To Strassburg we owe Goethe’s first important drama, Götz von Berlichingen, or, as it was called in its earliest form, Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlichingen dramatisiert (not published until 1831). Revised under the now familiar title, it appeared in 1773, after Goethe’s return to Frankfort. In estimating this drama we must bear in mind Goethe’s own Strassburg life, and the turbulent spirit of his own age, rather than the historical facts, which the poet found in the autobiography of his hero published in 1731. The latter supplied only the rough materials; the Götz von Berlichingen whom Goethe drew, with his lofty ideals of right and wrong, and his enthusiasm for freedom, is a very different personage from the unscrupulous robber-knight of the 16th century, the rough friend of Franz von Sickingen and of the revolting peasants. Still less historical justification is to be found for the vacillating Weisslingen in whom Goethe executed poetic justice on himself as the lover of Friederike, or in the women of the play, the gentle Maria, the heartless Adelheid. But there is genial, creative power in the very subjectivity of these characters, and a vigorous dramatic life, which is irresistible in its appeal. With Götz von Berlichingen, Shakespeare’s art first triumphed on the German stage, and the literary movement known as Sturm und Drang was inaugurated.
Having received his degree in Strassburg, Goethe returned home in August 1771, and began his initiation into the routine of an advocate’s profession. In the following year, in order to gain insight into another side of his calling, he spent four months at Wetzlar, where the imperial law-courts were established. But Goethe’s professional duties had only a small share in the eventful years which lay between his return from Strassburg and that visit to Weimar at the end of 1775, which turned the whole course of his career, and resulted in his permanent attachment to the Weimar court. Goethe’s life in Frankfort was a round of stimulating literary intercourse; in J. H. Merck (1741–1791), an army official in the neighbouring town of Darmstadt, he found a friend and mentor, whose irony and common-sense served as a corrective to his own exuberance of spirits. Wetzlar brought new friends and another passion, that for Charlotte Buff, the daughter of the Amtmann there—a love-story which has been immortalized in Werthers Leiden—and again the young poet’s nature was obsessed by a love which was this time strong enough to bring him to the brink of that suicide with which the novel ends. A visit to the Rhine, where new interests and the attractions of Maximiliane von Laroche, a daughter of Wieland’s friend, the novelist Sophie von Laroche, brought partial healing; his intense preoccupation with literary work on his return to Frankfort did the rest. In 1775 Goethe was attracted by still another type of woman, Lili Schönemann, whose mother was the widow of a wealthy Frankfort banker. A formal betrothal took place, and the beauty of the lyrics which Lili inspired leaves no room for doubt that here was a passion no less genuine than that for Friederike or Charlotte. But Goethe—more worldly wise than on former occasions—felt instinctively that the gay, social world in which Lili moved was not really congenial to him. A visit to Switzerland in the summer of 1775 may not have weakened his interest in her, but it at least allowed him to regard her objectively; and, without tragic consequences on either side, the passion was ultimately allowed to yield to the dictates of common-sense. Goethe’s departure for Weimar in November made the final break less difficult.
The period from 1771 to 1775 was, in literary respects, the most productive of the poet’s life. It had been inaugurated with Götz von Berlichingen, and a few months later this tragedy was followed by another, Clavigo, hardly less convincing in its character-drawing, and reflecting even more faithfully than the former the experiences Goethe had gone through in Strassburg. Again poetic justice is effected on the unfortunate hero who has chosen his own personal advancement in preference to his duty to the woman he loves; more pointedly than in Götz is the moral enforced by Clavigo’s worldly friend Carlos, that the ground of Clavigo’s tragic end lies not so much in the defiance of a moral law as in the hero’s vacillation and want of character. With Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), the literary precipitate of the author’s own experiences in Wetzlar, Goethe succeeded in attracting, as no German had done before him, the attention of Europe. Once more it was the gospel that the world belongs to the strong, which lay beneath the surface of this romance. This, however, was not the lesson which was drawn from it by Goethe’s contemporaries; they shed tears of sympathy over the lovelorn youth whose burden becomes too great for him to bear. While Götz inaugurated the manlier side of the Sturm und Drang literature, Werther was responsible for its sentimental excesses. And to the sentimental rather than to the heroic side belongs also Stella, “a drama for lovers,” in which the poet again reproduced, if with less fidelity than in Werther, certain aspects of his own love troubles. A lighter vein is to be observed in various dramatic satires written at this time, such as Götter, Helden und Wieland (1774), Hanswursts Hochzeit, Fastnachtsspiel vom Pater Brey, Satyros, and in the Singspiele, Erwin und Elmire (1775) and Claudine von Villa Bella (1776); while in the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeiger (1772–1773), Goethe drove home the principles of the new movement of Sturm und Drang in terse and pointed criticism. The exuberance of the young poet’s genius is also to be seen in the many unfinished fragments of this period; at one time we find him occupied with dramas on Caesar and Mahomet, at another with an epic on Der ewige Jude, and again with a tragedy on Prometheus, of which a magnificent fragment has passed into his works. Greatest of all the torsos of this period, however, was the dramatization of Faust. Thanks to a manuscript copy of the play in its earliest form—discovered as recently as 1887—we are now able to distinguish how much of this tragedy was the immediate product of the Sturm und Drang, and to understand the intentions with which the young poet began his masterpiece. Goethe’s hero changed with the author’s riper experience and with his new conceptions of man’s place and duties in the world, but the Gretchen tragedy was taken over into the finished poem, practically unaltered, from the earliest Faust of the Sturm und Drang. With these wonderful scenes, the most intensely tragic in all German literature, Goethe’s poetry in this period reaches its climax. Still another important work, however, was conceived, and in large measure written at this time, the drama of Egmont, which was not published until 1788. This work may, to some extent, be regarded as supplementary to Faust; it presents the lighter, more cheerful and optimistic side of Goethe’s philosophy in these years; Graf Egmont, the most winning and fascinating of the poet’s heroes, is endowed with that “demonic” power over the sympathies of men and women, which Goethe himself possessed in so high a degree. But Egmont depends for its interest almost solely on two characters, Egmont himself and Klärchen, Gretchen’s counterpart; regarded as a drama, it demonstrates the futility of that defiance of convention and rules with which the Sturm und Drang set out. It remained for Goethe, in the next period of his life, to construct on classic models a new vehicle for German dramatic poetry.
In December 1774 the young “hereditary prince” of Weimar, Charles Augustus, passing through Frankfort on his way to Paris, came into personal touch with Goethe, and invited the poet to visit Weimar when, in the following year, he took up the reins of government. In October 1775 the invitation was repeated, and on the 7th of November of that year Goethe arrived in the little Saxon capital which was to remain his home for the rest of his life. During the first few months in Weimar the poet gave himself up to the pleasures of the moment as unreservedly as his patron; indeed, the Weimar court even looked upon him for a time as a tempter who led the young duke astray. But the latter, although himself a mere stripling, had implicit faith in Goethe, and a firm conviction that his genius could be utilized in other fields besides literature. Goethe was not long in Weimar before he was entrusted with responsible state duties, and events soon justified the duke’s confidence. Goethe proved the soul of the Weimar government, and a minister of state of energy and foresight. He interested himself in agriculture, horticulture and mining, which were of paramount importance to the welfare of the duchy, and out of these interests sprang his own love for the natural sciences, which took up so much of his time in later
