. Poetry accepts other claims; religion claims absolute
authority, come hell or high water. That’s what gives it its doctrinaire tone.
In other words, Goethe becomes uncomfortable with the Koran unless he
is allowed to take it poetically. He’s bored by unending tautologies and
repetitions of commandments, threats of punishments, and promises of
heavenly bliss. He admits that again and again, he finds this sacred text
disgusting. But that is not his last word on the matter. In the same passage, he
goes on to remark that in the end the Koran commands his reverence because
Islam has proved that it can reshape mankind morally and create a social
context. Here, Goethe is thinking historically. He writes that Muhammad’s
great accomplishment was to bring political unity, an expansive dynamic, and
a unified moral code to scattered groups of desert dwellers. That could be
done only by tailoring the guiding spiritual principle to the understanding and
taste of the masses. That may be why the whole moral apparatus was
necessary, as well as the promises of heavenly reward or punishment
calculated to appeal to simple minds, promises that also are part of the
repertoire of Christianity.
So far, so good, but the poet’s business is different than the prophet’s. The
Prophet’s goal was sovereignty and attention to the moral cultivation of the
spirit; the poet’s goal is the free upsurge of the individual spirit. Goethe
viewed collectivist ideas of freedom with great skepticism: Just as you
never hear as much talk about freedom as when one party wants to
subjugate another and aims at nothing less than shifting power, influence,
and treasure from one hand to another.
But for Goethe the moral, political, and military systems do not give an
exhaustive account of Islam. Hafez is his guarantor that the spirit of Islam
goes beyond them. What is its spirit or, as Goethe puts it, what prevails as
the supreme guiding idea?
From a religious perspective, it is strict monotheism. The spirit may be
multifarious in its appearances—and that’s what poetry is concerned with—
but its animating principle is the One and Indivisible, which corresponds to
the human experience of identity and selfhood. The belief in a single God
always has the effect of raising the spirit by referring man back to the
unity of his own inner self. Goethe thinks that this principle is more
consistently followed in Islam than in Christianity, where the idea of the
Trinity was a concession to polytheism.
In the poem “Sweet Child, the String of Pearls,” originally meant for
inclusion in the “Book of Suleika,” Christian polytheism and the symbol of
the cross are pilloried from Hatem’s perspective. It was provocative, even
blasphemous, for Christian ears, and, on the advice of his Catholic friend
Boisserée, Goethe put it away, and it was not published until after his death.
Hatem calls the cross his beloved wears around her neck a thing of the devil
—Abraxas—and counts the miserable image on wood as one of the objects
of heathen polytheism that the Prophet has swept away: with the one, the
only God / he has conquered all the world. But since he is in love, Hatem
relents and is ready to tolerate the cross on his lover’s bosom. And so he
puts up with this renegade burden, a victory for the poetic spirit as well that
overcomes the dogmatic confines of religion, at least in this one erotic
situation.
In Goethe’s understanding, spirit is not moral rigor but, as he says in the
“Notes and Essays,” an overview of the world essence, irony, free use of
one’s talents. In a letter to Zelter in which he comments on the West-Eastern
Divan, he formulated his concept of spirit in the limpid prose of old age:
Unconditional acquiescence to the will of God, serene overview of the busy
life of earth, circling and spiraling and always returning, inclination
hovering between two worlds, everything real refined, resolving itself into
a symbol. What more could a Grandpa want?
Acquiescence doesn’t imply determinism and defeatism, but a serenity in
all one does. Do your best even though the result is not in your hands. The
will of God does not mean something we can understand, but rather the
incomprehensible. What seems superficially like chance is part of a context,
but a context we are unable to illuminate in detail. Goethe tends to sense this
context as primarily benevolent. The life of earth, circling and spiraling
and always returning, on the one hand reminds us of the similarly returning
die and become as the basic rhythm of life, and on the other is a warning not
to overestimate the importance of progress. Man does not change in
substance, even if the reach and depth of his technical and social tools
increase and produce enormous external changes. What are the sources of the
serenity and irony of this overview? They are the gentle effects of a spirit
that makes things easier by allowing them to become transparent. Empirical
reality is taken seriously, but by being related to a spiritual reality, it
becomes translucent—symbolic, Goethe would call it.
What is revealed thereby? In the West-Eastern Divan, it is the spirit of
love that pervades everything and appears everywhere, enchantingly
presented in the final poem of the “Book of Suleika”:

There are a thousand forms that thou canst hide in,

And yet, my all-beloved, I shall find thee.
...
In purest youthful striving of the cypress
I see the image of thy slender beauty.
In limpid rippling life of the canal
I feel the touch of thy caressing hands.
...
And when the morning sun ignites the mountain,
Oh then I greet thee, always-cheerful one.
And when the sky spreads its pure arc above me,
Oh then I breathe thee, heart-expanding one.
 Whate’er my senses and my heart have learned,
Thou all-instructing one, they know through thee.
And when I name the hundred names of Allah,
Each one contains an echo of thy name.

This lyric exaltation refers to a beloved person and at the same time to a
cosmic principle—it is erotic pantheism in the form of poetic polytheism. All
that’s missing to complete the maxim we already know is moral monotheism:
Investigating nature / We are pantheists, / Writing poetry, polytheists, /
Morally, monotheists.
None of these three approaches is a matter of dogmatic belief, but rather of
experience. That is what distances Goethe from religious communities in
which individuals do not find godliness in themselves but must instead have
faith in the truth of an external revelation. There are only two true religions;
one that recognizes and worships the sacred that dwells, quite formless,
within and all around us; the other that recognizes and worships the
sacred in the most beautiful form possible. Everything in between is
idolatry.
The sacred must dwell within us if it is to be a true religion. Thus its
original foundation is experience and not simply belief and opinion.
Formless and in the most beautiful form—that is the other significant
differentiation. As for which forms count as most beautiful, Goethe made no
secret of his preferences. He venerated sculptural representations of the
ancient gods and demigods, ancient temples and ceremonial vessels, hymns
and stories of the gods. Christianity couldn’t hold a candle to the wealth of
forms of classical antiquity, although he did admire the image of the Holy
Family, which he used at the beginning of Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman
Years. For Goethe, the spiritual content must be able to be embodied, which
can sometimes be very difficult in the case of Christianity’s transcendental
faith. Goethe was capable of making irreverent jokes about the haloes and
doves above the heads of the saints or the speech ribbons unfurling from the
mouths of the central figures in medieval paintings. He positively hated the
cross and the representation of martyred bodies and was annoyed by the
sanctimoniousness of the Nazarene painters.
But what does formless recognition of the divine mean? One finds it where
there is no special form for the recognition or even for the worship of the
divine; instead, it is realized in the way that the duties and tasks of everyday
life are carried out. It amounts to the sanctification of the work of life itself,
as expressed in the Divan poem “The Legacy of Ancient Persian Faith”: Let
this be a sacred legacy / To fraternal will, and a reminder: / Every day
complete the hardest tasks and / That is revelation, there’s no other. The
following strophes depict elementary activities, from burying the dead to
working in the fields, from house construction to irrigation. These acts, the
daily work of maintaining and enriching life, appear as indirect worship. You
do your work, fulfill your duty, pursue your goals, and if you do it with
devotion, something higher is revealed: the spirit of constructive living. That
was Goethe’s idea, and that’s why he was an adherent of indirect divinity.
Indirectness—for Goethe it was a central theme in his thinking about God,
the absolute, and transcendence. As a result of his encounter with Plotinus
and Neoplatonism, after 1805 he formulated the basic principles of his
theology and the philosophy of indirectness, which remained definitive from
then on.
The philosopher Hermann Schmitz was the first to recognize the
fundamental importance of Goethe’s critique of Plotinus,* first formulated in
1805 and published only later. Goethe writes, One can hardly blame ancient
and modern idealists for vigorously urging the acceptance of the One from
which everything flows and to which everything is to be attributed. For of
course, the enlivening and organizing principle in a phenomenon is so
beset with difficulties that it can barely save itself. However, we
shortchange ourselves in the other direction if we force the forming power
and the higher form itself back into a unity that is invisible to our external
and internal senses.
The One is what is usually called “God” or an all-determining “Spirit.”
The decisive statement is that this One is beset in empirical reality. With this
formulation, Goethe hints at the whole modern drama of materialism and
atheism: spirit is no longer found in nature and in the end, not in man either. It
is no help to remove spirit from our external and internal senses, by which
he means the abstractions of mathematics and metaphysical speculation,
whereby spirit is forced back into unobservable abstraction rather than
relocated in reality. That is what Goethe was protesting against. His belief is
that spirit can be sensed, if not captured, everywhere in nature. To be sure,
the precondition for that to happen is the abandonment of Plotinus’s Platonic
prejudice, which persists subliminally in the present, namely, that the
transition from idea to reality always represents a loss, analogous to the
divine creator’s superior rank vis-à-vis his creation. And so Goethe
continues in his critique of Plotinus, A spiritual form, however, is by no
means diminished when it emerges as a phenomenon, provided that its
emergence is a genuine begetting, a true propagation. The begotten is not
less than the begetter. Indeed, it is an advantage of living propagation that
the begotten can be more excellent than the begetter.
What Goethe here suggests is nothing less than the idea of a natural
evolution that goes beyond the maintenance of life to follow the principle of
enhancement of life. Thus spirit is not diminished in reality; on the contrary,
it drives reality out of a state of dull self-absorption and into the sunlight—
until at last the unnoticed but all-pervading spirit becomes aware of itself in
the human mind. Nor is spirit diminished in nature; on the contrary, it is made
manifest in nature as a productive principle that in the end comprehends itself
in human beings. This is the living process of propagation, a progressive
process. In the final analysis, it is the thought of a developing God in nature.
But what is “indirect” about this conceptual context? For Goethe,
transcendence is never directly apprehended by means of some rare
revelation, but rather immanent only in empirical reality, a deepening of
empirical experience. The transcendent is what has an effect, and thus is only
to be apprehended in its effects. It is the living principle that drives external
reality and motivates us internally, a riddle better solved by pursuing the
practical business of life than by theorizing.
The practical business of life, however, can have its pitfalls. It leads
directly into the web of society. Whatever experiences, intentions, wishes,
and hopes dwell within the individual, they never achieve pure expression.
There are some natural impediments, but, above all, the problem is the social
medium through which ideas are refracted, distracted, and distorted. This
besetting affliction in the social sphere is caused by envy, competition,
disapproval, indifference, hectic activity, and—especially emphasized by
Goethe—gossip.

What I fear: the captiousness

Of all repugnant gossip,
Where talk is fleeting, nothing sticks,
It disappears before my eyes
And I am tangled in the coils
Of a gray net of worry.
As Goethe grew older he began to perceive society—not only, but primarily
—as just such a gray net of worry in which it was all too easy to become
enmeshed and cheated of the best that one had, a perception that would later
be called alienation. It’s necessary to wear a mask, and, what’s worse, the
mask is forced upon us and in the end we don’t even know who we really
are. Thus it can happen that the absurd course of the world can intrude
between what is best and most delightful.
Of course, critiques of society have a long tradition, but it is striking that
Goethe’s unease about society was increasing at the moment when, in the
wake of the French Revolution, society was being discovered as a location
of ideas and truth. It was Hegel, whom Goethe had appointed professor at
Jena and with whom he had a fairly close friendship, who ennobled that
conception of society at the highest philosophical level. Ever since Hegel,
there has been a new kind of philosophizing. Philosophy had been dominated
by a clear duality: man is here, and being—whether divine or natural—is
there. After Hegel, the newly discovered world of society intrudes between
the two poles. Now society (together with its history) becomes the absolute
in which all other dichotomies and polarities are contained. To Hegel,
society is objective spirit. Until then, society had been simply real; now it
became a truth. The old metaphysics of being disappears in this new
metaphysics of society, and the old religious precepts—faith, love, and hope
—are now related to society and its progress. The Hegelian zeitgeist
declared that freedom originated through society. Goethe, however, believed
he needed to defend his freedom against society. The best thoughts, he once
wrote to Meyer, were dulled, disturbed, and distracted by the moment, the
century, by localities and other particulars. As far as he was concerned, it
was society that cheated him of his best.
But Goethe doesn’t just complain about it. He is much too aware of the
creative power of his singularity. He included these lines in his Tame
Xenias: Go ahead and wrap the world / In the net you’ve made! / In my
own living sphere I know / How to gain life for myself.
If Goethe thought he had to wrest the truth of his life from society, then for
him, that restrictive, distorting, leveling society was part of the affliction
that, according to his critique of Plotinus, was besetting the enlivening
principles. This conviction is not at odds with the ready pleasure he took in
being active, receiving new impulses, and intervening in social
circumstances. He had many official social and political responsibilities.
Much as he loved and practiced contemplation, he had a thoroughly active
nature. When he had spent a few years in Weimar, he wrote to Knebel, My
nature forces me into multifarious activities, and even to live in the
humblest village or on a deserted island, I would need to be just as busy.
Thus society is definitely a field for Goethe to prove himself in, but also
the realm against which he must assert himself to retain his integrity.
Precisely because he was so receptive and sensitive, so open to the world,
he was careful not to allow himself to be ensnared to the point of
insensibility. Goethe calls the strict egoism of self-assertion in the face of an
excess of worldly intrusion the indispensable, sharp, selfish principle. If the
individual is not to go under in the bustle and whirl of society, he must have
the inner coherence that Goethe once called, with reference to minerals, the
gravitational force toward oneself. The selfish principle gives a person
something off-putting, compact, impenetrable. The analogy to the mineral
world was so obvious to Goethe that in his last novel, on which he resumed
intense and uninterrupted work after completing the West-Eastern Divan, he
depicts Montan (the former Jarno)—the protagonist and embodiment of the
hard, impervious aspects of the selfish principle—as a man of the mountains
and stones.
Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or The Renunciants is the great
novel of Goethe’s last decade. Its main theme is the affliction with which
social reality besets the enlivening principles and the possibility of
sustained resistance to it. The novel enacts models of how intellectual and
spiritual life can assert themselves or become ossified. Utopias are also
presented, but it is not clear whether they are realizations or betrayals of the
spirit, whether they are meant as dreams or as nightmares. Between
sequences of deep thought, numerous stories are interspersed with only loose
connections to the main plot and no clear inner connections to one another.
These tales take up so much room that the plot seems almost like a frame
narrative, and the entire novel threatens to lose coherence. The frame
includes depictions of several social utopias, reflective passages that expand
into essays, and letters. Add to that a central character restricted to the role
of onlooker and a love story that plays out between a novella and the frame
narrative, and you have what can only be described as a hodgepodge.
Here the organizing principles are also beset, if they have not completely
disappeared. This is even mentioned in an interim remark in which it
remains unclear who is speaking—the real author or a fictive narrator. First,
the hodgepodge is named and then the work on the novel is described: So if
we are not again to bog down in this business, as has happened so often
these many years, there is nothing for it but to pass on what we possess,
communicate what has been preserved. Readers of this work of quickly
passing shape must fill in the blanks for themselves in what has not been
completely developed, i.e., its inner coherence. This disarmingly frank
confession, however, is only in the first, significantly shorter 1821 version of
the Journeyman Years. In the second and final version of 1829, it was
dropped. It is typical of Goethe’s style in old age: he simply claims the
freedom to leave the heterogeneity of a work without feeling the need to
justify it. The open form in which poetry, aphorisms, stories, essays, and
letters succeed each other is left to speak for itself. What has been written,
like what has happened, asserts its right to be, as he once wrote
imperturbably to Reinhard.
As the interim remark concedes, work on the Journeyman Years had
bogged down several times. Even while finishing Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship in 1796, Goethe was thinking about a continuation. In the first
Wilhelm Meister novel, he built in some things that could serve as a
bridgehead to a sequel, such as Wilhelm’s assignment to set off as a
journeyman. First he wrote a few stories that were meant to be included in
the sequel, but he told Schiller that he was going to lock what was idealistic
about it in a little box, hoping he could do something with it when I finally
become conscious of my own intentions. In other words, he was writing and
collecting things for the Journeyman Years, though the central idea wasn’t
clear to him yet. Most of the novellas and stories were completed by 1807.
The chapters containing the wisdom of the elderly Makarie and some of the
utopian schemes were not added until the 1820s. Between 1810 and 1819, he
did almost no work at all on the novel, and only when he had finished the
West-Eastern Divan did he take it up again, quickly completing the first
draft, which he published in 1821 without feeling that the novel was really
done. It received very little notice, and Goethe grimly remarked, The second
part will not be any more satisfactory than the first, but I hope to satisfy
the reader who has grasped the latter well. Be that as it may, such readers
were few and far between, which didn’t prevent Goethe from undertaking
additions and revisions for the next edition.
The final version of the Journeyman Years, appearing in 1829, preserved
the novel’s heterogeneity of content and its open form; indeed, it reinforced
them by inserting maxims and reflections collected under the titles
“Reflections in the Spirit of the Journeymen” and “From Makarie’s
Archives.” In conversation with Chancellor Müller, Goethe remarked that it
was silly to want to construct and analyze the whole thing systematically,
since it was nothing but an aggregation. He did not think this aggregative
character was a weakness, but rather a sign that the novel was especially
close to real life. With a little book like this, however, he wrote to Rochlitz,
it’s like life itself: in the complex whole one finds some things that are
necessary and others that are accidental, the central and the peripheral,
sometimes successful, sometimes not, through which it achieves a kind of
endlessness that cannot be completely grasped in sensible and reasonable
words.
The appropriate way to deal with such a book was to become engaged in
details as they emerge. We shall take that advice and be content to
emphasize a few details characteristic of the last period of Goethe’s life.
First, as already suggested, what Goethe called the novel’s aggregative
character means that its form mirrors the problem it addresses. For what is
depicted is how spiritual principles are beset in dispersive reality, as Goethe
discussed in his critique of Plotinus. The novel is close to real life precisely
because it is not a homogeneous work. Like life, it is disparate, contains
some things that are necessary and others that are accidental. It is not as
beautifully transparent and orderly as one might want, but that’s exactly why
there is a peculiar kind of endlessness to it. It is the endlessness of things
unfinished to which new and different things can constantly be added, whose
end is imposed from without, a breaking-off rather than a completion. If life
cannot achieve such completion, however, then how is it possible to become
what the West-Eastern Divan calls a personality in the chaos of
circumstances that make up the life of society? The novel plumbs some of the
possibilities—and impossibilities.
At the beginning a young man, Saint Joseph the Second, as the novel calls
him, is taking care of a widow and her child and is determined to live a life
like the one depicted in legends about Mary and Joseph. In the end, the three
of them really do resemble the Holy Family familiar from old paintings—or
from the paintings of the Nazarenes, whom Goethe was not very fond of, as
we have seen. Saint Joseph the Second finds his way through the confusion of
life in devotion to his role model. Given Goethe’s antipathy for the
Nazarenes, it is unclear whether the existence chosen by his character is after
all only an example—albeit a charming one—of the continuing power of the
superannuated: Life belongs to the living, and the living must be prepared
for change. Joseph the Second avoids change as long as he can fit himself
and the widow and her child into an image. Wilhelm Meister feels himself
transferred into a wondrously old-fashioned atmosphere, as if he were
seeing before him, in a dream, a series of moving images. He too is stirred
by a longing to disappear into those images, but he is awakened from his
drifting dreams by an encounter with Jarno, familiar to us as the cynic in
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and now known as Montan.
Joseph is like the images he reveres; Montan is like the rocks he collects
and studies. He prefers their mute company to the babble of humans. Stone is
hard and durable, man mutable and frail. Stone is impenetrable, man
permeable and vulnerable. Montan loves rocks more than people, on whom
he has turned his back. I decided to avoid people. There’s no helping them,
and they hinder us from helping ourselves.
Thus the first two figures we encounter in this novel represent two
extremes. Joseph the Second centers his life on imitating his namesake.
Impenetrable as stone, Montan immunizes himself against all possible
influences. He is the embodiment of the selfish principle at its most obdurate.
And it is Montan who rejects the ideal of well-rounded education
promulgated in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. One should specialize in
something, he declares, and not flutter about like some dilettantish butterfly,
taking a sip of this and that. What is called for is not universal receptivity but
toughening up for a particular function; not education but training for what
will benefit society—and yourself—because then you won’t get lost in
distractions. Yes, now is the time for being one-sided, he declares, and urges
Wilhelm, with his multifarious interests, Make yourself into an organ and
wait to see what place well-intentioned humanity will grant you in our
common life.
Of all people, it is the reclusive Montan who promotes useful
contributions to the mechanisms of society. However, that is not as
inconsistent as it sounds. The lover of rocks proceeds from self-reification to
self-petrification. No wonder Wilhelm, who once sought true treasure in the
human heart, can hardly bear to listen to Montan’s disquisitions. But like
other figures in the novel, Montan does not remain static, condemned to
represent a single principle. In the course of the novel, he becomes milder.
His misanthropy is transformed into skepticism and caution. Nevertheless, he
remains the advocate of a strict realism that rejects all romanticism and
sentimentality.
The next stop on Wilhelm’s journey, his uncle’s country estate, is not
particularly pleasant either. Tellingly, Wilhelm and his son, Felix, are first
put into prison. That is his uncle’s customary way to receive company, and
soon it becomes clear that the rules for living on his estate are simply
imprisonment by another name. The spirit of those rules is as utilitarian and
antipoetical as anything Montan could wish. Above the doors of the
workhouses stands the slogan From Utility through Truth to Beauty. Here
too, the emphasis is on usefulness, and in order to stand a chance, beauty
must pass through the eye of its needle. In the entire castle, said the
caretaker, you will not find a single picture that even vaguely refers to
religion, tradition, mythology, legend, or fable. Our master wishes to
promote the use of our imaginations only to envision truth. He likes to say
that we fabulate enough as it is without using external stimuli to
encourage that dangerous characteristic of our intellect.
Wilhelm’s uncle is pursuing a program of social reform. Nothing is
wasted; everything is reinvested to increase production and provide people
with work and wages. The uncle regards himself as a philanthropist. He has
had pleasure gardens and parks removed and replaced by fruit trees and
vegetable beds. He does not forgo owning property, but intends it to serve the
community, for the rich are only admired, he declares, insofar as others
enjoy life thanks to them. He aims at enjoyments that promote and perhaps
even increase the ability to work. Sundays are spent in silence: everyone
remains solitary and they devote themselves to prescribed contemplation.
Man is a limited being, and Sundays are devoted to reflecting on our
limitation. On workdays people are limited by their duties, and on Sundays
they think about that limitation. And so they are not tempted to use at least
that one day to kick over the traces. The clever Hersilie, with whom Wilhelm
will fall in love, notices that something is wrong with this arrangement. What
kind of nice life is this, she cries, when I have to resign myself to it once a
week?
His uncle’s estate is the first actual utopia that Wilhelm visits, and it is
still relatively liberal. The ones to come will be even more restrictive.
Common to all of them is the primacy of utility and usefulness. The
individual is a mere organ in an organism or, better, a cog in a machine. You
are nothing, your community is everything. What the novel’s utopian projects
have in common is the sober-sided and deeply prosaic principle that
yearning vanishes in productive activity.
Yearning, fantasy, mystery, melancholy, high spirits, and all sorts of
madcap antics are swept from the main (or frame) narrative and transferred
to the novellas. In the frame story, the weak-willed Wilhelm Meister wanders
as an onlooker from one utopian project to the next, and a group of
renunciants drifts through this wasteland of orderliness. Once, Mignon’s
famous song from Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is heard in fragmentary
phrases from far away: Knowst thou the land where lemons are in bloom, /
Dark leafy shade. . . . On the shores of Lago Maggiore, the renunciants have
gathered. The women threw themselves into each other’s arms, the men
embraced, and Luna witnessed the noblest, most virtuous tears. But soon
they are in a quandary again: They slowly returned to their senses and
separated, silently, with the strangest feelings and wishes, which, however,
already had no hope of fulfillment.
These are capable people, paragons of virtue, and yet to no avail; despite
the Romantic landscape, the reader is witness to the downfall of poetry: As if
under a magic spell, this paradise was now transformed for the friends
into an utter wasteland. Novalis, the arch-Romantic who had already
accused Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship of betraying poetry, would have
been appalled by this complete triumph of prose.
What is not clear is whether Goethe thought that the disappearance of
yearning in productive activity was a good thing, or simply unavoidable in
the dawning of an age of machines and objectivity. The novel itself gives no
satisfactory indication of whether it is a critique or a symptom of the
demystification of the world. The ideas of the emigrants and their plans for a
settlement in America oscillate between dream and nightmare. We hear that
measures will be taken against wasting time, telegraphs will be built to
remind everyone day and night of what time it is. Everyone’s usefulness will
be highly promoted by dividing up time and paying attention to each hour.
There will be police to enforce the schedule with the robust principle that
whoever proves disruptive will be removed until he understands how to
behave in order to be tolerated. Mignon and company would certainly not
be tolerated. There will be a mobile government whose leaders travel from
place to place, so that for some settlers the authorities will be absent while
others will have them on their backs. In this way, everyone will enjoy the
benefits of liberality and austerity in turn, and equality will be guaranteed.
The question of democracy and majority rule elicits a cautious reply: We
have our own distinctive thoughts about the majority; of course we honor
it in the necessary course of the world, but in a higher sense we don’t put
much trust in it. But I must not say anything more about that. Other plans
for disciplining the settlement are discussed at much greater length. Brandy
taverns and lending libraries must disappear; consumption of alcohol and
novels will be restricted. One might assume that a novel like the Journeyman
Years, however, would meet with no objections from these apostles of
sobriety.
But the world of the novel is not populated exclusively by renunciants and
those who have nothing to renounce. There is Felix, for one, Wilhelm’s son,
the embodiment of fresh strength and lust for life. He lives and falls in love
and suffers the usual follies that entails. And in any case, things are much
livelier in the novellas. A problem close to Goethe’s heart, the love of an
older man for a younger woman, is treated—twice, in fact—using the fairly
risqué situation of father and son competing for the same woman. Without
making a great deal of it, we should mention here that in 1816 Goethe
pressured his son, August, to marry Ottilie von Pogwisch, an attractive,
intelligent young woman whom Goethe himself wanted to have nearby, and
who wanted to be near him, although she wrote to her mother about the
wedding plans, “Goethe frightens me;—and asks more than before how it
will turn out.” When Ottilie finally married August—without being in love
with him—she did so only because she worshipped his father. The letters she
exchanged with August are sober, businesslike, and prosaic; those to her
father-in-law are poetry. In any event, the story of Ottilie could easily have
found a place in the cycle of novellas in the Journeyman Years.
Then there is the figure who transcends the entire world of the novel,
including the novella cycle: Makarie, a central star not yet risen in the book’s
first version. Goethe invented her as a counterweight, so that the novel would
not be too dominated by the spirit of efficiency and so that yearning would
not entirely vanish in productive activity. Makarie is the continuation of the
Beautiful Soul in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, with more intellectual
heft. Montan on the one hand and Makarie on the other: one attracted by
stones and the other by stars; one drawn down to the midpoint of the earth
and the other up and out beyond the limits of our solar system. Montan
wants to bring things down to earth, to clip the wings of poetry and
philosophical speculation, which is why he insists on utility and usefulness.
He is the enemy of flights of fancy, and since he deprives himself of things,
he is full of resentment toward those who indulge themselves. Makarie is his
opposite. She lives in a vision of cosmic connections, but her body is already
in sickly decline. Nevertheless, she is mysteriously cheerful and infects
everyone who visits her with her cheer. People encountering her feel
wondrously light and bright. With an ironic wink, the narrator takes special
notice of the fairy-tale effect when the doors into her house open
automatically. Her entire being is open, just as Montan’s is closed. Makarie
suffuses and is suffused by everything. She is entirely transparent and
permeable. She possesses inner composure without being hard or rigid. In
her archives, Goethe deposited some of his most brilliant maxims and
reflections, including those we have already quoted on Plotinus and the
besetting affliction of the enlivening principles. Makarie has surely
transcended such affliction, but, for that reason, seems not quite real. She
lives her life among the higher orders of being: the regular progression of the
constellations, the play of attraction and repulsion, the oscillation between
time and eternity, the music of the spheres. Makarie is on the verge of
dissolving, melting away into those regions: she seems to have been born
only to deliver herself from the earthly and suffuse the nearest and farthest
spaces of existence.
At the high point of these heavenly digressions, the narrator turns back to
the ground crew with the words As we herewith bring to a close this
ethereal poetry in the hope of forgiveness, let us return to those terrestrial
fairy tales.
Both versions of the novel bear the subtitle The Renunciants. What does
this renunciation mean? It means forgoing the realization of something, even
though you actually wish it and many factors urge you on. It can be a
relationship, an action, or a possession. Renunciation is connected to
sacrifice. You can renounce not only what you already possess but also the
striving to possess it. You merely need to have some stake in what is
renounced. Without a stake, renunciation is neither necessary nor possible.
But why should anyone renounce anything? Goethe wrote about that
question in the late 1820s in the fourth book of Poetry and Truth, following
an almost programmatic reflection on Spinoza: Both our physical and our
social life . . . everything calls upon us to renounce. But why? In order to
forestall an even greater loss. If we repeatedly become attached to what time
will eventually take away, we will suffer repeated disappointment. Then it
can make sense to become resigned once and for all in order to avoid all
partial resignations. That can mean forgoing things, but sometimes an inner
letting-go suffices—having something as if one didn’t have it. Thus you can
arm yourself against disappointment and say, with Heidegger, that
renunciation gives rather than taking away.
The refusal to realize a plan, the accumulation of a surplus of
incompletion, and the willpower involved in such renunciation can all enrich
one’s personality. The renunciant is better equipped for self-preservation in
the face of loss. Those who don’t decide to renounce will have to forgo
things in desperation. The renunciant retains his sovereignty, but sometimes
that’s all, and it could be too little.
Of course, the heart of the matter is erotic renunciation. That’s why
Wilhelm and Natalie are the real renunciants in the Journeyman Years. They
find their way to each other at the end of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,
but forgo actualizing their love except in letters. Why do they do that? Is it to
preserve the erotic suspense that might be quickly extinguished in sexual
fulfillment? Renouncing to keep longing and yearning alive? That may apply
to Wilhelm and Natalie, but not to the questionable utopian schemes of the
Journeyman Years. There, as we have heard, even yearning is meant to
disappear in productive activity, by fulfilling the practical demands of
everyday life.
Wilhelm has also abandoned his youthful dreams. Once the world of art—
and especially the theater—had allowed him to feel the protean nature of
ever-changing life. The Society of the Tower and the Association of
Emigrants, the Pedagogical Province and his uncle’s country estate—these
are the all too orderly counterworlds that assign everyone a useful place.
That too is renunciation, and it colors the entire novel.
Why was such a drastic cure needed? It is astonishing that Goethe
provides no satisfactory answer in his novel. Probably we will have to seek
it in his life.

* Hermann Schmitz, Goethes Altersdenken im problemgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang (Bonn: H.

Bouvier, 1959).
 CHAPTER 32

Memory Work. Repeated reflection. Between Walls of Paper.

The Aged Goethe in Company.
Why Always Think the Same Thing?
Against the Spirit of the Times and for the Carlsbad Decrees.
Three Sojourns in Marienbad. Ulrike and the Elegy. Farewells.

....

IN EARLY SUMMER 1816, GOETHE CLIMBED UNHURT OUT OF the

tipped-over coach that was to convey him to the Gerbermühle and Marianne
Willemer, and he took the accident as an evil omen. He decided to forgo the
visit and even stopped writing to Marianne for a while. It was a genuine
renunciation. He also let the West-Eastern Divan languish unfinished for a
few years, in melancholy recollection of those happier days yet half hoping
for their return. But for us what bliss it is to / Dip our hand in the
Euphrates, / In the fluid element to / Wander back and forth. But he was not
inclined to do any such wandering these days, so it was like a gift of fate
when he received the page proofs for the West-Eastern Divan in 1818 and
that magical mood returned for a brief time. Usually, he was even more
vigilant than before not to betray his inner feelings in public, but to maintain
a reserved formality. That was also the impression of the widowed Charlotte
Kestner, née Buff—the Lotte of his Wetzlar days—when she stopped in
Weimar to visit her brother-in-law Ridel in 1816 and was invited to dine at
Goethe’s house. She wrote to her son, “I’ve made a new acquaintance: an old
man. If I didn’t know it was Goethe—and even though I did—he still didn’t
make a good impression on me. You know how little I expected from this
reunion—or rather from this new acquaintance. So I was quite unself-
conscious. And in his stiff way, he did everything possible to be obliging to
me.” Charlotte was accompanied by her daughter, who also found Goethe to
be quite cold. She reported, “Unfortunately, however, all his conversation
was so ordinary, so superficial, that it would be presumptuous of me to say I
heard him talking or talked to him, for nothing that he said came from within
or even from his mind.”
Goethe had only recently recounted his memories of Wetzlar and Werther’s
love in the third part of Poetry and Truth. That long-vanished world had
again been in his thoughts. Perhaps that was the reason he was chary of too
close contact with what remained of it. If Charlotte was disappointed by him,
so was he by her. Her presence seemed dull compared with her image in his
memory. He could not summon up the magic of repeated reflection;
obviously, that was something that happened only when a memory was
reshaped as literature. Repeated reflection is what he called a process he
compared to that of the so-called entoptic colors—in which colors appearing
in a mirrored surface that has been heated and allowed to cool down become
brighter and more intense in another mirror facing the first one. According to
Goethe, the same thing happens to memory processed by literature. When we
consider that repeated . . . reflections not only keep the past alive but even
raise it to a higher life, it will remind us of the entoptic phenomena.
Recollected images are enhanced by the medium of literature, but not by
encountering acquaintances after many years. Goethe and Lotte sat together
for a while and felt they had been left high and dry. It took a Thomas Mann to
wring some literary charm from the unsuccessful encounter in his novel Lotte
in Weimar (translated into English as The Beloved Returns).
After the publication of the first three parts of Poetry and Truth, Goethe
continued to work on the autobiography with a growing feeling of alienation
from the present. He wrote to Zelter, I continue to live life in my own way,
with which you are familiar, see few people and am actually living only in
the past by attempting to sort through and edit old papers of every kind.
The ailing Schiller had complained that he was sitting between walls of
written paper, and now Goethe sometimes felt the same way. In another letter
to Zelter: I’ve been spending my winter in almost complete solitude, busily
dictating so that my entire existence is down on paper. What ends up on the
page is a reflection of a reflection of what he had written in years gone by,
and he is retrospectively surprised at his own insouciance. One certainly
feels the earlier endeavor to be serious and diligent, he writes to
Boisserée, one becomes acquainted with one’s own merits, merits that are
now lacking. . . . What’s more, the century is spreading out in all
directions, on paths both right and wrong, so that a naïveté like mine,
moving innocently forward, step by step, seems to me to play a wondrous
role. Once he had put up with Schiller’s definition of him as a “naïve”
writer, and now for the first time he uses the word himself. He sees himself
wandering like a sleepwalker, and he knows that it was the only way he
could have acted. You need to be insouciant; he would later declare that the
active person has to be without conscience. He would otherwise have been
condemned to immobility. Acting and creating mean a narrowing, a closing
off of yourself to produce something that has a breadth of its own. And so he
was quite content to read his old published works and manuscripts. He was
reading his way into himself and felt an inner expansion. But he preferred to
recollect things instead of being recollected: he neglected to answer
inquiries from Bettine von Arnim. He probably hadn’t forgiven her for
calling Christiane a “fat blood sausage” during an argument.
It had become lonelier in the big house on the Frauenplan since
Christiane’s death. Ottilie and August lived on the top floor, where they often
argued loudly. Goethe was happy to put up with his noisy grandchildren, but
not with the arguments. He was deluding himself when he wrote of the young
couple, they went well together even if they didn’t love each other. Not only
weren’t they in love; they weren’t at all suited to each other, and there was
constant discord. At times it was more than Goethe could stand, and he
moved to the garden house. He also frequently escaped to Jena even though
there was no longer a Schiller, a Schelling, or a Humboldt to be found there.
Once he confided to Chancellor Müller what he would have liked life in
the house on the Frauenplan to be: Wouldn’t it be possible to have a
standing invitation to a company that would gather in my house every day,
now in greater and now in lesser number? People would come and stay as
long as they liked and could bring any guests they wished. The rooms
would always be open and illuminated from seven o’clock on, and tea and
paraphernalia always at the ready. People would make music, play cards,
give readings, chat—everything according to inclination and whim. I
myself would appear and then disappear as the spirit moved me. And if I
sometimes absented myself entirely, that shouldn’t cause any disturbance. .
. . Thus an everlasting tea would be organized, like the eternal light that
burns in some chapels.
 A permanent open house, comings and goings like an inn, continuous
socializing, and without even needing to be present to remain the center of
attention. The only surprising thing is that it was supposed to be an
everlasting tea. Wine would actually have been more appropriate in a house
where it otherwise flowed so freely, both for the head of the house
downstairs and for the youngsters on the top floor. The unfortunate reality,
however, whether tea or wine was drunk, was that life was not so free and
easy. The sedate formal dinners had become fairly stiff affairs. Many came to
the house—in fact, there was an almost constant stream of visitors. People
paid their respects and Goethe granted audiences—sometimes casual and
sometimes elaborate. He would appear with the medal on his chest and hands
clasped behind his back, ask a few questions, and respond with his famous
Hm hm. Unforgettable, however, were his large, alert, observant eyes.
Ordinarily, one was not invited to sit down. But sometimes something ignited
his interest, and he would begin speaking in his sonorous and gently flowing
voice, stringing words out like pearls on a necklace. The tension would
suddenly relax, both in him and in his listener. But it didn’t happen very
often, and occasionally he remained quite silent. On many evenings when he
didn’t feel like talking but didn’t want to be alone, his loyal helpers Riemer,
Meyer, and Eckermann would have to keep him company, all nursing their
wine in silence.
But when he was in an expansive mood, they had to be prepared for
surprises. Since he didn’t think much of mere opinions, he liked to play with
them in order to confuse his interlocutors or even put their nose out of joint.
He once told Chancellor Müller, with whom he liked to play Mephisto (with
Eckermann he usually played Faust), Eh, have I gotten to be 80 years old in
order to always think the same thing? No, I strive to think something
different, something new every day so I won’t become a bore. You have to
keep changing all the time, renew yourself, grow youthful again, so you
don’t get in a rut.
The official role he had to play in public did not make it easy to be
youthful again. As a poet he was the national soul; as an official, a public
personage as he called himself. In 1815, the Congress of Vienna had
promoted Weimar to the status of grand duchy, which brought with it a
considerable increase in territory. The duke could now call himself “Royal
Highness” and Goethe was elevated to the rank of “Minister of State,”
although he no longer belonged to the cabinet but functioned only in the
background, as an adviser. He did not want to be burdened with day-to-day
tasks, and the duke graciously excused him from them. His salary grew while
his formal duties shrank. His official title was “Head Supervisor of the
Ducal Institutions for Science and Art in Weimar and Jena.” It no longer
included the time-consuming supervision of the university or, since the spring
of 1817, the direction of the Weimar theater. The friction with Frau von
Heygendorf, the former Karoline Jagemann, had not been settled after the
crisis of 1808. She continued to think Goethe was not a proper theater
director, found him too negligent in day-to-day operations, and moreover
wanted more concessions to popular taste. The leading role in a light French
farce was supposed to be played by a trained poodle, and she succeeded in
putting it on over Goethe’s express opposition. He thereupon let it be known
that he didn’t intend to be there to watch the theater go to the dogs and would
probably resign the directorship. The duke, hoping to prevent the poisoning
of their friendship, relieved him of that obligation.
Despite the scaling back of official duties, Goethe continued to represent
the Weimar state. There was not a crowned head or minister of state paying a
visit to Weimar who did not also pay his respects to Goethe in the house on
the Frauenplan, giving him the opportunity to wear the cross of the Légion
d’honneur that Napoleon had awarded him. Such receptions were expensive
affairs and to help defray costs, Goethe asked for and was granted some tax
relief.
On an income that, supplemented by royalties from his books, sometimes
amounted to ten thousand taler a year, he paid a tax of barely one hundred
fifty taler. And yet he thought he had to save and was annoyed at the fees he
still had to pay as a registered citizen of Frankfurt. He therefore requested
permission to resign his citizenship and was duly removed from the
municipal rolls, for which he paid thirty kreutzer without further ado.
Frankfurt was the seat of the German Confederation, the fairly toothless
umbrella organization of German (as well as some non-German)
principalities newly founded or reorganized by the Congress of Vienna.
Goethe’s friend Karl Friedrich von Reinhard, who spent decades in the
service of various French governments, was there as France’s representative
and was able to keep Goethe informed about European politics. The efforts
of the patriotic bourgeoisie to unite Germany were not appreciated by the
German Confederation, and it was known that Goethe didn’t think much of
them either. In 1817, he published a sharply worded polemic against “New
German Religio-Patriotic Art” in the second number of Über Kunst und
Altertum (On Art and Antiquity), the journal he edited during his final
decade as an organ for his views. It took aim not only at the Catholic art of
the Nazarene painters but also more generally at patriotic masquerading and
sentimental worship of the Middle Ages. He was vexed to see Götz von
Berlichingen being exploited as nationalist propaganda. Sulpiz Boisserée
had occasionally been able to interest him in medieval painting and sculpture
and Goethe had advocated continued construction on the Cologne cathedral,
but he did not want either thing linked to some patriotic political agenda. He
loved old things when they had life in them, not when they were artificially
revived to serve political ends. Thus, he gave a lovely depiction of medieval
tradition in his “Festival of Saint Roch in Bingen,” but with no intention of
being a propagandist for the world of Catholicism. The church festival
fascinated him as had the Roman carnival in times gone by.
The grand duchy of Weimar was especially attuned to the new political
climate. The grand duke had granted his state the constitution promised by the
German Federal Act of the Congress of Vienna, which gave the estates the
right to approve taxes and guaranteed freedom of the press. Goethe was no
friend of these renovations or of the switch to a constitutional monarchy. He
did not perceive the duchy as representing any threat to human rights. He
preferred patriarchal rule to democratic institutions, with a ruling elite
selflessly looking after the interests of the people. He was in favor of free
trade and the ownership of real property unencumbered by feudal privileges.
That was the extent of his political and social principles and wishes. He
didn’t think much of freedom of the press; as far as he was concerned, it gave
free reign to demagogues and idiots and encouraged general politicizing.
Nothing had changed in his annoyance at the agitated since the 1790s, when
he wrote plays against the revolution. But now, encouraged by the liberal
press laws, several patriotic and democratic newspapers had opened offices
in Weimar, of all places—Heinrich Luden’s Nemesis, for instance, and
Lorenz Oken’s Isis. They printed heated polemics against the reactionary,
authoritarian spirit and pilloried Habsburg and Russian predominance in
German affairs as a national tragedy. For patriots all over Germany, Weimar
became known as a bastion of progress. For Metternich and most of the other
rulers, however, Weimar was a thorn in their flesh, and when the first
Burschenschaft, or student fraternity, was founded in Jena in 1815, people
called the grand duke the Altbursche—the Old Boy.
 In October 1817, a nationalist festival was held on the Wartburg (where
Martin Luther had taken refuge to work on his Bible translation) to celebrate
the Reformation and the victory over Napoleon in the Battle of Leipzig.
There was a bonfire of some books the students considered reactionary,
including the works of Kotzebue, who was accused of being a Russian spy.
When the fraternity member and student of theology Karl Ludwig Sand
stabbed Kotzebue to death a year and a half later, on March 23, 1819,
Metternich used the assassination as a pretext to pass the Carlsbad Decrees,
a series of measures against so-called demagogic machinations. The
politically volatile universities were placed in trusteeship, harsh press
censorship was imposed everywhere, including Weimar, new police
regulations were imposed, and investigations of dissidents began on a
massive scale. The Carlsbad Decrees failed to stifle the newly awakened
political activity, but subterfuge and imagination were needed to get around
the more authoritarian regime. Goethe, completely in agreement with the
decrees, was taking the waters in Carlsbad in the waning days of August
1819 and was pleased and flattered to encounter Metternich and other
important people there. As he wrote to Karl August, Your Royal Highness
will surely soon have news of the results of these negotiations, and I only
hope that their success may completely live up to my expectations.
At Carlsbad and Teplitz, Goethe’s spas of choice for a few years, he found
an attractive and fashionable clientele: crowned heads, government
ministers, aristocrats, beautiful women both married and single, wealthy
bourgeois, and, last but not least, renowned artists and scientists. In the
morning they took the waters and in the evening drank champagne and
danced. They strolled and promenaded in elegant clothes. The spa orchestra
played in the park. In Teplitz in 1812, between chats with two empresses, he
had found some time for Beethoven as well, who made fun of Goethe’s
aristocratic pretensions but still deigned to play something for him on the
piano. Goethe was very impressed, although he found the music a little too
loud and passionate, and later remarked that he had never seen such a
ruthlessly artistic character before. They subsequently exchanged a few
politely superficial letters; Zelter could breathe easy.
In 1820, Goethe rode from Carlsbad over to Marienbad, the new spa
whose great era was yet to come. Still under construction, the place was
reputed to be a good investment, and it was besieged by people wanting to
build. I felt, he wrote to Karl August, as if I was in the forests of North
America, where they build a whole city in three years. The most impressive
house in town belonged to the Brösigke family. The estate owner Friedrich
Leberecht von Brösigke had built it with funds from a silent partner, Count
Klebelsberg. The latter had long been waiting to marry Brösigke’s daughter
Amalie von Levetzow, whose first two marriages had been unsuccessful. At
the tender age of fifteen, she had married a Levetzow, with whom she had
two daughters. Her husband soon left her, and she married his cousin, who
gambled away half her dowry, went to war, and died in the Battle of
Waterloo in 1815, leaving Amalie in debt. Levetzow number one was still
alive, and the Catholic Klebelsberg had to wait for him to die too before
getting his turn with Amalie. Goethe had met Amalie, then a new mother, in
Carlsbad in 1806. In his diary, he called her Pandora, both the title of a
festival play he was planning to write and a word he used to describe an
image of pleasurable delight. Now, in the summer of 1821, Amalie’s first
daughter, Ulrike, was about the age Amalie had been when Goethe had first
encountered her. Pandora had returned.
A few years earlier, Goethe had written in a Divan poem,

You say the years have taken much from you:

The real pleasure of the play of senses,
. . . contentment springs no longer
From your actions. You have lost your daring boldness!
What still remains that’s special now about you?

Brooding melancholy and lowered self-confidence, however, don’t get the

last word in this poem: There’s still enough! There’s still love and ideas!
And so it was. Goethe was never at a loss for ideas. And now he was in love
as well.
The summer after his first, brief visit in 1820, Goethe paid an extended
visit to Marienbad, taking up residence in the Brösigkes’ stately house,
where Amalie was staying with her daughters. At first, the seventy-two-year-
old Goethe was a sort of grandpa, found constantly in this family circle,
chatting on the terrace or out on a stroll with Ulrike, looking for rocks to
collect and belabor with his mineralogist’s hammer. They amounted to a
pretty collection and were displayed each night on the table before dinner.
One time, Goethe placed a bar of chocolate among them, since Ulrike was
not particularly fond of rocks—they all looked alike to her. Goethe also spent
considerable time with Amalie, who radiated her own allure. She was only
in her early thirties and was, as Goethe reported to the duke, a woman who
has done a pretty job of keeping her charm intact through a number of
years and shifting fortunes.
In his letters from that first summer in Marienbad, he at first wrote more
about the rocks than about the women. There was no cause for alarm back in
the house on the Frauenplan when a letter to August said, Give my best to
your wife and child, including Ulrike if she’s there. By chance there’s also
quite a charming Ulrike here in the house, so that in one way or another
I’m always reminded of her.
The charming Ulrike in the Brösigke house was a tall, slim, pretty young
woman who attended a girls’ boarding school in Strasbourg and spent the
summer in Marienbad with her mother and sisters. She had read Voltaire but
had never heard of Goethe. Now, of course, she learned how famous he was.
The first copies of the Journeyman Years had arrived at the spa fresh from
the printer’s. Ulrike began to read it, a bit bored, feeling that the story must
have begun in another book she wasn’t familiar with. She asked Goethe about
it. He told her some of what happens in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship—
that it centered around an itinerant troupe of actors—but told her that it was
not really appropriate reading matter for young women. The Journeyman
Years, on the other hand, contained nothing harmful. Ulrike didn’t read any
further, preferring to go for walks and to balls in the evening. According to
his diary, Goethe also occasionally attended the balls in the grand salon of
Brösigke’s house that summer. He attended them quite frequently the next
year, and after that even more often.
Compared with daily life on the Frauenplan, which had grown gloomy,
those summer weeks in Marienbad were filled with sunlight and cheerful
conviviality—as well as the shadow of young girls in flower. For the most
part, his letters to his son are silent on that score, but one can sense Goethe’s
feeling of well-being. My daily life is very simple: in the morning I take my
water in bed, bathe every third day, drink at the spring in the evening, take
my midday meal in company, and so life goes on. The wine finally arrived,
too. There was no lack of wine at the Brösigkes’, but Goethe wanted them to
sample his own favorites.
Gossip spread about Goethe spending so much time with Ulrike. In the
summer of 1822, a visitor to Marienbad writes, “He spends his evenings
mostly in the company of the Levetzow family, appearing primarily at the
side of the oldest fräulein, Ulrike von Levetzow, who entertains him either
with a song or some jocular conversation, so that he can forget at least for a
few moments the hurts he has to suffer on account of his unfortunate marriage
to his former housekeeper, known by the name of Vulpius.”
By the second summer in Marienbad, his feelings toward Ulrike were no
longer those of a grandpa. He realized that he was in love. This was the
summer he wrote Could I but flee from my own self; / Enough’s enough! /
Ah, why always seek to go / Where you don’t belong. These lines were
dashed out on the back of a written page, as were the following: Ah! Could I
only be healed! / What unbearable pain! / Like a wounded serpent / It
writhes within my heart.
Goethe’s feelings for Ulrike had already become so powerful that he found
it difficult to leave at the end of that second summer. The present knows
nothing of itself, / The farewell is horrible to feel. On the way home,
stopping in Eger, he wrote a poem in the composer Tomaschek’s album. Its
title was “Duet on the Pains of Love Directly after Parting.” Later, it was
changed to “Aeolian Harp,” the instrument beloved of the Romantics, who
hung them in pairs outdoors and tuned them to each other to produce
enchanting music played by the wind.

I thought I hadn’t any pain,

Yet just the same, my heart was sinking.
And it was written on my face,
While deep within my brain was empty.
Till finally tear on tear was falling
Releasing the restrained farewell.
And her farewell was cheerful, calm,
But now she’s weeping, just like you.

Ulrike would later say, “It wasn’t a love affair.” The poem also suggests
an asymmetrical relationship. The girl feels less pain at parting, as the
restrained and the cheerful, calm farewell suggest: she seems carefree. The
man in love has a sinking heart. Goethe had grown dissatisfied with himself
and with the entire business. He was half looking forward to the following
year, half fearing the dark winter months in the big house on the Frauenplan.
The days are full of tedium; / How boring it is when the night sky shines
with stars.
The following months were dark indeed. In mid-February, Goethe fell
dangerously ill with what was probably a heart infarct. He lost and regained
consciousness several times. Sharp abdominal pains kept him seated in a
chair for entire nights at a time. Chancellor Müller was a regular visitor and
wrote down Goethe’s uncomplaining but sometimes also despairing
comments. Death lurks around me in every corner, he said after one bout,
continuing, O you Christian God, how much suffering you heap upon your
poor people, and yet we’re supposed to extol and praise you for it in your
temples! Goethe was at loggerheads with God and with his doctors. It’s all
well and good for you to practice your arts, but you probably won’t save
me.
But his body still had enough powers of resistance to survive the crisis.
When he recovered, he seemed to some friends to be even more mentally
alert than before. He himself was astonished at how well he was able to give
his intellectual existence free rein to do what it could and what it wanted.
When spring came, his vital spirits awoke with it. He was moved to read
through the pile of heartfelt letters of sympathy and get-well messages. Once
again, they were evidence that even in illness he was a public personage. In
some places, he had already been pronounced dead. A special production of
Tasso celebrated Goethe’s recovery; his bust was on stage, crowned with
laurels.
The pious Countess Auguste zu Stolberg, his “Gustchen” of days gone by
and now the widow of the Danish minister Bernstorff, wrote her beloved pen
pal, concerned for his immortal soul. She saw the famous poet in danger, and
advised him to cast off “everything in the world that is small, vain, material,
and not good.” The letter had arrived before he fell ill; it annoyed him, and
he left it unanswered. Now, after his illness and recovery, he was in a
mellower mood and wrote a lovely long answer: To live a long time means
outliving a lot: people you’ve loved, hated, didn’t care about; kingdoms,
capitals, even woods and trees we sowed and planted in our youth. We
outlive ourselves and thankfully register it if even a few gifts of mind and
body remain to us. . . . I’ve tried to be true to myself and others my whole
life long and in all my earthly doings, have always kept an eye on the
highest things. . . . And so let us remain unconcerned about the future! In
our Father’s realm are many provinces, and since he has prepared us such
a happy place to settle on this earth, he surely will have provided for us
both in the hereafter.
In fact, however, Goethe was thinking less about the hereafter than about
the upcoming summer. He could hardly wait to see Ulrike again. On June 26,
1823, he set out for Marienbad. This time he didn’t stay in the Brösigkes’
house, because the grand duke had taken up residence there. Instead, Goethe
stayed in the Golden Grape, a genteel hotel across the way. It was only a few
steps to the Brösigkes’ terrace, where he could again while away the hours
with Ulrike. In the evenings there were the usual masquerades and balls, and
the days were spent collecting and examining rocks. And this summer, he
added meteorology to his scientific interests. He and Ulrike observed cloud
formations and took pleasure in their ever-changing shapes. These cloud
shapes acquired such symbolic importance for him that he would later
explicitly associate them with Ulrike in his great Marienbad “Elegy”:

How light and dainty, clear and finely spun,

A slender image, luminous and hazy,
Floats up, angelic, from the clouds’ stern choir,
On high, in the blue ether, so like Her.
You saw Her thus, the sovereign of the dance,
The loveliest of all those lovely figures.

But the summer was not over yet; there was still time for walks, suppers, and
dances. Goethe organized parlor games that sometimes took on a slightly
suggestive character. His idea was that they improvise a story based on the
word “garter.” The young women blushed, and Goethe talked innocuously
about the Order of the Garter.
In mid-August, he proposed marriage, the duke acting as go-between.
Much later, Ulrike wrote in her memoirs that she and her family were taken
completely unawares and at first thought that the proposal was a joke. There
may have been some roguishness in play, but Karl August put on a serious
face and made the grandiose offer of a new house across from the palace for
the “young couple.” Ulrike was assured of a generous pension if she survived
her husband. Her mother left the decision up to her. As Ulrike tells it, it
didn’t take her long to decide: she told her mother that she “was very fond of
Goethe, like a father, and if he were all alone, so that I could think I could be
useful to him, then I would take him; but because his son was married and
lived in the house with him, he had a family that I would usurp if I took their
place.” She also reports that Goethe himself did not speak to her about the
proposal. It was never explicitly rejected, and the matter remained
unresolved till the end of the year.
By his return journey to Weimar, he had inwardly bid farewell to Ulrike, if
at first only in the great “Elegy” that he scrawled into his pocket calendar
during the trip, transferred to fine paper at home, bound in red leather, and
treasured like a relic, shown only to a select few. Eckermann was one reader,
and so were Riemer and Wilhelm von Humboldt. The latter wrote to his
wife, “And so I began to read and I can truly say I was not just enchanted
with the poem but so astonished that I can hardly describe it. This poem does
not just achieve—it perhaps even exceeds the level of the most beautiful
things he has ever done.”
That was in November 1823, when Goethe had again succumbed to
illness. Humboldt was concerned and kissed Goethe on the forehead in
farewell, fearing he might not see him again. Goethe was despondent. He had
to come to terms with the inevitable end of this love story, but there was also
trouble at home. August, who feared for his inheritance, had read his father
the riot act; Ottilie suffered several fainting fits, shut herself up for days in
her room, and then took off without saying goodbye. Visitors could sense the
icy mood that had descended on the house. Only Zelter, with his easygoing,
jovial disposition, was able to counteract it. He described his visit to the
Frauenplan, where he found his friend completely neglected, as it seemed to
him: “[I] come to Weimar, drive up to the door. I wait a minute in the
carriage, nobody comes out. I go in the door. A woman’s face peers out of the
kitchen, sees me, and withdraws. Stadelmann comes and hangs his head and
shrugs. I ask, no answer. I’m still standing at the front door; maybe I should
leave? Does Death live here? Where’s the head of the house? Sad eyes.
Where’s Ottilie? Gone to Dessau. Where’s Ulrike? In bed. . . . The
chamberlain comes out: Father is—not well; sick, quite sick.—He’s dead!—
No, not dead, but very sick. I step closer and marble statues stand and stare
at me.* So I climb the stairs. The comfortable steps seem to draw back. What
will I find? What do I find? A man who looks as if he had love in his body,
the whole of love with all the tortures of youth. If that’s all it is, then he’ll
survive! No! He wants to hang on to it, glow like oyster lime; but he wants to
have pain like my Hercules on Oeta. No medicine should help; only the pain
should fortify and cure him. And so it was. It had happened: the loving heart
had delivered a divine child, fresh and beautiful. It was a difficult birth, but
the divine fruit of his labor was there and lives and will live.” Zelter knows
what to do. Since only the pain of beauty helps against ordinary pain, he
reads the “Marienbad Elegy” to Goethe in his soothing bass voice—reads it
again and again.
As we have seen, most of its strophes were written during his return trip to
Weimar. Verses from Tasso serve as an epigraph: And if a man’s struck dumb
by misery, / A god gave me power to say how much I suffer. Humboldt
remarked after visiting him that Goethe actually no longer felt an attachment
to the girl, but rather “to the mood that the experience engendered in him and
with the poetry he spun around it.” It is a poem about being in love but also,
and especially, about growing old. There is no mention of a difference in
ages, but of a threshold the lover is forbidden to cross:

A kiss—the last one—cruelly sweet, cuts through

The glorious web of intertwining loves.
My feet, now keen now loath to shun that threshold,
As if a flaming cherub drove them off,
I stare morosely down at the dark path,
And looking back, I see the gate is locked.

The elegy laments the passing of fleeting happiness—And how the day did
beat its hasty pinions / And seemed to drive the minutes rushing on!—
complains of the threshold of age and also of aging itself, and even of the
sudden paralysis of feeling, for external aging and old age are one thing, but
the disturbing experience of inner waning is another: And now, locked up
within itself, this heart, / As if it had never opened. At this point, it is no
longer merely about the loss of the beloved but about the loss of feeling. That
is a big difference, a difference that long ago provided the melancholy theme
for Werther; and it led Goethe now to group the elegy in a “Trilogy of
Passion” with the poem “To Werther,” written a year later, as well as
“Reconciliation,” a farewell to the Polish concert pianist Maria
Szymanowska, whom we will meet below. The elegy invokes the locked gate
and the heart locked up within itself. But everything rebels against that.
Escape is possible, for there is still the world of nature, offering all its
promise, alluring and alive: . . . Is there not green / And open land, a
meadow by the river? / Does not the sky unfold unearthly greatness, / So
full of figures, shifting, disappearing? And now, touched by nature’s breath,
the image of the beloved is reanimated and the heart, reflected therein,
rejoices at its own endurance. It is the poem itself that asks the questions
What is poetry? What is reality? and thus puts itself in question. The answer
is positively defiant: everything is owed to the beloved herself, not to the
phantom of poetic feelings: If ever love gave lover inspiration, / Then I’m
the one, and in the loveliest fashion; // It was through Her! He is certain
that he is not attached to a phantom, and his feelings rise to voluptuous
adoration, loving devotion: The peace of god that grants more bliss on
earth / Than even reason can—as we have read— / For me is like the peace
of love serene / In the presence of the being I love best. The blissful repose
in the image of the beloved does not last long; as we have read is already a
cautious suggestion of a distance that will slowly grow. A stop must be put to
that: Where’er you be, be all, and always childlike, / And thus, in fact,
you’re all, invincible. But after all, it cannot be. Time proves to be more
powerful:

A thousand times I conjure up her image.

Sometimes it wavers, then it’s snatched away.
One time it’s vague, another, radiant, pure.
How could this bring the slightest consolation?
This ebb and flow, this constant fluctuation?

The last two strophes bring the dramatic turning point. Suddenly it’s all
nothing. Not even nature provides any consolation: The universe I’ve lost,
I’ve lost myself, / I who was once the favorite of the gods. A final echo of
the Tasso motif, the boon of expression. The elegy ends with the lines They
urged me toward that mouth so rich in giving, / They parted us and sent me
to my ruin.
In the last summer in Marienbad, Goethe met Maria Szymanowska.
Celebrated throughout Europe, she had given a public performance but also
played for him alone one evening. She was a charming, highly educated
woman in her thirties, a widow. Goethe said it was hard to decide whether to
watch her in rapt delight or close his eyes and listen more attentively. The
last lines of the third poem in the “Trilogy of Passion,” dedicated to her, are
And then one felt—could it but last forever!— / The double bliss of music
and of love.
In October 1823, Maria Szymanowska paid a visit to Weimar. Goethe put
on a big reception in her honor and the next day invited her to dine in a small
circle. At the end of the evening, she had already said goodbye and left the
room when Goethe was overcome with a panic attack. He asked Chancellor
Müller to run after the beautiful Polish woman and beg her to return. She
agreed and came back with her sister. There was a great farewell to-do, with
Goethe struggling to control his feelings. “But all efforts at humor were to no
avail,” Müller reports. “He burst into tears and unable to speak, embraced
her and her sister, and his look of benediction followed them long after they
had disappeared down the long, open passage of rooms.”
It was the farewell of one who knew now that he really had become an old
man.

* Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an: Zelter here quotes a line from Mignon’s song at the
beginning of book 3 of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.
 CHAPTER 33

Faust: the Work of a Lifetime Finished at Last.

From heaven through the world to hell and Back.
I shall see to it that the parts are charming and entertaining
and give food for thought.
What Food for Thought Does Faust Give?

....

GOETHE HAD NOT COMPLETELY ABANDONED HOPES OF

marrying Ulrike. He wrote to her mother in late December 1823, May
nothing! nothing! stand in the way of fulfillment and success! . . . with
longing, in hope and expectation, but it was only a desperate last stand
against resignation. He countered his dejection in the time-tested way—with
new plans and activities—hoping to preserve and prove his youthful vigor
even in the face of frustrated love. When he had recovered from his
disappointment, he explained his method for combatting the melancholy of
age to his friend Sulpiz Boisserée, who was thirty-five years younger:
Forgive me, dear fellow, if I seem overly effusive; but since God and his
nature have left me to myself for so many years, I know nothing better than
to express my thankful acknowledgment through youthful activity. I want to
prove myself worthy . . . of the good fortune granted to me, and I spend day
and night in thinking of how it is possible and acting so that it is. Day and
night is no empty phrase, for I devote many a nocturnal hour (which, as is
the fate of someone my age, I spend sleeplessly) not to vague and general
thoughts but to considering exactly what I shall do the next day, which I
then honestly set about doing in the morning . . . something one avoids at
an age when one has the right to believe or to think that there will always
be a tomorrow and a day after tomorrow.
There were three main projects he now turned his energies to. In January
1824, he had copies made of Schiller’s letters in preparation for the planned
edition of their correspondence, and he sounded Cotta out about the
possibility of a new, complete, and definitive edition of his own works. Both
were urgent prompts to complete a third task: to continue working on and
possibly even finish the second part of Faust. He became absorbed in
rereading Schiller’s letters and felt the obligation to heed his friend’s words
of encouragement and admonition regarding Faust. And as he began to
negotiate with Cotta, the publisher made clear how much he wanted to have
the continuation of Faust for the new complete edition, not least for
economic reasons.
Faust was indeed a lifelong theme for Goethe. It had begun in childhood
with the puppet theater and a dog-eared copy of the old chapbook. There he
encountered Faust as the conjurer of the devil, a fairy-tale figure, both
comical and sinister, a genuine bogeyman, especially when the devil comes
to fetch him at the end. During his student days in Leipzig, the figure haunted
him, especially the mural in Auerbach’s cellar showing Faust astride a wine
barrel. He may have drafted the corresponding scene at that time, and
perhaps also the opening scene between the student and Mephistopheles,
which he may have written after his audience with the great Gottsched. When
he returned to Frankfurt from Leipzig and lay in bed, deathly ill, studying
alchemical writings and then trying some experiments with Fräulein von
Klettenberg, he felt especially close to the occult sphere of Faust the
necromancer. At first, Faust was for him a figure from medieval German
history, like Götz. Around 1772, after the execution of the infanticide Susanna
Margaretha Brandt in Frankfurt, he had the idea of combining the story of the
magician-scholar with the tragedy of Gretchen. After Götz and Werther, his
friends in Frankfurt were eagerly awaiting what was rumored to be the
imminent appearance of Faust. After a visit to Goethe in October 1774,
Heinrich Christian Boie, coeditor of the Göttinger Musenalmanach
(Göttingen Muses’ Almanac), wrote, “His ‘Doctor Faust’ is almost finished
and seems to me the greatest and most unique of all.” During his first years in
Weimar, Goethe often enjoyed reading aloud from his manuscript. Fifty years
after his death, some scenes in a manuscript copy dating from the mid-1770s
were discovered in the posthumous papers of Luise von Göchhausen, Anna
Amalia’s hunchback lady-in-waiting. They came to be known as the Urfaust.
By the time these scenes were written down, there were certainly drafts of
many more, including the act with Helen of Troy.
Goethe could not let go of the Faust theme, and that is exactly what made
him uncertain about finishing the play. But he put pressure on himself to do so
whenever a new edition of his works was in preparation. It happened with
the Göschen edition, for which he completed Egmont, Iphigenia, and finally
Tasso as well. He had hoped to bring Faust to an end, too, but in vain. In
1790 he published only Faust: A Fragment, to the disappointment of his
public. For the first Cotta complete works, he at last succeeded in bringing it
to a preliminary conclusion; in 1808, the eighth volume of that edition was
published as Faust: The Tragedy Part One.
Several scenes for Part Two were already completed by that time, for the
Helen of Troy act and for the end of the play, but mainly, there were only lists
showing the sequence of scenes. Since beginning Faust, Goethe oscillated
between intense proximity to the material and alienated distance from it.
Sometimes its northern phantoms felt remote and foreign to him; at others,
when he approached the world of Faust, scenes seemed to proliferate like a
family of mushrooms. He was himself astonished at how quickly he could
feel his way back into the material after a phase of neglecting it. Able to pick
up seamlessly where he had left off, he once wrote that if he smeared a bit of
soot on the new pages, no one would notice the difference in age of the
manuscripts. It was remarkable how much I resemble myself and how little
my inner life has suffered through all those years and events, he wrote in
1788, and there are similar statements from later years.
The version of Part One that was published in 1808 did indeed prove to be
seamlessly unified. That is no longer the case for Part Two, on which Goethe
began to work energetically in 1825. The atmosphere changes, as do the
characters. Faust is no longer the medieval German scholar or the passionate
lover. Now he enters the stage as a confident, worldly-wise gentleman. No
longer a dubious character, he plays a clear-cut role—or rather, a succession
of roles, each clearly defined in turn. An emperor courts him, and the stuffy
air of the scholar’s study is nowhere in evidence. In the Helen of Troy act, he
is a German knight of aristocratic carriage, a Nordic imperator. Then he
becomes a civilian attendant to the general staff and observer of battles, and
ends up as a dike-building entrepreneur. Mephisto’s character changes as
well. He has long since ceased to be a genuine medieval Satan and has
become a man of the world, an elegant cynic, the go-to man for technical
problems and dirty work; then he’s a slippery business consultant and, at the
very end, a gay roué. For long stretches, their wager is completely forgotten.
These are the very different worlds in which the second part of the tragedy is
played out. The Helen of Troy act was even supposed to appear as a separate
work. In the end Goethe decided to include it in the Faust tragedy, but still
brought it out in 1827 as an advance publication under the title “Helen:
Classic-Romantic Phantasmagoria.”
The Helen act was the starting point for his work on Faust II. With this
third act, completed in 1826, serving as a center, Goethe developed the
beginning of Part Two, the scenes at the emperor’s court and, above all, the
“Classical Walpurgis Night” as the antecedents to the Helen act. Earlier, he
had finished some material for the final act, but he still needed a transition,
an act four. Goethe was still working on it the year before he died. On July
22, 1831, his diary records, Achieved the main business. Final touches.
Inserted everything in fair copy. He told Eckermann, What’s left of my life .
. . I can now regard as a pure gift, and it is now basically all the same what
more I do, if anything. He informed his friends that the work was now
sealed and would be published only after his death. We don’t know whether
it was really put under seal; no traces of a seal have survived. Goethe did
open the manuscript once more, on January 24, 1832. New excitement about
Faust with regard to greater elaboration of the main motifs, which I had
handled all too laconically in order to finish.
Friends, including Wilhelm von Humboldt, urged him to publish the work
while he was still alive. In the last letter he ever wrote, Goethe replied to
Humboldt, There is no question that it would give me endless joy to
dedicate and communicate these very sober jests while still alive to my
worthy, far-flung, and gratefully acknowledged friends and to hear their
responses. These days, however, are really so absurd and confused that I
am convinced that my honest and long-pursued efforts on this curious
contraption would be poorly rewarded and driven onto the shore to lie
there in ruins like a wrecked ship and be covered by the flotsam and jetsam
of time. Confused lessons on confused actions rule the world.
If confused lessons rule the world, what about the lessons of this great
drama that Goethe wanted to keep from the public for now? Are they also
confused? Is there, in fact, some central lesson, some basic idea? Goethe’s
answers to that question were contradictory. On the one hand, he declared
that the intellect had the most stake in the matter, by which he referred to the
predominance of allegory. As a rule, our intellect is quite good at unraveling
the meaning of allegories. They may be complex, but they remain rational.
Their real appeal is to those who like riddles and are keen on finding a neat
solution, as well as to literary scholars who can make a career of analyzing
them. The masquerade scene explicitly refers to its own allegorical character
and even lets us know how to interpret the figures. Proclaim for each one,
who they are, cries the herald. The entire scene is the occasion for
suggestive jokes, but not for ambiguity. It resembles the pageants in Weimar
that Goethe arranged and composed verses for in his capacity as official
poet. In them, events at court as well as the virtues and vices were usually
presented as allegories. It was all playful and charming, but also quite
unambiguous.
On the other hand, Goethe emphasizes the incommensurability of his Faust
sequel. Each problem solved yields a new problem. Readers should follow
the subtle clues, he said, and they might even discover more than he had put
in. And so it was. People truly found many things—probably too many—in
the play. Even with Faust I, Goethe had no objection to this hunt for meaning.
He found it flattering, growing annoyed only when the riddle solvers became
so involved in their decryption that they lost sight of the cryptic beauty of the
work. Goethe advocated the aesthetic pleasure to be gained by a relaxed,
playful approach. The Germans, by the way, are such odd people! he told
Eckermann. They make life more difficult than is proper by looking for
deep thoughts and ideas everywhere and putting them into everything.—
Good gracious! Have the courage for once to surrender yourselves to your
impressions, allow yourselves to be captivated, moved, uplifted . . . but
don’t always think everything is vain that isn’t some abstract thought or
idea! . . . What a nice thing it would have been indeed had I decided to
string the rich, motley, and highly multifarious life I brought to view in
Faust on the meager string of a single, consistent idea!
And why should we be satisfied with a single idea when there are so many
in the play? Goethe wanted us to tease them out. To Schiller’s remark “I am
eagerly awaiting to see how the folktale is going to nestle up to the
philosophical part of the whole work,” Goethe replied, I shall see to it that
the parts are charming and entertaining and give food for thought.
Let us therefore cast an eye on this great play, in its final form at last, in
hopes that it will entertain us and also provide food for thought.
 First, Faust and Mephisto: as for the devil, there was actually no room for
him in Goethe’s worldview. He often said that he would not institute an
independent evil power, and when Kant introduced “radical evil” into his
philosophy, Goethe declared that the Sage of Königsberg had now
beslobbered the mantle of philosophy. For Goethe, the devil did not exist. If
you believe in God, you have to believe in the devil as well, and Goethe
believed in neither a transcendent God nor the devil. He had been a Spinozist
all his life, and his watchword was deus sive natura. God is nature in its
entire richness and creative power. And man can and should discover,
preserve, and use this creative power, which also lives within him. Activity
is thus the true service to God in nature, and the drive to create is absolutely
never ending. That is also Goethe’s vision of eternal life. My conviction that
we will continue to exist springs from the concept of activity, he told
Eckermann when he was almost eighty, for if I am ceaselessly active to the
end, then nature is obliged to assign me another form of existence when my
spirit is no longer able to sustain the present one.
Man fulfills his purpose when, as natura naturata (incarnate nature), he
participates in natura naturata (creative nature). Goethe’s dialectical
formulation is that as a creative process, nature means polarity and
enhancement. Opposites create a tension that enhances what is alive without
becoming locked in rigid dualism. Light and darkness together bring the
world of color into being. Good becomes better when it has passed through
the ordeal of evil. How we are to imagine that is explained by the Lord in the
“Prologue in Heaven”:

I never have disliked the likes of you.

Of all the many spirits of negation
It is the rogue who gives me least vexation.
It’s all too easy for man to lose his steam.
He soon becomes too fond of utter ease;
And so I like to give him a companion
Who’s active, goading, and does the Devil’s business.

Mephisto prevents man from slowing down and losing his steam by
keeping him busy. So Mephisto as a principle is an integral part of being
human. And to that extent, Mephisto is an integral part of Faust too. Although
Faust and Mephisto are independent figures, in the end they constitute one
person—in the same sense that Goethe spoke of himself as a collective
singular consisting of several persons with the same name. Faust frankly
articulates the contradictory unity that binds him and Mephisto together:

There dwell two souls, alas, within my breast!

The one desires a parting from the other.
The one clings to the world with earthly lust,
Hangs on for all it’s worth, with all its senses.
The other struggles mightily from the dust,
And yearns to reach the realms of lofty forebears.

The precarious unity of the individual does not prevent us, however, from
investigating its separate poles in order to trace what they contribute to the
enhancement of the whole.
The Lord says that Mephisto is meant to be a companion to man so that the
latter does not slow down too early. And how does this stimulation occur?
Through the spirit of negation—through criticism. Mephisto is a spirit who
says no. What does he negate? We can see his first significant negation in the
“Prologue in Heaven.” The angels are praising the cosmos and the great
works of the Lord. Everyone else is rejoicing and only Mephisto is carping.
As the negating spirit, he is the critical reviewer of the cosmos. What is there
to object to? Nothing less than an important flaw in the construction of man:

Of suns and worlds I’ve nothing much to say.

I only see the way that humans struggle.
The little god of the world remains unchanged,
As flighty as the day when he was born.
Could he do a little better? Well, he might,
If only you’d not given him the spark of heavenly light.
He calls it reason, employs it without cease
To be the beastliest of all the beasts.

Mephisto sketches out an anthropology. Man has a bit of heavenly light

and calls it reason. But he has too little of it to be truly reasonable and too
much to be in harmony with his animal self. So the “animal rationale” has a
flaw in his construction. The animalistic and the rational parts of him get in
each other’s way. Mephisto argues like the skeptical anthropologists of our
day, who describe man as an “eccentric being,”* a “defective being,”† or
even as a “stray bullet of evolution,”‡ since his instinct and his reason are
not in balance, with predictable results: fear of death, self-destruction,
destruction of the environment, and aggression. Mephisto sounds a warning:
And be forewarned, this human beastliness / Will soon be marvelously
manifest. Man can plunge into bestiality—entire cultures can—and, again in
the words of Mephisto, he can be the beastliest of all the beasts. That was
also Friedrich Schiller’s thesis, and it is quite possible that it was he who
inspired the idea in Goethe.
So Mephisto promises he can bring about an improvement in the
precarious and risky structure of mankind and do it by using Faust as his test
case. He intends to relieve him of the burdensome contradiction between
heaven and earth, spirit and material, by bringing him completely back down
to earth. He wants to prove that it is better for man if his life is no longer
confused by the spark of heavenly light, but can be unconditionally devoted
to what earth has to offer. This is Mephisto’s description of the illness he
will cure Faust of: From heaven he demands the brightest stars / And from
earth’s pleasures nothing but the best. / And whether they come from near
or very far, / They cannot soothe his deeply troubled breast.
What should we call someone whose yearning reaches out beyond the
physical environment in which he lives? It would be best to call him a meta-
physician.
But Faust is no metaphysician in the sense of seeking or providing the
answers sought by scholastic metaphysics. In his first monologue, Alas, I’ve
studied philosophy . . . , he shows himself to be someone who is dissatisfied
with and even disgusted by philosophical and theological answers. But he
remains a metaphysician in the sense that he is still asking Where shall I
grasp you, never-ending nature? and his yearning transcends mere physical
pleasure. He wants to understand what holds the world together at its core,
and he also wants to be moved by that understanding. This double desire—to
understand and to be moved by the spirit of the whole—is what makes Faust
a metaphysician. And that is the way he is spoken of in the “Prologue in
Heaven,” where the first of the two famous wagers is made, the bet between
Mephisto and the Lord, to be followed by the one between Mephisto and
Faust.
 The wager that Mephisto offers the Lord can be summarized as follows:
Mephisto bets that he can transform even as stubborn a metaphysician as
Faust into a one-dimensional being: Dust he shall eat. With Faust as an
example, he wants to prove that man is better served by clearing his head of
metaphysical follies and making him into a sober realist. It’s better to be
earthbound than suspended in some problematic space between heaven and
earth. But the Lord intends to prove that in the end, it will be impossible to
alienate Faust from his spiritual primal source and extinguish the light of
heaven within him: A good man even in his dark compulsion / Is well aware
of what the right path is.
What we have is a revealing reversal of the Job story alluded to in the
“Prologue in Heaven.” In both cases, God and Satan make a bargain. In the
story of Job, Satan intends to prove that he can destroy Job’s faith in God by
bringing him great misfortune. In the Faust story, Mephisto sets out to prove
that he can lure Faust away from God by bringing him earthly happiness.
Job’s misfortune and Faust’s earthly happiness are supposed to have the same
outcome: the surrender of the spiritual dimension, the betrayal of
transcendence.
In our post-metaphysical age, Mephisto seems quite familiar and also
utterly remote from everything we usually think of as evil. He is quite simply
the embodiment of the reality principle. What it demands is also what
Mephisto uses to tempt Faust: he should give up on transcendence and
concern himself with tangible pleasures. Mephisto will tell him, I’ve
administered a longtime cure / For the mishmash of your imagination. He
sounds like today’s positivists, sociologists, and psychologists. In the area of
cognition, he advocates reductionism:

Whoever would describe and understand

A living being must first drive out its spirit.
And when he holds its parts within his hand,
He finds it lacks, alas, the bond of spirit.
...
Next time will go much better, you will see,
Once you’ve learned to reduce it down
And classify it properly.
 As in cognition, so also in the pleasures of the senses: Faust should
become a reductionist. Mephisto wants to transform him into a robust
satisfier of only his basest drives—for his own good, he claims. As the
embodiment of the reality principle, Mephisto offers his services as a
physician to humans whose relationship to the world is problematic. That
becomes even clearer when we take a close look at the second wager, the
one between Faust and Mephisto.
Faust is in despair. He feels as if he’s locked in a prison; he is not able to
grasp infinite nature, either in his thinking or in his life. He intends to kill
himself, for it seems at least possible that beyond the gates of death a divine
height will rise into view. But it is just as possible that one disintegrates into
nothingness. On one side, metaphysical uncertainty; on the other, physical
certainties. He decides to remain here. He does not swallow the poison. He
is encouraged to continue living, first by the bells of the Easter celebration,
and then by Mephisto, who promises to make him a citizen of the world from
head to toe, to show him the plenitude of existence and the full enjoyment of
reality. I’ll serve you here and now, says Mephisto, and when we meet again
in the hereafter, you will serve me. That is the usual pact with the devil to
which Goethe alludes. But it never gets that far, for it turns into a wager with
quite a different significance. Its formula is If ever I should tell the moment,
/ I beg you, stay! You are so lovely! / Then I am yours to lay in chains.
Let us look at this wager from Faust’s point of view. In his hunger for
experience, he proves also to be filled with a peculiar pride: his longing is
supposed to be greater than the world. He wants to prove that the world is
too small and cramped to satisfy him. But to avoid misunderstandings, we
must also add that we’re talking about a world seen and presented through
the optics of Mephistopheles, a world reduced to an obscure object of
desire. Mephisto offers Faust the world as a package deal of pleasure, and
Faust wants to prove that a world reduced to an object of pleasure is not
enough for him. Mephisto transforms the world into a consumable, and Faust
wants to prove that he is more than a consumer; he wants to prove the
insatiability of his metaphysical desire. Mephisto, however, is betting that
Faust’s metaphysical desire will be taken care of once he has had his fill of
the worldly pleasures Mephisto provides. Faust sets out to prove that no
single moment can do justice to his aspiration, while Mephisto plans to have
him stretch out on a bed of idleness. Mephisto offers Faust the joys of
ordinariness. He wants him to realize that he too is only a man among men, a
consumer of the world.
By way of this wager Mephisto, whom we first meet as a spirit who says
no, becomes a productive principle. Between Faust and Mephisto there is a
tension that leads to enhancement. Faust really becomes Faustian only in
contention with Mephisto.
How so? Faust strives upward and Mephisto drags him downward. The
point is that neither the “pure,” high-flying Faust nor the “pure” Mephisto
who would bring him down triumphs. Instead, the result of these opposed
forces—this up and down—is a movement outward, neither vertical
transcendence nor pure immanence, but something else: an immanent
transcending, if you will. Tempted by Mephisto, Faust becomes a
transgressor of limits on a horizontal plane, hungry for experience. His urge
is “outward,” into the fullness of life. Mephisto’s magical cape helps Faust
immediately experience the things he hungers for. His vertical yearning is
replaced by excitements on the horizontal plane, excitements that are
extremely productive. The mechanics of this contest between Mephisto and
Faust are as follows: Mephisto offers tangible pleasures, and Faust makes
something sublime of them. Gretchen is an example. Mephisto obtains her as
a sexual object, but Faust falls in love with her. Sex becomes eros, desire
becomes ardor. This same pattern prevails throughout. Mephisto provides the
goods—and Faust makes something more of them.
This interplay between the metaphysician Faust and the realist Mephisto is
the proprietary secret of modernism. Therein we see how the vertical
striving of previous ages is redirected into the horizontal and becomes
thereby a historical force of unheard-of power. Modernism no longer strives
upward, since it has discovered that heaven is empty and God is dead. But in
modernism, the expansive passion that once led man to invent God—because
only God seemed spacious enough to incorporate within himself the wealth
of human life—was secularized, with the unexpected result that man can be
considered small, yet still capable of great things. The passion formerly
directed toward God becomes a passion for exploring and taking possession
of the world. That is exactly what it means to move “outward.” Instead of
trying to approach God, man circles the globe. Modernism is no longer
disposed to be cosmic, but to become global. With the wager between Faust
and Mephisto and the resulting dynamic action, the momentous transformation
of metaphysical furor into an engine for civilization’s conquest of the world
unfolds before our eyes. Aided by Mephisto, Faust has good fortune with
women, reforms government finance, provides bread and circuses, becomes
a successful military commander, and finally a colonizer on a grand scale. He
has dikes built to claim more land from the sea. As Mephisto’s student, Faust
becomes a metaphysician of the physical world. Instead of transcending the
world, he merges obsessively with it and so can demand of man: Let him
stand here firmly, take a look; / To the ambitious this world’s an open book.
/ Why waste time maundering in eternity?
Goethe imagines all the things that modernism could do with man—
including, for example, producing him in a laboratory. The Homunculus
scenes are his contribution to the discussion of anthropotechnology, to use a
neologism of Peter Sloterdijk’s.§ It is not Faust himself but his eager student
Wagner who finally succeeds in producing a monster in a test tube. The
terrifying hour has struck. / It echoes through the sooty walls. These words
open the scene in the laboratory and, at the crucial stage of his experiment,
Wagner whispers, A man is being made. Goethe’s original idea was to have
Faust himself perform this experiment. Then he transferred the deed to
Wagner, but still wanted to have Faust and Mephisto in attendance and, most
important, make the experiment succeed: the chemical manikin . . . instantly
shatters the glowing flask and makes his entrance as an agile, well-formed
dwarf reads the stage direction. In the final version, however, Faust is still
lying unconscious and only Mephisto is conscious and present—and not just
as a witness but as a participant. The crucial change from the first draft is
that Homunculus is not a complete person, and so is only half born. He
remains trapped in the test tube, but is a person to the extent that love for his
progenitor is awakened. Something made wants to be treated as something
born; it wants to be loved. Love is a prerequisite for its being able to exist.
And therefore, Homunculus speaks to its manufacturer Wagner, Well, dear
Father, how goes it? That was no jest. / Come, clasp me now—but gently—
to your breast. But that cannot be. Glass separates them, and so Homunculus
must learn his first lesson: That is the property of things: / For what’s
natural, the cosmos just suffices. / What’s artificial needs enclosed
devices. Homunculus remains in the test tube. What is artificial can for the
time being exist only in an artificial milieu, but the occupant of the test tube is
permitted to accompany Faust and Mephisto on their journey to ancient
Greece during the “Classical Walpurgis Night.”
 Goethe engages with the alchemical dream of creating human life at a time
in the history of science when Friedrich Wöhler’s successful synthesis of
urea—the formation of an organic substance from inorganic material—gave
rise to brave speculations about the possibility of artificially producing more
complicated organisms and perhaps even human life itself. Thus in the
Homunculus episode, written in 1828, Goethe refers not just to the alchemy
of Paracelsus but also to contemporary experimentation. Wagner declares,
What once was thought mysterious in nature / We venture to explore it with
our reason. / And things that nature used to organize / We now can have
them crystallized.
However, Goethe learned from the Jena chemist Johann Wolfgang
Döbreiner—his informant on developments in that field—that the newest
ideas about the creation of human life were nothing but idle fantasies. Goethe
was relieved to hear it and so transferred the project from Faust to the
scientifically informed but otherwise foolish Wagner. He is permitted to
voice ideas that contemporary geeks still believe in and proclaim: But in
years to come we’ll mock mere chance. / A brain like this, that’s meant for
first-class thought, / Can just as well be made by first-class thinkers.
There is a flash of irony when, at the end of the “Classical Walpurgis
Night,” Goethe returns Homunculus to the elements. Artificial man must go
back into nature’s evolutionary process and work his way up from the
bottom. And so the artificial thing learns to be born. The test tube shatters
and Homunculus dissolves in the sea, the fecund ur-soup: You’ll move by
everlasting norms / And pass through a thousand thousand forms, / Have
plenty of time to become a man.
Even though Homunculus is Wagner’s fabrication, he still belongs in the
sphere of the play between Faustian metaphysics and Mephistophelian
physics. Another example is the invention of paper currency, one more
modern idea that Faust and Mephisto concoct as part of their takeover of the
world. Let us recall that alchemical and magical practices still play a big
part in the first Walpurgis Night. There, Faust is dosed with fluid gold, a
magic potion that makes him young and attractive so that he can make a
conquest of Gretchen. But not until the paper money scene is the level of
genuinely modern sorcery reached, namely, the creation of value from
speculation on the future, i.e., from nothing. Apparently, the whole idea is
quite simple; it just has to occur to you. Money has become short at the
imperial court, with state indebtedness becoming immeasurably large.
What’s to be done? Faust’s and Mephisto’s idea is this: perhaps there is gold
—some natural, some buried—to be found in the ground. The emperor should
use the real estate that belongs to him as security against an increase in the
amount of money in circulation. And so they print paper money. On each bill
are the words,

Herewith let it be known to all and sundry:

This paper’s worth a thousand crowns of money,
As for the pledge of what is in your hand:
Vast riches lie beneath the kaiser’s land.
And it’s been all arranged: this buried wealth
Replaces the paper as soon as it’s unearthed.

This, by the way, was the very same idea behind the introduction of the so-
called Rentenmark after the hyperinflation of 1923, for the Rentenmark was
backed by the real property of the German empire.
It also seems the best solution to the emperor in the paper money scene in
Faust. More money is put into circulation, secured by real property.
Moreover, in this way money becomes unprecedentedly liquid. People don’t
have to drag around gold coins, that heavy form of cash:

A banknote’s handy carried in the breast

Where it pairs nicely with a billet-doux.
The priest keeps one devoutly in his prayer book.
It lets the soldier turn around right quick
When he can lighten the belt around his hips.

Two things are needed for the whole scheme to function. One is imagination:
you’ve got to be able to imagine the real value on which the paper money is
based. The other is trust: you need to trust that the valuation is correct, which
is why verification by a higher authority is required—in this case, by the
emperor. The emperor himself is ecstatic:

Let’s go, let’s go! . . .

...
Now let us squander time in merriment!
 For right on time, Ash Wednesday is approaching.
And in the meantime, we shall celebrate
The carnival with wild, carousing revels.

This is not exactly the way Faust had imagined it, however. Goethe, who
for some periods was also in charge of the duchy’s finances, had been
inspired by the financial revolution put in motion by the Bank of England
when it began basing the amount of money in circulation not just on gold and
existing securities but on the expectation of future creation of real value to
which the increased circulation was meant to contribute. That is also Faust’s
intention: to crank up production by putting more money into circulation. But
instead, he only unleashes consumption until there is nothing left to consume.
The final result is inflation, the paper ghost of guilders. Only the jester is not
fooled by this modern magic. Just looky here, this isn’t worth a cent. That’s
his comment on the pretentious banknotes, and he immediately puts his money
into tangible assets. Before his money can trickle away, he buys a house and
land. Tonight I’ll go to sleep in my own house!
Faust and Mephisto conjure up other specters of modernity as well. The
court is bored and wants to be entertained. Faust: As a start we made it rich,
/ And now it wants to be amused. People want to see Helen and Paris, a
magic lantern show, a theater of illusion. This story doesn’t end well either.
Faust asks for Mephisto’s help, and the latter recommends entering the
Realm of the Mothers. What sort of realm is that? What does he mean by
mothers? When Eckermann asked Goethe about it, he merely flashed his
Jupiter’s eyes at him and quoted his own verse The Mothers!—Mothers!—it
sounds so strange. But the scene that follows does make it somewhat
clearer. Linking to the paper money scene, it can be taken as a continuation of
creating something from nothing, but this time with images instead of paper.
When Mephisto sends Faust into the Realm of the Mothers, he’s referring him
to the inner workshop of the imagination. Here too, as with paper money, you
can make from nothing something that others experience as real. Faust tells
Mephisto, You dispatch me to the void / So that I there increase both art
and power. Mephisto refers Faust, whose job is to entertain the court with
his magic lantern show, to imagination which operates in the void. In what
sense is this a creation of value from nothing? It sounds puzzling at first.
Let us think about what happens when imagination is active and we try to
picture people or stories. We imagine them, and sometimes what we imagine
becomes so real that it triumphs over reality itself. Honoré de Balzac, for
example, threatened people who had annoyed him by saying, “Just you wait,
we’ll meet again in my next novel!” Imagination’s seizure of power can even
be political, and then we speak of the dominance of ideology. But it can also
happen in the politics of everyday life. Here too, Goethe has Faust foresee
things that have taken shape today in the age of media, where we all spend a
considerable part of our lives not in the “first” reality but in an imaginary
one, and even primary reality is shot through with the imaginary. The world
consists almost completely of the images the media offer us.
So Faust learns from Mephisto how to exploit the enchantment of
imagination. He gives the courtiers a performance: the abduction of Helen as
a magic lantern show. The only problem is that he ends up enchanting
himself. He can no longer tell reality from imagination. With the cry Who’s
seen her once can never do without her, he tries to embrace the imaginary
Helen. On the one hand, what’s happening is trivial: Faust tries to embrace
Helen as if she were a movie star, which won’t work. On the other hand, the
scene is extremely interesting from the point of view of media theory, for it
demonstrates that the ontological status of mediated reality is relatively
unclear. We don’t know exactly where figures like Helen—or in our day,
Madonna—are located on the continuum between existence and
nonexistence.
Mephisto, who wanted to cure Faust of the metaphysical mishmash of
imagination, contributes to his entanglement in other, more modern forms of
the same thing. That becomes clear in the war scene.
In the economic crisis unleashed by inflation, the empire threatens to sink
into anarchy. Internal and external contradictions are exacerbated and result
in war. Mephisto’s comment is laconic and very cynical: War and trade and
piracy, / an indivisible trinity. Faust and Mephisto act as advisers and
helpers to the emperor, who must fend off a counter-emperor. They serve him
well by specializing in the production of phantoms. They produce ghost
armies—a sort of fata morgana—that so intimidate the enemy that he flees. It
is quite possible to read this as an allegory of effective wartime propaganda,
a media-enabled presentation of false information. Waging war with images
—here too, Goethe is astute at anticipating future developments.
As we have seen, Mephisto plays the role of instigator of Faust’s
achievements in all these cases. Among other things, the drama is a song of
praise for Faust’s competence. Springing from the opposite tendencies of
metaphysical need and a will to be worldly, his competence is meant to
triumph in the end: Whoever strives with all his might, / In the end we can
redeem him. Yet his prowess does not seem so unconditionally positive,
especially since its prerequisite is Mephisto, who embodies not only the
stimulus of negation and the unrestrained will to be worldly but also the
sometimes ominous consequences of Faust’s competence. In another context,
Goethe famously said of this Mephistophelian aspect of competence, The
person who acts is always unscrupulous. No one has a conscience except
the contemplative person.
In the final act, Faust the entrepreneur wants to round out his real estate
holdings. But there is still a little chapel and the cottage of Philemon and
Baucis. My grand estate is not yet whole, says Faust, and Mephisto’s
assistants are immediately at hand to complete the relocation by force. The
chapel and cottage are burned to the ground and the elderly couple perish in
the flames. Is Faust justified by his active striving? In the “Prologue in
Heaven” the Lord declares, The striving man will always err. Is that a
pardon before the fact? No. Faust finds it objectionable that in his enormous
domain there is still a minuscule blank spot over which he has no authority,
an irritating remnant that defies his will to rule. And the more total his
ambition is, the more irritating the resistant remnant. Those few trees are not
my own, / they spoil the world that I possess. Faust is tired of being just and
wants to make short work of them. He delegates Mephisto to go and sweep
them all aside! Mephisto whistles shrilly and the thugs who will burn
Philemon and Baucis appear. It is a grisly scene, and one the poet Paul Celan
may have had in mind when he composed the great Holocaust poem “Death
Fugue.” Faust, who brings death, is also a “Meister aus Deutschland”—a
master from Germany—who “steps from the house and the stars are flashing
he whistles his hounds out / he . . . has a grave dug in the earth.”
Goethe has not tidily apportioned the bright and the dark sides to Faust and
Mephisto in the sense that Faust wants to do good and Mephisto turns it into
evil. It’s not that simple. Instead, their relationship is more like what
Heinrich Heine portrays in his satirical narrative “Germany: A Winter’s
Tale.” There the protagonist, a version of Heine himself, is followed by a
shadowy figure with an executioner’s ax. When confronted, the latter
explains, “whatever thoughts are in your mind, / I carry out, I do them. . . . I
am / the deed to your thought.” In the same way, Mephisto is the deed to
Faust’s thoughts. Faust’s competence casts a shadow, and the shadow is
Mephisto. He makes it manifest that the competent, successful Faust becomes
entangled in guilt, from the tragedy of Gretchen to the deaths of Philemon and
Baucis. Goethe’s world theater shows how, via long chains of causality, a
successful life in one place sooner or later results in the destruction of life in
another. The world is not fair, and the dead litter the course of Faust’s
worldly career. If the causal connection between an action and its evil
consequences is short, we speak of guilt; if somewhat longer, we speak of
tragedy. If the causal chain is very long, guilt and tragedy can be attenuated to
mere unease. Knowing ourselves to be survivors because others have
suffered and died, we cannot escape feeling such unease. Mephisto, who
spurs Faust on to consume the world, also embodies this unfathomable,
universal interconnection of action and guilt, the awful devolvement of a
deed, sooner or later, into an evil deed.
Goethe once said he had no talent for tragedy and that it was his nature to
balance things out. He calls his play a “tragedy” but ends it with Faust’s
redemption. At the beginning of Part Two, after the Gretchen tragedy, he puts
Faust into a healing sleep, a sleep of forgetting that has caused many a Faust
commentator sleepless nights ever since. What does forgetting mean here?
Forgetting is the art of finding new beginnings where there aren’t any. Goethe
was a past master of such new beginnings, and Faust’s awaking in Part Two
of the tragedy is a prime example. While the sun rises and Faust still
slumbers into the morning, Ariel’s song is heard: Remove the stinging, bitter
darts of blame, / And cleanse his mind of horror he has seen.
All well and good, but in the final act, we witness a macabre self-
delusion. Faust, successful and powerful, is now beleaguered by a
personified Worry:

Once I have got hold of someone

Nothing in the world can help him.
Never-ending gloom’s upon him,
And the sun’s gone from the sky.
All his outer senses function,
Yet within him dwells the darkness.

With the utmost effort, Faust thinks he has once again fended off this specter
of worry, but it returns to strike him blind. Still undaunted, he declares, I feel
the night invading, deep and deeper, / Yet still within me all is brightly lit.
Most commentators have extolled this inner light. Goethe, however,
presents a drastic account of how miserable is Faust’s end (before his final
ascension into heaven) and that this much celebrated inner light does not save
him from a serious misapprehension. Faust hears the clang of spades and
thinks it is the sound of work on his humanitarian project of land reclamation
—I open land for many, many millions. In fact, they are digging his grave.
In this sardonically ironic scene the wager—almost forgotten by this time
—also comes up again. In his delusion that a project is under way that will
last for centuries when it is only his own grave being dug, Faust surrenders
himself to euphoric visions: How I would love to see this busy swarm, / And
stand upon free ground with a free people. Inspired by this vision, he
declares, To this moment I could say: / You are so lovely! I beg you, stay!
Does this mean he has lost the bet, or is he saved by the subjunctive “I could
say”? Entire libraries have been devoted to that question. Goethe himself
said various things about it. Sometimes he talked about pulling a fast one on
Mephisto, sometimes about Faust’s being pardoned. One way or another,
Faust’s provisional end before the final end is a pitiful affair. He luxuriates
in his projections and doesn’t realize that his end approaches.
At the time Goethe was composing these scenes of the downfall of Faust
the entrepreneur, he was himself both fascinated by great engineering
projects and repulsed by the Saint-Simonian religion of industrialism, which
sacrificed the individual to the collective and beauty to utility. As for modern
technology, he procured a model of the first steam train and showed it off like
a cult object. With Eckermann he discussed the possibility of constructing
canals across Panama, at Suez, and another connecting the Rhine and the
Danube. I would like to see these three great things, he said, and it would
be well worth the trouble of holding out for another fifty years or so for
their sake. They were projects he regarded as the peak of humanity’s
inventive spirit and entrepreneurial prowess. To the extent that these visions
were shared by the Saint-Simonians, he welcomed the fact and confessed that
very intelligent people were obviously at the head of that sect. But their
socialist methods, subordination of all other goals to material welfare and
technical progress, and their ideas for collective ownership were anathema
to him. The collectivism he abhorred is voiced in Faust’s highly emotional I
open land for many, many millions. Perhaps the masses will then be free,
but not the individual. Because his Faust had strayed haphazardly too far into
Saint-Simonian territory, Goethe needed to lay him to rest with mordant
irony. And he was relieved when he heard that the Saint-Simonians had been
forced to disband in early 1832. He commented on them, The fools imagine
that they have the brains to play the role of Providence. And isn’t Faust
himself a fool for not realizing that his end is near and, instead, wallowing in
the idea that he will not perish for eons?
In any event, it is Mephisto who triumphs in the penultimate scene. He no
longer appears as a clown who inspires and facilitates Faust’s actions, but as
an unfathomable figure of nihilism and destruction who opens up the
terrifying prospect of the futility of all things. Mephisto is no longer a comic
but a cosmic nihilist. As the lemures—the spirits of the dead—dig Faust’s
grave, Mephisto declares, The elements are all in league with us, / and
sheer destruction is our goal. Although Mephisto is also a comic figure, he
remains the menacing accomplice of night, the lieutenant of nothingness, or as
Faust addresses him, Chaos’s fantastical son.
Mephisto has many contradictory faces. One Mephisto promotes
unconditional anti-metaphysical worldliness, another embodies the threat of
nihilism, the great futility of the cosmos. Today we have other names for it,
entropy, for example, which seems to foreordain the end of the universe and
the futility of the entire life process. Mephisto, therefore, is quite simply a
challenge to existence as meaningful order. That is what Faust learns, and
Goethe must have experienced it in his darker moments as well. In the scene
“Forest and Cave,” Faust turns in a monologue to his genius, the lofty spirit,
with the words

. . . To these delights that take me

Ever closer to the gods, you gave me
A companion and no longer can
I do without him, though in ice-cold insolence
He debases me before my very self
And with one breath transforms your gifts to naught.

Goethe’s understanding of nature was deep enough for him to be able to

grasp its immensity, which dissolves all meaningful order. He has Mephisto
proclaim the primacy of darkness: In the beginning was darkness, which then
gave birth to light, and thus everything will sink back into darkness. The
world arose from nothing and will return to nothing. This Mephistophelian
idea of the primacy of darkness is contradicted in the play, but it remains a
shadowy presence thanks to Mephisto, the clown and lieutenant of
nothingness. Perhaps that is why Goethe has Mephisto emerge from the mask
of Phorkyas at the phantasmagoric end of the Helen act. He rises up to a
gigantic height, as if he were the director of the entire scene. It could mean
that it’s all only a game, a beautiful sham contaminated by nothingness.
But is it really so bad if Mephistophelian stage managers are at work,
transforming reality into semblance so we no longer know what’s being
played?
We have our life in the reflected colors, says the hymn to the sunrise in the
first scene of Part Two. There man is portrayed as the inhabitant of an
intermediate world. From the advent of some immensity—whether it be pure
light or total darkness, complete being or absolute nothingness—we are
protected by composite conditions, refractions, indirections, reflected
colors. We need a world of appearance and even illusion and self-delusion,
and Mephisto is also a magician, an illusionist, a stage manager to the extent
that he helps construct the sphere we need in order to live our lives.
Faust consisted of very sober jests, Goethe wrote in his last letter to
Wilhelm von Humboldt. One of these sober jests is surely the ascension into
heaven at the end. It’s quite a sublime business, but not entirely. Mephisto
lurks in the wings, ready to snatch Faust’s immortality from the angels.
Unfortunately, it’s just too appetizing to ogle those angels’ backsides.
Mephisto feels desire: Absurd attraction, ordinary lust / Befall this
seasoned, hard-boiled devil. And so he misses the decisive moment when he
should have struck. Nothing more stands in the way of Faust’s ascension. It
was made possible only by lechery at an inconvenient moment.

* Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die
philosophische Anthropologie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965).
† Arnold Gehlen, Der Mensch: Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Wiesbaden: Athenaion,
1976).
‡ Arthur Koestler, Der Mensch, Irrläufer der Evolution: Eine Anatomie der menschlichen Vernunft
und Unvernunft (Berne: Scherz, 1978).
§ Peter Sloterdijk, A Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
 CHAPTER 34

Eckermann and Goethe’s Other Assistants.

The Definitive Edition. Enforcing the Copyright.
Schiller Again. Zelter: Short History of a Long Friendship.
Leave-Takings: Frau von Stein, Karl August, Goethe’s Son.
Last Outing to Ilmenau. “Peace lies over all the peaks.”
Against time’s flotsam and jetsam. Death.

....

FINISHING FAUST WAS ONE MAIN BUSINESS OF GOETHE’S FINAL

years. Another was the preparation of the Ausgabe letzter Hand, the last
personally supervised, definitive edition of his works. Cotta was the obvious
choice as publisher, but in the meantime the trust between author and
publisher had been compromised, and it was Cotta’s fault.
During his last sojourn in Carlsbad, in the summer of 1823, Goethe had
come upon a so-called original edition of his works in a bookstore. It was
published in Vienna, and Goethe had never heard of it. It was not one of the
usual pirated editions, however, but a reprint arranged by Cotta himself, as
he later contritely admitted. He had hoped thereby to drive the piratical
publishers out of business. But Cotta had neither informed Goethe of the
edition nor paid him additional royalties. He apologized and provided
tortuous explanations, to which Goethe did not respond for several months.
On January 14, 1824, he finally wrote that the affair had reawakened painful
feelings that a German author is reminded of all too often in the course of
his life. Others who spent their life working hard received their reward, but
not an author who had contributed to the education . . . of the Fatherland and
now sees himself injured in various ways and cheated of the just reward
for his ceaseless work.
Goethe had battled against pirated editions and reprints his entire working
life, without success. For his final, definitive edition, he pulled out all the
stops to put an end to this mischief, at least in his own case. He set to work
so resolutely that one has the impression that toward the end of his career, he
at last wanted to test his real significance to the public. He consulted with his
influential friend Reinhard, the French diplomat. He activated his
connections in the world of politics, wrote to ambassadors and ministers of
state—Metternich, for one—and also directly to crowned heads, emphasizing
his contributions to the intellectual life of Germany. He made clear to the
high and mighty who he was and why he deserved to have his copyright
protected.
The year 1825 was dominated by his efforts to persuade first the German
Confederation in Frankfurt and then—since the Confederation had no
authority in such matters—its thirty-nine individual states to grant him a
privilege that would protect his definitive edition from unauthorized reprints.
These efforts were successful, and he became the first author in Germany to
obtain protection for his works, no general copyright law existing at the time.
Arguing on his own behalf, Goethe always also pointed out that it was an
important matter for all German literature, as he wrote to the German
Confederation.
When grants of privilege from all members of the Confederation were
finally assembled in January 1826, it seemed to Goethe like a final victory in
a battle that had kept him in suspense all year long. The privilege itself
meant as much to him as the best medal. It was also very attractive
financially, both for the author and for some future publisher.
The news of copyright privilege for the definitive edition was the talk of
the 1826 Leipzig Book Fair. The edition was auctioned over a period of
months. Thirty-six publishers bid. The highest offer, 118,000 taler, came from
a Hanover publisher.
Goethe was still negotiating with Cotta, but relished giving him a running
account of his exorbitant market value. The mistrust engendered by the affair
of the Viennese reprint was still festering. Cotta, who of course was intensely
interested, was kept on tenterhooks for a while. He didn’t want to cause
Goethe any additional vexation, and so he refrained from exercising his
option to purchase a future edition. Negotiations with the other publishers
were conducted partly by Goethe’s son, August, and partly by Goethe
himself. August wanted to accept the highest bid. Goethe, however, still felt
some loyalty to Cotta, who had otherwise always behaved very decently, and
Goethe had special admiration for him as Schiller’s publisher. With the
participation of Sulpiz Boisserée and after some minor disagreements,
Goethe and Cotta finally settled on a contract for 60,000 taler in February
1826. Cotta counted it among the “most important events” of his life, and
Goethe wrote to him, Since the composure achieved by our spirit cannot be
expressed in words and signs, may I be permitted to tell Your Honor in
general terms what is of central importance: that for the first time in many
years I feel genuine satisfaction in these hours, when I am certain that the
results of my literary activity have been laid in your hands. There could be
no more valid testimony to our mutual trust. Step by step it will emerge
that I have no other business than to complete these fruits of my life, to the
honor and advantage of us both.
In order to accomplish this business—namely, to collect, sift through, put
in order, and prepare for printing the literary fruits of an entire life—Goethe
had recruited a staff of assistants including Johannes John, who provided
useful service as a scribe and copyist, and Johann Christian Schuchardt, who
archived and extensively cataloged Goethe’s papers. Other colleagues were
the reliable standby Johann Heinrich Meyer, known as Art Meyer, who saw
to the revision of Goethe’s art-history writings, and Frédéric Soret, a trained
theologian and tutor at the ducal court. As a practicing naturalist, Soret
devoted himself to the publication of the scientific writings and was an
important interlocutor in Goethe’s final years. Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer,
who had rejoined Goethe’s staff in 1819 after discord arising from his
tutoring of Goethe’s son, was a high school teacher, librarian, and writer
possessed of encyclopedic knowledge. He proved irreplaceable as a
walking lexicon of philology and cultural history, particularly with advice
during the work on Part Two of Faust.
From 1824 on, the leader of this staff of assistants was Johann Peter
Eckermann. Born into extreme poverty, he had risen to the post of registrar in
the military administration of Hanover. He had acquired his knowledge of
literature, to him the most important thing, largely as an autodidact. Goethe
was his great hero. He had read everything by him he could get his hands on,
and knew it all inside-out. His ambition was to be a writer, and he had
already composed some poems and was seeking a publisher for a monograph
on Goethe’s poetics. On June 10, 1823, the painfully shy young man was bold
enough to approach Goethe and ask for his help, and Goethe immediately
sensed that this admirer could prove useful. He sent Eckermann’s monograph
to Cotta the following day with a note saying that the young man inspired
great confidence and he intended to employ him in certain preparatory
work.
Goethe took him under wing and arranged lodging even before Eckermann
expressed an intention to remain. He praised his poems and his monograph
and gave him a first assignment: to collect Goethe’s anonymously written
reviews from the volumes of the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen from 1772
and 1773. From that day on and for many years to come, Eckermann devoted
all his energy to Goethe, who took him into his confidence, spoiled him with
recognition and praise, and paid him miserably. Eckermann had to give
private lessons, live in poorly furnished rooms, and keep postponing his
marriage because Goethe didn’t pay him enough to start a household. Goethe
kept him on a short leash but arranged to have Jena award him an honorary
doctorate and also advised him on his hair, his clothing, and his
comportment. He wanted Dr. Eckermann to be presentable and cut a fine
figure in general. He didn’t entirely succeed, however. There always
remained something obsequious and frail about him, if only toward Goethe.
With others he was quite self-confident. He knew that he was more important
to Goethe than the other assistants. Goethe thought so highly of him that he
conferred on him, along with Riemer, the task of editing his literary remains.
In Goethe’s last years, when he could be quite uncommunicative,
Eckermann’s greatest service was getting him to talk. His conscientiousness,
phenomenal memory, intimate knowledge of Goethe’s works, intelligent
curiosity, and the style he had learned from Goethe made his Conversations
with Goethe possible. Nietzsche, with some exaggeration, would later call it
“the best German book there is.”
Goethe had barely reached agreement with Cotta about the definitive
edition in early 1826 when another project needed to be finalized with the
publisher: an edition of Goethe’s correspondence with Schiller. On
December 19, 1806, a year and a half after Schiller’s death, Cotta had first
suggested publishing some of the two writers’ letters in Cotta’s house organ,
the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (Morning Paper for the Educated
Classes). Goethe did not respond, but seventeen years later, on June 11,
1823, told his publisher what extraordinary pleasure it had just given him to
browse in Schiller’s letters. He called the collection perhaps the greatest
treasure I possess. The following year, he published a few of the letters in
the periodical Über Kunst und Altertum. He did it as a sample, and now he
intended to publish the entire correspondence. First he needed to win over
Schiller’s widow, Charlotte, for the project, as his letters to Schiller were in
her possession. After complicated, drawn-out negotiations, mainly about the
fee, he came to an agreement with Schiller’s heirs (Charlotte having since
died) to split the royalties fifty-fifty, which was what Goethe had offered in
the first place. The correspondence appeared in 1828–29 in six octavo
volumes.
Goethe’s friend was once again very close to him as he prepared the
correspondence for publication, almost more so than when he was alive.
Eckermann relates how he and Goethe were sitting together in 1826, a bundle
of the letters on the table. Goethe reads from some, interrupts the reading to
pour glasses of wine, has supper brought in but doesn’t touch a bite, instead
pacing the room, luxuriating in memories. “Schiller was so alive in his
memory,” Eckermann writes, “that his conversation . . . was wholly devoted
to him.” And so Goethe goes on at length about Schiller’s boldness—even
his appreciation of cruelty (for instance, when he wanted to make Duke
Alba a witness to Egmont’s fear of death). About his protean nature (Every
week he was a different and more complete person). And about his talent for
greatness (Schiller cutting his fingernails was greater than these
gentlemen). There is no end to his praise, but of course there is criticism too:
Schiller burned the candle at both ends, he was brilliant at theory but perhaps
too brilliant. Didn’t he spend too much time thinking about poetry instead of
just plunging in and writing it? Questions, questions—but thinking about
Schiller made him feel uplifted and revitalized.
In these years, Schiller’s image reached its apotheosis for Goethe in the
image of Hercules in Part Two of Faust. In the “Classical Walpurgis Night,”
Faust asks Chiron, Will you not tell me something of Hercules? And Chiron
responds,

Alas! Awaken not my yearning . . .

...
I saw before my very eyes
What all men honor as divine.
And so he was: a monarch born.
This fits with Goethe’s remark that Schiller seems . . . in absolute
possession of his lofty nature. In one of his last letters to Zelter, Goethe even
spoke of a Christ-like tendency innate in Schiller: he never touched
something common without ennobling it.
A bizarre episode occurred involving Schiller’s skull. Schiller had been
dead for twenty years, and his remains were to be disinterred and moved to
the ducal crypt. In the interim, his (supposed) skull was deposited in the
ducal library. Without permission, Goethe removed it from there to his house
and kept it in his study for a year, until the end of 1827. That in itself is
astonishing, given Goethe’s strong aversion to any cult of death. The parades
of death were distasteful, he said. What’s more, this particular death’s head
became the inspiration for a poem. While he never gave a title to the
“stanzas,” Eckermann later used a conversation with Goethe to justify
entitling the poem “While Contemplating Schiller’s Skull.” It begins by
depicting the jumble of bones and skulls in the solemn charnel house. Lying
in a heap are parts that don’t necessarily belong together. And then the poet’s
gaze falls on a particular skull. It is not named, but referred to cautiously as a
Gebilde—an object—yet everything points toward it: You cryptic vessel,
source of oracles! / How am I worthy to hold you in my hand, / Devoutly
stealing this treasure from decay? Like someone who hears the roar of the
sea in a conch shell, the meditating poet feels himself transported to another
sea at the sight of this object or vessel, this particular skull. It is a sea that at
flood tide streams with lofty shapes and figures. All of natural history with
its unending metamorphoses is conjured up in the meditator. As if washed
ashore by this immense history, the skull now lies before him, and he takes
from it the message What more can one expect to gain in life, / Except that
God as nature be revealed, / And how it makes the solid melt in spirit, /
And solidly preserves what spirit yields. Not long before his own death,
while contemplating Schiller’s skull, Goethe gives expression to his belief in
the lasting power of what spirit yields. But this spirit is still always nature:
God as nature.
Given the intensity of his dead friend’s presence in Goethe’s life, it is
unsurprising that he had high hopes for the publication of their
correspondence. He wrote to Zelter on October 30, 1824, It will be a great
gift offered to the Germans—nay, I may say to mankind. Two friends of the
sort that augment each other by responding immediately and at length. It
gives me such an odd feeling to experience what I once was.
 There was little initial reaction when the correspondence finally appeared,
and reviews were at first mixed. Goethe made the painful discovery that
while the epoch on which he and Schiller had left their mark was really over,
it was not far enough in the past to be accepted as something priceless. The
reviews were full of either routine hero worship or polemical disagreement.
While the biographer and diplomat Karl August Varnhagen von Ense,
husband of the Berlin writer and saloniste Rahel Varnhagen, welcomed the
correspondence as a gift of “the richest profit for life,” the liberal journalist
and satirist Ludwig Börne saw Goethe and Schiller treading the “well-worn
path of self-interest.”
Goethe did not allow the negative reviews to irritate him. Times had
simply changed. At the moment, they were passing him by, but one shouldn’t
be discouraged. Better times for his influence were sure to come. That was
the unassailable conviction formulated in a letter to Zelter: Young people are
much too easily excited and then swept away in the maelstrom of the times;
wealth and speed are what the world admires and everyone strives for;
railroads, express letters, steamships, and every possible facility of
communication—that’s what matters to the educated world: to outdo and
outlearn one another and thereby remain stuck in mediocrity. As so often in
the late letters, this is followed by defiant self-assertion: Let us cling as
much as possible to the attitudes with which we grew up; perhaps with a
few remaining others, we shall be the last of an epoch that will not soon
return.
Karl Friedrich Zelter, recipient of this famous and oft-quoted letter and, as
we have seen, Goethe’s best friend after Schiller’s death, was a marvel of
vitality. He had learned bricklaying from the ground up and led one of the
most successful construction companies in Berlin. He was the head of a large
family, well-to-do and influential in the city, robust and decisive in his
person, and possessed of native Berlin wit and common sense. Intelligent,
straightforward to the point of earthiness, a good judge of men, and not easily
intimidated, he could also be tender and sensitive. He liked difficult
mathematical problems and appreciated emotional subtlety in works of art.
He also loved music, which, as was his habit, he learned from the ground up,
studying composition with the court composer Karl Friedrich Christian
Fasch, Frederick the Great’s music teacher. In the summer, he set off on foot
at three in the morning for his lesson with Fasch in Potsdam, so that he could
be back at his construction site in Berlin by noon. By the 1790s, Zelter was
known for his lieder and choral compositions, and it is not surprising that
spiteful tongues (the Schlegels for instance) made jokes about the bricklaying
composer. But envious jibes from starveling intellectuals slid off Zelter’s
broad back. In 1791, he played a substantial role in founding the
Singakademie in Berlin; it soon became the leading bourgeois music
organization in Germany and a model for the numerous song circles and
men’s choruses then springing up. Zelter did much to help make nineteenth-
century Germany a nation of singers.
He was ten years younger than Goethe and at first admired the poet from
afar. He set several of Goethe’s poems to music, and the poet praised the
results: if my poems have given rise to your melodies, then I can certainly
say that your melodies have awakened me to many a song. Zelter’s
admiration grew into respectful cordiality, and the two became very close,
Goethe desiring the intimacy as much as Zelter. They soon corresponded with
increasing trust, sharing the joys and sorrows of their daily lives, and in the
last twenty years of his life, there was no one in whom Goethe confided so
unreservedly. Any trace of patronizing disappeared entirely, and frequently it
was Zelter who acted as Goethe’s adviser and helper. Zelter’s varied
experience had enriched him; he retained an innate curiosity, had a ready
enthusiasm, and was always eager to learn. He was no genius, but did
everything with solid workmanship—as the head of his household, as a
builder, composer, organizer of musical events, and for a time as a member
of city government. Zelter was a man after Goethe’s own heart: multitalented,
always active, yet calm and collected. While correspondence with other
friends often slowed or stopped altogether, the exchange of letters with Zelter
only grew more frequent, and Goethe could not get enough of it. Farewell,
and tell me something again soon, so there aren’t such long pauses in
between, he once wrote him. Otherwise without realizing it, someone will
pause himself right into eternal life.
An important date in the history of their friendship was November 1812. A
despairing Zelter informed his friend of the suicide of his stepson, a young
man who had given him some cause for worry but in whom he had placed
great hopes. “Speak a healing word to me. I need to pull myself together, but
I’m no longer what I was some years ago,” he wrote. In his answer, Goethe
suddenly switched to the familiar du: My dear friend, your letter relating
the great calamity that has befallen your house has very much depressed,
indeed, bent me down with grief, for it found me in very solemn
contemplation of human life, and only the thought of you has raised my
spirits again. He writes of his own thoughts of suicide—as discussed in
chapter 9 in the context of Werther—the weariness of living that he knew
from personal experience, and how he repeatedly saved himself from
complete shipwreck by undertaking some activity. And then he wrote these
wonderful words of profound cheer: And so it is in all the tales of sailors
and fishermen. After a storm at night, one reaches shore at last. The
soaking man dries himself off and the next morning, when the glorious sun
reappears on the shimmering waves, the sea regains its appetite for figs.*
Here Goethe was consoling Zelter; later, Zelter had the opportunity to
provide consolation in return. When Goethe’s son, August, died in 1830,
Zelter wrote, “Our brotherhood, my dear friend, is proving to be a sober one.
Must we go through this, and remain quiet and still?—Yes! We are compelled
to watch an approaching calamity with our own eyes, but it is not a part of us.
That is the only consolation.”
Zelter’s first visit to Weimar was in 1802, and eleven more followed,
always at Goethe’s urgent invitation. Goethe himself, however, was not to be
lured to Berlin. Zelter was his eyes and ears in that city and always had to
give him detailed reports of what was happening in the theater, at court, and
elsewhere in the social life of Berlin. Goethe had a willing ear for indelicate
gossip. And he loved the delicacies available in Berlin. Zelter could oblige
him in both, bringing Teltow turnips, pickled fish, and sometimes even
caviar; he was a well-to-do man. Goethe returned the favor with game hens,
wines, and his newest works, which Zelter commented on in detail, at times
critically. It was a lifelong comradeship that encompassed both the everyday
and the exceptional. Zelter survived Goethe by only two months, his vitality
sapped after the death of his friend. But he retained his mordant humor to the
end. He wrote to an acquaintance after Goethe’s death, “So far I’ve been
separated from him by 36 miles.† Now I’m getting closer every day and he
won’t get away from me.”
The lukewarm reactions to the correspondence with Schiller had not
deterred Goethe from a plan to publish his correspondence with Zelter as
well. Since the mid-1820s, the two were writing letters knowing they would
be read by posterity. They maintained their familiar, intimate tone, yet one
can sense, especially in Goethe’s letters, that he is sometimes also
addressing future readers. As, for example, in his withering critique of the
Schlegels: The Schlegel brothers, with all their rich talents, are and were
their whole life long unhappy men; they wanted to be more than nature had
granted them and have a greater effect than they were capable of; as a
consequence, they did much mischief in art and literature. He wrote those
lines in his indignation at A. W. Schlegel’s criticism of the Schiller
correspondence. Zelter did not take it amiss when his friend sometimes let
off steam for the reading public (of the future), but he himself retained his
intimate tone and continued to write unself-consciously about his daily life
and work.
Goethe had Zelter’s friendship to the end. Of his other old friends, only
Wilhelm von Humboldt and Knebel were still alive. Charlotte von Stein had
died on January 6, 1827, at the age of eighty-four. Physically diminished and
barely able to hear and see, she remained mentally alert to the end.
“Unfortunately, I am like a stranger on the earth,” she wrote to her favorite
son, Fritz, who had spent his childhood in Goethe’s house. When the weather
was good, she sat on a bench in front of her house beneath the orange trees.
Goethe, who visited her infrequently, once sat down beside her for a bit of a
chat. Afterwards, she wrote, “How do you feel, dear Privy Councilor, after
sitting on my hard bench yesterday? I reproached myself for not having a
chair brought for you. . . . Don’t take the trouble to answer, just hearing news
that you are well will be pleasure enough.”
Charlotte’s only concern at the end was not to be a burden to anyone. She
arranged to have her funeral procession not pass the house on the Frauenplan
on its way to the cemetery. It might bother the “Privy Councilor.” Goethe,
who never attended funerals, stayed away this time too. There is no note of it
in his diary, no mention in his letters.
Karl August died the following year, on June 14, 1828. He had just visited
his Prussian relations in Berlin, and an honorary military review was held
for him as general of the cavalry. It taxed him quite a bit, as did the other
festivities. Zelter wrote from Berlin, “The grand duke had to put up with . . .
the Grosse Oper beating their drums for him, and you can be glad if he comes
back unscathed.” Karl August had been feeling sick for some time and had
extended his visits to the Bohemian spas in recent years. He sometimes still
felt young enough, however, to jocularly call his friend Goethe “old fellow.”
He encouraged Goethe, by then living quite a reclusive life, to move about a
bit and do some traveling again. Hoping to lure him outside, he once
described the spring flowers in the park, meticulously giving the Latin name
for each species: “the Acacia speciosa are like a snowfall, the Acalypha
hispida are extremely beautiful, and the Glabra are just opening up. There is
much to admire in the Belvedere!” Goethe answered this cheerful note at
ceremonious length but also with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, Your
Royal Majesty’s highly flowery admonitory communication with a
wondrous flower thereon having reached me through the good offices of
your spouse, it had such a happy effect on my stagnant condition that I
have resolved this very day to make an attempt to discover the extent to
which I might join the walkers and the strollers. This experiment will be
conducted at some distance from frequented areas.
Their tiff of 1817, when Goethe stepped down as theater director, was a
distant memory, and neither made waves any longer. There had always been
small irritations. The grand duke may or may not have made a sardonic joke
out of conveying Goethe’s proposal to Ulrike in the summer of 1823. With his
Prussian sympathies, Karl August was no friend of Prince Metternich and
was annoyed that Goethe made so much fuss about him. Metternich had used
his influence to ensure copyright protection for Goethe’s definitive edition,
but when Goethe enthusiastically told the duke about the most wonderful
document to that effect from Metternich’s hand, Karl August changed the
subject. He preferred to discuss barometric pressure and the new snowfall in
the Thuringian Forest.
Goethe was actively involved in the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary
of the grand duke’s rule on September 3, 1825. He hosted a party at his own
house that was not a part of the official festivities: although the grand duke
belonged to the great world, he also wanted to demonstrate what the duke
meant to him personally. “Many, many thanks for what was done in my honor
on the night of September 3 at your house, my dear old friend,” Karl August
wrote by way of thanks.
Two months later, the fiftieth anniversary of Goethe’s own service was
celebrated, counted from the date of his arrival in Weimar rather than the date
of his official appointment. The duke thanked him sincerely and in highly
emotional language: “The golden anniversary of the service of my first
minister of state, the friend of my youth . . . winning him permanently for the
duchy I regard as one of the greatest ornaments of my administration.”
Almost three years had passed since these festivities when Karl August
unexpectedly died on the return journey from Berlin. Goethe reacted in the
way we have become familiar with. When Chancellor Müller brought him
the news, he cried, Oh, that I had to experience this! Then he sank into
silence and made it clear he did not want to talk about it. Even his diary had
only the laconic note on June 15 that the news had spoiled a celebration
(probably some event at court). Nothing more until June 19: Note to
Chancellor Müller declining any participation in an obituary. Goethe had
composed a lengthy obituary after the death of Anna Amalia. But now,
nothing. It remains a mystery, although there was speculation that this
reluctance had to do with Goethe’s unclear relationship to Karl Friedrich, the
duke’s hereditary successor. In any case, Goethe chose not to put himself
forward, and before the official obsequies began he escaped to the palace
complex in Dornburg, with its enchanting view across the valley of the Saale.
He had apparently received official permission to go, since he noted in his
diary under July 3, Granted privilege of a sojourn in Dornburg. It was a
place of recollection: here he had once worked on Iphigenia and also spent
time with the duke. There’s a lovely description by Chancellor Müller of
how Goethe passed his time there: “He could stand up in the midst of a
conversation and say, Allow me to hurry down to my rocks alone; for after
such conversation it befits old Merlin to renew his friendship with the
primeval elements.” Müller continues, “For a long time and in good spirits,
we watched him as he solemnly climbed down into the valley, wrapped in
his light gray coat, halting first by this rock and then by that one or by
individual plants, and testing the rocks with his mineralogist’s hammer. The
hills were already casting long shadows in which he was lost to sight like a
ghostly presence.”
On November 10, 1830, Goethe received news of the death of his son in
Rome. Once again, Chancellor Müller brought the message. He also
recorded Goethe’s initial reaction: non ignoravi, me mortalem genuisse.‡
August had left for Italy in the spring, feeling it was the only way he could
save himself. He simply couldn’t stand it at home anymore. His relationship
with Ottilie was in shambles. After his departure, Ottilie wrote to Adele
Schopenhauer, the philosopher’s sister, “August’s return threatens me like an
ominous cloud. . . . The thought that I might never see August again causes not
the slightest feeling in me.” August also felt liberated. Having to play the part
of a great man’s son had become a torment. He wanted to find himself at last
and hoped he could succeed in Italy. After a few weeks, he wrote Ottilie with
news of his initial success: “Neither prodigality nor curiosity could tear me
from my family. The greatest extremity drove me to make a last attempt to
save myself. Some who last saw me in Weimar may not realize it, but my
behavior there was a desperate mask. I wish you could see me now! What
peace has entered my mind, how strong I feel again.”
He was still dogged by his father’s shadow, however. Like his father, he
intended to write his own Italian Journey, and when he wrote letters home,
he was being monitored and had to prove himself. Goethe read them with a
critical eye, almost like a reviewer. Where August wrote of finally being
happy, his father found a forced, eccentric tone and too much calculation.
Later he wrote that he had expected the worst. And the worst had happened.
August contracted meningitis and died in the space of a few days. An autopsy
revealed that his liver was also enlarged. He had been a drinker.
For a week after receiving news of the death, Goethe—who regularly
wrote several letters every day—wrote none. On November 25, he suffered a
pulmonary hemorrhage. Those around him feared for his life, but he
recovered in just a few days. He wrote to Zelter, The individual is still in
one piece and in his right mind. Good luck! In triumph he sent around the
doctor’s note announcing his recovery, but also complained of new burdens
to bear. To Zelter: The really strange and significant thing about this trial
is that all the burdens I . . . thought to have delegated to a younger person
I now must drag along by myself, and worse, must continue to do so. The
eighty-one-year-old had to see to the household himself. Now he kept the key
to the woodshed under his pillow. He had to check the shopping lists and
keep the household staff in line. Yet it all seemed to invigorate him. People
found him stronger and more youthful. That was the case in early December
1830 when Henriette von Beaulieu-Marconnay sent him her reminiscences of
her friend Lili von Türckheim, née Schönemann—Lili, his erstwhile beloved.
I was so moved I had to press your precious pages to my lips, he wrote to
Henriette. Those vital spirits still stirred within him.
August 1831 was sunny and pleasant. Goethe wanted to avoid festivities
for his eighty-second birthday on the twenty-eighth. It was the usual: he
simply didn’t feel that old and wanted not to be reminded of his age. Early on
the morning of the twenty-sixth, a Friday, he had the horses harnessed up.
Morning fog still lay on the landscape, but it promised to be a sunny day. A
last excursion to Ilmenau to visit once more—and perhaps for the last time—
the scenes of his past. I have no love for the parades of death, he often said,
but he had all the more for the parades of life. And so he packed his two
grandsons, Wolf and Walther, into the carriage. His servant Krause came too,
but not Ottilie. He didn’t want her along.
 Why Ilmenau? He had tried to revive the silver mine there—the most
important project of his first twenty years in government. The memory was
both happy and painful. And he had often gone to Ilmenau with his son.
In May 1776, he had spent some wild weeks there with the young duke.
They had wandered the surrounding country, been guests at alfresco meals
and boisterous drinking parties, played practical jokes, rolled an innkeeper’s
wine barrels down the street. Serious business had been conducted here too.
They had really tried to accomplish something. There had been stockholders’
meetings. The fledgling legation councilor had ventured into the mine shaft.
At the first grand celebration of the opening of the mine in 1784, Goethe had
broken off his speech in midsentence, a bad omen. The mine project did not
pan out. There were several accidents, the worst in October 1796, when a
disastrous influx of water cost lives and destroyed everything that had been
done up to that point. Three years later, the entire undertaking was moribund,
as far as Goethe was concerned. One gallery remained open until 1812, but
Goethe was no longer involved. It had been thirty years since he was last in
Ilmenau. In spite of the failure of the mine, the region remained important to
him. It was here that he learned to know, fear, and love rocks, here that he
became a mineralogist. Nearby, on the Schwalbenstein, he wrote the fourth
act of Iphigenia. The area around Ilmenau was also connected to his first
love in Weimar. Charlotte von Stein had once visited him there. The cave in
the Hermannstein, a bluff on the northwest slope of the Kickelhahn, was for
him a symbol of their covert happiness.
Goethe described his final excursion to Ilmenau in a letter to Zelter,
probably with an eye to posterity. We also have a description by the local
administrative official Johann Christian Mahr, Goethe’s guide along the
familiar, overgrown paths and also on some new ones he didn’t know.
On the second day of the outing, Saturday, August 27, he left the children in
the care of his servant, and he and Mahr set off on a pilgrimage up the
Kickelhahn. There was a marvelous view from the turret on the top of the
hill. Ah, Goethe cried, I wish my dear grand duke Carl August could have
seen all this beauty once more! He asked Mahr about the little forest house
that had to be somewhere nearby. He wanted to see it. “And in fact,” Mahr
writes, “he strode vigorously through the blueberry bushes that stand quite
tall on the crown of the hill until he came to the well-known two-story
hunting lodge built of wooden beams and clapboards. A steep staircase leads
to its upper story. I offered to lead the way, but he refused with youthful
vivacity . . . and the words, ‘Don’t suppose I can’t climb those stairs; I’m
still quite capable of it.’ Upon entering the upstairs room, he said, ‘In bygone
times I lived . . . eight days in this room and back then, I wrote a little poem
on the wall. I’d like to have a look at it again.’ ” Sure enough, there were the
verses, written in pencil. They were already well-known, although they had
never appeared in any of the authorized collected works: Über allen Gipfeln
ist Ruh—Peace lies over all the peaks . . . Goethe was seeing them here
again for the first time, “and tears streamed down his cheeks,” Mahr writes.
That was the subdued high point of his last outing to Ilmenau. His birthday
was passed in serene happiness. Breakfast with his grandsons, and then a
brass band arrived and played the choral Nun danket alle Gott (Now thank
we all our God). Girls in white dresses with flowers in their hair recited
poems. When that was over, Goethe set out a drinking glass he had brought
along expressly for the occasion. It was a gift from Amalie von Levetzow
from the summer of 1823 in Marienbad, and bore the initials of her
daughters. He wrote to Amalie, not to Ulrike, Today . . . I put the glass in
front of me that harkens back so many years and recalls to me those
beautiful hours.
Goethe’s report to Zelter betrays his powerful feelings, but the episode is
carefully framed by nature and humanity. In a lonely wooden house on the
highest peak of the fir forest, I recognized the inscription, he writes, and
then continues, After so many years I could then survey what lasts, what has
disappeared. Successes stood out and cheered me, failures were forgotten,
over and done with. People all continued to live as is their custom, from
the charcoal burner to the porcelain manufacturer. Iron was being smelted,
brown coal dug from the crevices . . . pitch boiled . . . and so it went, like
ancient granite. . . . In general, a remarkable exploitation of the manifold
surfaces and depths of the earth and mountains prevails.
He spent his last half year busily occupied and full of curiosity, as always.
He got out his Hegel again and wrote to Zelter, Nature does nothing in vain
is a philistine old saw. Nature is eternally alive and active, superfluous
and extravagant in order that what is eternal may be continuously present,
because nothing can persist. With that, I even think I’m approaching the
Hegelian philosophy. Nature is not useful and goal-oriented. Only
philistines would think so. And that’s what they think about art as well: that
it should make itself useful. Nonsense. The true artist knows it is quite the
opposite, he writes to Zelter. He makes art as it wants to be made, not as he
wants it, much less as the public wants it. The world cannot understand,
because now only economics and utility matter. Hasty philistines rule the day,
along with everything veloziferisch (a portmanteau word, coined in a draft
letter to his grandnephew Nicolovius, that combines “velocity” with
luziferisch—“satanical”). Just as the steam engines are not to be stifled,
neither is the new morality: the briskness of trade, the rustle of paper
money, the accumulating debts to pay off other debts—those are its
monstrous elements. That was the world that was worrying him and
troubling his rest. Not a good time for an inward-looking art, an art of
contemplation and meditation that resisted quick consumption. An art that
demanded attention. The draft continues, I am compelled to think that the
greatest curse of this era, which allows nothing to mature, is that every
moment devours the one that preceded it. . . . No one is permitted to rejoice
or suffer except as a pastime for others.
In Goethe’s last letter, written to Wilhelm von Humboldt on March 17,
1832, five days before he died, this anger at the present flares up once more:
The world is dominated by confusing lessons drawn from confused activity,
but he continues serenely, and I have nothing more pressing to do than, if
possible, to enhance what remains to me and to cohobate§ my
peculiarities, just as you do there in your castle, my worthy friend.

Goethe’s life was coming to an end. The last entry in his diary is also from
March 17, 1832, a Friday: Feeling unwell, spent all day in bed. The day
before, he had taken a ride in his carriage and probably caught a cold. He
had sharp pains in his chest, a fever, and pressure in his bowels. His
personal physician Vogel was alarmed: “He seemed somewhat distraught, but
it was primarily his slack gaze that shocked me and the dullness of his
normally bright, unusually lively eyes.” There were periods of improvement
when Goethe was eager to talk to visitors and make jokes. But they didn’t
last long. Vogel was called in on the morning of March 20. “A woeful sight
awaited me! Terrible fear and unrest drove the aged man, long since
accustomed to only measured movement, into bed—where he vainly sought
relief by changing his position from one moment to the next—and then back
to the armchair standing next to the bed. His teeth chattered from the chills he
was having. The pain that was more and more concentrated in his chest,
pressed now groans and now loud cries from the tortured man. His features
were distorted, his face ashen, his eyes deeply sunk into their livid sockets,
dull, bleary. His glance expressed the most terrible fear of death.”
On the following day, March 22, Goethe was calmer. He was able to sit in
his armchair and say a few words that were difficult to understand. He lifted
an arm and drew something in the air. Letters. The doctor thought he
recognized a W. Tradition has it that he said, “More light,” but the doctor
didn’t hear it.
It was noon when he nestled comfortably into the left- hand corner of his
chair.

* Figs were a traditional offering for the sea and also have an erotic connotation here: the sea becomes
lusty again.
† At the time, a mile (eine Meile) was about six or seven kilometers.
‡ Latin: I always knew I had begotten a mortal.
§ cohobieren: an alchemical term meaning to distill or purify.
 FINAL REFLECTION

Becoming Who You Are

....

GOETHE WANTED TO FINISH THINGS. RIGHT UP TO THE end it left

him no peace. He finished Faust not long before he died. The same with
Poetry and Truth. He allowed the second version of Wilhelm Meister’s
Journeyman Years to be published in 1829 so that it would at least appear to
be finished. The editors of the definitive edition still had some things to do
after his death, but he had already done much (he thought most) of the work of
getting his literary remains in order.
Although Goethe sought to finish individual works, he hated the idea that
life was not complete until its end. Every moment of life was supposed to
have worth and significance not vis-à-vis some final goal but in and of itself.
He rejected a teleological concept of life. He had no intention of serving
some large historical purpose or of forcing his own life toward some
assigned objective, even though in 1780 he used a pyramid that he intended
to complete to its peak as the image for his life’s work. He was ready to
accept that he would not succeed, but it was worth a try. He owed that to his
conception of a work of art, which usually has a beginning and an end.
The results were one thing, his constant activity another: Goethe could not
imagine that would ever end. He told Eckermann on February 4, 1829, that
his conviction of continued existence sprang from his concept of activity. If
he worked unstintingly to the end, then nature was obliged to assign him
another form of existence, since the current one was no longer able to carry
his creative spirit. What remained was a creative restlessness. As an eighty-
two-year-old, he said that he was always striving forward and therefore
forgot things he had written and had to take possession of them anew, they
seemed so foreign to him. It’s true that in old age, he carefully collected his
writings and whenever possible, asked people to return his letters. He
wanted to have his own works around him, but he preferred leaving it to
others to figure out their coherence and interconnections. He doubted that
there was such a thing and declared that whatever sense and significance
each work had could stand by itself and be comprehended on its own terms.
He bet on the creative moment and for him life was a series of such moments,
reflected in individual works. Taken together, they might amount to a great
confession. However, its meaning did not emerge only at the end of his life
but in every motivating moment.
He created such moving moments and was also moved in turn. His
influences were many, and he received, reworked, and responded to them.
He had no fear of being influenced, as he did not strive for originality for its
own sake. For him, the creative act was a connection between the individual
and what transcended individuality. He thought of himself as a kind of
medium for the spirit of the times. He wanted to prove himself as an
individual but also—as he says in Faust—subsume within himself the lot of
all humanity. Shortly before he died, he told the court tutor Frédéric Soret
that he was a collective singular by the name of Goethe.
The exhilaration of the creative act, subjective as it was, also meant
something objective for him, a sign that he had hit on a truth. He did not think
much of poets who withdrew all too modestly into their own subjectivity. He
wasn’t satisfied with expressing himself. He wanted to grasp the world both
poetically and scientifically and locate himself within it. Everything about
him strove outward, sought objective form. Internalization was not what he
was after. As he once wrote, he could understand himself only via the world.
The world was enough of a riddle for him; he didn’t look for riddles in the
wrong place—in murky inner worlds, for instance.
He once wrote to Schiller that he took satisfaction from being able to get
closest to nature when he followed his own nature. Goethe placed great trust
in his instincts and intuition and in his sometimes somnambulistic self-
assurance. He thought epistemology erroneous if it tried to define the subject
out of the world, as if it were not intimately connected to it. For that reason,
he was actually suspicious of Kantianism, although he always expressed
great respect for the Königsberg philosopher. He was too impatient and
hungry for experience to stop and analyze the instruments of cognition, even
when Schiller sometimes gave him access to such an analysis. He didn’t
want to perceive perception, he wanted to perceive the world. When Hegel
took aim at Kant by saying that the fear of error could itself be error, Goethe
heartily agreed. He wanted to eat, not just study the menu.
It was simply impossible for him to think himself out of the world, as
philosophers sometimes do for methodological reasons. And he was always
out there in the world while also remaining collected. His character was
objective through and through. He took his own creative intelligence as
something through which nature could observe itself and poetry produce
itself. He always contemplated his subjectivity from an objective standpoint.
It is no accident that, in the letters of his final years, he often simply leaves
out the first-person pronoun ich.
That didn’t keep the next literary generation, young writers of the 1820s,
from branding him the greatest egotist and a prince’s toady who had feathered
his own nest and was indifferent to the fate of those who labor and are heavy
laden. Börne hurled thunderbolts at Goethe, saying that he had not used his
“fiery tongue” to defend the rights of the common people. One heartless
aristocrat fewer, some said at the news that Goethe was dead.
Something of that still clings to Goethe’s image: the philistine who tends to
his lovely garden and seeks shelter from the storms of history, selfishly
concerned for his own welfare. That was Ortega y Gasset’s judgment of
Goethe in 1932, the year of crisis. And in 1947, Karl Jaspers would accuse
Goethe—but even more, his admirers—of escapism and irresponsibility. We
experienced situations in which evil reigned and heard the screams of horror,
said Jaspers, and realized that “we had no more inclination to read Goethe.”
But others reacted differently; others read Goethe as a means of survival in
great distress and despair. Especially in Goethe’s works, we see the gentle
provocation of art: even when it presents what is painful and terrible, it
retains a peculiar serenity. Since his days, that serenity has become offensive
for some who try to force art into a false kind of earnestness. Goethe insisted
that art keeps us from foundering on reality. If someone deals us a nasty trick,
we always still have play, in which we can stroll quite well / from heaven
through the world to hell.
Heinrich Heine, who considered Goethe the representative of divine
poetry on earth, explained why his liberal colleagues from the Young
Germany movement were so furious at Goethe: he was like a mighty tree that
put everyone else in the shade and left them to wither. He was too much of a
heathen for the pious, too erotic for the moralists, too aristocratic for the
democrats. His trunk grew so tall, Heine wrote, that you couldn’t top it off
with the revolution’s cap of liberty.
Nothing but art!—that was the reproach of a younger generation that was
fighting for freedom and national unity and demanded that literature be
politically engaged. Heine, who shared such sympathies (he said that
political engagement was the professional obligation of the nightingales),
defended Goethe even while making fun of him. Goethe, he wrote, was like
the ancient sculptor Pygmalion, who created a statue of a beautiful woman,
fell in love with her, and yet had no children by her as far as anyone knew—
voilà the uselessness of art for anything practical. Heine warned against
making social usefulness the most important criterion and imagined the
frightful consequence for the future should that opinion triumph: pages of
poetry books used to wrap packets of coffee, flour, and snuff.
Goethe himself found contemporary German literature hardly worth a
mention. The late Romantics were too fantastical and sentimental, others too
pious or prissy, others too realistic or too politically agitated. In the German
literature of his late years, he said he found a world that was either a blue
haze or a field hospital. By contrast, he praised the authors whom he read
with pleasure: the Frenchmen Balzac, Stendhal, and Hugo; the Englishmen
Scott and Byron; the Italian Manzoni. In their works he found bustling life
and great passion. This was world-class literature. Thus German authors of
the younger generation had plenty of reason to feel themselves badly treated
by the Old Master, and some paid him back in kind. Wolfgang Menzel in
Stuttgart, one of the most influential literary critics of the day, managed the
feat of completely ignoring Goethe’s death in the literary journal he edited. It
wasn’t even worth a mention.
Goethe foresaw that the contemporary age would not be friendly to him,
and he wrote as much in his last letter to Humboldt. He could sense the shifts
heralded by the July Revolution of 1830: the triumph of industry, the age of
the machine, increasing mobility, acceleration, the concentration of
communication, the growth of the cities, the masses gaining prominence in
politics and public life. It was the beginning of a new era, one in which the
spirit of economics, social utility, and practical realism were in great
demand. Art, literature, and philosophy were losing respect and prestige and
becoming at best a beautiful irrelevancy.
 Part Two of Faust, however, proves that the changing times didn’t just
frighten him. He also admired their dynamism and energy. But the darker
aspects of such developments are also part of the theme of the play. Goethe
allowed himself no illusions: it wasn’t just Philemon and Baucis who would
be beset by the spirit of the new age but also the entire delicate empiricism
of poetry. Demand for the tangible, practical, and utilitarian would triumph.
He also foresaw that a modern form of worry would be on the rise, for
technology brings improvements but also new fears and new risks. While
Faust builds dikes against the elements, a society of risk is also born in
which worry about the future is omnipresent. As its personification says,

Once I’ve got ahold of someone

Nothing in the world can help him.
...
Be it bliss or be it sorrow
He puts it off until tomorrow.

Goethe could look far and wide but in vain for an audience who would
understand the sober jests in Part Two of Faust. And it was truly half a
century before that part of the play was produced for the first time. His
posthumous reputation was as he had feared: the flotsam and jetsam of time
drifted over him. The hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1849 passed
almost unnoticed, while Schiller’s hundredth anniversary ten years later was
a national holiday; the first great show of strength of the bourgeois movement
for freedom and national unity after the failed revolution of 1848 came under
the banner of the inspiring poet of freedom.
Goethe was absolutely unsuitable for such celebrations. He didn’t trust his
dear Germans—as he called them ironically—an inch. He preferred to keep
them at a distance. And as for freedom, he had always cherished it but never
demanded it rhetorically as a political goal. His outward circumstances had
been favorable. But even inherited freedom must be re-earned if one is to
really possess it. Goethe used his freedom creatively. He is the great
example of how far you can go when you accept the lifelong task of becoming
who you are.
I recall a complimentary reproach once made by a friend of my youth.
He said, What you live is better than what you write, and it would
please me if that were still true.
—GOETHE TO REINHARD
JANUARY 22, 1811
 TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I OWE A LARGE DEBT OF GRATITUDE TO RÜDIGER SAFRANSKI

for his patience and promptness in answering the host of questions that arose
during work on the translation. Thanks also to Robert Weil for his enthusiasm
for the project and, especially, to Janet Byrne, whose splendid work as a
copy editor made this a better book than it would have been without her.
 CHRONOLOGY

1749
AUGUST 28: Johann Wolfgang Goethe born between noon and one
o’clock in the house on the Hirschgraben in Frankfurt am Main.
Father: Johann Caspar Goethe (1710–82); mother: Katharina
Elisabeth Goethe, née Textor (1731–1808).

1750
DECEMBER 7: Cornelia Friederike Christiana Goethe born (died,
1777). Of Goethe’s four other younger siblings—two boys and two
girls—Hermann Jakob lived to be six years old; the others died in
infancy.

1753
Goethe’s grandmother gives him a puppet theater for Christmas.

1755
The house on the Hirschgraben is renovated after his grandmother’s death.

1756–63
SEVEN YEARS’ WAR. Goethe’s father supports of Frederick the Great;
his grandfather Textor, the emperor. Frankfurt periodically occupied
by French troops. Clash between Goethe’s father and Thoranc, the
military governor of Frankfurt. Frankfurt painters frequent the house.
Goethe’s first acquaintance with French theater.

1763
Hears the seven-year-old Mozart in recital. Meets “Gretchen” and is
exploited by dubious friends, with unpleasant consequences.

1764
Joseph II crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Frankfurt. High point
followed by ennui. Goethe retreats into books.

1765
SEPTEMBER 30: departs for Leipzig to study law (until August 1768).
Much socializing, literary experiments, letters; hardly any serious
study.

1766
Affair with Anna Katharina (Kätchen) Schönkopf. Friendship with the
tutor Ernst Wolfgang Behrisch.

1768
Friendship with Behrisch’s successor Ernst Theodor Langer. Religious
influences. Studies engraving and etching with Johann Michael Stock
and drawing with Adam Friedrich Oeser. Avoids meeting Lessing.
MARCH: visits the painting gallery in Dresden.
JULY: pulmonary hemorrhage.
AUGUST 28: leaves Leipzig without saying goodbye to Kätchen.
Annette, manuscript book of poems. The Lover’s Spleen.

1769
Recovers slowly. Experiments with religion. Dabbles in alchemy and
magic. Among the Herrnhuters. Acquaintance with the “beautiful soul”
Susanna Katharina von Klettenberg. Finishes Partners in Guilt, begun
in Leipzig.

1770
Begins keeping a commonplace book, Ephemerides.
MARCH: arrives in Strasbourg to finish his legal studies.
Climbs the steeple of the Strasbourg cathedral.
SEPTEMBER: beginning of the friendship with Johann Gottfried Herder.
OCTOBER: in Sesenheim for the first time. Beginning of the romance
with Friederike Brion.

1771
JUNE: Meets Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz.
Goethe’s dissertation is rejected.
AUGUST: defends a set of theses and graduates as a licentiate of law.
Returns to Frankfurt, where he is not accorded the title doctor of law.
Begins work as a lawyer. Makes plans for Faust.
OCTOBER: gives a speech in the house on the Hirschgraben to celebrate
Shakespeare’s name day.
NOVEMBER TO DECEMBER: first draft of Götz.
Beginning of the friendship with Johann Heinrich Merck.

1772
Merck becomes editor of the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen. Goethe
contributes frequent reviews.
JANUARY: execution of the infanticide Susanna Margaretha Brandt.
BEGINNING IN FEBRUARY, frequent visits to the Sentimentalists in
Darmstadt (Herder’s fiancée Karoline Flachsland, Luise von Ziegler,
Franz Michael Leuchsenring, Merck). Goethe as the “Wanderer.” The
flock of his admirers grows.
MAY TO SEPTEMBER: practicum at the Imperial High Court in Wetzlar.
Falls in love with Charlotte Buff. Friendship with her fiancé Johann
Christian Kestner.
SEPTEMBER: leaves Wetzlar without saying goodbye. Returns to
Frankfurt on foot. Visits Sophie von La Roche and her daughter
Maximiliane (later married to Peter Anton Brentano and mother of
Clemens and Bettine Brentano). Falls in love with Maximiliane.

1773
JUNE: after a revision, Götz von Berlichingen is published. Goethe
writes farces and hymns, fragments of a play about Prometheus,
scenes for Faust, and poems in folk-song style (“Sah ein Knab’ ein
Röslein stehn”—“Saw a lad a little rose”).
Cornelia Goethe marries Goethe’s friend Johann Georg Schlosser. Goethe
reads Spinoza for the first time. Scenes of jealousy in the Brentano
household.

1774
APRIL: finishes Werther.
Johann Kaspar Lavater visits Goethe in Frankfurt. Beginning of their
friendship.
SUMMER: travels down the Rhine with Lavater and Basedow: two
prophets and “the world’s child in between.” Meets with Jung-
Stilling. Beginning of the friendship with the philosopher Johann
Georg Jacobi.
Werther an international best-seller. Streams of visitors and the merely
curious to the house on the Hirschgraben, including prominent literary
figures such as Klopstock.
LATE FALL: writes the hymn “Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus” (“Cover
your heaven, Zeus”).
Ice-skating, chess, and collaboration on Lavater’s Physiognomic
Fragments.
DECEMBER: Knebel’s visit. Goethe is introduced to the Weimar princes
Karl August and Konstantin on their way through Frankfurt.
Begins work on Egmont.

1775
Love affair with Anna Elisabeth (“Lili”) Schönemann. At the same time,
begins to correspond with his soulmate Countess Auguste
(“Gustchen”) zu Stolberg.
APRIL: engagement with Lili.
MAY TO JULY: travels to Switzerland with the Stolberg brothers,
dressed like Werther. En route, meets with Karl August in Karlsruhe.
Visits his sister in Emmendingen and meets with Lenz. With Lavater in
Zurich. Climbs to the top of the Gotthard Pass.
SEPTEMBER: on his way to Karlsruhe, Karl August—now the reigning
duke—invites Goethe to Weimar.
AUTUMN: engagement to Lili is dissolved. Ready to travel to Weimar,
Goethe waits in vain for the promised coach to carry him there.
 Decides to travel to Italy instead. The coach catches up with him in
Heidelberg.
NOVEMBER: arrives in Weimar.
NOVEMBER 11: meets Charlotte von Stein.
Spends Christmas in the forester’s lodge in Waldeck.

1776
APRIL: Karl August gives Goethe the garden house in the park as a gift.
Madcap adventures with the young duke: hiking, riding, shooting, fencing,
card-playing, drinking, dancing, flirting with girls, and cracking
whips. Klopstock writes an admonitory letter; Goethe rejects his
interference.
APRIL: Lenz visits Weimar (until December 1). Other Sturm und Drang
visitors show up: Klinger and Kauffmann.
MAY: visits the mine in Ilmenau for the first time.
JUNE: Goethe is named legation councilor with a seat and a vote in the
privy council and a salary of 1,200 taler.
Occasional poems.

1777
Begins to write Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission.
JUNE: Goethe’s sister Cornelia dies.
NOVEMBER TO DECEMBER: travels alone on horseback and incognito
to the Harz region. Visits Plessing, a despairing reader of Werther.
Inspects the Harz silver mines. Climbs the Brocken. A “divine
signal.” The poem “Winter Journey in the Harz.”

1778
JANUARY: Christel von Lassberg drowns in the Ilm River with The
Sorrows of Young Werther in her pocket.
The Triumph of Sentimentalism performed for Countess Luise’s birthday.
MAY: first and only trip to Berlin on a diplomatic mission with the duke.
War of Bavarian Succession impending.
Works on Egmont.

1779
Works on Iphigenia while recruiting troops.
AUGUST: “crucifixion” of Jacobi’s Woldemar. Falling-out with Jacobi.
Burns old papers before setting off for Switzerland with the duke. The
idea of purity.
NOVEMBER: on the Gotthard Pass for the second time.
DECEMBER: en route, visits the Hohe Karlsschule military academy in
Stuttgart, where Schiller is a student.

1780
JANUARY: opening of the newly constructed theater in Weimar. Begins
work on Tasso.
AUGUST: Countess Branconi visits Weimar. Goethe torn between her and
Charlotte von Stein.
SEPTEMBER: on the Kickelhahn mountain in Ilmenau. Writes the poem
“Über allen Gipfeln . . .” (“Peace lies over all the peaks . . .”).
Begins to study natural history, anatomy, and mineralogy. Writes letter to
Lavater about completing the pyramid of his life.

1781
Beginning of estrangement from Lavater. Dispute about religion.
Tensions with the duke because of Karl August’s prodigal spending.

1782
Diplomatic mission to the Saxon and Thuringian courts to discuss a
possible league of princes. Father dies on May 25. Goethe moves into
the house on the Frauenplan as a renter. Granted a patent of nobility.
Works on Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission.
OCTOBER: reconciliation with Jacobi.
Becomes a master mason.

1783
Takes Fritz von Stein into his house and takes charge of his rearing and
education.
Meets with Georg Forster in Cassel. Corresponds with Jacobi about
Spinoza.
 1784
Resident company installed at the Weimar theater. End of amateur
theatricals.
APRIL: official opening of the mine in Ilmenau; Goethe pauses
inexplicably during his speech.
MARCH: discovers the intermaxillary bone.
Organizes relief efforts for flood victims in Jena.
Financial crisis necessitates drastic reductions in the duchy’s army.
Journey to the Harz. Secret negotiations with the Duke of Braunschweig.
Works on the epic poem Die Geheimnisse (The Mysteries). Intensive
study of rocks. Composes the poem “Kennst du das Land . . .”
(“Knowst thou the land . . .”).

1785
Continues correspondence with Jacobi about Spinoza. Annoyance at
Jacobi’s unauthorized publication of the Prometheus poem. Combats
tax evasion in Ilmenau. Works on Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical
Mission.

1786
Intensive study of natural history. Discontent in his official duties. While
preparing a new, authorized complete edition for Göschen,
dissatisfaction with the large number of fragmentary works. Self-
doubt. Secret preparations for the trip to Italy; not even Charlotte von
Stein is informed.
LATE JULY: travels to Carlsbad.
SEPTEMBER 3: leaves Carlsbad for Italy, traveling under the name
Philipp Möller. Incomplete manuscripts in his luggage: Egmont,
Iphigenia, Tasso, Faust, Wilhelm Meister.
LATE OCTOBER: arrives in Rome. Meets Johann Heinrich Wilhelm
Tischbein, Johann Heinrich Meyer, Karl Philipp Moritz, Angelika
Kauffmann.
Keeps travel diary for Frau von Stein, who resents his secret departure.
Recasts Iphigenia in blank verse.

1787
Goethe shadowed by the Austrian secret service. First letter from Karl
August to Italy: grants Goethe a leave of unspecified duration.
FEBRUARY: visits Naples. Meets the painter Philipp Hackert and the
British ambassador Sir William Hamilton and his mistress (and later
wife) Emma, who stages tableaux vivants in scanty attire. Climbs
Vesuvius.
Hopes to discover the Urpflanze in Naples.
MARCH: by sea to Sicily. Visits the Villa Palagonia to see the prince’s
architectural and garden follies. Visits the parents of Cagliostro,
whose real name is Balsamo. Plans a tragedy about Nausicaa.
MAY: returns to Naples by sea.
JUNE: returns to Rome. Lessons in drawing and painting. Works on
Egmont. Love affair with the Roman woman “Faustina.” Extensive
descriptions of his travels and of works of art for his friends in
Weimar.

1788
APRIL 24: departs Rome.
JUNE 18: arrives in Weimar. Cool reception from Frau von Stein.
JULY: begins an affair with Christiane Vulpius.
SEPTEMBER 7: first, unsatisfactory encounter with Schiller at the
Lengefelds’.
Karl Philipp Moritz visits Goethe for several weeks. Schiller is jealous.
Works on Tasso and studies Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

1789
Schiller in Jena, conflicted feelings about Goethe. Goethe’s friendship
with Wilhelm von Humboldt begins.
AUGUST: finishes Tasso.
NOVEMBER: at the request of the duke, moves into the hunting lodge on
the edge of town with Christiane.
DECEMBER 25: Goethe’s son, August, is born. Cozy family life.

1790
Completes Göschen edition of his works (with a Faust fragment and
Tasso, Iphigenia, and Egmont completed).
MARCH: travels to Venice to escort Anna Amalia home.
More studies of natural history.

1791
Goethe directs the reconstruction of the burned palace. The Weimar Court
Theater has its first guest engagement in Lauchstädt. Goethe present at
opening ceremony.
Goethe’s friend Merck commits suicide.
The Masonic comedy Der Gross-Cophta (The Grand Kophta). Gives his
fee to the Balsamo (Cagliostro) family.
“Art” Meyer settles permanently in Weimar.

1792
JUNE: returns to his house on the Frauenplan.
AUGUST TO NOVEMBER: accompanies the duke in the campaign
against revolutionary France. On the way, visits his mother in
Frankfurt, the Jacobis in Pempelfort, Plessing in Duisburg, and the
pious princess Gallitzin in Münster. Edifying days after the adventures
of war. Simultaneous work on the Theory of Color. Has no more taste
for Iphigenia.

1793
Resumes work on his novel, now entitled Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship. Writes the antirevolutionary play The Citizen-
General in just a few days.
MAY TO JULY: participation in the siege of Mainz.
Verse epic Reynard the Fox.

1794
At Goethe’s wish, Fichte is appointed professor in Jena.
JUNE: Schiller invites Goethe to collaborate on Die Horen.
JULY 20: the happy event of a successful encounter with Schiller. Their
friendship begins.
SEPTEMBER: Schiller spends two weeks in the house on the Frauenplan;
intense discussions, many plans. Gives Schiller newly written
chapters of Wilhelm Meister to read.
Finishes the “Roman Elegies” for publication in Die Horen.

1795
Meets Alexander von Humboldt. In Carlsbad, meets Rahel Levin, who
later marries Karl August Varnhagen von Ense and presides over one
of Berlin’s most prominent salons.
AUGUST: first tunnel collapse in the Ilmenau mine.
Prepares to travel to Italy, but the trip is scrapped because of armed
conflict in the south.
Conversations of German Émigrés, including “The Fairy Tale,” for Die
Horen.
DECEMBER: has the idea of writing satirical “xenias” against the
literary establishment. Schiller enthusiastic about collaborating on
them.

1796
APRIL: production of Schiller’s adaptation of Egmont in Weimar. Enjoys
amusing collaboration with Schiller on the Xenias. Finishes Wilhelm
Meister. High point of his correspondence with Schiller about the
novel.
SEPTEMBER: begins work on Herrmann and Dorothea.
OCTOBER: tunnel collapse and catastrophic flooding in the Ilmenau
mine. End of the project.

1797
The actress Karoline Jagemann, later mistress of the duke, begins
employment at the Weimar theater. At first, Goethe holds her in high
regard. Sends Schiller the first outline of the Theory of Color.
MAY: again plans a trip to Italy.
Goethe and Schiller encourage each other to write ballads. Return to
Faust. In a great auto-da-fé, Goethe burns all the letters he has
received since 1792 and names Schiller as his executor. Breaks off
work before his trip to Switzerland (August to November). In
Frankfurt, Hölderlin pays him a visit; Goethe has no appreciation for
his work.
Goethe avoids an encounter with Lavater when he sees him on a street in
Zurich.
After his return from Switzerland, begins the epic poem The Death of
Achilles, but soon abandons it.

1798
The end of Die Horen. Purchases an estate in Oberrossla. Allows the
Schlegel brothers to court his favor and tries unsuccessfully to
mediate between them and Schiller. Propyläen is published.
OCTOBER: the renovated theater opens with a performance of Schiller’s
Wallenstein’s Encampment. Goethe again working on Faust.

1799
MARCH: Fichte is dismissed in the wake of the atheism controversy.
Goethe purchases a coach and horses and invites Schiller on frequent
excursions.
AUGUST: first letter to Zelter. Finds a house for Schiller in Weimar.
DECEMBER: Schiller moves to Weimar.

1800
JANUARY: Goethe’s translation of Voltaire’s Mahomet performed in
Weimar to great acclaim.
NEW YEAR’S EVE: celebrates the new year with Schiller and Schelling;
lively discussion.

1801
JANUARY 3: falls seriously ill with shingles; near death. Gradual
recovery after two weeks. Resumes work on Faust. Discusses natural
philosophy with Schelling. Takes the water in Bad Pyrmont; discusses
natural science with academic acquaintances in Göttingen. Hegel
visits for the first time. Goethe works on The Natural Daughter and
plans a cycle of plays.

1802
Produces plays by the Schlegel brothers, but the public rejects them and
Kotzebue mocks them. Again Goethe considers resigning as theater
director. The duke keeps him on. Goethe and Schiller collaborate on
the principles of a purified theater: the Weimar Dramaturgy.

1803
APRIL: disappointing premiere of The Natural Daughter. Discord with
Herder. Sale of the estate in Oberrossla at a loss. Founding of the
Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (Jena General Literary
Journal). Riemer hired as tutor for August and as Goethe’s secretary.
DECEMBER: Herder dies. Stressful visit of Madame de Staël.

1804
MAY: Schiller in Berlin, where he receives a tempting invitation to move
there. Goethe succeeds in keeping him in Weimar. Their friendship is
restored.

1805
At Schiller’s suggestion, Goethe translates Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew.
Schiller sickens and dies on May 9. Goethe also falls seriously ill.
Recovers slowly. Tries and fails to complete Schiller’s Demetrius.
Writes “Epilogue on Schiller’s ‘The Bell’ ” for a memorial service in
Lauchstädt on August 10.

1806
AUGUST: has long conversation about Faust with Luden.
OCTOBER 14: Battle of Jena. Prussia defeated. Weimar occupied by
French troops. Goethe in mortal danger. Christiane’s courage. Goethe
survives unscathed.
OCTOBER 19: hasty, unannounced marriage to Christiane. Puts his
financial and testamentary affairs in order.

1807
Works on the Theory of Color.
MAY: writes the first chapter of Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years.
Finishes Faust, Part I for Cotta’s first complete edition.
Works on Pandora’s Return.

1808
Faust, Part I is published. Elective Affinities is extracted from the stories
in the Journeyman Years and expanded into a novel in its own right.
Goethe directs an unsuccessful production of Heinrich von Kleist’s The
Broken Jug.
OCTOBER 2: first meeting with Napoleon at the congress of European
princes in Erfurt.
NOVEMBER: because of conflicts with Karoline Jagemann, Goethe tries
to resign his directorship of the theater. The duke keeps him on.

1809
Works on the Theory of Color.
OCTOBER: Elective Affinities is published.
Drafts an outline for an autobiography.

1810
MAY: first letter to Sulpiz Boisserée; their friendship begins.
The Theory of Color is published to little critical notice.
In Carlsbad during the summer, socializes with Empress Maria Ludovika
of Austria.
OCTOBER: asks Bettine Brentano to pass on to him his mother’s stories
of his childhood.

1811
Works on Poetry and Truth. Bettine, now married to Achim von Arnim,
visits Weimar, quarrels with Christiane. Goethe breaks with Bettine.
OCTOBER: Part 1 of Poetry and Truth is published.

1812
French troops are quartered in Weimar during Napoleon’s Russian
campaign.
Goethe spends May to September in Carlsbad and Teplitz. More
socializing with Empress Maria Ludovika. Meets Beethoven in
Teplitz. Beethoven plays for him on July 21.
SEPTEMBER: news of the burning of Moscow reaches Goethe.
OCTOBER: Part 2 of Poetry and Truth is published.
On his retreat from Russia, Napoleon passes near Weimar and sends
greetings to Goethe.

1813
JANUARY: Wieland dies. Goethe has long conversation with Falk about
immortality.
APRIL: goes to Carlsbad early on account of the unsettled military
situation.
OCTOBER: Napoleon suffers crushing defeat at the Battle of Leipzig.
Goethe prevents his son, August, from volunteering for combat duty.
Conducts color experiments and discusses the Theory of Color with
Arthur Schopenhauer.

1814
MAY: Part 3 of Poetry and Truth is published.
Goethe prevents a duel between August and a returned volunteer who
accused him of cowardice.
Writes Epimenides Awakes for a celebration of peace in Berlin.
JUNE: reads poems by Hafez.
JULY TO OCTOBER: travels to the Rhine, the Main, and the Neckar.
Meets with Boisserée and friends from Frankfurt. Composes the first
Divan poems.
AUGUST 4: meets with Johann Jakob Willemer and Marianne Jung.
SEPTEMBER 15: first visit to the Gerbermühle with the Willemers
(Marianne having married Willemer in the meantime).
Celebrates the first anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig with the
Willemers. Returns to Weimar, where he writes more Divan poems.
Plans a new complete edition for Cotta.

1815
Works on the Italian Journey.
MAY TO OCTOBER: travels to the Rhine, Main, and Neckar.
Extensive conversations with Boisserée about German art.
AUGUST 28: birthday celebration in the Gerbermühle. Romance and
lyrical dialogue with Marianne.
SEPTEMBER: in Frankfurt for the last time. Bids farewell to Marianne
and will never see her again.
Cloud studies. Goethe officially named Minister of State for the Grand
Duchy of Weimar.

1816
JUNE 6: Christiane dies.
JULY 20: intends to take the waters in Baden-Baden and visit the
Willemers. Carriage tips over shortly after leaving Weimar. Goethe,
although unhurt, cancels the trip.
SEPTEMBER: Charlotte Kestner (“Lotte” from Wetzlar) visits Goethe.
DECEMBER: outline for Faust, Part II.

1817
APRIL 13: the conflict with Karoline Jagemann, now Frau von
Heygendorf, comes to a head on account of a dog on the stage. Goethe
is relieved of the theater directorship.
August von Goethe marries Ottilie von Pogwisch.
OCTOBER: writes the poem “Urworte: Orphisch” (“Primal Words:
Orphic”). Nationalist celebration, including a book burning, on the
Wartburg. Patriotic fraternity students irritate Goethe and cause
trouble for the duke.

1818
Natural history studies in morphology and color theory. Systematic
meteorological observation. Birth of his first grandson, Walther
Wolfgang.
At Carlsbad in the summer, works on the Notes and Essays toward a
Better Understanding of the West-Eastern Divan.

1819
MARCH: Jacobi dies.
AUGUST: West-Eastern Divan is published.
The assassination of Kotzebue by the Jena student Sand in March leads in
September to the Carlsbad Decrees to suppress the democratic-
patriotic movement.
A production of Egmont in Berlin is prohibited. Goethe refuses to cede
disciplinary oversight over the University of Jena to a trustee.
Works on the Annals and the Campaign in France.

1820
Summer in Carlsbad. Resumes work on the Journeyman Years. Studies
cloud formations.
SEPTEMBER: birth of his second grandson, Wolfgang Maximilian.

1821
MAY: first version of Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years is published.
Studies morphology.
Summer in Marienbad and Eger. Meets Amalie von Levetzow and her
seventeen-year-old daughter, Ulrike.
Writes for the journal On Art and Antiquity.

1822
SUMMER: again in Marienbad. Socializes with the Levetzows. Falls in
love with Ulrike, is with her at dances, parties, and rock collecting.
OCTOBER: the young Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy visits Goethe.
Student unrest in Jena.

1823
FEBRUARY: serious infection of the pericardium. Near death.
MARCH: complete recovery. Goethe seems rejuvenated, looks forward
to another summer in Marienbad.
JUNE: first visit from Johann Peter Eckermann. Goethe asks him to stay in
Weimar. Enthusiasm for and correspondence with Lord Byron.
JULY TO SEPTEMBER: Marienbad, Carlsbad, and Eger. Socializes with
the Levetzows. Sends Karl August as messenger to ask for the hand of
Ulrike. No official answer, but Ulrike turns him down. Goethe still
has hope. Meets the Polish pianist Maria Szymanowska.
SEPTEMBER: on the journey home, Goethe writes down some lines of
the “Marienbad Elegy.”
OCTOBER: Szymanowska visits Goethe in Weimar. Emotional farewell.

1824
MARCH: writes the poem “To Werther” for the new edition of his first
novels. Together with the poem of farewell to Szymanowska and the
“Marienbad Elegy,” it constitutes the “Trilogy of Passion.”
Prepares the edition of his correspondence with Schiller.
Sorrow over Byron’s death.
OCTOBER: Heinrich Heine visits Goethe.

1825
Studies plans for a canal in Panama.
MARCH: the Weimar theater burns down.
Franz Schubert sends Goethe some of his lieder but receives no answer.
NOVEMBER: the fiftieth anniversary of Goethe’s service to the Weimar
state.

1826
Becomes regular reader of the Saint-Simonian journal Le Globe. Ideas on
world literature. Contemptuous remarks about contemporary German
letters.
Succeeds in his efforts to get the German states to protect his copyright.
Accepts Cotta’s offer of 60,000 taler for the definitive edition of his
works.
Visit of Bettine von Arnim, the tiresome gadfly.
After the closing of an ossuary in Weimar, Goethe takes the (probable)
skull of Schiller home with him for a year, until it is interred in the
ducal crypt. Goethe keeps the key to Schiller’s coffin in his house.
Reads James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans.
Drafts the chapter on the emigrants for the Journeyman Years and
completes the interpolated story “The Man of Fifty Years.”
DECEMBER: Alexander von Humboldt visits Goethe.

1827
Reads Victor Hugo and writes to Sir Walter Scott.
Decides to compose the “Classical Walpurgis Night.”
DECEMBER: writes the poem “Den Vereinigten Staaten” (“To the United
States”).

1828
JULY: Karl August dies on the return trip from Berlin.
Goethe withdraws to Dornburg Castle.
DECEMBER: the correspondence with Schiller is published.

1829
August and Ottilie quarrel. Goethe tries in vain to reconcile them.
The second version of Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years is
published.
JULY TO AUGUST: Goethe resides in the garden house for the last time.
AUGUST: first production of Faust in the Weimar theater.
Paganini plays for Goethe.

1830
Grand Duchess Luise dies.
APRIL: August von Goethe travels to Italy with Eckermann.
Goethe follows the events of the July Revolution in Paris with distress.
NOVEMBER: receives word of the death of his son on October 26.
Suffers a hemorrhage. Resumes work on Faust, Part II.
Contracts with Zelter to publish their correspondence posthumously.

1831
JANUARY: makes a will.
MARCH: returns Marianne von Willemer’s letters along with a poem.
AUGUST: Finishes Faust, Part II. Probably seals it (but reopens it later).
AUGUST 26–31: last excursion to Ilmenau with his two grandsons and
his servant. Finds the poem “Über allen Gipfeln” (“Peace lies over
all the peaks”) still written on the wall of the lodge on the Kickelhahn.
SEPTEMBER: finishes part 4 of Poetry and Truth.
 1832
JANUARY: reads aloud from Faust, Part II for Ottilie.
FEBRUARY: letter to Boisserée with a detailed explanation of rainbows.
MARCH 14: last carriage ride.
MARCH 16: beginning of final illness.
MARCH 17: last letter (to Wilhelm von Humboldt).
MARCH 22: Goethe dies at noon.
 NOTES

The following abbreviations are used in the notes:

GOETHE’S WORKS
WA Goethes Werke, commissioned by the Grand Duchess Sophie of
Saxony, 143 vols. (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1887–1919). Known as the
Weimarer Ausgabe.
MA Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines
Schaffens, ed. Karl Richter, Herbert G. Göpfert, Norbert Miller,
Gerhard Sauder, and Edith Zehm, 33 vols. (Munich and Vienna:
Hanser, 1985–98).
FA Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher
und Gespräche, 40 vols. (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker
Verlag, 1985–99).
HA Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke, ed. Erich Trunz, 12th ed., 14
vols. (Munich: Beck, 1981).
Tgb Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Tagebücher, 5 vols. (Stuttgart and
Weimar: Metzler, 1998–2007).

LETTERS
WA See above: Abteilung (section) IV, 53 vols.
GBr Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Briefe, ed. Karl Robert
Mandelkow and Bodo Morawe, 3rd ed., 4 vols. (Munich:
Beck, 1988).
BranG Briefe an Goethe, ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow, 3rd ed., 2
vols. (Munich: Beck, 1988).
BrEltern Johann Caspar Goethe, Cornelia Goethe, and Catharina
 Elisabeth Goethe, Briefe aus dem Elternhaus, ed. Ernst
Beutler (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1997).
BW Christiane Goethes Ehe in Briefen: Der Briefwechsel
zwischen Goethe und Christiane Vulpius, 1792–1816, ed.
Hans Gerhard Gräf (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1989).
BW mit einem Bettine Brentano, Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem
Kinde Kinde, ed. Waldemar Oehlke (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel,
1985).
BW Reichardt J. F. Reichardt–J. W. Goethe Briefwechsel, ed. Volkmar
Braunbehrens, Gabriele Busch-Salmen, and Walter Salmen
(Weimar: Böhlau, 2002).
BW Reinhard Goethe und Reinhard: Briefwechsel in den Jahren 1807–
1832 (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1957).
BW Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Körner, ed. Ludwig
Schiller/Körner Geiger, 4 vols. (Stuttgart and Berlin: J. G. Cotta, 1892).
BW Willemer Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Briefwechsel mit Marianne
und Johann Jakob Willemer, ed. Hans-J. Weitz (Frankfurt
a. M.: Insel, 1965).
Schiller und Schiller und Lotte: Ein Briefwechsel, ed. Alexander von
Lotte Gleichen-Russwurm, 2 vols. (Jena: Diederich, 1908).
Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Arthur
Briefe Hübscher (Bonn: Bouvier, 1978).
VB Goethe in vertraulichen Briefen seiner Zeitgenossen, ed.
Wilhelm Bode, Regine Otto, and Paul-Gerhard Wenzlaff, 3
vols. (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1979).

CONVERSATIONS AND OTHER BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES

Gespräche Wolfgang Herwig, ed., Goethes Gespräche,
Biedermannsche Ausgabe, 5 vols. (Zurich: Passau,
1965–87).
Unterhaltungen Kanzler von Müller, Unterhaltungen mit Goethe, ed.
Ernst Grumach (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1956).
Bode Wilhelm Bode, Goethes Leben, 9 vols. (Berlin: Mittler,
1920–27).
Gräf Hans Gerhard Gräf, ed., Goethe über seine Dichtungen,
 9 vols. (Frankfurt a. M.: Rütten & Loening, 1904).
Grumach Ernst Grumach and Renate Grumach, eds., Goethe:
Begegnungen und Gespräche, vols. 1–6 and 15 (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 1965 ff.).
Ottilie Ulrich Janetzki, ed., Ottilie von Goethe, Goethes
Schwiegertochter: Ein Porträt (Berlin: Ullstein, 1982).
Steiger Robert Steiger, ed., Goethes Leben von Tag zu Tag:
Eine dokumentarische Chronik, 8 vols. (Zurich and
Munich: Artemis, 1982–96).

OTHER SOURCES
Best Otto F. Best, ed., Aufklärung und Rokoko (Stuttgart: Reclam,
1976).
Leithold Norbert Leithold, Graf Goertz: Der grosse Unbekannte: Eine
Entdeckungsreise in die Goethezeit (Berlin: Osburg, 2010).
Lenz Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Werke und Briefe, ed. Sigrid
Damm, 3 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1987).
Schiller Friedrich Schiller. Sämtliche Werke, ed. Peter-André Alt, Albert
Meier, and Wolfgang Riedel, 5 vols. (Munich and Vienna:
Hanser, 2004).

All quotations from Goethe are given in italics and without quotation
marks. Quotations from all other sources are given between quotation marks.

CHAPTER 1
1 which may have benefited: MA 16, 13.
2 dressing gown like a cassock: MA 16, 41 f.
2 the feeling of inviolable peace: MA 16, 42.
2 threw a knife at his son-in-law: See BrEltern, 152.
2 never showed a trace of violence: MA 16, 42
3 subaltern offices ohne Ballotage: MA 16, 79.
3 Thereby . . . he had made himself the equal: MA 16, 80.
3 “with no particular inclination . . . handsome man”: BW mit einem
Kinde, 438.
 4 My father considered his life: MA 16, 34.
4 to publicly declare himself: MA 16, 75.
4 I was not at all displeased; a kind of moral illness: MA 16, 76.
4 How true it is: MA 16, 77.
4 I cannot reconcile myself: BW mit einem Kinde, 419.
4 lovely, gaunt woman: MA 16, 15.
5 Add to that all the danger: MA 1.1, 18.
6 I wish they had sent you: MA 16, 111.
6 My father . . . was by nature: MA 16, 17.
7 I was supposed to follow: MA 16, 34 f.
7 slow to make; private articled; I completed: MA 16, 736.
7 Father gave me my physique: MA 13.1, 228.
8 “don’t plague the boy”: BrEltern, 884 (July 1, 1808).
8 “Napoleon has even deklared”: BrEltern, 838 (Feb. 2, 1806).
8 “The gift God gave me”: BrEltern, 867 (Oct. 6, 1807).
8 “extremely eager”: BW mit einem Kinde, 420.
8 “with shining eyes”: BW mit einem Kinde, 421.
8 “I always thought”: BrEltern, 402 f. (May 23, 1776).
9 But whereas I felt relieved: MA 16, 621 f.
9 “sworn a sacred oath”: BrEltern, 473 (May 16, 1780).
9 “drink the less good wines”: BrEltern, 477 (July 14, 1780).
9 “without a pinch of tobacco”: BrEltern, 854 (May 16, 1807).
9 “I hear you’ve put on weight”: BrEltern, 808 (Sept. 24, 1803).
9 “bare bottoms”: BrEltern, 257.
9 “But since God has so favored me”: BrEltern, 476 (May 19, 1780).
10 “He was accompanying his mother”: Gespräche 1, 676.
11 “that he had done all this”: BW mit einem Kinde, 420.
11 the siblings shared and mastered: MA 16, 14.
11 The disaster had happened: MA 16, 15.
12 directly into contact; One felt free: MA 16, 14.
12 chance and caprice; The lad developed: MA 16, 21.
13 to a lovely, fruitful plain: MA 16, 16.
13 even when what was happening: MA 16, 152.
14 process, repeat, reproduce: MA 16, 38.
14 The lightning blazes: MA 1.1, 81.
14 God forbid; There’d be no honor: MA 1.1, 23.
15 who produced; deeply troubled me: MA 16, 37.
15 well-turned love letter: MA 16, 184.
15 And so I fooled myself: MA 16, 187.
16 I cannot deny: MA 16, 240 f.
16 weeping and raving; that I had sacrificed: MA 16, 242.
16 capable of penetrating: MA 16, 243.
16 greatest crowd: MA 16, 244.
17 choleric temperament; but where I have nothing: WA IV, 1, 2 (May
23, 1764).
17 for a hundred years: WA IV, 1, 2 (May 23, 1764).
17 “For heaven’s sake”: VB 1, 6 (May 29, 1764).
17 “I learned that he is very devoted”: VB 1, 6 (July 16, 1764).
17 “For the rest”: VB 1, 7 (July 18, 1764).
17 “We were always the lackeys”: Quoted from Bode, 1, 174.
17 “no matter which side he takes”: VB 1, 12 (Oct. 3, 1766).
18 taking pleasure: MA 16, 261.

CHAPTER 2
19 rambles through: MA 16, 263.
19 And in the end: MA 16, 264.
19 no scruples; impious: MA 16, 265.
20 “It’s off to jolly Saxony”: Quoted from Bode 1, 180 f.
20 I did not fail: MA 16, 267.
21 “If you’re to live in Leipzig”: Quoted from Albert Bielschowsky,
Goethe: Sein Leben und seine Werke, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1905–
06), 1:43.
21 chickens, geese: WA, IV, 1, 15 (Oct. 21, 1765).
22 “If you could only see him”: VB 1, 9 (Aug. 12, 1766).
22 I’m cutting a great figure: WA IV, 1, 14 (Oct. 20, 1765).
22 I have a bit more taste: WA IV, 1, 81 f. (Oct. 18, 1766).
22 Roman civil law: WA IV, 1, 117 (Oct. 14, 1767).
23 I’m going to hang myself: WA IV, 1, 117 (Oct. 14, 1767).
23 Just like a bird: WA IV, 1, 13 (Aug. 21, 1765).
23 Alone, alone: WA IV, 1, 44 (April 28, 1766).
23 You know how great my love: WA IV, 1, 45 (April 28, 1766).
24 The dust settles down: WA IV, 1, 46 (April 28, 1766).
24 “Who opens up the womb of Earth”: Quoted from Best, 157.
24 “Your wit would fain delight the world”: Quoted from Best, 164 f.
25 “two valiant peoples”: Quoted from Best, 73 f.
26 whereupon the sizable old patriarch: MA 16, 292.
26 And so little by little: MA 16, 319.
26 Self-development through the transformation: MA 16, 843.
26 according to nature: WA IV, 1, 113 (Oct. 2, 1767).
26 Let them leave me be: WA IV, 1, 89 (May 11, 1767).
26 I open my eyes: WA IV, 1, 8 (Oct. 12, 1765).
27 “If Goethe weren’t my friend”; “very tenderly”: VB 1, 11 (Oct. 3,
1766).
27 I have gained her: WA IV, 1, 60 f. (Oct. 1, 1766).
27 The little Schönkopf girl: La petite Schoenkopf merite ne pas etre
oubliée entre mes connoissances. . . . Elle est mon oeconome, quand
il s’agit, de mon linge, de mes hardes, car elle entend tres bien cela,
et elle sent du plaisir de m’aider de son savoir, et je l’aime bien
pour cela: WA IV, 1, 86 (May 11, 1767).
29 Honest man: MA 1.1, 123.
29 He says what a pleasure it is: C’est une chose tres agreable a voir,
digne de l’observation d’un connoisseur, un homme s’efforcant a
plaire . . . et de voir apres cela moi immobile dans un coin, sans lui
faisant quelque galanteries, sans dire une seule fleurette, regardé de
l’autre comme un stupide qui ne sait pas vivre, et de voir a la fin
apportés a ce stupide des dons pour les quels l’autre feroit un
vojage a Rome: WA IV, 1, 62 (Oct. 8, 1766).
29 With the most ardent caresses: WA IV, 1, 101 (early Oct. 1767).
30 Enamored eyes: WA IV, 1, 102 (early Oct. 1767).
30 In the bedroom: WA IV, 1, 102 (Oct. 7 or 9, 1767).
30 Love is misery: WA IV, 1, 127 (Nov. 2, 1767).
30 I can’t help it: WA IV, 1, 130 f. (Nov. 3, 1767).
31 This hand: WA IV, 1, 132 (Nov. 7, 1767).
31 Ah Behrisch: WA IV, 1, 134 (Nov. 10, 1767).
31 My blood runs: WA IV, 1, 134 (Nov. 10, 1767).
31 I’ve cut myself a new quill: WA IV, 1, 135 (Nov. 10, 1767).
31 I found her box: WA IV, 1, 137 f. (Nov. 10, 1767).
31 I saw how coldly: WA IV, 1, 138 (Nov. 10, 1767).
32 Yet another quill; But I must fill up: WA IV, 1, 139 (Nov. 10, 1767).
32 It pleases the imagination: WA IV, 1, 128 (Nov. 2, 1767).
32 What shall I do tomorrow?: WA IV, 1, 139 f. (Nov. 10, 1767).
32 By this impetuous; What made the world: WA IV, 1, 141 (Nov. 11,
1767).
32 My letter has: WA IV, 1, 143 (Nov. 13, 1767).
32 the violence of love: WA IV, 1, 145 (Nov. 20, 1767).
33 It pleases her: WA IV, 1, 146 (Nov. 20, 1767).
33 We began with love: WA IV, 1, 159 (April 26, 1768).
33 good little piece: WA IV, 1, 113 (Oct. 12, 1767).
33 Can there be any harm: MA 1.1, 289 f.
33 No wonder; His jealousy’s; Dear child: MA 1.1, 291.
34 If he tortures me: MA 1.1, 292.
34 Without a cause; Let him think: MA 1.1, 293.
34 You say you love Amine: MA 1.1, 307 f.
34 A little pleasure: MA 1.1, 309.
35 insulting and humiliating: MA 16, 309.
35 I never tired of pondering: MA 16, 310 f.
35 we have parted: WA IV, 1, 158 (April 26, 1768).
35 But not I: WA IV, 1, 159 (April 26, 1768).
35 upright man: WA IV, 1, 157 (March, 1768).
35 infected with the obsession; bad mood; terrible scenes: MA 16, 307.
37 My taste for beauty: WA IV, 1, 178 (Nov. 9, 1768).
37 Whether complete censure: WA IV, 1, 179.
37 His teaching influenced: MA 16, 334 f.
37 It was the first time: MA 16, 346.
37 I had really lost her: MA 16, 308.
38 And I’m going ever more downhill: WA IV, 1, 160 (May 1768).
38 What he had to say: MA 16, 359.
39 She greeted me: WA IV, 1, 191 f. (Feb. 13, 1769).

CHAPTER 3
40 lacked the compass; For one; cheerful, free: MA 9, 937.
41 before Easter: WA IV, 1, 184 (Dec. 30, 1768).
41 Johannismännchen: WA IV, 1, 185 (Dec. 30, 1768).
41 how life is lived: WA IV, 1, 184 (Dec. 30, 1768).
41 finding, instead of a sturdy: MA 16, 362 f.
41 certain smug arrogance: MA 16, 369.
41 aping: MA 16, 375.
41 all too superficial: MA 16, 376.
41 gloomy family background: MA 16, 309.
42 For the time being . . . hanged: MA 1.1, 385.
42 expresses playfully: MA 16, 309.
42 heavenly: MA 16, 359.
42 religious heroes: MA 16, 144.
42 a God stood at their side: MA 16, 145.
42 both in the greatest solitude: MA 16, 152.
42 general, natural religion; behind nature; such a conviction: MA 16,
150.
43 form . . . works; Natural products: MA 16, 48.
43 One is tempted: MA 16, 51.
43 in direct connection: MA 16, 48.
43 Praying to the Creator: MA 11.1.2, 139
43 pious boredom: MA 11.1.2, 140.
43 a kind of dry morality: MA 16, 47.
44 I had lost; beautiful, leafy; that a poor: MA 16, 244.
44 to sanctify and seclude: MA 16, 245.
44 effulgent sense: MA 11.1.2, 140.
45 when it is not fortunate: MA 16, 245.
45 The eye was: MA 16, 246.
45 image hunts: MA 16, 301 and 302.
45 the observer encountered: MA 16, 302.
45 saddest case . . . forced to idolize: MA 13.1, 378.
45 bigoted delusions: MA 11.2, 181.
46 fullness: MA 16, 312.
46 must be accustomed: MA 16, 313.
46 And so through a shining round: MA 16, 314 f.
46 own religion: MA 16, 376.
46 “monastic rule”: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Werke, vol. 8 (Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 1984), 568.
46 gloomy scruples: MA 16, 317.
46 lighthearted hours; strange bad conscience: MA 16, 318.
47 I returned his affection: MA 16, 360.
47 to say that what I had: MA 16, 359.
47 the matter of clothing: WA IV, 51, 30 (Sept. 8, 1768).
47 going to meetings: WA IV, 51, 34 (Nov. 24, 1768).
47 love . . . friendship . . . veneration: WA IV, 51, 33 f. (Nov. 24, 1768).
47 My fiery head: WA IV, 51, 34 (Nov. 24, 1768).
47 still too flustered: WA IV, 51, 33 (Nov. 24, 1768).
48 What’s the point: WA IV, 51, 36 (Jan. 17, 1769).
48 Offenherzigkeit; matters of; cold and calm: WA IV, 51, 29 (Sept. 8,
1768).
48 the history of my heart: WA IV, 51, 37 (mid-Oct. 1769?).
48 You see; But worries: WA IV, 51, 36 (Jan. 17, 1769).
48 And I hold my little heart: MA 1.2, 200.
49 her favorite: MA 16, 363.
49 I can hardly recall: MA 5, 422.
50 a Herrnhuter sister: MA 5, 400.
50 What is belief; pull . . . is led to: MA 5, 396.
50 injustice . . . in order to: MA 5, 403.
50 What shone out: MA 5, 519 f.
50 She took pleasure; reconciled God: MA 16, 364.
50 like a heathen; earlier, when: MA 16, 675.
50 Pelagianism; grandeur: MA 16, 677.
51 inexplicable man: MA 16, 365.
51 mystical chemical-alchemical; treasure: MA 16, 365.
51 nature presented in: MA 16, 366.
51 quite cheerfully: MA 16, 366 f.
52 productive . . . from which one could hope: MA 16, 368.

CHAPTER 4
53 his own whimsies: WA IV, 1, 246 (Aug. 26, 1770).
53 so sincerely boring: WA IV, 1, 245 f. (Aug. 26, 1770).
53 with as little feeling: WA IV, 1, 218 (Dec. 12, 1769).
54 I’ll get 10 rooms: WA IV, 1, 226 (Jan. 23, 1770).
54 “Enlarge the place”: See BrEltern, 778 (Feb. 7, 1801).
54 an abundance: WA IV, 1, 232 (April 13, 1770).
54 As I looked out: WA IV, 1, 235 f. (June 27, 1770).
55 When the dear valley: MA 1.2, 199.
55 What happiness; chains of; always moving: WA IV, 1, 236 (June 27,
1770).
55 What am I studying?: WA IV, 51, 43 (May 11, 1770).
55 There’s nothing: WA IV, 51, 42 (April 29, 1770).
56 snatched away; Only now: WA IV, 51, 42 (May 11, 1770).
56 When we are touched: WA IV, 51, 43 (May 11, 1770).
56 “the most miserable German”: Quoted from Bode, 1, 354 (n. 1).
56 All by myself: MA 16, 404.
57 It was given to few; ants . . . weakling . . . will always get: MA 1.2,
415.
57 free, convivial: MA 16, 405.
58 a man of much good sense: WA IV, 1, 246 f. (Aug. 26, 1770).
58 weather vane: WA IV, 1, 262 (June 1771?).
58 Write to me: WA IV, 2, 213 (Dec. 5, 1774).
59 always knew how: MA 16, 403.
59 a certain irritability; balance: MA 16, 404.
59 the most significant event: MA 16, 433.
59 gently sought; one could never expect: MA 16, 437.
60 to be of service: MA 16, 436.
60 “Goethe is really”: VB 1, 20 (March 21, 1772).
60 for no inclination; ringing and humming: MA 16, 445.
61 great affection . . . discontent: MA 16, 437.
61 chiding and reproving; came to appreciate: MA 16, 436.
61 “later reason”: Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, ed. Michael Knaupp,
3 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1992–93), 1370.
61 O my friends!: MA 1.2, 206.
62 all noble souls: MA 1.2, 414.
62 I sit here: MA 1.1, 231.
63 happy position: MA 16, 440 f.

CHAPTER 5
64 who sought their salvation: MA 16, 401.
65 The elemental part: MA 16, 400.
65 sleepwalker . . . whom: MA 16, 401.
65 “free existence . . . except that Goethe . . . reign over”: Johann
Heinrich Jung-Stilling, Lebensgeschichte (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel,
1983), 255 f.
65 divine pedagogy. . . presumptuous; neither pleasant: MA 16, 726.
65 to become aware: MA 16, 725.
66 Such an aperçu: MA 16, 726.
66 In science: MA 10, 639.
67 operation of cognitive genius: MA 16, 725.
67 “grew fond of him . . . It is a shame”: Jung-Stilling, Lebensgeschichte,
258.
67 “Stilling’s enthusiasm”: Jung-Stilling, Lebensgeschichte, 276.
68 You left, and I stood: FA I, 1, 129 (version of 1775).
68 I left, and you stood: MA 3.2, 16 (version of 1789).
68 Those were painful days: MA 16, 532.
69 continue along: MA 16, 498.
69 At that moment: MA 16, 466.
69 Her nature, her form: MA 16, 489.
69 Such a youthful inclination: MA 16, 530.
69 The reasons a young woman: MA 16, 531.
69 premature inclinations: MA 16, 496.
69 The virtuous heart: WA IV, 1, 61 (Oct. 1, 1766).
70 weather vane: WA IV, 1, 262 (June 1771?).
70 more beautiful; that one is not a whit: WA IV, 1, 259 (June 1771?).
70 the dear child continues; Not even taking: WA IV, 1, 261 (June
1771?).
70 double role: MA 16, 496.
70 the youthful urge . . . most venial attempts: MA 16, 497.
70 transported from this fictitious: MA 16, 461.
71 How brightly nature: MA 1.1, 162.
72 I love the angel: MA 1.1, 158.
72 You golden children: MA 1.1, 159.
72 Little leaves and little blossoms: MA 1.1, 159.
72 My heart was beating: FA I, 1, 128 f. (version of 1775).
74 can return in thought: WA IV, 4, 67 (Sept. 25, 1779, to Charlotte von
Stein).
74 much more motley: MA 16, 512.
74 humiliated: MA 16, 512.
74 never be accepted: MA 16, 513.
74 We thus found ourselves: MA 16, 524 f.
75 Until now, however: WA IV, 2, 2 (Fall 1771).
75 We have within ourselves: MA 1.2, 411.
75 gigantic strides . . . great wayfarer: MA 1.2, 411.
75 I vividly felt: MA 1.2, 412.
76 What are you doing: MA 1.2, 412.
76 And I cry nature!: MA 1.2, 413.
76 vied with Prometheus: MA 1.2, 414.
76 Shakespeare’s theater: MA 1.2, 413.
76 I lacked real knowledge: MA 16, 505.
76 what each individual; domestic, heartfelt: MA 16, 506.
77 “Herr Goethe has played”: VB 1, 29 (July 4–5, 1772).
77 “some of Herr von Voltaire’s”: VB 1, 17 (Aug. 7, 1771).

CHAPTER 6
78 Thus for me at present: WA IV, 51, 44 (Aug. 28, 1771).
79 The rabble almost: MA 1.1, 408 (from the first draft of the play).
79 “indecent style”: MA 1.2, 919.
79 “In this case”: Quoted from Bode 2, 36.
79 a furious termagant: MA 1.2, 558.
79 After his deeply concealed: MA 1.2, 564.
79 The same register of insults: MA 1.2, 568 f.
80 of a rough-hewn: MA 16, 445.
81 subject to no one: MA 1.1, 404.
81 colossal stature: MA 1.2, 414.
81 hidden point: MA 1.2, 413.
81 We have within us: MA 1.2, 411.
81 I feel with incredible: MA 1.2, 412.
81 fallen in love: MA 16, 605.
82 cabinet of curiosities: MA 1.2, 413.
82 have to hum . . . all the power . . . distracted life: WA IV, 2, 7 (Nov.
28, 1771).
82 not to always just indulge: MA 16, 604.
82 And so I kept: MA 16, 604.
83 imagination: MA 16, 605.
83 You always were one: MA 1.1, 494 f.
83 An error that made me: MA 1.1, 493.
83 God, you made her: MA 1.1, 508.
84 that her skin . . . made an unpleasant . . . not the least: MA 16, 769.
84 “But how can I aspire”: Quoted from Bode 1, 330.
84 by a magnet: MA 16, 249.
84 physical and moral powers; The inquisitiveness of youth: MA 16,
250.
84 I must honestly admit: MA 16, 770.
85 They say it: WA IV 1, 236 (June 17, 1770).
85 bullies; When we try; Whoever mistreats: MA 1.1, 398.
86 any harm: MA 1.1, 441.
86 noblest Germans: WA IV, 2, 7 (Nov. 28, 1771).
86 Charity is a noble virtue: MA 1.1, 397.
86 coward whose bile: MA 1.1, 492.
86 God reflects: MA 1.1, 431.
86 poverty, chastity, and obedience: MA 1.1, 393.
86 It’s a pleasure: MA 1.1, 395.
86 You alone are free: MA 1.1, 416.
86 to see a powerful rival: MA 1.1, 435.
86 all feeling of greatness: MA 1.1, 403.
87 feel boundless joy; When their well-cultivated: MA 1.1, 462.
87 We’ll clear the mountains: MA 1.1, 462 f.
87 What a life: MA 1.1, 463.
87 Have I not known; in the open air: MA 1.1, 618.
87 The time of deception: MA 1.1, 509.
88 To all the fools: WA IV, 2, 10 (Dec. 1771).
88 until you have voiced: WA IV, 2, 11 (late 1771).
89 I belittle him; That’s annoying: WA IV, 2, 19 (mid-July 1772).
89 “There’s an uncommon amount of German strength”: MA 1.1, 958.
89 “Hang the diapers”: MA 16, 606.
89 a completely new play: MA 16, 606.

CHAPTER 7
90 strolled around . . . the essence of any mastery: WA IV, 2, 17 (mid-
July 1772).
90 When you stand: WA IV, 2, 16 f. (mid-July, 1772).
91 Writing is busy idleness: MA 1.1, 475.
91 Although the Bible says: WA IV, 2, 127 (late Nov. 1773).
91 there is a forming nature: MA 1.2, 421.
91 One tug: WA IV, 2, 104 (Sept. 15, 1773).
92 “If he ever finds happiness”: VB 1, 51 (Oct. 17, 1773).
92 “Here by secret means”: Quoted from Bode 2, 22.
93 jealous: MA 16, 586.
93 For a jaunty lad: MA 1.2, 177.
94 “amid unceasing cries”: Quoted from Ernst Beutler, Essays um
Goethe (Frankfurt a. M. and Leipzig: Insel, 1995), 98.
94 Just listen to the townsfolk: MA 1.1, 187.
94 whether a woman: MA 1.2, 916.
94 That lovely, innocent creature: MA 1.2, 183.
95 God’s judgment; She has been put: MA 1.2, 188.
95 My friends must forgive: WA IV, 2, 8 (Nov. 28, 1771).
95 to be a doctor: WA IV, 2, 1 (late Aug. 1771?).
95 singular man: MA 16, 540.
96 I was as pleased: WA IV, 2, 12 f. (late 1771).
96 “He’s a man . . . fall in love”: VB 1, 23 (March 1772).
96 “enthusiasm and genius”: VB 1, 18 (Dec. 30, 1771).
96 by nature an upright; in a negative: MA 16, 541.
96 wonderful mirror: FA 29, 176.
96 “Hang the diapers”: MA 16, 606.
98 “Merck, Leuchsenring, and I”: Quoted from Bode 2, 52 f.
98 “Goethe is full”: VB 1, 24 (April 13, 1772).
 99 When for the first time: MA 1.1, 208.
99 I cast a hopeful glance: MA 1.1, 210.
99 bewildered wayfarer: MA 1.1, 213.
100 “In more ways than one”: VB 1, 28 (June 6, 1772).
100 So I also want to tell you: WA IV, 2, 18 f. (mid-July 1772).
100 “Wanderer”: MA 16, 555.
100 When I was met: MA 16, 556.
100 Genius, he whom: MA 1.1, 197.
101 I live in Pindar: WA IV, 2, 15 (mid-July 1772).
101 To be sure: WA IV, 2, 16 (mid-July 1772).
101 There on the hill: MA 1.1, 200.
101 Gale-breathing godhead: MA 1.1, 199.
102 Strike him dead: MA 1.1, 224.
102 As police officers: MA 1.2, 309.
102 Herr Benignus Pfeufer: MA 1.2, 337.
102 pathetic twaddle: MA 1.2, 391.
102 with any theory: MA 1.2, 398.
103 Are not raging storms: MA 1.2, 399.
103 art is precisely: MA 1.2, 400.
103 walls of glass; softer and softer: MA 1.2, 400.
103 tribute: MA 1.2, 402.
104 It is our firm belief: MA 1.2, 363.
104 O Genius of our Fatherland: MA 1.2, 350 f.
105 Laws and rights: MA 6.1, 588, lines 1972–75.
106 “Frankfurt newspaper writer”: VB 1, 29 (July 18, 1772).
107 “There . . . I found him”; “You know that I don’t”: VB 1, 36 (Fall
1772).
107 “was no longer free”: VB 1, 38 (Fall 1772).
107 entangled and enraptured: MA 16, 577.
107 general favor: MA 16, 576.
107 Mephistopheles . . . romance: MA 16, 588 f.
107 Thus they continued: MA 16, 578.
107 “qualities that can make him”: VB 1, 39 (Nov. 18, 1772).
107 “of making Lottchen”; “that he would have to”: VB 1, 40 (Nov. 18,
1772).
108 “He, Lottchen, and I”: VB 1, 32 (Sept. 10–11, 1772).
108 If I had stayed a single: WA IV, 2, 21 (Sept. 10, 1772).
108 Now I am alone: WA IV, 2, 22 (Sept. 10, 1772).
108 “But she was happy”: VB 1, 33 (Sept. 10–11, 1772).

CHAPTER 8
109 “[Goethe] has what one calls genius”: VB 1, 36 f. (Fall 1772).
110 Mama: e.g., in WA IV, 2, 163 ff. (May–June 1774).
111 Dear God: WA IV, 2, 35 (Nov. 10, 1772).
111 what it means: MA 1.2, 409.
111 I honor such a deed: WA IV, 2, 30 f. (Oct. 10, 1772).
111 anxious striving: WA IV, 2, 40 (Nov. 20, 1772).
112 This news was terrible: WA IV, 2, 33 (early Nov. 1772).
112 If that damned cleric: WA IV, 2, 33 f. (early Nov. 1772).
112 No clergyman: MA 1.2, 299.
112 lying in: WA IV, 2, 73 (April 7?, 1773).
112 It cost me little: WA IV, 2, 76 (April 10, 1773).
112 And between you and me: WA IV, 2, 81 ( April 14?, 1773).
112 And so I dream: WA IV, 2, 91 f. (June 1773).
113 I don’t know why: WA IV, 2, 76 (April 10, 1773).
113 I’m wandering through the desert: WA IV, 2, 75 (April 1773).
113 My poor existence: WA IV, 2, 82 (April 21, 1773).
113 shooting: WA IV, 2, 43 (Dec. 1772).
113 could succeed in sinking; laughed at myself: MA 16, 618.
113 “vile imitation”: MA 1.1, 970.
114 “the most beautiful”: MA 1.1, 962.
114 “We could tell”: MA 1.1, 960.
114 And a drama for performance: WA IV, 2, 106 (Sept. 15, 1773).
115 The gods have sent: WA IV, 2, 97 (July 1773).
115 They want to share: MA 1.1, 671.
115 And you are to my spirit: MA 1.1, 671 f.
116 Look down, Zeus: MA 1.1, 675.
116 Cover your heaven: MA 1.1, 229.
116 Here I sit: MA 1.1, 231.
116 I know nothing so pitiful; Who aided me: MA 1.1, 230.
117 Even though one can and did: MA 16, 681.
117 most secure foundation: MA 16, 680.
117 I was ready: MA 16, 680 f.
118 “This Goethe”: Werthes to Jacobi, VB 1, 71 f. (Oct. 18, 1774).
118 “some sitting, some standing”: Quoted from Katharina Mommsen,
Goethe und der Islam (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 2001), 72.
118 “writing anything comprehensible”: VB, 1, 64 (Aug. 27, 1774).
118 Mahomet . . . Dost thou not: MA 1.1, 517.
118 The fullness of the holiest: MA 1.2, 441 f.
119 As a temporal Gospel: MA 16, 614.
119 also wants to spread; coarse world: MA 16, 671.
119 altered the old robe: MA 16, 681.
120 The things of this world: MA 16, 672.
120 Everything that Genius: MA 16, 673.
120 He thinks the world: MA 1.1, 547.
121 Hearken how confusion: MA 1.1, 662.
122 There’s nothing in the world: MA 1.1, 657.
122 burgeoning nature . . . foreign adornments . . . enjoy the earth: MA
1.1, 661.
122 the old robe: MA 16, 681.

CHAPTER 9
123 My passion to create; but in convivial company: MA 16, 554.
123 fruits: WA IV, 2, 127 (late Nov. 1773).
124 poetic use . . . recent life: MA 16, 621.
124 blue striped bed jacket: WA IV, 2, 92 (June 1773).
124 general confession: MA 16, 621.
124 Merck made the wicked comment: A côté de cela il a la petite
Madame Brentano à consoler sur l’odeur de l’huile, du fromage et des
manières de son mari: Gespräche 1, 88 (Feb. 2, 1774).
124 If you knew: WA IV, 2, 140 (Jan. 21, 1774).
125 whims concerning suicide; hypochondriacal fancies: MA 16, 618.
125 bird’s-eye view: MA 16, 619.
125 impressive: MA 16, 614.
125 Here we have to do: MA 16, 617.
126 What’s more: MA 19, 491.
126 taedium vitae; Werther will leave: MA 20.1, 294 (Dec. 3, 1812).
126 recurrence of external things: MA 16, 611.
127 take part; such lovely offerings: MA 16, 612.
127 What actually uplifts: MA 16, 612.
127 To rejoice in your own worth: MA 9, 127.
127 paralyzing imagination: MA 16, 613.
128 I intend to enjoy: MA 1.2, 197.
128 when she speaks of her fiancé: MA 1.2, 226.
129 A shudder passes through: MA 1.2, 260.
129 I fear, I fear: MA 1.2, 279.
129 cold dull consciousness: MA 1.2, 273.
129 I have no power: MA 1.2, 240.
129 sacred, animating power: MA 1.2, 266.
129 heart, which on its own: MA 1.2, 259.
129 And now I have lent: WA IV, 2, 156 (April 26, 1774).
130 dialogue: MA 16, 610.
130 can no longer pump: MA 1.2, 267.
130 When I look out my window: MA 1.2, 266.
131 creation bereft: MA 1.2, 268.
131 paints the walls: MA 1.2, 203.
131 brought back again: MA 1.2, 273.
132 But whereas I felt relieved: MA 16, 621 f.
132 “One hardly gets seduced”: HA 6, 531.
132 “pleasure”: VB 1, 74 (Oct. 26, 1774).
132 I turn back into myself: MA 1.2, 203.
133 no argument in the world: MA 1.2, 234.
133 You ask whether you should send: MA 1.2, 200.
133 O my friends!: MA 1.2, 206.
134 This mutual agitation: MA 16, 554.
134 “Everything I have read of yours”: BranG 1, 55 (Oct. 3, 1775).
135 Predestined, I to stay: MA 13.1, 134.
135 Very soon I will send you: WA IV, 2, 168 (June 16, 1774).
135 patched together with passions: WA IV, 2, 159 (May 1774).
135 too much: BranG 1, 36 (early Oct. 1774).
135 The thing is done: WA, IV, 2, 200 (Oct. 1774).
135 If you could feel: WA IV, 2, 207 (Nov. 21, 1774).
136 Werther must: WA IV, 2, 208 (Nov. 21, 1774).

CHAPTER 10
137 that if her brother: MA 16, 587.
137 “Although I have long rejected”: Quoted from Sigrid Damm, Cornelia
Goethe (Berlin: Aufbau, 1987), 92.
138 new world: MA 16, 586.
139 [Lotte] was used to sharing: MA 2.2, 447 f.
139 “bashfulness . . . porcupine’s skin”: Quoted from Damm, Cornelia
Goethe, 115.
139 “Doctor and Privy Councilor”: BrEltern, 427 (Oct. 16, 1788).
139 “Every wind, every drop of rain”: BrEltern, 232.
140 “My love disgusts”: BrEltern, 233.
140 The thought of giving herself: MA 19, 444 f. (March 28, 1831).
140 We have an entire house: WA IV, 1, 226 (Jan. 23, 1770).
141 you don’t need to write: MA 16, 706.
141 romantic, youthful power: WA IV, 2, 187 (Aug. 21, 1774).
141 an indeterminate: WA IV, 2, 171 f. (June 1, 1774).
141 it was as if: MA 16, 706.
141 literary garrisoning . . . loan guarantees: MA 16, 706 f.
142 forgiveness of sins: MA 1.2, 384.
142 brooding . . . conjures: MA 1.2, 385.
143 “I know no greater genius”: VB 1, 51 f. (Nov. 4, 1773).
143 I am not a Christian: BranG 1, 17 (Nov. 30, 1773).
143 “harass . . . play the partisan”; “You shall become one”: BranG 1, 17
(Nov. 30, 1773).
143 “By means of many”: MA 1.2, 863.
144 This gently descending forehead: MA 1.2, 457.
144 It would be a wonderful: MA 1.2, 490.
144 feels where he should approach: MA 1.2, 462.
144 “with the expression”: Quoted from Bode 2, 289.
145 “I have never found”: BranG 1, 35.
145 In a land to which He came: MA 1.1, 243.
145 Scheinding . . . Scheissding: WA IV, 2, 262 (May 1775).
146 As if to Emmaus we bumped along: MA 1.1, 247.
146 “Walked up and down”: BranG I, 33 (Aug. 26, 1774).
146 “I hope that in this epoch”: BranG 2, 132 (Dec. 28, 1812).
147 “one of the most extraordinary”: Grumach 1, 308 (Dec. 23, 1774).
147 “This Goethe is a vulgar”: Quoted from Leithold, 68.
148 save me: WA IV, 2, 249 (March 25, 1775).
148 Yes, dearest friend: WA IV, 2, 231 (probably Jan. 18–30, 1775).
148 carnival Goethe; courting a dainty; being captivated; insufferable:
WA IV, 2, 233 (Feb. 13, 1775).
148 who, always living: WA IV, 2, 233 f. (Feb. 13, 1775).
149 o dear friend: WA IV, 2, 243 f. (March 10, 1775).
149 what people will think: WA IV, 2, 234 (Feb. 13, 1775).
149 to float around: WA IV, 2, 278 (Aug. 8, 1775).
149 The disproportion: WA IV, 5, 179 (Aug. 11, 1781).
149 The greatest names: MA 1.2, 124.
150 His lessons are not quite: MA 1.2, 122.
150 tamed: MA 1.1, 267.
150 I’ve no use: MA 1.1, 271.
151 “creator of her moral . . . duty and feeling”: Grumach 1, 371 (Dec. 3,
1830).
151 inkling of his serious: MA 16, 770.
152 “I admire the genius”: Grumach 1, 358 (Aug. 4, 1775).
152 “I have enjoyed”: Gespräche 1, 153 (July 31, 1775).
152 Whenever I’m feeling: WA IV, 2, 270 f. (July 25, 1775).
152 Here in the room: WA IV, 2, 273 (Aug. 3, 1775).
153 I’m stranded again: WA IV, 2, 278 (Aug. 8, 1775).
153 Unfortunately, her distance: WA IV, 2, 289 (Sept. 10–19, 1775).
153 “her mother asked for time”: Grumach 1, 370 (Jan. 8, 1776).
153 Will my heart: WA IV, 2, 293 (Sept. 18, 1775).
153 flee from Lili: MA 16, 823.
154 not for the sake: WA IV, 2, 298 (Oct. 1775).
154 The first moments: WA IV, 2, 302 (Oct. 18, 1775).
155 I packed for the north: Tgb I, 1, 13 (Oct. 30, 1775).

CHAPTER 11
162 to regard [his] intrinsic: MA 16, 716.
162 sleepwalking: MA 16, 717.
162 Through field and wood: MA 16, 616.
162 business of the world: MA 16, 718.
163 his son’s reflected glory: WA IV, 3, 14 (Jan. 5, 1776).
163 My life is going along: WA IV, 3, 1 (Nov. 22, 1775).
164 I’m certainly having: WA IV, 3, 15 f. (Jan. 5, 1776).
164 Every day I learn: WA IV, 3, 12 (Dec. 31, 1775).
164 I can’t tell you anything: WA IV, 3, 1 (Nov. 22, 1775).
164 “but he is coddled”: Quoted from Leithold, 108.
165 “This Goethe is a boy”: Quoted from Leithold, 86.
165 “satirical masterpiece”: MA 1.1, 990.
166 That’s the damn thing: WA IV, 2, 217 (Dec. 23, 1774).
166 “He has an intellectual need”: Grumach 1, 308 (Dec. 23, 1774).
166 Wieland is and will always be: WA IV, 2, 238 f. (March 1775).
166 “Since last you made the trip”: Quoted from Bode 3, 88.
166 without my knowledge: WA IV, 2, 255 (April 9, 1775).
167 “It is certain that he no longer”: Quoted from Leithold, 119.
168 “Maman [Anna Amalia]”; “He is constantly sad”: Quoted from
Leithold, 128.
168 “comedy of state”: VB 1, 163 (Feb. 7, 1776).
168 “The whole court”: VB 1, 163 (Feb. 15, 1776).
168 “There is an astonishing amount”: VB 1, 169 (March 8, 1776).
169 And just as I can never: WA IV, 3, 14 (early Jan. 1776?).
169 But God only knows: WA IV, 3, 18 (Jan. 15 or 16, 1776).
169 Dear lady, permit me: WA IV, 3, 24 (Jan. 28, 1776).
169 I’m trying to make up my damn mind: WA IV, 3, 25 (Jan. 29, 1776).
169 Oh, if only my sister: WA IV, 3, 34 (Feb. 23, 1776).
169 soother: WA IV, 3, 20 (Jan. 1776).
170 You are right: WA IV, 3, 54 f. (May 1, 1776).
170 But since my love: WA IV, 3, 55 (May 2, 1776).
170 No more about Lili; My heart, my head: WA IV, 3, 50 (April 10,
1776).
170 I cannot account for: WA IV, 3, 51 f. (April 1776?).
170 I’d like it in your hand: WA IV, 3, 53 (April 16, 1776).
170 Fate, why did you grant: MA 2.1, 20.
171 Tell me then, What does fate; Drop by drop: MA 2.1, 23.
171 Whenever I want: WA IV, 3, 74 (1776).
171 “They say that Lotte”: Quoted from Leithold, 151.
172 I see now: WA IV, 3, 114 (Oct. 7, 1776).
172 eclipse: Tgb I, 1, 27 (Sept. 7, 1776).
172 Marvelous night: Tgb I, 1, 26 (Sept. 3, 1776).
172 a feverish night: Tgb I, 1, 35 (Jan. 2, 1777).
172 Didn’t sleep: Tgb I, 1, 35 (Jan. 6, 1777).
172 “The duke is one of the most remarkable”: VB 1, 223 (Jan. 9, 1778).
173 “I’ll tell you honestly”: VB 1, 220 (Nov. 3, 1777).
173 all too great heat: WA IV, 3, 57 (May 4, 1776).
174 scrawls . . . They’re still. . . how much . . . Behave: WA IV, 3, 7 f.
(Dec. 23–26, 1775).
174 “quite in love . . . to destroy”: VB 1, 145 (Nov. 10, 1775).
174 “Goethe, whom we’ve had”: VB 1, 146 (Nov. 16, 1775).
175 “It is a wizard”: Christoph Martin Wieland, Werke, ed. Fritz Martini
and Hans Werner Seiffert, 5 vols. (Munich: Hanser, 1964–68), 4:623
f.
176 “lively circle . . . Here, unobserved”: Gespräche 1, 220 (Jan. 25,
1813).
176 “amicably presiding genius”: Gespräche 1, 222 (Jan. 25, 1813).
176 “Goethe is causing”: VB 1, 180 f. (May 10, 1776).
176 You just shouldn’t seem: WA IV, 3, 30 (Feb. 19, 1776).
177 “state of affairs in Weimar”: VB 1, 189 (June 19, 1776).
177 “wild fellow”: VB 1, 191 (July 14, 1776).
177 “what will be the unfailing”: BranG 1, 58 (May 8, 1776).
177 You can feel yourself: WA IV, 3, 63 f. (May 21, 1776).
177 “Your misconstruction”: BranG 1, 59 (May 29, 1776).
178 Then . . . the duke came: WA IV, 4, 296 f. (Sept. 21, 1780).
178 And thus you can never: WA IV, 3, 46 (March 25, 1776).
178 My situation is advantageous: WA IV, 3, 21 (Jan. 22, 1776).
178 Dear Brother: WA IV, 3, 17 (Jan. 15, 1776).
179 I shall stay here: WA IV, 3, 81 (July 9, 1776).

CHAPTER 12
180 “trampling on convention”: Grumach 1, 403.
180 Of course, I’m leading: WA IV, 3, 15 (Jan. 5, 1776).
180 Ah! I am so tired of striving: MA 2.1, 13.
180 I’ve sampled the court: WA IV, 3, 38 (March 8, 1776).
181 turn [his] literary career: Grumach 1, 413 (June 18, 1776).
181 My writing has become: WA IV, 4, 221 (April 14, 1780).
181 idle life at home: WA IV, 3, 28 f. (Feb. 14, 1776).
182 subordinate . . . exaggerated . . . unsatisfied: MA, 16, 616 f.
182 always had an uncomfortable: WA IV, 7, 243 (July 12, 1786).
182 son whom I love: WA IV, 2, 127 (late Nov. 1773).
183 the odd little thing: WA IV, 3, 49 (April 5, 1776).
183 “We’ve spoken enough”: Lenz 3, 306.
184 “You are the first person”: Lenz 3, 440 (late April, 1776).
185 “through excrement”: Lenz 3, 416 (late March, 1776).
185 “What does our soldier”: Lenz 2, 794 and 798.
185 “I am working on an essay”: Lenz 3, 400 (March 1776).
185 The defects of that profession: MA 16, 634.
186 Lenz’s asinine behavior: WA IV, 3, 54 (April 25, 1776).
186 “Here I am engulfed”: Lenz 3, 427 (April 14, 1776).
187 “I’m going to the country”: Lenz 3, 472 (June 27, 1776).
187 “Rothe is a traitor”: Lenz 2, 411.
187 “As far as I have been able”: MA 8.1, 309 (Feb. 2, 1797).
188 “expelled from heaven”: Lenz 3, 517 (Nov. 29 or 30, 1776).
188 “Frau von Stein finds my method”: Lenz 3, 495 (mid-Sept. 1776).
188 We can be nothing to each other: WA IV, 3, 103 (1776).
189 I’m sending you Lenz: WA IV, 3, 105 f. (Sept. 10, 1776).
189 I hesitated: WA IV, 3, 106 (Sept. 12, 1776).
189 “I am too happy”: Lenz 3, 494 (mid-Sept. 1776).
190 I got into the water: WA IV, 3, 117 (Nov. 3, 1776).
190 “Where into my heart”: Lenz 3, 205.
190 “Man must not desire”: Lenz 2, 382.
190 How much has sprung: WA IV, 3, 119 (Nov. 8, 1776).
190 all sorts of stuff: WA IV, 3, 118 (Nov. 6, 1776).
190 Lenz will leave: WA IV, 3, 123 (late Nov. 1776).
191 “admit to a crime”: Lenz 3, 516 (Nov. 29, 1776).
191 The whole affair: WA IV, 3, 124 (Dec. 1, 1776).

CHAPTER 13
192 Klinger with his rough: WA IV, 3, 111 (Sept. 16, 1776).
193 He was a loyal: Unterhaltungen, 202.
193 “genius banquet”: Karl August Böttiger, Literarische Zustände und
Zeitgenossen, ed. Klaus Gerlach and René Sternke (Berlin: Aufbau,
1998), 75.
193 I praise the gods: WA IV, 3, 125 (Dec. 2, 1776).
194 But act completely: WA IV, 3, 265 (Dec. 14, 1778).
194 it will also be a distraction: WA IV, 4, 38 (May 22, 1779).
194 I would so much like: WA IV, 4, 46 (July 13, 1779).
194 You have neither sunk: WA IV, 5, 50 (Feb. 11, 1781).
194 We should do what we can: WA IV, 4, 290 f. (Sept. 14, 1780).
195 Every work of man: Tgb I, 1, 82 (July 14, 1779).
195 all arrogance . . . beautiful strength: Tgb I, 1, 83 (July 14, 1779).
196 I’m adapting myself: WA IV, 5, 222 (Nov. 14, 1781).
196 “Now it’s as if”: VB 1, 214 (June 13, 1777).
196 “not cast off”: VB 1, 223 (Jan. 9, 1778).
196 “with such dryness”: VB 1, 253 (Jan. 2, 1780).
196 Good effect on me: Tgb I, 1, 81 f. (July 13, 1779).
197 With them he was by turns: MA 2.2, 22.
197 pitch that limed: MA 2.2, 31.
198 Werner was proud: MA 2.2, 47.
198 thus speech often stuck: MA 2.2, 53.
199 The German stage: MA 2.2, 29.
199 Dark, disrupted day: Tgb I, 1, 44 (June 16, 1777).
199 “I cannot tell you”: Quoted from Sigrid Damm, Cornelia Goethe
(Berlin: Aufbau, 1987), 243.
199 “I will not complain”: Quoted from Damm, Cornelia Goethe, 244.
200 happy . . . nature . . . which allows: WA IV, 3, 161 (June 28, 1777).
200 To their favorites: MA 1.1, 34.
200 Ever since: WA IV, 3, 186 (Nov. 12, 1777).
200 I am very much changed: WA IV, 3, 188 (Nov. 16, 1777).
200 My thoughts are in wonderfully: WA IV, 3, 189 (Nov. 29, 1777).
200 the most wonderful thing: MA 14, 478.
201 It’s a curious feeling: WA IV, 3, 192 (Dec. 4, 1777).
201 pure peace in my soul . . . glimpses of sun: Tgb I, 1, 52 (Nov. 29,
1777).
201 the sun rose; Night arrived: Tgb I, 1, 53 (Nov. 30, 1777).
201 I saw the long and well-lit: MA 14, 480 f.
201 To be sure: MA 14, 481.
201 Like the vulture: Tgb I, 1, 53 (Dec. 1, 1777).
202 Like the vulture: MA 2.1, 37 f.
203 adventure . . . survived: WA IV, 3, 190 (Dec. 4, 1777).
203 He was completely like: MA 14, 483.
203 one would rescue: MA 14, 485 f.
204 gloomy phantom . . . clear reality: MA 14, 486.
204 released from any further: MA 14, 487.
204 I was already burdened: MA 14, 479.
204 I can assure you: WA IV, 6, 14 (July 26, 1782).
204 Behind him the branches: MA 2.1, 38.
204 And for him the snow-shrouded: MA 2.1, 41.
205 sign of confirmation: WA IV, 3, 199 (Dec. 10, 1777).
205 I want to reveal: WA IV, 3, 200 (Dec. 10, 1777).
205 What is man: Tgb I, 1, 54 (Dec. 10, 1777).
205 however, am surrounded; duke grows closer: Tgb I, 1, 50 (Oct. 8,
1777).
205 He whom, Genius: MA 1.1, 197.
205 God deals with me: WA IV, 3, 199 (Dec. 10, 1777).
206 I was silent: WA IV, 3, 201 (Dec. 11, 1777).
206 You stand, with unfathomed breast: MA 2.1, 41.
207 On a winter journey: MA 10, 49.

CHAPTER 14
208 that steel springs: MA 2.1, 176.
209 sentimentalisms: MA 2.1, 201.
209 “Tell me something”: VB 1, 224 (Feb. 12, 1778).
210 We worked into the night: WA IV, 3, 207 f. (Jan. 19, 1778).
210 A few days in quiet: Tgb I, 1, 60 (Jan. 18, 1778).
210 This week, often out: Tgb I, 1, 60 (Jan. 30, 1778).
211 I didn’t get comfortable: Tgb I, 1, 61 (Feb. 23, 1778).
211 I was a young lad: WA IV, 3, 214 (March 17, 1778).
211 “through the opening created”: Gespräche 1, 222 (Jan. 25, 1813).
212 Tom foolery: Tgb I, 1, 62 (April 14, 1778).
212 in the clamor of the world: WA IV, 3, 223 (May 14, 1778).
212 hidden gears; No dirty joke: WA IV, 3, 225 (May 19, 1778).
213 flower of public trust: WA IV, 3, 224 (May 17, 1778).
213 considered too proud: Grumach 2, 81 (Feb. 14, 1787).
213 My soul used to be: WA IV, 3, 224 (May 17, 1778).
213 destined for much alienation: Tgb I, 1, 50 (Oct. 8, 1777).
214 settle in and put down: MA 2.2, 673.
214 an unpleasant, hateful; end of trouble: MA 2.2, 674.
215 closer bond . . . protect themselves: MA 2.2, 675.
215 diabolically humane: MA 8.1, 874 (Jan. 19, 1802).
216 “We thought we were seeing”: Grumach 2, 115.
216 much too carelessly: WA IV, 47 (July 21, 1779).
216 Little by little: WA IV, 4, 12 (Feb. 22, 1779).
216 Here, the drama simply: WA IV, 4, 18 (March 6, 1779).
217 get measured and inspected: WA IV, 4, 20 (March 8, 1779).
217 I enter my old castle: WA IV, 4, 21 (March 8, 1779).
217 Now I am living: WA IV, 4, 14 (March 2, 1779).
217 a lovely concert: WA IV, 4, 17 (March 5, 1779).
218 Inadequacy is productive: Gespräche 2, 677.
218 What? The king would do: MA 3.1, 166, lines 192–96.
219 Oh hear me!: MA 3.1, 197, lines 1190–203.
219 and my advice is: MA 3.1, 194, lines 1232–38.
219 My heart is telling me: MA 3.1, 197, lines 1358–64.
220 Just consider that with every breath: MA 20.2, 1321 (Feb. 15, 1830).
220 Oh my soul, be calm: MA 3.1, 202, lines 1526–31.
221 I call that worry noble: MA 3.1, 205 f., lines 1640–60.
221 The days of man: MA 13.1, 186.
221 In our actions: MA 17, 758.
221 I am almost convinced: MA 3.1, 206, line 1665.
222 Look at us!: MA 3.1, 220, lines 248–50.
222 the voice of truth: MA 3.1, 214, lines 1938 f.
222 So leave!: MA 3.1, 220, line 2151.
222 Farewell!: MA 3.1, 221, line 2174.
222 selfish principle: MA 13, 1, 357.
223 frittering oneself: BW Reinhard, 198.
223 Pure intermediate effect: MA 17, 749.
223 “lives in fear”: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des
Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1952), 462 f.
223 In silence maintain: MA 13.1, 204.
224 with a rich interior: MA 19, 549.
224 It wasn’t at all to my taste: MA 14, 465.
224 Performed Iph.: Tgb I, 1, 78 (April 6, 1779).

CHAPTER 15
225 Straightened up: Tgb I, 1, 85 ff. (Aug. 7, 1779)
226 muddle, bustle . . . purposeful thought: Tgb I, 1, 86 f. (Aug. 7, 1779).
226 May he allow us: Tgb I, 1, 87 (Aug. 7, 1779).
227 “Recently, he read to us”: Grumach 2, 498 (Nov. 2, 1784).
227 Whoever desires: MA 17, 876.
227 yearning vanishes: MA 17, 471.
228 according to whose will: Tgb I, 1, 83 (July 14, 1779).
228 Whatever touched: MA 2.1, 68.
228 whiff of pretension: WA IV, 5, 122 (May 7, 1781).
229 it is inevitable: Grumach 1, 48 (Oct. 31, 1779).
229 it seems miraculous: WA IV, 4, 58 f. (Sept. 7, 1779).
230 “I am sorry”: Grumach 2, 140 (Oct. 16, 1779).
230 to see Lavater: WA IV, 4, 69 (Sept. 28, 1779).
230 “There’s something uniquely”: Grumach 2, 199 (Nov. 29, 1779).
230 taking the waters; when one sees again: WA IV, 4, 150 (Nov. 30,
1779).
230 I am with Lavater: WA IV, 4, 148 (Nov. 30, 1779).
230 Only here do I clearly: WA IV, 4, 150 (Nov. 30, 1779).
231 “behavior that won”; “one of Göthe’s”: Grumach 2, 220 (Jan. 17,
1780).
231 Since I am now; In former days: WA IV, 4, 66 f. (Sept. 25, 1779).
231 She explains to me: MA 9, 941.
232 that I can now think; There too I was met: WA IV, 4, 67 (Sept. 28,
1779).
232 good creature: WA IV, 4, 68 (Sept. 28, 1779).
232 impressive social . . . everything she needed; and so there is: WA IV,
4, 68 (Sept. 28, 1779).
232 She seems so beautiful; In the end: WA IV, 4, 92 and 93 (Oct. 23,
1779).
233 I cannot answer: WA IV, 4, 298 f. (Sept. 20, 1780).
233 The beautiful lady: WA IV, 4, 274 (Aug. 27, 1780).
233 Only now do I feel: WA IV, 4, 276 (Aug. 28, 1780).
233 to avoid longing: WA IV, 4, 281 (Sept. 6, 1780).
233 Your letter could not: WA IV, 4, 321 (Oct. 16, 1780).
234 Peace lies over: MA 2.1, 53.
234 The sublime gives: WA IV, 4, 70 (Oct. 3, 1779).
234 If I had been alone: WA IV, 4, 78 (Oct. 14, 1779).
234 Even now, Italy: WA IV, 4, 120 (Nov. 13, 1779).
235 Neither in Israel: WA IV, 4, 148 (Nov. 30, 1779).
235 he is the flower of mankind: WA IV, 4, 153 (Dec. 7, 1779).
235 My God, to whom: WA IV, 4, 73 f. (Oct. 8, 1779).
236 purest mutual enjoyment: WA IV, 4, 147 (Nov. 30, 1779).
236 the shriveling and freezing: WA IV, 4, 150 (Nov. 30, 1779).
236 promise of eternal life; for my taste: WA IV, 4, 115 (Nov. 2, 1779).
237 The daily work assigned: WA IV, 4, 299 (ca. Sept. 20, 1780).
237 You must leave my earth: MA 1.1, 230.
238 As you beautify: WA IV, 5, 56 (Feb. 19, 1781).
238 every day the scales: WA IV, 5, 88 (March 18, 1781).
238 “strength personified”: GBr 1, 698, footnote 257.
238 And yet, a fool: WA IV, 5, 88 (March 18, 1781).
238 narrow limits of; silly and; What can I say: WA IV, 5, 214 (Nov. 14,
1781).
238 Believe me: WA IV, 5, 149 (June 22, 1781).
239 that an image has remained: WA IV, 5, 147 (June 22, 1781).
239 bird of paradise: WA IV, 5, 148 (June 22, 1781).
239 Exclusive intolerance!: WA IV, 6, 37 (Aug. 9, 1782).
240 a blasphemy against: WA IV, 6, 36 (Aug. 9, 1782).
240 decidedly not; So, let me hear: WA IV, 6, 20 f. (July 29, 1782).
240 Nature also deserves: WA IV, 6, 65 f. (Oct. 4, 1782).
241 What man notices: WA IV, 6, 65 (Oct. 4, 1782).
241 I hereby confess: MA 12, 306.
241 shrivels up: WA IV, 6, 65 (Oct. 4, 1782).
241 We exchanged not a single: WA IV, 7, 250 (July 21, 1786).
241 “I found Goethe older”: VB 1, 320 (Aug. 1786).
241 His gait was: MA 19, 287 (Feb. 17, 1829).

CHAPTER 16
242 Thousands and thousands of thoughts: WA IV, 4, 246 (June 30,
1780).
242 an image of discordantly: MA 2.2, 488.
242 foundation: MA 2.2, 504.
242 And thus anyone familiar: MA 2.2, 504 f.
243 “made the character of this pompous”: VB 1, 245 and 248 (Nov. 10,
1779).
243 When we get older: WA IV, 6, 62 (Oct. 2, 1782).
243 “I always interpreted”: BranG 1, 81 (Oct. 17, 1782).
244 we loved each other: MA 14, 328.
244 homo temperatissimus . . . extremely fair: MA 2.2, 875.
244 very close: WA IV, 6, 387 (Nov. 11, 1784).
244 vile heresy: MA 2.2, 874.
248 We cannot think: MA 2.2, 480.
248 in his view: WA IV, 7, 63 (June 9, 1785).
248 circle . . . in defiant; more and more simple; blessing: MA 2.2, 482.
249 Nature’s consistency: WA IV, 7, 36 (April 2, 1785).
249 with the greatest: WA IV, 7, 182 (Feb. 20, 1786).
249 as tinder for an explosion: MA 16, 681.
249 “If I must call myself”: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Über die Lehre des
Spinoza in Briefen an Herrn Moses Mendelssohn, ed. Marion
Lauschke (Hamburg: Meiner, 2000), 22.
250 “a decided Spinozist”; “conceal”: Jacobi, Lehre des Spinoza, 331.
250 You’ll have to leave my earth: MA 1.1, 230.
251 “The poem Prometheus”: MA 1.1, 870 f.
251 Herder finds it amusing: WA IV, 7, 93 (Sept. 11, 1785).
252 “These are the only two philosophies”; “These are the only”: Quoted
from M. Kronenberg, Geschichte des Deutschen Idealismus, vol. 2
(Munich: Beck, 1912), 276.
253 does not prove; Forgive me that: WA IV, 7, 62 and 63 (June 9, 1785).
253 Forgive me for not writing: WA IV, 7, 110 (Oct. 21, 1785).
253 I came to Weimar: Unterhaltungen, 107.
254 Enfolding enfolded: MA 1.1, 233.
254 For nature / is unfeeling: MA 2.1, 90.
254 the observing concept: WA IV, 5, 25 (Dec. 27, 1780).
254 May neither legend; Now if one assumes: WA IV, 5, 24 (Dec. 27,
1780).
255 as a text: WA IV, 5, 217 (Nov. 14, 1781).
255 I feel such joy: WA IV, 6, 259 (March 27, 1784).
255 I have found: WA IV 6, 258 (March 27, 1784).
256 I think a scholar: WA IV, 7, 41 (April 8, 1785).
256 phenomena . . . once and for all: Quoted from Erich Heller, Enterbter
Geist (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1954), 44.
256 Man on his own: MA 20.1, 185 (June 22, 1808).
256 What are you up to: WA IV, 7, 206 (April 14, 1786).
256 However, God has also: WA IV, 7, 213 f. (May 5, 1786).
257 “So now he is really”: VB 1, 283 (July 11, 1782).
258 “Herder’s new book”: VB 1, 301 (May 1, 1784).
258 “Goethe visits me often”: VB 1, 310 (Dec. 20, 1784).
258 One of the most outstanding: WA IV, 6, 232 (late Dec. 1783).

CHAPTER 17
259 to raise up: WA IV, 4, 299 (ca. Sept. 20, 1780).
260 “to fetch Him back here”: BranG 1, 72 (June 17, 1781).
260 an evil genius: WA IV, 5, 169 (July 8, 1781).
260 I ask you: WA IV, 5, 178 f. (Aug. 11, 1781).
260 You recall the last time: WA IV, 5, 179 (Aug. 11, 1781).
261 How much more fortunate: WA IV, 5, 180 (Aug. 11, 1781).
261 irresponsible; Believe me, however: WA IV, 5, 180 (Aug. 11, 1781).
261 I follow my nature: WA IV, 5, 220 (Nov. 14, 1781).
262 I’m adapting myself: WA IV, 5, 222 (Nov. 14, 1781).
262 Just as in my father’s: WA IV, 6, 97 (Nov. 21, 1782).
262 big tea . . . duties to society: WA IV, 6, 96 f. (Nov. 21, 1782).
262 Only in the innermost: WA IV, 6, 97 f. (Nov. 21, 1782).
262 I have long known: MA 3.1, 445, line 697.
263 And shall I tell you: MA 3.1, 456, lines 1109–14.
263 He possesses: MA 3.1, 452, lines 943–50.
263 permitted is what pleases; permitted is what is proper: MA 3.1, 453,
lines 994 and 1006.
264 Would you know exactly: MA 3.1, 453 f., lines 1013–22.
264 Ah, dear Lotte: WA IV, 8, 206 (Feb. 21, 1787).
264 feelings: WA IV, 9, 124 (June 1, 1789).
264 You’ve conquered me: MA 3.1, 515, line 3282.
265 I’ve felt for quite a while: MA 3.1, 472, lines 1704–6.
265 Today, in the bustle: WA IV, 4, 292 (Sept. 14, 1780).
265 I extract as much water: WA IV, 4, 291 (Sept. 14, 1780).
265 “Amusingly enough”: Gespräche 1, 390.
267 “It has been a long”: MA 2.2, 958.
267 And so let us not: MA 2.2, 753.
267 “[Goethe] seemed to have”: MA 19, 682.
268 he is useful: MA 4.2, 516.
269 One uses the word “mein”: WA IV, 6, 160 (May 6, 1783).
269 Haste is the enemy: MA 2.2, 651.
269 How mistaken you are: MA 2.2, 75.
269 Really, I was born: WA IV, 6, 39 (Aug. 10, 1782).
269 I was created to be: WA IV, 6, 58 (Sept. 17, 1782).
269 it is natural; Enjoy my present existence: WA IV, 6, 222 (Dec. 7,
1783).
270 Just now I intended to complain: WA IV, 7, 100 (Sept. 25, 1785).
270 that after finishing: WA IV, 7, 231 (June 25, 1786).
270 at last rendered me useless: WA IV, 8, 327 (Jan. 25, 1788).
270 When I undertook: WA IV, 8, 83 (Dec. 12, 1783).
271 to travel a long: WA IV, 8, 40 (Nov. 3, 1786).
271 this separation: WA IV, 8, 23 (Sept. 18, 1786).
271 when you return: WA IV, 7, 243 (July 12, 1786).
272 Do not deny me: WA IV, 8, 86 (Dec. 12, 1786).
272 At last I can open: WA IV, 8, 39 f. (Nov. 3, 1786).
272 The length of my present: WA IV, 8, 40 (Nov. 3, 1786).
273 preserve his love so that: WA IV, 8, 42 (Nov. 3, 1786).
273 It’s a curious feeling: WA IV, 3, 192 (Dec. 6, 1777).
273 tic by which I find: MA 8.1, 208 (July 9, 1796).
273 In general, at the moment: WA IV, 8, 12 (Sept. 2, 1786).
274 “Herr Privy Councilor”: Grumach 2, 73 (Sept. 8, 1786).

CHAPTER 18
275 What all am I not: MA 3.1, 19 (Sept. 5, 1786).
275 drive and restlessness: MA 3.1, 19 (Sept. 11, 1786).
275 I shall return: WA IV, 8, 43 (Nov. 4, 1786).
275 For a new life: WA IV, 8, 37 (Nov. 1, 1786).
275 One must be born: WA IV, 8, 90 (Dec. 13, 1786).
276 But what I can say: WA IV, 8, 41 (Nov. 10, 1786).
276 In my dress: MA 3.1, 79 (Sept. 23, 1786).
276 I cannot tell you: MA 3.1, 82 (Sept. 25, 1786).
276 I talk to the people: MA 3.1, 12 (Sept. 3, 1786).
277 The people walking up and down: MA 3.1, 40 (Sept. 11, 1786).
277 Nordic bear: MA 3.1, 44 (Sept. 11, 1786).
277 but we Cimmerians: MA 15, 51 (Sept. 17, 1786).
277 When you . . . stand up: MA 3.1, 57 f. (Sept. 16, 1786).
277 I simply keep walking: MA 3.1, 75 (Sept. 21, 1786).
277 the glory of a great: MA 3.1, 71 (Sept. 19, 1786).
278 Of course, [classical architecture] is different: MA 15, 103 (Oct. 8,
1786).
278 And so, thank God: MA 3.1, 89 (Sept. 28, 1786).
278 On this journey: MA 3.1, 107 (Oct. 5, 1786).
278 studying more: WA IV, 8, 89 (Dec. 13, 1786).
278 It is a grand, admirable: MA 3.1, 92 (Sept. 29, 1786).
278 Today for the first time: MA 3.1, 99 (Oct. 1, 1786).
279 The first phase of my journey: MA 3.1, 127 (Oct. 12, 1786).
279 I take no pleasure: MA 3.1, 133 (Oct. 17, 1786).
279 I will control myself: MA 3.1, 137 (Oct. 19, 1786).
279 We’ll take a closer look: MA 3.1, 144 (Oct. 25, 1786).
279 I don’t even get undressed: MA 3.1, 153 (Oct. 27, 1786).
279 Now good night: MA 3.1, 157 (Oct. 28, 1786).
279 Now I begin to live: MA 3.1, 157 (Oct. 29, 1786).
279 I’m counting it as: WA IV, 8, 77 (Dec. 2, 1786).
279 I’m living a new youth: WA IV, 8, 173 (Feb. 6, 1787).
280 Since I’ve been in Rome: WA IV, 8, 93 (Dec. 14, 1786).
280 that it is, namely: WA IV, 8, 97 f. (Dec. 12–23, 1786).
280 The longer you look: WA IV, 8, 292 (Nov. 17, 1787).
280 Muses and Graces: WA IV, 8, 134 (Jan. 13, 1787).
281 first amour in Rome: MA 15, 183.
281 sweet burden: MA 15, 124 (Oct. 19, 1786).
281 “dearest friend . . . that there are other”: MA 15, 150.
281 The zitelle: WA IV, 8, 314 (Dec. 29, 1787).
281 The girls—or rather: WA IV, 8, 170 (Feb. 3, 1787).
282 He’s a handsome fellow: MA 15, 428 (June 27, 1787).
282 “The day of your departure”: BranG 1, 95 (May 10, 1788).
282 I’ve hardly ever seen: WA IV, 8, 83 (Dec. 12, 1786).
282 It was otherwise a good life: MA 15, 639 (April 1788).
283 “I feel ennobled”: VB 1, 321 (Nov. 23, 1786).
283 Moritz, who is still: WA IV, 8, 94 (Dec. 16, 1786).
283 So, that was all you had: WA IV, 8, 79 (Dec. 9, 1786).
283 Your note pained me: WA IV, 8, 93 (Dec. 13, 1786).
283 bittersweet; will not be; faltering times: WA IV, 8, 115; 116; 117
(Jan. 6, 1787).
283 a good deal freer: WA IV, 8 116 (Jan. 1, 1787).
284 I have looked my way: WA IV, 8, 162 (Feb. 3, 1787).
284 Just as in Rome: MA 15, 231 (March 5, 1787).
284 I forgave: MA 15, 224 ff. (Feb. 27, 1787).
284 I am in my own way: MA 15, 227 (Feb. 27, 1787).
285 Naples is a Paradise: MA 15, 254 (March 16, 1787).
285 The doubts about whether: MA 15, 277 (March 26, 1787).
285 belly of a whale: MA 15, 283 (April 2, 1787).
285 If you have never found: MA 15, 287 f. (April 3, 1787).
286 The blackish waves: MA 15, 300 (April 7, 1787).
286 There was nothing about: MA 15, 369 (1787).
286 You are not one: MA 3.1, 232.
286 A radiant whiteness: MA 3.1, 232.
286 for various nefarious escapades: MA 15, 314 (April 13–14, 1787).
286 desolate sight: MA 15, 383 (May 13, 1787).
286 Then one would perhaps: MA 15, 409 f. (May 28, 1787).
287 Nordic lands . . . make a joke: MA 15, 410 (May 28, 1787).
288 beneath this sky: MA 15, 268 (March 22, 1787).
288 perhaps something of this: MA 15, 268 (March 22, 1787).
288 without disadvantage . . . become more; I already: WA IV, 8, 225
(May 17–29, 1787).
289 to qualify myself: WA IV, 8, 242 (Aug. 11, 1787).
289 Art is serious business: WA IV, 8, 261 f. (Sept. 28, 1787).
289 found myself again: WA IV, 8, 357 (March 17, 1788).
289 It was an unspeakably: MA 15, 516 (Nov. 3, 1787).
290 As if lashed by: MA 3.1, 276 f.
290 wonderful play . . . I only intend: WA IV, 5, 285 (March 3, 1782).
290 immeasurable love of life: MA 16, 821.
290 an enormous strength: MA 16, 822.
291 My Egmont is almost: WA IV, 5, 239 (Dec. 12, 1781).
292 when I banish: WA IV, 8, 148 (Jan. 27, 1787).
292 It is easy for a shepherd: MA 3.1, 306.
292 to restrain them: MA 3.1, 307.
292 to keep his old constitution: MA 3.1, 306.
293 I have lived: MA 3.1, 326.
293 Sweet slumber!: MA 3.1, 327 f.
293 freedom of mind: MA 15, 518 (Nov. 10, 1787).
293 Cupid, wanton and capricious: MA 15, 566 (Jan. 1788).
293 to tell him how much: MA 19, 316 (April 8, 1829).
293 and of course: WA IV, 8, 346 (Feb. 16, 1788).
294 of some charming strolls: WA IV, 8, 347 (Feb. 16, 1788).
294 pudenda: WA IV, 9, 9 (late July or early Aug. 1788).
294 “I fear you are angry”: Quoted from Roberto Zapperi, Das Inkognito:
Goethes ganz andere Existenz in Rom (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999),
221.
294 “like a child”: Quoted from Zapperi, Das Inkognito, 231.
295 I answer your friendly: WA IV, 8, 355 (March 17, 1788).
295 I cannot deny . . . that I was overtaken: MA 15, 653 (April 1788).
295 Since that night: MA 15, 654.

CHAPTER 19
296 Lord, here am I: WA IV, 8, 358 (March 17, 1788).
296 a whole mountain: WA IV, 8, 373 (May 23, 1788).
296 I have gone terribly to seed: WA IV, 8, 374 (May 23, 1788).
297 Bidding Rome farewell: WA IV, 8, 374 (May 12, 1788).
297 tap on the rocks: WA IV, 8, 376 (May 24, 1788).
297 “He has gotten leaner”: Gespräche 1, 433.
297 “He proved more talkative”: Gespräche 1, 431.
297 I am happy to listen: WA IV, 9, 3 (mid-July 1788).
298 Eroticon: WA IV, 9, 57 (Nov. 16, 1788).
298 recommend erotica: WA IV, 9, 102 f. (April 6, 1789).
298 I haven’t done anything: WA IV, 9, 114 (May 10, 1789).
298 “Now I have it from Frau von Stein”: VB 1, 392 (March 8, 1789).
298 “What you write”: VB 1, 395 (March 28, 1789).
299 I hesitated: WA IV, 9, 123 (June 1, 1789).
299 What kind of relationship; But I freely admit: WA IV, 9, 124 (June 1,
1789).
299 Unfortunately, you have long scorned: WA IV, 9, 125 (June 1, 1789).
300 to make a plan: WA IV, 9, 127 (June 8, 1789).
300 There are reasons: WA IV, 9, 49 (Nov. 6, 1788).
300 utterly hateful . . . mix my hot: MA 3.2, 24.
301 eroticis: WA IV, 9, 117 (May 12, 1789).
301 entertainments: WA IV, 9, 111 (May 8, 1789).
301 I believe my elegies: WA IV, 9, 199 (April 3, 1790).
301 Tell me, oh stones, and speak: MA 3.2, 39.
301 Mother and daughter: MA 3.2, 41.
301 Do not, Beloved: MA 3.2, 43.
301 Once she appeared to me: MA 3.2, 45.
302 All the night long: MA 3.2, 47.
302 “a few too lusty thoughts”: MA 3.2, 450.
302 We delight in the joys: MA 3.2, 79.
302 the desired stiffening . . . to apply a searing: MA 3.2, 571.
302 “filling the bed chamber”: Aurelius Augustinus, Vom Gottesstaat, ed.
Wilhelm Timme (Zurich and Munich: Artemis, 1955), 306.
302 to untie the girl’s waistbelt: MA 3.2, 586.
303 I’m maneuvering: WA IV, 9, 163 (Nov. 20, 1789).
303 A sacred rite: WA IV, 9, 171 (Dec. 27, 1790).
304 “gods and idolaters”: BW Schiller/Körner 1, 85 (July 23, 1787).
304 “I have considered myself”: BW Schiller/Körner 1, 138 (Sept. 10,
1787).
304 “Of course, the party”: BW Schiller/Körner 1, 254 (Sept. 12, 1788).
304 a powerful but immature: MA 12, 86.
304 “It would make me unhappy”: BW Schiller/Körner 2, 16 (Feb. 2,
1789).
305 “This man, this Goethe”: BW Schiller/Körner 2, 37 (March 9, 1789).
305 “I must tell you”: BW Schiller/Körner 1, 295 (Dec. 30, 1788).
305 especially since this acquisition: WA IV, 9, 65 (Dec. 9, 1788).
306 moral part of the play: WA IV, 9, 37 (Oct. 1, 1788).
306 “wary of making”: VB 1, 359 (Aug. 18, 1788).
306 “It’s just a shame”: VB 1, 365 (Oct. 17, 1788).
306 “I’ve had really a great”: VB 1, 390 f. (March 2, 1789).
306 withdrawal into my inner: WA I, 53, 386.
306 In Italy I felt myself: MA 14, 463.
307 the real result: WA I, 53, 386.
308 “Art has completely occupied”: Gespräche 1, 452.
308 I’ve known him for years: MA 3.1, 483 f., lines 2117–34.
309 I feel myself relieved . . . My heart drives on: MA 3.1, 514 f., lines
3272–73, 3281.
309 And if a man’s struck: MA 3.1, 519, lines 3432 f.
309 And when you seem to lose: MA 3.1, 519, lines 3419 f.
309 You’re not as miserable: MA 3.1, 518, lines 3405 f.
309 Just so the drowning sailor: MA 3.1, 520, lines 3452 f.
310 in that strange period: MA 14, 463.
310 confidentially, that this journey: WA IV, 9, 197 f. (April 3, 1790).
310 My life on the whole: WA IV, 9, 253 (March 20, 1791).
310 “Nothing is simpler”: Karl August Böttiger, Literarische Zustände
und Zeitgenossen, ed. Klaus Gerlach and René Sternke (Berlin:
Aufbau, 1998), 67 f.

CHAPTER 20
311 Accept me as a guest: WA IV, 8, 357 f. (March 17, 1788).
312 to get a literary grip; the preoccupation: MA 12, 308.
313 Who could ever deny: MA 4.1, 592.
313 But you know: WA IV, 5, 312 (April 17, 1782).
313 She has persuaded herself: MA 19, 493 (Jan. 4, 1824).
314 seemed almost to have lost: MA 14, 14.
314 I shall now adopt: Grumach 4, 52.
314 that people in the Fatherland: MA 14, 512.
315 The masses have to smash things: MA 9, 137.
315 Our part in public affairs: MA 17, 860.
315 Active engagement . . . Man knows himself: MA 12, 306.
315 Meanwhile, I become: WA IV, 9, 270 (June 1, 1791).
315 harmonious development: MA 5, 290.
315 Aristocratic manners . . . carefree delicacy: MA 5, 289.
316 whether that state of affairs: MA 5, 290.
316 This small person: WA IV, 5, 76 f. (March 11, 1781).
317 where I can lock up: WA IV, 10, 6 (Aug. 18, 1792).
317 Get a move on, Chronos: MA 1.1, 260 f.
318 notions: WA IV, 10, 13 (Sept. 2, 1792).
318 Everyone is complaining: WA IV, 10, 11 (Aug. 27, 1792).
318 the idle observer: WA IV, 10, 15 (Sept. 10, 1792).
318 Under these circumstances: MA 14, 384.
319 premature burial; here and today: MA 14, 385.
319 I’m very happy: WA IV 10, 25 f. (Sept. 27, 1792).
319 And so here I also want: MA 14, 401.
319 This campaign: WA IV, 10, 33 (Oct. 15, 1792).
319 as if born again . . . to realize: WA IV, 10, 40 (Nov. 14, 1792).
320 In these six weeks: WA IV, 10, 32 (Oct. 10, 1792).
320 His Highness the duke: WA IV, 10, 44 (Dec. 24, 1792).
320 realism came to the fore: MA 14, 464.
320 The longing within me: MA 14, 462.
321 hardened . . . I felt alienated: MA 14, 465.
321 convivial, clever: MA 14, 490.
321 any admiration: MA 14, 494.
321 Be cheerful, my dear child: WA IV, 10, 40 (Nov. 14, 1792).
322 a testimony to my annoyingly: MA 14, 512.
322 patriotic contribution: MA 4.1, 110.
322 alarm and distrust; where all classes: MA 4.1, 129.
322 People say: MA 4.1, 95.
323 to a certain extent regard it: MA 19, 493.
323 How often these valiant heroes: MA 4.1, 164.
323 Ever since I perceived: MA 4.1, 160 f.
324 Each of us is able: MA 4.1, 161.
324 I used to take it too lightly: MA 4.1, 160.
324 On the one hand: WA IV, 10, 87 (July 7, 1793).
325 The misery these people: WA IV, 10, 101 (July 27, 1793).
325 In my present situation: WA IV, 10, 84 f. (July 3, 1793).
325 half despairingly: MA 14, 21.
325 But I sought to save myself: MA 14, 513.

CHAPTER 21
326 My vagabond life: WA IV, 10, 104 f. (Aug. 19, 1793).
326 Knowst thou the marvelous poison; Difficult to tame: MA 4.1, 774.
326 “Since a few days ago”: VB 1, 453 (Nov. 25, 1793).
327 “Goethe turned to me”: Grumach 4, 63.
327 1. Light is the simplest: MA 4.2, 361 (July 15, 1793).
328 “We always believe”: BranG 1, 137 (Oct. 7, 1793).
328 I wish very much: WA IV, 10, 145 f. (Feb. or March 1794).
328 Now my thoughts are bent: WA IV, 10, 131 (July 12, 1793).
331 Is it the object: MA 17, 827.
331 that I did not understand: WA IV, 10, 167 (June 24, 1794).
331 “Recently he described”: Grumach 4, 88.
332 “If someone puts his entire strength”: Schiller und Lotte, 184 (Feb.
25, 1789).
332 certain harsh passages: MA 12, 87.
332 “But when that short spring”: Schiller V, 458, footnote.
333 “The culture of the Germans”: Schiller V, 868.
333 I shall be heartily delighted: WA IV, 10, 166 (June 24, 1794).
334 “It is turning out to be”: BW Schiller/Körner 3, 126 (July 4, 1794).
334 I must add that: WA IV, 10, 169 (June 28, 1794).
334 for me it was a new spring: MA 14, 34.
335 For I had realized: MA 12, 930.
335 There must be such a thing!: MA 15, 327.
335 and with some characteristic . . . That is not an experience . . . I find
it so nice: MA 12, 88 f.
336 neither of us: MA 12, 89.
336 It is, however, rare: MA 14, 581.
336 “We had . . . spoken at length”: BW Schiller/Körner 3, 133 (Sept. 1,
1794).
337 in which with a friendly hand: MA 8.1, 16 (Aug. 27, 1794).
337 “But even to have set out”: MA 8.1, 14 (Aug. 23, 1794).
337 “In your authentic intuition”: MA 8.1, 13 (Aug. 23, 1794).
338 You will soon see for yourself: MA 8.1, 17 (Aug. 27, 1794).
338 “since unfortunately my cramps”: MA 8.1, 22 (Sept. 7, 1794).
338 ”although lubricious”; “A few days ago”: Schiller und Lotte, 556.

CHAPTER 22
341 the honorable public: WA IV, 4, 311 (Oct. 11, 1780).
341 One can’t even imagine; In the sphere: MA 17, 310.
342 Now that everyone reads; Noble friend: MA 4.1, 660 f.
342 “Humanity has lost its dignity”: Schiller V, 594.
343 I read the manuscript: MA 8.1, 33 (Oct. 26, 1794).
343 to the irresistible temptation: MA 4.1, 441.
343 the guillotine would be blessed: MA 4.1, 444.
344 sparing one another’s feelings: MA 4.1, 449.
344 in the name of virtue; sociable education: MA 4.1, 448.
344 “For—to say it once and for all”: Schiller V, 618.
344 who depend on society: MA 4.1, 452.
344 You will at least want to recite: MA 4.1, 454.
345 until I see 99 predecessors: WA IV, 10, 352 (Dec. 21, 1795).
345 had to be sacrificed: MA 8.1, 36 (Oct. 28, 1794).
345 centaur: MA 8.1, 93 (July 20, 1795).
345 “Die Horen will have to be”: VB 2, 41 f. (July 27, 1795).
345 “a few thoughts”: MA 3.2, 450.
345 “I have no appreciation”: MA 3.2, 451.
345 “two baptized Jewesses”: Quoted from Der Briefwechsel zwischen
Friedrich Schiller und Wilhelm von Humboldt, ed. Siegfried Seidel
(Berlin: Aufbau, 1962), 1:177.
346 “The child whom Goethe and I”: BW Schiller/Körner 3, 229 (Feb. 1,
1796).
347 “It is one of the greatest joys”: MA 8.1, 187.
347 “How vividly this opportunity”: MA 8.1, 187.
347 There is no escape: MA 9, 439.
348 preached the gospel: MA 12, 97.
348 The novel goes along: MA 8.1, 169.
348 Like my other things: WA IV, 24, 202 (March 16, 1814).
348 “You are a true man!”: MA 5, 570.
349 acquainted with himself: MA 5, 190.
349 likes to play destiny: MA 5, 555.
349 So you are merely playing: MA 5, 549.
349 “I think I see”: MA 8.1, 204.
350 “How easily his genius”: BW Schiller/Körner 2, 37 (March 9, 1789).
350 Everything you have seen: MA 5, 549.
350 He no longer regarded: MA 5, 504.
351 The decision to leave: MA 5, 570.
351 “Aesthetic atheism”: Novalis, Werke, Tagebücher und Briefe
Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Mandred Frank (Frankfurt a. M.:
Hanser, 1978–87), 2:801.
351 “a pilgrimage toward”: Novalis, Werke, 2:807.
351 when I led an easy: MA 5, 535.
352 There is no question: MA 8.1, 209 (July 9, 1796).
352 more water of reason: MA 8.1, 181 (June 25, 1796).
352 “Moreover, the women”: VB 2, 79 (Oct. 25, 1796).
352 “because those sheets”: VB 2, 52 (Dec. 6, 1795).
352 “I cannot yet stifle”: VB 2, 145 (March 10, 1799).
353 feminine epoch: MA 8.1, 467 (Dec. 16, 1797).
353 “It is understood”: MA 8.1, 505 (Jan. 26, 1798).

CHAPTER 23
354 has some claim: MA 8.1, 283 (Dec. 7. 1796).
355 sense of honor . . . no ambition: MA 4.1, 568.
355 Thus to the sailor: MA 4.1, 629.
356 “And Homer’s sun”: Schiller I, 234.
356 because I need to have done: MA 8.2, 245 (July 7, 1796).
356 feeling of manhood: MA 4.1, 617.
357 “While the rest of us”: Friedrich Schiller, Briefe, ed. Gerhard Fricke
(Munich: Hanser, 1955), 466 f.
357 Herrmann and Dorothea . . . for once: MA 8.1, 485 (Jan. 3, 1798).
357 greatly moved: MA 8.1, 49.
357 for now all the world: MA 4.1, 628.
358 the solidest ground: MA 4.1, 629.
358 “By the way, I was amused”: MA 8.1, 351 (May 23, 1797).
358 Penniless and sick at heart: MA 4.1, 863.
359 Dig no more: MA 4.1, 864.
359 play out naturally: MA 8.1, 398 (Aug. 22, 1797).
359 When new faith germinates: MA 4.1, 866.
359 When the sparks are blowing: MA 4.1, 871.
359 And of the ancient gods: MA 4.1, 867.
360 “Fallen now are all”: Schiller I, 167 f.
360 “Nothing occasions more difference”: VB 2, 116 (Oct. 18, 1797).
360 Our study of ballads: MA 8.1, 360 (June 22, 1797).
361 Once more, you wavering: MA 6.1, 535.
362 No longer will they hear; Nameless now; A shudder: MA 6.1, 535.
363 Now, however, I wish: MA 8.1, 359 (June 22, 1797).
363 “duplicity of human nature”: MA 8.1, 360 (June 23, 1797).
363 “to the service”: MA 8.1, 361 (June 23, 1797).
363 “led to a life of activity”: MA 8.1, 363 (May 25, 1797).
363 It would now only be a matter: MA 8.1, 369 (July 1, 1797).
363 Faust has been postponed: MA 8.1, 370 (July 5, 1797).
364 “May heaven help me”: Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und
Briefe, ed. Michael Knaupp (Munich: Hanser, 1992–93), 2:554 (Nov.
1794).
364 has the makings of a poet: MA 8.1, 365 (June 28, 1797).
364 I’m already dreading: MA 8.1, 381 (July 29, 1797).
364 million-headed Hydra: MA 8.1, 393 (Aug.17, 1797).
365 Therefore, I have made: MA 8.1, 398 f. (Aug. 22, 1797).
365 these enormous rocks: MA 8.1, 423 (Sept. 25, 1797).
365 that it all would be purchased: MA 8.1, 392 (Aug. 17, 1797).
366 in a constant whirl: MA 8.1, 384 (Aug. 9, 1797).
366 You surely know . . . and you saw: WA IV, 12, 252 (Aug. 24, 1797).
366 They remember you: MA 8.1, 408 (Aug. 31, 1797).
366 “What would I have given 16 years ago”: MA 8.1, 412 (Sept. 8,
1797).
366 I think it was an advantage: MA 8.1, 424 (Sept. 9, 1797).
367 I felt . . . a strange longing: MA 8.1, 432 f. (Oct. 14, 1797).
367 Yesterday your head: MA 8.1, 437 (Oct. 1, 1797, in a letter of Oct.
17).
367 instilled much confidence: MA 8.1, 434 (Oct. 14, 1797).
367 “How much I wish”: MA 8.1, 443 (Oct. 30, 1797).

CHAPTER 24
369 productive self: MA 8.1, 455 (Nov. 29, 1797).
369 I can only work: MA 8.1, 463 (Dec. 9, 1797).
369 “aggressive”: MA 8.1, 460 (Dec. 8, 1797).
369 I don’t know myself: MA 8.1, 462 (Dec. 9, 1797).
370 “because of its emotional“; “wants to express”; “embarrasses you”:
MA 8.1, 464 (Dec. 12, 1797).
370 a sort of darkness: MA 8.1, 17 (Aug. 27, 1794).
370 the epic poet recites: MA 4.2, 126.
371 “The dramatic action moves”: MA 8.1, 473 (Dec. 26, 1797).
371 Why are our epic works: MA 8.1, 475 (Dec. 27, 1797).
371 “If drama really needs”: MA 8.1, 477 (Dec. 29, 1797).
372 to produce another peak: MA 6.2, 355.
372 what the world is losing: MA 6.2, 26.
373 little family portrait: MA 6.2, 1003.
373 imaginators . . . try to appeal: MA 6.2, 123.
374 should stick to nature: MA 6.2, 13.
374 Once the artist has taken up: MA 6.2, 17.
375 “the barge of Acheron”: Schiller I, 212.
375 “nothing but a story”: Schiller I, 212.
375 “One should really conceive”: MA 8.1, 450 (Nov. 14, 1797).
375 independent work . . . In any event: MA 8.1, 452 (Nov. 25, 1797).
376 “In the opera”: MA 8.1, 478 (Dec. 29, 1797).
376 “The character of the hero”: BranG 1, 325 (Jan. 31, 1799).
378 “with all their talk of eternity”: Quoted from MA 6.3, 1300.
378 As for Fichte: WA IV, 14, 172 (Aug. 30, 1799).
378 “I must have been vexed”: Quoted from MA 6.2, 1300.
379 Serenissimi philippic: MA 6.2, 923 (Dec. 26, 1798).
379 lack of feeling: MA 8.1, 802 (July 25, 1800).
379 that sacred night: MA 11.1.2, 215.
379 Miracles I cannot do: WA I, 6, 476.
380 My consolation is her love: MA 6.1, 143, lines 567 f.
380 The necessity for our tragic theater: MA 6.2, 692.
380 “unpoetical ceremonial stage”: Quoted from MA 6.1, 923.
380 lack of feeling: MA 8.1, 802 (July 25, 1800).
381 My Helen; Now I am so much drawn: MA 8.1, 812 (Sept. 12, 1800).
381 path of mist and fog: MA 8.1, 360 (June 22, 1797).
381 “Don’t be unsettled by the thought”: MA 8.1, 812 f. (Sept. 13, 1800).
381 To connoisseurs this play: MA 6.1, 1050.

CHAPTER 25
383 Not a moment was idly spent: MA 14, 62.
383 “cheeky . . . one-sided”: MA 8.1, 600 (July 23, 1798).
383 What would remain to be said: MA 8.1, 604 (July 28, 1798).
383 When he began: Grumach 4, 541.
384 “He loves you like a father”: Eckart Klessmann, Das Leben der
Caroline Michaelis-
Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling 1763–1809 (Munich: DTV, 1979), 229.
384 He has a very lucid: WA IV, 13, 168 (May 29, 1798).
384 direct us from above: MA 8.1, 588 f. (June 30, 1798).
385 We intend to do our utmost: MA 8.1, 517 (Sept. 23, 1800).
385 Ever since I tore myself free: WA IV, 15, 117 (Sept. 27, 1800).
385 At least I can flatter: WA IV, 15, 173 (Feb. 1, 1801).
385 reentrance into life: WA IV, 15, 176 (Feb. 5, 1801).
385 Unfortunately, when we parted: WA IV, 15, 174 (Feb. 5, 1801).
386 We shall wait and see: MA 8.1, 888 (March 9, 1802).
386 As a whole, it is the prodigious sight: MA 8.1, 887 (March 9, 1802).
387 vessel: MA 14, 60.
387 superstition: MA 14, 66.
387 For if a miracle: MA 6.1, 323, lines 2854 f.
388 At home, securely ruled: MA 6.1, 303 f., lines 2179–84.
390 “March fifth passed more happily”: MA 8.1, 888 (March 10, 1802).
390 with more concentration: MA 8.1, 909 (July 5, 1802).
390 “If I ever succeed in writing”: MA 8.1, 912 f. (July 6, 1802).
391 “a premonition”: Grumach 5, 539.
391 By the way, I feel well: MA 8.1, 1001 (April 25?, 1805).
392 Oh no! Destruction!: Grumach 5, 589.
392 Unannounced and without fanfare: Grumach 5, 565.
392 I thought I would lose myself: MA 20.1, 98 (June 1, 1805).

CHAPTER 26
397 In defiance of death; His loss seemed; most marvelous: MA 14, 130.
398 hollowed-out; Only now; unceremoniously; friendship still: MA 14,
131.
398 His mind forged on: MA 6.1, 91.
398 I cannot . . . cannot: MA 6.1, 904.
398 really ought to begin; So now I only see each day: MA 20.1, 98 (June
1, 1805).
399 Schiller’s idealistic tendency: MA 14, 132.
399 because I was afraid: Gespräche 3.1, 674, footnote (April 5, 1824).
399 longing for . . . loss . . . compensation . . . passion: MA 14, 678.
400 In order not to bore us: MA 9, 20.
400 “loveliest of all the virgin roses”: Wilhelm Bode, Goethes
Liebesleben (Berlin: Mittler, 1914), 350.
401 “When a complete version”: Gräf II, 2, 125 f.
401 “[o]nce I decided to enjoy”: Gräf II, 2, 141.
402 “haphazardly”: Gräf II, 2, 150.
402 Meanwhile . . . we will break off: Gräf II, 2, 152.
402 harmful effects of potatoes: Tgb III, 1, 248 (Aug. 19, 1806).
402 Since the great breach: GBr 3, 20 (April 4, 1806).
403 Dispute between the servant: Tgb III, 1, 244 (Aug. 7, 1806).
403 Reflections and discussions: Tgb III, 1, 243 (Aug. 6, 1806).
404 extremely rough: WA IV, 19, 169 (Aug. 8, 1806).
404 I am most obliged: WA IV, 19, 180 (Aug. 23, 1806).
404 It would be difficult; Kapellmeister Hummel; despite the gloomy:
MA 14, 180.
405 necessarily bring down ruin; tenacious author: MA 14, 181.
405 I put my trust: MA 6.1, 93.
405 “He is shamefully egotistical”: Grumach 6, 149 (Nov. 21, 1813).
405 “It’s really horrible”: Grumach 6, 150.
405 At five o’clock: Tgb III, 1, 263 (Oct. 14, 1806).
406 “Although already undressed”: Grumach 6, 153.
406 But I suffered something: WA IV, 19, 248 (mid-Dec. 1806).
407 “In those sad days”: Grumach 6, 163.
407 worst moments: WA IV, 19, 244 (Dec. 9, 1806).
407 never seen a greater image: Grumach 6, 157.
408 It will be cause for celebration: WA IV, 19, 248 (mid-Dec. 1806).
408 He is still making good progress: WA IV, 19, 251 (Dec. 25, 1806).
408 In the last few days and nights: WA IV, 19, 197 (Oct. 17, 1806).
408 “introduced his wife to me”: Grumach 6, 166.
409 “Amid the thunder of cannon”: Quoted from Wolfgang Frühwald,
Goethes Hochzeit (Frankfurt a. M. and Leipzig: Insel, 2007), 47.
409 treated very inappropriately . . . If you feel: WA IV, 19, 253 (Dec. 25,
1806).
409 In the worst hours: MA 10.1, 142 (Dec. 26, 1806).
410 childishly egotistical spirit . . . pride of the professors: Grumach 6,
181.
410 to most jealously preserve . . . the person in whose hand: Grumach
6, 210.
411 When Paul says to obey: Grumach 6, 172.
411 When someone complains; that Germany: MA 20.1, 155 (July 27,
1807).
412 the highest phenomenon: WA IV, 19, 258 (Jan. 3, 1807).
412 Prometheus . . . light . . . drawn everyone’s: Gespräche 3, 2, 22
(March 8, 1826).
413 congress in Erfurt: MA 14, 207.
413 “The emperor is supposed”: BW Reinhard, 77.
413 Well, so the wonderful words: BW Reinhard, 78 f.
413 world conqueror . . . making use of a device: MA 14, 578.
414 dramas of fate . . . recall the past: MA 14, 579.
414 manifold expressions: MA 14, 580.
414 I’m happy to admit: WA IV, 20, 225 (Dec. 2, 1808).
415 it is unfortunately probable: WA IV, 20, 226 (Dec. 2, 1808).

CHAPTER 27
416 somewhat abstruse little work: WA IV, 22, 76 (April 17, 1811).
416 plucky, loyal: MA 9, 157, line 163.
416 commitment: MA 9, 158, line 218.
417 We set off boldly: MA 9, 180 f., lines 915–30.
418 Alas, I seem to myself: MA 20.1, 263 (June 26, 1811).
418 You must have no mercy: MA 8.1, 937 (May 22, 1803).
418 had no other wish: MA 8.1, 642 (Oct. 31, 1798).
419 day of liberation: MA 14, 215.
420 For in truth, it is a vain; the deeds of light: MA 10, 9.
420 What spectacle!: MA 6.1, 547 f., lines 454 and 461.
421 [A]s I placed the prism: MA 10, 909 f.
421 that looked mouse-colored: MA 10, 442.
422 But it is better: MA 10, 263.
422 Love and hate: Tgb III, 1, 315 (May 25, 1807).
422 error of the Newtonian theory: MA 19, 105 (May 2, 1824).
422 Thus we are not talking about: MA 10, 12.
422 I perceived light in its purity: MA 19, 492.
423 These phenomena: MA 10, 45.
423 Let no one search: MA 17, 824.
423 Theories are mostly: MA 17, 797.
423 The greatest happiness: MA 17, 919.
424 What a precious, marvelous thing: MA 15, 108 (Oct. 9, 1786).
425 in the process his outward sense: MA 17, 352.
426 the greatest and most precise: MA 17, 846.
426 “Experts will find nothing new”: Quoted from HA 13, 619.
427 “stillborn bagatelle”: MA 10, 996.
427 I take no pride: MA 19, 297 (Feb. 19, 1829).
427 To rejoice in your own worth: MA 9, 127.
427 Young Schopenhauer: WA IV, 24, 44 (Nov. 24, 1813).
428 “Praised be his name”: Schopenhauer Briefe, 7.
428 Teaching’s a chore: MA 9, 92.
429 “What I think, what I write”: Schopenhauer Briefe, 16.
429 “If I compare your Theory of Color”: Schopenhauer Briefe, 19.
430 “I know with absolute certainty”: Schopenhauer Briefe, 20.
430 “Except for a few weeks”: Schopenhauer Briefe, 22.
430 Whoever is himself inclined: WA IV, 26, 154 f. (Nov. 16, 1815).
430 briefly: WA IV, 26, 235 (Jan. 28, 1816).
431 Dr. Schopenhauer sided with me: MA 14, 252.

CHAPTER 28
432 second part of the Theory of Color: WA IV, 21, 195 (Feb. 21, 1810).
432 to once again converse; I put a lot into it: MA 20.1, 211 (June 1,
1809).
433 from a business: WA IV, 10, 210 (Nov. 10, 1808).
434 There are so many connections: MA 10, 624.
434 like a kind of inclination: MA 12, 206.
435 It seems that the author’s: MA 9, 285.
435 But after all, man is: MA 9, 318.
435 traces of murky, passionate necessity: MA 9, 285.
436 That could well happen . . . Consciousness: MA 9, 292.
436 Eduard yearned: MA 9, 401.
437 “idealistic”: quoted from Tgb III, 2, 1095.
437 What’s more, I am only too honored: WA IV, 20, 26 (March 7, 1808).
437 As demanded by the speedy progress: Grumach 6, 457.
437 diatribe against the new poetasters: Tgb III, 1, 430 (April 17, 1808).
437 Each one dies peacefully: Grumach 6, 453.
437 The common topics: WA IV, 20, 27 (March 7, 1808).
438 Schlegel’s conversion: WA IV, 20, 93 f. (June 22, 1808).
438 a lascivious masquerade ball: WA IV, 20, 27 (March 7, 1808).
439 I cannot warm up: WA IV, 20, 15 (Feb. 1, 1808).
439 “You poor souls”: Zacharias Werner, Wanda (Tübingen, 1810), 85.
441 Eduard held only Ottilie: MA 9, 364.
441 I ought to have made: MA 9, 500.
442 They still exerted an indescribable: MA 9, 517.
442 Whoever makes a serious descent: MA 17, 880.
443 the tremendous, importunate forces: MA 9, 507.
443 Consciousness . . . not an adequate: MA 9, 292.
443 Peace hovers above: MA 9, 529.
443 quiet virtues only recently: MA 9, 526 f.
444 a single nature: MA 9, 285.
444 “Of course, your characters and actions”: BW Reinhard, 110 f.
445 We’ve often heard: MA 9, 37.
446 And then at last he’s there: MA 9, 42.

CHAPTER 29
448 Who should receive: MA 3.2, 151.
448 of a glorious epoch: MA 6.2, 196.
448 And it was she: MA 6.1, 345.
448 The difference from earlier times: WA IV, 19, 337 (May 24, 1807).
448 heart . . . held out: MA 9, 932.
449 My dear mother’s death: WA IV, 20, 169 (Sept. 21, 1808).
449 at her advanced age: WA IV, 20, 166 (Sept. 19, 1808).
449 With a “good morning”: WA IV, 5, 184 (Aug. 26, 1781).
449 breadth and speed: WA IV, 5, 179 (Aug. 11, 1781).
449 to find in your company: WA IV, 5, 180 (Aug. 11, 1781).
450 “I like people very much”: BrEltern 549 (Nov. 14, 1785).
450 “heartwarming”: BrEltern 882 (June 3, 1808).
450 “thumb screws”: BrEltern 884 (July 1, 1808).
451 And now I’m hoping for: WA IV, 20, 4 (Jan. 9, 1808).
451 Tranquil review of my life: Tgb I, 1, 85 ff. (Aug. 7, 1779).
451 At the core of my plans: WA IV, 6, 97 (Nov. 21, 1782).
452 which can be conceived only: MA 20.1, 17 (May 29, 1801).
452 The center and basis: MA 4.2, 515.
452 in one way or another; avert his eyes: MA 4.2, 516.
453 Since he learned to accept: MA 4.2, 516.
453 to respond to it actively: MA 4.2, 519.
453 I hereby confess . . . that the great: MA 12, 306.
453 Adversaries are out of the question: MA 12, 307.
454 Everyone is himself: MA 9, 935.
454 We love only what is individual: MA 9, 935.
454 One cannot hold it against the historian: HA 9, 843.
454 to learn about what is denigrating: MA 9, 936.
454 Anyone who writes a confession: Tgb IV, 1, 146 (May 18, 1810).
455 ironic view of life: Tgb IV, 1, 145 (May 18, 1810).
455 most earnest; recollection . . . poetic capacity: MA 20.2, 1320 (Feb.
15, 1830).
456 It would not be too difficult: Unterhaltungen, 138.
456 Like a balloon: MA 16, 614.
457 lack of deeds: MA 16, 617.
457 bring a poetic task: MA 16, 618.
457 the Protestant has too few: MA 16, 312.
458 “Man reveals God”: GBr 3, 588 (footnote 956).
458 Whoever can’t get it into: WA IV, 22, 321 f. (April 4, 1812).
458 if his old gray head: WA IV, 22, 323 (April 4, 1812).
458 As for me: WA IV, 23, 226 (Jan. 6, 1813).
458 Investigating nature: MA 17, 863.
458 with it something of: MA 20.2, 1320 (Feb. 15, 1830).
459 monstrous condition: MA 16, 565.
460 The aesthetic spirit: MA 16, 569.
460 But when people bewail: MA 20.1, 155 (July 27, 1807).
460 what is monstrous: MA 16, 820.
460 pure chance . . . providence . . . interconnectedness: MA 16, 820.
460 And so . . . I want: MA 16, 821.
460 This demonic quality: MA 16, 822.
461 full of boundless energy: MA 19, 424 (March 2, 1831).
461 It is not in my nature: MA 19, 424 (March 2, 1831).
461 belonging to himself: WA IV, 23, 136 (Nov. 12, 1812).
462 From the way I handle: BW Reinhard, 173.
462 “splendid man”: VB 1, 145.
462 This brilliant man: MA 9, 959.
463 admiration . . . with what attention: MA 9, 957.
463 cheerfulness: MA 9, 951.
463 Why should I allow: Gespräche 2, 768.
463 Under no circumstances: Gespräche 2, 770.
463 Let us continue to act: MA 20, 1, 981 f. (March 19, 1827).

CHAPTER 30
464 I’m not at all affected: WA IV, 23, 151 (Nov. 14, 1812).
464 Our imagination is incapable: BW Reinhard, 477.
466 Rattle your chains: Gespräche 2, 795.
466 the fiery signs in the sky: WA IV, 23, 349 (May 21, 1813).
466 united than in their hatred: WA IV, 24, 43 (Nov. 24, 1813).
467 and if our enemies threaten: MA 4.1, 629, lines 313–18.
467 occasional poems: WA IV, 24, 277 (May 18, 1814).
467 flattering: WA IV, 24, 284 (May 20, 1814).
467 “There is no celebratory act”: Quoted from MA 9, 1162.
468 I’m ashamed of my hours: MA 9, 228, lines 873–80.
468 Here in Weimar we live: WA IV, 24, 195 (March 13, 1814).
469 launch: WA IV, 24, 199 (March 15, 1814).
469 And all of us are born: MA 9, 230, lines 942 f.
469 Asian beginnings of the world . . . The culture: WA IV, 22, 252 (Jan.
30, 1812).
470 react productively . . . to escape the real world: MA 14, 239.
470 North and West and South: MA 11.1.2, 9.
470 recapitulation of puberty . . . When . . . the poems: MA 19, 610.
470 lift us from earth: MA 11.1.2, 168.
471 that the poet must not: MA 11.1.2, 164.
471 kind of poetry . . . to be as foolish: MA 20.1, 403 (March 11, 1816).
471 Where, with a wall of rain: MA 11.1.2, 15.
472 “the wings of my spirit”: BW Willemer, 7 (Dec. 11, 1808).
472 In the evening to Frau Privy Councilor: WA IV, 25, 58 (Oct. 12,
1814).
473 “Among the many I’m but one”: BW Willemer, 11 (Dec. 12, 1814).
474 When I look at the red dots: BW Willemer, 15 (Dec. 28, 1814).
474 to become rejuvenated: WA IV, 25, 93 (Nov. 23. 1814).
474 “Goethe is . . . happy”: Gespräche 2, 1124.
474 Yet that you whom: MA 11.1.2, 67 f.
475 Du beschämst wie Morgenröte: MA 11.1.2, 80.
475 What bliss it is: MA 11.1.2, 69.
476 steeped in the sense: MA 20.1, 383 (May 17, 1815).
476 Greatest joy: MA 11.1.2, 76.
476 That may be!: MA 11.1.2, 77.
476 Could I stand to lose you?: MA 11.1.2, 80.
477 By the East this tree’s entrusted: MA 11.1.2, 71.
478 Come Darling, come: MA 11.1.2, 73.
478 “Oriental poems”: Gespräche 2, 1065.
478 My wounded heart: BW Willemer, 339.
478 “I long to open my heart”: BW Willemer, 346.
478 My sweetest lady’s cipher: MA 11.1.2, 91.
479 “whenever Goethe comes!”: BW Willemer, 63 (July 23, 1817).
479 What’s the meaning of this movement?: MA 11.1.2, 85.
479 West wind, ah, how much I envy: MA 11.1.2, 87 f.
479 “He is very affected”: Gespräche, 2, 1118 f.
480 Letters. Decided to leave: Tgb V, 1,304 (Oct. 6, 1815).
480 “Suddenly, Goethe wants to leave”: Gespräche 2, 1118 f.
480 daemon . . . hair . . . home via. . . be angry: WA IV, 26, 97 (Oct. 8,
1815).
480 But that is too much: BW Willemer, 29 (Oct. 6, 1815).
480 “He is visibly calmed”: Gespräche 2, 1120.
480 Hardly do I once more have you: MA 11.1.2, 83.
481 In splendor rides across the heavens: MA 11.1.2, 86.
481 It sounds so splendid: MA 11.1.2, 87.
481 Strangest book of all the books: MA 11.1.2, 31.
482 My wife in extreme danger: Tgb V, 1, 375 (June 5, 1816).
482 Slept well and much better: Tgb V, 1, 375 (June 6, 1816).
483 Have you not yourself been thoroughly ruined: BW Willemer, 43
(Aug. 20, 1816).
483 “Dearest friend, what hostile genius”: BW Willemer, 74 (Oct. 30,
1818).
483 “How much joy for me”: BW Willemer, 78 (Dec. 1818).
483 “I was a riddle to myself”: BW Willemer, 92 (Oct. 1819).
483 Dearest, ah!: MA 11.1.2, 33.
484 and so certain special pages: BW Willemer (Feb. 10, 1832).
484 To the eyes of one I cherish: BW Willemer (Feb. 29, 1832).

CHAPTER 31
485 Even here . . . a spiritual: MA 11.2, 210.
485 The poet regards himself: MA 11.2, 208.
485 Leave me in the saddle: MA 11.1.2, 11.
485 Poetry’s exuberance: MA 11.1.2, 19.
486 One thing more is necessary: MA 11.1.2, 14.
486 Anyone who’s vexed: MA 11.1.2, 55
486 Your song revolves: MA 11.1.2, 25.
487 The drinker, however: MA 11.1.2, 96.
487 My glass of wine: MA 11.1.2, 95.
487 does not repudiate the suspicion: MA 11.2, 208.
487 General, natural religion: MA 16, 150.
488 In his dislike of poetry: MA 11.1.2, 150.
488 unending tautologies . . . again and again . . . commands: MA 11.1.2,
148.
489 Just as you never hear: MA 11.1.2, 181.
489 spirit . . . what prevails: MA 11.1.2, 170.
489 The belief in a single God: MA 11.1.2, 153.
489 miserable image on wood . . . with the one: MA 11.1.1, 103.
490 renegade burden: MA 11.1.1, 104.
490 overview of the world: MA 11.1.2, 170.
490 Unconditional acquiescence: MA 20.1, 601 (May 11, 1820).
490 There are a thousand forms: MA 11.1.2, 93 f.
491 Investigating nature: MA 17, 863.
491 There are only two true religions: MA 17, 840.
492 Let this be a sacred legacy: MA 11.1.2, 112.
492 One can hardly blame ancient: MA 17, 835.
493 A spiritual form: MA 17, 836.
494 What I fear: the captiousness: MA 18.1, 19.
494 that the absurd course of the world: WA IV, 29, 222 (late June 1818).
495 dulled, disturbed, and distracted: WA IV, 45, 249 (April 23, 1829).
495 Go ahead and wrap the world: MA 13.1, 14.
495 My nature forces me: WA IV, 5, 228 (Dec. 3, 1781).
495 indispensable, sharp: MA 13.1, 357.
496 interim remark: MA 17, 116.
496 So if we are not; quickly passing . . . completely developed: MA 17,
117.
496 What has been written: BW Reinhard, 108.
497 idealistic . . . little box . . . when I finally: MA 8.1, 388.
497 The second part will not be: WA IV, 35, 76 (Sept. 7. 1821).
497 to want to construct: Unterhaltungen, 183.
497 With a little book: WA IV, 46, 166 (Nov. 23, 1829).
497 become engaged in details: WA IV, 46, 167 (Nov. 23, 1829).
498 Life belongs to the living: MA 17, 261.
498 I decided to avoid people: MA 17, 266.
499 Yes, now is the time: MA 17, 270.
499 sought true treasure: MA 17, 271.
499 From Utility through Truth: MA 17, 298.
499 In the entire castle: MA 17, 297 f.
500 for the rich are only admired: MA 17, 301.
500 everyone remains solitary: MA 17, 316.
500 What kind of nice life: MA 17, 317.
500 yearning vanishes: MA 17, 471.
500 Knowst thou the land: MA 17, 469.
500 The women threw themselves; As if under a magic spell: MA 17, 470.
501 highly promoted: MA 17, 633.
501 whoever proves disruptive: MA 17, 634.
501 equality: MA 17, 635.
501 We have our own distinctive: MA 17, 635.
502 “Goethe frightens me”: Ottilie, 184 f.
502 to the midpoint of the earth: MA 17, 672.
503 she seems to have been born: MA 17, 677.
503 As we herewith bring to a close: MA 17, 679.
503 Both our physical and: MA 16, 713.
503 to become resigned: MA 16, 714.

CHAPTER 32
505 But for us what bliss it is: MA 11.1.2, 18.
505 “I’ve made a new acquaintance”: VB 2, 662.
506 “Unfortunately, however”: VB 2, 660.
506 When we consider: MA 14, 569.
506 I continue to live life: MA 20.1, 463 (Oct. 25, 1816).
506 I’ve been spending my winter: MA 20.1, 685 (Feb. 5, 1822).
506 One certainly feels: WA IV, 28, 99 (May 27, 1817).
507 they went well together: WA IV, 29, 198 (June 8, 1818).
507 Wouldn’t it be possible: Unterhaltungen, 80 f. (Oct. 2, 1823).
508 Eh, have I gotten to be 80: Unterhaltungen, 189 (April 24, 1830).
511 Your Royal Highness will surely soon: WA IV, 32, 5 (Sept. 3, 1819).
512 I felt . . . as if I was in the forests: WA IV, 33, 1 (April 28, 1820).
512 You say the years have taken much: MA 11.1.1, 197.
513 who has done a pretty job: WA IV, 35, 44 (Aug. 16, 1821).
513 Give my best to your wife: WA IV, 35, 54 (Aug. 22, 1821).
514 My daily life is very simple: WA IV, 36, 83 (June 29, 1822).
514 “He spends his evenings mostly”: VB 3, 113 f.
514 Could I but flee from my own self; Ah! Could I only be healed: MA
13.1, 72.
514 The present knows nothing; The days are full of tedium: MA 13.1,
73.
515 Death lurks . . . O you Christian God: Gespräche 3, 469.
515 It’s all well and good: Gespräche 3, 468.
515 intellectual existence: WA IV, 37, 7 (April 10, 1823).
516 “everything in the world”: BranG 2, 338 (Oct. 15, 1822).
516 To live a long time means: WA IV, 37, 19 (April 17, 1823).
516 How light and dainty: MA 13.1, 136.
517 “was very fond of Goethe”: Gespräche 3, 549.
517 “And so I began to read”: VB 3, 170.
518 “[I] come to Weimar”: MA 20.1, 780 f. (Nov. 21, 1823).
518 And if a man’s struck dumb: MA 13.1, 135.
518 “to the mood that the experience”: Gespräche 3, 626.
518 A kiss—the last one; And now, locked up: MA 13.1, 136.
519 Is there not green: MA 13.1, 136.
519 its own endurance; If ever love; The peace of god: MA 13.1, 137.
519 Where’er you be: MA 13.1, 138.
520 A thousand times I conjure up: MA 13.1, 139.
520 The universe I’ve lost; They urged me: MA 13.1, 139.
520 And then one felt: MA 13.1, 140.
520 “But all efforts at humor”: Gespräche 3, 612.

CHAPTER 33
521 May nothing! nothing!: WA IV, 37, 299 f. (Dec. 31, 1823).
521 Forgive me, dear fellow: WA IV, 41, 208 f. (Oct. 22, 1826).
522 “His ‘Doctor Faust’ is almost finished”: VB 1, 71.
523 remarkable how much I resemble: MA 15, 619.
524 Achieved the main business: MA 18.1, 542.
524 What’s left of my life: MA 19, 456 f.
524 There is no question that: WA IV, 49, 283 (March 17, 1832).
525 Proclaim for each one: MA 18.1, 129, line 5406.
525 incommensurability: MA 19, 347 (Jan. 3, 1830).
525 The Germans, by the way: MA 19, 571.
525 I shall see to it: MA 8.1, 364 (June 27, 1797).
526 My conviction that we will continue: MA 19, 278 (Feb. 4, 1829).
526 I never have disliked the likes of you: MA 6.1, 544, lines 337–43.
527 There dwell two souls, alas: MA 6.1, 565, lines 1112–17.
527 Of suns and worlds I’ve nothing: MA 6.1, 543, lines 279–86.
528 And be forewarned: MA 6.1, 598, lines 2297 f.
528 From heaven he demands: MA 6.1, 543, lines 304–7.
528 Alas, I’ve studied philosophy: MA 6.1, 545, line 354.
529 Where shall I grasp you: MA 6.1, 547, line 455.
529 Dust he shall eat: MA 6.1, 544, line 334.
529 primal source . . . A good man: MA 6.1, 544, lines 324 and 328 f.
529 I’ve administered a long-time cure: MA 6.1, 630, lines 3268 f.
529 Whoever would describe and understand: MA 6.1, 587, lines 1936–
45.
530 divine height: MA 6.1, 554, line 713.
530 into nothingness: MA 6.1, 554, line 719.
530 in the hereafter: MA 6.1, 580, line 1658.
530 If ever I should tell the moment: MA 6.1, 581, lines 1699–701.
532 Let him stand here firmly: MA 18.1, 330, lines 11,445–47.
532 The terrifying hour has struck: MA 18.1, 177, lines 6819 f.
532 chemical manikin: MA 18.1, 810.
533 Well, dear Father: MA 18.1, 179, verses 6879 f.
533 That is the property of things: MA 18.1, 179, line 6882.
533 What once was thought mysterious: MA 18.1, 178, lines 6857–60.
533 But in years to come we’ll mock: MA 18.1, 178, verses 6868–70.
534 You’ll move by everlasting norms: MA 18.1, 227, lines 8324–26.
534 Herewith let it be known: MA 18.1, 149, lines 6057–62.
535 A banknote’s handy: MA 18.1, 150, lines 6104–8.
535 Let’s go, let’s go!: MA 18.1, 118, lines 5047 and 5057–60.
535 paper ghost of guilders: MA 18.1, 154, line 6198.
535 Just looky here: MA 18.1, 152, line 6165.
535 Tonight I’ll go to sleep: MA 18.1, 153, line 6171.
535 As a start we made it rich: MA 18.1, 154, lines 6191 f.
536 The Mothers!—Mothers!: MA 18.1, 155, line 6217.
536 You dispatch me to the void: MA 18.1, 156, lines 6251 f.
536 Who’s seen her once: MA 18.1, 168, line 6559.
537 War and trade and piracy: MA 18.1, 321, lines 11,187 f.
537 Whoever strives with all his might: MA 18.1, 346, lines 11,936 f.
537 The person who acts is always: MA 17, 758.
537 My grand estate: MA 18.1, 320, line 11,156.
538 Those few trees are not my own: MA 18.1, 323, lines 11,241 f.
538 of being just: MA 18.1, 323, line 11,272.
538 go and sweep them all aside!: MA 18.1, 324, line 11,275.
538 “whatever thoughts are in your mind”: Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche
Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb (Munich: Hanser, 1968–76), 4:591 f.
539 Remove the stinging, bitter darts: MA 18.1, 105, lines 4624 f.
539 Once I have got hold of someone: MA 18.1, 330, lines 11,453–58.
539 I feel the night invading: MA 18.1, 331, lines 11,449 f.
539 I open land for many: MA 18.1, 334, line 11,563.
539 How I would love to see: MA 18.1, 335, lines 11,579 f.
540 To this moment I could say: MA 18.1, 335, lines 11, 581 f.
540 I would like to see these three: MA 19, 539 (Feb. 21, 1827).
540 very intelligent people: MA 20.2, 1496 (June 28, 1831).
540 The fools imagine: MA 20.2, 1496 (June 28, 1831).
541 The elements are all in league: MA 18.1, 334, lines 11,549 f.
541 To these delights that take me: MA 6.1, 629, lines 3242–47.
541 then gave birth to light: MA 6.1, 571, line 1350.
542 We have our life in the reflected colors: MA 18.1, 108, line 4727.
542 very sober jests: WA IV, 49, 283 (March 17, 1832).
542 just too appetizing: MA 18.1, 342, line 11,800.
542 Absurd attraction: MA 18.1, 343, lines 11,838 f.

CHAPTER 34
543 painful feelings . . . education: WA IV, 38, 19 (Jan. 14, 1824).
544 important matter for all German: WA IV, 39, 85 (Jan. 11, 1825).
544 in suspense: WA IV, 40, 198 (Dec. 25, 1825).
544 Since the composure achieved: WA IV, 40, 282 (Feb. 3, 1826).
546 great confidence: WA IV, 37, 63 (June 11, 1823).
546 “the best German book there is”: Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche
Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: DTV,
1980), 2:599.
547 perhaps the greatest treasure: WA IV, 37, 62 (June 11, 1823).
547 “Schiller was so alive”: MA 19, 129 f. (Jan. 18, 1825).
547 appreciation of cruelty: MA 19, 130 (Feb. 24, 1825).
547 Every week he was a different: MA 19, 131 (Feb. 24, 1825).
547 Schiller cutting his fingernails: MA 19, 188 (Jan. 17, 1827).
547 Will you not tell me something: MA 18.1, 197, lines 7381–87.
548 Schiller seems . . . in absolute: MA 19, 252 (Oct. 3, 1828).
548 Christ-like tendency: MA 20.2, 1395 (Nov. 9, 1830).
548 solemn charnel house: MA 13.1, 189.
548 You cryptic vessel: MA 13.1, 189.
548 It will be a great gift: MA 20.1, 818 (Oct. 30, 1824).
549 “the richest profit for life”: MA 8.2, 72.
549 “well-worn path of self-interest”: MA 8.2, 127.
549 Young people; Let us cling as much as possible: MA 20.1, 851 (June
6, 1825).
550 if my poems have given rise: MA 20.1, 8 (Aug. 26, 1799).
550 Farewell, and tell me: MA 20.1, 103 (June 16, 1805).
550 “Speak a healing word”: MA 20.1, 289 (Nov. 15, 1812).
551 My dear friend, your letter; And so it is in all: MA 20.1, 294 (Dec. 3,
1812).
551 “Our brotherhood”: MA 20.2, 1400 (Nov. 13, 1830).
551 “So far I’ve been separated”: Quoted from Siegfried Unseld, Goethe
und seine Verleger (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1991), 611.
552 The Schlegel brothers: MA 20.2, 1558 (Oct. 20, 1831).
552 “Unfortunately, I am like a stranger”: Quoted from Doris Maurer,
Charlotte von Stein: Eine Biographie (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1997),
287.
552 “How do you feel”: BranG 2, 411 (July 11, 1825).
553 “The grand duke had to put up with”: MA 20.2, 1128 (June 13–15,
1828).
553 “the Acacia speciosa”: Quoted from Friedrich Sengle, Das Genie und
sein Fürst (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), 491.
553 Your Royal Majesty’s highly flowery: WA IV, 39, 220 (June 13, 1825).
553 “Many, many thanks”: Quoted from Sengle, Das Genie, 493.
554 “The golden anniversary”: BranG 2, 414 (Nov. 8, 1825).
554 Oh, that I had to experience: Unterhaltungen, 348.
554 “He could stand up”: Unterhaltungen, 29 f.
555 non ignoravi: Gespräche 3.2, 680 (Nov. 15, 1830).
555 “August’s return threatens me”: Ottilie, 90.
555 “Neither prodigality nor curiosity”: Ottilie, 89 f.
555 The individual is still in one piece: MA 20.2, 1407 (Dec. 1, 1830).
555 The really strange: MA 20.2, 1403 (Nov. 21, 1830).
556 I was so moved: WA IV, 38, 31 f. (Dec. 7, 1830).
557 Ah, . . . I wish my dear: Gespräche 3.2, 810 (Aug. 1831).
557 “And in fact . . . he strode”: Gespräche 3.2, 810 f. (Aug. 1831).
558 Today . . . I put the glass: WA IV, 49, 50 (Aug. 28, 1831).
558 In a lonely wooden house: MA 20.2, 1530 (Sept. 4, 1831).
558 Nature does nothing in vain: MA 20.2, 1513 (Aug. 13, 1831).
558 Just as the steam engines: GBr 4, 159 (late Nov. 1825).
559 The world is dominated: WA IV, 49, 283 (March 17, 1832).
559 “He seemed somewhat distraught”: Gespräche 3.2, 865 (March 16,
1832).
559 “A woeful sight”: Gespräche 3.2, 873 f.
 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
FOR FURTHER READING

GOETHE’S LIFE
Boyle, Nicholas. Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Vol. 1, The Poetry of
Desire, 1749–1790. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991.
———. Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Vol. 2, Revolution and
Renunciation, 1790–1803. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2000.
Williams, John R. The Life of Goethe: A Critical Biography. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell, 1998.

GOETHE’S WORKS IN TRANSLATION

The Collected Works. Edited by Victor Lange, Eric Blackall, and Cyrus
Hamlin. Various translators. 12 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1994–95.
The Essential Goethe. Edited by Matthew Bell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2016 (excerpts from The Collected Works, which is
now out of print).
Elective Affinities. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin
Classics, 1978.
Faust Part One. Translated by Nicholas Boyle. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Roman Elegies and Other Poems & Epigrams. Translated by Michael
Hamburger. London: Carcanet, 2007.
Selected Poetry. Translated by David Luke. New York: Penguin Books,
2005.
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels. Translated by Thomas
Carlyle. North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing
 Platform, 2016.

BACKGROUND
Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant
to Fichte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
———. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–
1801. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
———. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German
Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Bruford, W. H. Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 1775–1806.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Carlson, Marvin. Goethe and the Weimar Theatre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1978.
Eliot, T. S. “Goethe as the Sage (1955).” In On Poetry and Poets. London:
Faber & Faber, 1957.
Fairley, Barker. A Study of Goethe. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
1947.
Heller, Erich. The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German
Literature and Thought. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957.
Loram, Ian. Goethe and His Publishers. Lawrence: University of Kansas
Press, 1963.
Lukács, Georg. Goethe and His Age. Translated by Robert Anchor. New
York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1969.
Mommsen, Katharina. Goethe and the Poets of Arabia. Translated by
Michael M. Metzger. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014.
Nisbet, H. B. Goethe and the Scientific Tradition. London: Humanities
Press, 1972.
Pascal, Roy. The German Sturm und Drang. Manchester, UK: Manchester
University Press, 1953.
Safranski, Rüdiger. Romanticism: A German Affair. Translated by Robert
E. Goodwin. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015.
———. Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy. Translated by
Ewald Osers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Tobin, Robert. Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Trevelyan, Humphry. Goethe and the Greeks. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1981.
Wellbery, David E. The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the
Beginnings of Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1996.
Ziolkowski, Theodore. German Romanticism and Its Institutions.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
 INDEX

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use
your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
“Accursed Second Pillow, The” (Tischbein), 281
Achilleid (Goethe), 369, 370
Addresses to the German Nation (Fichte), 465
Aeneid (Virgil), 70
“Aeolian Harp” (Goethe), 514–15
Aeschylus, 115, 217
Agitated, The (Goethe), 313, 323–24
Alarcos (Schlegel), 389
Alcestis (Wieland), 165
alchemy, 51–52, 80, 522, 532–34
Ambrosch, Marianne, 405
anatomy, 255
André, Johann, 150
Anna Amalia (dowager duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach):
Charlotte von Stein romance and, 172, 448
conflicts at court and, 164, 167
death of, 447, 448
Goethe’s Italy sojourn and, 294–95
Goethe’s mother and, 10, 449–50
Goethe’s privy council appointment and, 179
Klinger and, 192–93
Lenz and, 186, 188
relationship with Goethe, 167–68, 447–48
Annals (Goethe), 314, 334, 382–83, 399, 419, 431
Anton Reiser (Moritz), 282
aperçu, 65–67
Apparitionist, The (Schiller), 349
architecture, 57, 277–78
Arnim, Bettine von, 111, 507
art:
autonomy of, 307–10
dilettantism and, 373–74
Goethe’s encounter with School of Athens, 55–56
Goethe’s endeavors at, 36–37, 45, 180, 256, 289
Goethe’s Italy sojourn and, 280, 282, 289, 307, 310
Goethe’s review of Sulzer and, 102–4
nature and, 44–45, 103–4, 307
Schiller on, 342–43
see also life vs. poetry
Arts in Their Origin, Their True Nature, and Best Application, The
(Sulzer), 102–4
Asseburg, Amelie von, 274
Athenäum, 383
Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (Fichte), 329–30
August (prince of Gotha), 345
Augustine, Saint, 302
Ausgabe letzter Hand (definitive edition) (Goethe), 543–46, 553
autobiography of Goethe, see Poetry and Truth

Balsamo, Giuseppe (Alessandro di Cagliostro), 238–39, 287

Balzac, Honoré de, 536, 564
Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 145–46
Basic Lexicon of Mythology (Hederich), 115
Batsch, Karl, 327
Batty, George, 227
Baumgarten, Peter im, 193–94
Beaulieu-Marconnay, Henriette von, 556
Beautiful Magelone, The, 13
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 512
Behrisch, Ernst Wolfgang, 28–29, 30–31
Berlepsch, Emilie von, 209
Bertuch, F. J., 174, 270
Beutler, Ernst, 93, 94
Bible, 14, 54, 235, 236, 469
Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich, 405
Bodmer, Johann Jakob, 117
Böhme, Jacob, 37
Boie, Heinrich Christian, 522
Bois-Reymond, Emil du, 427
Boisserée, Sulpiz, 457, 471, 477, 479, 480, 489, 510, 545
Börne, Ludwig, 549, 563
Böttiger, Karl August, 193, 310, 327, 360
Brachmann, Louise, 353
Branconi, Antonia von, 232–33
Brandt, Susanna Margaretha, 93–95, 522
Breitkopf, Theodor, 41
Brentano, Bettine, 450–51
Brentano, Clemens, 342, 386, 472
Brentano, Maximiliane von, 92, 111, 124–25
“Bride of Corinth, The” (Goethe), 359–60, 450
Bride of Messina, The (Schiller), 376
Brion, Friederike, 56, 58, 68–74, 77, 81, 161, 184, 231–32
Britannicus (Racine), 412–13
Broken Jug, The (Kleist), 439
Brother and Sister (Goethe), 190
Brun, Friederike, 353
Büchner, Georg, 191
Buff, Lotte (later Kestner), 104–5, 106–8, 112–13, 123–24, 135–36, 138–39,
505–6
Bürger, Gottfried August, 211, 353
Bury, Friedrich, 280
Büttner, Christian Wilhelm, 421
Byron, George Gordon, 564

Cagliostro, Alessandro di (Count) (Giuseppe Balsamo), 238–39, 287

Campaign in France, 1792 (Goethe), 203, 224, 306, 318–19, 325
Carlsbad Decrees, 511
Catechism of Moral Doctrine for the Rural Populace (Schlosser), 92
Catholicism, 45–46, 437, 438, 457–58
Catullus, 301
Celan, Paul, 538
celebrity, cult of, 113–14, 117–18, 134–35, 152, 158–59, 341
Cellini, Benvenuto, 353
chapbooks, 13
charioteer image, 90–91
Chateaubriand, François-René de, 457
“Christianity or Europe” (Novalis), 383
Citizen-General, The (Goethe), 321–23
City of God (Augustine), 302
Clauer, Dr. (lodger), 13–14
Clavigo (Goethe), 96–97, 114, 140–41
Clodius, Christian August, 25, 37
Collector and His Circle, The (Goethe), 373
“Colored Shadows” (Goethe), 328
color theory, 331, 385, 391, 404
see also Theory of Color
Confederation of the Rhine, 215, 410, 433, 465
Confessions (Rousseau), 455
Congress of Vienna (1815), 508, 510
Conversations of German Émigrés, 343–45, 354–55
Conversations with Goethe (Eckermann), 546
Cotta, Johann Friedrich:
Ausgabe letzter Hand and, 543, 544–45
Die Horen and, 333, 342, 346
Faust and, 380, 400, 522
Goethe-Schiller correspondence collection and, 546
Goethe’s marriage and, 409
Propyläen and, 373
West-Eastern Divan and, 469, 470
“Cranes of Ibykus, The” (Schiller), 359

Darmstadt Sentimentalists, 97–102, 122

“Death Fugue” (Celan), 538
“Dedication” (Goethe), 361–62, 400
Demetrius (Schiller), 391, 397–98
depression, see taedium vitae
de Staël, Germaine, 388
“Development of the Concept of Religion” (Forberg), 377
Diamond Necklace Affair, 238, 287, 314
“Diary, The” (Goethe), 445–46
Diary of the Italian Journey for Frau von Stein (Goethe), 275
Diderot, Denis, 60
disguise:
Friederike Brion romance and, 68–69, 70, 161
Harz journey and, 201, 272
Italy sojourn and, 271–72, 273, 285
Divan (Hafez), 469
“Diver, The” (Schiller), 359
“Divinity” (Goethe), 254
Döbreiner, Johann Wolfgang, 533
Don Carlos (Schiller), 81
Don Quixote (Cervantes), 131
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 103
dramaturgy, see theater

Eckermann, Johann Peter, 293, 414, 508, 517, 536, 540, 545–46, 547
Egmont (Goethe), 91, 219, 266, 289–93, 305–6, 338, 460
Einsiedel, August von, 163, 174, 186
Elective Affinities (Goethe), 440–45
“The Diary” and, 446
freedom in, 435, 443
Kätchen romance and, 35
Minna Herzlieb romance and, 400
natural science and, 433, 434–35
plot of, 435–36, 440–41
on power of attraction, 441–43, 444–45
on renunciation, 445
Schiller and, 347
Werner and, 438
Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years and, 409–10, 432
Emilia Galotti (Lessing), 89
Engelbach, Johann Konrad, 68
Enlightenment, 24, 58, 61, 87, 173, 379, 447
epic poetry, 370–72
“Epilogue” (1792) (Goethe), 111
“Epilogue” (1805) (Goethe), 398
“Epilogue to Schiller’s ‘Bell’” (Goethe), 398
Epimenides Awakes (Goethe), 468, 469
“Epistles” (Goethe), 342–43
Erman, Jean Pierre, 213
Ethics (Spinoza), 244, 246–47, 250
Euripides, 217–18, 220

Fabricius, Katharina, 54
Fahlmer, Johanna (later Schlosser), 163, 176, 199
Fairy Tale, The (Goethe), 344–45
Falk, Johannes Daniel, 186
Fanchon the Hurdy-Gurdy Girl, 405
Fasch, Karl Friedrich Christian, 549–50
Faust (Goethe), 522–42
alchemy in, 51, 52, 80, 522, 532–34
color theory and, 420
on competence, 537–38
completion of, 524–25
completion of part I, 400–401, 523
fifteenth-century world and, 80
Frankfurt and, 366
further work on (1800), 380–81
Goethe’s Wetzlar sojourn and, 105
Gretchen affair and, 15
healing sleep in, 219
Herder and, 60
on imagination, 536–37
Luden and, 401–2
Mephisto’s role in, 527–28
metaphysics in, 528–31, 534
modernism and, 531–32, 534–36
new political age and, 565
nihilism in, 540–41
redemption in, 538–39, 542
 return to work on (1797), 360, 361–63
return to work on (1824–25), 522–24
Riemer and, 545
Saint-Simonianism and, 540
Schiller and, 363, 369–70, 380, 381, 400, 522, 525, 528, 547–48
Susanna Brandt trial and, 93–95, 522
on unity, 526–27
Urfaust, 522
Faustrecht, 81
Felsenburg Island (Schnabel), 14
“Festival of Saint Roch in Bingen” (Goethe), 510
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb:
death of, 465
Die Horen and, 333, 342, 353
dismissal of, 377–79, 383
French Revolution and, 330–31
on Kant, 329–30
Karl August and, 331, 376, 377–78
Napoleon and, 412
Napoleonic wars and, 465
Schelling and, 385
Schlegel circle on, 382
on subjectivity, 251–52
Flachsland, Karoline, 92, 97, 98, 99–100
folk spirit, 62–63
Forberg, Friedrich Karl, 377
“Forest Brother, The” (Lenz), 187, 188, 190
Forster, Georg, 324
Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge (Fichte), 330, 331, 382
Four Sons of Aymon, The, 8, 13
Frankfurt:
Goethe as city child and, 12–13
Goethe resigns citizenship in, 509
Goethe’s visit to (1797), 365–66
Holy Roman Empire and, 1–2
Seven Years’ War and, 2, 5–6, 8
see also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, childhood and adolescence of;
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Frankfurt sojourn of
Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen (Frankfurt Literary Advertiser), 95, 102–
5, 111, 114, 142, 546
Frederick the Great (king of Prussia), 113, 173, 177
freedom:
in Elective Affinities, 435, 443
in Götz von Berlichingen, 81–82, 86
nationalism and, 565
religion and, 76–77
Schiller on, 347–48, 349–50, 371
society and, 495
in The Sorrows of Young Werther, 133
Spinoza on, 246–47
French Revolution, 312–18
The Agitated and, 313, 323–24
The Citizen-General and, 321–23
Conversations of German Émigrés on, 343–45
Fichte on, 330–31
Frankfurt and, 365–66
Goethe on aristocracy and, 315–17
Goethe’s dismay at, 313–15
Goethe’s personal characteristics and, 195
Hermann and Dorothea and, 313, 354, 357–58
impact of, 312–13
The Natural Daughter on, 387–88
Schiller on, 333
Schlegel circle on, 382
society and, 494
Voltaire’s Mahomet and, 377
wars of, 224, 317–21, 324–25, 418
Weimar official duties and, 395
Freud, Sigmund, 11–12
Fritsch, Jakob Friedrich (Baron), 179, 268–69
Frommann, Carl Friedrich Ernst, 418
Fuseli, Henry (Johann Heinrich Füssli), 142
Gallitzin, Adelheid Amalie (Princess), 321
 “Ganymede” (Goethe), 254
Garrick, David, 75
Garve, Christian, 132, 353
Gedike, Friedrich, 213
Gehlen, Arnold, 240
Gellert, Christian Fürchtegott, 24–25, 37, 97
genius:
architecture and, 57
in Goethe’s review of Sulzer, 104
Götz von Berlichingen and, 82
Herder on, 61–62
Jung-Stilling and, 67
Prometheus figure and, 91
Schiller on, 332
in The Sorrows of Young Werther, 61, 133
Sturm und Drang movement on, 61, 62, 133–34
in “Wanderer’s Storm Song,” 101
“Winter Journey in the Harz” on, 206
see also celebrity, cult of; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, self-confidence
of
Genius of Christianity, The (Chateaubriand), 457
Gensler, Johannes, 404
German Confederation, 509–10, 544
“Germany: A Winter’s Tale” (Heine), 538
Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig, 97, 98
Göchhausen, Luise von, 522
“God and the Bayadère, The” (Goethe), 359, 450
Gods, Heroes, and Wieland (Goethe), 121, 165, 184
“Gods of Greece, The” (Schiller), 305, 360
Goethe, August (son), see Goethe, Julius August Walter von
Goethe, Cornelia Friederica Christiana (later Schlosser) (sister):
in childhood, 10–11, 13
death of, 140, 199
Goethe’s visit to, 151
Götz von Berlichingen and, 82, 84, 138
Iphigenia in Tauris and, 224
Kätchen romance and, 27–28
 Lenz and, 191
marriage of, 92–93, 137, 138–40, 199
relationship with Goethe, 137–38
Goethe, Johann Caspar (father):
background of, 2–5
Goethe’s education and, 19, 23
Goethe’s Italy sojourn and, 285
Goethe’s law practice and, 6–7, 78–79, 111
on Goethe’s marriage prospects, 141
Goethe’s view of, 449
Goethe’s Weimar arrival and, 163
house renovation by, 5–6
religion and, 42
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von:
artistic endeavors of, 36–37, 45, 180, 256, 289
Ausgabe letzter Hand production and, 543–46, 553
belligerence of, 166
charisma of, 290
cult of celebrity and, 113–14, 117–18, 134–35, 152, 158–59, 341
curiosity of, 558–59
death of, 551, 559, 564
death of son and, 551, 555
destruction of papers, 26, 229, 361
family origins of, 1–5
French Revolutionary war campaigns (1792 and 1793), 224, 317–21,
324–25, 418
Gustchen’s letter to, 515–16
Harz journey (1777) of, 199, 200–207, 424
Ilmenau excursion (1831) of, 556–58
Karl August and, 552–54
Kestner on, 109–10
loneliness of later years and, 507–8
love of disguise, 68–69, 70, 161, 201, 271–72, 273, 285
playfulness of, 7, 160–61
pragmatism of, 195–96
reserve of, 195–96, 306, 505–6
Schiller correspondence collection of, 521, 522, 546–47, 548–49, 552
 Switzerland journey (1775), 151–52
Switzerland journey (1779), 73–74, 229–35
Switzerland journey (1797), 360–61, 362–63, 364–68
Zelter friendship with, 549–52
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, childhood and adolescence of:
adolescent friendships, 17–18, 20
birth, 1
broken crockery anecdote, 11–12
city environment and, 12–13
education, 6–7, 15
Gretchen affair, 15–16, 44, 93
reading during, 14
reflection on, 157
religion during, 42–43, 487–88
siblings, 10–12
talent for languages during, 13
writing during, 14–15, 26
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Frankfurt sojourn of (1771–75), 90–108, 109–
14
cult of celebrity and, 117–18
Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen reviews, 102–4, 111, 142, 546
friendships during, 92–93, 95–97, 110–11
Götz von Berlichingen success, 113–14
identity as a writer, 90–91
law practice, 6–7, 78–80, 95, 111
Lotte Buff romance, 104–5, 106–8, 112–13, 123–24, 135–36
poetry composed during, 99–101
Prometheus play, 115–17
Sentimentalists and, 97–102
Susanna Brandt trial, 93–95, 522
Wetzlar sojourn, 104–8
Wilhelm Jerusalem suicide, 111–12, 125, 135
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, identity as a writer
easy writing process and, 123, 159
Frankfurt sojourn and, 90–91
Göschen edition and, 270–71
Italy sojourn and, 289
 Leipzig sojourn and, 26
Prometheus figure and, 115–16, 117
prophecy and, 118–22, 238, 379
purity and, 227–28
reserve and, 306
Weimar arrival and, 181
see also life vs. poetry
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, illnesses of
neck growth (1769), 51
pericardium infection (1823), 515–16, 517–18
pulmonary hemorrhage (1830), 555–56
on return from Leipzig (1768), 37–39, 41, 522
shingles (1800 and 1805), 385–86, 391
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Italy sojourn of (1786–88), 270–74, 275–89
Anna Amalia and, 294–95
architecture and, 277–78
art and, 280, 282, 289, 307, 310
departure, 274
disguise and, 271–72, 273, 285
flirtations and love affairs, 281–82, 293–94
friendships, 279–80, 282–83, 284–85
itinerary for, 276–77, 280
Karl August and, 272–73, 274, 293–95
renewal as goal of, 275–76
return from, 296–97
Charlotte von Stein and, 271, 273, 274, 276, 283, 310
unfinished works and, 270–71
Weimar official duties and, 278, 288–89
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Leipzig sojourn of (1765–68), 19–39
aftermath of, 40–41
appearance, 22
artistic endeavors during, 36–37
city environment, 20–21
embarcation, 19–20
financial resources, 21–22
Gellert and, 24–25, 37
Gottsched and, 25–26
 illness (1768), 37–39, 41, 522
Kätchen romance, 27–33, 35–36, 39, 48, 53–54, 69
legal studies, 22–23
poetry composed during, 23–24, 25, 28, 30, 41
reflection on, 157–58
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, philosophies of life of:
aperçu, 65–67
daily discipline, 226–27
purity, 220–24, 225–29
reflection on, 562–63
taedium vitae and, 125–29, 160–61, 456–57, 551
see also life vs. poetry; religion, Goethe’s approaches to
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, romances of
Antonia von Branconi, 232–33
Corona Schröter, 172
Charlotte von Stein, 168–72, 188–91, 229, 260, 269–70, 297, 299, 310,
448
Friederike Brion, 56, 58, 68–74, 77, 81, 161, 184, 231
Gretchen affair, 15–16, 44, 93
Kätchen Schönkopf, 27–33, 35–36, 39, 48, 53–54, 69
Lili Schönemann, 147–49, 150–51, 152–53, 170, 232, 406, 556
Lotte Buff, 104–5, 106–8, 112–13, 123–24, 135–36
Marianne Willemer, 471, 472–79, 480, 482–84, 505
Maximiliane von Brentano, 124–25
Minna Herzlieb, 399–400
Ulrike von Levetzow, 512–15, 516–18, 521, 553
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, self-confidence of:
childhood and adolescent evidence of, 4, 15, 17, 157
genius and, 62
Götz von Berlichingen and, 82, 114
Harz journey and, 206
professional careers and, 159–60
Prometheus figure and, 91, 117
publishing contracts and, 357
Weimar arrival and, 163
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, spa sojourns of:
Bad Pyrmont (1801), 386
 Carlsbad (1806), 403, 404
in later years, 511–12
Marianne Willemer and, 482
Teplitz (1814), 465–66
Wiesbaden (1814), 471, 472
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Strasbourg sojourn of (1770–71), 54–77
academic studies, 55, 94
city environment, 55–57
descriptive letters written during, 54–55
dissertation, 76–77
French culture and, 74–75
Friederike Brion romance, 56, 58, 68–74, 77, 81, 161, 184, 231
friendships, 57–63, 64–66, 67–68
poetry composed during, 71–74
reflection on, 158
Shakespeare, study of, 75–76
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Weimar arrival of (1775–76), 162–79, 180–
91
beneficiaries, 193–94
Charlotte von Stein romance, 168–72, 188–91
conflicts at court, 164–68
court amusements, 163–64, 176, 177, 180, 393
cult of celebrity and, 163, 174–76
invitation to, 153–55, 162–63, 166
Kaufmann and, 193
Keller visit, 174–76
Klinger and, 192–93, 204
Lenz and, 181, 182–83, 185–91, 204
life vs. poetry and, 180–82, 196
public interest in, 176–77
relationship with Karl August, 164, 172–74, 178, 205
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Weimar official duties of:
easing of, 311–12
Egmont and, 291–92
frustrations in, 267–69
grand duchy status and, 508–9
Italy sojourn and, 278, 288–89
 military affairs, 266–67
mining, 200, 233, 242, 267–68, 556–57
personal benefits of, 260–62
pragmatism and, 195
privy council appointment, 179, 187, 229
reflection on, 394–95
relationship with Karl August and, 213–14
road construction, 267
War of the Bavarian Succession and, 212–13, 214–15
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, works of:
Achilleid, 369, 370
“Aeolian Harp,” 514–15
Agitated, The, 313, 323–24
Annals, 314, 334, 382–83, 399, 419, 431
Ausgabe letzter Hand (definitive edition), 543–46, 553
“Bride of Corinth, The,” 359–60, 450
Brother and Sister, 190
Campaign in France, 1792, 203, 224, 306, 318–19, 325
Citizen-General, The, 321–23
Clavigo, 96–97, 114, 140–41
Collector and His Circle, The, 373
“Colored Shadows,” 328
Conversations of German Émigrés, 343–45, 354–55
“Dedication,” 361–62, 400
“Diary, The,” 445–46
Diary of the Italian Journey for Frau von Stein, 275
dissertation, 76–77
“Divinity,” 254
Egmont, 91, 219, 266, 289–93, 305–6, 338, 460
“Epilogue” (1772), 111
“Epilogue” (1805), 398
“Epilogue to Schiller’s ‘Bell,’” 398
Epimenides Awakes, 468, 469
“Epistles,” 342–43
Fairy Tale, The, 344–45
“Festival of Saint Roch in Bingen,” 510
“Ganymede,” 254
 “God and the Bayadère, The,” 359, 450
Gods, Heroes, and Wieland, 121, 165, 184
Göschen edition, 270, 300, 321, 523
“Granite I,” 242–43
Hanswurst’s Wedding, or The Way of the World, 149–50
“Helen: Classic-Romantic Phantasmagoria,” 524
Hermann and Dorothea, 313, 354–58, 467
Italian Journey, 277–78, 279, 280, 293, 294, 307, 335, 461–62
“Letter of the Pastor in *** to the New Pastor in ***,” 92, 143
Lila, 215
“Little Heath Rose,” 63
Lover’s Spleen, The, 33–35
Lumberville Fair, 123
Mahomet (fragment), 118, 119–20
“Mahomet’s Song,” 206, 379
“Marienbad Elegy,” 516, 517, 518–20
“Marriage Song,” 20
Maxims and Reflections, 227, 442, 458
“May Day,” 71
“Morning Complaint,” 300
Morphological Notebooks, 334
Morphology, 241
Natural Daughter, The, 387–88
Nausicaa tragedy plan, 286
“New German Religio-Patriotic Art,” 510
New Songs, Set to Music by Bernhard Theodor Breitkopf, 41
New Works, 323
“Notes and Essays toward a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern
Divan,” 43, 44, 470–71, 487, 488
“On Epic and Dramatic Poetry” (with Schiller), 370
“On German Architecture,” 57
Palaeophron and Neoterpe, 448
Pandora, 416–18
Partners in Guilt, 41–42
“Phenomenon,” 471–72
“Pleasure,” 300
poem to accompany Götz von Berlichingen, 88
 “Poetic Thoughts on Christ’s Descent into Hell,” 14
Poetry and Truth, 1, 4, 91, 402, 451–56, 459–60, 461–62, 506–7
“Prelude at the Theater,” 362, 400
“Primer,” 481
“Prologue in Heaven,” 362, 400
“Prometheus,” 62, 116–17, 249, 250–51
Rameau’s Nephew (Diderot), translation of, 391
“Reconciliation,” 519, 520
“Relief,” 481
“Resonance,” 481
Reynard the Fox, 325
Satyros, or The Wood-Devil Deified, 119, 120, 121–22, 123, 238
Schiller correspondence collection, 521, 522, 546–47, 548–49, 552
“Self Portrait,” 268
Shrovetide Play of Pater Brey, The, 119, 120–21, 123, 238
Stella, 149
“Sweet Child, the String of Pearls,” 489–90
Tame Xenias, 223, 428, 495
“To a Woman,” 326
“To Chronos the Coachman,” 317
Torquato Tasso, 262–65, 285, 306, 307, 308–9, 310, 425, 518
“To Werther,” 135, 519
translation of Voltaire’s Mahomet, 376–77, 379–80, 413
“Treasure Hunter, The,” 358–59
Triumph of Sentimentalism, The, 208–9, 215
Urfaust, 522
“Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!,” 405
“Venetian Epigrams,” 448
“Visit, The,” 300
“Wanderer’s Night Song,” 180, 234, 557
“Wanderer’s Storm Song,” 100–101, 205
“Wandering Jew, The,” 145
“Welcome and Farewell,” 72–73
“What Does It Mean to Speak in Tongues?,” 119
“While Contemplating Schiller’s Skull,” 548
“Winter Journey in the Harz,” 199, 201–3, 204–5, 206
“Xenia” (with Schiller), 345–46
 see also Elective Affinities; Faust; Götz von Berlichingen; Iphigenia in
Tauris; Poetry and Truth; “Roman Elegies”; Sorrows of Young Werther,
The; Theory of Color; West-Eastern Divan; Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or The
Renunciants
Goethe, Julius August Walter von (son):
Ausgabe letzter Hand and, 544
birth of, 303
death of, 551, 555
Frankfurt visit of (1797), 365
French Revolution and, 315
Goethe’s mother’s relationship with, 450
legitimation of, 386
marriage of, 502, 507, 555
Napoleonic wars and, 466–67
Ulrike von Levetzow romance and, 517
Goethe, Katharina Elisabeth Textor (mother):
background of, 3
character of, 7–10
Christiane Vulpius and, 9, 298, 365, 450
death of, 448–49, 450
death of son Hermann Jakob and, 11
Goethe’s relationship with, 10, 449–51
as storyteller, 7–9
Goethe, Ottilie (née von Pogwisch), 502, 507, 517, 555
Goethe in the Campagna (Tischbein), 282
Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child (Brentano), 451
Goldsmith, Oliver, 70–71
Görres, Joseph, 436–37
Görtz, Caroline (countess of Schlitz), 164, 167–68, 171–72
Görtz, Johann Eustachius (count of Schlitz), 147, 164, 165, 166
Göschen, Georg Joachim, 270, 300, 321, 523
Göttingen Grove, 151
Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 25–26, 87
Götz von Berlichingen (Goethe), 80–89
audience for, 113
Enlightenment and, 87
 erotic drama in, 83–85
fifteenth-century world and, 80
freedom in, 81–82, 86
Friederike Brion romance and, 70, 81
Goethe’s identity as a writer and, 91
Goethe’s Wetzlar sojourn and, 106
Herder and, 60, 80, 88, 89
historical Götz and, 80, 85–86
imitations of, 114
individualism in, 80–81
Lavater on, 143
law practice in, 79
Lersé and, 58
Merck and, 88, 89, 96, 113
nationalism and, 510
plot of, 82–83
Prometheus figure and, 115
reconciliation in, 87
responses to, 88–89, 96
Shakespeare and, 76, 81, 82
Sturm und Drang movement and, 133
success of, 89, 113–14, 117, 123, 158
Goué, Siegfried von, 111
“Granite I” (Goethe), 242–43
Gretchen affair, 15–16, 44, 93
Gundolf, Friedrich, 126

Habsburg Empire, 167, 212–13, 214–15

Hackert, Philipp, 285
Hafez, 469, 470–71
Hamann, Johann Georg, 134, 193
Hamilton, William, 284
Hammers, Joseph von, 469
Hanswurst’s Wedding, or The Way of the World (Goethe), 149–50
Hardenberg, Friedrich von (Novalis), 351, 352, 382, 383, 437, 501
Hart, Emma, 284–85
Hederich, Benjamin, 115
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 76, 252, 405, 494, 495, 558, 563
Heidegger, Martin, 503
Heine, Heinrich, 538, 564
Heinse, Wilhelm, 117
“Helen: Classic-Romantic Phantasmagoria” (Goethe), 524
Herder, Johann Gottfried:
on Christiane Vulpius, 298–99
engagement of, 97, 98, 100
fifteenth-century world and, 80
folk spirit and, 62–63, 75
French Revolution and, 312, 314
Friederike Brion romance and, 70, 71
Goethe’s approaches to religion and, 64, 241
on Goethe’s daily discipline, 227
Goethe’s friendship with, 59–63, 327
Goethe’s Italy sojourn and, 294
on Goethe’s playful nature, 161
on Goethe in Weimar, 259
Götz von Berlichingen and, 60, 80, 88, 89
Die Horen and, 353
Islam and, 379
Jacobi and, 251
Kaufmann and, 193
Lenz and, 184, 188
natural science and, 256, 258
“On German Architecture” and, 57
pantheism and, 247
Pindar and, 101
reconciliation with Goethe, 257–58
Satyros and, 121–22
Schiller and, 304
Shakespeare and, 75
Sturm und Drang movement and, 134
on Weimar court, 168
Weimar court position of, 178–79, 256–57
Herder, Karoline, 294, 298, 306
Hermann and Dorothea (Goethe), 313, 354–58, 467
Herrnhuters, 46–47, 49, 50, 53, 64, 65, 142
Herzlieb, Minna, 399–400
Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 19
Historical and Critical Notes on Italy (Volkmann), 276
History of Doctor Faustus, 13
History of Fräulein von Sternheim, The (La Roche), 110
History of the Succession of the United Netherlands from Spanish Rule
(Schiller), 305
Hoffmann, E. T. A., 438
Hofmeister, Der (The Tutor) (Lenz), 114
Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, Prince, 404–5
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 363–64
Holy Roman Empire, 1–2, 3, 16, 403, 459
Homer, 25, 106, 327, 355–56, 369, 370
Höpfner, Ludwig Julius Friedrich, 118
Horen, Die (The Horae):
Conversations of German Émigrés, 343–45
“Epistles” in, 342–43
failure of, 353, 372
Goethe invited to editorial board, 332–34
Lenz and, 187
power of literature and, 340
“Roman Elegies” and, 301, 338, 345
Schlegel brothers and, 353, 382
Horn, Adam, 17, 20, 22, 27, 38
Hufeland, Christoph Wilhelm, 216
Hugo, Victor, 564
Humboldt, Alexander von, 329
Humboldt, Wilhelm von:
on Conversations of German Émigrés, 344
Faust and, 524
Die Horen and, 333, 342, 353
“Marienbad Elegy” and, 517, 518
Napoleon and, 414
“Roman Elegies” and, 345
Schiller and, 329, 336
Hyginus, 217
idealism, 251, 412
see also Fichte, Johann Gottlieb
Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Herder), 258
Iffland, August Wilhelm, 438, 467–68
imagination, 32, 131, 536–37
Imhoff, Amalie von, 353
incognito, see disguise
Ion (Schlegel), 389
Iphigenia in Tauris (Goethe), 215–24
autobiographical elements in, 224
Corona Schröter and, 172
French Revolutionary war campaigns and, 321
healing sleep in, 219–20
Italy sojourn and, 281
Moritz and, 283
mythological origins of, 217–18
The Natural Daughter and, 387, 388
performances of, 216, 374
plot of, 218–22
purity in, 220–24
Weimar official duties and, 216–17
Iris, 71
Isis, 511
Islam, 379, 488–89
see also Mahomet
Italian Journey (Goethe), 277–78, 279, 280, 293, 294, 307, 335, 461–62

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich:

cult of celebrity and, 117
Goethe’s French Revolutionary war campaigns and, 320
Goethe’s friendship with, 146–47, 327
reconciliation with Goethe, 243–44
on religion, 241, 458
on Spinoza, 116, 146, 244, 249–53
Woldemar incident, 228–29, 243
Jacobi, Johann Georg, 71, 146
Jagemann, Karoline (later von Heygendorf), 433, 480, 509
Jaspers, Karl, 563
Jena, Battle of (1806), 405–6, 448
Jena, University of:
botanical garden and institute at, 327
Fichte appointment at, 329, 330
Fichte dismissal, 377–79
Hegel appointment at, 494
Loder appointment at, 255, 401
Schiller appointment at, 305, 331
student unrest at, 324
Jerusalem, Wilhelm, 105–6, 111–12, 135
Jesus the Messiah, or The Future of the Lord (Lavater), 236–37
John, Johannes, 545
Julie, or The New Heloise (Rousseau), 130
July Revolution (1830), 565–66
Jung-Stilling, Johannh Heinrich, 64–66, 67–68, 76–77

Kalb, Johann August Alexander von, 153, 162, 163, 186, 188
Kant, Immanuel:
on evil, 526
Fichte on, 329–30
Forberg and, 377
genius and, 57
Goethe’s reading of, 160
Goethe’s suspicion of, 563
healing sleep and, 220
Herder and, 61
Die Horen and, 353
Moritz and, 307
Schelling and, 385
Karl August (duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach):
Christiane Vulpius and, 298
conflicts at court and, 166
death of, 552, 554
as demonic figure, 461
Fichte and, 331, 376, 377–78
French Revolutionary war campaigns, 318, 324
 Goethe’s affliction with shingles and, 385
Goethe’s amusements with, 163, 164, 211–12
Goethe’s discontent with, 259
Goethe’s first meeting with, 147, 165
Goethe’s Italy sojourn and, 272–73, 274, 293–95
Goethe’s later years and, 552–54
Goethe’s marriage to Christiane Vulpius and, 408
Goethe’s mother and, 450
Goethe’s privy council appointment and, 179
Goethe’s property and, 407–8
invitation to Goethe, 153–55, 162–63, 166
Lenz and, 186, 188
Napoleon and, 433–34, 468
Napoleonic wars and, 403, 404
relationship with Goethe, 164, 172–74, 178, 205, 213–14, 224
“Roman Elegies” and, 301, 302, 345
Switzerland journey (1779), 229–30, 231, 234, 235
Ulrike von Levetzow romance and, 517, 553
Voltaire’s Mahomet and, 376
Weimar theater and, 374, 376, 377, 433, 480
Karl Friedrich (grand duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach), 554
Kauffmann, Angelika, 282
Kaufmann, Christoph, 193
Kayser, Philipp Christoph, 296
Kestner, Johann Christian:
first encounter with Goethe, 106
on Goethe’s personal characteristics, 109–10
Lotte Buff romance and, 107, 108, 124
Wilhelm Jerusalem suicide and, 111–12, 125
The Sorrows of Young Werther and, 135
Kleist, Heinrich von, 439
Klettenberg, Susanna von, 48–52, 65, 76, 144–45, 321, 522
Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian, 8–9, 134, 141, 192–93, 204
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb:
Darmstadt Sentimentalists and, 97
Goethe’s reading of, 14
on ice-skating, 163
 physiognomy on, 144
public reverence for, 24
The Sorrows of Young Werther and, 128, 132
on Weimar court amusements and Goethe’s break with, 177, 182
Knebel, Karl Ludwig von, 147, 166, 298, 308, 327
Kniep, Christoph Heinrich, 285, 287
Körner, Theodor, 305
Kotzebue, August von, 388–90, 511
Kraft, Johann Friedrich, 194
Kraus, Georg Melchior, 174, 407

Langer, Ernst Theodor, 38, 39, 46–47, 76

La Roche, Sophie von, 92, 110–11, 124, 184
Lassberg, Christel, 209–10
Laukhard, Friedrich Christian, 56
Lavater, Johann Kaspar:
background of, 141–42
Basedow and, 146
Cagliostro and, 238–39, 287
correspondence with Goethe, 143
end of Goethe’s friendship with, 241, 367
Goethe’s approaches to religion and, 142, 145, 235–41
Goethe’s Switzerland journey (1775) and, 151–52
Kaufmann and, 193
physiognomy and, 143–44, 211
Switzerland journey (1779) and, 230–31, 235
visit to Goethe in Frankfurt (1774), 141–42, 144–45
League of the Virtuous, 17
Lebensekel, see taedium vitae
Leipzig, see Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Leipzig sojourn of
Lengefeld, Charlotte von (later Schiller), 304
Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold:
Friederike Brion and, 184, 231–32
genius and, 134
Gods, Heroes, and Wieland and, 165, 184
Goethe’s mother and, 8
Goethe’s support of, 141
 Goethe’s visits to, 151, 152
Jung-Stilling and, 67
literary struggles of, 183–85
ruination of, 191
The Tutor, 114, 183
Weimar visit of (1776), 181, 182–83, 185–91, 204
“Lenz” (Büchner), 191
Leopold I (prince of Anhalt-Dessau), 212
Lersé, Franz, 58–59, 67
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 24, 36, 87, 89, 132, 249, 250
“Letter of the Pastor in *** to the New Pastor in ***” (Goethe), 92, 143
Leuchsenring, Franz Michael, 98
Levetzow, Amalie von, 512, 513, 558
Levetzow, Ulrike von, 512–15, 516–18, 521, 553
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 328
Life and Death of Saint Genevieve (Tieck), 383
life vs. poetry:
Friederike Brion romance and, 70–71
Iphigenia in Tauris and, 217
new political age and, 563–64
power of literature and, 341–42
purity and, 226–27
religion and, 44–45, 493–95
Sturm und Drang movement and, 182
Torquato Tasso on, 262–65, 308–10
Weimar arrival and, 180–82, 196
Weimar official duties and, 262, 265, 291–92
West-Eastern Divan on, 477
in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 196–97, 198
in Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, 498–501
Lila (Goethe), 215
Limprecht, Johann Christian, 54
literature, power of, 131–32, 340–42
“Little Heath Rose” (Goethe), 63
Loder, Justus Christian, 255
Lotte in Weimar (Mann), 506
Lover’s Spleen, The (Goethe), 33–35
Lucian, 115
Luden, Heinrich, 401–2, 510–11
Luise von Hesse-Darmstadt (duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach), 153, 164,
167, 215–16, 433–34
Luise (Voss), 356
Lumberville Fair (Goethe), 123
Lyncker, Karl von, 265–66

Macpherson, James, 63
Mahomet (fragment) (Goethe), 118, 119–20
“Mahomet’s Song” (Goethe), 206, 379
Mahomet (Voltaire), Goethe’s translation of, 376–77, 379–80, 413
Mahr, Johann Christian, 557
Maid of Orléans, The (Schiller), 386, 390
Mann, Thomas, 506
Manual of Anatomy (Loder), 255
Manzoni, Alessandro, 564
Marie Antoinette (queen of France), 55
“Marienbad Elegy” (Goethe), 516, 517, 518–20
“Marriage Song” (Goethe), 30
Martin Luther, or The Consecration of Power (Werner), 438–39
Mary Stuart (Schiller), 387
Massenbach, Christian von, 405
Maxims and Reflections (Goethe), 227, 442, 458
“May Day” (Goethe), 71
Melusine, 13
Mendelssohn, Abraham, 10
Mendelssohn, Moses, 213, 249–50
Menzel, Wolfgang, 564
Merck, Johann Heinrich:
on Clavigo, 141
cult of celebrity and, 118
Goethe as reviewer and, 102
Goethe’s friendship with, 95–97
on Goethe’s pragmatism, 196
on Goethe in Weimar, 259–60
Götz von Berlichingen and, 88, 89, 96, 113
 on Karl August’s relationship with Goethe, 172, 173
Lenz and, 184
Lotte Buff romance and, 107
Sentimentalists and, 98
Sophie La Roche and, 110
as spiritual guide, 28
suicide of, 97
Mereau, Sophie, 353
Messias (Klopstock), 14, 182
meteorology, 516
Metternich, Klemens von, 511, 544, 553
Metz, Johann Friedrich, 51–52, 93
Meyer, Johann Heinrich, 360, 366, 369, 372, 407, 482, 508, 545
Michaelis, Johann David, 19
Mieding, Johann Martin, 228
mineralogy, 206, 242–43, 254–55, 268, 424, 495
modernism, 103, 531–32
Moors, Ludwig, 17, 20, 79–80
Morhardt, Otto, 433
Moritz, Johann Friedrich, 54
Moritz, Karl Philipp, 282–83, 306–8, 309
“Morning Complaint” (Goethe), 300
Morphological Notebooks (Goethe), 334
Morphology (Goethe), 241
Möser, Justus, 81, 147, 292
Müller, Friedrich von, 253
Müller, Johannes, 410, 414, 456, 508, 515, 520, 554, 555
Münch, Anna Sibylla, 112, 140–41
Muses’ Almanac for the Year 1797, 346
Muses’ Almanac for the Year 1798, 358, 360

Napoleon Bonaparte:
art and, 367, 372
banishment of, 468
Egmont and, 460
Goethe on, 386–87
Goethe’s audience with, 412–15
 Goethe’s fascination with, 411–12, 460–61, 468
Pandora and, 417–18
political hegemony over Weimar of, 410–11, 433–34
on The Sorrows of Young Werther, 135
Theory of Color and, 422
University of Jena and, 331
Voltaire’s Mahomet and, 377, 413
see also Napoleonic wars
Napoleonic wars:
Goethe’s Teplitz spa journey and, 465–66
Napoleon’s defeat in Russia, 460, 461, 464
Napoleon’s final defeat, 419, 466–68
nationalism and, 465
plundering of Weimar, 406–7, 417
Poetry and Truth and, 459–60
Prussian defeat, 402, 405–6, 448, 460, 465
Prussian soldiers billeted in Jena, 404–5
Weimar state and, 402–3, 404, 410–11, 433–34
nationalism, 465, 510–11
Natural Daughter, The (Goethe), 387–88
natural religion, 42–43, 487–88
natural science:
anatomy, 255
aperçu and, 66
color theory, 331, 385, 391, 404; see also Theory of Color
development in, 424–26
Goethe’s discovery of, 253–54
Goethe’s self-analysis and, 453
Herder and, 256, 258
history and, 254–56
Italy sojourn and, 275, 284
Jena botanical garden and institute, 327
meteorology, 516
mineralogy, 242–43, 254–55, 268, 424, 495
observation and, 253–54
Propyläen and, 372
Schiller and, 334–36
 Urpflanze, 284, 286, 334, 335
nature:
art and, 44–45, 103–4, 307
vs. culture, 443–44
Herder on, 251
natural religion, 42–43, 487–88
Neoplatonism on, 493
nihilism and, 541
power of attraction and, 441–43
Spinoza on, 244–45, 246, 247, 251, 526
Sturm und Drang movement on, 254, 424
see also natural science
Nausicaa tragedy plan, 286
Nemesis, 510–11
Neoplatonism/Platonism, 51, 252, 420, 442, 492–93
Neptunism, 254–55, 314
“New German Religio-Patriotic Art” (Goethe), 510
New Songs, Set to Music by Bernhard Theodor Breitkopf (Goethe), 41
Newton, Isaac, 419, 421, 422, 426
New Works (Goethe), 323
Nicolai, Christoph Friedrich, 213
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 546
“Notes and Essays toward a Better Understanding of the West-Eastern
Divan” (Goethe), 43, 44, 470–71, 487, 488
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 351, 352, 382, 383, 437, 501

Oberlin, Johann Friedrich, 191

Oberrossla estate, 358
Observations on the Theater (Lenz), 183
Oeser, Adam Friedrich, 36–37
Oken, Lorenz, 511
On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller), 333, 338, 342–43, 345
“On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine World Order” (Fichte), 377
On Divine Things and Their Revelation (Jacobi), 458
“On Epic and Dramatic Poetry” (Goethe and Schiller), 370
“On German Architecture” (Goethe), 57
On German Character and Art (Herder), 57
“On Grace and Dignity” (Schiller), 332
“On the Improvement of the Understanding” (Spinoza), 245
“On the Plastic Imitation of the Beautiful” (Moritz), 306–8
On the Teachings of Spinoza in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn
(Jacobi), 116, 244, 249–53
“On Vision and Colors” (Schopenhauer), 428–29
Ortega y Gasset, José, 563
Ossian, 62–63, 106, 125
Ovid, 115, 217, 295

Palaeophron and Neoterpe (Goethe), 448

Palladio, Andrea, 277
“Pandaemonium Germanicum” (Lenz), 183–84
Pandora (Goethe), 416–18
pantheism, 247, 438, 491
Paracelsus, 533
Partners in Guilt (Goethe), 41–42
Patriotic Fantasies (Möser), 81, 147, 292
Paul, Jean, see Richter, Jean Paul
Pelagianism, 50–51
Penthesilea (Kleist), 439
“Phenomenon” (Goethe), 471–72
physical challenges, 56–57, 205–6
physiognomy, 143–44, 211
Pietism, 47–48, 64, 65
Pindar, 90–91, 101, 106
Platonism/Neoplatonism, 51, 252, 420, 442, 492–93
plays, see theater; Weimar theater; specific titles
“Pleasure” (Goethe), 300
“Pledge, The” (Schiller), 359
Plessing, Victor Leberecht, 200, 202–4, 210–11
Plessner, Helmuth, 240
Plotinus, 492–93, 497, 502–3
Plutonism, 255
“Poetic Thoughts on Christ’s Descent into Hell” (Goethe), 14
Poetry and Truth (Goethe), 91, 402, 451–56, 459–60, 461–62, 506–7
poetry vs. life, see life vs. poetry
polytheism, 489–90
“Prelude at the Theater” (Goethe), 362, 400
“Primer” (Goethe), 481
“Prologue in Heaven” (Goethe), 362, 400
Prometheus, Deucalion, and His Reviewers, 166
Prometheus figure:
Goethe’s self-confidence and, 91, 117
Napoleon and, 412
in Pandora, 416–17
plan for play on, 115–16
“Prometheus” poem on, 62, 116–17, 249, 250–51
Shakespeare and, 76
in “Wanderer’s Storm Song,” 100
“Prometheus” (Goethe), 62, 116–17, 249, 250–51
Prometheus (periodical), 416
Propertius, 301
prophecy, 118–22, 238, 379, 488, 489
Propyläen (Propylaea), 372–73, 374, 380, 381
Prospects of Eternity (Lavater), 142
Prussia:
defeat of, 402, 405–6, 448, 460, 465
Karl August and, 167
War of the Bavarian Succession, 212–13, 214–15
see also Napoleonic wars
purity, 220–24, 225–29, 230, 233

Racine, Jean, 14, 412–13

Rameau’s Nephew (Diderot), Goethe’s translation of, 391
Ramler, Carl Wilhelm, 213
Raphael, 55–56
Recke, Elsa von, 353
“Reconciliation” (Goethe), 519, 520
Reinhard, Karl Friedrich von, 413, 444, 462, 509–10, 544
“Relief” (Goethe), 481
religion, Goethe’s approaches to, 42–52
alchemy and, 51–52
aperçu and, 66, 67
 Catholicism and, 45–46, 457–58
in childhood, 42–43, 487–88
dissertation and, 76–77
Gretchen affair and, 44
Herder and, 64, 241
Herrnhuters and, 46–47, 53, 142
Islam, 488–89
Jung-Stilling and, 65–66, 67
Klettenberg and, 48–52
Langer and, 46–47
Lavater and, 142, 145, 235–41
life vs. poetry and, 44–45, 493–95
pantheism and, 247, 491
Pelagianism and, 50–51
Pietism and, 47–48
Plotinus and, 492–93, 497, 502–3
Prometheus figure and, 116–17
prophecy and, 118–19, 488, 489
Spinoza and, 247–49, 526
West-Eastern Divan and, 241, 487, 488–91, 492
renunciation, 445–46, 500–501, 503–4
“Resonance” (Goethe), 481
Reynard the Fox (Goethe), 325
rhetoric, art of, 15
Richardson, Samuel, 98
Richter, Jean Paul, 380
Ridel, Kornelius Johann Rudolf, 297, 407
Riemer, Friedrich Wilhelm:
Ausgabe letzter Hand and, 545, 546
Battle of Jena and, 405–6
Christiane Vulpius’s death and, 482
Faust and, 400
Goethe’s loneliness and, 508
Goethe’s marriage and, 408
“Marienbad Elegy” and, 517
Poetry and Truth and, 454
Riese, Johann Jakob, 17, 20
Robbers, The (Schiller), 134, 304, 332, 341, 366
Roesler, Costanza, 281
“Roman Elegies” (Goethe):
Anna Amalia and, 448
Christiane Vulpius and, 298, 300–303
Goethe’s mother on, 450
Italy sojourn and, 293, 294
public response to, 360
Schiller and, 301, 338, 345
Romanticism:
genius and, 134
Goethe’s criticism of, 436–37, 438, 439, 564
Holy Roman Empire and, 459
power of literature and, 341–42
Schiller on, 374
Schlegel circle, 382–84
Voltaire’s Mahomet and, 380
on Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 351, 437, 501
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 98, 121, 130, 190, 424, 455
Roussillon, Henriette von, 92, 97
Runge, Philipp Otto, 426

Sachs, Hans, 37
Saint-Simonianism, 540
Salzmann, Johann Daniel, 28, 58, 67
Satyros, or The Wood-Devil Deified (Goethe), 119, 120, 121–22, 123, 238
Saussure, Horace-Bénédict de, 234
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph:
Goethe’s friendship with, 384–85
on nature, 252
pantheism and, 247
on purity, 222–23
Schlegel circle and, 382, 383–84
Schiller, Charlotte, 547
Schiller, Friedrich:
Athenäum and, 383
beginnings of Goethe’s friendship with, 336–39
 Conversations of German Émigrés and, 344
cult of celebrity and, 341
death of, 391–92, 396, 397–99, 400, 402, 439, 447
on Egmont, 305–6, 338
on epistemology, 563
fame of, 386
Faust and, 363, 369–70, 380, 381, 400, 522, 525, 528, 547–48
first encounter with Goethe, 304
on freedom, 347–48, 349–50, 371
Goethe’s affliction with shingles and, 385
Goethe’s self-awareness and, 452
Goethe’s Stuttgart visit (1797) and, 366
Götz von Berlichingen and, 80, 81
Hermann and Dorothea and, 357
Hölderlin and, 363–64
Die Horen and, 187, 301, 332–34, 338, 340, 342–45, 353
Humboldt and, 329, 336
initial resentment of Goethe, 304–5, 346, 347, 350
on Iphigenia in Tauris, 219–20
Kotzebue and, 389–90
Lenz and, 187–88
named as Goethe’s executor, 360, 361
natural science and, 334–36
“Roman Elegies” and, 301, 338, 345
skull of, 548
The Sorrows of Young Werther and, 128
Sturm und Drang movement and, 134
Theory of Color and, 391, 398, 418
University of Jena appointment of, 305, 331
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and, 346–47, 348, 349–50, 351–52
on Wilhelm Tell, 367–68, 390
see also Schiller, Friedrich, collaborations with Goethe
Schiller, Friedrich, collaborations with Goethe:
ballads, 359–60
correspondence collection, 521, 522, 546–47, 548–49, 552
Demetrius, 391, 397–98
dilettantism, 373–74
 epic poetry, 370–72
“On Epic and Dramatic Poetry,” 370
reflection on, 395–96
theater and, 338, 371–72, 374–76, 387–88
tragedy, 369–70
“Xenia,” 345–46
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 353, 382–83, 389, 552
Schlegel, Friedrich, 353, 373, 382, 383, 389, 436–37, 438, 552
Schlegel, Karoline, 382, 383–84, 385
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 383
Schlosser, Johann Georg:
Goethe’s law practice and, 79
Kätchen romance and, 27
Lenz and, 191
marriage of, 92–93, 137, 138, 139, 199
Merck and, 95
on Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 352
Schmidt, Johann Christoph, 288
Schmitz, Hermann, 492
Schnabel, Johann Gottfried, 14
Schöne, Albrecht, 205
Schönemann, Elisabeth (Lili) (later Türckheim), 147–49, 150–51, 152–53,
170, 232, 406, 556
Schönkopf, Anna Katharina (Kätchen), 27–33, 35–36, 39, 48, 53–54, 69
School of Athens (Raphael), 55–56
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 127, 409, 427–31
Schopenhauer, Johanna, 407, 408–9, 427, 437
Schröter, Corona, 172, 208, 216
Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel, 134–35
Schulthess, Barbara, 152
Schütz, Johann Georg, 280
science, see natural science
Scott, Walter, 564
Seckendorff, Sigmund von, 168
Seibt, Gustav, 407
Seidel, Philipp, 229, 271, 298
“Self Portrait” (Goethe), 268
Sentimentalists, 97–102, 122, 151, 208–9, 341
Sesenheim, see Brion, Friederike
Seven Years’ War, 2, 5–6, 8
Shakespeare, William, 62, 75–76, 81, 82, 106, 113, 376
Shrovetide Play of Pater Brey, The (Goethe), 119, 120–21, 123, 238
Sloterdijk, Peter, 532
Small Town Germany (Kotzebue), 389
Socrates, 235
Soldiers, The (Lenz), 184
Soret, Frédéric, 545
Sorrows of Young Werther, The (Goethe):
assumptions about autobiographical nature of, 135, 286, 341
audience for, 113
copycat suicide rumors and, 132, 210
Cornelia and, 138–39
cult of celebrity and, 134–35, 152, 158, 341
descriptive passages in, 55
epistolary form of, 54, 129–31
genius in, 61, 133
Herder on, 60
impact of, 211
influence of, 132–34
Karl August on, 147
Kätchen romance and, 27, 32
Lenz and, 187
Lotte Buff romance and, 106, 107, 108, 123–24, 135–36, 138–39
“Marienbad Elegy” and, 519
Maximiliane von Brentano and, 111, 124–25
Napoleon and, 413–14
Pietism and, 48
Plessing and, 200, 211
power of literary fashion in, 131–32
Stolberg and, 148
Sturm und Drang movement and, 133
success of, 132
taedium vitae and, 125–29, 160, 161
The Triumph of Sentimentalism and, 209
 Wilhelm Jerusalem suicide and, 112, 125, 135
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and, 197
writing of, 123
Spiel (play), Goethe’s father and, 7
Spinoza, Baruch, 244–53
art and, 307, 309
Goethe’s reading of, 160
Goethe’s thoughts on, 247–49, 526
ideas of, 244–47
Jacobi on, 116, 146, 244, 249–53
pantheism and, 247
Stein, Baron Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom, 474
Stein, Charlotte von:
Anna Amalia and, 448
Antonia von Branconi and, 233
Christiane Vulpius and, 297, 298–99
death of, 552
distancing from Goethe, 297, 298–300
Goethe’s contentment in Weimar and, 260
on Goethe’s domesticity, 326–27
Goethe’s Italy sojourn and, 271, 273, 274, 276, 283, 310
Goethe’s letters to, 169–71
Goethe’s romance with, 168–72, 188–91, 229, 260, 269–70, 297, 299,
310, 448
gossip about, 171–72
Herder and, 258
initial encounters with Goethe, 168–69
Iphigenia in Tauris and, 224
Lenz and, 186, 188–91
life vs. poetry and, 198
physiognomy on, 144
poetry sent to, 170–71, 180–81
“Roman Elegies” and, 345
Schiller and, 304
Spinoza and, 244, 248
Torquato Tasso and, 263
on Weimar court amusements, 176
 on Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 352
Woldemar, a Rarity from Natural History and, 229
Stein, Fritz von, 297, 299
Stein, Josias von, 176
Stella (Goethe), 149
Stendhal, 564
Stöber, Elias, 77
Stock, Johann Michael, 36
Stolberg, Auguste zu (Gustchen) (later Bernstorff) (Countess), 148–49, 150,
151, 152, 515–16
Stolberg, Christian zu (Count), 151–52
Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold zu (Count), 151–52, 184
Strasbourg, see Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Strasbourg sojourn of
Sturm und Drang (Klinger), 192
Sturm und Drang movement:
cult of celebrity and, 134
Elective Affinities and, 444
on folk spirit, 62–63
French Revolution and, 317
on genius, 61, 62, 133–34
Goethe’s mother and, 8
Karl August and, 173
Kaufmann and, 193
Klinger and, 192
life vs. poetry and, 182
Napoleonic wars and, 460
nationalism and, 465
on nature, 254, 424
pragmatism and, 195
suicide and, 132
suicide:
Christel von Lassberg, 209–10
Goethe’s thoughts of, 113, 125, 457, 551
Werther copycat rumors, 132, 210
Wilhelm Jerusalem, 111–12, 125, 135
Sulzer, Johann Georg, 102–4
“Sweet Child, the String of Pearls” (Goethe), 489–90
Szymanowska, Maria, 519, 520

taedium vitae, 125–29, 160–61, 456–57, 551

Talma, François-Joseph, 412
Tame Xenias (Goethe), 223, 428, 495
Tancred (Voltaire), Goethe’s translation of, 380
Taschenbuch für Damen auf das Jahr 1817, 470
Tell, Wilhelm, 367–68, 369, 390
Teutsche Merkur, Der, 114, 165, 340
Textor, Johann Jost (uncle), 93
Textor, Johann Wolfgang (grandfather), 1–2, 78
theater:
Goethe-Schiller collaborations and, 338, 371–72, 374–76, 387–88
Goethe’s mother and, 9–10
Napoleon and, 412–13, 414
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and, 197, 198–99, 348–49
Theophrastus, 385
Theory of Color (Goethe), 418–24
on aperçu, 66
Elective Affinities and, 433, 434–35
guiding principle of, 327–28
on Harz journey, 206–7
observation and, 256
publishing of, 409
reception of, 426–27
Schiller and, 391, 398, 418
Schopenhauer and, 427–31
Thoranc, Count, 5–6, 8
Thousand and One Nights, 14
Tibullus, 301
Tieck, Ludwig, 342, 373, 383, 436–37
Tiefurt Journal, 448
Till Eulenspiegel, 13
Tischbein, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284, 285
“To a Woman” (Goethe), 326
“To Chronos the Coachman” (Goethe), 317
“To the Ether” (Hölderlin), 363–64
“To Lessing’s Friends” (Mendelssohn), 250
“To Psyche” (Wieland), 175
Torquato Tasso (Goethe), 262–65, 285, 306, 307, 308–9, 310, 425, 518
“To Werther” (Goethe), 135, 519
“Treasure Hunter, The” (Goethe), 358–59
Trebra, F. W. von, 176
Triumph of Sentimentalism, The (Goethe), 208–9, 215
Tutor, The, or Advantages of a Private Education (Lenz), 114, 183

Über Kunst und Altertum (On Art and Antiquity), 510, 547
Unger, Johann Friedrich Gottlieb, 328–29
Urfaust (Goethe), 522
Urpflanze, 284, 286, 334, 335

“Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!” (Goethe), 405

Varnagen von Ense, Karl August, 549
Veit, Dorothea, 383
“Venetian Epigrams” (Goethe), 448
Vicar of Wakefield, The (Goldsmith), 70–71
Vieweg, Johann Friedrich, 357
Virgil, 70
“Visit, The” (Goethe), 300
Voigt, Christian Gottlob, 288, 303, 379, 404, 408, 410
Volkmann, Johann Jakob, 276, 280
Voltaire, 14, 77, 173, 177, 376–77, 379–80, 413
Voss, Johann Heinrich, 177, 327, 407
Vulpius, Christiane (later Goethe), 5, 264
birth of son August, 303
The Citizen-General and, 322
death of, 482, 507
domesticity with, 310, 321, 326–27
erotic poems written about, 300–301
first meeting with Goethe, 297–98
Frankfurt visit of (1797), 365, 366
Goethe’s marriage to, 408–9
Goethe’s mother and, 9, 365, 450
Napoleonic wars and, 406–7
 “Roman Elegies” and, 298, 300–303
Schiller and, 306

Wagner, Heinrich Leopold, 8, 134, 141, 166

“Walk, The” (Schiller), 356
Wallenstein trilogy (Schiller), 338, 369, 375, 376, 386
Wanda, Queen of the Sarmatians (Werner), 439
“Wanderer, The” (Hölderlin), 363–64
“Wanderer’s Night Song” (Goethe), 180, 234, 557
“Wanderer’s Storm Song” (Goethe), 100–101, 205
“Wandering Jew, The” (Goethe), 145
War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–-79), 212–13, 214–15
Wedel, Otto Joachim Moritz, 174, 229
Weimar state:
economic troubles (1775), 162–63
European politics and, 167, 402–3
grand duchy status, 508–9
league of princes and, 266
Napoleonic wars and, 402–3, 404, 410–11, 433–34
nationalism in, 510–11
War of the Bavarian Succession and, 212, 214–15
see also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Weimar official duties
Weimar theater:
Anna Amalia and, 447
Goethe relieved of directorship, 509
Iphigenia in Tauris performances in, 216
Jagemann conflict, 433
Karl August and, 374, 376, 377, 433, 480
Kotzebue and, 389
Napoleonic wars and, 405
Werner and, 438
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and, 199, 348
Weisse, Christian Felix, 181
“Welcome and Farewell” (Goethe), 72–73
Werner, Zacharias, 399–400, 436, 438–39
Werthern-Beichlingen, Emilie von, 316
West-Eastern Divan (Goethe):
 inspiration for, 469–71
Marianne Willemer romance and, 474–77, 478–79, 480–81, 483–84
Napoleonic wars and, 464
on poetry as life force, 485–87
on prophecy, 379
on religion, 241, 487, 488–91, 492
renunciation and, 505
Ulrike von Levetzow romance and, 512
Wiesbaden trip and, 471–72
Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years and, 498
Wetzlar, Goethe’s sojourn in (1772), 104–8
see also Buff, Lotte
Weyland, Friedrich Leopold, 68
“What Does It Mean to Speak in Tongues?” (Goethe), 119
“While Contemplating Schiller’s Skull” (Goethe), 548
Wieland, Christoph Martin:
Anna Amalia and, 447
conflicts with Goethe, 165–66
cult of celebrity and, 174–75
death of, 462, 463
French Revolution and, 312
Goethe’s friendship with, 327, 462–63
on Goethe’s pragmatism, 196
on Goethe in Weimar, 259
Götz von Berlichingen and, 114
Kaufmann and, 193
Schiller and, 304
Shakespeare and, 75
on The Sorrows of Young Werther, 132
on Weimar court amusements, 168, 180
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe):
early version of, 196–99, 211, 288, 329
end of, 350–51
freedom and, 349–50
French Revolution and, 315–16
Die Horen and, 333, 346
Italy sojourn and, 288
 Johann Jakob von Willemer on, 472
on power of literature, 341, 342
publishing contract for, 328–29, 340
reception of, 352, 360
Romantics on, 351, 437, 501
Schiller and, 346–47, 348, 349–50, 351–52
Schlegel circle on, 382
Susanna von Klettenberg in, 49, 50
theater and, 197, 198–99, 348–49
Weimar official duties and, 269
Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years and, 496–97, 498, 499, 500, 502,
504
Zelter and, 518
Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or The Renunciants (Goethe), 495–
504
Elective Affinities and, 409–10, 432
form of, 496, 497–98
Holy Family image in, 491, 498
novella cycle in, 500–502
on purity, 227
renunciation in, 500–501, 503–4
society vs. poetry in, 498–501
Ulrike von Levetzow and, 513
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and, 496–97, 498, 499, 500, 502, 504
Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission (Goethe), 196–99, 211, 288, 329
see also Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Tell (Schiller), 367–68, 390
Willemer, Johann Jakob von, 472–73, 479, 483
Willemer, Marianne, 471, 472–79, 480, 482–84, 505
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 36, 218, 372
“Winter Journey in the Harz” (Goethe), 199, 201–3, 204–5, 206
Wöhler, Friedrich, 533
Woldemar, a Rarity from Natural History (Jacobi), 228–29, 243
Wolf, Friedrich August, 356, 399
Wolff, Amalia, 398
Wolff, Christian, 250
Woltmann, Karl Ludwig, 333, 342
Wolzogen, Karoline von, 353

“Xenia” (Goethe and Schiller), 345–46

Young, Edward, 98

Zachariä, Just Friedrich, 21

Zapperi, Roberto, 281, 294
Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Kunst, 437
Zelter, Karl Friedrich, 392, 398, 512, 517–18, 549–52
Ziegler, Luise von, 92, 97
Zöllner, Johann Friedrich, 213
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RÜDIGER SAFRANSKI is a freelance writer and honorary professor of
philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. His important biographies of E.
T. A. Hoffmann, Martin Heidegger, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich
Nietzsche, and Friedrich Schiller have won numerous prizes and been
translated into more than twenty languages. He is also the author of books on
such basic problems of philosophy and human existence as truth, evil, time,
and globalization. His biographies of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and
Schopenhauer as well as his book on Romanticism have already appeared in
English translation. Rüdiger Safranski lives in Berlin and Badenweiler.
 ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

DAVID DOLLENMAYER is a literary translator and emeritus professor of

German at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts.
He has translated works by Rolf Bauerdick, Andreas Bernard, Bertolt
Brecht, Elias Canetti, Peter Stephan Jungk, Michael Kleeberg, Stefan Klein,
Marie-Luise Knott, Michael Köhlmeier, Peri-kles Monioudis, Anna
Mitgutsch, Mietek Pemper, Moses Rosenkranz, Willibald Sauerländer,
Hansjörg Schertenleib, Daniel Schreiber, and Martin Walser and is the
recipient of the 2008 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize and the 2010
Translation Prize of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York. He lives in
Hopkinton, Massachusetts.
 BOOKS BY RÜDIGER SAFRANSKI

Romanticism: A German Affair

How Much Globalization Can We Bear?
Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography
Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil
Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy
 The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften
International– Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and
Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation,
the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT, and
the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels
(German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

Copyright © 2013 by Carl Hanser Verlag Müchen

Translation copyright © 2017 by David Dollenmayer

Originally published in German as Goethe: Kunstwerk des Lebens: Biographie

All rights reserved

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THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PRINTED EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Names: Safranski, Rüdiger, author. | Dollenmayer, David B., translator.

Title: Goethe : life as a work of art / Rudiger Safranski ; translated by
David Dollenmayer.
Other titles: Goethe: Kunstwerk des Lebens. English
Description: New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017008798 | ISBN 9780871404909 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749–1832. | Authors,
German—18th century—Biography. | Authors, German—19th
century—Biography.
Classification: LCC PT2051 .S2413 2017 | DDC 831/.6 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008798

ISBN 978-0-87140-491-6 (e-book)

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