Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the last universal genius of Europe: the greatest German poet, a novelist who changed the European novel twice, a dramatist whose Faust is the central myth of modern striving, a scientist who discovered a bone in the human jaw and challenged Newton on colour, a civil servant who ran a small state’s mines, roads and finances, and a sage to whom the whole of Europe made pilgrimage. Napoleon, meeting him, said simply: “Vous êtes un homme” — “You are a man.”

Life

Frankfurt and Sturm und Drang

Goethe was born on 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt am Main, the son of a wealthy, pedantic lawyer and a lively, much younger mother. He studied law at Leipzig and Strasbourg, where he met the critic Herder, who taught him to love Shakespeare, folk song, Homer and Ossian. His play Götz von Berlichingen (1773), about a rebellious knight, and his epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) launched the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement of passionate rebellion against Enlightenment rationalism. Werther — the story of a sensitive young man who falls hopelessly in love with a woman engaged to another and shoots himself — was a European sensation; young men dressed in Werther’s blue coat and yellow waistcoat, and some, it was said, imitated his suicide.

Weimar

In 1775 the eighteen-year-old Duke Karl August invited Goethe to the small duchy of Saxe-Weimar, where he stayed for the rest of his life. He became a minister — responsible for mines, roads, finance and the army — and for ten years wrote little of note, absorbed in administration and an intense, platonic relationship with Charlotte von Stein.

In 1786 he fled secretly to Italy for nearly two years — Rome, Naples, Sicily — and was reborn as a classicist, devoted to Greek and Roman form, sensuous fulfilment and natural science. Returning, he took the young flower-maker Christiane Vulpius as his partner (they married only in 1806), scandalizing Weimar society.

From 1794 until Schiller’s death in 1805, his friendship and collaboration with the poet Friedrich Schiller created Weimar Classicism, the summit of German literature. In these years and after, he wrote Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96), the model of the Bildungsroman (novel of formation); Hermann and Dorothea; Elective Affinities (1809), a novel of marriage and chemical attraction; his autobiography Poetry and Truth; the West-Eastern Divan (1819), poems inspired by the Persian poet Hafiz; and, throughout, Faust.

The sage

In old age Goethe was a European institution. Visitors came from everywhere; his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann recorded their talks in the Conversations with Goethe (1836), which Nietzsche called “the best German book there is”. He coined the term Weltliteratur — world literature — reading Persian, Chinese and Indian works in translation. He finished Faust Part Two in 1831, sealed it, and directed that it be published only after his death. He died on 22 March 1832; his reported last words were “Mehr Licht!” — “More light!”

Thought

Nature and metamorphosis

Goethe was a serious natural scientist. In anatomy he identified the intermaxillary bone in humans (1784), evidence of continuity between humans and animals. In botany, The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) argued that all parts of a plant are transformations of a single form, the leaf — an idea of morphological unity that anticipates evolutionary thinking. In his Theory of Colours (1810), he attacked Newton’s analysis of white light into spectral colours; physicists consider his optics wrong, but his account of colour as experienced — after-images, coloured shadows, the psychology of colour — inspired painters (Turner) and philosophers (Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour).

Spinoza and the whole

Goethe found peace in Baruch Spinoza, whose vision of God-or-Nature as one whole (Deus sive Natura) matched his own sense of the divine in nature. He distrusted abstract systems, including Kant’s and Hegel’s, preferring “delicate empiricism” — patient observation until the phenomenon reveals its own law.

Bildung

The ideal of Bildung — self-formation through experience, error, love, art and work — is Goethe’s great contribution to modern culture. Wilhelm Meister follows a young man who wants to be an actor and gradually finds his place in the world; the novel created the genre of the Bildungsroman (Dickens’s David Copperfield, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, Mann’s Magic Mountain).

Influence

Goethe stands behind German Romanticism and Idealism — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Schelling admired him; Arthur Schopenhauer worked with him on colours; Friedrich Nietzsche called him “the last German before whom I feel reverence” and his model of the integrated human being. Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Berlioz (The Damnation of Faust), Gounod (Faust), Mahler (the Eighth Symphony sets the end of Faust) set him to music. Freud said Goethe’s essay on nature made him choose medicine. Thomas Mann wrote a novel about him (Lotte in Weimar) and a modern Doctor Faustus.

Using Goethe in conversation

• On striving: “Whoever strives with all his might, him we can redeem.”
• On theory and life: “Grey, dear friend, is all theory, and green the golden tree of life.”
• On self-formation: Bildung — becoming oneself through experience.
• On culture: “Weltliteratur” — world literature.