On Goethe’s birthday, revisit Adam Kirsch on what the great genius of German literature seemed to possess that the modern world lacked—a “Grow up!” kind of wisdom, the ability to understand life and how it should be lived.
The book captured the sensibility of a generation, running, as Thomas Mann wrote, “like a fever and frenzy over the inhabited earth, acting like a spark in a powder magazine, setting free a dangerous amount of pent-up force.” At least some of Goethe’s readers took him to be endorsing and glamorizing Werther’s suicide. One young woman, a Weimar courtier named Christel von Lassberg, drowned herself in the River Ilm with a copy of the novel in her pocket.
Goethe knew his hero’s despair as well as any reader could. In fact, the book became scandalous for its resemblance to real people and events. Werther’s strained triangular relationship with Charlotte, whom he loves, and Albert, whom he respects as a friend, was taken directly from Goethe’s own entanglement with a woman named Charlotte Buff and her fiancé, Johann Kestner.
At the same time, he developed a conception of nature that provided an alternative to the mathematical and spiritless mechanism that the Enlightenment seemed to offer. “The Essential Goethe” includes a generous sample of his scientific writing, which reveals how much of Goethe’s science was devoted to the idea of holism—the sense, more an intuition than a theory, that the universe is a living organism that develops and grows.
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