The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  At the same time that Goethe was pursuing his multifarious activities, he was also writing 1,800 letters to another Charlotte, Charlotte von Stein (the standard edition of Goethe’s works and letters runs to 138 volumes). She carefully hoarded these, “well aware that they were a unique record of an exceptional man’s inner life.” Their relationship is alluded to in Goethe’s two “Charlotte” plays, Iphigenie auf Tauris and Torquato Tasso, where she is presented as the best in German womanhood, “a German Beatrice,” who aids the development of the immature poet and introduces him to “the pleasures and responsibilities of Humanity.”24

  Goethe never really lost the central interest he explored in his “Charlotte” period: his pursuit of “Bildung” (a word he used quite a bit). The inward pursuit of perfection is never again mentioned so directly as in his letters, but Goethe never lost his concern with the individual’s responsibility for his own inner development.25

  From 1781, by which time Goethe had been in Weimar for six years, he confided to Charlotte that he no longer felt able to address her as “Sie,” and must use the more intimate “du.” This brought about a sea change. As one critic put it, Goethe’s letters now became “prose poems of happy love with few parallels in any literature.” However, at the very moment their relationship should have matured, it didn’t—and the results were catastrophic. So far as we know, Charlotte, in her “strange ménage,” never made any move to leave her husband. When she did confess her love for Goethe, Goethe responded by leaving for Italy without even telling her that he was going, and by the time of his return from the warm south (Verona, Venice, Ferrara, Florence, Arezzo, Rome, Naples) the situation had deteriorated.26 He had enjoyed his time (“this journey is really like a ripe apple falling from the tree”), but his views on love had been transformed (from a romantic view to a “pagan” view, it was said by some).27 A sketch by his friend Tischbein, made in Rome, shows Goethe irritably pushing away “the second pillow”—i.e., Charlotte’s husband.28 Also, Charlotte found it difficult to come to terms with the fact that Goethe had begun another affair, with Christiane Vulpius. (“I am only interested in the real thing, eager eyes and smacking kisses.”) Charlotte made a lame attempt to pillory Goethe in her play Dido, but it was not a success.29 Their once-beautiful relationship had turned sour, and though they patched it up eventually, things were never the same again.

  Through it all, Goethe continued to write. A mixture of the realist and the romantic, not given overmuch to abstract speculation, Goethe subscribed to the view, explored in Chapter 2, that “God does not exercise influence on earth except through outstanding chosen men.”30 He knew he had it in him to be an outstanding man, “a great soul,” as he had described the character of Iphigenia.31 He was also deeply affected by his discovery of the Greeks (thanks to Herder) and their idea that individuals—even geniuses—may contain within them unconscious creative urges that other people will find superlative, but those works still need to be realized, to be produced, and that task involves craft, perseverance, individual effort. The idea that life is a task, was, of course, Pietist in origin, but the Greek influence seems to have induced Goethe to craft his next masterpiece, Wilhelm Meister, and so successfully that even a sarcastic skeptic like James Joyce had to put him on a par with Shakespeare and Dante (Joyce’s trinity was “Shopkeeper,” “Daunty” and “Gouty”).32

  In 1798, in a famous “Fragment” published in the Athenäum, the periodical of the early German Romantics, Friedrich Schlegel identified the French Revolution, Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (1794), and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, as “the three greatest ‘tendencies’ of the age.”33 Schlegel was being deliberately provocative, but even in retrospect this takes some swallowing. Schlegel we shall encounter presently, where we can examine what, exactly, he meant by his choice. Fichte we shall also come to later, where we can explore the meaning and significance of his Wissenschaftslehre. But whatever Schlegel meant, when he put Wilhelm Meister in this exalted company, he was doing us a favor of sorts. There is no question that, as a novel, as a story, Wilhelm Meister was not only a masterpiece: it was also the first of a genre, a particularly German genre, which became known as Bildungsroman.

  A Bildungsroman is typically a novel of ideas. William Bruford, professor of German at Cambridge after World War II, devoted an entire book to the German Bildungsroman, in which he shows that Goethe’s model was followed by many others in Germany. Here is his definition of the form: “[W]e are shown the development of an intelligent and open-minded young man in a complex modern society without generally accepted values…We see him acquiring a point of view but above all a ‘Weltanschauung,’ a lay religion or general philosophy of life…In a Bildungsroman the centre of interest is not the hero’s character or adventures or accomplishments in themselves, but the visible link between his successive experiences and awareness of worthy models and his gradual achievement of a fully rounded personality and well tested philosophy of life.”34 It is a journey inward as much as forward.

  In Goethe’s story, Wilhelm is born into a bourgeois family and, as his adventures go by, he comes to understand the limitations of his original existence as a “carefully brought-up son” in the middle classes. He lives for a time among theater people, engrossed by the charm of their spontaneity; elsewhere, he is introduced to “the lesser talents” of being a gentleman, talents that are mainly negative—a gentleman “does not show his feelings,” he understates everything, he never hurries; later, Goethe has Wilhelm wounded in an attack by armed bandits. Through it all, he meets a raft of women—older women, capricious women, women from a higher social class. He observes which men are successful with the opposite sex and what their secret is.35 He immerses himself in the works of Shakespeare, discovering a rich world he never knew existed. Eventually, he marries a woman from a large family and—part of the point of the book—begins to achieve a measure of control over, and understanding of, his life.

  Goethe had a serious aim. He had told Caroline Herder that he had lost his belief in divine powers in the summer of 1788 and the purpose of life, when there is no god, he is saying in the book, is to become, to become much more than one was.36 “The ultimate meaning of our humanity is that we develop that higher human being within ourselves, which emerges if we continually strengthen our truly human powers, and subjugate the inhumane.”37 Some non-Germans have found it too much. Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge-based late nineteenth-century philosopher, is said to have reprimanded a German visitor who observed there was no word in English equivalent to “gelehrt” (cultivated). “Oh yes there is, we call it a prig.”

  Goethe’s most famous masterpiece, however, and this is true both inside and outside Germany, is Faust. This, “the most characteristic product of his genius,” was written at intervals over sixty years, in four bursts of creative energy.38 It was by no means a new story, being a well-known medieval legend, made into a play by Christopher Marlowe, though Goethe wasn’t aware of Marlowe’s work until he had written more than half of his own version.39

  The legend may even be grounded in fact. There was a Georg Faust alive at the turn of the sixteenth century who wandered through central Europe claiming to possess recondite forms of knowledge which gave him special healing powers. After his death he gradually acquired a slight change of name and an academic title, as Dr. Johannes Faustus, a professor at Wittenberg. In his lectures, he was alleged to “conjure up at will” personages from classical Greece, and he was notorious too for allegedly playing tricks on both the pope and the emperor. There was a price to pay for this license and in his case it was said that he had agreed to “a term” of twenty-four years with the devil, whereupon his body would be “torn to pieces by demons.” Faust was often featured in puppet plays, which is where Goethe may have encountered the story as a child.40

  According to the legend, Faust becomes disillusioned with the many forms of secret knowledge he has tried out, and the devil, Mephistopheles, makes a wager with God that he can
tempt Faust into his world. Mephistopheles sees to it that, in the course of his researches into magic and alchemy, he himself is conjured up by Faust, whereupon he broaches his famous proposal: Mephistopheles will introduce Faust to all the pleasures the world has to offer, the only proviso being that if, at any point, Faust should wish to sample any delight “for longer than the moment it is on offer,” his life will end and he will belong to the devil. Bored, unfulfilled, Faust accepts.

  In Part One the main theme is Faust’s seduction and subsequent desertion of Margareta (Gretchen), a beautiful girl he meets outside a church. In Part Two—written decades later—Faust, waking from a long sleep during which he has forgotten Margareta, now becomes enamored of Helen of Troy (this is a magical world, after all).41

  No brief summary can do justice to the attractions of Faust—its language, its wit, its pithy insights into human nature, not to mention Mephistopheles’ brand of cynicism, “an original and highly effective, not to say sympathetic conception of the devil.” Faust and Mephistopheles have even been compared to the Book of Job as a meditation on the nature of evil (in Job too there is a compact with God). Goethe also took a leaf out of Shakespeare’s book: like the Bard’s plays, Faust resists Christianization. God is not the petty-minded jealous God of the Israelites but a more generous—and yes, even witty—deity.

  Goethe began writing the book in the early 1770s, later destroying the manuscript—or so he thought. The very existence of this early manuscript, the Urfaust, was unknown until 1887, when it was discovered sixty-five years after his death. Apparently it was copied by a young lady at the Weimar court, and her manuscript was never destroyed. Goethe’s description of Faust as “fragments of a great confession” should not be forgotten. He himself wrote:

  …Our play is rather like the life of Man:

  We make a start, we make an end—

  But make a whole of it? Well, do so if you can.*

  Was he saying that was the best way to treat life? Absorb its disparate parts, “Kiss the moment,” as Schiller was to put it, but don’t try too hard to impose too much unity.42 For Faust, it is not the search for unity that matters, it is movement, creation, activity, over and above and before mere enjoyment. Mere contemplation of beauty is empty. In this Goethe is a pre-Romantic.

  Nicholas Boyle, in his biography of Goethe and his age, argues that “more must be known, or at any rate there must be more to know, about Goethe than any other human being…Nearly 3,000 drawings by him survive, as do the villa he built, the palace he rebuilt, and the park he first laid out. He amassed very substantial private collections of mineralogical specimens, [and] incised gems…After he moved to Weimar the daily chronicle of his doings, now being put together for the first time in seven large volumes by Robert Steiger, is practically continuous, especially once he began to keep a regular diary in 1796. Accounts of conversations with him…run to some 4,000 printed pages, over 12,000 letters from him are extant, and about 20,000 letters addressed to him.” As for his writing, Boyle concludes, “As the age of paper passes, so he comes to seem its supreme product.”

  A NEW MEANING FOR “NATION” AND “CULTURE”

  Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was five years older than Goethe and, like Winckelmann, like Heyne and like Fichte, a poor boy who had risen out of his class through sheer ability, along with a chance meeting with a Russian army surgeon who, on his way back from the Seven Years’ War, was quartered in 1761–62 in the east Prussian town where Herder lived. Conceiving a liking for Herder, the surgeon proposed to take him to Königsberg, where the young man could study medicine at the university. In return, Herder would translate a medical treatise into Latin. Herder accepted the proposal but, once in Königsberg, he found medicine uncongenial and switched to theology.

  This was a second fortuitous turn, for it brought Herder to study under Kant, and it was Kant who introduced Herder to Rousseau and Hume, who were to have such an effect on his thinking. Ordained in 1767, Herder found his way to Paris where he was received by some of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, including Denis Diderot and d’Alembert. But he was still chronically poor and so accepted a position as the tutor and traveling companion to the son of the Prince of Lübeck and Holstein. This was the third fortuitous turn. En route to his appointment, he stopped off in Hamburg, where he met Lessing and, soon afterward, in Strasbourg with the prince, he met Goethe (this was July 1770). Realizing at once that Herder was less than content with his position, Goethe prevailed upon Karl August to invite his friend to Weimar as head of the clergy in the state. Herder kept the position for the rest of his life and seems to have been content—his children used to go looking for painted eggs in Goethe’s garden.43

  Herder is not nearly as famous as Goethe, but in many ways his ideas and influence were more immediate, more direct, and more widespread.44 “Like Max Weber over a century later, Herder was preoccupied with the problem of social relations in a world that increasingly came to resemble for him a vast machine in which men were like cogs, whose lives were governed by the inexorable operations of mechanical bureaucracies.” He addressed this predicament in two books, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind; 1784–91; four volumes), and Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity), published in 1774. Here, his main concern was, as he put it, to discover the rules of the morals of association. What invisible hand is there that shapes spontaneous political association?

  Hume and Kant aside, the main influence on Herder was Leibniz. Herder looked upon Leibniz as “the greatest man Germany ever possessed” and saw himself as part of that tradition—Leibniz, Thomasius, Lessing, and Herder. These men had conceived the idea of “becoming,” when the universe was held to be an “organic” entity and in which Leibniz’s understanding of history as “a continuous process of development, energised by human striving,” profoundly affected Herder’s historical thinking. For Lessing, moral striving, “moral becoming,” as he put it, was the central concern of all education, of all cultivation. “Man could only be truly himself by consciously realising his individuality.” Herder refined this eloquently. He insisted that, for him, humanity was not a state into which man was born “but rather a task demanding fulfilment by conscious development.” This idea of Bildung as a task dominated the philosophy of the majority of subsequent German writers, from Goethe, as we have seen, to Humboldt and Fichte.45 Again, one can imagine Henry Sidgwick snorting, as he turns in his grave, but there is a unity here in German thought: Bildung as a task comes from the recognizably Pietist lineage and looks forward to Weber’s concept of the Protestant work ethic. It was also subversive, because it placed a premium on the intrinsic worth of individual judgment, and accordingly rejected (external) authority as the fundamental source in religious and moral matters.

  Herder also thought that Rousseau had in effect put the cart before the horse. A “social contract” was a misnomer for him because, as he saw it, the state of society is man’s state of nature. Man is born into a family whether he likes it or not. But man isn’t just a social animal—he is also a political animal, for life in society needs order, organization.46 This is where Herder joined forces with Bodmer, Gottsched, Wolf, and Humboldt: the underlying “sustaining force” of all this organization, he said, is language. As Locke had done, Herder dismissed the divine origin of language. There was, he said, no stage or epoch in prehistory when language had been invented, nor had it developed from animal sounds. We cannot think without words, he insisted, therefore language must have emerged when consciousness developed.47 Which meant that, for Herder, language reflects the history and psychology of a distinctive social heritage, and this was by far his most influential argument—language identifies a Volk or nationality, and this, the historico-psychological entity of the common language, is for him “the most natural and organic basis for political organisation…Without its own
language a Volk is an absurdity (Unding). For neither blood and soil, nor conquest and political fiat can engender that unique consciousness which alone sustains the existence and continuity of a social entity.”48 Language, as well as unifying a community, also identifies that community’s consciousness of difference from those speaking other tongues. “A Volk, on this theory, is a natural division of the human race, endowed with its own language, which it must preserve as its most distinctive and sacred possession.” Language was given a potency it had never had before.

  It was this close association, between language and self-consciousness, that brought about such a drastic change in the most commonly accepted idea of a “nation.” “A nation no longer simply meant a group of citizens united under a common political sovereign.”49 It was now regarded as a separate natural entity whose claim to political recognition “rested on the possession of a common language.”50

  Herder went further. For him, in any Volk grouping, there were two elements. There was first the bourgeoisie (das Volk der Bürger), and second a minority of intellectuals (das Volk der Gelehrsamkeit). The Bürger were not only the most numerous but also the most useful (he called them “the salt of the earth”), and he sharply distinguished them from what was in fact a third group, the “rabble” (Pöbel). What distinguished the Bürger, and what was the chief reason for their social inferiority and political impotence (until that point), he said, was their lack of education. The fact that this was so, he insisted, could not be put down to innate ability, or lack of it. “It was rather the harvest of persistent and wilful neglect.” He therefore came out boldly and blamed the ruling aristocracy for this state of affairs. “That those as yet unborn should be destined to rule over others not yet born, simply by virtue of their blood, seemed to Herder the most unintelligible of propositions.”51