In Our Time - Goethe

Episode Date: April 6, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the great German polymath. 'I had the great advantage of being born at a time that was ripe for earth-shaking events which continued throughout my long life, so that I witnessed the Seven Years War...the French Revolution, and the whole Napoleonic era down to the defeat of the hero and what followed after him. As a result I have attained completely different insights and conclusions than will ever be possible for people who are born now...' Goethe's friend Johann Peter Eckermann recorded these remarks made by the great writer at the end of his life in a series of published recollections. Goethe's life was indeed remarkable. At the age of twenty-five he was author of the first German international best-seller The Sorrows of Young Werther. A year later, he was invited by the Grand Duke to join him at the Imperial Court as Privy Councillor where he oversaw commissions on war, roads and tax. He rode to war with the Prussian Army against the French and embarked on a remarkable creative friendship with Schiller which saw the establishment of a new form of German theatre. What made Goethe the dominant cultural icon of his time and after? What links were there between his interest in politics and the arts? Why did he support Napoleon despite the French invasion of Weimar? How did his relationships with women define his work? And how was he able to transform the status of the German language? With Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge; Sarah Colvin, Professor of German at the University of Edinburgh; W. Daniel Wilson, Professor of German at Royal Holloway, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, I'll start with a quotation from Goethe. He said, I had the great advantage of being born at a time that was ripe for earth-shaking events

which continued throughout my life so that I witnessed the seven years' war, the French Revolution, and the whole Napoleonic era down to the defeat of the hero and what followed after him. As a result, I've attained completely different insights and conclusions than will ever be possible for people who are born now. Gertes' friend Johann Peter Eckerman recorded those remarks made by the great writer at the end of his life in a series of published recollections. Gertes life was indeed remarkable. At the age of 25, he was author of the first German international bestseller, the Sorrows of Young Verta. A year later, he was invited by the Gertr, Grand Duke to join him at the Imperial Court as Privy Council, where he oversaw commissions on war,

roads and tax. He rode to war with the Prussian army against the French and embarked on a remarkable creative friendship with Schiller, which saw the establishment of a new form of German theatre. What made Goethe the dominant cultural icon of his time and after? What links were there between his interest in politics and the arts? Why did he support Napoleon, despite the French invasion of Weimar? And how was he able to transform the status of the German language? With me to discuss Gertes' life and work are Tim Blanning, Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge University, Sarah Colvin, Professor of German at Edinburgh University, and Dan Wilson, Professor of German at Royal Holloway University of London. Tim Planing, what do we know of Gertes' family background and early years?

He'd a remarkably long life, born in 1749, died in 1832. But what about his early years and his family? Well, Gertr was lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was born, as you say, in 1749 in the Free Imperial City of Frankfurt am Main, a quite a large city by German standards, in the second division, I suppose, after Vienna, Berlin and Hamburg, but still by German standards, contemporary standards, a major metropolis with many cultural facilities.

His father was wealthy from a partition background. He owned one fortune in property, another fortune in bonds, and consequently could live the life of Veronier. He could organise his son's education in the best possible way. Gertr had the best education that money could buy. So from all those points of view, he's really born in the purple. Subsequently, in 1782, he was ennobled by the Duke of Weimar, Carl August. Gertrter said that he didn't really pay any attention to that at all.

He didn't set any store by it because, as he came from a patrician family in Frankfurt am mine, he felt himself to be the equal of nobles. anyway. So Gertes coming from a very comfortable, cultured, well-educated, urban, metropolitan, even, Protestant background. And which direction did his education take him into? His education takes him, well, I think that's rather difficult to go into every possible detail. I think one thing I would like to pull out, though, which is very important for his subsequent life and for his works, is that he has a very thorough grounding in the Bible, in its Lutheran translation, in Lutheran theology. Because Goethe later, indeed, at a relatively early age, turned his back on Christianity or turned away from Christianity,

it's easy to forget just how deeply embedded in his personal culture is Lutheran theology and above all the Lutheran Bible. That is one of the other great sources of the modern German language. Gerta himself has probably as important an impact on the development of the German language as, let us say, Shakespeare did on the development of English. But it's out of that Lutheran Bible, I think, that so much is coming. And he became a scientist of considerable achievement as well. Was that developed in his adolescence, in his education? Indeed it was. He has a wonderfully quick, accurate, observing eye. Everything Gertes sees, he sees it without. with a particularly penetrating gaze. And that comes through, I think,

pretty quite everything he writes, but more especially in his poetry. And I think in a way it's important not to make too clear a distinction between his poetry and his science. He himself would not have made that distinction. They're part of the complete person. And so when he's looking for language

in which to express his discoveries in nature, in what we would call the natural sciences, it's expressed in a, in a poetic way. And so one can go to his poetry as well as to his more formally scientific works to find those kinds of insights. As a young man Goethe affiliated himself of the movement called, I'm going to use the English. I haven't got German. Storm and stress.

Can you tell us about that? Perhaps you could risk the German, but storm and sounds much, I'm sure it sounds better in German. Storm and stress, what was it about and what was his role in that movement? Well, for once it does sound better in German. Quite a lot of things do, believe it or not. But in German, it's Sturmant Drang. And Stormant Drung has a more, has a more, how should I put it, a more activist kind of sound than Storm and Stress.

Storm and Stress is altogether too static, but Drang is a word which really means thrust, or it has that connotation of thrust. So it's very much a movement of movement, a movement of forward's movement, a movement of thrust and storm and stress as well. It's a movement of the 1770s. It's short-lived. It can be best described, I think, as a movement of angry young men. These are all young men, those who are involved in Gertr and Herder and Klinger and Lentz and so on.

They're young men who are in revolt against what they see as the stuffy old, over-rationalist, enlightened French classicism. Sarah Colvin, can we take that on, that Storm and Stress, did it appear in Gertes' early work, and how did he express the ideas? in his work? It appeared in the play that made him famous, which was Goetz von Berlichingen, with the iron hand. And Goetz is a play that really encapsulates

all of the intentions of storm and stress, Strom and Drang. One of the things that the Sturmmer undranger, the Storm and Stress representatives were doing, was reacting against the kind of hegemony of French neoclassical theatre in Germany. And they wanted a theatre style that was more natural, more immediate,

And one of their heroes was Shakespeare. And when Goethe writes Goetz, he was 24 years old, very young, he's working in the style of Shakespeare, of a Shakespearean history play. What does that mean? He's looking at the individual in society. He's looking at a civil war situation. Tim was talking about Luther, Goethe's awareness and admiration for Luther. He sets the play in the time of Luther, 16th century.

Goetz is a 16th century knight who's under pressure from the expanding empire. and he resists that pressure. He's trying to maintain his local independence. One of the things the storm and stress people were interested in was the fate of the individual in a kind of society and movement, and Goetz is certainly that. And we have in that, for the time, an original character of a woman, a character who's original, a woman, is would you say that, Adelheim?

Adelheim. Adelhyde is Goetz's counterpart in the play. I mean, as Tim was saying, Storm and Stress is it is a boy's movement, man's movement. And Ardall Haidt, I think, is probably the least attractive woman character Gertie ever wrote. He claimed himself to be in love with her, but she's an extremely unattractive character. And what she represents is the forces of the courts. Goetz is, in fact, a very masculine play. The ideal of a kind of Germanic masculine hero is what Gutz is. And his counterpart, Adelhide, is an evil scheming woman of the court who seduces Guts' friend, takes him away, takes him to

court eventually poisons him and is condemned to death at the end by a secret court, which also seems to be made up entirely of men. Why do you think then that Goethe thought that he was in love with her? It's something I've never understood. Gerta simply said that he himself was in love with idle height. She's a dreadful character. The book, a year after it had written the play, the book that made him famous was the Sorrows of Young Verta, a novel, which, like Byron, he woke up to

find himself famous and so on. Can you tell us a little about that and why, what sort of fame it brought him? Tell it, if you just outlined for those who don't know quickly, the story, it's quite easy to outline. And then what sort of did to him? Yes, well, the story is easy to act and it's a novel written in letters. That's important because that makes it very immediate. And it tells the story of a young man who falls in love with a woman who is engaged to another man. And it brought Gershah enormous fame. It was hugely successful. There are elements of storm and stress in it as well, but mainly it was tapping into the cult of sensibility, the importance of the heart, the importance of the emotions. And an enormous audience responded

to that. It sold out very quickly for a little while. I think it was the best known book in Germany after the Bible, the stories of Young Vauter. And it was popular for all kinds of reasons, you know, partly because of the cult of sensibility, also partly because it was taken to be a hormone a clue, something that you could decode and people love that. They decode it as Gerta in Vetzla when he himself fell in love with the young woman called Charlotte of von

Buff. The main character that Verta falls in love with is called Lotta. That brought some embarrassment actually to the real Charlotte of von Buff and her fiancé. You haven't mentioned sorry to me but the most important thing is that he kills himself at the end and the most important thing in the book is that the class decision.

Now that he's snubbed by that. Now we are told, you tell me if I'm right that after that a lot of young men either did enough or contemplated taking their own lives, an imitation of Vert. It had that sort of that effect as well as being widely read. That's right. And this actually sort of impinged on his life,

this kind of fame, disturbed his place in society. It did. I mean, Verta was badly understood, misunderstood as an novel. I mean, firstly, because people didn't understand that Gertr was actually criticizing the cult of sensibility in the character of Verta, who eventually commits suicide. And secondly, because it's,

It was read as an encouragement to suicide, which it certainly wasn't. It was partly Goethe dealing with the story of Kali Huzelam, a young man he knew who'd committed suicide. And he rewrote the novel in 1787 to make readers more critical. I think Goethe was very disappointed in his reading audience when he wrote Werter, because they misunderstood him on so many counts. That's a common feeling among writers, I've been told. Dan Wilson, in 1775, Gertr received. an invitation from Duke

Carl August who was only 18 to join him at the Imperial Court of Weimar, which shines very grand, and it was part of the Holy Roman Empire, but it was a state of 100,000 people, but can be grand enough. But how did that come about, and what did he do when he got there? Well, at first he was not invited

to be part of the government. He was simply invited to visit Weimar for the first half year, so it was not clear what role he would play there, and he was sort of a protoge of the Duke. The Duke had just He just turned 18, so he just had become the Duke, Carl August. In, as you say, a territory that was very small, the city of Weimar itself numbered some 8,000 inhabitants, so it was really kind of a glorified village, and yet had a court and all sorts of culture that became very important.

The Duke, and Goethe was 26 at this point, so he was he was he was was older than Carl August. And when they got to Weimar, there was a great deal of, you know, sort of carryings on by the two of them and some of their male friends. They sort of rode around in the countryside, scaring the peasants, and pulling all sorts of tricks. This has generally been felt to be the reason for this. It's generally felt to have been that Gertrude intended to gain the confidence of Carl Agus so that he could then have a beneficial influence on him and this would benefit the entire duchy. On the other hand, Gertrta seems to have been the ringleader more or less of this group. And there is some evidence that he was from later conversations that Götta had that he was trying to make Carl August into a sort of natural, a more natural person by pulling him away from the court.

and sleeping with, in his whole group would sleep out under the stars. And this sort of, so this was kind of a project to make him into, into the kind of person that would be susceptible to, you know, the sort of positive influence. And as I read it, this young man was dazzled by this brilliant intellectual and was hoping that he would become, he would attract other intellectuals from across the German-speaking Holy Roman Emperor. He encouraged Goethe to come into government, and he made him a private councillor.

Tim said earlier in the programme, he ennobled him, which partly enabled, therefore, Goethe to eat at the top table and said on the middle table and be a diplomat. Instead of not being a diplomat, these things matter, and we mustn't forget that they did matter there. What effected his duties, because he seems to been very conscientious, lots of meetings and lots of tax collecting and lots of imposing of this, that and the other. What effect did his duties have on him and on his writing? Could you briskly tell us that? Yeah. Well, first of all, I should say that he, when this happened, when the Duke of Weimar appointed him to the highest government body in Weimar, what in English is often called the Privy Council, this was a huge scandal in Weimar because Götta was very seriously underqualified for the position. He had studied law. But normally it would have taken maybe 20 years to reach a position like that. In any case, when it happened though, Goethe really settled down, these sort of antics in the countryside stopped. And he really put his nose to the grindstone and worked very hard for essentially nine years until the spring of 1785.

Doing practically nothing else. Now, he did write some shorter things, some poem, a lot of poems. he did write drafts of works, but these were not published in these nine years. So basically the reading public gave up on him and figured he would never write again. He would never publish again. So it was very, very hard work. He treated some 11,000, over 11,000 different cases during those nine years when he was privy counselor. It's extraordinary that it gets himself involved in that detail.

What sort of man did he turn out to be at the end? Was he a benevolent person or was he not? Well, I mean, politically, it's very interesting because I think he had plans for reform when he entered this position. But I think that you'd have to say that the power corrupted him as much as it would have anyone in that kind of system where there really was no sort of control or little control. and there are areas where he did things that even in his own government were considered to be. Can you give us an example, then? One of the things, for example, that, well, since I'm an American and they're British here, we can use this example, they sold off inmates from the prison in Weimar to British.

recruiters for service in the war against the Americans. Now this happened from the beginning of the American War right to the end, which was more or less the same period as Goethe's nine years in that position. And this was illegal? It was illegal in Weimar Law, and it was objected to by the judicial authority, and yet they went ahead and did it. Because if someone had been put in jail for seven years for theft, then transforming that into what amounted to for many people a death penalty was not foreseen in Weimar law. Tim, planning, just briefly, before we move on to move on from this, do you think that Vimar did in that sense, as been indicated by Don Wilson, corrupt him and take him away from

what would be his bigger cultural, or a different, his cultural purpose? I don't think I'd see it that way, and I don't think he saw it that way himself. It, one has to wonder why he went to Weimar, which, as Dan has said, was a small court in a small town and a small principality. The kind of explanation I like is the one offered by Nicholas Boyle in his great biography of Goethe, in which he points out that Weimar is geographically almost exactly halfway from Frankfurt Unmine to Berlin. And so what Goethe is doing, he's moving out of Frankfurt Unmine, a free imperial city, a self-governing municipality, but in his eyes, very conservative, very narrow, very Philistine. On the other hand, he doesn't want to go to a great big court like that of Frederick the Great in a great big city like Berlin, which would have all kinds of other problems,

not the Philistineism. Frederick the Great's court was nothing, it certainly was not Philistine. So what he goes for is something in the middle, somewhere which is a court, which has those kinds of cultural facilities like a theater and so on and so forth, and where he's going to get status as well, which he does, of course, but which doesn't have that kind of Philistine, burger type, culture that Frankfurt and mine, which he referred to disparagingly.

In fact, he told his mother subsequently that he wouldn't have stayed in Frankfurt and mine, even if that invitation hadn't come along. Sarah Colvin, in We have one of the most significant relationships with women. He has several significant relationships with women. This is, can you tell us about Charlotte von Steen? Well, Gertr is famous for his relationships with women and critics who are extremely interested. This is generally considered the most interesting. Charlotte von Stein was Lady in Waiting to Anna Amalia, so to Duke Karl-August's mother.

When Gertr arrived in Weimar, she was 33. She was about seven years older than he was. She'd been married for 12 years. She'd had seven children, three of them survived. Common fate for parents in those days was losing children. and Goethe almost immediately became very close to Charlotte of von Schaigne. He actually knew about her before he went there. He'd seen her picture.

His friend Lafatea, his Swiss friend, collected silhouettes. Shadow silhouettes are very popular in that day and made deductions about people's characters by looking at them. This was Lafate's science. And so Goethe had not only seen a picture of Charlotte of vonstein, he'd also received a notion about what kind of a character she was. And what happened between them then? I'm not asking for any.

I mean, I'm not ferreting around. The fact is they had an interesting intellectual relationship. That's where I'm going to get out. Well, they did, yes. And, I mean, what happened between them is one of the great questions that German studies battles with. Nobody knows whether there was a physical relationship between them. People have been very interested in that, but there is no evidence either way. It was certainly an intense intellectual relationship.

Goethe wrote over the period he knew her well over one and a half thousand letters to Charlotte of von Schaen. But part of the problem. problem is we don't have the letters she wrote back. They're lost. The story goes that Charlotte vonstein demanded them back from Goethe and destroyed them. Again, there's no evidence for that. We don't know who destroyed them. What he did do was send her his work. She read his plays. She was herself a playwright. That's something that often isn't mentioned about Charlotte vonstein. She was a writer. She was a very funny playwright, a very witty playwright. She lampooned Goethe in a couple of her plays. There was a very early one she wrote just after he arrived at

called Rino, where she just makes fun of the new arrival. And there's a much later one after their estrangement. They had quite a bad estrangement after Goethe ran off to Italy and didn't mention to Charlotte of Vonstein that he was going. Came back two years later and was terribly surprised that she didn't really want to talk to him anymore. We haven't time really to dwell on Italy, but we have to mention it, Tim, because I want to move on quite quickly now.

But he left for Italy without it appears telling anyone, not even Charlotte of Weinstein, with whom he had a close intellectual relationship, and the rest is unknown, so leave it at that. He just got fed up with being the administrator at Vimar and he wanted to find, because in Italy he set out to be a painter first of all when he went to Italy, didn't he? He did, that's quite right.

And didn't make a bad shot of that either. I don't think one has to cuddle one's brains too hard to decide to determine why he went to Italy. Lots of Germans did. And indeed his father had always planned that Goethe should go to Italy to complete his education as a part of a kind of intellectual grand tour. So he would have gone sooner or later, I think,

anyway, it turns out to be later rather than sooner. And as I'm sure you'll know, I mean, Germans have this kind of yearning for the south, the drang-nachshud, the sort of the desire to get to the south. It crops up again and again in German literature, in Thomas Mann, for example, in Budenbrooks. So I think it's part of that. And there's a kind of yearning for the south for all that it represents. It's indeed one of the most famous lines in German poetry is that which begins, do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom.

That's a poem which comes in Goethe's Wilhelmmeister's apprenticeship. It's one of the most famous lines in German poetry. It's a kind of yearning for the South where everything is sunnier and things smell better and so on. So I think I'm sure that frustration with the day-to-day, the mundane existence and the 11,000 cases he had to try in Veymar, had a lot to do with it, but it's not the whole story. And he wrote Roman elegance and he painted there, but he started to write there again. These were also considered at the time to be rather erotic poems.

But he came back to Weimar, divested himself of a lot of his administrative responsibilities, as I understand it, Dan Wilson, and ended in a relationship with Christiane Vulpius. Now, can you tell us briefly about that? And it was very different from that with Schallelze von Schaunstein, wasn't it? Well, yes, Christiana Vulpios was from the lower classes, more or less. and she, I mean, they met sort of by chance, and right after he had come back from his first long trip to Italy. And the relationship was a scandal, really,

because they lived together for many years in sin without being married, had a child after the first year. Do you think he didn't marry because of the class difference? Because we haven't really touched on that, but it bubbles around his work very strongly. and so he is an old obviously wants to be an old you could say no

and away we go but she is lower class and she is not the letter writer that Sarah an intellectual Sarah was describing earlier of the other woman do you think that enters in

yes probably I mean probably I think there's not much evidence for that but certainly you know as as Tim has said he was himself a nobleman at this point the

the interestingly, the scandal, I think, had wider precautions than simply, you know, sort of a moralistic thing, because if any of the other subjects of the Duke had dared to do this, they would have been hauled before the church authorities and been forced to either punished or been forced to recant, whatever. So I think people were scandalized also because it was seen as a sort of abuse of privilege. on Gertes' part. Tim. This class consciousness, that's something we need to address. It needs to be brought out.

In Verta, when we were talking about Verta, we didn't mention that. But there are several moments in Verto where Gertr really parades himself as an angry young man, kicking against the aristocratic pricks, no pun intended. For example, there's a moment

when Verta goes to an assembly in the evening and is cold-shouldered by the aristocrats and it is asked by his friend the Count to leave. So this is something which I think Gertr felt really acutely in the 1770s. It may well be. that power corrupted him at Weimar and he becomes increasingly easy and more comfortable with aristocratic society but I think it's still there and it's there not just because it's as

it were an intra-German thing one a German commoner feeling discriminated against by a German aristocrat but there's also a cultural dimension to this in that the aristocratic culture is associated with French domination and so when a German like like Vietta adopts English dress rather than the Frenchified dress of the courtiers. And when he gets cross about discrimination at court, this is a blow not just against German aristocrats, but against the domination of French culture. Let's go to his work now, Sarah, with you. He'd been working on his great drama Faust,

and the 1790 the first publication of the first edition came out. What drew him to Faust, and can you tell us what he added to the Faust story, which had been around in German folk tales and had been written about before? Well, Faust takes us back again to the time of Luther. The very first German Faust book was published by Luther's publisher and was just recorded a legend really. And Goethe picked up that legend, which again was a very German legend, like the Goethe's story, a German theme for a German theatre,

and ran with it and he developed the legend quite radically. I mean, Marlowe had already picked it up and used it in England. I mean, Goethe didn't in fact read Marlowe's play. to laughter he'd written his Feist one, but Goethe changes the story and adds things to it. He changes the ending radically. Marlowe's Feist is torn apart by devils. Gertes is saved. He develops the episode with Helen of Troy. Feist marries and lives with Helen of Troy. And crucially, in Fice Part 1, he adds a completely new story where Fice meets the young woman called Gretchen, seduces her, leaves her, she's pregnant, kills her baby,

when it's born because otherwise she risks enormous social shame and is then put in prison and executed. So that's an addition by Goethe to the Faustre in a very famous one. Was it received very well when it came, when it was first published? It's been in, it's the greatest work of his that ever since rolls through. Well it is, you know, Fausti went up lots of incarnations. The 1790 publication was called a fragment, and it was a number of scenes that Goethe had put together while he was.

in Italy and brought them back and published them as a fragment. The part one, as we know it now, wasn't published till 1808. And part two wasn't published until after Goethe died. And part two was the bit that Goethe was most concerned about in a way. He didn't actually want it opened until after his death. He wasn't really quite sure how it was going to be received. And part two is extremely problematic and almost impossible to stage. It's very episodic, involves elephants on stage, all kinds of stuff.

So by far the more difficult mission, actually in Germany today and in Britain as well, if you're going to see first, what you tend to see is part one and not part two. It's difficult to keep him about it, because his life was so massive and his work was so massive. To keep the balance with the life and the work is quite a tricky operation. But let's go back to the life for a second. Dan Wilson, in 1792, Goethe joined the Prussian army expedition into France to rescue the monarchy. In effect, he was a monarchy, anti-nationalist but pro-monicist. What impact, what impact did that time as part of the army have on him?

Yes, he joined the Duke who was the general of a Prussian regiment. That happened back then if you were related to the, especially if you were related to the Prussian family, which Carl August was. He joined him and was there in his official capacity as a sort of traveling privy counselor. It was a horrible campaign. Tim knows has worked on this. It was, and some of the things that Goethe witnessed

really shook him very deeply. Not only the hostilities, but also, you know, they were caught in rivers of mud and there was horrible dysentery on the front and they were finally forced to retreat. This, in some of the letters that Gertr wrote,

you can really sense how deeply it affected him. But I'd have to say that even before that, before he directly experienced war, he wrote some things that were very, you might say today, pacifist. In the play Egmont, there's a passage where one of the characters warns

against civil war and just sort of the real effect that it has on people. And even in 1792, when the war that had until then been simply a war between Prussia and Austria, on the one hand and France on the other hand was declared a war of the empire against France and therefore that Weimar was then at war with France. Goethe wrote very critically that decision of his colleagues in the Privy Council and he said,

you know, years from now people are going to look back and see that, you know, that there would be another 30 years war coming for this. He was wrong in the number, but until 1815, you know, Europe was at war, and he considered it a huge mistake. Back to the work now, Sarah Colvin. Just before he went into France, he took up the directorship of the Weimar Theatre and became very, very close friends with Schiller, and they worked together and had ideas about a new German theatre.

Can you tell us something about that, the impact of Schiller on Goethe and vice versa? What were they after that? Well, it was an enormously important friendship. Gertr was the elder of the two. Gertr was 10 years older than Schiller, and Schiller had always admired him and been in awe of him. They made friends finally because Schiller really needed Gertes. Schiller wanted to produce a journal called Di Horen, the Graces,

which was about establishing a German national literature. And this was the beginnings of what is called Vimar Classicism, and Gerta and Schiller are the central figures in Vimar Classicism. And it's classicism in the sense of fifth, Athens, I suppose. It's about establishing a nation, creating a nation. Not really nationalist in the way that we tend to think of that negatively to do with Germany these days. I mean, Germany at that time, you're very fragmented. There wasn't a Germany as though.

There wasn't a Germany as such. There was an England and there was a, there wasn't a Germany. Precisely. What there was was a collection of states. Lots of states that were part of the Holy Roman Empire. And what Gertr and Schiller wanted to create was a German literature that enabled those states to come together. I thought was also aware of what was going on abroad. It was never intended to be exclusive. But also, you know, as Tim was saying,

the French neoclassical influence, the Higamuneo French culture, also Italian culture. The courts were playing Italian opera, French theatre. There wasn't really anything culturally German. And the same was happening with music in the 18th century trying to establish something culturally German. That's what Goethe and Schiller were looking to do.

I think this is very, really, very, very important. that Goethe and Scherlern are, when they look at Germany, they don't see a country which is fragmented so much, although I think one could use that. That's an obvious adjective to use. They see a Germany which is more polycentric, which has lots and lots of cultural centres. So Goethe, again, when talking to Ekaman late in life,

looking back on a Germany, which has been quite much simplified by the peacemakers of 1815, he sees the fact that Germany is divided into all kinds of different different states as a positive advantage. And he says, well, where else in Europe will you find 20 theatres, 20 opera houses, 100 public libraries? We have that because we have no one capital. And when he wants to look for a counter example, he says, look at France.

There is Paris. Paris is France is Paris. And he has sucked all the blood out of the provinces which are dead. And he may have been wrong about that, but that was something which he believed. So he advocated this polycentralism of Germany as something which was. was a real benefit and should be protected. They're cultural nationalists, but in political terms, they would like to see it decentralized still. Yes, that's very true and very important, I think.

Even at the very beginning of his relationship with Carl August, when Carl August came to Frankfurt and sought Gertrude out, they discussed this, apparently. At least there was a copy of a book by Justus Murser, who was a writer, political writer, who favored the smaller, principality, the system in Germany that supposedly protected freedom and the smaller principalities. And along with this, it's important to note, I mean, I've pointed out some of the negative aspects of the political Goethe, but next to his pacifism, or what one could, at least

antipathy to war, one should mention his antipathy to the new nationalism in Germany. He did not want, when in 1813 there was an uprising against Napoleon, he really, really was very opposed to it and ostentatiously wore the Legion of Honor Medal that Napoleon had bestowed on him. So for that reason, it's been difficult for nationalists throughout German history to sort of adopt Goethe as one of their own. I want to come to Napoleon, but Sarah Colvin, you were to get in. Well, later in life, Goethe developed a concept he called world literature, and his concept of literature was always about crossing boundaries, and he was particularly interested in France and Britain

in Germany, but literature was always about crossing boundaries, and certainly in the theatre in Weimar, Goethe and Schiller, put on international plays, not just German plays. But also what's important is that their conception of art was as something that could educate politically and socially, that art and the theatre were alternative spaces where in this Europe that was suffering war and uproar, people could kind of retreat into this other space, experience, balance, harmony, education, and then carry that back. into society and develop civic society through art.

We must remember, as Dan Wilson pointed out, that we're in a period of incredible turmoil. I mean, this country that we're in at the moment was seriously shaken and terrified that Napoleon would get here. And Europe was a great fight going on all over the place, and it was a fight to do with Monarchy, a fight to do it, obviously to do with territorial power,

but a fight to do with... And so on. I want to bring Napoleon in here quickly, Tim, planning because although Goethe was anti-nationalist and probably one of the greatest nationalists

were one of it. Napoleon. He, and Napoleon invaded Weimar and curiously they didn't get, Gertes mistress who became his wife stood outside the house, we were told, and defended the house. What he was doing inside, I can't work up, but there you go.

And yet he met Napoleon Napoleon admired him, as everybody seemed to do it, gave him a decoration which he wore till his dying. What was going on there between Gerta and Napoleon? Well, I think the secret to Gerta's very obvious admiration of Napoleon is his disapproval of the French Revolution. Gerta disapproved of the French Revolution from the very start. His friend, Schiller, turns against the Revolution only in 1792 after the September massacres, and then turns against it big time, incidentally.

But Gertrater, right from the start, disapproved at the French Revolution, was opposed to. to root and branch. So when Napoleon takes power in 1799 and appears to close down the revolution, to solve the domestic problems, to put an end to the anarchy and the bloodletting and so on and so forth, Goethe very much a world dictator in stone. Exactly so. Yes, I think that's seriously misjudged, seriously misjudged Napoleon, one of the great criminals of world history, but never mind. That's one thing. The other is, I think, of course, that Napoleon flattered him. And Gerta being a human being like being flattered a great deal. When they met in 1808, Napoleon told him that he'd read Vietta seven times.

There was one of the books he'd taken him with him on his expedition to Egypt, and he gives him the cross of the legion d'Honneur. And so, and Gerta, Gerta likes that. I think that has quite a lot to do with it, too. Donn Wilson, I just wanted to add to that. His opposition to the revolution didn't prevent him, however, from understanding that the elites in France had brought the revolution on themselves, He said that more than once, that it's the irresponsibility of the powerful that caused this event.

And therefore, German princes should learn from this example. I mean, there was a widespread opinion in Germany that they should sort of clean up their act and introduce reform so that they could avoid the same fate. But it really was an important event in Goethe's life, a really traumatic event. one. And everything he wrote practically from the beginning of the revolution in 1789 until the late 1790s dealt in some way or another with the revolution. And even his friendship with Schiller can be seen as sort of, you know, as aimed partly. The two of them wrote invective against their political critics who were generally opposed to their conservative views. Sarah Colvin briefly, can you tell us what his legacy is in terms of

of his portrayal of women? Well, I mean, there's a real-life Gershya and a literary Gertsha, and the real-life Gershya is very often and quite rightly criticised for his treatment of women. And he wasn't at all supportive of women writers, not a bit. He and Schiller didn't really think that women had it in them and made that perfectly clear. On the other hand, the literary Gersher is fascinating in his portrayal of women.

he writes his play Iphigenia, a version of the Erypita's play, and shows us a woman who first of all tells us what a hard life women have because they're constrained in the domestic sphere, you know, as they were also in the 18th century, as Gerta very well new, and then launches with the play a kind of critique of masculine politics and masculine rhetorics with which his Iphigenia breaks through at the end and tells the truth and saves the day. And in Faust, Faust is saved at the end by a figure of the eternal feminine, which has caused havoc in scholarship, because people don't know quite what it means. And it's sometimes been taken to mean the rather cliched notion of the ideal woman

who lets men off the hook of behaving well because she's doing it for them. But on the other hand, you could also see the eternal feminine as a great kind of opposite poll, again, to male politics, masculine discourse, male rhetoric, and a space of aesthetic education. Well, we're going to end the programme, unfortunately. We'll have to miss out all the science, which is a bit of a nuisance. We can do go to the science. to some other times, but finally, Tim Blanning, what would you say, what is his, we could use the word German cultural icon,

a force that set German culture on its better pass. How would you sum it up, him up, if you could? Well, I can sum it up best by quoting, former colleague of mine, Ernest Gelner, who was professor of social anthropology in Cambridge, and he liked to quote a line from a penny dreadful

by James Hadley Chase, which runs as follows. Every girl should have a husband, preferably her own. And then Ernest went on to say, and every nation should have a culture, preferably its own. And that's where Goethe comes in. The Germans wanted a culture, they wanted their own, they wanted their great writer who was as great as Dante,

as great as Shakespeare, and in Goethe, they found him. And did he, was he there's someone that people clustered around from then on, I have clustered around, have found as an example. Yes, he's been reinvented by every succeeding generation of Germans. Well, thank you all very much. Sorry about the science, Dan. We could have talked a lot about that. Dan Wilson, Sarah Colvin and Tim Blanning.

And next week I'll be talking about the Oxford Movement. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.