Goethe: Kunstwerk des Lebens, Biographie by Rüdiger Safranski (review)

In 1863 Henry Lewes asserted in the preface to the second edition of The Life of Goethe that “there is little probability of any subsequent publication bringing to light fresh material of importance.” By now, of course, Goethe’s writings have been so thoroughly mined that a biographer is truly in a position to evaluate the person and the work in a way that was not available to Goethe’s earliest biographers or even those of the first half of the twentieth century. As Rüdiger Safranski notes in the preface to Goethe: Kunstwerk des Lebens, no modern writer has had so much written about him. Although the bibliography includes secondary sources, Safranski dispenses with scholarly footnotes and paraphernalia. His account is based solely on primary sources: “Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher, Gespräche, Aufzeichnungen von Zeitgenossen” (17–18).

Let it be said straight off that this is an elegantly told story—which one might expect of Safranski, who is not a professional academic but a public intellectual. Besides demonstrating a sovereign command of his material, Safranski is able to make big ideas comprehensible and also enjoyable to read about, as already demonstrated in biographies of Schopenhauer (1988), Heidegger (1994), Nietzsche (2000), and Schiller (2004). Such a narrative gift is fitting for a biography of Goethe, who was known to say that he found the explanations of philosophers tiresome (even if, it must be admitted, Safranski’s portrayal of the influence of Spinozism on Goethe is a bit hard going).

So, what kind of “life” is this? It is helpful to contrast the approach here with that of Nicholas Boyle’s multivolume Goethe: The Poet and the Age. Note that Boyle (unlike everyone else) does not bill his study as a biography: his subject is the development of the literary artist within his time. Thus, for Boyle and in contrast to Safranski, Goethe’s diaries are “voluminous and eventually informative, but without any literary interest.” It is through such primary sources that Safranski aims instead to portray what Goethe made of his life. His promise: “So wird Goethe lebendig und tritt auf, wie zum ersten Mal” (18).

The first thing that strikes this reader about Safranski’s Goethe is his emotional volatility, evident in childhood, but which does not lessen as he ages. Indeed, one might draw conclusions about Goethe unintended by Safranski. From the channeling of the early prophets and divinities in the Sturm und Drang poetry to expressions of adulation for Napoleon, Goethe’s life gives meaning to the term “Napoleon complex.” Note this description: “Im Hochgefühl der poetischen Inspiration fühlte er sich den Propheten immerhin so nahe, daß er sich in Gestalten wie Mohammed oder Abraham ganz gut einfühlen konnte, wenn sie von einem Gott ganz erfüllt waren” (147). Safranski does not wish to be reductive, to ascribe the life and work to pathology. (That has already been done, beginning in 1896 with Über das Pathologische bei Goethe by the psychiatrist P. J. Möbius, who also authored, in 1909, Über den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes.) From the evidence here, Goethe was aware of this grandiose aspect of himself and its complement, depression, and he would later transform these moods into “Gedanken,” “Bilder,” “Symbole,” and, in Weimar, “Tätigkeit.” The task was not easy. It was a life’s work. Thus, “Kunstwerk des Lebens.”

Again, it is interesting to contrast Boyle, who concedes that what Goethe called his soul was (quoting Goethe) “like an everlasting firework display, never pausing for rest,” but this concession is part of a larger point, explaining why Goethe pursued Charlotte von Stein: she was “the antithesis of so much that he had been, and indeed still was. He used her very emptiness [ouch!] as the instrument for him to live to the full the life of the principal alternative possibility that contemporary Germany offered to a man of his gifts and background, the life of an official at an absolutist court. He used her to compress into interiority...