Goethe:
His Faustian Life
by a. n. wilson
bloomsbury, 416 pages, $35
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is among the most confusing and compelling of all European figures, but one thing everyone can agree on is that he was a great man. Indeed, it was Goethe’s most notable popularizer in the English world, Thomas Carlyle, who gave us the “great man” theory of history. Playwright, poet, novelist, scientist, lawyer, administrator, diplomat, botanist, collector, Goethe seems to have done just about everything, and to have known and conversed with just about everybody: Novalis, Schelling, Schiller, Jacobi, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Herder, Wieland, Mendelssohn, Fichte, Alexander von Humboldt, and, of course, Napoleon.
The almost infinite scope and ambition of Goethe’s life, suggests Wilson, is most powerfully reflected in his best-known work, Faust, which presents the scientist, and the author, as Promethean magician-poets. Wilson tells Goethe’s story through the lens of Faust, skillfully weaving the impossibly diverse strands of his life into a coherent narrative.
The story begins in Frankfurt, where Goethe was raised by a father disappointed in his wayward son, and soon overflows into a series of dramatis personae. First we have Goethe as adolescent lover, sentimentally devoted to unattainable girls and maternal substitutes (a pattern from which he would never entirely break). Next comes the romantic literary firebrand of Sturm und Drang, the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, who sneered at the crumbling order of the Holy Roman Empire. Now the author of Torquato Tasso, the outrageous poet-courtier of Weimar, wooing his own princess, the lady-in-waiting Charlotte von Stein. But also and at the same time the Renaissance genius, the enlightened polymath who busied himself with reforming and administering the lands of his patron, Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. And when the role became too tiring or confining, as Wilson vividly evokes, then came the inevitable flight and transformation. Thus follows Goethe’s famous exile in Italy, where he found mature love and conceived of his great reconciliation of classicism and romanticism. He returned to Weimar to inflict fresh outrages, stubbornly refusing the lure of German nationalism during the struggles with Napoleon, and taking up with Christiane Vulpius in an extraordinarily modern relationship of cheerfully post-Christian cohabitation. Soon afterwards, Faust, Part One was finally published.
This account makes, like the ending of Faust, Part One, for a seemingly neat conclusion. But Goethe outlives any such convenient closure, as he outlived most of his friends and family. Christiane and his children all preceded him into the grave, the old certainties of German society fell apart in his lifetime, his own revolutionary sympathies were harshly tempered by experience. He lived on and on. Yet like Faust, he refused to cease striving. He fell in love with a teenage girl and, with all the mad romanticism of his youth, broke down in tears when she refused to marry him. He wrote more and more, finishing his autobiography, Poetry and Truth, and continued to develop his scientific ideas about color and botany. And he completed Faust, Part Two, a text of extraordinary strangeness, suffused with rich allegory and ending with Faust’s redemption by the intercession of the divine feminine. As the curtain finally fell upon this extraordinary life, his last words are reported to have been Mehr Licht!—More light!
It is impossible—Wilson is utterly persuasive on this point—to separate Goethe and his work. Yet Goethe is by no means the authoritative interpreter of his own writing. Indeed, he tended to resist such interpretation, and though he could frequently be prevailed upon to make statements about his work, these were often ambiguous and contradictory—as is much of the writing itself.
The combination of literary genius, personal celebrity, multiple personae, and a taste for ambiguity made Goethe, like the ever-changing Proteus he discovered in nature, a symbol whose meaning could be appropriated for wildly different causes and purposes. In the Prussian-dominated German Empire, he was rendered as a “national” poet, a totemic symbol of Teutonic culture. As Wilson notes, it was alleged by Rudolf Wustmann that German soldiers fought more ferociously on the Western Front because of the influence of Faust. If this seems a fanciful suggestion, it will seem less so when we consider the sentiments of Ernst Jünger, in his famous memoir of the war, Storm of Steel, as he was marching off to battle: “We had grown up in a material age, and in each one of us there was the yearning for great experience, such as we had never known. The war had entered into us like wine. We had set out in a rain of flowers to seek the death of heroes.” It does not take much effort to see the spirit of Dr. Faust’s ceaseless striving and comet-like ambition in this vision of martial romanticism, this hunger for experience no matter the human cost.
Yet when the German Empire was shattered and overthrown, it was to Goethe and Weimar that the founders of a new German republic symbolically turned, and it was in the rebuilt theater where Goethe had presided as director that the Weimar Constitution was drafted. In addition to escaping the violence on the streets of Berlin, the framers of a new Germany sought to capture a very different kind of Faustian spirit: that of the humanistic, nature-worshipping Weimar Classicism. This was an idea of Germany as an Athens of the North, a nation of scholars and poets rather than soldiers and industrialists.
The dream of Weimar would fast become a nightmare. Even as the moderates in Weimar were desperately trying to prevent Germany from tipping into communist revolution or back into militarist dictatorship, Oswald Spengler was interpreting Goethe in a very different light. Spengler saw classicism as a feature of “dying Cultures,” and he looked instead to the “Gothic springtime” as the origin of the vitality of Western culture. For Spengler, Western civilization was “Faustian”:
This is the outward- and upward-straining life-feeling—true descendant, therefore, of the Gothic—as expressed in Goethe’s Faust monologue when the steam-engine was yet young. The intoxicated soul wills to fly above space and time. An ineffable longing tempts him to indefinable horizons. Man would free himself from the earth, rise into the infinite, leave the bonds of the body, and circle in the universe of space amongst the stars.
This reading of Goethe reflected widespread fears in German society of the consequences of industrialization and modernity. As Spengler put it, the “country gentleman” was being superseded by “the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful.” Spengler’s analysis was brilliant and original, but lethally dangerous in the context of interwar Germany. Though Spengler, with his emphasis on culture and individual genius, thoroughly rejected the biological racism that the Nazis were to embrace, his ideas, and others like them, would serve as fuel for the terrible conflagration to follow.
Thus Goethe’s seemingly innocent veneration of nature, and his fascination with Indian philosophy, were echoed in far darker forms. Following in his footsteps, thousands of German boys in the Weimar period participated in the Wandervögel, youth organizations that traversed the mountains and forests of Germany and rebelled against industrialization, urbanization, and rationalism. One such wanderer above the sea of clouds was Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, a former Lutheran missionary in India who abandoned Christianity for an occultist philosophy that soon developed in a racist and nationalist direction. In 1933, Hauer founded the Deutsche Glaubensbewegung, the “German Faith Movement,” as an attempt to revive Germanic paganism and break with Christianity, which he attacked for its “Semitic” character. At its height, the movement had 200,000 members and aspired to act as Nazism’s official religion.
This most poisonous strain of German culture would finally bloom atop Ettersberg hill, the site of Goethe’s romantic walks and picnics, not far from the peak of Kickelhahn, where his most famous line of verse, the Über allen Gipfeln, was inspired. In 1937, the SS constructed the Buchenwald concentration camp in the midst of this famous geography, and the gentle beechwoods became a charnel house, as tens of thousands of Jews and political prisoners were worked or gassed to death.
To ask hard questions of Goethe’s work in this context seems to bring us quickly to another question: To what extent do the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s implicate German culture as a whole? Was Nazism a desecration and derailment of nineteenth-century German nationhood, or its fulfillment? Even if we stop short of a comprehensive judgement, we are still left wondering whether all the intellectual and cultural genius of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Goethe was missing some crucial element that might have inoculated their civilization against future errors.
A look at the history of this age only multiplies our doubts. The nature-loving youth movements of the time led some toward the Hitler Youth, but they were no less instrumental in developing the unbelievable courage of the bodies of young men and women who opposed Nazism, such as the Edelweiss Pirates and the White Rose. These youthful resistance groups, which flouted the strict sex separation of the German youth movement and employed chivalric, religious imagery in their underground resistance, had more than a touch of Goethe’s spirit of rebellion against both sexual and aesthetic puritanism.
That Goethe was a weapon so easily wielded by any hand seemed, for many trying to understand what had gone wrong in that time, a result of a fundamental flaw in the German character. Thomas Mann’s fictional denunciation of the Nazi regime in the 1940s was a retelling of Dr. Faustus. And in his address to the American people, The Coming Victory of Democracy, Mann identified Goethe as typical of the “pre-democratic era,” when intellectuals propounded theories “without the slightest consideration for the realistic consequences of thought. That indicates a lack of pragmatic spirit which is reprehensible.”
This judgment would form an important component in a common account of the failure of German nationhood. Unlike Britain and France, Germany entered industrial modernity still dominated by a conservative, aristocratic culture, and without the revolutionary experiences of England in the 1640s and France in the 1790s. Whereas the English and French intelligentsia were actively engaged in an emerging democratic politics, the luminaries of the German Enlightenment were generally content to labor under despotic regimes, benign or otherwise. On this reading, Goethe’s deference to authority and tradition anticipates the passivity of German citizens in the face of totalitarianism.
There are elements of truth to this picture, but it is not really adequate. Goethe’s combination of aesthetic radicalism and political conservatism does not add up to the complacent inwardness Mann seeks to make of it. Rather, there is in Goethe, who was in fact a serious and practical administrator in Weimar, a realistic skepticism toward popular liberal revolutions. Having, like much of the German intelligentsia, initially welcomed the French Revolution, he quickly grew horrified by its violent excesses—a major factor in his enthusiasm for Napoleon Bonaparte, who finally brought them to an end.
Indeed, the most disturbing elements of Goethe’s often contradictory politics are not his reactionary impulses, but rather his idealization of Napoleon as a great man of history driven by “daemonic” energies. We see in both aspects of the man not a complacent disengagement but a mix of merited wariness toward mass politics and a naive enthusiasm for charismatic leaders. Goethe is almost impossible to pin down, and he may be read either as promoting or as warning against the powerful poetic images he raises in his writing.
Wilson’s account of Goethe is unstinting in its critical eye for his subject’s failings—alcoholism, selfishness, extraordinary pride and pomposity—but, perhaps for that very reason, it gives us a touching portrait of the man. Wilson’s narrative evokes the famous painting by Tischbein of Goethe at the Window—relaxed at last, clad in anonymity, basking in the Mediterranean sunlight, still curious, unformed, yearning, eternally boyish—which continues to grip us with a sense of its ease and tenderness. And the very silliness of his endless unconsummated love affairs, which he pursues with all the starry-eyed abandon of P. G. Wodehouse’s Bingo Little, serves to increase our affection toward him.
Wilson’s argument that Goethe was a prophet of modernity, especially of its darker manifestations, is persuasive. In Faust, Part Two, the image of the Doctor seeking to reclaim land from the sea—the ultimate conquest of nature—and ordering the destruction of a chapel and humble cottage because they have evaded his all-mastering grasp, is a prescient allegory. Likewise, his vision of the Homunculus, an alchemically created human life, is the stuff of today’s debates over genetic manipulation and artificial intelligence.
Most unsettling of all is the violence Mephistopheles unleashes in Faust’s name, when Faust orders the expulsion of an old couple living on his land. The demon dresses up the murders in the language of bureaucratic apology and accident:
Pardon us! We’ve caused you trouble.
We knocked, and knocked on the door,
But it seemed locked for evermore:
We rattled it, and shook it too,
Until the planks broke in two:
We called aloud, and threatened, then,
But there was no reply, again.
And as happens in such cases,
They heard nothing, hid their faces:
But we commenced without delay
To drive the stubborn folk away.
That pair knew scant anxiety,
They died of terror, peacefully.
A stranger, who was hiding there,
And wished to fight, we tried to scare.
But in the fast and furious bout,
From the coals that lay about,
The straw took fire. Now all three,
In that one pyre, burn merrily.
Faust denies having given the order, Mephistopheles claims he was just following orders, and the very deaths are reduced to accidents.
We begin to approach both Goethe’s genius and his fatal flaw. As the literary critic Erich Heller observed, Goethe was incapable of writing real tragedy. In his Iphigenia, the tragic arc is cut short by everyone’s fessing up before disaster can befall. Faced with what, in any conventional work, would be Faust’s last horrific crisis following Part One, Goethe instead creates a scientific-mystical allegory in which the doctor is rescued from damnation by a host of angels and personifications of the divine feminine, including a deified Gretchen.
The inevitability of evil is a universal problem that faces every thinker, and Goethe’s failing is his refusal to face it. Even Mephistopheles is not really evil, but an embodiment of death and entropy, a necessary shadow that dogs the steps of the life force.
The problem, ultimately, is a religious one. Though Goethe differed greatly from Kant, he shared Kant’s belief that the understanding knows only appearances, not the thing-in-itself. When Goethe looked for a theory of illumination—of the light of knowledge by which we apprehend reality—he looked, as we see in his color theory, not to revelation, but to nature. And the religion of nature must, inevitably, naturalize evil, and so in some sense justify or explain it. If evil, in other words, is not a metaphysical privation, an external source of corruption, but rather an inevitable aspect of material reality, then it must have a purpose or a usefulness of some kind.
Very quickly, in such a system, evil infiltrates our highest desires and impulses. Though Dr. Faust claims to renounce a Baconian interrogation of nature—“I never used your ancient gear / To extract from her by torture with screw or lever / Nature’s mystery”—we should treat his renunciation with the greatest skepticism. Faust attempts to seduce his future divine feminine, Gretchen, through gifts, deceit, and poison. This desire to dissect and vivisect nature, to bend it to our own desires by way of money, manipulation, and force, seems not just a temptation but an inescapable result of the scientific endeavor. In Goethe’s account of technology’s corrupting power, he is a Cassandra warning of the horrors of the twentieth century, in which teleology is reduced to the pursuit of individual mastery.
Goethe is far too brilliant and sensitive to fail to see this, and the sharpness of Gretchen’s ruination, and the brutality of the scene that greets Faust’s final joy—he believes he hears his canal being built, when it is really the sound of his grave being dug—reflect this recurring shadow. But because Goethe is unable to resolve these contradictions, he litters his work with dangerous half-solutions, perilously enchanted by the magic of his poetic genius. Each of these half-solutions is a kind of retreat, echoing the periodic escapes in Goethe’s own life. There is the retreat to suicide in the face of the earth-spirit’s unknowability; the naive nature-worship in which Faust exults, even as Gretchen’s ruination plays out; the embrace of commercial and technological exploitation as a path to utopia, justifying every past crime and folly; and finally, the final aesthetic consummation with the “divine feminine,” which seems to evade questions of good and evil in the flight to beauty.
What makes this picture so alarming is that it cannot be safely offloaded onto Nietzsche, Spengler, and some failure of the German spirit. Goethe, as Wilson shows, is an utterly modern man. In tearing down the walls between science, religion, and poetry, he anticipates contemporary environmentalism and spirituality; and for a society radically unmoored from traditional sources of morality and meaning, and caught between humanistic sentiment and scientific rationalism, Goethe is indispensable reading. More damningly, Dr. Faust’s solipsism and individualism, his abstract humanitarianism and inconstant sentimentality, his obsession with his own inner psychology, and his tolerant superiority toward those who disagree, are recognizable as our own habits of mind today.
One aspect of Goethe’s modern mind, as Heller identified, was that he sought emotional resolution, not in a catharsis, but in a “cure.” There is an anticipation here of the catastrophic eugenic “solutions” to human suffering that would unfold in the twentieth century. But disturbingly for modern readers, it is a message that resonates just as much with our contemporary desire to discover psychological and medical solutions to spiritual and physical agony, solutions that increasingly include so-called assisted dying. Goethe’s own considerable comfort with the idea of suicide reflects not a despair of life, which he treasured, but a belief that the escape from pain is a noble and rational act, even to the point of sacrificing a human life. In Faust, he offers a Dantesque spiritual journey whose focus is purely individual and inward rather than relational, and whose final resolution is psychological rather than ethical.
Goethe anticipated, far in advance, a mentality that continues to lurk in many of our contemporary debates. We like to think in simple dichotomies, but his merger of sensualism and science, sadism and sentimentality, in the figure of Dr. Faust, is a bitterly accurate portrait. From the modern politician who avoids offensive language but is happy to drone-strike a wedding, to a society that is willing to kill the infirm to assuage their pain, we are all more Faustian than we know.
Sebastian Milbank is executive editor of The Critic.
