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"Voilà, un homme!"


"Behold: a man!"  Thus is Napoleon said to have greeted Goethe when the two met at Erfurt in 1808.  Napoleon read Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, which I am currently teaching in Humanities, multiple times.

Goethe is of course the giant of German literature, and one of the towering figures of European culture.  To help prepare for class, I was poking around in Jeremy Adler's new life of Goethe, and he quotes the great English critic Matthew Arnold on Goethe:

"Goethe is the greatest poet of modern times, not because he is one of the half-dozen human beings who in the history of our race have shown the most signal gift for poetry, but because, having a very considerable gift for poetry, he was at the same time, in the width, depth, and richness of his criticism of life, by far our greatest modern man."

That's pretty high praise.  The scope of Goethe's interests and influence was remarkable, as Daniel Johnson nicely lays out in the early part of this review.

I have not read as much Goethe as I should.  Part One of Faust, of course, and a few other things now and then.  There is never quite enough time to read!  But it is impossible to hear the list of his achievements (look at that Johnson essay) and not think that he deserves more sustained attention.

It would be interesting to build a course around Goethe's life and works.  He lived from 1749 to 1832--through the Seven Years' War (for Americans, the French and Indian War), the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the entire Napoleonic period with the revolutionary waves in its aftermath.  Goethe's own work went through several stages, covered multiple genres, and intersected with philosophy and science.  So one could imagine using Goethe as the pivot for a course examining the development of European politics and culture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  It would be the sort of thing I enjoy teaching.  Maybe one day.


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