Volume 47, Number 6 · April 13, 2000
Germany's Greatest
By Gordon A. Craig
Das Goethe-Tabu: Protest und Menschenrechte im klassischen Weimar
by W. Daniel Wilson
Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 414 pp., DM24.90 (paper)
Goethe: The Poet and the Age Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation (1790-1803)
by Nicholas Boyle
Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 949 pp., $45.00
Das Inkognito: Goethes ganz andere Existenz in Rom
by Roberto Zapperi
Munich: C.H. Beck, 299 pp., DM39.90
Christiane und Goethe: Eine Recherche
by Sigrid Damm
Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 540 pp., DM49.80
Goethe, the greatest of German poets, and the only one who can be placed in the company of Shakespeare and Dante, has always received a mixed reception in his own country, where he has been the object of praise and censure in almost equal measure. After the rapturous reception of The Sorrows of the Young Werther, which was written in four weeks in 1774 and became a European best seller, the poet's popularity in Germany drained away during his long years as minister of state for the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, reviving sporadically, but not completely, with the publication of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship in 1795-1796, which greatly impressed the new Romantic generation, and again with that of Hermann und Dorothea in 1796- 1797, an epic set amid the convulsions caused by the French Revolution. His growing aloofness contributed to the belief that he had no interest in the common people, and Ludwig Börne wrote in his diary in 1830:
Review, 5792 words
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