By the time of Goethe's death in 1832, many of the characteristics of the modern age were evident: revolution, parliamentary democracy, political parties and human rights. However, the political world in which Goethe grew up and matured was essentially premodern; the eighteenth century saw only the first stirrings of the modern national state and its political institutions. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) had cemented the status quo, in which hundreds of sovereign states sought increasing autonomy under the loose umbrella of the Holy Roman Empire – which, as the joke went, was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, but rather a weak federation, approximately coextensive with German-speaking territories. Because the Empire was an impediment of sorts to the rise of the national state, it was seen as a political dinosaur by Prussophile nationalist historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and indeed by many thinkers in the eighteenth. However, more recent historians, critical of this nationalist heritage, have begun to valorize the Empire as the protector of rights, diversity and regionalism, as opposed to the faceless centralism and bureaucratization that characterized larger national states like France. There is certainly some truth to this view, which sees the Empire as a sort of model for European union today.

Goethe was Director of the Weimar Court Theatre from 1791 to 1817 and steered it from comparative insignificance to national importance, as a theatre where a repertoire of literary merit was combined with a style of playing predicated on a classical aesthetic. This style, in its decisive departure from the realistic tendencies of the contemporary German stage, aroused controversy and dissent, both in Goethe's day and after. Whether a rare flowering or a theatrical dead end, the Weimar theatre under Goethe, particularly during the years of collaboration with Schiller (1798-1805), was at the very least a highly significant experiment that raised the national level of debate about theatrical performance. Goethe's major plays were not, on the whole, written with the stage in mind, nor did he take on the directorship of the theatre in order to put them on the stage, for they formed only a tiny part of the repertoire. His concern was, within the constraints imposed by the means at his disposal, to bring to audiences the great plays of world literature in a vivid yet elevated style and thus take German theatre out of its provinciality.

German theatrical life underwent huge changes in the course of the eighteenth century. For the first half the commercial theatre with dedicated buildings hardly existed. Theatrical life was divided between the courts and the non-aristocratic sector. The former was served largely by French theatre companies and Italian opera companies, and there was only limited access for members of the bourgeoisie.

Goethe's relationship with Schiller is a rare phenomenon in literature, an alliance of equals that stimulates the work of both but also transcends it in a common cause. The individualism inherent in creative writing is turned, in an extraordinary act of mutual tolerance, into understanding and cooperation. Each offers the other constructive criticism and practical example, they consult and collaborate. Their aim is not just to fulfil their own potential, but to establish new standards for German literary culture. Through theory and practice, and sometimes through satire and polemic, they create what came to be known as Weimar Classicism.

The contrast with earlier classicisms – this is the last one Europe would see – is striking. The French grand siècle, the Spanish siglo de oro, the Elizabethan and Augustan ages of English literature were all prolonged developments, rooted in a stable national society, concentrated in capitals and major cities, and in each case the work of several great names. The German version was created in just one decade within the borders of a small and insignificant duchy in a politically fragmented Germany that was not yet even a nation; and it was the doing of just two writers, whose contemporaries contributed little of significance or, often, actually opposed them.

Throughout Goethe's childhood and adolescence – as he tells us in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth) – the main focus of his religious awareness was the Bible, which he learned to read not only in Luther's translation but also in its original languages (HA ix, 124-8). He derived early poetic inspiration from it (HA ix, 140-3) and later described it as the main source of his moral education (HA ix, 274). His father's copy of the Vulgate stood on his desk throughout his later years (HA12ix, 731). Although he therefore had little sympathy with those who, like Voltaire, ridiculed the Bible as a tissue of absurdity and superstition (HA ix, 274-5 and 510), his own reading of it was by no means uncritical. After his encounter with Herder in 1770, he came to regard the Old Testament not only as a rich repository of ancient poetry – both he and Herder produced their own translations of the Song of Songs – but also as a historical and anthropological document affording valuable insights into primitive oriental society (HA ix, 129-35 and 511). It followed from this that the Old Testament and its doctrines were of limited relevance to other ages and cultures, including that of modern Europe: their religious significance remained primarily local and Judaic.

Approaching Goethe’s poetry

If we associate hexameter with Homer and Virgil, distichs with the Latin elegiac and satirical poets, terza rima, ottava rima, and the sonnet with Dante and the Italian Renaissance poets, the sonnet and iambic pentameter with Shakespeare, the alexandrine with Victor Hugo and even Baudelaire, there is no particular poetic form we can immediately associate with Goethe; he wrote in all these forms and many, many more. Indeed, Goethe's supreme gift is that of convincing the reader that his chosen lyrical form, and no other, is the appropriate one for the expression of a particular poetic statement. His historical situation at a vibrant stage in the development of German language and literature, a time when the culture was becoming self-consciously German and yet was also highly receptive to foreign influences, his position at the threshold of European Romanticism, which he did much to shape and further, determined the scope and variety of his eclectic lyrical output – allied with an outstanding gift of poetic articulation, a quasi-magical command of language that suggests, no doubt misleadingly, that he was someone to whom poetic expression came as easily and as naturally as eating or breathing. Poetic language and expression informs and characterizes the whole range of Goethe's writing, quite particularly his verse dramas, but also much of his prose fiction, his private correspondence, and even some of his scientific work, the results of which were frequently expressed in lyrical form, in verse epigrams, or in longer didactic poems.

Goethe's views on the systematic investigation of nature were informed by his belief that science once developed out of poetry, and that one day these two human faculties might well meet again to their mutual advantage (cf.HA XIII, 107). Against the background of this belief, his own contributions to the study of organic form and transformation (morphology), to optics and the science of colour, to geology and mineralogy, and to meteorology must be seen as an attempt to maintain the unity of human knowledge and experience, and the unity of humankind and nature. He differed from the more speculative of the Romantics through his insistence on empirical evidence and demonstration, and from the positivist tendency of the emerging natural sciences through a highly developed consciousness of theoretical issues. This chapter portrays the specific nature of Goethe's natural investigations, concentrating on morphology and the theory of colour as the most important areas of his activities. It will argue that, ultimately, the relevance to us of Goethe's scientific activities lies in methodological issues rather than individual results. His balancing of analytical and synthetic procedure makes it possible to extract elements from the totality of nature without losing sight of its unity. Goethe insists on a continuous dialogue between experience and theoretical abstraction, and on the phenomena themselves providing the true teachings of nature. This is a necessary corrective to the idea that scientific theories are the expression of something more fundamental than the phenomena themselves. The indivisible association of knowledge and respect for the object of knowledge is at the heart of Goethe’s approach.

The visual arts were for Goethe a subject of intense interest and concern. His work on them is not restricted to the writings on art and art theory collected in the five relevant volumes of the Frankfurt edition (FA i, vols. xviii-xxii); it also includes drawings, sketches, colour plates, copper engravings, illustrations to his theatre productions, portraits and scientific illustrations. Over his lifetime he produced an enormous body of texts on visual art, architecture, sculpture and painting. He knew personally many of the most talented artists of his time and had an intimate knowledge of much western and later also oriental art history. As a result of his travels in Italy and throughout Europe, he became acquainted with numerous prominent art experts, and through his initiatives as publisher, art critic and administrator he tried to promote certain artistic ideals and to influence the content and spectrum of ongoing artistic endeavours. He recommended travel to Greece, to the ruins of Paestum in Italy, and across Sicily in order that people might participate in his insights into the aesthetics of classicism, yet he also drew attention to the importance of local history as documented in both high art and popular culture, and his own literary work liberally mixes colourful scenes from the carnival and the marketplace, local history and everyday life.

In many ways Goethe does not strike one as a born storyteller. There is little in his prose fiction of that teeming materiality we have come to expect from the great European novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet the narrative mode evidently meant a great deal to him because he wrote prose fiction throughout his long creative life. And he was a remarkably sophisticated witness to the emergence of the various forms of modern narrativity, particularly the novel.

Admittedly the tradition of German novel writing of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which he helps to inaugurate does not figure in the pantheon of established European ‘classics’. Within the broad compass of narrative realism, with its wholehearted acknowledgement of the omnipresence of social life, German fiction tends to figure as at best a marginal presence. But all the same it has valuable insights to offer; most particularly, German writing of this period sustains and is sustained by an urgent dimension of reflectivity, one which invests the narrative process with an unmistakable intensity of theoretical self-commentary. Three of Goethe’s theoretical comments on fiction can serve to focus the particular contribution he makes to this tradition.

Goethe occupied a position that often placed him closer to historical events than he might have liked and forced him to come to terms with them, not only personally, but above all for the sake of Duke Carl August (1757-1828) and the small German state of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach that Goethe served throughout his adult life. Thus Goethe was not just a man of letters, but also a man of affairs; he was acquainted with, met - not least through his regular sojourns at the Bohemian spas - or had dealings with an impressive number of the leading players of his age ranging from Prussian kings and statesmen to Napoleon Bonaparte, Czar Alexander I of Russia and Prince Metternich, the architect of Restoration Europe.

Faust has been seen as the paradigmatic text of modernity almost since its conception. By 1836 Karl Gutzkow was claiming that Goethe was 'set by the gods as a boundary-stone to mark where the past ends and modernity begins', while for Matthew Arnold he was the great manifestation of the modern spirit. Innumerable critics have identified Goethe's most famous work as the beginning of this or that tradition. Whether or not one fully agrees with these characterizations, Faust is undeniably one of those rare works that capture some major turning point in our history. Composed over six decades, from 1773 to 1832, Faust comprehends far-reaching changes in philosophy, science, political and economic organization, industrialization and technology that might best be summarized as Europe's confrontation with the impact of secularization. Europe entered the eighteenth century with institutions and structures still defined in terms of a cosmos ordered by a divine principle; but increasingly the universe was felt to operate on its own and sometimes seemed entirely the product of natural processes.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) was the first German writer of unquestioned European stature. And no other writer of his stature has his range and diversity. Author at the age of twenty-five of the first German international bestseller, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther), his impact on the literary scene at home and beyond Germany's borders was immense. Throughout his long productive life (he finished the second part of Faust only months before his death in 1832) he continued to surprise his contemporaries with the freshness and unexpected new departure of each work. He was a supreme lyric poet who also produced masterpieces in the genres of drama, prose fiction and verse epic. He was a serious natural scientist, an art critic and art historian as well as a painter, a chronicler of his own life and times, a theatre director and actor, a Privy Councillor and administrator. He conducted a vast international correspondence and was acquainted and had dealings with many of the prominent political players of the time. His collected works, the amount known about his life, the amount written about it and about his works are all huge. While this volume cannot begin to do justice to its subject, it aims to give the reader approaching Goethe for the first time some sense of the character of his work, some impression of his achievement, and some awareness of and orientation in the critical debates that have raged and still rage over aspects of his work and status.

For much of his adult life, Goethe had a dominant position in the Republic of Letters in Germany as well as abroad. No one who amounted to anything, whether it was Kleist or Heine, Scott or Byron, Musset or Saint-Beuve, Mazzini or Pushkin, could possibly bypass him and his work. Admirers and opponents alike would agree on one point: 'He disposes of the poetic world, like a conqueror of the real earth.' Confronted with his monumental stature and output, they took a position either in favour of Goethe or against him, sometimes even switching sides in the course of their careers. As a result, Goethe became a controversial figure both for poets and critics, for Germans as well as for Europeans. But what has been his enduring impact?

By the end of his life, Goethe felt less accepted by German than by European contemporaries, who between 1827 and 1831 not only sent him birthday gifts (medallions and books) from Paris, Moscow, and Scotland (Carlyle in 1831), but also published three reviews of his ‘Helena’ tragedy (Faust II, Act iii) in the same year (The Foreign Review, Edinburgh; Le Globe, Paris; The Moscow Messenger, 1828). Goethe was delighted, since this lively response seemed to confirm his venture to promote Weltliteratur (world literature) as a network of communication among intellectuals and peoples across national frontiers. For him Weltliteratur was neither the sum of all national literatures nor the ever increasing canon of world masterpieces, rather he conceived of it as a dynamic process of rapprochement among European nations – above all Britain, France and Germany – with the goal of breaking down the walls of national prejudices that hampered peaceful coexistence in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.

Even aged sixteen Goethe strove for authority. He may not have achieved the sublime degree of autoritas he envisaged as a Leipzig fresher in 1765 - that of a German university professor. But among his peers he quickly acquired unparalleled poetic authority. After the publication of his first major innovative works, the Shakespearean patriotic drama Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and the Rousseauesque sentimental novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Goethe was lionized. In his Pandaemonium Germanicum (c. 1775) Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz portrayed Goethe atop the German Pantheon, surrounded by adoring critics whom he must shake off like flies. Johann Caspar Lavater's Physiognomische Fragmente (Physiognomical fragments, 1775-8) presented Goethe for page after page as a divine poetic genius. This poetic charisma remained undiminished as generations and literary paradigms passed. Twenty years on, in Über die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Humanity, 1795), Friedrich Schiller painted Goethe's portrait as the model classical poet. Such admiration also stretched across literary ideologies. In 1798 the leading early German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel asserted that Goethe's classical novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1795-6) represented one of the age's three fundamental tendencies).

When Goethe first drew up a schematic diagram for his planned autobiography in October 1809, he had just completed work on his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), whose formal elegance contrasts all the more glaringly with the moral and societal crisis depicted therein. In the years since the death of Schiller in 1805, Goethe had witnessed the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the defeat of Prussia, and the reorganization of the political map of Europe by Napoleon. His mother had died in 1808, removing yet another link to his childhood and youth. Under these conditions he undertook the re-examination of his life and career as a writer from the vantage point of a sixty-year-old interested in imbuing individual stages of his life with historical significance.

It is in this context that the title Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (From my Life: Poetry and Truth, 1811–33) assumes its meaning: while not neglecting factual information (Wahrheit), Goethe is above all concerned with the refashioning and interpretation of his recollections (Dichtung). In the process, the specific events and individuals depicted in Goethe’s autobiographical writings become paradigmatic not only of important stages in the individual development of the poet, but also of significant moments in the social, cultural, religious and literary life of German-speaking Europe.

Goethe left a rich and heterogeneous body of work in the dramatic genre. Besides the five major dramas (Götz von Berlichingen, Egmont, Iphigenie auf Tauris, Torquato Tasso and Faust), various completed works survive of differing style, length and quality, as well as a large number of fragments and sketches. But even if we isolate the major dramas, we are again struck by their diversity. To be sure, while Faust (which is treated separately in this volume) is unique and incommensurable, Götz and Egmont are both historical plays written in prose, while Iphigenie and Tasso are both written in blank verse. A closer examination will show, however, that each work has its own unique features. For Goethe each dramatic work represented a fresh challenge to discover the appropriate vehicle for his immediate needs. In view of this diversity I shall not confine myself here to the small canon of major works, as some other critics have done, but shall try instead to do justice to the breadth of Goethe's remarkable body of work in this genre.

Isaac Newton's Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John, prepared for the press from his manuscripts by his nephew Benjamin Smith, was published in two editions in London and Dublin in 1733. According to Richard S. Westfall, Newton's finest twentieth-century biographer, the author “had cleansed his Observations” and his heirs “could publish the manuscript without concern.” Yet one might be permitted to wonder whether either the actual or the intended reception of Newton's posthumous work was as uncontroversial as it has seemed to late twentienth-century eyes. The book was dedicated to Peter King, baron of Ockham, the lord chancellor, who had defended Newton's sometime disciple, William Whiston, during his trial for heresy in July 1713. Although Whiston later fell out with King, he nevertheless continued to maintain that King's youthful writings on the primitive Church supported the Arian position for which he had himself been condemned. King was also the dedicatee of other works of dubious theological orthodoxy, such as Daniel Mace's attempted revision of the New Testament.

The opposition between analytical and synthetic proof methods has an intriguing and complex role in the history of Western mathematics. In Antiquity analytical method (in brief, analysis) was conceived of as a method of discovery, or problem solving: it starts from what is sought as if it had already been achieved, and, working step by step backwards, it eventually arrives at what is known. This and similar rather vague definitions were aimed at describing in a general way a whole apparatus of geometric problem solving procedures developed by the Greeks. Synthesis goes the other way round: it starts from what is known and, working through the consequences, it arrives at what is sought. The axiomatic and deductive structure of Euclid's Elements was the model of the synthetic method of proof. Analysis (or resolutio) was often thought of as a method of discovery preliminary to the synthesis (or compositio), which, reversing the steps of the analytical procedure, achieves the true scientific demonstration. Analysis was thus the working tool of the geometer, but it was with synthesis that one could demonstrate things in an indisputable way. In the Middle Ages this pattern of definitions became bound up with the philosophical and logical tradition. A question which was often raised concerned the relationship between the mathematical proof methods and other accepted forms of deductive proof, typically those codified in Aristotle's Organon.