The Life of Goethe

Abstract

Williams, John R. Life of Goethe. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998. 318 pp. $44.95 hardcover. 1999 is the 250th anniversary of Goethe's birth, and coinciding with the planned colloquia and conferences celebrating the most renowned man of German letters is a groundswell of publications. Life of Goethe is one such work and aims at reintroducing Goethe to the English-speaking audience and providing insights into Goethe's life and work for the scholar and student of German literature. Williams contextualizes Goethe's literary work within his biography and contemporary literary and political movements. He argues that the broad lines of Goethe's private and public life can be discerned from his literary works which reflect and are a product of his transformation from a youthful radical to neoclassicist and from a Frankfurt patrician to a minister of state. In order to establish a firm biographical and historical base from which to proceed and interpret Goethe's works, Williams begins the study with a narrative of Goethe's life. Williams wishes to correct some of the historical misunderstandings regarding Goethe and avoids the ideological extremes that have characterized Goethe reception. To understand Goethe and his life, one must understand the social, political, and cultural context in which he lived and wrote, as well as the human side of him. Williams divides the biographical section into many short subsections based on chronology and the cities where Goethe lived. In chapter two Williams argues that Goethe was most gifted as a poet and that his lyrical oeuvre meshes with his emotional, intellectual and even his professional career in a clearly recognizable biographical profile (54). Williams concentrates on Goethe's development as a poet, organizes the chapter by poetic genre and subgenre, and marks overarching changes and shifts in literary style and content. Though the subsections coincide with traditional demarcations of Goethe's poetry, such as The Sesenheim Poems, Williams avoids generalizing about Goethe's poetry and his style. In the chapter on Goethe as dramatist, Williams closely details how Goethe's dramas reflect historical, political, and cultural shifts, and interprets individual dramas, including lesser known and neglected works. Herder, argues Williams, served as the first major literary influence on Goethe, and directed his interests toward German literary and cultural traditions. Williams stresses the great breadth of Goethe's literary genius. Whereas Goethe may be best known for Gotz and his Weimar dramas, he experimented during the period of the Storm and Stress with many dramatic and forms (Fastnachtspiele, odes, hymns), figures, ideas, and verses. Williams suggests that Goethe entered the classical age earlier than generally thought: It seems that for all his and Schiller's later efforts to establish a republic of letters in Weimar and Germany in the 1790s, Goethe was at this stage around 1780, when both the Empfindsamkeit and the Storm and Stress seem to be losing their impetus (145). He does not contend that all of Goethe's dramas after 1780 are examples of classicism-in fact he argues that Egmont is closer to the Storm and Stress and is devoid of classicizing features-but rather that Goethe becomes skeptical about a renewal of German literature and begins to turn to classical antiquity as an aesthetic model. …