There was a time when Europeans, North Americans, and their partners around the world would unite around their cultural greats: Beethoven’s Fidelio against tyranny; Friedrich Schiller on brotherhood (“Ode to Joy”); and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, polymath on everything.
Goethe (1749-1832) was torn between his respect for Napoleon’s initial mission of peace and stability under the Napoleonic Code, and his regret that Germans were divided and lived in dozens of mini-states. But his response was not to pursue German nationalism.
Instead, he wanted to raise people to a love of art and science. This objective did not have a narrow national focus but — if genuine — would attach itself to beauty and truth wherever it was found.
Much of Goethe’s own intellectual and emotional culture derived from France. How could he be anti-French? German nationalists, he feared, were demanding that he renounce Moliere as a foppish dramatist, Diderot as a fool, and Claude Lorraine as a bad painter.
Goethe enjoyed and learned from the literature of many cultures. He worked on Faust, his greatest work, for more than 60 years, adding insights he gained from the great authors of Western civilization — from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare and the rule-breaking novelists and dramatists of 18th and early 19th century Britain and France.
Steeped in Western culture, Goethe left his base in Weimar in his thirties to spend two years in Italy soaking up classical thought and sculpture as well as joie de vivre. He also respected and integrated what he learned from Chinese and Indian philosophy and the Quran.
Like his friend Schiller, Goethe questioned the benefits of violent revolution. A better society could emerge only when everyone — according to his talents, his tendencies, and his position in society — did his utmost to increase the cultural development of the people.
The philosopher John Armstrong, in Love, Life, Goethe (2006), notes that Goethe warned about the destructive impact of war on private property as well as public buildings. The quality of life for citizens depends on the cultural wealth accumulated by wise government, including fine parks, comfortable houses, art collections, libraries, and the continued existence of universities. It is foolish to risk such wealth in a war to serve a fatherland.
In 1819, Goethe published The West-Eastern Divan, a collection of poems set in a dream-like Persia, a tranquil paradise unlike the world where empires collide, and thrones tumble. In this paradise, people live simply and do not chatter but speak only from the heart, and their confidence in life and each other is deep.
Goethe’s lifetime witnessed the arrival of democracy as a political possibility in the US, attempts to replicate this republican experiment in Europe, and coming to terms with the rising commercial class. Merchants replaced aristocrats as the most powerful men in Britain, France, and Germany, while people began to doubt the old religious certainties.
Against this background of vital change, literature reflected an age when the individual, as a private personality, emerged as a subject of consideration. Novels came into being, not like previous romances about dragons, king,s and queens, but tales about men and women with feelings who were falling in love, or, like Faust, searching for it.
Faust reveals us to us ourselves, challenging, disturbing, and consoling us into the preoccupations of a generation that worries about how the world is governed and how we respond to nature.
Faust, like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, can engage people from any culture. Chinese President Xi Jinping told German Chancellor Angela Merkel he had repeatedly read and memorized a Chinese translation of Faust, the only book available when he spent years in a remote region during the Cultural Revolution.
The British writer A. N. Wilson writes in Goethe; A Faustian Life (2024) that the work touches us because it is about us. Goethe, a man of the Enlightenment, mythologized Faust, a man of the Renaissance, and used Faust’s inner journeyings to explore his own contemporaries’ attitudes to science, philosophy, the structure of society, revolution, war, and nature.
“The great figures of Goethe’s time — Napoleon, Byron, Kant, Hegel — might not be named in Faust, but they are all there,” Wilson writes. “What makes Goethe different from any of them is that he saw the way that their actions and attitudes were going to shape later worlds — the world of newspapers and mass media, the world of international power politics, the world which had taken leave of God, but did not know how to live . . . without him.”
The Herr (Lord) in Faust takes a long view: “So long as they strive, humans will make mistakes,” he says. Then, in his next speech, he adds a note of optimism: “a good man, in his darkest impulse, is well aware of the right path.”
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Boston University.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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