Johann Wolfgang Goethe (Frankfurt 1749 – Weimar 1832; nobility predicate “von” awarded in 1782 in Weimar) was born into a patrician household in Frankfurt, then a Free Imperial City. Home-schooled and culturally inspired by a French officer quartered in the household, he studied law in Leipzig, then in Strasbourg. It was here, under the influence of Herder, that Goethe discovered idyllic sentimentalism and historicist interests, associated with the area’s “German” character and mobilized in a growing anti-classicist (i.e. anti-French) aesthetic paradigm shift. Goethe’s interest in Renaissance and Baroque literary material and in the Gothic (“German”) architecture of the city’s cathedral merged with a Rousseauesque cult of the authentic and a cult of Shakespeare as a national “original genius”. All this, overlaid with the sentimentalism of the time, marked Goethe’s participation in the budding “Sturm und Drang” movement (Von deutscher Baukunst, 1773; the chivalric tragedy Götz von Berlichingen, 1773). At the same time it marked the young poet’s persona as a restlessly questing spirit, driven by tender passions and love affairs, and, in a proto-Hegelian sense, encountering the world in an ongoing process of spiritual self-questioning and growth. The novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) led to his Europe-wide literary notoriety while defining a literary personality that owed more to Ossian than to Homer, for whom love was a torment rather than a dalliance, and who combined intense passion with no less intense self-analysis. Around the same time he contributed a German translation of Hasanaginica, a Croatian tragic poem noted down from oral transmission, to Herder’s Stimmen der Völker in Liedern. Throughout his life, Goethe would try in his lyricism to capture complex emotions in a simple, homely and folk-ballad-derived diction.
Invited to Weimar in 1775, he assumed authoritative public duties (which, given the duchy’s Lilliputian size, were less onerous than grandiloquent, and left him ample room for private study). This allowed Goethe to complete his self-formation into the type of the Romantic artist and of an intellectual committed to his cultural traditions; it prepared the ground for his enormous symbolical status and public perception as the very embodiment of German literature reborn. This national stature came to fruition after a Grand Tour to Italy (1786-88), which reconciled his Strasbourg enthusiasm for the German Gothic and vernacular traditions with a new admiration for classical aesthetics. The duality was expressed in plays either classical (Iphigenie auf Tauris, 1786) or Patriotically national (Egmont, 1788).
These theatrical initiatives were galvanized after a meeting with Schiller in 1794. Friendship led to collaboration, and the collaboration made Weimar the centre of a vibrant literary renaissance. Goethe published Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, a novel which redefined the meaning of Bildung, and the two collaborated on brief aphoristic fragments (Xenien, 1796) and the periodical Propyläen (1798-1800). In addition, Weimar offered the pair a dramatic laboratory in the availability of the court theatre. While Schiller was the more productive dramatist of the two, Goethe’s own contribution, Faust (1805), provided German letters with a key classic. Faust summarized, well before Hegel systematized it in his dialectics, an understanding that progress (personal and historical) is non-linear and tragic, driven by conflict and oppositions. Indeed, Faust provided German literature with a spiritual and moral myth that would be invoked incessantly afterwards as expressive of a German ethnotype as such: the restless spirit of penetrating understanding, the tragic dilemma between insight and innocence, the duality between the spirit and the flesh.
Faust appeared in the year of Schiller’s death, 1805; the next year saw the Battle of Jena nearby and the hegemony of Napoleon, who met with Goethe in an encounter marked by mutual esteem. As the cultural centre of gravity shifted from Jena to Heidelberg, Goethe maintained his overwhelming status as the titan of German letters; but the younger, more nationally-minded Romantics at the same time, while continuing to profess their hero-worship, were out sympathy with the aging oracle’s existential irony, his habit of placing himself beyond the issues and immediate concerns of the day, and his refusal to denounce Napoleon, classical culture, or other pet hates. There was also some sense that the Romantic Nationalists were cultivating something that had already been tried, done, and abandoned by Goethe thirty or forty years before: e.g. creating a national literature based on a national epic or on Shakespearean history plays, or taking inspiration from folk culture. Thus Grimm’s discovery of Serbian oral epic as edited by Vuk Karadžić in 1824 recalled to Goethe his translation of Hasanaginica as early as 1775; and as the German philologists and poets were proclaiming the ethnic rootedness of the national literature, Goethe felt it was time to move to world literature instead, and drew inspiration from the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez for his West-östlicher Divan (1819). Thus towards the end of his life Goethe merged the principle of national literature (as whose German demiurge he was revered) with that of literary cosmopolitanism.
Goethe’s later years opened with the post-sentimental novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) and were dominated by the less successful continuations of Wilhelm Meister and Faust, and autobiographical self-reflection. He died in Weimar in 1832. Third in stature only to the Bible and Shakespeare, and along with Byron, Scott, and Schiller, he would be the most eagerly translated modern author in Europe’s various emerging national movements.
