Germany’s Greatest

1.

Goethe, the greatest of German poets, and the only one who can be placed in the company of Shakespeare and Dante, has always received a mixed reception in his own country, where he has been the object of praise and censure in almost equal measure. After the rapturous reception of The Sorrows of the Young Werther, which was written in four weeks in 1774 and became a European best seller, the poet’s popularity in Germany drained away during his long years as minister of state for the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, reviving sporadically, but not completely, with the publication of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in 1795–1796, which greatly impressed the new Romantic generation, and again with that of Hermann und Dorothea in 1796–1797, an epic set amid the convulsions caused by the French Revolution. His growing aloofness contributed to the belief that he had no interest in the common people, and Ludwig Börne wrote in his diary in 1830:

Goethe could have been a Hercules and saved his fatherland from much rubbish, but he merely gathered the golden apples of the Hesperides, which he kept for himself, and then sat himself at the foot of omphalos, and remained sitting. How entirely differently did the great poets of Italy, France and England comport themselves, Dante, Alfieri, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Milton, Swift, Byron, Thomas Moore!¹

During his long intellectual collaboration with Friedrich Schiller, Goethe’s praise of Greek classicism at the expense of modern tendencies, his cosmopolitanism, and his indifference to national issues alienated much of the younger generation of writers, and this continued after his death and was not relieved by the fact that, in conservative circles and in the universities, he became a cult figure, standing above criticism. In both the Nazi period and the brief life of the German Democratic Republic, his name was invoked to promote authoritarian causes, and this automatically made his memory suspect in the eyes of supporters of democracy.

The past year has marked the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth, and there has been much to do about Goethe all over Germany, especially in Weimar, his home for over fifty years and the designated Cultural Capital of Europe for 1999. Much of this activity has been politically innocuous: new performances of Faust, the masterpiece that he began in his youth and finished only within months of his death, as well as of his early dramas Clavigo and Stella; lectures on every phase of his work, from his Theory of Colors to his late poem-cycle The West-East Divan; exhibitions on such subjects as “The Young Goethe,” “Goethe and the Theater,” and “Goethe and Women,” and, specially produced for people who believe history only when they can touch it, Goethe masks, Gretchen silk stockings with Faust citations along the seams, and, for the very young, J. W. G. pacifiers (also called “Culture City Suckers”). But among the streams of books and articles in newspapers and journals called forth by the occasion there have also been a fair number rehearsing everything that Börne and his contemporaries found to criticize in Goethe and pretending to reveal political and moral frailties hitherto unknown.

The most hotly discussed of these is W. Daniel Wilson’s Das Goethe-Tabu. A professor of German Studies at Berkeley, the author is intent on proving that the much-praised Weimar Enlightenment was in truth fraudulent, a petty dictatorship in the interest of the aristocracy but repressive in its attitude toward the lower-classes. As a member of the duke’s ruling council, Goethe, Wilson argues, shared in and approved of the government’s offenses against human rights, although this has been carefully obscured by professional students of German literature. Specifically, Wilson charges Goethe with having failed to prevent the execution of a woman who had killed her child, although there was considerable public sympathy for a lighter sentence, with having permitted Weimar citizens to be impressed for military service in the war in America, with encouraging espionage against students and professors at the University of Jena, with playing an important part in the dismissal of the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte from Jena, and with other offenses.

Wilson has done an enormous amount of research in German archives, and his findings, particularly about the attitudes of the peasantry toward the government and the nature of lower-class protest, are of considerable interest. On the other hand, his charges against Goethe are often overdrawn or inaccurate. In the case of the child murderess Anna Catharina Höhne, Goethe did not vote for execution but rather expressed the view that it would be unwise to change the existing law, a stand similar to that expressed by Al Gore in Claremont, New Hampshire, in November of this past year, when he was asked about his views on the death penalty, although. Gore was speaking in a general rather than a specific context.²

Neither Goethe nor the duke approved of recruiting for the American war, but they did permit two local criminals to substitute service in the Hessian army for the long jail sentences that they were facing, hardly something that can be considered a violation of human rights. Wilson is correct in saying that Goethe tended to be unsympathetic toward university intellectuals with liberal views, but this was because he feared that their activities would lead neighboring princes to withdraw their subjects from the university he had done so much to build up. This was true in the case of Fichte’s defiant atheism, which led to his dismissal, which Goethe, who had brought him to Weimar five years earlier and had a high regard for him as a philosopher, did not try to prevent.

Writing at one point of what he considers to be the tendency to condone all of Goethe’s faults, Wilson makes a revealing comment. “It seems,” he writes, “that the courage of one’s convictions which we demand of citizens in the twentieth century is not expected of the great men of cultural history.” This surely betrays a lack of perspective. Goethe’s Weimar was profoundly different from Wilson’s Berkeley, and it makes little sense to criticize the poet for having failed to base his behavior on standards prevalent in America two hundred years after his own time. Wilson does not acknowledge this and goes on shaking his head disapprovingly over what he believes to be moral delinquency on Goethe’s part without any appreciation of the difference in historical circumstances.³

In an address in Frankfurt, the poet’s birthplace, on April 14, 1999, Roman Herzog, the president of the Federal Republic, sought to take a balanced view. After beginning with a pun on his own name, saying that he was hardly the kind of duke (Herzog) that Goethe would have expected to meet on an occasion like this, the President cited some of Wilson’s more extreme charges about Goethe’s violations of human rights and, to the indignation of many of his auditors, appeared to associate himself with them, since he went on to say that there was “no longer any reason for an uncritical idealization of Goethe the man.” He then suggested that it was necessary to think of the subject of the day’s celebration as the “distant Goethe,” making the point that Wilson seemed not to appreciate, that he was a citizen of an age whose politics, institutions, economic organization, and cultural goals were so remote from our own that it was difficult for us to understand or sympathize with them. The distant Goethe, nevertheless, exercised a peculiar fascination on us, and what he said and wrote sometimes had a striking relevance to our own concerns. (Here Herzog cited a book by the GDR author Ulrich Plenzdorf, The New Sorrows of the Young Werther, which profoundly influenced young people in East Germany in the 1970s.) And above all, the President concluded, the distant Goethe had remained close to us in his language.

Indeed, no one ever again opened so many new possibilities to the German language as he. He not only put his stamp on German but—whether we realize it or not—he also deeply influenced our own range of expression. And his poems, we can rightly say, have become part of the history of the German soul. Consider “Füllest wieder Busch und Tal,” or “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh” or the seemingly so simple “Sah ein Knab ein Röslein stehn.” Many of them appear as if they were really made for today and for us—yes, as if we had helped to conceive them.⁴

This tribute was a handsome one, but it hardly concealed the fact that Herzog’s address had essentially mirrored Germany’s usual ambivalence toward its greatest writer.

John R. Williams has written recently that the reception of Goethe in Britain was always less concerned about political ideologies than in Germany.⁵ His early works were received warmly, Sir Walter Scott translating his first play, Götz von Berlichingen, in 1798-1799, and Shelley and Byron hailing the first part of Faust with enthusiasm, although Byron was not proficient enough in German to appreciate it fully. It was Thomas Carlyle who did most to establish Goethe’s reputation in Britain, translating Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in 1824 and, in Sartor Resartus and other essays, emphasizing his qualities as a thinker rather than as a poet. Thanks to Carlyle, writers like George Eliot and Matthew Arnold became interested in him, and Eliot’s husband, G. H. Lewes, wrote the first full biography of Goethe in any language and one that maintained its authority into our own time.

Goethe did not escape the British proclivity for taking potshots at the great; and in 1936 The Evening Standard, perhaps reflecting the growing anti-German feeling that followed the Rhineland crisis, could write that “he was a snob of the most obvious sort who treasured a handkerchief into which Napoleon had blown his nose and kept his mistress in the kitchen because of her bad table manners.”⁶ Both charges, incidentally, were untrue. Generally, however, he has been treated with an evenhandedness that is not usual in Germany, and it is perhaps not surprising that the most impressive Goethe biography of our time is being written by an Englishman rather than by one of his own countrymen.

The first volume of Nicholas Boyle’s biography appeared in 1991, under the title Goethe: The Poet and the Age; Volume I: The Poetry of Desire (1749-1790).⁷ His purpose, the author wrote in his preface, was “to set Goethe’s life in the context of his age and his poetry in the context of his life.” This was an ambitious undertaking, given the richness and length of his subject’s life, but Boyle brings to his task inexhaustible energy, an eye for telling detail, and great lucidity of judgment.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born in the imperial city of Frankfurt, the only son of a patrician family. Even as a child he showed literary gifts, and these became more pronounced when he was sent to Leipzig in 1762 to study law. He showed little zeal in this pursuit, but, before being forced to return home in 1768 by incipient tuberculosis, he found time to fall in love with Käthchen Schönkopf, an innkeeper’s daughter with whom he briefly contemplated marriage, and to write his first play, as well as a lot of elegant erotic poetry. It was only in Strasbourg, however, where he resumed his studies in 1770 after his recovery, that a fortuitous meeting with J. G. Herder gave purpose and clarity to his vague plans for a literary career. Herder, the author of a provocative essay on the current state of German letters, inspired Goethe with his own belief in the necessity of a literary renewal based upon national rather than foreign models—such things as ballads and folk songs—and upon the conscious cultivation of the language itself. In Boyle’s view:

No doubt only Goethe could have led German literature along the path that it took in the 1770s, but at a decisive moment it was Herder who showed Goethe the direction in which that path might lie, and showed him too that it was a path he personally could profitably follow.

The next five years showed an explosion of creativity that astonished Goethe’s contemporaries: the remarkable poems inspired by his abortive love affair with the Sesenheim pastor’s daughter Friederike Brion (“May Song,” “Awaken, Friederike,” “Welcome and Parting”); the sprawling Shakespearean drama Götz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, set in the period immediately before Luther’s revolt; the sensational novel Werther, inspired by Goethe’s passion for Charlotte Buff, the fiancée of a friend, and by the suicide of an acquaintance; the first sketch of a play on the Faust theme, although this was very fragmentary; the plays Clavigo, Stella, and the beginnings of Egmont; the operettas Claudine of Villa Bella and Erwin and Elmira; and the poems associated with his Storm and Stress period, including “Prometheus” and “The Wanderer’s Storm Song.”

By 1775 Goethe was a famous man and was engaged to be married to the beautiful and talented Lili Schoenemann, daughter of a wealthy Frankfurt family. But, as he had in the case of Käthchen Schönkopf, he flinched away from the idea of a permanent attachment, his muse, according to Boyle, depending upon desire rather than fulfillment. On October 30, 1775, he wrote in his diary, “Lili, adieu! … It has been decided—we must play out our roles separately,”⁸ and entered the service of Karl August, the young Duke of Saxe-Weimar.

This was not as surprising as it might seem. Goethe’s interests were too diverse and his opinion of his abilities too generous for him to regard himself simply as a professional writer, and he would almost certainly have entered the public service of his native city had he not gone to Weimar. He was after all a member of one of Frankfurt’s first families and a trained jurist and solicitor, and he must always have regarded a political career as the most likely means of providing him with the security and material resources necessary for the development of his genius.

His job in Weimar proved to be no sinecure, and it was soon challenging his imagination and engaging all of his energies. He was interested particularly in public works and labored long and hard to improve the system of roads and to revive the silver mines at Ilmenau. He sought also to reform the finances of the state and pushed for lower expenditures on nonproductive government activities, like the military, and was so successful that Boyle has called him one of the few defense ministers in history who voluntarily halved their own budgets. His willingness to take on new responsibilities led Karl August to heap them on him, and Herder, whom he had been instrumental in bringing to Weimar as general superintendent of the Evangelical Church, was soon writing sourly to his friend Johann Georg Hamann:

He is… at the present time Working Privy Councillor, President of the Chamber, President of the War College, Superintendent of Construction, including roadbuilding, in addition Directeur des Plaisirs, Court Poet, arranger of beautiful festivities, court operas, ballets, masked balls and pageants, inscriptions, art works, etc., Director of the Drawing Academy, in which he last winter gave lectures in osteology, himself everywhere the leading actor, dancer, in short the factotum of Weimar and, if God wills it, soon the major domo of all the Ernestine castles to which he will make processions in order to be adored.⁹

As time passed, however, this life became less satisfying. Goethe began to feel disenchanted with the cultural limitations of court society and with the duke’s growing resistance to reform. He was frustrated by his inability to make any real progress with Iphigenie on Tauris and Torquato Tasso, dramas that he had begun at the end of the 1770s, and probably even more by the fact that his prolonged friendship with Charlotte von Stein, the wife of the duke’s equerry, fell short, for all of its intellectual satisfaction, of emotional intimacy. What Boyle calls “that strangely frozen relationship with Charlotte, in which two individualities were both drawn together and held apart by their own isolation,” may well have been the most important reason for Goethe’s decision in September 1786 to slip away secretly to Rome, where he remained for almost two years.

Boyle has given a highly satisfactory account of this episode in Goethe’s life, which enabled him to reassess his career and clarify his objectives. It was from Italy that he negotiated an agreement with the duke for a sharp reduction of his ministerial functions after his return to Weimar. It was there also that he decided finally that his thoughts of a career in the visual arts, cherished since Leipzig, were without substance. At the same time, the writing block that had plagued him was dissolved: Egmont was finally finished, as was Torquato Tasso; Iphigenie was remodeled in verse; and some real progress was made on Faust. Finally, Goethe’s emotional life acquired an important new dimension.

2.

In 1790, in his Venetian Epigrams, Goethe wrote of Venice, which he was visiting in the suite of the Duchess Anna Amalie,

Schön ist das Land, doch ach!
Faustinen find’ ich nicht wieder.
Das ist Italien nicht mehr, das ich
mit Schmerzen verliess.

(The country is beautiful, but alas!
I can no longer find Faustina.
This is no longer the Italy that I
left in sorrow.)¹⁰

These lines have always been taken as referring to a real amatory experience during his stay in Rome and have aroused much speculation about its object. Boyle, for example, suggests that it may have been a young widow named Faustina Antonini, whom Goethe met in January 1788, during the preparations for the Carnival. In a new book published during Goethe’s anniversary year, Roberto Zapperi, a private scholar in Rome, points out, however, that, while there was a real Faustina Antonini, church records show that she died in 1784, more than two years before Goethe came to Rome.

Still, the identity of Goethe’s Faustina is perhaps not as important as the fact that there was one, and—this is the real point of Zapperi’s entertaining book—that Goethe was determined from the moment of his arrival in Rome that there should be. The difficulty was that his choice was restricted by the danger of venereal disease on the one hand and of marriage on the other, and much of Zapperi’s book is devoted to describing his efforts to avoid both. In the end Goethe succeeded in finding an amenable partner who posed neither of those risks, and, in a chapter called “The Faustina Riddle,” based upon intensive study of Goethe’s Roman Elegies, his correspondence with his ducal patron, and new documents from German and Italian archives, Zapperi concludes that, although her name is unknown, she was a simple woman of the people, not a prostitute, who lived with her mother and met Goethe in January 1788, falling deeply in love with him, a passion that he reciprocated. Zapperi suggests that she was a Clärchen to Goethe’s Egmont, representing the kind of free love that he had long dreamed of but never before attained, and that he was grief-stricken when his return to Weimar forced him to end the affair. Forty years later he was to say to Eckermann, “I never again attained this height, this happiness of feeling. Compared with my circumstances in Rome I was really never happy again.”

Immediately, the loss of his Roman love made Goethe disinclined to go back to the starved emotional life that had been his before his departure for Italy, and when, shortly after his return, he met Christiane Vulpius, the daughter of a long-established but impoverished Weimar family, he almost immediately took her into his bed and his home. Christiane probably bore a strong resemblance to the lost Faustina—good-looking, cheerful, basically intelligent and with some formal education, and willing to enter into a relationship with a man in middle years without asking him to make commitments. The affair shocked court society and ended Goethe’s long relationship with Frau von Stein. Those who disapproved of it, including the duke, did not expect it to be of long duration. In fact, it lasted for twenty-eight years and was formalized by marriage in 1806.

Sigrid Damm’s Christiane und Goethe spent a good deal of the poet’s anniversary year at the top of the bestseller lists in Germany, as it certainly deserved to do. Based upon six hundred letters exchanged between Goethe and Christiane, as well as state and Church records, the Vulpius family archive, Goethe’s household accounts, and the diary that Christiane kept in the last six months of her life, it is the record of a warm but difficult relationship, perhaps, as Michael Butler has suggested, a love affair that was slowly dissolving,¹¹  although that is something the reader will have to decide for himself, for there are many gaps in the record, which Damm has wisely not sought to fill in by guesswork.

It is clear that Christiane’s life with Goethe was never one of unalloyed happiness, for in the poet’s life art took precedence over everything else. The happiest years were probably the first, when his passion was strongest and when his son August, of whom he was very fond, was growing up. Later, his absences from the house on the Frauenplan became frequent, either because he preferred to do his work in weeklong solitary stays in Jena or because the duke took him off on lengthy expeditions, as he did during the military campaign of 1792. Christiane had few friends of her own, and aristocratic society in Weimar either ignored or spread tales about her; Frau von Stein told the world that Goethe’s “Demoiselle,” as she called her, drank too much and was becoming fat, while Schiller, after his first stay in the house on the Frauenplan, neither acknowledged Christiane’s presence nor thanked her for making him comfortable.

She put up with this and found her own amusements, learning to skate, going, with Goethe’s approval, to redoutes and balls (she was an excellent dancer) or to the theater, and taking the waters in Lauchstädt, meanwhile performing with efficiency the formidable task of running the Weimar establishment, bearing four more children who did not survive, planting the gardens and raising vegetables, keeping household accounts, seeing to August’s education, and answering the absent Goethe’s frequent requests for delicacies (“I have done my best about the goose liver pastries, but there is no goose liver to be had, and no truffles”). Damm’s account does not enable us to chart Goethe’s emotional life as the years passed in any detail, but there is no reason to believe that his affection for and gratitude toward his “gleinen Nadurwesen,” as Christiane sometimes signed her letters, ever wavered. In 1806, after she had shown singular courage and presence of mind when French troops occupied their home in the wake of the battle of Jena, he finally married her, thus giving her a firm social status as Frau Geheime Räthin von Goethe and a financial security that she had not had before. And on August 16, 1813, the twenty-fifth anniversary of their love, he wrote and dedicated to her the poem “Gefunden” (Found), which tells of a youth who, on an aimless walk in the woods, finds a beautiful flower, which he resolves to pick but then, changing his mind, digs up instead with the roots:

Und pflanzt es immer
Am stillen Ort;
Nun zweigt es immer
Und bliiht so fort.
(And plants it for ever
In the quiet place.
Now it branches always
And blooms so forth.)

Three years later, when Christiane died after a week of intense suffering, Goethe, who could never confront sickness and death and always sought to take refuge from them in work or other activity, wrote in his calendar:

My wife’s end near. Last fearful struggle of her nature. She passed away at about noon. Emptiness and the stillness of death in and around me. Arrival and festive entrance of Princess Ida and the Bernhards. [Visits by Christiane’s friends] Hofrat Meyer [and] Riemer. In the evening brilliant illumination of the city. My wife to the funeral parlor at about midnight. I spent the whole day in bed.

3.

The year 1789 marked the onset of profound changes in Germany, not only because of the dangers posed by the revolution in France but also because the decades that followed saw the transformation of philosophy and literature by the Kantian revolution and the beginning of the European movement of Romanticism. Boyle’s second volume is a thoroughgoing discussion of how all this affected Goethe’s political views and his relations with his contemporaries and, most particularly and brilliantly, how it was reflected in his literary achievements.

Unlike his contemporaries Förster, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling, Goethe never had the slightest enthusiasm for the French Revolution, regarding it from the beginning as a force that would bring social upheaval and distress to all classes of society. In the Venetian Epigrams, he wrote in 1789,

France’s sad fate, the great have
reason to ponder it.
But in truth the small even
more.

Great ones were ruined; but who
protected the crowd
From the crowd? The crowd
became the crowd’s tyrant.¹²

A realistic sense of what the revolution might mean to Europe he acquired in 1792, when the duke, who commanded a regiment in the Prussian army, asked Goethe to accompany him during the Austro-Prussian campaign that was fondly expected to destroy France’s military strength. Goethe, who was feeling a lack of fulfillment in both his literary and his scientific work, accepted. His function, Boyle writes, was to act as “‘the duke’s field-poet’ —amusing the company, reflecting, moralizing, recounting anecdotes and parallels from the past,” but he was not protected from the dreadful weather and the lack of hot food which soon infected half of the army with dysentery. Nor did he seek to avoid the normal risks of combat. Indeed, at serious risk to his own life, he deliberately rode into the French bombardment that had stopped the allied army at Valmy, curious to share the experience of those under fire. Boyle suggests that he may have been testing the fates, looking for a sign that destiny had more in store for him than the doldrums into which he had fallen in the last three years, but it is more likely that he was driven by that curiosity that always affected him when he was confronted with a new and compelling phenomenon. He wrote to his friend Knebel: “I am very glad that I have seen all this with my own eyes and that I shall be able to say when people talk of this important epoch: et quorum pars minima fui.”

Life did not resume its normal state for another year, for Goethe had to accompany the duke during the siege of Mainz in 1793, an account of which he was to write in his old age. But that marked the end of his military adventures, and in 1794 there were signs that his lust for writing had been restored. This was largely a result of the fact that, in the fall of that year, he established friendly relations with Friedrich Schiller and began a partnership that lasted until Schiller’s death in 1805 and had profound effects on German literature.

Schiller, whose early play The Robbers had caused a sensation much like the one that had greeted Werther, had in recent years become a student of Kant and in 1795 was to publish his On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind in a Series of Letters, which Boyle calls “the founding document of a new age in German culture” and which profoundly influenced Hölderlin, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Marx, to say nothing of the leaders of the new German Romantic movement. Summarizing the aspects of Schiller’s argument that would have been influential for Goethe, Boyle writes:

Beauty is freedom—that is, moral perfection—in appearance. In showing us beauty, Art shows us man deified—it is not for nothing that the Greeks made play, or idleness, the distinguishing characteristic of their gods.

Goethe was no philosopher, but the collaboration with Schiller effected a relationship with the movement of philosophical idealism that influenced all of his future work, not least in giving it a new focus and making him concentrate on literature as the most important agency of cultural change.

Common to both partners was devotion to the cause of a classical culture in Germany and to a concerted and sustained attack on mediocrity in thought, art, and literature.¹³ The first purpose was served by their journal Die Horen, which in its earliest issues printed Schiller’s Aesthetic Education and his Naive and Sentimental Poetry and in general sought to provide models for emulation; the second was carried out by the Xenia, a series of satirical epigrams attacking contemporary writers, particularly those who were not in accord with the didactic aims of Die Horen, that caused consternation and anger throughout the literary scene. But the partnership was productive in other ways. It brought Schiller back to poetry and to the magnificent plays of his last period. In Goethe’s case, it inspired the classical ballads “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “The Bride of Corinth,” and “The God and the Bayadère,” the completion in 1796 of the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and the composition of the epic poem Hermann und Dorothea, written in classical hexameters. Of the popularity of the last of these, which contrasted German virtue and order to the excesses of the French Revolution, Boyle writes:

The public was in no doubt that Goethe had made good the indiscretion of the Xenia, and even the puzzling and unmanageable Wilhelm Meister, and until the First World War luxurious editions of Hermann and Dorothea provided school prizes and confirmation presents for German youth… As the product of a year marked by the Xenia controversy and by repeatedly changing and disappointed hopes for a return to Italy, it can be seen as Goethe’s last hesitation before taking up Faust, with which it none the less shares one extremely important feature, humour.

That Goethe finally renounced the second Italian journey which had been the object of his hopes and plans for years—and the cause of growing dread on the part of Christiane and August—was probably largely due to Schiller. Because he was the truest believer in Goethe’s immense talent and its importance for German literature, he was in the best position to persuade Goethe that the Italian tour would be a misdirection of energy on a grand scale and that it was his duty to complete the work that had first inspired him when he was a young poet in Strasbourg. That Goethe recognized his debt to his partner is indicated by the lines he wrote to Schiller in 1798:

If I have served you as a representation of various objects, you have shown me the way back to myself from too stringent an observation of external things and their relations; you have taught me to look more equitably on the multiplicity of the inner man; you have given me a second youth and made me a poet again, which I had as good as ceased to be.

The last part of Boyle’s second volume describes how Goethe took up Faust again, rethinking its basic structure and the essential nature of the relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles. His analysis here is sophisticated and persuasive. As the gaps in Goethe’s long-unfinished manuscript were filled up, it became clearer, Boyle writes, that

Faust is a man for whom Christian belief is past, but he is also a man who has undertaken never to rest in the contemplation of beauty: Christianity means little to him but neither does renunciation or the cultural achievement of antiquity. He is modern, both as Goethe felt at one with modernity, and as Goethe felt at odds with it.

As for the bargain with Mephistopheles (“If I ever say to the moment, ‘linger on, you are so beautiful’… then I will gladly perish. Let time then be over for me… if I stand still I am a slave—what do I care whether yours or someone else’s?”), Boyle writes that the entire moral heritage of early post-Kantian idealism is concentrated in it:

To a great extent it is the morality of modernity itself, individualist and subjective in its inmost principle. Faust will and must drive on through a life which is a hectic onrush of moments, none of which can realize all the potentialities of his self… Only at the highest price—that of using every moment and all his energy to try to prove himself wrong—can Faust gain the right to pronounce himself free and the world valueless, and if he is wrong he is willing to die, for an unfree self, enslaved to something, however beautiful, in the world outside it, is not worth having anyway.

Boyle’s second volume is a remarkable achievement, although there are moments when one feels it is a bit too much of a good thing. Its 794 pages of text get us only as far as the year 1803, and the reader will have to wait until the third volume (or perhaps a fourth, unless Boyle learns to be more concise) for the story of the completion of Faust and the other works that filled the almost thirty years remaining of Goethe’s life.

4.

Meanwhile, at the end of a year in which his countrymen have said and written so much about him, it may be permissible to ask what Goethe thought about the Germans. Fritz Stern has reminded us recently of Nietzsche’s comment that there were lots of things about which Goethe never spoke plainly and that he was skilled his life long in “subtle silence [das feine Schweigen], probably with good reason.”¹⁴

But Goethe was not always silent, and there were times, as Nietzsche noted, when he spoke with an impatient harshness, as if from a foreign country, about things of which the Germans were proud. Thus, he once defined the famous German Gemüt (temperament) as “indulgence of foreign frailties and their own.”¹⁵

Similarly—and this may explain why he believed that poetry was a more urgent matter than civil rights—he told Eckermann in May 1827:

We Germans are of yesterday. We have, to be sure, been very efficient with cultivation for the last hundred years, but it may still take a couple of centuries before enough spirit and higher culture penetrates and becomes so pervasive among our countrymen that they pay homage to beauty as the Greeks did, that they become enthusiastic about a poem, and that one can say of them that it is a long time since they were barbarians.¹⁶