BEFORE WE COME TO detailed consideration of Goethe's literary works, we wish to explore three aspects which combine to constitute what one might call the “Goethe phenomenon.” They are: his life, his thought, and, for want of a better word, his image. All great writers tend to generate in the minds of their readers a sense both of the historical person who wrote the literary works and of the mentality, the creative persona from which these works emanated. Moreover, the thinking of great writers tends to play a role in the cultural (and even, on occasion, socio-political) traditions of their native land. As we shall see, all three propositions apply with particular force to Goethe. As regards the third aspect, his role as an icon within Germany's culture and politics has been both complex and, on occasion, problematic.

To convey a sense of the issues involved, let us begin with a quotation from Friedrich Gundolf's magisterial study of 1916, which is entitled simply Goethe. In the introduction he reflects on and justifies that one-word title in the following terms:

And, a few paragraphs later, we read the following:

Here, Gundolf claims that a particular wholeness and centeredness informs every facet of Goethe's life, experience, thinking, writing. His key terms are “wesentlich,” “gesamte Gestalt,” “größte Einheit,” “deutscher Geist,” “das größte verewigte Beispiel,” “bildnerische Kraft,” “den gesamten Umfang seiner Existenz.” We shall return later to the particular issue of uses (and abuses) of Goethe within German culture.