Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"This book came into my hands very recently and I’m really glad that it did, so that I was able to include it on this list. I think it is an excellent introduction to Goethe. It gives you a view of his life, the contexts of his activity, and the major influences on him. It offers a rich and insightful account of the full spectrum of his literary work. The focus is primarily literary, but not exclusively by any means. There’s a wonderful introduction that tells us about Goethe’s ongoing influence into the 20th and 21st centuries. We also get an outline of his biography, since the book is chronologically organized. One of the things that I particularly like about this book is that it is not a book for specialists. It is written for people who have broad interests and whose reading is, let us say, European in scope. The references run to several literatures—to British and American literature, but also to French literature and to the Italian Renaissance . It is a book that makes clear Goethe’s indispensability to our contemporary self-understanding. Moreover, the book is wonderfully written and broadly accessible. It provides translations of all the passages and draws pertinent connections to contemporary culture. So, this is the book to pick up if you want to find out something about Goethe. It’s a tremendous achievement. There’s nothing more difficult than to take such a complex and rich writer and give us a compelling sense of his contribution. For those who then want to read more, we have the first two large volumes of Nicholas Boyle’s great biography, Goethe: The Poet and the Age . Volume I is called The Poetry of Desire and Vol II is Revolution and Renunciation . These take us up to 1803, and the world waits for Vol III to take us to Goethe’s death in 1832. As far as Napoleon is concerned, we can’t imagine that Goethe was his pal, but Napoleon indeed belongs to the admirers. He was an admirer in particular of the most widely read of Goethe’s four novels: The Sufferings of Young Werther (1774). This is a novel that comes out of and transforms the epistolary sentimental novel tradition. It takes that form in a different direction. If you’re familiar with Richardson’s Clarissa , it’s about 950 pages. Pamela is a little bit smaller. Rousseau ’s La Nouvelle Héloïse is also a compendious, rhetorically effusive novel in letters. Goethe then comes along and writes an incredibly thin and powerful novel. It’s just one writer sending letters of vibrant intimacy that take his character through a failed love into suicide. And Napoleon is gripped by that. I forget the exact number, but I think Napoleon claimed to have read it thirteen times. Then we have people like Beethoven. Here we have a musician who is inspired by Goethe’s literary works and by the revolutionary energy that he finds in them. So, if he focuses in particular on a figure like Goethe’s Egmont, he is focusing on a figure of great energy. The core features of Egmont’s character are radical independence, on the one hand, and contagious vital energy, on the other. And that radical independence, even though it has a tragic outcome, is something that inspired the entire artistic generation that followed Goethe. Goethe was born in 1749 and Beethoven in 1770, along with, for example, Hölderlin and Hegel. The generation of 1770 sees Goethe as its guide. In 1825 Hegel wrote in a letter to Goethe: “If I look at the course of my intellectual development, I see you interwoven with it everywhere and I may call myself one of your sons; from you my inner life drew strength to resist abstraction and oriented itself on your works as its guiding beacons.” What is the source of Goethe’s impact? I think a key factor is Goethe’s focus on human experience in its immediacy, on the individual human world encounter and the formative world-shaping and self-shaping character of that encounter. The world makes me and I make my world in the immediacy of this experience. That’s what I think ignited in the minds of the Romantic generation that followed upon him. Goethe broke off from the rhetorical and generic norms of aristocratic culture and sought to capture experience in its emergence and freshness. His own experiential response was the touchstone of all his inquiries. Let’s consider the example of Freud, who draws scientific inspiration from Goethe’s literary works, his scientific works (his studies of morphologies and change, growth, and development), and his autobiographical writings. What could Freud, a scientist, find, say, in the Faust drama or in the autobiography Poetry and Truth ? I think that if we review all Freud’s references to Goethe what we find as the common factor is his belief in the authenticity of Goethe’s testimony as to the nature of experience. In 1930, Freud received the Goethe Prize awarded by Goethe’s home city of Frankfurt, an opportunity for him to express his intellectual debt to a predecessor who had shown him the path of intellectual independence. “Goethe broke off from the rhetorical and generic norms of aristocratic culture and sought to capture experience in its emergence and freshness” So, Goethe has a huge intellectual impact. And we’re only beginning to understand that intellectual impact right now. Goethe’s influence on 20th-century thought across a broad spectrum is a recent and lively research topic in Goethe studies."