Reviewed by: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe by Jeremy Adler David E. Wellbery Jeremy Adler. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. London: Reaktion, 2020. 256 pp. This presentation of Goethe's life and work in the Critical Lives series is just the book every scholar of Goethe has been looking for, and this not merely because it is deeply informed, original in its judgments, and keenly insightful, but also because it is the book to recommend to students and nonspecialists who, after having read, say, Werther or Faust, seek a picture of the overall achievement. The book's virtues are legion. Perhaps foremost among them is that it calls attention to Goethe's contemporary significance while firmly situating his work within the context of European literary and cultural history. Goethe's work comes into view here as both remarkably relevant to the concerns of our moment and as a nodal point in a webwork of cultural traditions extending as far back as the biblical and Greco-Roman interventions. Thankfully, Adler's interrogation of Goethe's life and work sloughs off the carapace of disciplinary obsession and gives us a Goethe who deserves to be a topic of urbane and literate conversation. Indeed, the book is a demonstration of the indispensability of appreciation and discernment—the aims of "criticism" as it emerged in the Enlightenment—to a free and flourishing cultural life. Every knowledgeable reader will find in Adler's book moments that illuminate their own particular zones of interest. Among the segments I found especially salient was the account of Goethe's Italian sojourn and, in particular, the account of his deep engagement with Palladio. Brief but nonetheless sharply focused observations on Palladio's masterful treatise The Four Books of Architecture (1570), a copy of which Goethe, inspired by his autoptic inspection of several buildings, intensely studied, lead into an explanation of neoclassical form as remarkably supple and multivalent. The significance of Palladio's art for Goethe can, in fact, be studied in the latter's own drawings and commentaries on particular polyfunctional moments of architectural composition. Adler employs the insights gained from his consideration of the Palladio material in an account of the controlled fluidity that characterizes the verse version of Iphigenie auf Tauris, an account that, despite its brevity, is fresh and richly suggestive. I add to this Adler's important thought—one I share—that Iphigenie is best viewed together with the major dramatic works that chronologically frame it: Lessing's Nathan der Weise and Mozart and Schikaneder's Die Zauberflöte. The same (slightly dilated) decade that produced Kant's three critiques is likewise the epochal home of the three masterpieces of German-language Enlightenment drama. Add to this the link that Adler draws between Goethe's play and Mary [End Page 179] Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman and you have material for a rewarding exploration of Goethe's play. The same chapter that contains the discussion of Iphigenie concludes with a demonstration of abundance in brevity: a survey of Goethe's studies in plant morphology, his hypothesis of the Urpflanze, the famous debate with Schiller, the elegiac couplets of "Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen," and the afterlife of Goethe's theory in the work of Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and D'Arcy Thompson. I also want to call attention to the six rich pages Adler devotes to Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Of course, there is no more knowledgeable expert than Adler on the "chemical simile" that gives the novel its title and, to a degree, models the movements of its characters. Accordingly, the reader learns that the term comes from the Swedish chemist Bergman, that it charts the "chiastic" process of double exchange of bonded substances (not elements!), and that chemists today call the process "double decomposition." Adler does not dwell on the ambiguities of the figure but moves quickly and helpfully to its significance as a model of social and psychological cohesion and dissolution. It adds to our appreciation of the novel to learn that Max Weber, who often employed literary references to lend intellectual zest to his analyses, employed the concept of elective affinities in two of his most famous works. In criticism, choice of the...