A little more than two months ago, precisely on 28th August, the German writer Goethe would complete 270 years-old, so this post is a tribute to him. His writings advanced the world towards the right direction of science, culture, education, and ethics. He was against hipocrisy, war, unaccountability and solipsism.This post is a summary of two articles. The first was published at https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe. The second was published at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/01/design-for-living-books-adam-kirsch
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, and amateur artist, considered the greatest German literary figure of the modern era. He could be said to stand in the same relation to the culture of the era that began with the Enlightenment and continues to the present day as William Shakespeare does to the culture of the Renaissance and Dante to the culture of the High Middle Ages. His Faust though eminently stageworthy when suitably edited, is also Europe's greatest long poem since John Milton's Paradise Lost. Goethe was the eldest of seven children, though only one other survived into adulthood, his sister Cornelia. The years from 1788 to 1794 were lonely years to Goethe, his only close friend was the duke. Personal loyalty to the duke partly explains Goethe's hostility from the start to the French Revolution. Goethe's distance from the Revolution can be overstated. He disliked the militarism and centralism of modern, would-be states like Prussia or, later, Napoleon's France. He felt at home in Germany's multiplicity of states small enough for rulers and ruled to have a sense of personal obligation to each other. The year 1829 brought celebration throughout Germany of Goethe's 80th birthday. It also brought the first performance in Weimar of part one of Faust. In 1830, came the unexpected news that his son had died in Rome. Goethe fell seriously ill immediately but recovery. He still had work to do, and only in August 1831, he sealed the manuscript of part two of Faust. To get a sense of how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dominates German literature, we would have to imagine a Shakespeare known to the last inch, a Shakespeare squared or cubed. Goethe's significance is only roughly indicated by the sheer scope of his collected works, which run to a hundred and forty-three volumes. Here is a writer who produced not only some of his language's greatest plays but hundreds of major poems of all kinds. Now consider that he also wrote three of the most influential novels in European literature, and a series of classic memoirs documenting his childhood and his travels, and essays on scientific subjects ranging from the theory of colors to the morphology of plants. Then, there are several volumes of his recorded table talk, more than twenty thousand extant letters, and the reminiscences of the many visitors who met him throughout his sixty-year career as one of Europe's most famous men. Goethe accomplished all this while simultameously working as a senior civil servant in the duchy of Weimar, where he was responsible for everything from mining operations to casting actors in the court theatre. Germans began debating the significance of the Goethe phenomenon while he was still in his twenties, and they have never stopped. His lifetime, spanning some of the most monumental disruptions in modern history, is referred to as a single whole, the Goethezeit, or Age of Goethe. Worshipped as the greatest genius in German history and as an examplary poet and human being, he has also been criticized for his political conservatism and quietism, Goethe is strangely neglected in the English-speaking world. Goethe's poems, unfortunately, seldom come across vividly in translation. This is partly because Goethe so often cloaks his sophistication in deceptively simple language. One of his earliest great poems, is written in the style of a folk song and almost entirely in words of one or two syllables. Victorian intellectuals revered Goethe as the venerable Sage of Weimar. Thomas Carlyle implored the reading public to "close thy Byron, open thy Goethe." Matthew Arnold saw Goethe as a kind of healer and liberator, calling him the "physician of the Iron Age," who read each wound, each weakness of the suffering human race." For these writers, Goethe seemed to possess something the modern world lacked: wisdom, the ability to understand life and how it should be lived. Though he studied law, at his father's insistence, and even practiced briefly, the occupation was never more than a cover for what really interested him, which was writing and falling in love. It was one of these early infatuations that plunged Goethe into the despair that would become the subject of his first success, "The Sorrow of Young Werther." This short novel tells the story of an unhappy love affair. Through letters written by Werther toa friend, we learn about his hopeless love. After Charlotte get married, Werther feels that he has nothing to live for, and decides to commit suicide. At least some of Goethe's readers took him to be endorsing and glamorizing Werther's suicide. One young woman, named Chirstel von Lassberg, drowned herself in the river Ilm with a copy of the novel in her pocket. Goethe must have felt much as one might imagine J.D.Salinger felt about Mark Chapman's copy of "The Catcher in the Rye," guilty, but also horrified at being so misread. Yet, far from ennobling its hero, "Werther" is actually a warning against what Goethe sees as a consuming spiritual disease. What kills Werther is not disappointed love but toxic self-centeredness, subjectivity run wild. The fatal complication of his illness is pride. So far, Werther strongly resembles Hamlet, who calls Denmark and the whole world a prison. After ten years of office work, Goethe abruptly threw aside his work and left Weimar. Goethe's time in Italy marked a watershed in his life. He was thirty-seven. As a worshipper of the classical world, Goethe found Rome to be a revelation and a rebirth. Liberated from his more onerous court duties, Goethe was free to take up projects that he had first begun to think about years, even decades, earlier: the gestation period for the verse drama "Faust" spanned more than thirty years. Goethe's persistence also testifies to the continuity of his interests during his entire life. The meaning of education, the difficulty of embracing life, the danger and redemptive possibilities of love. The concept of 'Bildung', a word that means education but also implies a cultivation of the self and of maturity, was central to Goethe's thought, and he, in turn, made it central to German culture. For Thomas Mann, Goethe was above all an educator, Mann wrote that a "vocation towards educating others does not spring from inner harmony, but rather from inner uncertainties, disharmony, difficulty, and from the difficulty of knowing one's own self." Goethe's most celebrated and canonical work, "Faust" is defined by his refusal to be satisfied with anything life has to offer. As in the traditional folktale, Goethe's Faust sells his soul to the Devil. This is central issue of Goethe's life and work: on what terms is life worth living? For Faust, as forWerther before him, ordinary existence is flavorless and intolerable; like an alcoholic, he demands ever-stronger draughts of emotional intoxication. Above all, he demands the intoxication of love, and he finds it with Gretchen, an innocent young girl, whom he seduces and abandons. Not until the end of the play, when Faust returns to find Gretchen in prison for infanticide, and on the edge of madness, he realizes how selfish his quest for experiences have been. A heavenly voice announces that Gretchen will be saved, Goethe, no moralist when it comes to sex, can forgive her for being carried away by passion. But there is no salvation for Faust, whose crime is the one transgression that Goethe can never forgive, solipsism, the refusal to acknowledge the full reality of other people.
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