On his return to Frankfurt, he found it: the life of Götz von Berlichingen, an early-sixteenth-century knight with a prosthetic iron hand, whose autobiography Goethe had stumbled upon in the city library. In six weeks, he drafted his first major work: “Götz von Berlichingen,” a sprawling history play in five acts, which staged its hero’s shifting military and sexual alliances in the disintegrating Holy Roman Empire. Amid kidnappings, poisonings, suicides, affairs, and the Peasants’ War—“the plot spirals into utter chaos,” Bell observes—Götz attempts to hold fast to his honor and his freedom to fight for whom he pleases. Loyal to the Emperor, scornful of the aristocracy, and sympathetic to the peasants’ desire for liberation, if not their bloodlust, he is torn between medieval chivalry and modern self-preservation. He incarnates a distinctly Goethean type: the exceptional individual who, as Goethe worried, “encounters the crude world” and must “surrender his high qualities and finally renounce them altogether.”
The play, published in 1773 and first performed in Berlin the following year, was “the most beautiful, the most captivating monstrosity,” a critic declared. Its mingling of high and low characters, settings, and dialects trampled on the rules of classical drama and inaugurated a German dramatic tradition. Success brought Goethe relief but also anxiety. “I think it will be some time before I again do something that will find a public,” he wrote.
Not so. “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” published in 1774, was his most influential work. It is now as famous for the cult that allegedly sprang from it—young men emulating its protagonist’s yellow waistcoat and his suicide—as for its odd epistolary form and even odder story. An ardent young man, Werther, falls in love with Lotte, a simple village girl engaged to a dependable but dull man named Albert. Love transforms Werther. He grows exquisitely and obsessively aware of the natural world around Lotte—the details of the mountains, the valleys, the walnut and linden trees under which she stands. In his letters, he imagines Lotte as a naturally occurring phenomenon, an innate and ineffable presence: “When I close my eyes, here, in my forehead, at the focus of my inner vision, her dark eyes remain.”
Falling in love was an early and harmless pleasure for Goethe. He wrote love letters that mingled lush images of nature with innocent theories of emotion—a true “Rousseauian child of nature,” as Bell describes him. “When I say love, I mean the oscillatory sensation in which our heart floats, moving always to and fro on the same spot,” Goethe mused in one draft. “We are like children on a rocking-horse, always in motion, always at work, and rooted to the spot.” The events in “Werther” were inspired by two abutting love triangles: Goethe’s infatuation with his friend Johann Christian Kestner’s wife, Charlotte, and the suicide of a neurotic lawyer, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, who shot himself with a pistol borrowed from Kestner.
But the novella is not merely about one man’s unrequited love. The critic György Lukács insisted that it is “one of the greatest love stories in world literature” because Goethe succeeded in generalizing his experience, and “concentrated into this love-tragedy the whole life of his time.” The prevailing Romantic view was that passion disrupted the social order, and so had to be denied. “What dreadful people there are, whose minds are completely absorbed in matters of etiquette,” Werther exclaims, when he takes a position at court to try to forget Lotte. Each episode in the book—Werther’s retreat from his home, his failure at court, his despair over Lotte’s marriage—arises from his inability to impress his desires onto an artificial and indifferent world. The more powerful his feeling, the greater his isolation. He can imagine no escape but to borrow two pistols from Albert and shoot himself in the head.
Whereas “Götz” had given German readers a glimpse of their past, “Werther” showed them their present. It was Goethe’s first attempt at what Lukács called the “educative novel,” in which man learns a “practical understanding of reality.” In “Werther,” this education concerns the true nature of desire. “That children do not know the reason of their desires, all the learned teachers and instructors agree,” Werther writes. Yet he fails to see that his desire to express the full force of his personality, and his despair when he cannot, are far from unique. Just as Lotte’s rejection feels scripted to him—“All that should be printed,” he tells her, “and we could recommend it to educators”—so, too, to us, do the passionate effusions of Werther’s letters, which mimic the verse that an educated man of his times could be expected to have absorbed. Werther, in his self-delusion, embodies another Goethean type, the longing man—ordinary, but convinced of the extraordinariness of his feelings. “Werther became a fashion because it was about a fashion,” Boyle observes. When the book was published, both those who swooned over it and those who censured it failed to catch its satiric edge. It was a good thing they hadn’t. “Götz” had made Goethe’s name in Germany, but “Werther” vaulted him to international renown. He was twenty-five years old.
Weimar came calling for Goethe’s services in 1774, weeks after “Werther,” and he answered with enthusiasm. It was a match of convenience. The Dowager Duchess believed that Goethe would help her teen-age son, the Duke, mature into a benevolent despot. Goethe believed that a small polity would be better than a large one for testing his political acumen. “The Duchies of Weimar and Eisenach will be a stage on which one can try out whether a role in worldly affairs suits one or not,” he wrote. He was not cheap, but he was a good catch—according to his valet, “lean, nimble, and dainty.” He thought he had the strength of mind to withstand the tedium and the pettiness of court: “I’m better positioned to recognize the thorough shittiness of this our secular majesty.”
But, as any administrator knows, shittiness can be hard to overcome. Much of Goethe’s time was spent putting out fires—literally, in the villages, and figuratively in the overspent treasury, the understaffed university, and the collapsing mines. At court, he was perceived as “minister-like and cold.” He valued “order, precision, speed,” and “self-denial.” With the Duke, matters were different. The rumored adventures of the twenty-six-year-old poet and his eighteen-year-old prince were crass and likely exaggerated. “They dug potatoes from the earth, cooked them with kindling in the forest, slept with girls in the forest, carved inscriptions on the trees,” a friend reported. Goethe, in his first decade at Weimar, lived half as a child of nature, half as a bureaucrat. He produced shorter poems and plays, essays on minerals and anatomy, and more than a thousand letters to a lady at court, Charlotte von Stein, with whom he had a chaste and confused liaison. But he struggled to finish the ambitious projects that he had started before his arrival—the play “Egmont” and his first full-length novel, “Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission.” By 1785, his friends noted his gloominess and his protracted illnesses. He asked the Duke for a reprieve to recover in the spa city of Karlsbad, and then secretly set off to Italy.
