Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , 28 August 1749
– 22 March 1832) was a German writer and statesman. His body of work includes epic
and lyric poetry written in a variety of metres and styles; prose and verse dramas; memoirs;
an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour;
and four novels. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, more than 10,000
letters, and nearly 3,000 drawings by him are extant.
A literary celebrity by the age of 25, Goethe was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Carl
August in 1782 after first taking up residence there in November 1775 following the success
of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther. He was an early participant in the Sturm und
Drang literary movement. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe served as a member
of the Duke's privy council, sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening
of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau, and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the
University of Jena. He also contributed to the planning of Weimar's botanical park and
the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace, which in 1998 were together designated a UNESCO
World Heritage Site. After returning from a tour of Italy in 1788,
his first major scientific work, the Metamorphosis of Plants, was published. In 1791 he was made
managing director of the theatre at Weimar, and in 1794 he began a friendship with the
dramatist, historian, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whose plays he premiered until Schiller's
death in 1805. During this period Goethe published his second novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship,
the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and, in 1808, the first part of his most celebrated
drama, Faust. His conversations and various common undertakings throughout the 1790s with
Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, Wilhelm von
Humboldt, and August and Friedrich Schlegel have, in later years, been collectively termed
Weimar Classicism. Arthur Schopenhauer cited Wilhelm Meister's
Apprenticeship as one of the four greatest novels ever written and Ralph Waldo Emerson
selected Goethe, along with Plato, Napoleon, and William Shakespeare, as one of six "representative
men" in his work of the same name. Goethe's comments and observations form the basis of
several biographical works, most notably Johann Peter Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe.
There are frequent references to Goethe's various sayings and maxims throughout the
course of Friedrich Nietzsche's work and there are numerous allusions to Goethe in the novels
of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann as well as in the psychological writings of Sigmund Freud
and Carl Jung. Goethe's poems were set to music throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries by a number of composers, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven,
Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Charles Gounod, Richard Wagner, Hugo
Wolf, and Gustav Mahler. Biography
Early life Goethe's father, Johann Caspar Goethe, lived
with his family in a large house in Frankfurt, then an Imperial Free City of the Holy Roman
Empire. Though he had studied law in Leipzig and had been appointed Imperial Councillor,
he was not involved in the city's official affairs. 38-year-old Johann Caspar married
Goethe's mother, Catharina Elizabeth Textor, the daughter of the mayor of Frankfurt Johann
Wolfgang Textor and his wife Anna Margaretha Lindheimer, when she was 17 at Frankfurt on
20 August 1748. All their children, except for Goethe and his sister, Cornelia Friederike
Christiana, who was born in 1750, died at early ages.
His father and private tutors gave Goethe lessons in all the common subjects of their
time, especially languages (Latin, Greek, French, Italian, English and Hebrew). Goethe
also received lessons in dancing, riding and fencing. Johann Caspar, feeling frustrated
in his own ambitions, was determined that his children should have all those advantages
that he had not. Goethe had a persistent dislike of the Roman
Catholic Church, and characterized its history as a "hotchpotch of fallacy and violence"
(Mischmasch von Irrtum und Gewalt). His great passion was drawing. Goethe quickly became
interested in literature; Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Homer were among his early favourites.
He had a lively devotion to theatre as well and was greatly fascinated by puppet shows
that were annually arranged in his home; a familiar theme in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.
He also took great pleasure in reading from the great works about history and religion.
He writes about this period: Goethe became acquainted with Frankfurt actors.
Around early literary attempts, he was infatuated with Gretchen, who would later reappear in
his Faust and the adventures with whom he would concisely describe in Dichtung und Wahrheit.
He adored Charitas Meixner (27 July 1750 – 31 December 1773), a wealthy Worms trader's
daughter and friend of his sister, who would later marry the merchant G. F. Schuler.
Legal career Goethe studied law in Leipzig from 1765 to
1768. He detested learning age-old judicial rules by heart, preferring instead to attend
the poetry lessons of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert. In Leipzig, Goethe fell in love with
Anna Katharina Schönkopf and wrote cheerful verses about her in the Rococo genre. In 1770,
he anonymously released Annette, his first collection of poems. His uncritical admiration
for many contemporary poets vanished as he became interested in Lessing and Wieland.
Already at this time, Goethe wrote a good deal, but he threw away nearly all of these
works, except for the comedy Die Mitschuldigen. The restaurant Auerbachs Keller and its legend
of Faust's 1525 barrel ride impressed him so much that Auerbachs Keller became the only
real place in his closet drama Faust Part One. As his studies did not progress, Goethe
was forced to return to Frankfurt at the close of August 1768.
In Frankfurt, Goethe became severely ill. During the year and a half that followed,
because of several relapses, the relationship with his father worsened. During convalescence,
Goethe was nursed by his mother and sister. In April 1770, Goethe left Frankfurt in order
to finish his studies in Strasbourg. In Alsace, Goethe blossomed. No other landscape
has he described as affectionately as the warm, wide Rhine area. In Strasbourg, Goethe
met Johann Gottfried Herder. The two became close friends, and crucially to Goethe's intellectual
development, it was Herder who kindled his interest in Shakespeare, Ossian and in the
notion of Volkspoesie (folk poetry). On 14 October 1772 he held a gathering in his parental
home in honour of the first German "Shakespeare Day". His first acquaintance with Shakespeare's
works is described as his personal awakening in literature.
On a trip to the village Sessenheim, Goethe fell in love with Friederike Brion, in October
1770, but, after ten months, terminated the relationship in August 1771. Several of his
poems, like Willkommen und Abschied, Sesenheimer Lieder and Heideröslein, originate from this
time. At the end of August 1771, Goethe acquired
the academic degree of the Lizenziat (Licentia docendi) in Frankfurt and established a small
legal practice. Although in his academic work he had expressed the ambition to make jurisprudence
progressively more humane, his inexperience led him to proceed too vigorously in his first
cases, and he was reprimanded and lost further ones. This prematurely terminated his career
as a lawyer after only a few months. At this time, Goethe was acquainted with the court
of Darmstadt, where his inventiveness was praised. From this milieu came Johann Georg
Schlosser (who was later to become his brother-in-law) and Johann Heinrich Merck. Goethe also pursued
literary plans again; this time, his father did not have anything against it, and even
helped. Goethe obtained a copy of the biography of a noble highwayman from the German Peasants'
War. In a couple of weeks the biography was reworked into a colourful drama. Entitled
Götz von Berlichingen, the work went directly to the heart of Goethe's contemporaries.
Goethe could not subsist on being one of the editors of a literary periodical (published
by Schlosser and Merck). In May 1772 he once more began the practice of law at Wetzlar.
In 1774 he wrote the book which would bring him worldwide fame, The Sorrows of Young Werther.
The outer shape of the work's plot is widely taken over from what Goethe experienced during
his Wetzlar time with Charlotte Buff (1753–1828) and her fiancé, Johann Christian Kestner
(1741–1800), as well as from the suicide of the author's friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem
(1747–1772); in it, Goethe made a desperate passion of what was in reality a hearty and
relaxed friendship. Despite the immense success of Werther, it did not bring Goethe much financial
gain because copyright laws at the time were essentially nonexistent. (In later years Goethe
would bypass this problem by periodically authorizing "new, revised" editions of his
Complete Works.) Early years in Weimar
In 1775, Goethe was invited, on the strength of his fame as the author of The Sorrows of
Young Werther, to the court of Carl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, who would become
Grand Duke in 1815. (The Duke at the time was 18 years of age, to Goethe's 26.) Goethe
thus went to live in Weimar, where he remained for the rest of his life and where, over the
course of many years, he held a succession of offices, becoming the Duke's chief adviser.
In 1776, Goethe formed a close relationship to Charlotte von Stein, an older, married
woman. The intimate bond with Frau von Stein lasted for ten years, after which Goethe abruptly
left for Italy without giving his companion any notice. She was emotionally distraught
at the time, but they were eventually reconciled. Goethe, aside from official duties, was also
a friend and confidant to the Duke, and participated fully in the activities of the court. For
Goethe, his first ten years at Weimar could well be described as a garnering of a degree
and range of experience which perhaps could be achieved in no other way. Goethe was ennobled
in 1782 (this being indicated by the "von" in his name).
Italy Goethe's journey to the Italian peninsula
from 1786 to 1788 was of great significance in his aesthetic and philosophical development.
His father had made a similar journey during his own youth, and his example was a major
motivating factor for Goethe to make the trip. More importantly, however, the work of Johann
Joachim Winckelmann had provoked a general renewed interest in the classical art of ancient
Greece and Rome. Thus Goethe's journey had something of the nature of a pilgrimage to
it. During the course of his trip Goethe met and befriended the artists Angelica Kauffman
and Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, as well as encountering such notable characters
as Lady Hamilton and Alessandro Cagliostro (see Affair of the Diamond Necklace).
He also journeyed to Sicily during this time, and wrote intriguingly that "To have seen
Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the
clue to everything." While in Southern Italy and Sicily, Goethe encountered, for the first
time genuine Greek (as opposed to Roman) architecture, and was quite startled by its relative simplicity.
Winckelmann had not recognized the distinctness of the two styles.
Goethe's diaries of this period form the basis of the non-fiction Italian Journey. Italian
Journey only covers the first year of Goethe's visit. The remaining year is largely undocumented,
aside from the fact that he spent much of it in Venice. This "gap in the record" has
been the source of much speculation over the years.
In the decades which immediately followed its publication in 1816 Italian Journey inspired
countless German youths to follow Goethe's example. This is pictured, somewhat satirically,
in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Weimar
In late 1792, Goethe took part in the battle of Valmy against revolutionary France, assisting
Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar during the failed invasion of France. Again during the
Siege of Mainz he assisted Carl August as a military observer. His written account of
these events can be found within his Complete Works.
In 1794 Friedrich Schiller wrote to Goethe offering friendship; they had previously had
only a mutually wary relationship ever since first becoming acquainted in 1788. This collaborative
friendship lasted until Schiller's death in 1805.
In 1806, Goethe was living in Weimar with his mistress Christiane Vulpius, the sister
of Christian A Vulpius, and their son Julius August Walter von Goethe. On 13 October, Napoleon's
army invaded the town. The French "spoon guards," the least-disciplined soldiers, occupied Goethe's
house. The next day, Goethe legitimized their 18-year
relationship by marrying Christiane in a quiet marriage service at the court chapel. They
already had several children together by this time, including their son, Julius August Walter
von Goethe (25 December 1789 – 28 October 1830), whose wife, Ottilie von Pogwisch (31
October 1796 – 26 October 1872), cared for the elder Goethe until his death in 1832.
The younger couple had three children: Walther, Freiherr von Goethe (9 April 1818 – 15 April
1885), Wolfgang, Freiherr von Goethe (18 September 1820 – 20 January 1883) and Alma von Goethe
(29 October 1827 – 29 September 1844). Christiane von Goethe died in 1816.
Later life After 1793, Goethe devoted his endeavours
primarily to literature. By 1820, Goethe was on amiable terms with Kaspar Maria von Sternberg.
In 1823, having recovered from a near fatal heart illness, Goethe fell in love with Ulrike
von Levetzow whom he wanted to marry, but because of the opposition of her mother he
never proposed. Their last meeting in Carlsbad on 5 September 1823 inspired him to the famous
Marienbad Elegy which he considered one of his finest works. During that time he also
developed a deep emotional bond with the Polish pianist Maria Agata Szymanowska.
In 1832, Goethe died in Weimar of apparent heart failure. His last words, according to
his doctor Carl Vogel, were, "Mehr Licht!" ("More light!'), but this is disputed as Vogel
was not in the room at the moment Goethe died. He is buried in the Ducal Vault at Weimar's
Historical Cemetery. Eckermann closes his famous work, Conversations
with Goethe, with this passage: The first production of Richard Wagner's opera
Lohengrin took place in Weimar in 1850. The conductor was Franz Liszt, who chose the date
28 August in honour of Goethe, who was born on 28 August 1749.
Literary work The most important of Goethe's works produced
before he went to Weimar were Götz von Berlichingen (1773), a tragedy that was the first work
to bring him recognition, and the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (called Die Leiden
des jungen Werthers in German) (1774), which gained him enormous fame as a writer in the
Sturm und Drang period which marked the early phase of Romanticism – indeed the book is
often considered to be the "spark" which ignited the movement, and can arguably be called the
world's first "best-seller". (For the entirety of his life this was the work with which the
vast majority of Goethe's contemporaries associated him). During the years at Weimar before he
met Schiller he began Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, wrote the dramas Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia
in Tauris), Egmont, Torquato Tasso, and the fable Reineke Fuchs.
To the period of his friendship with Schiller belong the conception of Wilhelm Meister's
Journeyman Years (the continuation of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), the idyll of Hermann
and Dorothea, the Roman Elegies and the verse drama The Natural Daughter. In the last period,
between Schiller's death, in 1805, and his own, appeared Faust Part One, Elective Affinities,
the West-Eastern Divan (a collection of poems in the Persian style, influenced by the work
of Hafez), his autobiographical Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (From My Life:
Poetry and Truth) which covers his early life and ends with his departure for Weimar, his
Italian Journey, and a series of treatises on art. His writings were immediately influential
in literary and artistic circles. Goethe was fascinated by Kalidasa's Abhijñānaśākuntalam,
which was one of the first works of Sanskrit literature that became known in Europe, after
being translated from English to German. Faust Part Two was only finished in the year
of his death, and was published posthumously. Also published after his death was the so-called
Urfaust, the first sketches, made probably in 1773–74.
The short epistolary novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, or The Sorrows of Young Werther,
published in 1774, recounts an unhappy romantic infatuation that ends in suicide. Goethe admitted
that he "shot his hero to save himself": a reference to Goethe's own near-suicidal obsession
with a young woman during this period, an obsession he quelled through the writing process.
The novel remains in print in dozens of languages and its influence is undeniable; its central
hero, an obsessive figure driven to despair and destruction by his unrequited love for
the young Lotte, has become a pervasive literary archetype. The fact that Werther ends with
the protagonist's suicide and funeral—a funeral which "no clergyman attended"—made
the book deeply controversial upon its (anonymous) publication, for on the face of it, it appeared
to condone and glorify suicide. Suicide was considered sinful by Christian doctrine: suicides
were denied Christian burial with the bodies often mistreated and dishonoured in various
ways; in corollary, the deceased's property and possessions were often confiscated by
the Church. Epistolary novels were common during this time, letter-writing being a primary
mode of communication. What set Goethe's book apart from other such novels was its expression
of unbridled longing for a joy beyond possibility, its sense of defiant rebellion against authority,
and of principal importance, its total subjectivity: qualities that trailblazed the Romantic movement.
The next work, his epic closet drama Faust, was to be completed in stages, and only published
in its entirety after his death. The first part was published in 1808 and created a sensation.
The first operatic version, by Spohr, appeared in 1814, and was subsequently the inspiration
for operas and oratorios by Schumann, Berlioz, Gounod, Boito, Busoni, and Schnittke as well
as symphonic works by Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler. Faust became the ur-myth of many figures in
the 19th century. Later, a facet of its plot, i.e., of selling one's soul to the devil for
power over the physical world, took on increasing literary importance and became a view of the
victory of technology and of industrialism, along with its dubious human expenses. In
1919, the Goetheanum staged the world premiere of a complete production of Faust. On occasion,
the play is still staged in Germany and other parts around the world.
Goethe's poetic work served as a model for an entire movement in German poetry termed
Innerlichkeit ("introversion") and represented by, for example, Heine. Goethe's words inspired
a number of compositions by, among others, Mozart, Beethoven (who idolised Goethe), Schubert,
Berlioz and Wolf. Perhaps the single most influential piece is "Mignon's Song" which
opens with one of the most famous lines in German poetry, an allusion to Italy: "Kennst
du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?" ("Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom?").
He is also widely quoted. Epigrams such as "Against criticism a man can neither protest
nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him",
"Divide and rule, a sound motto; unite and lead, a better one", and "Enjoy when you can,
and endure when you must", are still in usage or are often paraphrased. Lines from Faust,
such as "Das also war des Pudels Kern", "Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss", or "Grau
ist alle Theorie" have entered everyday German usage.
It may be taken as another measure of Goethe's fame that other well-known quotations are
often incorrectly attributed to him, such as Hippocrates' "Art is long, life is short",
which is found in Goethe's Faust ("Art is something so long to be learned, and life
is so short!") and Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. Scientific work
Although his literary work has attracted the greatest amount of interest, Goethe was also
keenly involved in studies of natural science. He wrote several works on morphology, and
colour theory. Goethe also had the largest private collection of minerals in all of Europe.
By the time of his death, in order to gain a comprehensive view in geology, he had collected
17,800 rock samples. His focus on morphology and what was later
called homology influenced 19th century naturalists, although his ideas of transformation were
about the continuous metamorphosis of living things and did not relate to contemporary
ideas of "transformisme" or transmutation of species. Homology, or as Étienne Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire called it "analogie", was used by Charles Darwin as strong evidence of common
descent and of laws of variation. Goethe's studies led him to independently discover
the human intermaxillary bone in 1784, which Broussonet (1779) and Vicq d'Azyr (1780) had
(using different methods) identified several years earlier. While not the only one in his
time to question the prevailing view that this bone did not exist in humans, Goethe,
who believed ancient anatomists had known about this bone, was the first to prove its
peculiarity to all mammals. During his Italian journey, Goethe formulated
a theory of plant metamorphosis in which the archetypal form of the plant is to be found
in the leaf – he writes, "from top to bottom a plant is all leaf, united so inseparably
with the future bud that one cannot be imagined without the other". In 1790, he published
his Metamorphosis of Plants. As one of the many precursors in the history of evolutionary
thought, Goethe wrote in Story of My Botanical Studies (1831):
Goethe also popularized the Goethe barometer using a principle established by Torricelli.
According to Hegel, 'Goethe has occupied himself a good deal with meteorology; barometer readings
interested him particularly... What he says is important: the main thing is that he gives
a comparative table of barometric readings during the whole month of December 1822, at
Weimar, Jena, London, Boston, Vienna, Töpel... He claims to deduce from it that the barometric
level varies in the same propoportion not only in each zone but that it has the same
variation, too, at different altitudes above sea-level'.
In 1810, Goethe published his Theory of Colours, which he considered his most important work.
In it, he contentiously characterized color as arising from the dynamic interplay of light
and darkness through the mediation of a turbid medium. In 1816, Schopenhauer went on to develop
his own theory in On Vision and Colors based on the observations supplied in Goethe's book.
After being translated into English by Charles Eastlake in 1840, his theory became widely
adopted by the art world, most notably J. M. W. Turner. Goethe's work also inspired the philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein, to write his Remarks on Color. Goethe was vehemently opposed to
Newton's analytic treatment of color, engaging instead in compiling a comprehensive rational
description of a wide variety of color phenomena. Although the accuracy of Goethe's observations
does not admit a great deal of criticism, his theory's failure to demonstrate significant
predictive validity eventually rendered it scientifically irrelevant. Goethe was, however,
the first to systematically study the physiological effects of color, and his observations on
the effect of opposed colors led him to a symmetric arrangement of his color wheel,
'for the colors diametrically opposed to each other... are those which reciprocally evoke
each other in the eye. (Goethe, Theory of Colours, 1810). In this, he anticipated Ewald
Hering's opponent color theory (1872). Goethe outlines his method in the essay The
experiment as mediator between subject and object (1772). In the Kurschner edition of
Goethe's works, the science editor, Rudolf Steiner, presents Goethe's approach to science
as phenomenological. Steiner elaborated on that in the books The Theory of Knowledge
Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception and Goethe's World View, in which he characterizes
intuition as the instrument by which one grasps Goethe's biological archetype—The Typus.
Novalis, himself a geologist and mining engineer, expressed the opinion that Goethe was the
first physicist of his time and 'epoch-making in the history of physics', writing that Goethe's
studies of light, of the metamorphosis of plants and of insects were indications and
proofs 'that the perfect educational lecture belongs in the artist's sphere of work'; and
that Goethe would be surpassed 'but only in the way in which the ancients can be surpassed,
in inner content and force, in variety and depth – as an artist actually not, or only
very little, for his rightness and intensity are perhaps already more exemplary than it
would seem'. Eroticism
Many of Goethe's works, especially Faust, the Roman Elegies, and the Venetian Epigrams,
depict erotic passions and acts. For instance, in Faust, the first use of Faust's power after
literally signing a contract with the devil is to fall in love with and impregnate a teenage
girl. Some of the Venetian Epigrams were held back from publication due to their sexual
content. Goethe clearly saw human sexuality as a topic worthy of poetic and artistic depiction,
an idea that was uncommon in a time when the private nature of sexuality was rigorously
normative. Religion and politics
Born into a Lutheran family, Goethe's early faith was shaken by news of such events as
the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years' War. In July 1782, he described himself as
"not anti-Christian, nor un-Christian, but most decidedly non-Christian." In his Venetian
Epigram 66, Goethe listed four things that he disliked: "tobacco smoke, bugs and garlic
and the cross." In the book Conversations with Goethe by Goethe's secretary Eckermann,
however, Goethe is portrayed as enthusiastic about Christianity, Jesus, Martin Luther,
and the Protestant Reformation, even calling Christianity the "ultimate religion". Although
he opposed many of the central teachings of the Christian churches, he thought that he
could nevertheless be inwardly Christian. His later spiritual perspective evolved among
pantheism (heavily influenced by Spinoza), humanism, and various elements of Western
esotericism, as seen most vividly in Part II of Faust. According to Nietzsche, Goethe
had "a kind of almost joyous and trusting fatalism" that has "faith that only in the
totality everything redeems itself and appears good and justified."
On the other hand, a year before his death, in a letter to Sulpiz Boisserée, Goethe wrote
that he had the feeling that all his life he had been aspiring to qualify as one of
the Hypsistarians, an ancient Jewish-pagan sect of the Black Sea region. After describing
his difficulties with mainstream religion, he mentioned that he had learned of this sect
who, hemmed in between heathens, Jews and Christians, declared that they would reverence,
as being close to the Godhead, what came to their knowledge of the best and most perfect.
In politics, Goethe was conservative. At the time of the French Revolution, he thought
the enthusiasm of the students and professors to be a perversion of their energy and remained
skeptical of the ability of the masses to govern. Likewise, he did not oppose the War
of Liberation (1813–15) waged by the German states against Napoleon, and remained aloof
from the patriotic efforts to unite the various parts of Germany into one nation.
Influence Goethe had a great effect on the nineteenth
century. In many respects, he was the originator of many ideas which later became widespread.
He produced volumes of poetry, essays, criticism, a theory of colours and early work on evolution
and linguistics. He was fascinated by mineralogy, and the mineral goethite (iron oxide) is named
after him. His non-fiction writings, most of which are philosophic and aphoristic in
nature, spurred the development of many philosophers, including G.W.F. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Ernst Cassirer, Carl Jung, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Along with Schiller,
he was one of the leading figures of Weimar Classicism.
Goethe embodied many of the contending strands in art over the next century: his work could
be lushly emotional, and rigorously formal, brief and epigrammatic, and epic. He would
argue that classicism was the means of controlling art, and that romanticism was a sickness,
even as he penned poetry rich in memorable images, and rewrote the formal rules of German
poetry. Even in contemporary culture, he stands in the background as the author of the ballad
upon which Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice is based.
His poetry was set to music by almost every major Austrian and German composer from Mozart
to Mahler, and his influence would spread to French drama and opera as well. Beethoven
declared that a "Faust" Symphony would be the greatest thing for art. Liszt and Mahler
both created symphonies in whole or in large part inspired by this seminal work, which
would give the 19th century one of its most paradigmatic figures: Doctor Faustus.
The Faust tragedy/drama, often called Das Drama der Deutschen (the drama of the Germans),
written in two parts published decades apart, would stand as his most characteristic and
famous artistic creation. Followers of the twentieth century esotericist Rudolf Steiner
built a theatre named the Goetheanum after him—where festival performances of Faust
are still performed. Goethe was also a cultural force, who argued
that the organic nature of the land moulded the people and their customs—an argument
that has recurred ever since. He argued that laws could not be created by pure rationalism,
since geography and history shaped habits and patterns. This stood in sharp contrast
to the prevailing Enlightenment view that reason was sufficient to create well-ordered
societies and good laws. It was to a considerable degree due to Goethe's
reputation that the city of Weimar was chosen in 1919 as the venue for the national assembly,
convened to draft a new constitution for what would become known as Germany's Weimar Republic.
The Federal Republic of Germany's cultural institution, The Goethe-Institut is named
after him, and promotes the study of German abroad and fosters knowledge about Germany
by providing information on its culture, society and politics.
The literary estate of Goethe in the Goethe and Schiller Archives was inscribed on UNESCO's
Memory of the World Register in 2001 in recognition of its historical significance.
Goethe's influence was dramatic because he understood that there was a transition in
European sensibilities, an increasing focus on sense, the indescribable, and the emotional.
This is not to say that he was emotionalistic or excessive; on the contrary, he lauded personal
restraint and felt that excess was a disease: "There is nothing worse than imagination without
taste". He argued in his scientific works that a "formative impulse", which he said
is operative in every organism, causes an organism to form itself according to its own
distinct laws, and therefore rational laws or fiats could not be imposed at all from
a higher, transcendent sphere; this placed him in direct opposition to those who attempted
to form "enlightened" monarchies based on "rational" laws by, for example, Joseph II
of Austria or the subsequent Emperor of the French, Napoleon I. A quotation from Goethe's
Scientific Studies will suffice: That change later became the basis for 19th-century
thought: organic rather than geometrical, evolving rather than created, and based on
sensibility and intuition rather than on imposed order, culminating in, as Goethe said, a "living
quality", wherein the subject and object are dissolved together in a poise of inquiry.
Consequently, Goethe embraced neither teleological nor deterministic views of growth within every
organism. Instead, his view was that the world as a whole grows through continual, external,
and internal strife. Moreover, Goethe did not embrace the mechanistic views that contemporaneous
science subsumed during his time, and therewith he denied rationality's superiority as the
sole interpreter of reality. Furthermore, Goethe declared that all knowledge is related
to humanity through its functional value alone and that knowledge presupposes a perspectival
quality. He also stated that the fundamental nature of the world is aesthetic.
His views make him, along with Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Ludwig van Beethoven,
a figure in two worlds: on the one hand, devoted to the sense of taste, order, and finely crafted
detail, which is the hallmark of the artistic sense of the Age of Reason and the neo-classical
period of architecture; on the other, seeking a personal, intuitive, and personalized form
of expression and society, firmly supporting the idea of self-regulating and organic systems.
Thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson would take up many similar ideas in the 1800s. Goethe's
ideas on evolution would frame the question that Darwin and Wallace would approach within
the scientific paradigm. The Serbian inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla was heavily
influenced by Goethe's Faust, his favorite poem, and had actually memorized the entire
text. It was while reciting a certain verse that he was struck with the epiphany that
would lead to the idea of the rotating magnetic field and ultimately, alternating current.
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