The polymath genius, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832), friend of princes, reluctant law student, wayward romantic, child of nature and arch burgher, believed utterly in the classical imagination and spent two years in Rome feasting on Roman art and architecture. The central figure of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) German literary group of the 1770s, he inspired Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Lizst, Gounod, Wolf and Mahler by his writing. Goethe the scientist challenged Newton's findings with his own Theory of Colour, Farbenlehre, and, in old age, he was to play Johnson to Eckermann's Boswell in Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe (1836) described by Nietzsche as "the best German book there is".
As a teenager, he saw the seven-year-old Mozart perform and always saw his own long life in the context of the Thirty Years War, which ended a century before his birth, while as a contemporary observer, he doubted the idealism of the French Revolution. During his career, Germany developed a cultural and political identity. His diverse body of work and range of interests came to personify the emerging intellectual energy of his fragmented country as it aspired towards unification.
On settling in 1775 in the small central German town of Weimar, of which he agreed to become prime minister, Goethe found a patron and a life-long friend in Carl August (1757-1828), the visionary if volatile Duke of Saxe Weimar, and helped transform a provincial backwater into a German, and European, intellectual capital.
Standing alongside Dante and Shakespeare, a trio immortalised as "Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper" by who else but Joyce in Finnegans Wake, Goethe is today more revered than read.
Author of Faust, the Wilhelm Meister novels, Egmont and Elec- tive Affinities as well as some of the most beautiful lyric poetry ever written in German - he could be credited with the invention of German poetic language as we know it, as he was the first to explore fully the expressive registers of modern German. He also penned the world's first bestseller, The Sorrows of Young Werther, a strongly autobiographical, ultimately tragic love story which not only caused many a despairing young swain to lament his loss but also to adopt Werther's wardrobe of blue frock coat and buff trousers. Wertheresque suicides followed.
Just over a century after Goethe's death, Thomas Mann, the 20th-century German writer who most admired him and best emulated his ironic detachment, based the vivid and poignant novel, Lotte In Weimar (1939), on the visit in 1816 of the object of Goethe's youthful affections, Charlotte Buff, now 63 and long widowed, to the writer's town where the citizens welcome her as "Werther's Lotte". Mann's novel is a miracle in characterisation, particularly for its portrait of the old writer. "Minds like Goethe's are the common property of all nations," wrote Carlyle in the preface to his 1824 translation of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. He called the German "the Wisest of our Time" and his opinions certainly excited a generation of Victorians such as George Eliot and Matthew Arnold. Both wrote essays about Goethe, and Eliot was to help her partner, G.H. Lewes, who wrote the first full biography, The Life and Works of Goethe, 1855. While researching it, the couple spent a year in Weimar. Even then, 20 years after his death, it was Goethe's town.
August 28th marks the 250th anniversary of his birth, and a definitive, three-day birthday party is planned. How did the only and indulged son of a Frankfurt am Main Imperial Counciller and lawyer come to personify not only German culture but the spirit of the European Enlightenment? It has to be said that his friendship with Carl August proved vital.
August was the son of the pioneering and enlightened Anna Amalia, who had come to Weimar as a bride and on being widowed early, began its transformation. In August Goethe had a patron well aware of his talents and range of interests. It was he who gave Goethe the elegant baroque-style house at the Frauenplan which today houses the Goethe National Museum and in which he lived for half a century. Built in 1709, it is an unusual, elongated, yellow building, a series of small, interconnecting rooms in which his various collections are on display. It includes a courtyard and a small shed in which his coach resides. Standing in the house and noting the clever, purpose-built cabinets used to store his engravings, prints and mineral specimens, as well as artefacts of classical antiquity dominating the Juno Room, consolidates the impression that here lived a European equivalent of Thomas Jefferson. It also makes it easier to understand his Faust's obsessive and compulsive character.
Goethe the collector possessed an artist's eye and mind. The house has an opulence as well as an earthy practicality which is also true of his work. In his modest, quite spartan bedroom, the chair on which he died on a March day in 1832 still looks out on a beautiful garden, now full of summer colour and the same plants which feature in his gartenhaus which stands on the right bank of the Ilm River in the landscaped parkland which adjoins the town.
HIS garden house was his first home in Weimar, and he lived and worked there until 1782 when he moved to the grand house at the Frauenplan. For all his obvious love of nature and botany, he never saw them as a source of inspiration and remarked to Eckermann: "I have never observed Nature with a view to poetic production."
A few years before Goethe's arrival at August's invitation, the poet, novelist and translator of Shakespeare, Christoph Wieland, had come to Weimar from nearby Eurfurt as tutor to the prince. Weeks after Carl August came to power in 1775 he summoned Goethe, who in turn was instrumental in bringing the philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder to the town, where he became the leader of the church and the court preacher. Five years older than him and author of On the Origin of Language, Herder (1744-1803) was an important influence on Goethe. Melancholic by nature, he always retained an ambivalent attitude towards Weimar, viewing it as both provincial and oppressively cosmopolitan. It was Herder who most influenced the young Goethe's early play Lotz, (1973) a rowdy Shakespearean drama much admired by Sir Walter Scott, who inaccurately translated it. John Arden loosely adapted it for the English stage in 1965 under the title of Iron Hand. For Goethe personally, however, probably the most important arrival in Weimar was that of playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), who first arrived in 1787 and interestingly, was not initially welcomed by Goethe, who must have viewed the young author of The Robbers as a rival. In Jena in 1794 they again met and this time a friendship was established which would culminate in their work for the Weimar Theatre.
Such was its success that Schiller moved his family from Jena to Weimar in 1799, and lived there until his early death aged 46 in 1805. This friendship became probably the most important in German literature. In death Goethe and Schiller lie side by side in lead coffins encased in oak caskets, in the ducal vault, a crypt under the Prince's Church in Weimar. In 1827, Goethe, speaking of his dead friend to Eckermann remarked "through all Schiller's works there runs the idea of freedom . . . In his early years it was the idea of physical freedom which concerned him, in his later years ideal freedom." Schiller was a near invalid for much of his life, and Goethe was also to recall in a conversation with Eckermann the day he arrived at Schiller's house and had to wait. By way of passing the time he sat down at Schiller's desk to write some notes but was quickly overcome by a sickening smell. It came from the desk which he opened to find a mess of rotting apples, a scent which helped Schiller's breathing.
A five-minute walk covers the distance between Goethe's house and Schillerhaus, the pretty, rather less formal, shuttered villalike residence in which Schiller lived with his wife and their four children. The theatre which itself is the most public monument of Goethe and Schiller is a few hundred yards further up the street. The two, giants in bronze, dominate the square it overlooks and appear to be gazing at the future. Considering their lasting legacy, their visionary pose is well justified.
Goethe's political career spanned administrative positions of increasing importance until about 1786, when he set off on the first of two important trips to Italy he recorded in Italian Journey (1816-17). Interestingly, this was not translated until 1962 when the poet W.H. Auden and long time champion of Goethe collaborated with Elizabeth Mayer. As a member of the Weimar Court, Goethe, who had been elevated to the nobility in 1782, enjoyed influence and played a part in civic policy, particularly with regard to art, architecture and the landscaping of the Ilm parklands. He was effectively groomed for the position of great man and spokesman on most things. In 1791 he was appointed director of the Weimar Court Theatre and was in the happy position of being able to collaborate with a talent such as Schiller's. Tasso explores the problems of the artist in society and like so many of his works, it draws on his experience as Weimar's resident poet. In 1795, a series of sensuous love poems, Roman Elegies was published. Hermann and Dorothea, a pastoral epic based on the plight of the Protestant routed by the Archbishop of Salzburg draws parallels with the French Revolution.
Between 1777 and 1829 he worked on the famous Wilheim Meister novels, while an even greater span of years was devoted to his masterwork, Faust, the revisions of the second part of which he was engaged in until his death. The first part appeared in 1808, the second in 1832. In it, the disillusioned Faust engages with Mephistopheles, who having earlier boasted to the Lord that he can ruin Faust's soul, sets about corrupting him. The Lord, however, is confident the Devil will fail. As is so typical of Goethe's work, earthly desire is a major theme. Faust, having inadvertently caused the death of his first love, Gretchen/Margaret, is full of remorse and then embarks on an elaborate penance reclaiming for man a stretch of submerged land from the sea. Prior to this episode is the dramatic romance with Helen. Faust defies the Devil and angels bear his soul to heaven. In the profound and non-moralistic Elective Affinities (1809) he looked at a marriage in which both parties become involved with other people.
There are sufficient contradictions to ensure that one's interest in Goethe never fails: as conventional as he was bohemian, he only married his mistress of 18 years after she saved him from personal attack when a French soldier invaded their house. Goethe was 57, she was 41. As ahead of his time as he was of it, he remained as fascinated with the outside world as he was with his notion of himself as a genius. Dichtung und Warhelt (Poetry and Truth), his autobiography which was published between 1811 and 1832, offers an exhaustively detailed account of his youth.
His work has grandeur as well as normality. His practicality is matched by his imagination. Just as Swift remains a dominant presence in Irish literature, Goethe - poet, thinker, and scientist - is the towering figure of Western literary thought precisely because of his mercurial overview, his relentless curiosity, his energy, depth of feeling and abiding regard for form in all things. He died at 82, neither bitter nor insane, his love of life intact.
