The Yale Review | Thomas Mann: "Goethe"

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Goethe

Thomas Mann

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For this essay on Goethe, a task of which I feel so unworthy, I shall fall back upon a memory, a personal experience, to hearten myself for the venture and give it the stamp of authenticity, which is best and final in all things. I recall the emotions that crowded in upon me years ago when I found myself for the first time in Goethe’s childhood home on the Hirschgraben in Frankfurt. Those rooms and stairs I knew perfectly, in style and tone and atmosphere. Here was “ancestry,” as it is recorded in the book of my life, and the beginning, likewise, of something gigantic. I was at home and at the same time I was a late and shy guest in the realm of genius. The homelike and the grand rubbed shoulders. This bourgeois-patrician mansion, now become a museum, where reverence treads softly as at the cradle of a demi-god; this dignified and decorous setting, treasured and held sacred because of the son who left it behind—how far behind!—to grow to austere world stature—I gazed on all this, I breathed it in; and the discord between familiarity and awe in my breast was resolved into that feeling in which humility and self-assertion are one, into smiling love.

I cannot speak of Goethe except with love—with a sense of intimacy; if there be offensiveness in this, it is mitigated by the keenest awareness that he is incomparable. I may leave it to those who feel qualified by training and temperament to dwell upon his highest flights, from their purely intellectual standpoint as historians and commentators. It is quite another thing to share in Goethe’s substance, in its human guise; and it is only from the standpoint that I and others like me can speak of Goethe at all. Why deny that recognition, that right of intimacy, transcending the personal and embracing the national? This year the world at large is commemorating that great citizen; but only Germans can do so with the familiarity I have mentioned that comes through being a part of his substance. The dignified bourgeois setting as the home of one who was to be at home in all that is human; the world greatness with a bourgeois origin: this destiny, the result of good ancestry and tremendous growth, is nowhere found in such a typical form as in Germany; and everything German that has grown up from the bourgeois order to higher spiritual levels is smilingly at home in that Frankfurt birthplace.

There are various ways of looking at the figure of this great man and poet (always putting the emphasis upon the man), depending upon the historical standpoint from which we regard him. Thus he appears—to take the most modest view first—as the lord and master of a German cultural epoch, the classical epoch, for which the Germans have been hailed as the nation of poets and thinkers. It was an epoch of idealistic individualism and the source of the German concept of culture; a period which, in Goethe’s own case, cast its humane spell in the peculiar psychological combination of self-development and self-fulfilment with the idea of education, in such a way, moreover, that the idea of education bridged the gap between the inner life of the individual and the social order. To see Goethe thus, as the representative of this classical-humanist epoch of culture, is to take the narrowest view of his personality. A second, much larger, way of regarding him suggests itself: it is that in which Carlyle, one of his first admirers outside Germany, saw him immediately after the great German’s death. There have been men on this earth, Carlyle remarks, who have set up impulses requiring fifteen hundred years for their complete development, impulses, indeed, that even after two thousand years continue to act with all their individual force. From such a standpoint, the age of Goethe extends not only over centuries but over millennia. As a matter of fact, even to Goethe’s contemporaries his personality had something so miraculous about it that they could call him “a divine human being” without any sense of extravagance. There was in this wonderful personality the making of a colossal myth, comparable with those of the greatest human beings who have trod this earth, and no one can say to what proportions his stature will yet grow with the passage of time. To such men belongs the world-wide acclaim that falls to the lot of legendary figures only, the pride of the race—representatives of timeless humanity, who form the highest justification of mankind face to face with the eternal and the universal.

But between these two ways of looking at Goethe, the most intimate and the most sublime, there is a third and intermediate possibility; and for us, who are witnessing the ending of the bourgeois epoch, and who are destined in the throes and crises of the transition to find a path to new worlds, new patterns of...