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Johann Wolfgang Goethe is widely recognized as the greatest
writer of the German tradition. The Romantic period in Germany
(the late eighteenth and early nineteengh centuries) is known
as the age of Goethe, and Goethe embodies the concerns of the
generation defined by the legacies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Immanual Kant, and the French Revolution. His stature derives
not only from his literary achievments as a lyric poet, novelist,
and dramatist but also from his often significant contributions
as a scientist (geologist, botanist, anatomist, physicist, historian
of science) and as a critic and theorist of literature and of
art. He was, finally, such an imposing personality that for the
last thirty years of his life he was Germany's greatest culturual
monument, serving as an object of pilgrimage from all over Europe
and even from the United State and leaving the small town of
Weimar a major cultural center for decades after his death. Out
of this extraordinary personal presence; out of his overwhelming,
almost threatening, literary stature; and out of the rejection
of his political position in the turbulence of nineteenth-century
German politics, a tradition developed that Goethe's greatness
lay in his wisdom rather than in his literary achievement. Nevertheless,
the continuing fascination with his works, especially with Faust
(1808, 1832; translated, 1823, 1838) confirms his position as
one of the most important writers of the Europen tradition. |
