The German Genius

self-consciousness, and the self-confidence, of the middle classes.
    As for many others, for Wieland the German nation was “not really a nation, but an aggregate of many nations, like ancient Greece.” 10 He nevertheless thought that modern Germany had a character all its own, meaning he had sympathy with—and encouraged in his journal—the early Sturm und Drang poets then emerging. He also welcomed Goethe’s Götz as “the most beautiful and interesting of monstrosities, worth a hundred of our sentimental comedies.” 11 Here was the kind of new voice that, he felt, was needed.
    T HE F IRST G REAT T RAGIC N OVEL
     
    Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s arrival in “the large chateau” stemmed from a chance meeting he had with Karl August, the son of Ernst August and Anna Amalia, in Frankfurt. Having chosen his bride, Luise of Hesse-Darmstadt, as he approached his eighteenth birthday, the prince regarded himself as now free to embark on his grand tour. This began, sensibly enough, with a visit to Karlsruhe, where Luise was living, but en route Karl August stopped at Frankfurt, where he was introduced to Goethe, already well known because of Götz and Werther (see Chapter 4). This unlikely pair got on surprisingly well together and met for a second time months later, this time in Karslruhe. The prince had overnighted there on his way back from Paris, while Goethe was bound for Switzerland. Paris had seduced Karl August. His tastes and his ambitions had grown more sophisticated and more cosmopolitan: Goethe was invited to Weimar. 12
    The difference between Frankfurt and Weimar was larger than Goethe expected. In Frankfurt, a center of commerce, position was largely determined by financial criteria. At Weimar, in contrast, a basic distinction was made between those admissible at court ( die Hoffähige ) and the rest. To be admitted at court, a title was necessary. And so was established a pattern that was to be repeated. Goethe was raised to the nobility, becoming Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as happened with Schiller and Herder some years later. 13
    At first, Goethe thought of himself as a visitor in Weimar, and this seems to be how others regarded him. Portraits show a man with large eyes, a slight crown on the bridge of his prominent nose, sensual lips. When he arrived in Weimar, Goethe was twenty-six to the prince’s eighteen—a large gap at that age and not the only important difference between them. Karl August might be a prince but Goethe was already much more famous. The previous year, he had produced Die Leiden des jungen Werthers ( The Sorrows of Young Werther ), which, it is no exaggeration to say, had taken Europe by storm. Generally regarded as the first piece of “confessional” literature, this novel is of added interest because of its autobiographical element. The plot line of Werther is closer to Goethe’s life than that between almost any other author and their works.
    In his early twenties, Goethe had spent time in Wetzlar, a small town forty miles north of Frankfurt. Ostensibly looking for a law practice, but not trying too hard, he spent a good deal of his time reading and writing poetry and falling in love with a young woman, Charlotte Buff, who was already engaged to someone else. It took Goethe a while to realize he could never win Charlotte, but then he moved on to Koblenz where, as was his way, he soon fell for someone else. He kept in touch with Lotte and her fiancé and through them learned the details of the suicide of a mutual friend, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. Jerusalem had fallen in love with a married women who hadn’t returned his feelings, whereupon the young man had borrowed some pistols (from none other than Charlotte’s fiancé) and shot himself. It therefore comes as no great surprise, as Michael Hulse says, that Die Leiden des jungen Werthers , published in Leipzig in 1774, was received in its time (and continues to be read) as partly autobiographical, partly biographical. 14 Goethe, who took barely four weeks to write the book, later referred to it often as a “confession.”
    The plot is simple and, says Nicholas Boyle, could only have been written because of Goethe’s religious emancipation. 15 Werther falls in love with Charlotte (Lotte), who is betrothed to another man. Although his love is requited by Lotte, it is doomed, and the unresponsiveness of the world and the couple’s sufferings eat away at him, so that he can see no alternative but to shoot himself with