A Fantastic Goethe Biography

Goethe’s color wheel, 1809

There was nothing Goethe despised with more passion than death. He loved life and made life into high art form. He banished death on the literary stage, exorcised and eluded it, and came away severely disturbed and grossly offended. When his mother died, Goethe remained in Carlsbad and complained afterward that death “made entering Weimar a very gloomy experience.” He lay sick in bed after Schiller died and didn’t feel up to viewing the deceased or attending the funeral. He wrote a eulogy for Wieland but also kept his distance from the deceased and the burial. He withdrew in silence after learning of the death of Duke Karl August and shortly after that his only son had died in Rome. The renowned poet and scientist even remained in bed after his wife died. Charlotte von Stein knew of Goethe’s hatred of death. When making her own final arrangements, she requested that the funeral procession avoid the Frauenplan and not pass by Goethe’s house. For his part, Goethe himself naturally avoided the burial.

Masterfully woven

“The death parades are not what I love.” This was a refrain in Goethe’s letters and discussions, and no sentence is quoted more often by Rüdiger Safranski in his biography of Weimar’s prince of poets. That cannot be due to carelessness in this excellent and stylistically brilliant book on Goethe’s life. Rüdiger Safranski weaves facts and interpretations masterfully, drawing on his wealth of knowledge, and on the life and work of Goethe as well as the time period he lived in. He writes like a novelist and is comfortable navigating waters that could easily drown read and author alike. In the most exquisite way, he uses details to construct the larger picture, tells a life story against the panorama of history and literature and interprets the heart of an existence.

It is not without meaning thus that this telling quote is repeated with remarkable frequency and serves as a leitmotif throughout the book. The biographer sees in it the disposition of the subject. Or more precisely, the eminent factor of the subject’s existence. Which implies a slightly skeptical undertone. The reader has to keep in mind Safranski’s emphatic study of Schiller and Goethe’s (2009) friendship to sense his inner distance to Goethe. He doesn’t idolize Goethe. He finds his subject interesting. Some aspects of his existence irritate him. Certain nuances Safranski employs make that evident, including Goethe’s egocentric contempt for death. Such reservations can perhaps also be gleaned from the apt subtitle Safranski chose: Artwork of Life. Is it impish to hear irony here alongside admiration?

Because this invariably resonates in the sentiment that “the death parades are not what I love.” He had adopted so much of the art of living and lust for life that made him a beneficiary of life many times over that the maxims of this existence likewise demanded a great deal of protection and avoidance against loss. Safranski’s portrait effortlessly depicts how Goethe created art out of life and transformed existence itself into an aesthetic work. The biographer does not demolish the monument along the way, but rather he shows the poet in life size—how he dithered and dilly-dallied and needed to count on outside support in many of his undertakings.

It begins in Strasbourg where Goethe stumbled in his promotion to doctor of law. His dissertation was rejected and so he returned to Frankfurt in 1771 possessing only a license to practice law. After accepting an invitation from the recently appointed ruler Duke Karl August, he moved to Weimar in 1775 and decided life should be “subordinated my writing”.  Nevertheless, this occurred after Goethe had succeeded early on with Goetz von Berlichingen and after The Sorrows of Young Werther became a sensation in 1774. “The works of art succeeded more easily than the artwork of life,” writes Safranski. “He felt like a student in this arena and he knew that genius does not protect one who is an amateur at life.” What Safranski does not tell us directly, but what emerges from his depiction of the poet’s early literary success at this time, is that art and balance were not only lacking in Goethe’s practical affairs but in virtually every dimension of his life.

In any case, Goethe was a cheerful dilettante in romance, writing and government. Karl August immediately involved him in governmental duties, some of which failed – especially Goethe’s prominent projects. In Ilmenau, mining was supposed to contribute to the prosperity of the resource-poor duchy (and allow Goethe to gain insight into the earth’s interior). But the mining venture was a showcase project turned investment failure. Goethe also failed at road construction. The money ran out before the major arteries were built connecting Erfurt, Weimar and Jena. And on the side, the privy councilor pursued his occupation as a (dilettante) scientist, discovering in the intermaxillary bone proof of the human being’s link with the rest of the animal kingdom.

Goethe enthusiastically delved into an array of tasks given to him by the duke or taken up on his own. But in his first decade in Weimar, he worked himself to the bone. Safranski dedicates a lot of space to covering the double life of administration and poetry, effectively setting the stage for the ensuing upheaval. The trip—or rather flight—to Italy marks Goethe’s rebirth as an artist once again. He would later write: “The longing for the land of the arts was replaced by a longing for art itself.” Just as he required someone to give him the decisive push to make the move to Weimar, his transformation in Italy was not his sole doing. In Rome, Goethe found in Karl Philipp Moritz a man to pave the way. While Goethe was there, Moritz worked out an aesthetic philosophy that assigned art an autonomous space. This offered the Weimar exile a new perspective on his double life, whereby art becomes transformed into a sphere with its own rules and independent claim.

It is here that Safranski details circumstances of Goethe’s rebirth, the stupendous and surely most important consequences of midwifery in literary history. After his initiation into the autonomous sphere of art, Goethe allows himself to come under the spell of Fichte’s enthronement of the creative ego. At the same time, his philosophy presages that consequential “auspicious event” of July 20, 1794 in Jena where Schiller and Goethe meet and strike up a friendship. “I ask you”, Goethe writes in a letter to his dear friend, “not to cease, I would like to say, pushing me beyond my own limits.”

Piecemeal creation process

Some things remain piecemeal in Goethe’s creative work till that point and beyond. For Faust, this is true without reservation and up to its completion. Schiller encouraged his friend to continue the work he started in the early 1770s. Goethe struggled with it until the end. His oft-interrupted life work became a mirror of this “artwork of life”, which succeeded most happily when he abandoned maxims and allowed himself to be inspired by friends. Right up to the Oriental Divan, a work based on poetic and erotic conversations with Marianne von Willemer. Which is what makes this life a work of art, that here creative genius was combined with the endowment of multi-facetted love and friendship. And that a group of friendly and open individuals formed around Duke Karl August who even in death were sensitive to feelings of the poet.

Rüdiger Safranski: Goethe. Kunstwerk des Lebens. Biography. Carl-Hanser-Verlag, Munich 2013, 751 pages.

By Roman Bucheli, published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on December 22, 2013