I actually know nothing about him, but I liked the alliteration. Goethe seems to always show up on lists of titans of 19th century literature, and one of the great Germans of all time. I’m a reasonably educated and well-read individual; and not only have I never read anything by him, I’d be hard-pressed to name anything he wrote.
So tell me: what makes him so special?
Faust is Goethe’s telling of the Faust(us) story, and the best of the bunch. He develops Faust and Mephistopheles into something resembling real characters, and adds a nuance to the story that you don’t usually get. I read that in translation three of four times when I was 19. I’ve always wished I knew German, so I could read it in the original.
I’ve just started reading Faust.
Where is this quote from? ‘“Know thyself”? If I knew myself I’d run away!’
Because he was the preeminent German, if not Continental European, poet and playwrite of his time. His work inspired German philosophy, and the great German composers, like Mozart and Beethoven, based their works on him. It was largely based on him that the Romantic movement got started. And his work is just good.
Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was enormously influential in developing the archetype of the languishing young romantic hero. But I think also the breadth of Goethe’s activities – not just as a novelist and poet but as a scientist – made him the type-specimen of the German artist/intellectual.
FWIW, Sherlock Holmes, in one of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, says he admires Goethe.
Scientist?? This is news to me; tell me more.
Captain Amazing – I think you summarized exactly what I already knew (not to sound snarky); but I was looking for some why he was so influential.
Goethe, if I’m not mistaken, came up with a theory of color. It’s different from Maxwell’s tristimulus theory, and fell out of favor until Edwin Land discovered the Land effect, which suggested that relative intensities might actually play a role in color perception, which is somewhat similar to Goethe’s suggestions, so it got a new lease on life.
He also took a newly-discovered fragment of an ancient Greek drama about Phaethon and speculated that the myth might have been started by the fall of a meteorite. He wrote a book abouit this.
I’ve never found a reliable source for this, and I’m pretty sure it’s not a Goethe quote. Most telling is that I’ve never seen a German or Greek/German version of it. Moreover, it doesn’t sound particularly like Goethe.
There are a lot of quotes unduly attributed to Goethe — another sign of his prominence. Somewhat surprising is that many are originally in English. I recall finding out a few years ago the source of another one, which turned out to be a Scottish author (I think it was something about following your dreams).
However, for a real quote : He may have been the first respectable writer to put into print “Er kann mich im Arsch lecken!”
Goethe’s influence on the German language can be likened to Shakespeare’s.
(on English, that is.)
There are several references to this.
The original quotation comes to us through Plutarch (A.D. 46?–A.D. c. 120)
"There are two sentences inscribed upon the Delphic oracle, hugely accommodated to the usages of man’s life: “Know thyself,” (in Greek: Gnothi seauton) and “Nothing too much;” and upon these all other precepts depend.
Anyway the references can be found here.
For what little it may be worth, this website puts Goethe at the top of a list that estimates the IQs of the “greatest geniuses in history.” So he had to have something going for him.
All I know about Goethe is that he wrote “Faust,” “The Sorrows of Young Werther” (which inspired a lot of melancholy young men at the time), and a lot of travelogues, particularly of Italy. I’ve only ever read excerpts of any of these.
Goethe’s career as a scientist is a slightly awkward affair to assess. His scientific ideas were clearly immensely important to him, he invested a great deal of time and energy in developing them, he incorporated scientific themes into his fiction (notably in Elective Affinities), his technical books on the subject were widely read and he was influential in certain quarters, yet his reputation has become that he was wildly wrong about most of them. C.C. Gillespie’s remark that it was a case of “a great man making a fool of himself” is not untypical of how some historians have sized up the matter.
As I’ve said, Goethe himself was not one to underestimate his contributions:
But he also complained that all his ideas had been dismissed because of his pre-existing fame as a literary figure and, in a defence of him in 1838, the French naturalist Isidore Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire protested in much the same terms.
Some of his more minor technical contributions were fully accepted, even though they were rather bold and relatively controversial at the time. For instance, he predicted and identified a small bone present in the jaws of human embryos that had been overlooked because it then fuses during later development.
However, his major biological interest was in plant morphology, which is the subject of an essay by Stephen Jay Gould (it’s in Eight Little Piggies) that’d be a good place to learn more about this aspect of Goethe. The idea was to try to understand development and form in terms of underlying archetypes. Despite Gould’s attempts over the years to resurrect this type of biology, this remains a deeply unfashionable way of thinking in 21st century science and modern biologists dismiss Goethe’s ideas as nonsense. However, this sort of stuff was very much a part of 19th century German Naturphilosophie and, while the details of what he was proposing were rejected, the argument can be made that Goethe’s science - rather than just his literary work - was an important influence on the movement.
In physics, as Cal has mentioned, his big idea was a theory of how colours work. The context was that Newton had successfully convinced everybody that colours can be produced by splitting white light into more fundamental components with a prism. Goethe instead proposed reverting to a version of the older idea that dates back to Aristotle whereby colours are produced by a combination of white and black.
There are features about Goethe’s reasoning that are quite attractive from certain points of view. He took the rather Romantic line that Newton had gone horribly wrong by trying to make the matter too objective, with rigid experiments and instruments, and so had missed the keys to colour as an experience. His book on the subject, Zur Farbenlehre (1810), is thus filled with his subjective observations of colour in different circumstances. And being a great writer these reports are extremely vivid pieces of writing. Minneart thus frequently quotes Goethe’s observations in his great Light and Colour in the Open Air.
That aspect of the book meant that it was influential on many 19th century artists, probably most notably on Turner in the last decade of his life, leading to works like Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory). (This was famously stolen in 1994, though the Tate later recovered it, albeit in circumstances that have been the subject of controversy in the last few weeks.)
The scientific reception of Zur Farbenlehre was much less favourable. He did win some converts amongst German physicists, but that was about it. It didn’t help that much of his case was framed as an all-out personal attack on Newton. Given that he was then possibly at his peak as a national hero, that wasn’t a tactic designed to win friends in Britain. Apparently the 1840 English translation (as Theory of Colours, the version that’s still in print) had to cut most of the abuse and, even then, the reviews were damning.
Cal’s mention of the Land Effect points to the one area of modern reassessment. (And I’ll note that that Gillespie quote above dates from 1960, before this phase.) It’s central to Goethe’s notion of the subject that our perception of colour is all about context. Even though he is still seen has having been completely wrong about the physics, he can be interpreted as a forerunner of contemporary thinking about the psychology of colour.
That said and despite Goethe’s complaints, I suspect that he’s an example of someone whose non-scientific reputation has sustained the interest in his scientific work. Were it not for his literary fame, that would probably be of no interest to other than specialists. But that fame does mean that he can’t be ignored as a figure in 19th century science.
While I do own a copy of Theory of Colours, I have to confess I’ve only ever dipped into it. I have read Young Werther and I’d recommend that as a first dip into the literary work.
Favorite quote:
“If I love you, what business of that is yours?”
I’m not the scholar to assess his real literary contributions - the appeal of the later parts of Faust pass me by - but like Shakespeare, he’s got some great lines, and he said them first and said them well. Imperfect paraphrased translations follow:
Mephistopheles to God - “You’ve given Man a little bit of heaven’s light. He calls it sensibility, and then goes around with it acting more beastly than any beast.”
Mephisopheles to Faust - “What a holy man you are! Haven’t you often - with great authority - expounded upon the workings of the world, the doings of men, and what reigns within their hearts and minds? And did you really - be honest now! - did you really know as much about such things as you do about this fellow Schwerdtlein’s death [that is, nothing]?”
This is true, and Goethe was confounded by it.
His portrait of Werther was meant to ridicule and condemn languishing romantic sorrows as nonsense, but lots of people missed the point and lauded Werther as a role model. Goether was one of the first to recognize and articulate what “romanticism” consists of (and not in a positive way).
Goethe’s telling of FAUST is chilling in retrospect. 200 years later, Germans should notice that Hitler was a “dead-on-balls”, real-life target for the main character.
More about Goethe -> Sitemap
It’s a test. If you know how to pronounce the name correctly you can be part of the club.
That’s the one thing I do know. 
It doesn’t rhyme with “loathe”.
It’s pronounced “GRR-tuh,” right?
Close enough. (I expect a germanophone will come along and tell us all about the umlaut.)