For lovers of German culture the Goethe House in Weimar is the holiest of holies, writes DEREK SCALLY
THE FAMOUS last words of German poet, dramatist and thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) were: "More light!" Picking my way through his home in the gloom of a grey Weimar day, rain streaming against the 200-year-old window panes, it's easy to see what he was talking about.
For lovers of German culture, the Goethe House is the holiest of holies, what Stratford is to Shakespeare lovers, a holy place of pilgrimage with an air of the obligatory that can repel as much as it attracts.
The sparely decorated house facing onto a pretty square was a gift to Goethe in 1794 from the culture-loving Duke Charles Auguste of Saxe-Weimar, a small duchy located in today’s eastern state of Thuringia.
With the house, the duke guessed, rightly as it turned out, that Goethe would make his home in Weimar, allowing the small city to adorn itself with the most famous artist of the era.
Eventually an entire artistic movement flourished around Goethe. Known as ‘Weimar Classic’, it remains for many the pinnacle of German culture and includes contemporary poets and dramatists such as Schiller, Wieland and Herder.
Goethe, born to a wealthy merchant family from Frankfurt, had studied law but shot to fame as the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther(written in 1774 and published in a revised form in 1787), a novella about a love-sick young man that caused a sensation across Europe.
In Weimar, Goethe tried his hand at everything from politics to science but finally returned to writing, with new, radical approaches to poetry and drama. From the epic tragedy of Faustto The Sorcerer's Apprentice, his works are still celebrated today.
Yet for all his importance, few in Germany remember Goethe’s love-hate relationship with the land of his birth and its people as, during his lifetime, it began a slow drift toward nationhood.
"The Germans, like the Jews, should be scattered around the world," Goethe once remarked to a visitor. "Only that way are they bearable." Germans prefer to overlook remarks like those because Goethe is the foundation stone of what his Weimar contemporary Johann Karl Musäus described as the Land der Dichter und Denker– the land of poets and thinkers.
This label, worn proudly by Germany to this day, was invented in Weimar as much out of necessity as anything else. After the 1789 revolution in France, many intellectuals began to distance themselves from all things French and thinkers in Weimar and elsewhere began to push the German language – until then mostly used by aristocrats to give orders to servants – as the key to healing a “divided nation”.
Seeing as the muddled landscape of German kingdoms and duchies made national unity a political and practical non-starter, the intellectuals played the cards they were dealt and praised instead their pursuit of a more noble goal: German cultural unity.
During Goethe’s long life – he died at the age of 82 – he fell in and out of favour but it was only after his death that his second career began, as posthumous cultural ambassador.
Goethe was co-opted for the first time in 1871 and crowned a national great by the new German Reich in a hurried hunt for heroes, even though his 100th birthday had been roundly ignored two decades earlier.
It was all the more audacious considering that Goethe was on the record as detesting shows of nationalism, “the lowest step of culture”.
He was anxious to precipitate – and ascend to – an era of what he termed “world culture” and “world literature”.
In 1919, as Germany picked itself up from the ruins of the Great War, representatives came to draft a constitution for a new republic in Goethe’s adoptive home. The choice of location was mostly down to practical reasons – the availability of Weimar’s spacious National Theatre – but it didn’t stop the later president Frederick Ebert citing Goethe and the “spirit of Weimar” as the way to shift Germany “from imperialism to idealism, from world power to intellectual greatness”. It wasn’t to be: two decades later Germany plunged into a second World War. As the nation picked itself up once again in 1945, the increasingly worn visage of Goethe was hoisted once again, this time by Thomas Mann and others, as the poster boy of the “good Germany”.
West German efforts to rebuild trust with neighbours through cultural exchange even bore his name in the Goethe Institute.
These days, Goethe is as much an industry as culture.
In his former home, visitors can buy everything from Faust oven gloves to a recipe book of Goethe’s erotic love dishes.
But it’s his enduring works that remain most popular with visitors.
“What’s fascinating is the sheer scale and scope of his learning and his art,” said visitor Claudia Ahrens (28). “Despite everything in our history, we’ll always have Goethe.”