Culture | A giant German

Goethe’s life as a work of art

A new biography shows how the great German lived life as a story with a beginning, middle and end

Goethe: Life as a Work of Art. By Rüdiger Safranski. Translated by David Dollenmayer. Liveright; 651 pages; $35 and £26.99.

WHEN Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was in his 60s, he recalled a friend of his youth once telling him, “What you live is better than what you write.” On reflection, Goethe said, “It would please me if that were still true.” In a biography of the great German writer and polymath, Rüdiger Safranski sets out to show that Goethe was more than the sum of his works, outstanding though they were; in fact, he conceived his entire life as a work of art, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Mr Safranski is a German philosopher who has written books on Schiller, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Heidegger. Though he concedes that Goethe has had more written about him than any other German writer, he could not resist adding to the pile. He has confined himself to primary sources—mainly Goethe’s own works, letters, diaries and conversations, along with accounts by contemporaries—which makes for a fresh and authentic-feeling read. The book was published in German four years ago and has now been well translated by David Dollenmayer, with much support from the author.

Though considered a German latter-day Shakespeare, Goethe is much less widely read in the English-speaking world than at home. The one exception is “Faust”, his most famous work, on which he laboured on and off for most of his life. Works about him in English are thin on the ground, and most of what there is came out some time ago. Two volumes of a biography by Nicholas Boyle of Cambridge University have been published to great acclaim, but the third and final volume has yet to appear. So this new account of the German literary legend fills a gap.

Goethe was a man of protean talents, interests, appetites and achievements who lived through a particularly tempestuous period of wars and revolutions in Europe. Born in 1749 into a prosperous and well-connected family in Frankfurt, he had written a bestseller, “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, by the age of 25 and had established a glittering reputation. But after a while he began to feel that he wanted to experience the world at first hand, not just write about it. The opportunity came when the young Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar invited Goethe to come and work for him. The writer eventually became finance minister, and he and the prince ended up as lifelong friends.

While at court in Weimar Goethe continued to write, and to build up a network of relationships with the cultural and intellectual elite of the time, including a deep and long-lasting friendship with Schiller, a fellow poet, writer and protagonist of the Sturm und Drang (storm and urge) movement. Goethe also pursued a plethora of other interests, including natural history, anatomy and mineralogy, and developed a controversial theory of colour. When life at Karl August’s court became too much, he took himself to Italy for his own version of the Grand Tour, before eventually returning to Weimar.

In his lifetime, Goethe was famous not only for his literary achievements and political and artistic connections, but also for the number and variety of his romantic pursuits, ranging from innkeepers’ daughters to the cream of society. (Some of these women were attainable, some not.) He did not settle into a long-term relationship until he was nearly 40. Christiane Vulpius, the object of his affections and soon to be the mother of his son, August, was so far below his social status that marriage seemed out of the question, though two decades later the two did quietly wed. He far outlived her and retained his capacity for falling in love to an advanced age, proposing to a 19-year-old when he was in his early 70s. She turned him down.

By then the arc of Goethe’s life was descending. His great friend Schiller had been dead for decades, and the ranks of other friends were thinning rapidly. His princely champion Karl August died in 1828, followed two years later by Goethe’s own son. For his 82nd birthday the old man took his two grandsons on a final visit to a local mountain retreat where as a young man he had scratched a poem into the wall, and was pleased to find it still there:

Peace lies over
All the peaks
In all the trees
You sense
Hardly a breath;
The little forest birds fall silent.
Wait, and soon
You too will rest.

Six months later, in the spring of 1832, Goethe suddenly fell ill, declined rapidly and died soon afterwards. Half a century earlier he had written to a friend that he hoped to “raise up as high as possible the pyramid of my existence”. His wish was extravagantly granted.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "A man in full"

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