Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “And you can say you were there”

Who would Johann Wolfgang von Goethe have chosen in Thuringia today? Idle question. The great “Portrait of a Life” by the literary scholar Thomas Steinfeld, born in 1954, excludes any nationalist, backward-looking, anti-emancipatory party from his ballot paper.

The author has achieved a great success. His book does the protagonist justice in every respect. Here, not only the world-famous works of the poet prince and privy councilor, from “Götz von Berlichingen” and the “Sufferings of Young Werther” to “Faust” I and II, “Wilhelm Meister” and the “Elective Affinities” are recapitulated in their genesis and impact , but also some almost unknown ones with brief information about the contents. The profound biography shows the whole person from his early family influences in Frankfurt am Main through his stormy youth years, studies in Leipzig and Strasbourg, to his eventual center of life in Weimar.

It reports on the senior administrator and early cultural manager in the not so insignificant Thuringian duchy, with whose sovereign he initially got along unconventionally well and with whom he later had a bad disagreement. The picture of life looks over the shoulder of the natural scientist and reflects his successes and mistakes. And of course the topic of Goethe and the fairer sex is not neglected here. Steinfeld lists them all, the ladies under whose spell Goethe felt, whom he courted, sometimes discreetly and sometimes less discreetly.

The 21-year-old had fallen madly in love with Friederike Brio in Sessenheim, Alsace, but soon abandoned her. His friendship with Charlotte Freifrau von Stein, which could not only be reduced to long-term correspondence, was legendary. Goethe had lived with Christiane Vulpius for years and fathered children, all of whom, with the exception of their son August, died early before he married her. After her death, the now over 70-year-old fell in love with 17-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow in Marienbad.

Goethe’s trip to Italy is largely known. Steinfeld also takes the reader along on his travels to Switzerland and lets him share in the poet’s enthusiasm at the cannonade of Valmy, the victory of the French revolutionary army over the allied counter-revolutionary powers of Europe. Geothe is said to have exclaimed on the occasion: “From here and today a new era in world history begins, and you can say that you were there.”

Turbulent times are remembered: the Great French Revolution, Napoleon’s triumphal march across Europe until the Emperor was stopped at the gates of Moscow and had to make an ignominious and sacrificial retreat with his Grande Arme, the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and the Reorganization of Europe after the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Information is provided about the rapid development of science, medicine and technology. All of this creates a colorful panorama of the time in which Goethe lived, who was universally interested, brilliant as a poet and ahead of his contemporaries as an inquisitive researcher. His friendship with Friedrich Schiller occupies just as much space in Steinfeld’s book as his influence on the best years of Jenens University with the greats of German philosophy such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Whatever Goethe did was usually accomplished with a certain nonchalance. His working day was clearly organized and structured. Steinfeld cites reports about the all-rounder’s concentrated and memorized way of working. None of this is new, but Steinfeld knows how to tell it in a new and captivating way. His portrait reads at the same time as a critical literary history of the German classics, as a social history not only of Germany, but of Europe. His biography invites you to read Goethe’s works in the original again.

The book quotes a variety of poems, letters, novels and plays and encourages us to read Goethe again in the original. It’s hard to put down a good book like this. But even such a thing has to be read out.

Thomas Steinfeld: Goethe. Portrait of a life, pictures of a time. Rowohlt, 784 p., hardcover, €38.