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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (born August 28, 1749, Frankfurt am Main [Germany]—died March 22, 1832, Weimar, Saxe-Weimar), German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era.

Goethe is the only German literary figure whose range and international standing equal those of Germany’s supreme philosophers (who have often drawn on his works and ideas) and composers (who have often set his works to music). In the literary culture of the German-speaking countries, he has had so dominant a position that, since the end of the 18th century, his writings have been described as “classical.” In a European perspective he appears as the central and unsurpassed representative of the Romantic movement, broadly understood. He could be said to stand in the same relation to the culture of the era that began with the Enlightenment and continues to the present day as William Shakespeare does to the culture of the Renaissance and Dante to the culture of the High Middle Ages. His Faust, though eminently stageworthy when suitably edited, is also Europe’s greatest long poem since John Milton’s Paradise Lost, if not since Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

Early years (1749–69)

Goethe was one of the very few figures of Germany’s 18th-century literary renaissance who were, in the full sense of the term, bourgeois. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he had no need, at least in the first half of his life, to seek princely patronage of his writing or employment as an official or an academic. The Frankfurt in which he was born and in which his social attitudes were formed was, as it is now, a wealthy commercial and financial centre, but it was also virtually a self-governing republic, a city-state within the Holy Roman Empire. The nobility and the grand and petty sovereigns who figured so much in Goethe’s later life had no part in his early experiences: he was a town child from a rich family in an essentially middle-class world.

His father, Johann Caspar Goethe (1710–82), the son of a wealthy tailor-turned-innkeeper, was a man of leisure who lived on his inherited fortune and devoted himself, after studying law in Leipzig and Strasbourg and touring Italy, France, and the Low Countries, to collecting books and paintings and to the education of his children. Goethe’s mother, Catharina Elisabeth Textor (1731–1808), was one of the daughters of Frankfurt’s most senior official and was a lively woman closer in age to her son than to her husband. Goethe was the eldest of seven children, though only one other survived into adulthood, his sister Cornelia (1750–77), for whom he felt an intense affection of whose potentially incestuous nature he seems to have been aware. Another emotional factor in the poet’s childhood that may have affected his later development was a love-hate relationship with a younger brother, who died in 1759 at age six: Goethe’s later relationships with literary contemporaries were ambiguous, though he nonetheless described them as “brothers,” and he was repelled by literary and artistic representations of death.

Goethe was educated with his sister at home by tutors until he was 16. His father had very definite ideas about his education and intended that Goethe should follow the pattern he himself had pursued as a young man: studying law, gaining experience at the Reichskammergericht (the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire) in Wetzlar, and eventually rounding off his worldly culture with a grand tour to Italy, after which he could marry and settle down, perhaps rising, as his father had not been able to do, to a position of responsibility in the city administration. Reluctantly and with some delay, Goethe followed his father’s prescription, although he did not complete the final stages until some years after his father’s death.

In 1765, therefore, Goethe left home to study law in Leipzig. The university there had been the centre of Germany’s literary revival over the previous 40 years. In the drawing academy run by Adam Friedrich Oeser—friend and teacher of the art historian Johann Winckelmann, then living in Rome—Goethe indirectly became one of Winckelmann’s disciples. Goethe had in almost-finished form a biblical play and a moralistic novel when he entered the university, but, after reading them to his friends, he ostentatiously burned them as unworthy of his now advanced taste and started to write erotic verse and a pastoral drama, Die Laune des Verliebten (1806; “The Lover’s Spleen”; Eng. trans. The Lover’s Caprice), begun in 1767. He fell in love with the daughter of an innkeeper, Käthchen Schönkopf, but she preferred someone more solid, a lawyer who eventually became deputy burgomaster of Leipzig. Goethe took revenge by starting his first mature play, Die Mitschuldigen (1787; “Partners in Guilt”), a verse comedy showing a woman’s regrets after a year of marriage to the wrong man. His emotional state became hectic, and his health gave way—he may have suffered an attack of tuberculosis—and in September 1768 he returned home to Frankfurt without a degree. Another bout of illness then brought him apparently near death, and in the aftermath he underwent a brief conversion from freethinking to evangelical Christianity. At the same time, though, he seriously studied alchemy and may already have formed the idea of writing a play about Faust, a half-legendary figure who sells his soul to the Devil for knowledge and power and who became the subject of Goethe’s greatest work.

Last years (1817–32) of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The year 1817 saw the marriage of Goethe’s son, as well as Goethe’s resignation from the post of director of the Weimar theatre and his final surrender of the Frankfurt citizenship that he still nominally retained. He had to make a new will and could see his 70th birthday approaching. The period until 1823 was one of tidying up at the end of life. But there was no decline in Goethe’s energies. He completed another collected edition with Cotta, began some more-impersonal autobiographical memoirs (Tag- und Jahreshefte [1830; “Journals and Annals”]), wrote a vivid account of his military experiences in 1792 and 1793 (Campagne in Frankreich, Belagerung von Mainz [1822; “Campaign in France, Siege of Mainz”]), rather hastily finished off The Wanderings of Wilhelm Meister, and brought out many of his earlier, hitherto unpublished scientific writings in a new irregular periodical (Zur Naturwissenschaft Überhaupt [“On Natural Science in General”]). He also took up a new scientific interest, meteorology.

One more crisis remained. In 1818 Goethe resumed his summer visits to Bohemia. In Marienbad he was the guest of the Levetzow family and fell in love with the family’s daughter Ulrike, to whom in 1823, when she was 19 and shortly before his 74th birthday, he proposed marriage. Family reluctance probably played as great a part in Ulrike’s refusal as any personal disinclination. In anguish Goethe returned to Weimar, drafting in the carriage the poem “Elegie” (“Elegy”), which he later made into the centrepiece of “Trilogie der Leidenschaft” (1827; “Trilogy of Passion”).

Goethe stayed in Weimar and its immediate surroundings for the rest of his life. It was a final stage of renunciation, an acknowledgement of the reality of passing time and strength and life. But it was also a time of extraordinary, indeed probably unparalleled literary achievement by a man of advanced age. Partly in order to secure the financial future of his family—he now had three grandchildren and could not know that they would all die without issue—he prepared a final collected edition of his works, initially in 40 volumes, the Ausgabe letzter Hand (“Edition of the Last Hand”). In the course of this huge task, he rewrote and greatly extended The Wanderings of Wilhelm Meister (1821; 2nd ed. 1829). Less a novel than a collection of stories, extracts, and reflections in which fact and fiction, the prosaic and the intensely poetic, interact unpredictably, the book is held together by a framework narrative that violates conventional expectations as deliberately as much 20th-century experimental writing. It also engages directly with such 19th-century themes as industrialization, utopian socialism, public education, and immigration to America. He wrote a fourth section of his autobiography Poetry and Truth, completing the story of his life up to his departure for Weimar in 1775; he compiled an account of his time in Rome in 1787–88, Zweiter Römischer Aufenthalt (1829; “Second Sojourn in Rome”); and above all he wrote part two of Faust, of which only a few passages had been drafted in 1800. Yet he did not cut himself off from the world. He followed public events closely, such as the establishment of the first railways in Britain in 1825 and the July Revolution in France in 1830 (which influenced the closing scenes of Faust). In literature he read the first works of the Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac. His correspondence had become enormous, and the stream of visitors was never-ending—among them Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Heinrich Heine, Franz Grillparzer, William Makepeace Thackeray, Felix Mendelssohn, and King Louis (Ludwig) I of Bavaria, but also hopeful young unknowns, such as the would-be poet Johann Peter Eckermann, who, by noting down Goethe’s conversations at this time, wrote what Friedrich Nietzsche called “the best German book in existence.”

The year 1829 brought celebrations throughout Germany of Goethe’s 80th birthday. It also brought the first performance in Weimar of part one of Faust; Goethe assisted with the rehearsals but did not attend the performance. As he grew older, deaths naturally accumulated round him: Frau von Stein in 1827, Duke Charles Augustus in 1828. In 1830, however, came the unexpected and terrible news that his son had died in Rome during his own Italian journey. Goethe fell seriously ill immediately but recovered. He still had work to do, and only in August 1831—when, shortly before his 82nd birthday, he sealed the manuscript of part two of Faust for publication after his death—did he say he could regard any life that remained to him as a “pure gift.” The following spring, having caught a cold, he died of a heart attack, sitting in his armchair in the modest little bedroom beside his study, on March 22, 1832, at about 11:30 in the morning.

Work on Faust accompanied Goethe throughout his adult life. Of a possible plan in 1769 to dramatize the story of the man who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for earthly fulfillment, perhaps including his ultimate redemption, no firm evidence survives. In its first known form, Goethe’s version already contains the feature that most decisively differentiates it from its predecessors, the 16th-century German chapbooks about Faust and the puppet plays ultimately deriving from English dramatist Christopher Marlowe’s adaptation of those chapbooks for the stage: the tragic story of Faust’s love for a town girl, Margarete (Gretchen), and of her seduction, infanticide, and execution. This theme is entirely of Goethe’s invention; it was probably suggested to him by a case in Frankfurt in 1771–72, and it clearly links the play with other works that express his sense of guilt at abandoning Friederike Brion in 1771. This earliest manuscript version (usually called the Urfaust), to which Goethe probably added little after 1775, is a Sturm und Drang drama in a balladesque, sometimes mock-16th-century style—intensely poetic, both visually and verbally—in which the self-assertion of the magician Faust meets its nemesis in the Gretchen catastrophe. The precise nature of Faust’s agreement with the diabolical figure Mephistopheles remains inexplicit, however.

That issue was still unresolved in the scenes Goethe wrote for the first published version, Faust: ein Fragment (1790), which seems to suggest that the Gretchen story was destined to become merely a subordinate episode in Faust’s career through the gamut of human experience. Only in Faust: Part One (1808) does Goethe commit himself to his second great divergence from the traditional fable: his Faust now makes not a contract with the Devil but a wager. Faust wagers that, however much of human life the Devil shows him, he will find none of it satisfying—and if he is wrong (i.e., if he is satisfied), he is willing to give up living altogether. Faust now appears as a singularly modern figure, racing through satisfactions but condemned by his own choice to discard them all. His tragedy (from 1808 the word appears in the play’s subtitle) is that he cannot experience life as, for example, Gretchen experiences it: not as a potential source of satisfaction but as a matter of love, or of duty. This theme is common to both the first and the second parts of the play.

Goethe had always wanted to dramatize that part of the traditional story which shows Faust summoning up Helen of Troy, the quintessence of the beauty of the ancient world, and the logic of the wager required that Faust should at least taste the experience of public and political life. Faust: Part Two (1832) thus became an extraordinary poetic phantasmagoria, covering—as Goethe acknowledged—3,000 years of history and mingling evocations of Classical landscapes and mythological figures with literary allusions from Homer to Lord Byron and with satire of the Holy Roman Empire, the French Revolution, and the capitalism and imperialism of the 1820s. Yet it is all held together by the thematic device of the wager and by structural parallels with Part One, and at the end Faust is redeemed, not by his own efforts but by the intercession of Gretchen and the divine love he has known in her. Part Two is in a sense a poetic reckoning with Goethe’s own times, with their irresistible dynamism and their alienation from his Classical ideal of fulfilled humanity. As with much of Goethe’s later work, its richness, complexity, and literary daring began to be appreciated only in the 20th century.

Legacy of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe was a contemporary of thinkers—Kant, Herder, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt—who carried out an intellectual revolution that is at the basis of most modern thinking about religion, art, society, and thought itself. He knew most of these people well, furthered the careers of several of them, promoted many of their ideas, and expressed his reaction to them in his literary works. The age they helped to make was an age dominated by the idea of freedom, of individual self-determination, whether in the intellectual and moral sphere or in practical politics—the age both of German Idealism and of the American and French revolutions. If there is a single theme running through Goethe’s huge and varied literary output, it is his reflection on subjectivity—his showing how in ever-changing ways we make our own selves, the world we inhabit, and the meaning of our lives. Yet he also shows how, without leaving that self-made world, we collide all the time with the reality of things. Ultimately, Goethe believes, this reality is not alien or hostile to us, because, whatever it is, we—and our capacity for experience—ultimately derive from it too. Goethe therefore calls it Nature, that out of which we are born.

Because of his unusually independent personal circumstances, Goethe was able to live through the consequences of the intellectual revolution as a free man, with no traditional religious or social attachments. (His eminent social and political position he owed to his friendship of more than 50 years with Duke Charles Augustus, but he could have been, if he had chosen otherwise, a wealthy lawyer and man of affairs in his native city of Frankfurt.) He led a long and productive life in which his energy and originality never slackened. He was, those who met him agreed, an intensely and uncannily fascinating man, and part of the secret of his fascination was that he was always changing: he was called a chameleon or a Proteus or simply inconsistent. In particular, his writings show a remarkable, but usually discreetly phrased, awareness of the permanently shifting character of human sexuality. His public never knew what he was going to do or write next: none of his works is like any of the others—he never substantially repeated himself. Yet he remained faithful to his duke, to his wife, to Weimar (his adopted homeland), to his rejection of Christianity, and to his literary vocation. The attractive power of his writing, which has not diminished with time, perhaps lies in the extraordinary strength of personality that it radiates, the certainty it conveys of an inexplicit unity underlying all its diversity, and the promise it seems to offer of a disclosure of the secret nature of personality itself.

Courtesy - Nicholas Boyle
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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