Goethe

His Life and Times

Richard Friedenthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351517058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The study of Goethe's life is a task that each generation must undertake anew. Thus writes Richard Friedenthal, author of this rich biography. Spanning eight momentous decades of war, revolution, and social upheaval, Goethe's life reveals itself as one of conflict and dynamic development, of inner contradiction and unceasing creativity.As novelist, dramatist, and poet, Goethe produced epochal works of fiery romanticism, only later to dedicate himself to a classical ideal of purity and measure. His superb love lyrics immortalize a succession of ardent relationships; yet, in him too, was a strain of frigid egotism mingled with an Olympian detachment. The new introduction serves to place in perspective this outstanding work on the German master.He was capable of tirelessly exploring the external world as physiologist, geologist, and botanist. He was equally capable of plunging to the depths of profound subjective analysis. A minister of state, a model of distinguished probity, Goethe nonetheless lived a life of passionate seeking, eternally questioning official values. Nothing perhaps better sums up this vast complexity than his lifelong work, Faust, the supreme dramatization of man's quest on earth.

1
In Praise of Ancestry

It was a difficult birth, continuing over a period of three days. Goethe entered the world almost lifeless, ‘quite black’ as his mother said later. This meant, in fact, blue, through respiratory deficiency and interruption of the circulation; asphyxia is the medical term. There was no doctor present, only a midwife, who is said to have been clumsy, and the grandmother, who stood behind the blue check curtains of the bed; these curtains could be drawn. The child was shaken and rubbed under the heart with wine. ‘Ratin, he is alive,’ cried the old woman as the infant opened his eyes, very large dark brown, almost black eyes, as they were later described.

In his memoirs, Dichtung und Wahrheit, the fact and fiction of his life, Goethe sounds a more solemn note to record the date and hour of his birth: August 28, 1749, as the clock struck noon. He tells us the astrological constellation of the planets, which was favourable: the sun in the sign of Virgo, culminating, Jupiter and Venus favourable, Mercury not adverse, all of which had, for him, its secret and direct bearing on the course of his life. The full moon exercised its influence and opposed the birth until his planetary hour had passed.

A lying-in room in the eighteenth century, even in houses belonging to well-to-do middle-class families, was no very hygienic affair, quite apart from the absence of a doctor in this case. We must imagine the room as rather dark, with bull’s-eye window-panes. The house was old; in fact, it consisted of two houses joined together, with many stairs and many ‘Gothic’ irregularities. The child was laid in an old family crib, made of brown wood with inlaid decoration; he was tightly swaddled, according to the custom of the day, and was probably subjected to other procedures which would shock us now. Infant mortality was high then, in the Goethe family as well. The birth was a miracle, but the boy was sturdy and lived to a great age, like Voltaire, whose life was also despaired of at birth. A wet-nurse was called in, the mother did not nurse the child herself.

At his christening the boy was given the names of his maternal grandfather, Johann Wolfgang Textor, who had just recently been made Schul-theiss, the head of the judiciary, and the highest permanent appointment in the town. During the ceremony the infant was held over an old family heirloom dating from Gothic times, a bridal rug covered with a pattern of flowers and foliage. At Goethe’s funeral in 1832, in the ‘Prince’s Vault’ at Weimar, this rug was brought out once more and laid under the coffin.

The christening, at the Katharinenkirche, was performed according to the rites of the Protestant Church. Although the Emperors, who were strictly Roman Catholic, were elected and crowned in Frankfurt, the city was strictly Lutheran, and Goethe retained a formal adherence to this faith. He used to refer to himself as ‘decidedly non-Christian’, and even, to stress the fact, as ‘pagan’, or else he would profess to having a creed of his own; but occasionally when there was talk of protesting, he claimed to be a ‘cheerful Protestant’.

The notice of his birth, in the Frankfurt weekly paper, was printed along with others announcing births of children to craftsmen and merchants, to a brewer, a potter, a joiner, a baker, a carpenter, a cobbler and a tailor. It ran: ‘S(alvo) T(itulo) Hr. Joh. Caspar Goethe, Ihro Rom. Kayserl. Majestät würklicher Rath, einen Sohn, Joh. Wolffgang.’

Those were the old days: an old Imperial city, a republic of German nationality within the Holy Roman Empire, with its many crafts and trades, its old houses and crooked streets; a young mother of just 18, and an already ageing father of 39.

Bach and Handel were still alive. The memories passed on to the child by his parents and their circle went back to the beginning of the century and beyond. The wars against the Turks were no mere legend, nor were the wars of Louis XIV, traces of which were still clearly to be seen in the Palatinate and in nearby Heidelberg. On the city gates of Frankfurt, impaled on iron spikes, the withered and shrunken heads of rebels from times long past were still displayed. Frankfurt remained a medieval city, its houses and streets tightly packed within its walls; each morning the keepers of the city gates still had to collect the keys from the burgomaster before the gates could be opened. Membership of a guild was compulsory, there were regulations as to dress, there were patricians and plebeians. In the squares of the town, scaffolds were erected for the public execution of infanticides. The world of Goethe’s Faust is no figment of his imagination, conjured up from a long-vanished age, it is the world in which he was born and bred.

His long life saw many changes: insurrections and wars; revolutions in the social order and living conditions, in science, art and literature. He lived through the Seven Years War, which among other things destroyed the old Empire; he lived through the American Revolution, and the French Revolution which followed, bringing twenty-five years of war in its train; he saw the rise and fall of Napoleon, the restoration of the monarchy and the reaction to it, and, as a very old man, the Paris Revolution of 1830 in which the proletariat made itself felt as a power for the first time. There were changes in art from baroque to rococo, and on to classicism and romanticism; German literature developed out of provincialism and insignificance into its noblest grandeur, with Goethe himself representing it to the world. Through him the tiny city of Weimar became the focal point of world literature, a place of pilgrimage for young Russians, Englishmen, Americans, Serbs, Poles, Scandinavians and Italians. Technical development made tremendous strides, and the aged Goethe dreamed of seeing the construction of the Suez and Panama Canals. His collections contained models of the first railways, while on the Lake of Constance steamers were plying in the service of Herr Cotta, his able publisher and a business man of great distinction. In science alchemy became chemistry, out of which whole new industries were already developing. The old theological picture of the world was dethroned and man given his place within the framework of natural evolution, a step in which Goethe, as a natural scientist, played a part. New branches of science were discovered, leading to ever-increasing intensity of specialization and refinement, while Goethe, the last of the old order, still attempted to combine in his own person the whole realm of science and research. Religious belief underwent changes from old-fashioned piety, as practised by Goethe’s mother, to enlightenment, then back again to mysticism or strict orthodoxy, and then once more to whole-hearted materialism and scientific thinking. In all these changes Goethe participated, in his own way, maintaining his own belief in Gott-Natur and in a future life for his own powerful entity, whose destruction by death he was quite unable to envisage.

The origins of such a genius remain a mystery. The most extensive research into Goethe’s ancestry has produced only a series of names and dates reaching back into the fifteenth century. But why this particular grandson of a ladies’ tailor, this descendant of farriers and, on his mother’s side, of lawyers, butchers, wine merchants and clerks, became the greatest German poet is a mystery as deep as that of the genius of Handel, whose pedigree, carefully traced for many generations, reveals not one single musically gifted forebear. Nor is much to be learned from an examination of the geographical origins of Goethe’s family. Central Germany and Thurin-gia, the cradle of so many great men, are prominent on both sides. In his figure and in his features, however, with his commanding dark Italian’ eyes, Goethe was in every way a child of the Rhine and Main districts. His origins were in the Roman Limes, the first great wall to divide the European world, and from behind which, for nearly four hundred years, the Roman legions kept their watch on German soil. The Roman blood, however, is open to question, for the legions were recruited not from Italy alone, but from Spain, Syria and the Balkans as well, and we are left only with the strange fact that Goethe felt completely at home in Italy from the moment he arrived, ‘as though I had been born and bred there’. But this in itself proves nothing; the yearning for Italy is an old German tradition, dating back to the medieval marches on Rome, and to Albrecht Diirer. Goethe’s father had made the pilgrimage, the only great event in his otherwise empty life.

We must content ourselves with a few pointers. The father’s family came from Thuringia, where Goethe’s great-grandfather was a farrier. His grandfather, Friedrich Georg, left his native village and turned to a more elegant craft; he became a ladies’ tailor, going to France to study the finer aspects of his trade. Goethe would have nothing to do with this highly honourable calling of his grandfather’s, and never once did he refer to it. In his old age, when discussing his title with the faithful Eckermann, he said: ‘We Frankfurt patricians always considered ourselves the equals of the aristocracy, and the day I held the diploma of nobility in my hand I was not aware of anything that I had not already long possessed.’ And this Goethe legend, invented by himself without the slightest compunction, for long received general acceptance. In the ‘sixties of the last century Bancroft, the American Ambassador in Berlin and an eminent historian, once found himself in a dispute on the subject with a high Prussian official; Bismarck was also present. The official maintained the thesis of the patrician origin, Bancroft contradicted him. At their next meeting he referred to a sentence in Lewes’ newly published biography: ‘Goethe’s grandfather was a tailor’s apprentice who came to Frankfurt and became a master of the tailors’ guild there.’ Bismarck was asked his opinion. He declared: ‘Of Goethe’s origin I know nothing, but I do know that he had a tailor’s soul; then, to roars of laughter, he quoted Goethe’s poem An den Mond:

Selig, wer sich vor der Welt

Ohne Hass verschliesst,

Einen Freund am Busen hält

Und mit dem geniesst...

(Blessed the man who stands aloof, unhating, from the world, clasping to his breast a friend with whom to share his joy ...) ‘Anyone who can write that has a tailor’s soul. Just imagine! No hatred! And clasping to his breast! ...’

Goethe’s grandfather, the tailor, travelled far and wide, and was a man of great ability. At the time of Louis XIV’s abolition of the Edict of Nantes, when, as a Protestant, he was driven out of France, he was working in Lyon, the centre of the silk industry; years later, in his foppish days, his grandson was to order an elegant silk frock coat from there. In addition to many able Huguenot manufacturers, soldiers and officials, Germany has to thank Louis XIV for her greatest poet.

Friedrich Georg went to Frankfurt. Throughout his life he called himself Gôthé. In order to be accepted into the Guild, custom required him to marry a tailor’s daughter or widow; he did so twice, in fact. On the death of his first wife he married a rich tailor’s widow who bought him a prosperous inn, the Weidenhof ₉ which for long remained one of the leading inns of Frankfurt. The business card of a subsequent owner shows an almost palatial building of four stories, with half pillars in the centre of the façade; the card also contains a list of distances from important towns, including places as far afield as Rome and St Petersburg, for the convenience of an international clientele. It was the wine trade that brought F. G. Gothe most of his business, and through it he amassed the greater part of the family fortune, from which his grandson was to defray his living expenses for very many years. A patrician the wine-merchant was not, but he left ninety thousand florins in land, mortgages and hard cash, this last contained in seventeen leather bags. The son, Goethe’s father, made no addition to the fortune; he lived as a ‘gentleman of means’, with his title of Councillor—a meaningless sham, bought from the Emperor for three hundred and thirteen florins.

It is not easy to get an accurate picture of this Johann Caspar. Even Goethe’s descriptions of his father are vague; they contain complaints of severity and lack of understanding but, at the same time, note his inner weakness, with its resulting awkwardness of behaviour. He studied law; the tailor wanted his son - the elder son was an imbecile - to better his social position by entering the influential ranks of the legal profession. After studying at the University of Leipzig he took his doctor’s degree at Giessen, but without studying there; his thesis, a comprehensive affair, was published, and the cost of all this to his father was the not inconsiderable sum of 200 florins. He made the Italian tour, a very ambitious undertaking for a young man of no social standing, and afterwards, with the help of a language teacher, wrote an account of it in Italian. This Italian journey was the great experience of his life; anticipating his son’s own journey to Rome, it exerted a considerable influence on Goethe. The strangest omens are to be found in the thick quarto volume: interest in the natural sciences and in mineralogy, including a detailed list of the types of stone used in Verona for building; observations on the evolution of all natural phenomena, from a speck of dust to the Creator; and, as an appendix, even the story of a love affair with a beautiful Milanese girl to whom he sends messages, from the window of his room at the inn, painted in large characters on a sheet of paper: ‘When may I express my adoration in greater intimacy?’ But the greater intimacy was never achieved, and in this it foreshadowed Goethe’s affair, half a century later, with the Milanese Maddalena Riggi.

With this journey, however, the energy of Johann Caspar seemed to have spent itself. He dawdled, did not want to return home, and then, when he did so, presented himself as a haughty and overbearing young man, demanding, without further ado, a seat on the city council, for which he was prepared, initially, to forgo any salary. He received a curt refusal, probably because the city fathers did not like this rattling of the money-bag by the son of such a recent arrival as the tailor’s apprentice. Out of spite he bought himself a title which, socially, placed him on a level with the higher Frankfurt circles, but which, at the same time, debarred him from any further attempted participation in the city government. Hurt and disappointed he withdrew into private life, before his public life had even begun. A further six years elapsed before he married, and then when nearly 40, a considerable age in those days, he took for a wife, but without a dowry, the 17-year-old Elizabeth Textor, a member of a highly respected family of lawyers. A year later the son, Johann Wolfgang, was born, followed by a daughter, Cornelia, and three other children who died young; after that, it seems, marital intercourse ceased. Henceforth the Councillor devoted himself exclusively to his collection of books, objects of natural history, paintings by Frankfurt masters and the education of his two children. His last major undertaking was the conversion of the two houses he inherited into a single building, containing a stately patrician staircase. His cultural interests were extremely catholic, the catalogue of his library covering a wide field; but one book in it he seems never to have read, a pamphlet by a Herr von Wondheim, The Art of Being Always Happy. The Councillor possessed a lute, which he tuned endlessly but which, as his son tells us, he almost never played. No characteristic is more significant of his life than this. Unsung melodies may have slumbered in his soul. They were never heard.

His father-in-law, Textor, was a man of very different calibre; sly and clever he had worked his way stubbornly up the tangled paths of city politics until he reached the top and achieved the leading position in the city republic of Frankfurt. But he was no patrician either. The Textors, the name latinized from Weber, were lawyers, and had lived in Frankfurt for only a few decades. His wife, a Lindheimer, came from a long line of butchers, who had also risen to the lawyer class in the person of her father. Textor had met his wife at the Reichskammergericht - The Imperial Supreme Court of Appeal - in Wetzlar, where the poet was later to be inscribed. Here, too, occurred the episode, immortalized by Goethe’s little poem about his ancestry, in which ‘one of them courted a lady fair’. Young Textor was summoned to answer a charge of adultery. As evidence the enraged cuckold threw onto the courtroom table the culprit’s wig, which he had left in the bedroom on taking his hurried departure. Quite apart from this episode, however, he seems to have been fond of the good things in life. He was a gourmet, and his cookery book, which has been preserved, contains, among other things, complicated experiments in mixing together crabs and oysters. In his garden he cultivated peaches and carnations, and it was thus, as a patrician tending his trellised fruit trees, that Goethe remembered him.

With his son-in-law, Textor was soon on bad terms; they did not see eye to eye politically, and during the Seven Years War they nearly came to blows. The Schultheiss was a loyal supporter of the Emperor, as befitted an Imperial city official, while the Councillor was an admirer of Frederick the Great. The latter accused his father-in-law of dark deeds, saying he had been bribed by the French and had surreptitiously opened the city gates to them. The Schultheiss threw a knife at him, the Councillor drew his sword; a pastor, who was present, intervened and stopped the fight.

Subsequent relations between the two were cool. Cool too, in all probability, was the atmosphere in the father-in-law’s home, which he kept overheated because he felt the cold.

With a cool head, and without standing on ceremony, he married off his daughters. He had spent little money on their education; they had grown up half wild and could barely read and write. The eldest got the elderly but well-to-do Councillor Goethe, the second a grocer named Melber, the third a pastor, and the youngest a lieutenant of the Frankfurt city garrison. The son became a lawyer and, later, a burgomaster. As he grew older Goethe virtually ignored this branch of the family. He lacked entirely the homely virtues of cultivating family relationships and of delving into his ancestry, let alone of actually engaging in research into his family pedigree. Once he had left Frankfurt he maintained a coolness even towards his own mother that is scarcely comprehensible. He visited her at long intervals, and then only when he could not avoid it; during the last eleven years of her life he neglected her completely, although he travelled often enough for other purposes. The references to her in his memoirs are meagre and tell us little. He intended to write a postscript to Dichtung und Wahrheit in praise of ‘the best of all mothers’, but it was never completed and was padded out with stories told him by Bettina Brentano, who had sat at his mother’s feet and then created her own legend of the Frau Rat. Goethe quotes these stories reflectively, as though he were saying: well, it may have been lik...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• 1 In Praise of Ancestry
• 2 Childhood
• 3 Gradus ad Parnassum
• 4 Leipzig Student
• 5 The Wayward Shepherd
• 6 Twilight
• 7 New Dawn
• 8 Strasbourg Wanderings
• 9 Friederike in Sesenheim
• 10 Doctor Goethe
• 11 Lotte in Wetzlar
• 12 Genius in Exuberance
• 13 The Sufferings of the Young Werther
• 14 Sturm und Drang
• 15 Physiognomies
• 16 Lili
• 17 Weimar
• 18 Sleigh-Ride
• 19 Government
• 20 Minister of State
• 21 The School of Frau von Stein
• 22 Courtier and Poet
• 23 Flight
• 24 Italy
• 25 Erotikon
• 26 Collected Works
• 27 Interpretation of Nature
• 28 Revolutionary Days
• 29 Goethe at War
• 30 The First German Republic
• 31 Two Masters
• 32 A German Idyll
• 33 Goethe’s Theatrical Mission
• 34 The Days of Napoleon
• 35 A Galaxy of Kings
• 36 Exploits and Sufferings of Light
• 37 The Patriarch
• 38 Awakening of the Sleeper
• 39 The Oriental Divan
• 40 The Wanderer in Weimar
• 41 Trilogy of Passion
• 42 Conversations with Goethe
• 43 Faust
• 44 World Literature
• Postscript
• Chronological Tables
• Bibliographical Survey
• Index