GOETHE

The evolution of a Renaissance man.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) bridged the ages of Enlightenment and Romanticism. He reshaped German as a medium for lyric poetry, philosophical inquiry, and scientific examination. He sought the essence of culture in a blend of folklore and erudition. He turned the story of Doctor Faustus into a tale of modern intellectualism. This biography rewards the patient reader with a map of Goethe’s social, political, and mental landscapes. Its central questions are: How did Goethe think? How was that thought shaped by a history of 18th-century ideas? How did he make, and respond to, 19th-century ways of looking at the world? Behind all his work is this: What is human nature and what is the place of humankind in the natural world? The great scholarly achievement of this book lies in its synthesis of Goethe’s personal writing (especially his letters) with his public work. It shows how he created modern German as a language for a people—how the German-speaking peoples, scattered across small kingdoms, duchies, and imperial lands, could find unity in a literary heritage. This book does not ignore the paradoxes of Goethe’s life. A man of great faith, he was an indefatigable analyst of nature. A proponent of human freedom, he could consort with despots. Goethe enabled us to find philosophy in literature, much as he sought faith in Shakespeare and the Greeks. Bell, a professor at King’s College London, distills an ethical lesson from that search: “Faith is…an expression of compassion. What matters is that our compassion engages with the world….The natural human capacity to feel concern or compassion, rooted deep in our nature, dwarfs any reasoning about good or evil or otherwise of religious doctrine.” That is the lesson of literature, and that is the lesson of this amazing book.

An epic reassessment of the founder of modern German life and letters.