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  • People have always had trouble pronouncing his name;

  • if you don't speak German it's not at all obvious how you're supposed to say it.

  • A safe bet is to start with a hard G on Ger- and end with a -ter: Ger-ter.

  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has often been seen as one of Europe's big cultural heroes,

  • comparable to the likes of Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer.

  • During his life, Goethe's admirers were impressed by his literary works,

  • but more than any of his books, what impressed people at the time,

  • was how he lived his life, the kind of person he was.

  • We can pick up some vital lessons from him:

  • 1. Stop being so romantic

  • Goethe's first proper job after law school was as an assistant at a national tribunal

  • judging cases between the many minor German states that, at that time, made up the Holy Roman Empire.

  • While he was working, Goethe fell in love with the fiance of one of his colleagues.

  • He then committed a huge indiscretion and wrote up the love affair as an novel.

  • He called it, "The Sorrows of Young Werther".

  • The central character, Werther, is a lightly disguised self-portrait.

  • The book tells the story of how, Werther/Goethe falls in love with a young woman, Charlotte.

  • It's a very detailed description of all the tiny steps one takes on the road to infatuation:

  • they danced together, at one point their feet accidentally touch under the table,

  • they smile, they write each other flirtatious little notes;

  • it makes being in love seem like the most romantic experience in life;

  • Werther asks himself, "what is a life without romantic love? A magical lantern without a lamp".

  • This deeply charming novel was a best-seller across Europe for the next 25 years.

  • Napoleon boasted he'd read it seven times.

  • The story has a miserable ending:

  • Charlotte doesn't really love Werther and finally rejects him.

  • In despair he kills himself.

  • The tragic denouement shows Goethe beginning to see the limitations of the romantic view of life.

  • Romantic love is deeply attractive but it causes us immense problems too.

  • The core problem, as Goethe came to see it, is this:

  • romantic love hopes to freeze a beautiful moment;

  • it's a summer's evening after dinner; Werther is walking in the woods with his beloved;

  • he wants it to be always like this so he feels they should get married, have a house together, have children;

  • though, in reality marriage will be nothing at all like the lovely June night;

  • There'll be exhaustion, bills to pay, squabbles, and a sense of confinement.

  • By comparison, with the extreme hopes of Romanticism, real love, as Goethe came to see,

  • is always, necessarily, a terrible disappointment.

  • That's why Goethe gradually moved away from romanticism towards an ideology of love he termed "classicism" :

  • marked by a degree of pessimism and acceptance of the troubles that afflict all couples over time,

  • and of the need to abandon some of the heady hopes of the early days for the sake of tranquility and administrative competence.

  • Goethe was a critic of romantic ideology, not because he was cold-hearted or lacking in imagination,

  • but because he so deeply and intimately understood the attractions of romanticism and therefore its dangers.

  • 2. Get a real job

  • In April 1775, not long after his big success with Werther, Goethe got a job as a civil servant.

  • Karl August, the Duke of Weimar, appointed him as his chief adviser

  • and senior administrator to help run his country.

  • Goethe continued in this employment for most of the rest of his life.

  • His main jobs was Minister for Roads and as the overseer of the state-owned silver mining operation.

  • It can sound like a strange move for a very successful creative figure,

  • as if the winner of the Booker Prize became a civil servant;

  • we just assume that art and literature are at odds with an enthusiasm for government administration.

  • But Goethe didn't see it that way;

  • he felt that understanding administration would help him put big ideas into practice.

  • Later in his life, instead of writing about how good it would be to have a national theater,

  • he was able to establish one,

  • and instead of just saying that cities should have green spaces,

  • he was able to rev up the governmental machinery into action and actually create a model urban park.

  • 3. Travel as therapy

  • In September 1986, after 10 years in the Weimar civil service, when his 40th birthday was coming into view,

  • Goethe got fed up with Germany: the cold, the bad food, and this was key for him, the lack of sex.

  • So he went to Rome with a very classical idea of the point of travel:

  • the outer journey was intended to support an inner journey towards maturity.

  • He felt that there were parts of himself that could only be discovered in Italy.

  • But, like many visitors to Rome, when he got there he felt a bit disappointed.

  • In the famous book of poems he later wrote about his experience, the Roman Elegies;

  • he describes how the great city seemed to be filled with lifeless ruins

  • that were famous but didn't actually mean anything to him;

  • "Speak to me, you stones!", he pleads.

  • It's a feeling many later visitors have had.

  • Goethe realized that what he needed was not a more elaborate guidebook,

  • but the right person to have an affair with;

  • someone who would embody the spirit of the place he was in.

  • In his poems he describes the woman he meets, whom he calls Faustina.

  • They spend lazy afternoons in bed.

  • She's not a great intellectual, but she breathes the spirit of Rome;

  • she tells him about her life, about the building she passes on her way to the market, the Pantheon,

  • a Baroque church designed by Bernini, which she hadn't even realized were famous;

  • they were just the buildings that happened to be around when she was getting the milk and the aubergines.

  • For Goethe, the point of travel isn't relaxation or just taking a break from routine, he had a bigger goal in mind;

  • the aim of travel is to go to a place where we can find a missing ingredient of our own maturity.

  • 4. Living Life to the Fullest

  • One of the most striking things about Goethe is how much he did,

  • how broad his horizons were, and how wide his interest came to be;

  • He explored this particularly through his most famous work, Faust.

  • Goethe worked on Faust all his life;

  • the earliest sketches go back to his teens

  • and he only decided he was done with it when he was in his early eighties.

  • Faust comes in two parts and together the performance takes about 13 hours.

  • Goethe himself never saw the whole thing and few people have ever since.

  • Faust is a medieval academic and scholar, he's very learned, but he doesn't do very much.

  • He's unfulfilled in love, he hasn't made any money, and he has no power.

  • His knowledge is sterile, his life feels pointless, and he wishes he could die.

  • But then he is visited by a devil, called Mephistopheles,

  • who offers him boundless energy, good looks, and the ability to do whatever he wants.

  • The question is: what will Faust want to do?

  • The first danger for Faust is to just stay an academic who resists worldly impact;

  • with the Devil's help he could be the ultimate bookworm; he could get his hands on the oldest rarest manuscripts.

  • But Faust gets weary of words and longs for action.

  • Now the second danger is that he will use his new powers to gratify every sensual appetite;

  • he might become just a pure hedonist.

  • Faust goes some way down this path; he goes to a bar and gets everyone very drunk, he goes to huge orgy,

  • but then he realizes that what he really seeks is beauty and love, and this leads him on from sex and alcohol.

  • The third danger is that Faust will become a confident, but shallow political leader;

  • but in a second part of the play, Faust pursues a grander purpose:

  • eventually he organizes the development of a new country, somewhat reminiscent of the Dutch Republic,

  • which at that time was the most enlightened and successful society in the world.

  • Faust is a morality tale for all of us;

  • he shows us both the pitfalls of life and how we might avoid them.

  • Faust knows a great deal, but he resists being an academic;

  • he love sex, but he doesn't give way to debauchery;

  • he likes power but he doesn't use it for megalomania;

  • he puts it to work in the service of noble ends.

  • Faust's career path is not unlike Goethe's.

  • Faust is essentially tracing for us a theory of how to live a full life:

  • he's very interested in ideas, but not a scholar;

  • he visits Italy, but he doesn't stay there;

  • he goes back to work: he tries out administration and learns how to wield power,

  • but once he's mastered this side of himself he moves on.

  • The Faustian idea is that in order to develop fully,

  • we have to flirt with things that are quite dangerous, but hold on to a sense of higher purpose.

  • 5. Science for Artsy People

  • Goethe was the last European to do a certain kind of remarkable things:

  • to write great novels and plays, and also to play a significant role in science.

  • His interest ranged through geology, meteorology, physiology, and chemistry,

  • and his most important work was in botany.

  • In 1790 he produced a study: The Metamorphosis of Plants,

  • and a book on optics and color, called The Theory of Colors, was published in 1810.

  • Thereafter this combination of very significant work in the arts and in the sciences disappears from the European civilization.

  • Goethe gives us some guidance as to why this has happened.

  • He's a hero for people of a more literary and artistic sensibility,

  • who are attracted from a distance to the broad subject matter of science,

  • but who find the details a bit less appealing.

  • Goethe liked science that you can do yourself, by looking carefully at the world around you;

  • for example, he did a lot of his research on plants in his own back garden in Weimar,

  • he did a lot of his research on optics with candles and colored pieces of paper in his study;

  • he liked the training this gave in asking oneself, "what do I actually see?"

  • Goethe was very interested in the psychological aspect of our relationship to the sorts of things that science investigates:

  • plants, light, stones;

  • rather than exclude the issues of personal meaning,

  • Goethe sees these essential to the proper and full investigation of nature.

  • Goethe was worried by the direction that science was taking,

  • which he particularly associated with the work of Isaac Newton.

  • As Goethe saw it, the academic professional scientist

  • wasn't interested in a personal meaning of the things they were investigating,

  • and thereby helped to kill the subject.

  • As he aged, Goethe kept on working, and he kept on seeking love and sex;

  • in his seventies, he fell in love with a woman called Ulkrike; his passion was unrequited.

  • He died at his house in Weimar in 1832, aged 83.

  • We have so much to learn from him;

  • we don't often hear people declaring a wish to be a little more like Goethe,

  • but if we did, the world would definitely be a more vibrant and humane place.

People have always had trouble pronouncing his name;

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