Benjamin W - Goethe - The Reluctant Bourgeois

8/6/2019 Benjamin W - Goethe - The Reluctant Bourgeois

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Walter Benjamin

When Johann Wolfgang Goethe came into the world on 18 August 1749 in

Frankfurt-am-Main, the town contained 30,000 inhabitants. In Berlin, thelargest town in Germany at the time, there were 126,000, whereas both Paris

and London had already surpassed 500,000. These figures are an important

signpost to the political situation in Germany, for throughout the whole of

Europe the bourgeois revolution depended on the big cities. On the other

hand, it is a significant fact about Goethe that during his entire life he never lost

a powerful feeling of antipathy towards living in big towns. He never visited

Berlin1 and in later life he paid only two reluctant visits to his native Frankfurt,

passing the larger part of his life in a small princely town with 6,000 inhabitants.The only cities he ever became more familiar with were the Italian centres,

Rome and Naples. Goethe was the cultural representative and, initially, the

political spokesman of a new bourgeoisie, whose gradual rise can be clearly

discerned in his family tree. His male ancestors worked their way up from

artisan circles and they married women from educated families or families

Goethe: The Reluctant Bourgeois

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otherwise higher in the social scale than themselves. On his fathers sidehis great-grandfather was a farrier, his grandfather was first a tailor andthen an innkeeper, while his father Johann Caspar Goethe began as anordinary lawyer. Within a short time, however, he acquired the title ofImperial Councillor and when he had succeeded in winning the hand ofKatharina Elisabeth Textor, the daughter of the Mayor, he definitivelyestablished his position among the ruling families of the city.

The youth which Goethe spent in a patrician household in a Free ImperialCity developed and consolidated in him a trait traditionally found in theRhenish Franconian region: reserve towards any political commitmentand a correspondingly lively appreciation of what was appropriate andadvantageous to the individual. His immediate familyGoethe had onlyone sister, Corneliasoon permitted him to concentrate on himself.Despite this the attitudes prevailing in the household prevented him fromcontemplating an artistic career. His father forced him to study law. Withthis end in view he went first to Leipzig University at the age of sixteen,

and in the summer of1770, to Strasbourg. He was then twenty-one.

I. The Sturm-und-Drang Period

It is in Strasbourg that we first get a clear picture of the cultural milieufrom which Goethes early poetry emerged. Goethe and Klinger fromFrankfurt, Brger and Leisewitz from Central Germany, Voss andClaudius from Holstein, Lenz from Livonia. Goethe was the patrician;Claudius was a burgher. There were the sons of teachers or parsons, likeHoltei, Schubart and Lenz; members of the petty bourgeoisie, like Maler

Mller, Klinger and Schiller; the grandson of a serf (Voss); and, finally,noblemen like the Counts Christian and Friedrich von Stolberg. They allworked together in an effort to renew Germany by means of ideology.However, the fatal weakness of this specifically German revolutionarymovement was its inability to reconcile itself with the original pro-gramme of bourgeois emancipation, the Enlightenment. The bourgeoismasses, the Enlightened, remained separated from their vanguard by avast abyss. The German revolutionaries were not enlightened and theGerman enlighteners were not revolutionary. The ideas of the firstcentred on revolution, language and society, those of the latter focusedon the theory of reason and of the state. Goethe subsequently took overthe negative side of both movements: together with the Enlightenmenthe opposed revolution, while with theSturm-und-Drang he resisted thestate. It is in this division within the German bourgeoisie that we find anexplanation for its failure to establish ideological contact with the West;Goethe, who subsequently made a detailed study of Diderot and Voltaire,was never further from an understanding of France than when he was inStrasbourg. Particularly revealing is his comment on that celebratedmanifesto of French materialism, HolbachsSystme de la Nature, a book

in which the icy draught of the French Revolution can already be felt. Hefound it so grey, so Cimmerian, so lifeless, that it startled him as if he hadseen a ghost. He thought it unpalatable, insipid, the very quintessence ofsenility. It made him feel hollow and empty in this melancholy atheisticgloom.

1 Benjamin was in error here: Goethe visited Berlin 1620 May 1778.

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These were the reactions of a creative artist, but equally of a Frankfurtpatrician. Goethe subsequently presented the Sturm-und-Drang move-ment with its two most powerful manifestoes, Gtz von Berlichingen andWerther. But it is to Johann Gottfried Herder that these two works owethe universal form which made it possible to fuse their disparate elementsinto a single ideological whole. In his letters and conversations withGoethe, Hamann and Merck he provided the programme for the

movementthe original genius; Language: the revelation of the spiritof the people; Song: natures first language; the unity of human andnatural history. During the same period Herder was busy assemblingmaterial for his great anthology of poems,Stimmen der Vlker in Liedern(Voices of the Peoples in Song), a collection of poems from Lapland toMadagascar which had the greatest influence on Goethe. For in his ownearly poetry we find him using the folk-song as a means of revitalizing thelyric in combination with the great liberation that had been effected by thepoets of the Gttinger Hain. Voss emancipated the marshland peasantryfor poetry. He expelled the conventional figures of the Rococco frompoetry with pitch-forks, flails and the Lower Saxon dialect which onlyhalf doffs its cap to the squire. But since the basic mode of Vosss poetryis still descriptive (just as Klopstock poetry is still conceived in terms ofthe rhetoric of the hymn), it was left to Goethes Strasbourg poems(Willkommen und Abschied, Mit einem gemalten Band, Mailied, Heidenrslein)to liberate German poetry from the realms of description, didacticmessage and anecdote. This liberation, however, could still not beanything more than a precarious, transitory phenomenon and one thatwould lead German poetry into a decline in the course of the nineteenth

century, whereas in the poetry of his old age, in the West-stlicher Divan,Goethe himself had already introduced conscious restrictions. In 1773,together with Herder, Goethe produced the manifesto Von deutscher Artund Kunstwith his study in praise of Erwin von Steinbach, the builder ofStrasbourg Cathedral, an essay whose very existence made Goethes laterfanatical classicism an additional source of irritation to the Romantics intheir efforts to rehabilitate the Gothic.

This milieu also supplied the matrix for Gtz von Berlichingen in 1772. Thedivided nature of the German bourgeoisie is clearly dramatized in this

work. The towns and courts as the representatives of a principle of reasonwhich has been reduced to a coarse expression of Realpolitik, stand forthe host of unimaginative Enlighteners; they are opposed by the

Sturm-und-Drang in the person of the leader of the insurgent peasantry.The historical background to this work, the German Peasants War,could easily convey the impression that Goethe had a genuine revolution-ary commitment. That would be a mistake, for at bottom what Gtzsrebellion expresses are the grievances of the old seigneurial class, theImperial Knights, who are in the process of surrendering to the growingpower of the princes. Gtz fights and dies in the first instance for himself,

and then for his class. The core idea of the play is not revolution, butsteadfastness. Gtzs actions are redolent of reactionary chivalry; they arethe fine, charming deeds of a seigneur, they are the expression of anindividual impulse and not to be seen in the same light as the brutaldestructive deeds of the peasant robbers with whom he joins forces. Wesee in this work the first instance of a process which is to become typicalfor Goethe: as a dramatist he repeatedly succumbs to the seduction of

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revolutionary themes, only to deflect them or to abandon them asfragments. Examples of the first procedure are Gtz and Egmont, of thesecond, The Natural Daughter. Goethes essential withdrawal from therevolutionary energy of theSturm-und-Drang movement in his very firstimportant play emerges very clearly from a comparison with the plays ofhis contemporaries. In 1774 Lenz published The Tutor or The Benefits of a

Private Education, a work which mercilessly exposes the social constraints

pressing upon the world of letters, constraints of consequence forGoethes career too. The German middle class was far too weak to be ableto support an extensive literary life from its own resources. Inconsequence, literatures dependence on feudalism persisted even whenthe writers sympathies had gone over to the middle class. His penurycompelled him to accept free-board, to act as tutor to the children of thenobility and to accompany young princes on their travels. His state ofdependence went so far as to jeopardize his literary earnings, since onlyworks expressly named by government decree were protected from pirateeditions produced in the various states of Germany.

The Successes ofYoung Werther

In 1774, after Goethes appointment to the Imperial Supreme Court ofAppeal in Wetzlar,Die Leiden des jungen Werthers appeared in print. Thisbook may well be the greatest success known to the history of literature.Goethe here perfected the portrait of the writer as genius. For if thegreat writer is someone who transforms his inner life into a matter ofpublic interest from the very outset and simultaneously makes thequestions of the clay into matters of immediate concern for his ownpersonal thought and experience, then it is in Goethes early works thatwe find the most consummate exemplification of this kind of author. InWerther Goethe provided the bourgeoisie of his own day with aperceptive and flattering picture of its own pathology, comparable in itsway to the one supplied by Freud for the benefit of the modernbourgeoisie. Goethe knitted the story of his unhappy love for CharlotteBuff, the fiancee of a friend,2 into his account of the adventures in love ofa young writer, whose suicide had caused a sensation.

In Werthers moods we see the Weltschmerz of the period unfolding in allits nuances. Werther is not just the unhappy lover whose unhappinessdrives him to find a solace in nature which no lover had looked for sincethe appearance of Rousseaus Nouvelle Hloise; he is also the burgherwhose pride is wounded battering at the barriers of class and whodemands recognition for himself in the name of the rights of man andeven of the rights due to any living creature. This is the last occasion for avery long time that Goethe allows the revolutionary element in his youthto have its say. In an early review of a novel by Wieland he had written:The marble nymphs, the flowers, vases, the colourfully embroidered

cloth on the tables of these nice peoplewhat a high degree of refinementthey presuppose, what inequality among the classes, what want wherethere is so much pleasure, what poverty where the wealth is so great. InWerther, however, he had already softened his attitude a little: Many

2 Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem (17471772), whom Goethe had known slightly in Leipzig andwhose posthumous writings were later edited by Lessing.

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things can be said in defence of the Rules [of classical drama], the samethings, more or less, that can be said in praise of bourgeois society. InWerther the bourgeoisie finds the demi-god who sacrifices his life forthem. They feel redeemed, without being liberated; hence the protest ofLessing whose class-consciousness was incorruptible. He missed thepresence of bourgeois pride as a counterweight to the nobility and calledfor a cynical conclusion to the book.

After the hopeless complications of his love for Charlotte Buff, theprospect of a bourgeois marriage to a beautiful, impressive and respectedFrankfurt girl appeared as a welcome solution. It was a strange decisionon the part of the powers whose will governs our lives that theremarkable twists and turns of my life should include the experience ofwhat it feels like to be engaged. But the engagement to Lili Schnemannturned out to be no more than a tempestuous incident in that war againstmarriage which he conducted for over thirty years. The fact that LiliSchnemann was probably the most significant woman, and certainly themost liberated one, ever to have had a close relationship with him couldultimately only increase the strength of his resistance to her attempts tobind him to her. In 1775 he made good his escape, undertaking a trip toSwitzerland in the company of Graf Stolberg. The outstanding feature ofthe journey was his meeting with Lavater. In the latters physiognomicalstudies, a sensation of the period, Goethe discovered something of hisown understanding of nature. In later years Goethe came to dislike theway Lavater found it necessary to synthesize this study of the naturalworld with his own Pietistic beliefs.

The Weimar Courtier

On the return journey, chance brought about a meeting with KarlAugust, the Crown Prince and subsequently Duke of Saxe-Weimar. Alittle after this Goethe accepted the Princes invitation to his court. Whatwas intended as a visit turned out to be a lifelong stay. Goethe arrived inWeimar on 7 November 1775. In the same year he was made a PrivyCouncillor with a seat and vote in the Council of State. From the outsetGoethe himself viewed his decision to enter into the service of Karl

August as a commitment that would change the course of his life. Twofactors influenced his acceptance. In an age when the German bourgeoisieharboured increased political expectations, his position at court allowedhim close contact with the realities of politics. On the other hand, as ahigh official in a bureaucratic apparatus he was relieved of the need to takeany radical steps. For all his inner uncertainty of mind this position did atthe very least provide him with an outward support for his self-confi-dence and his actions. The heavy price he had to pay was something hecould have learned about easily enough from the questioning, disap-pointed and indignant voices of his friends, had his own incorruptibly

alert self-knowledge not kept it permanently before his mind. Klopstockand even Wieland, like Herder later on, took offence at the generous spiritin which Goethe acceded to the demands of his position, and even moreto the demands made on him by the personality and mode of life of theGrand Duke. For, as the author ofGtz and Werther, Goethe representedthe bourgeoisfronde. And his name meant all the more as the tendencies ofthe age were barred from almost every means of expression other than the

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personal and individual. In the eighteenth century an author was still aprophet and his works the keystone to a gospel which seemed mostperfectly expressed by his life. The immeasurable personal prestige whichGoethes first works had brought himthey were received as revela-tionsevaporated in Weimar. But since people were unwilling to thinkof him as being anything other than larger than life, the most nonsensicallegends about him began to take shape. He was said to be getting drunk

on brandy every day, Herder was alleged to be preaching in boots andspurs and riding three times round the church after the sermonthis washow people imagined the wild escapades of those first months in Weimar.Of greater consequence, however, was the friendship between Goetheand Karl August, the foundations for which were laid during this periodand which subsequently provided Goethe with the guarantee of acomprehensive intellectual and literary sovereignty: the first suchuniversal European dominion since Voltaire. As for the judgment of theworld, the nineteen-year-old Karl August wrote at the time, whichmight disapprove of my installing Dr. Goethe in my most importantCouncil without his having already achieved the status of magistrate,professor, chamberlain or state councillornone of that will deter me inthe least.

The suffering and the inner conflict of these first Weimar years were givennew shape and sustenance in Goethes love for Charlotte von Stein. Anexamination of the style of the letters he wrote to her in the years from1776 to 1786 reveals the steady transition from Goethes earlierrevolutionary prose, a prose which cheated language of its privileges, to

the great composed rhythms of the letters which he dictated for her inItaly between 1786 and 1788. As for their content, they are the mostimportant source of our knowlege of the difficulties the young poetexperienced in coming to terms with the business of administration and,above all, with the court society. By nature Goethe was not always veryadaptable.

He wished to become so, however, and kept a close watch on theso-called men of the world to see how they did it. And in fact it was notpossible to conceive of a harder school than his relationship with

Charlotte which, given the small town environment, was inevitablyhighly exposed. An added factor was the circumstance that Charlotte vonStein, even in the years when she was in such profoundly intimatecommunion with Goethes world, was never prepared to flout the rules ofcourtly decorum. It took years before Charlotte could acquire such anunshakeable and propitious place in his life that her image could enter hiswork in the figure of Iphigenie and of Eleonore dEste, Tassos beloved.The fact that he proved able to put down roots in Weimar in the way hedid is very closely bound up with his relationship to Charlotte von Stein.Through her he came to know not just the court, but also the town and

the countryside. Alongside all the official memoranda there is a constantstream of more or less hasty notes to Frau von Stein in which Goetheappears, as was his practice as a lover, in the full range of his talents andactivities: as sketcher, painter, gardener, architect, and so on. When in thecourse of his account of Goethes life in 1779, Riemer relates how Goethespent a month and a half travelling around the Duchy, inspecting theroads by day, taking part in recruiting young men for military service in

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the evenings and resting at small inns and working on Iphigenie at night,he provides us with a miniature portrait of this critical and in many waysthreatened phase of Goethes life.

The poetic yield of these years includes the beginnings of WilhelmMeisters Theatrical Mission, Stella, Clavigo, Werthers Letters from Switzer-land, Tasso and above all a large part of his most powerful lyric poetry:

Harzreise im Winter,An den Mond,Der Fischer,Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt,ber allen Gipfeln, Geheimnisse. Goethe also did some work on Faustduring these years and even laid the inner foundations for parts of FaustII, to the extent at least that it was in the experiences of these first Weimaryears that we find the origins of Goethes nihilistic view of the state whichwas to be so bluntly expressed later in Act II. In 1781 we find him saying:Our moral and political world is undermined by subterranean galleries,cellars and sewers, as often occurs in a great city when there is no one tothink about and concern himself with its needs and with the conditionsof the inhabitants; only, for anyone who has got wind of the situation itwill come as no very great surprise if one day the earth caves in, ifsmoke . . . rises up in one place and strange voices are heard in another.

Every step which strengthened Goethes position in Weimar increasedthe distance between himself and the friends and associates of his youth inStrasbourg and Wetzlar. The incomparable authority which had accom-panied him to Weimar and which he had brought to bear to such effect inthe court, was based on his role as leader of the Sturm-und-Drang. In aprovincial town like Weimar, however, this was a movement whichcould only make a brief appearance and, since it was prevented frombearing any fruit, it was forced to remain at the level of tumultuousextravaganza. Goethe saw this quite clearly from the outset and dideverything in his power to prevent any attempts to transplant Strasbourgways to Weimar. In 1776 when Lenz appeared in Weimar and behaved atcourt in the style of theSturm-und-Drang, Goethe had him expelled. Thatwas political expediency. But to an even greater degree it was aninstinctive reaction against the boundless impulsiveness and the emo-tional extravagance implicit in the life-style of his youth which he felthimself unable to contain in the long run. Among his associates at that

time he had experienced the most egregious examples of scandalousbehaviour, and a statement of Wielands from that period gives us aglimpse of the devastating effects on him of his association with suchpeople. Wieland wrote to a friend saying that he would not like topurchase Goethes fame if the price he had to pay was the latters physicalsufferings. In later years, then, the poet took the strictest prophylacticmeasures to protect his constitutional sensitivity. Indeed, when weobserve the precautions Goethe took to avoid certain tendenciesallforms of nationalism and most of Romanticism, for examplewe areforced to conclude that he was afraid they might be directly contagious.

The fact that he wrote no tragic work is something he himself attributedto that same frailty of constitution.

II. The Flight from Politics

The more Goethes life in Weimar approached a certain state ofequilibriumin external terms his acceptance into court society was

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completed in 1782 by his elevation into the nobilitythe moreunbearable he found the town. His impatience took the form of apathological irritation with Germany. He talks of writing a work whichthe Germans would hate. His antipathy goes even deeper. After a twoyear long youthful enthusiasm for German Gothic, landscape andchivalry, Goethe began to discover in himself a resistance to the climateand landscape, the history, politics and nature of his own people, a

resistance which came from his innermost being. This mood began totake shape vaguely and unclearly at the age of twenty-five; it graduallybecame clearer, and then a matter of passionate conviction, culminatingin a definite view systematically rationalized. It found dramatic ex-pression in 1786 in Goethes abrupt departure for Italy. He himselfdescribed his journey as a flight. He was so oppressed by tensions andsuperstitious feelings that he had not ventured to divulge his plans toanyone.

In the course of this journey which lasted two years and which took him

to Verona, Venice, Ferrara, Rome and Naples and down to Sicily, twoissues were resolved. The first was that Goethe renounced his hopes ofcommitting himself to a life based on the plastic arts. This was an idea hehad repeatedly entertained. If Goethe had unconsciously acquired theimage of a dilettante in the eyes of the nation, an image which he was for along time reluctant to discard, one of the causes of this, as well as of themany instances of uncertainty and carelessness in his literary works, washis hesitation about the nature of his gifts. So as to smooth his way as apoet, he all too often allowed his genius to degenerate to a mere talent.

The experience of the great art of the Italian Renaissance which Goethe,gazing at it through Winckelmanns eyes, was unable to distinguish fromthat of Antiquity, laid the foundations, on the one hand, for theconviction that he was not meant to be a painter, while on the other, itsupplied the basis for that narrow classicistic theory of art which isperhaps the only sphere of thought in which Goethe lagged behind hisage, rather than taking the lead. There was yet another sense in whichGoethe may be said to have rediscovered his true self. In a letter home, hesays, referring to the Weimar court: The illusion that the fine seeds thatare ripening in my life and in those of my friends had to be sown in that

ground and that those celestial jewels could be made to fit into the earthlycrowns of these princes, has now been completely dispelled, and Idiscover my youthful happiness wholly restored.

In Italy the prose draft ofIphigenie gave way to the definitive version. Inthe following year, 1788, Goethe completed Egmont. Egmont is nopolitical drama, but a character study of the German tribune that Goethe,as the spokesman of the German bourgeoisie, might at a pinch havebecome. The only trouble with it is that this portrait of the fearless man ofthe people is all too idealized and this in turn lends greater force to the

political realities uttered by Alba and William of Orange. The concludingphantasmagoriaFreedom clad in a celestial gown, bathed in light, restsupon a cloudunmasks the supposedly political ideas of Count Egmontand reveals them as the poetic inspiration they fundamentally are. Goetheinevitably had a very limited view of the revolutionary freedommovement which broke out in the Netherlands in 1566 under theleadership of Count Egmont. His vision was obscured in the first place by

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a social milieu and a personal temperament for which the conservativenotions of tradition and hierarchy were inalienable; and in the secondplace, by his basic anarchistic attitude, his inability to conceive of the stateas a historical reality. For Goethe history represented an unpredictablesequence of cultures and forms of rule in which the only fixed points weregreat individuals such as Caesar and Napoleon, Shakespeare and Voltaire.He was never able to bring himself to believe in national or social

movements. It is true that he was unwilling on principle to make a generalstatement about such matters, but this is the view that emerges both fromhis conservations with Luden, the historian, and also from WilhelmMeisters Wanderings and Faust. It is such convictions as these thatdetermine his relationship with the dramatist Schiller. For Schiller theproblem of the state had always been a matter of central importance. Thestate in its relations to the individual was the subject of his early plays; thestate in its relations to the representatives of power was the theme of theworks of his maturity. In contrast, the driving force in Goethes dramas isnot conflict but a process of unfolding.

The chief lyrical product of the Italian period was the Roman Elegies, acollection of poems which preserve the memory of many Roman nightsof love in verses which are remarkable for their classical definition andperfection of form. The heightened sensual intensity of his nature nowdrove him to the decision to concentrate his energies and henceforth toconfine himself to more limited commitments. While still in Italy Goethewrote the Duke a letter which shows his diplomatic style at its best,asking to be relieved of all his political and administrative duties. His

request was granted, but despite this it was only after lengthy detoursthat Goethe found his way back to intensive literary production. Thechief cause of the delay must be sought in his preoccupation with theFrench Revolution. In order to understand his attitude hereas withhis scattered, disconnected and impenetrable utterances on politicalmattersit is less important to make a synthesis of his theoreticalimprovisations than to consider their function.

Between Absolutism and Revolution

It is beyond all doubt that after his experience as a Privy Councillor inWeimar and long before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Goethefound the enlightened despotism of the eighteenth century problematic inthe extreme. Nevertheless, he proved unable to reconcile himself to theRevolution. This was not just because of his temperamental attachmentto the feudal regime, or even because of his fundamental opposition toany violent upheavals in public life, but because he found it difficult andeven impossible to arrive at any considered views on political issues. If henever made the clear statement on the limits of the efficacy of the statethat we find for example in Wilhelm von Humboldt, the reason was that

his political nihilism was too extreme to enable him to do more than dropinconclusive hints. It is enough to note that Napoleons intention ofdividing the German people up into its original tribes held no terrors forGoethe, who regarded such perfect fragmentation as the outwardmanifestation of a community in which great individuals could demarcatetheir own spheres of activitya realm in which they could exercisepatriarchal sway and communicate with each other down the ages and

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across the frontiers of the state. It has been rightly said that for Goethe,who was himself the incarnation of a Gallicized Franconia, the Germanyof Napoleon supplied the environment that suited him best. But in hisrelationship to the Revolution we must also take note of the effects of hishypersensitivity, the pathological state of shock induced in him by thegreat political events of his age. This shock, the effect of certain episodesin the French Revolution as well as of personal blows of fate, made the

idea of re-ordering the world of politics purely on the basis of principlesas inconceivable to him as applying such principles in order to regulatethe private existence of individuals.

In the light of the class antagonisms existing in Germany at the time wemay interpret this in the following way: unlike Lessing, Goethe felthimself to be less the champion of the middle classes than their deputy,their ambassador to German feudalism and the princes. His constantvacillation may be explained in terms of the conflicts arising from hisposition as representative. The greatest representative of classical

bourgeois literaturethe only indisputable claim of the German peopleto the honour of being admitted to the ranks of modern culturednationswas himself unable to conceive of bourgeois culture outside theframework of a perfected feudal state. Of course, if Goethe rejected theFrench Revolution, this was not just so as to defend feudalismthepatriarchal idea that every culture, including bourgeois culture, couldonly thrive under the protection of and in the shadow of the absolutestate. Of equal importance was the petty-bourgeois motive, the efforts ofthe private individual who anxiously seeks to seal off his life and protect itfrom the political upheavals all around. But neither the spirit of feudalism

nor that of the petty bourgeoisie sufficed to make his rejection absoluteand unequivocal.

It is for this reason that not a single one of the literary works in which hesought over a period of ten years to come to terms with the Revolution,can be assigned a central place in his overall output. Between 1792 and1802 there are no fewer than seven works in which Goethe attemptedagain and again to arrive at a compelling formula or a definitive portrait.These included in the first place occasional pieces such as the GrandCophta or The Agitated ( Die Aufgeregten), which mark the nadir of

Goethes achievement, or else as in The Natural Daughter, efforts thatwere doomed to remain fragments. In the end, however, Goethe cameclosest to his goal in two works in both of which the Revolution istreated, as it were, en bagatelle. Hermann und Dorothea reduces it to a sinisterbackcloth which serves as a useful foil to an attractive German small townidyll; Reynard the Fox ( Reineke Fuchs) dissolves the pathos of theRevolution into a verse satire in which it is no coincidence that Goethereverts to the medieval genre of the animal epic. The Revolution asbackground to a moralistic genre scenethat is the method ofHermannund Dorothea; the Revolution as comic intrigue, as an intermezzo in theanimal history of mankindthat is his approach inReynard the Fox. It isby such methods that Goethe overcomes the traces of resentment that areevident in his earlier attempts in this direction, above all in theConversations of German migrs (Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten).But the notion that has the last word here is the hierarchical, feudal beliefthat the high point of human history discovers mankind assembledaround the person of the monarch. Despite this, it is the king in The

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Natural Daughterwho makes Goethes failure to comprehend politicalhistory so palpably plain. He is the King Thoas ofIphigenie in a new garb,the king as the good man, who, when transported into the upheavals ofthe Revolution, must inevitably be found wanting.

The Sanctuary of Science

The political problems which the 1790s imposed on Goethes production

explain why he made a series of efforts to escape from literature. His chiefrefuge was the study of science. Schiller clearly perceived the escapistcharacter of Goethes scientific preoccupations in these years. In 1787 hewrote to Krner: Goethes mind has moulded all the people who belongto his circle. A proud philosophical contempt for all speculation andinvestigation together with an attachment to nature bordering onaffectation and a retreat to knowledge as vouchsafed by his five senses; inshort, a certain childlike simplicity of mind characterizes him and hiswhole sect here. They prefer looking for herbs or studying mineralogy toempty theorizing. This can be quite wholesome and good, but it can alsobe greatly overdone. His study of natural history could only estrangeGoethe still further from politics. He understood history only as naturalhistory, and comprehended it only insofar as it could be thought of interms of mans biological nature. This is why the educational theory helater developed in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderings represented the mostadvanced position he was able to adopt in the realm of the historical. Hisscientific bent went against the grain of politics, but it must be added thatit was hostile to theology in equal measure. In this respect it represents themost positive fruit of Goethes anti-clerical Spinozism. It explains why he

took offence at the pietistic writings of Jacobi, his former friend, becausethe latter had argued that nature conceals God, whereas for Goethe thecrucial aspect of Spinozas thought lay in his assertion that both natureand spirit are a visible aspect of the divine. This is what Goethe meanswhen he writes to Jacobi, saying God has punished you withmetaphysics . . .; whereas He has blessed me with physics.

Goethes master concept in describing the revelations of the physicalworld is the primal phenomenon (Urphnomen) . It developed originallyout of his botanical and anatomical studies. In 1784 Goethe discovered

that the bones of the skull were the morphological development ofchanges in the bones of the spine; a year later he discovered themetamorphosis of plants. What he meant by this was the idea that all theorgans of plants, from the roots to the stamen, are nothing but leaves in amodified form. This led him to the concept of the primal plant(Urpflanze) which Schiller, in his celebrated first conversation with him,declared to be an idea, whereas Goethe insisted on endowing it with acertain sensuous reality. The place occupied in Goethes writings by hisscientific studies is the one which in lesser artists is commonly reservedfor aesthetics. This aspect of Goethes work can only be appreciated when

it is realized that unlike almost all other intellectuals in this period, henever really made his peace with the idea of art as beautiful appearance(der Schne Schein).3

3 German classical aesthetics, as summed up by Hegel, defined Beauty as the sensuousmanifestation of the Idea. But it was above all Schiller who developed the concept into aheuristic principle which would enable art to function as a revolutionary force, supplantingpolitical action.

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What reconciled poetry and politics in his eyes was not aesthetics, but thestudy of nature. And precisely because of this it is vital to note even in hisscientific writings how obstinately Goethe opposed certain innovationsin the realm of technology just as much as in politics. On the verythreshold of the scientific age which was destined to extend the range andprecision of our sense-perceptions in such a radical and unprecedentedway, he reverted once more to old forms of scientific explanation and

could therefore write: Man himself, when he makes use of his own soundsenses is the greatest and most precise physical apparatus that can exist,and the great catastrophe of modern physics is that in it the experimentshave, as it were, been separated off from man and aim . . . to know Naturesimply by virtue of what artificial instruments can reveal. According tohis way of thinking the immediate natural purpose of science is to bringman in his thought and actions into harmony with himself. Changing theworld by means of technology was not really his concern, even though asan old man he was astonishingly clear about its immeasurable implica-tions for the future. The greatest benefit of scientific knowledge wasdetermined for him by the form it gives to ones life. This conviction wassomething he developed into a strict pragmatic maxim: Only what isfruitful is true.

Goethe belongs to the family of great minds for whom there is basicallyno such thing as an art separated from life. In his eyes the theory of theprimal phenomenon in science was also a theory of art, just as scholasticphilosophy had been for Dante and the technical arts for Drer. Strictlyspeaking his only genuine scientific discoveries were in the field ofbotany. His research in anatomy was also important and has receivedrecognition: this was his work on the intermaxillary bone whichadmittedly was no original discovery.4 The Meteorology received littleattention, and the Theory of Colours, which for Goethe represented thecrowning point of his entire scientific work, and indeed, according to anumber of statements, of his whole life, became the subject of fiercedispute. In recent times the controversy surrounding this, the mostcomprehensive of Goethes scientific writings, has flared up once more.The Theory of Colours takes up a position diametrically opposed toNewtons optics. The basic disagreement underlying Goethes often

exasperated polemic, prolonged over many years, is this: whereasNewton explained white light as the composite of the different colours,Goethe declared it to be the simplest, most indivisible and homogeneousphenomenon known to us. It is not a compound . . . least of all, acompound of coloured lights. The Theory of Colours regards the coloursas metamorphoses of light, as phenomena which are formed in the courseof the struggle between light and darkness. Together with the idea ofmetamorphosis, the concept of polarity, which runs like a thread throughGoethes entire scientific enterprise, is of decisive importance here.Darkness is not merely the absence of lightfor then it would not be

discerniblebut a positive counter-light. In his old age we even find him

4 The intermaxillary bone, i.e. a bone between the upper and lower jaws, played a role in thepre-Darwinian evolutionary debate about whether human beings were, as theologiansinsisted, anatomically different from the primates. Goethe, almost simultaneously with theFrench anatomist Vicq-dAzyr, of whose work he was ignorant, showed independently thatthis bone, which is developed in animals, also survives vestigially in man who could nottherefore be thought of as generically unique.

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entertaining the idea that perhaps plants and animals evolved from theirprimal condition through the agency of light or darkness.

A peculiar feature of his scientific studies is that in them Goethe comes asclose to the spirit of the Romantic School as he remains remote from it inhis aesthetics. It is much harder to explain Goethes philosophicalposition in terms of his poetic writings than of his scientific ones. Ever

since that youthful moment of illumination which is recorded in thecelebrated fragment onNature, Spinoza remained the guiding light in hismorphological studies. It was these that subsequently provided the basisfor his relationship with Kant. While he could not find any point ofcontact with the main critical oeuvrethe Critique of Pure Reason and theCritique of Practical Reason (i.e. ethics)he held the Critique of Judgmentinthe greatest possible esteem. For in that work Kant repudiates theteleological explanation of nature which had been one of the chiefsupports of enlightened philosophy and of deism. Goethe had to agreewith him on this point, particularly since his own anatomical andbotanical researches represented very advanced positions in the campaignof bourgeois science against the teleological outlook. Kants definition ofthe organic as a purposiveness whose purpose lay inside and not outsidethe purposive being, was in harmony with Goethes own concepts. Theunity of the beautiful, natural beauty included, is always independent ofpurposein this Goethe and Kant are of one mind.

The Connoisseur of Enlightenment

The more Goethe became affected by developments in Europe, the morevigorous were his efforts to achieve security in his private life. It is in thiscontext that we have to consider the fact that very shortly after his returnfrom Italy he ended the relationship with Charlotte von Stein. Goethesassociation with Christiane Vulpius, whom he met soon after he cameback from Italy and who later became his wife, continued to outrage thecitizens of the town for 15 years. Nevertheless, it would be an error tothink of this relationship with a proletarian girl, who worked in a flowernursery, as evidence of Goethes emancipated views. Even in suchmatters of private life Goethe held no fixed principles, let alone

revolutionary ones. At the start Christiane was no more than his mistress,the remarkable feature of the relationship was not its beginnings but itslater development. Even though Goethe was never able, and perhapsnever even tried, to bridge the enormous cultural gap between himselfand Christiane, even though Christianes lowly birth inevitably gaveoffence to the petty-bourgeois society of Weimar and her way of lifeproved unacceptable to more liberal-minded and intelligent people, andeven though neither partner regarded marital fidelity as sacrosanctallthis notwithstanding, Goethe dignified this union and with it Christianeby his unswerving loyalty and by a wholly admirable perseverance in an

extremely delicate situation. And with a church wedding in 1807, fifteenyears after their first meeting, he forced both court and society to acceptthe mother of his son. As for Frau von Stein, a lukewarm reconciliationwas only achieved very much later, after years of profound antipathy.

In 1790, as Minister of State, Goethe took over the responsibility forculture and education, and a year later he was put in charge of the Court

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Theatre. His activities in this sphere are simply immeasurable. They grewin scope from one year to the next. All scientific institutes, all themuseums, the University of Jena, the technical schools, the voice-trainingacademies, the academy of art, all these were placed under the poetsimmediate direction, and he frequently concerned himself with theminutest matters of detail. Hand in hand with this went his efforts toexpand his own household into an institute of European culture. His

activities as a collector extended to every area of study and interest. Thesecollections have formed the basis of the Goethe National Museum inWeimar with its picture gallery, its galleries of drawings, porcelain, coins,stuffed animals, bones and plants, minerals, fossils, chemical and physicalapparatus, to say nothing of the collections of books and autographs. Hisuniversality knew no bounds. In areas in which he could not achieveanything as an artist, he wished at least to be a connoisseur. At the sametime these collections provided a framework for a life which increasinglywas enacted publicly on a European stage. They also endowed him withthe authority which he required in his role as the greatest organizer ofprincely patronage that Germany had ever known. Voltaire was the firstman of letters to secure a reputation on a European scale and to make useof intellectual and material resources of equal magnitude to defend theprestige of the bourgeoisie vis--vis the aristocracy. In this respectGoethe is Voltaires immediate successor. And as with Voltaire, Goethesposition must be thought of in political terms. Hence despite his rejectionof the French Revolution it remains true that he more than anyone elsemade purposeful and ingenious use of the increase in power which thatrevolution brought to the man of letters. Whereas Voltaire acquired

wealth on a princely scale in the second half of his life, Goethe neverachieved a comparable financial status. But in order to understand hisremarkable obstinacy in business matters, notably in his dealings with thepublishing house of Cotta, we must bear in mind that from the turn of thecentury onwards he looked upon himself as the founder of a nationalheritage.

III. The Collaboration with Schiller

Throughout this decade it was Schiller who time and again recalled

Goethe from the distractions of his political activities and his immersionin the observation of nature and brought him back to literary production.The first meeting between the two poets took place soon after Goethesreturn from Italy and was not a success. This was very much in tune withthe opinion each held of the other. Schiller, who had made his name withsuch plays as The Robbers, Love and Intrigue, Fiesko and Don Carlos hadcommitted himself to class-conscious statements of a directness thatstood in the sharpest possible contrast to Goethes efforts at moderatemediation. Whereas Schiller wanted to take up the class struggle all alongthe line, Goethe had long since retreated to that fortified position fromwhich only a cultural offensive could be launched and any politicalactivity on the part of the bourgeoisie had of necessity to be defensive.

The fact that these two men could reach a compromise is symptomatic ofthe unstable character of the class consciousness of the Germanbourgeoisie. This compromise was brought about under the aegis ofKantian philosophy. In the interests of aesthetics Schiller, in his letters on

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The Aesthetic Education of Man, had stripped the radical formulations ofKantian ethics of their subversive bite and converted them into aninstrument of historical construction. This paved the way for arapprochement, or better an armistice, with Goethe. In reality theassociation between the two men was always marked by the diplomaticreserve which was the price of this compromise. The discussions betweenthem were almost anxiously confined to formal problems of writing.

Admittedly, on this plane they were epoch-making. Their correspon-dence is no doubt a balanced document, carefully edited down to the lastdetail and for ideological reasons it has always enjoyed a greater prestigethan the deeper, freer and livelier correspondence which Goetheconducted with Zelter in his old age. The Young-German criticGutzkow has rightly drawn attention to the hairsplitting discussionsabout aesthetic trends and artistic theories which go round and round incircles throughout the correspondence. And he was also right to lay theblame for this at the door of the hostility, indeed the utter incompatibilityof art and history which we encounter here. And even when it came totheir greatest works, the poets could not always rely on each other for asympathetic reception. He was, Goethe says of Schiller in 1829, like allpeople who base themselves too much on an idea. He too had no peace ofmind and could never be finished with a thing. . . . I had my work cut outto hold my own and protect his work and mine and keep them safe fromsuch influences.

Schillers influence was important in the first instance for Goethesballads (The Treasure Hunter, The Sorcerers Apprentice, The Bride ofCorinth, The God and the Bajadere). The official manifesto of their literaryalliance, however, was the Xenien. The almanach containing thesesatirical epigrams appeared in 1795. Its thrust was directed at the enemiesof Schillers Die Horen,5 namely the vulgar rationalism centred onNicolais circle in Berlin. The onslaught was effective. The literarysuccess was heightened by a personal interest: both poets had put theirnames to the whole collection without revealing the authorship of theindividual couplets. But all the verve and elegance of their campaigncannot conceal an underlying note of desperation. The era of Goethespopular acclaim was over; and even if his authority grew from one decade

to the next, he never again achieved true popularity. The later Goethe inparticular displays that resolute contempt for the reading public which ischaracteristic of all the classical writers with the exception of Wieland andwhich receives its strongest expression at certain points in the Goethe-Schiller correspondence. Goethe had no relationship with his public. Ifhe had a powerful impact, it remains true that he never lived or continuedto live in that realm in which he created those first works which set theworld alight. He remained unaware of the extent to which he was himselfa kind of gift to Germany. And least of all was he able to commit himselfto any trend or tendency of the age. His attempt to represent his alliance

with Schiller as such a trend proved illusory in the last analysis. Thedestruction of this illusion was a legitimate need and one which led theGerman public in the nineteenth century again and again to contrastGoethe and Schiller and measure each against the other. The influence ofWeimar on the great mass of Germans was not that of the two poets, but

5 A literary periodical that appeared from 1795 to 1798 but proved a failure.

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instead of the periodicals of Bertuch and Wieland, the Allgemeine Literarische Zeitung and the Teutscher Merkur. We do not desire theupheavals, Goethe had written in 1795, which could pave the way forclassical works in Germany. The upheaval in questionthat would havebeen the emancipation of the bourgeoisie which came too late to givebirth to any classical works. Germanness, the genius of the Germanlanguagethose were undoubtedly the strings on which Goethe played

his great melodies; but the sounding-board of this instrument was notGermany, but the Europe of Napoleon.

A Citizen of Europe

Goethe and Napoleon shared a similar vision: the social emancipation ofthe bourgeoisie within the framework of political despotism. This wasthe impossible, the incommensurable and the inadequate that was thedeepest source of their unrest. It brought Napoleon down. Of Goethe,however, it can he said that the older he became, the more his life assumed

the shape of this political idea, consciously acquiring the form of theincommensurable and the inadequate, and turning itself into a miniaturemodel of that political idea. If we could draw clear demarcation lines, thenwe could think of poetry as providing a metaphor for the bourgeoisfreedom of this micro-state, whereas in its private affairs the regimecorresponds perfectly to the rule of despotism. But in reality of course it isequally essential to pursue the interweaving of these irreconcilableaspirations in both life and poetry: in life, as a freedom of eroticexperience and as the strictest regime of renunciation, in poetry,nowhere more than in the second part ofFaustwhose political dialecticsprovide the key to Goethes position. Only in this context is it possible tounderstand how Goethe could spend his last thirty years subordinatinghis life to the bureaucratic categories of compromise, mediation andprocrastination. It is senseless to judge his actions and his stands in termsof any abstract standard of morality. It is such abstraction that isresponsible for the touch of absurdity we can see in the attacks Brnelaunched against Goethe in the name of Young Germany. It is preciselywhen we come to examine his maxims and the most remarkable aspects ofhis conduct that we find that Goethe only becomes comprehensible in the

context of the political position which he created and in which he installedhimself. The subterranean but all the more profound kinship withNapoleon is so decisive that the post-Napoleonic age, the power thattoppled Napoleon, is no longer capable of understanding it. The son ofbourgeois parents rises in the world, outstrips everyone, becomes the heirto a revolution whose power in his hands is such that it makes everyonetremble (French Revolution; Sturm und Drang); and at the very momentwhen he had dealt the most grievous blow to the power of superannuatedforces, he established his own dominion within the self-same archaic,feudal framework (Empire; Weimar).

In the political constellation that governed his life, the animosityGoethe felt for the Wars of Liberation, an animosity highly offensive tobourgeois literary historians, becomes entirely comprehensible. In hiseyes Napoleon had been the founder of a European public even before hehad established a European Empire. In 1815 Goethe let himself bepersuaded by Iffland for the last time to write a play, The Awakening of

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Epimenides, in celebration of the entry of the victorious troops into Berlin.But he could only bring himself to renounce Napoleon by simultaneouslyrefusing to relinquish the chaotic and dark manifestations of the sameelemental power which Napoleon embodied and which had once shakenthe world. He could muster no sympathy for the victors. And on theother hand, we find the same kind of idiosyncrasy in the paineddetermination with which he fends off the patriotic spirit which moved

Germany in 1813, something we also see in the way he could not bear toremain in the same room with sick people or in the vicinity of the dying.His dislike of everything military is not so much a rejection of armydiscipline, or even drill, as a horror of everything which is calculated todetract from the appearance of the human being, from the uniform to thewound. In 1792 his nerves were subjected to a severe test when he had toaccompany the Duke in the invasion of France by the allied armies. Onthis occasion Goethe was forced to display all his art in concentrating onthe observation of nature, optical studies and sketching, in order toinsulate himself from the events he was witnessing. The Campaign inFrance is just as vital for an understanding of the poet as it is a melancholyand vague response to the problems of world politics.

The change of direction towards Europe and towards politicsthat isthe mark of the final stage of Goethes poetic work. But it was only afterthe death of Schiller that he could feel this the firmest of all groundbeneath his feet. In contrast, the great prose work which was taken upagain after a long pause and completed under Schillers influence, WilhelmMeisters Apprenticeship, shows Goethe still tarrying in the antechambers

of idealism, in that German humanism from which he later emerged aftermuch struggle to enter into an ecumenical humanism. The ideal of theAppenticeshipeducationand the social milieu of the herothe worldof actorsare indeed strictly related to each other, since they are both theexponents of that specifically German realm of beautiful appearance thatseemed so empty of meaning to the bourgeoisie of the West which wasjust in the process of entering on its period of hegemony. In fact it wasalmost a poetic necessity to place actors in the centre of a bourgeoisGerman novel. It enabled Goethe to avoid a confrontation with thecontingencies of politics, only to take them up again with a correspond-

ingly greater vigour twenty years later in the sequel to the novel. The factthat in Wilhelm Meister Goethes hero was a semi-artist was whatguaranteed the novels decisive influence, precisely because it was aproduct of the German situation at the end of the century. It led to theseries of artist-novels of Romanticism, from the Heinrich von Ofterdingen ofNovalis and TiecksSternbalddown to Mrikes Maler Nolten. The booksstyle is in harmony with its content. There is no sign anywhere of logicalmachinery or a dialectical struggle between ideas and subject matter;instead, Goethes prose offers a theatrical perspective, it is a thought-outpiece that has been learnt by heart, a work in which gentle prompting has

led to a creative structure of thought. In it the things do not speakthemselves, but as it were seek the poets permission to speak. This is whyits language is lucid and yet modest, clear but without obtruding itself,diplomatic in the extreme.

It lay in the nature of both men that Schillers influence functionedessentially as a formative stimulus on Goethes production, without

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basically modifying its direction. The fact that Goethe turned towards theballad and resumed work on Wilhelm Meisterand the Faustfragment, mayperhaps be put down to Schillers influence. But the actual exchange ofideas about these works almost always confined itself to questions of craftand technique. Goethes inspiration remained undiverted. His friendshipwas with Schiller the man and the author. But it was not the friendship oftwo poets which has often been claimed for it. The extraordinary charm

and force of Schillers personality nevertheless revealed themselves toGoethe in their full magnitude, and after Schillers death Goethe left amemorial to them in the poem Epilogue to Schillers Bell.

IV. Goethes Apogee

After Schillers death Goethe reorganized his personal relationships.Henceforth he would not have anyone in his immediate circle whosestature was even remotely comparable to his own. And there was hardlyanyone in Weimar who could be said to have been taken into his

confidence in any special way. On the other hand, in the course of the newcentury the friendship with Zelter, the founder of the Berlin voice-training academy, grew in importance for Goethe. In time Zelter came toassume the rank of a sort of ambassador for Goethe, representing him inthe Prussian capital. In Weimar itself Goethe gradually established forhimself an entire staff of assistants and secretaries without whose help thevast inheritance that he prepared for the press could never have beenorganized. In an almost mandarin manner the poet ended up by puttingthe last thirty years of his life in the service of the production of thewritten word. It is in this sense that we have to regard his great literary

press office with its many assistants from Eckermann, Riemer, Soret andMller down to clerks like Kruter and Kohn. Eckermanns Conversationswith Goethe are the main source for these last decades and they aremoreover one of the finest prose works of the nineteenth century. Whatfascinated Goethe about Eckermann, perhaps more than anything else,was the latters unrestrained attachment to the positive, a quality neverfound in superior minds but also one which is rare even in lesser men.Goethe never had any real relationship with criticism in the narrowersense. The strategy of the art business which did fascinate him from timeto time always expressed itself in dictatorial ways; in the manifestoes hedrafted with Schiller and Herder or in the regulations he drew up foractors and artists.

More independent than Eckermann, and for that very reason, of course,less exclusively useful to the poet, was Chancellor von Mller. But hisConversations with Goethe are likewise one of the documents that havehelped to shape the image of Goethe as it has come down to posterity.These two should be joined by Friedrich Riemer, the Professor ofClassical Philology, not because of his gifts as a conversationalist, but byvirtue of his great and perceptive analysis of Goethes character. The first

great document to emerge from this literary organism which the ageingGoethe created for himself, was the autobiography.Poetry and Truth is apreview of Goethes last years in the form of a memoir. This retrospectiveaccount of his active youth provides access to one of the most crucialprinciples of his life. Goethes moral activity is in the last analysis apositive counterpole to the Christian principle of remorse: Seek to give acoherent meaning to everything in your life. The happiest man is one

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who can establish a connection between the beginning of his life and theend. In such statements we see an expression of the desire to give shape toand make manifest the image of the world he had accommodated himselfto in his youth: the world of the inadequate, the compromised, thecontingent; of erotic indecision and political vacillation. It is only againstthis background that we can see the Goethean credo of renunciation inits right sense, in all its terrible ambiguity: Goethe renounced not just

pleasure, but also greatness and heroism. This is perhaps why hisautobiography breaks off before its hero has achieved a position insociety. The reminiscences of later years are scattered through the Italian

Journey, the Campaign in France, and theDiaries (Tag- und Jahreshefte). In hisdescription of the years 17501775 Goethe has included a series ofvignettes of the most important contemporaries of his youth, whileGnther, Lenz, Merck and Herder have partly entered literary history inthe same formulas that Goethe devised for them. In portraying themGoethe depicted himself at the same time, and shows himself adopting ahostile or sympathetic stance towards the friends or competitors withwhom he had to deal. We see here the same compulsion at work thatinspired him as a dramatist to confront William of Orange with Egmont,the courtier with the man of the people, or Tasso with Antonio, the poetwith the courtier, Prometheus with Epimetheus, the creative man withthe elegaic dreamer, and Faust with Mephisto, as the ensemble ofpersonas at work in his own personality.

Beyond this more immediate group of assistants, a further circle grew upin these later years. There was the Swiss, Heinrich Meyer, Goethesexpert on questions of art, strictly classicistic in outlook, a reflective manwho helped Goethe with the editing of the Propylen and with the laterperiodical Kunst und Altertum ( Art and Antiquity). There was FriedrichAugust Wolf, the classical philologist, whose demonstration that theHomeric epics were the product of a whole series of unknown poetswhich were harmonized by a later editor and only then became known asthe works of Homer, evoked very mixed feelings in Goethe. Wolftogether with Schiller was drawn into Goethes attempt to write the

Achilles as a sequel to the Homeric epics, a work that remained afragment. We should also mention Sulpiz Boissere, the discoverer of the

German Middle Ages in painting, the inspiring advocate of GermanGothic, and as such a friend of the Romantics who chose him to act asspokesman for their views on art. (His labours in this direction, whichwere spread over many years, had to rest content with a half-victory:Goethe finally allowed himself to be persuaded to submit a collection ofdocument and plans concerning the history and completion of CologneCathedral to the court.) All these relationships, and countless others, arethe expression of a universality in the interests of which Goetheconsciously blurred the dividing lines between the artist, the researcherand the amateur. No poetic genre or language acquired popularity in

Germany without Goethe at once turning his attention to it. Everythinghe achieved as translator, writer of travel-books, as a biographer,connoisseur, critic, physicist, educationalist and even theologian, astheatrical producer, court poet, companion and ministerall this servedto enhance his reputation for universality. However, it was a European,as opposed to a German arena, which increasingly became the focus ofthese interests. He felt a passionate admiration for the great European

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minds who emerged towards the end of his life, for Byron, Walter Scottand Manzoni. In Germany, on the other hand, he would often giveadvancement to mediocrities and he failed to appreciate the genius ofsuch contemporaries as Hlderlin, Kleist and Jean Paul.

Elective Affinities and Feudal Restorations

In 1809, at the same time as Poetry and Truth, Goethe also wrote TheElective Affinities. His work on this novel coincided with his first realexperience of the European nobility, an experience which gave him aninsight into that new, self-assured worldly public to whom, twenty yearspreviously in Rome, he had resolved to address his writings. The Elective

Affinities is in fact directed at a public consisting of the Silesian-Polisharistocracy, lords, migrs and Prussian generals who congregated in theBohemian spas around the Empress of Austria. Not that this prevents thepoet from giving a critical view of their mode of life. For The Elective

Affinities provides a sketchy, but very incisive picture of the decline of the

family in the ruling class of the period. But the power which destroys thisalready disintegrating institution is not the bourgeoisie, but a feudalsociety which, in the shape of the magic forces of fate, finds itself restoredto its pristine state. Fifteen years previously, in his drama of therevolution, The Agitated ( Die Aufgeregten), Goethe had made theschoolmaster say of the nobility, For all their superciliousness, thesepeople cannot rid themselves of the mysterious feeling of awe thatpermeates all the living forces of nature; they cannot bring themselves todeny the eternal bond that unites words and effects, actions and theirconsequences. And these words provide the magical patriarchal ground-motif of this novel. It is a mode of thought we find repeated in WilhelmMeisters Wanderings in which even the most resolute attempts toconstruct the image of a fully developed bourgeoisie lead him backinexorably to the pastiche of mystical, medieval organizationsthe secretsociety of the Tower. Goethe understood the emergence of bourgeoisculture more fully than any of his predecessors or successors but he wasnonetheless unable to conceive of it otherwise than from within theframework of an idealized feudal state. And when he found himself evenfurther estranged from Germany by the mismanagement of the German

Restoration which coincided with the lasty twenty years of his workinglife, he even emphasized this idealized feudalism still further byamalgamating it with the patriarchal features of the East. We witness theemergence of the oriental Middle Ages in the West-stlicher Divan(West-Eastern Collection).

This book not only created a novel type of philosophical poetry; it wasalso the greatest expression of the love poetry of old age to be found inGerman and European literature. It was more than political necessity,that led Goethe to the Orient. The powerful late blossoming of Goethes

erotic passion in his old age made him regard old age itself as a rebirth, asa sort of fancy-dress which merged in his mind with the world of theOrient and which transformed his encounter with Marianne vonWillemer into a brief intoxicating festival. The West-stlicher Divan is theepode of this love. Goethe could only understand the past, history, to theextent to which he could integrate it into his life. In the succession ofpassionate relationships, Frau von Stein represented for him the

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reincarnation of Antiquity, Marianna von Willemer the Orient and Ulrikevon Levetzow, his last love, the symbiosis of these with the fairy-taleimages of his youth. This is the message of his last love poem, theMarienbad Elegy. Goethe underlined the didactic strain in the West-stlicher

Divan in the notes he appended to the volume in which, basing himself onHammer-Purgstall and Diez, he presented the fruits of his oriental studiesto the public. Amid the expanses of the Middle Ages in the East, amid

princes and viziers, in the presence of the splendour of the ImperialCourt, Goethe assumes the mask of Hatem, a vagabond and drinker, aman without needs, and thereby commits himself in his poetry to thathidden aspect of his nature which he once confided to Eckermann:Magnificent buildings and rooms are all right for princes and wealthymen. When you live in them, you feel at your ease . . . and want nothingmore. This is wholly at odds with my nature. When I live in a splendidhouse, like the one I had in Karlsbad, I at once become lazy and inactive.A lowlier dwelling, on the other hand, like the wretched room we are innow, a little untidy, a little gipsy-likethat is the right thing for me; itleaves my inner being with the complete freedom to do what it wishes andto create from within myself. In the figure of Hatem, Goethe, who had bythen become reconciled to the experience of his adult years, allows freerein to the unstable and untamed elements of his youth. In many of thesepoems he was able to use all his genius to give the wisdom of beggars,publicans and tramps the finest poetic expression they have ever received.

In Wilhelm Meisters Wanderings the didactic quality of the later writings isat its most deliberate. The novel which long lay fallow was then

completed in a great hurry. Teeming with contradictions and inconsisten-cies, it was finally treated by the poet as a storehouse in which he gotEckermann to record the contents of his notebooks. The numerousstories and episodes which form the basis of the work are only looselyconnected. The most important of them concern the PedagogicalProvince, a very remarkable hybrid in which we can see Goethe comingto grips with the great socialist writings of Sismondi, Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen and Bentham. It is unlikely that his knowledge of themderived from his own reading; their influence among his contemporarieswas powerful enough to induce Goethe to try and combine feudaltendencies with those of the bourgeois praxis which are so prominent inthese writings.

This synthesis is achieved at the expense of the classical ideal of education,which retreats here all along the line. Very typical is the fact that farmingis held to be obligatory whereas instruction in the dead languages goesunmentioned. The humanists of Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship haveall turned into artisans: Wilhelm is a surgeon, Jarno a mining engineer,Philine a sempstress. Goethe took over the idea of vocational education

from Pestalozzi. Earlier on he had sung the praises of handicraft inWerthers Letters from Switzerlandand he now does so again here. Since atthis time economists were already beginning to confront the problems ofindustry, we may regard this as a rather reactionary stance. But that aside,the socio-economic ideas which Goethe supports here fit well enough intoan extreme utopian version of the ideology of bourgeois philanthropy.Property public and private is the slogan proclaimed by one of the

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inscriptions on the Uncles model estates. And another motto ran: Fromthe useful via the true to the beautiful. The same syncretism is to befound, typically, in religious instruction. While on the one hand Goethe isthe sworn enemy of Christianity, on the other, he respects religion as thestrongest guarantee of any hierarchic form of society. He even goes so faras to reconcile himself to the image of the sufferings of Christ, somethingwhich had provoked a violent antipathy in him for decades. The social

order in the Goethean sense, i.e. an order governed by patriarchal andcosmic norms, finds its purest expression in the figure of Makarie. Theexperience he gained of practical, political activity failed to modify hisbasic attitudes, even though it frequently contradicted them. In conse-quence his attempt to reconcile his experience and his convictions in awork of art was inevitably doomed to remain as fissured as the structureof this novel. And we even see ultimate reservations in Goethe himselfwhen he looks to America to provide his characters with a happier, moreharmonious future. That is where they emigrate to at the end of his novel.It has been described as an organized, communist escape.

The Faustian Longing

If it was the case that in the years of his maturity Goethe frequentlyavoided literature to follow his whims or inclinations more freely intheoretical work or administrative duties, the major phenomenon of hislater years can be said to lie in the fact that the boundless circle of hiscontinuing study of natural philosophy, mythology, literature, art andphilology, his former involvement in mining, finance, the theatre,

freemasonry and diplomacy, was now all drawn together concentricallyinto a final, monumental work of literature: the second part ofFaust. Byhis own admission Goethe spent over sixty years working on both partsofFaust.6 In 1775 he brought the first fragment, the Urfaust, with him toWeimar. It already contained some of the principal features of the laterwork. There was the figure of Gretchen, who was the nave counterpartto Faust, the prototypical reflective man, but she was also the proletariangirl, the illegitimate mother, the child-murderer who is executed andwhose fate had long fuelled the fierce social criticism in the poems andplays of theStrmer und Drnger. There was the figure of Mephistopheles,

who even then was less the devil of Christian teaching than the EarthSpirit from the traditions of magic and the Cabbala. And finally Fausthimself, who was already the titan and superman, the twin brother ofMoses about whom Goethe had also planned to write and who likewisewas to attempt to wrest the secret of creation from God/Nature. In 1790Faust, A Fragmentappeared. In 1808 for the first edition of his worksGoethe sent the completed Part I to Cotta, his publisher. Here, for thefirst time, we find the action clearly defined. It is based on the Prologue inHeaven where God and Mephisto make a wager for the soul of Faust.When the devil comes and offers his services, however, Faust makes a

6 To clarify matters for the English reader, the publication history ofFaustis as follows: TheUrfaust, completed by 1775, did not appear at the time, but was lost and did not come tolight again until 1887. The first portion to appear was the so-called Faust, A Fragment, in1790. This contained parts of Faust I. The latter was published complete in 1808 asBenjamin states. Goethe finished work on Faust II in 1831, but refused to allow publicationduring his lifetime. The work appeared shortly after his death in 1832.

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pact with him to the effect that he will only forfeit his soul if he says to themoment:

Ah linger on, thou art so fair!Then may your fetters on me layIll gladly perish then and there.Then may the death-bell toll, recalling

That from your service you are free;The clock may stop, the pointer fallingAnd time itself be past for me!

But the crux of the work is this: Fausts fierce and restless striving for theabsolute makes a mockery of Mephistos attempts at seduction, the limitsof sensual pleasure are soon reached, but are insuffient to cost Faust hissoul: Thus from desire I reel on to enjoyment/And in enjoymentlanguish for desire.7

With the passage of time Fausts longing grows and grows, surpassing allbounds. The first part of the play ends in Gretchens dungeon amidst criesof woe. Taken on its own, this is one of Goethes darkest works. And ithas been said that both in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the Faustlegend was the tragedy of the bourgeoisie, whose cause was defeated oneach occasion. The first part concludes Fausts existence as a bourgeois.The political setting of Part II consists of imperial courts and classicalpalaces. The outlines of Goethes own Germany which are stilldiscernible through the veil of the Romantic Middle Ages in Part I havedisappeared entirely in Part II. Instead the whole vast movement of

thought is ultimately imaged in terms of the German Baroque and it isthrough the eyes of the Baroque that Goethe views antiquity. Havinglaboured his whole life long to imagine classical antiquity ahistoricallyand, as it were, suspended freely in space; now, in the classical-romanticphantasmagoria of the Helen scenes he constructs the first great image ofantiquity as seen through the prism of the German past. Around thiswork, which was to become Act III ofFaust II, the rest of the poem isassembled. It can hardly be over-emphasized how much these later parts,above all the scenes at the Imperial Court and in the military camp,constitute a political apology and represent a political summing-up ofGoethes former activities at court. If his period of duty as a minister hadended in a mood of profound resignation and with his capitulation to theintrigues of a mistress of the Prince, he nevertheless creates at the end ofhis life, in the setting of an ideal Baroque Germany, a screen on which heprojects a magnified image of the world of the statesman in all itsramifications and at the same time shows all its defects intensified to thepoint of grotesqueness. Mercantilism, antiquity and mystical scientificexperiments: the perfection of the state through money, of art throughantiquity, of nature through experiment. These provide the signature of

the epoch of German Baroque which Goethe here invokes. And it isultimately not a dubious aesthetic expedient but the innermost politicalnecessity of the poem when, at the close of Act V, the heaven ofCatholicism is unveiled to disclose Gretchen as one of the penitent.Goethe saw too deeply to allow his political regression towards

7 Translated by G. M. Priest, New York 1932.

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absolutism to rest content with the Protestant courts of the eighteenthcentury. Soret has made the penetrating observation that Goethe isliberal in an abstract sense, but in practice he inclines towards the mostreactionary principles. In the crowning stage of Fausts life Goethe givesexpression to the spirit of his practice: the reclaiming of land from the sea,an activity which nature prescribes to history and in which nature is itselfinscribedthat was Goethes conception of historical action and any

political formation was only justified in his eyes if it could protect andguarantee such action. In the mysterious, utopian interplay betweenagrarian and technological activity on the one hand with the politicalapparatus of absolutism on the other, Goethe glimpsed the magicformula which would dissolve the realities of social conflict intonothingness. Bourgeois agricultural methods operating under thedominion of feudal tenurethat was the discordant image in whichFausts greatest moment of fulfilment was to be crystallized.

The Bourgeoisie Reject Goethe

Shortly after bringing the work to completion, Goethe died on 22 March1832. By that time industrialization in Europe was proceeding at a furiouspace. Goethe foresaw future developments. In a letter to Zelter in 1825,for example, he says: Wealth and speed are what the world admires andstrives for. Railways, express mail, steamships and all possible facilitiesfor communication are what the cultivated world desires in order toover-cultivate itself and thereby to stick fast in mediocrity. The conceptof the general public has also led to the spread of a medium-level culture:this is the goal of the Bible Societies, the Lancastrian method and Godknows what else. The fact is that this is the century for able minds, forquick-thinking, practical men with a certain dexterity which enables themto feel superior to the crowd, even though their gifts do not put them inthe first rank. Let us try and remain true to the principles with which wecame; along with perhaps a few others we shall be the last members of anera which may not return so quickly. Goethe knew that in the short runhis work would make little impact, and in fact the bourgeoisie in whomthe hopes of a German democracy were burgeoning once more, preferredto look up to Schiller as their model. From the circle of the Young

German writers came the first weighty literary protests. Brne, forexample, wrote as follows: Goethe always paid homage only to egoismand coldness; hence it is only the cold who like him. He has taughteducated people how to be educated, broadminded and unprejudiced,while remaining egoistic; how to possess every vice without becomingcoarse, every foible without becoming ridiculous; how to keep a puremind uncontaminated by the filth of the heart, how to sin with decorumand to make use of artistic form to beautify anything reprehensible orbase. And because he taught all this he is revered by educated people.Goethes centenary in 1849 passed unnoticed, whereas that of Schiller,

ten years later, was made the occasion for a great demonstration by theGerman bourgeoisie.

Goethe did not come to the fore until the 1870s, after the establishment ofthe Empire, at a time when Germany was on the lookout for monumentalrepresentatives of national prestige. The chief milestones are as follows:the foundation of the Goethe Society under the aegis of German princes;

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the Weimar edition of his works, under princely patronage; theestablishment of the imperialist image of Goethe in the Germanuniversities. But despite the never-ending flood of literature produced byGoethe scholars, the bourgeoisie has never been able to make more than alimited use of his genius, to say nothing of the question of how far theyunderstood his intentions. His whole work abounds in reservations aboutthem. And if he founded a great literature among them, he did so with

face averted. Nor did he ever enjoy anything like the success that hisgenius merited; in fact he declined to do so. And this was so as to pursuehis purpose of giving the ideas that inspired him the form which hasenabled them to resist their dissolution at the hands of the bourgeoisie, aresistance made possible because they remained without effect and notbecause they could be deformed or trivialized. Goethes intransigencetowards the cast of mind of the average bourgeois and hence a new viewof his work acquired a new relevance with the repudiation of Naturalism.The Neo-Romantics (Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal andRudolph Borchardt), the last bourgeois poets of any distinction toattempt to rescue bourgeois ideology, if only on the plane of culture andunder the patronage of the enfeebled feudal authorities, provided a newimportant stimulus to Goethe scholarship (Konrad Burdach, GeorgSimmel, Friedrich Gundolf). Their work was above all concerned withthe exploration of the works and the style of Goethes last phase, whichnineteenth century scholars had ignored.

Translated by Rodney Livingstone

Benjamin W - Goethe - The Reluctant Bourgeois

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