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Updated: September 18, 2025
It would be difficult to co-ordinate them into a higher synthesis, for that universality is at the same time diversity and mutability. Goethe is essentially changeable and elusive. In his works we find combined the antipodes of human thought. There is little in common between the poet of Goetz von Berlichingen and Werther on the one hand and the poet of Tasso and Iphigenia on the other hand.
Such was the state of things when Goethe appeared. His rapid glance at once discerned the poverty of dramatic art, and his flexible and many-sided genius set itself to supply the deficiency. His "Goetz von Berlichingen" illustrated the possibility of a dramatic literature founded upon national history and national character.
The latter hovers between that of classic tradition and the licence of Shakespeare, while the subjects are generally taken from foreign history or from Greek mythology; only occasionally, as in Goetz von Berlichingen and Wallenstein, from German history.
Well is it for Germany that other ideas now prevail, well, that Goethe in his old age overcame the Gallomania, which for a while possessed him, of translating all his works, and thenceforth writing only in French. The iron hand of Goetz of Berlichingen would burst the seams of a Paris kid-glove.
Then we hired the hack and the horse which Goetz von Berlichingen used to use, and drove several miles into the country to visit the place called WEIBERTREU Wife's Fidelity I suppose it means. It was a feudal castle of the Middle Ages. When we reached its neighborhood we found it was beautifully situated, but on top of a mound, or hill, round and tolerably steep, and about two hundred feet high.
Among these was Jung-Stilling, the self-educated charcoal-burner, who in his memoir has left a graphic account of Goethe's striking appearance, in his broad brow, his flashing eye, his mastery of the company, and his generosity. Another was Lerse, a frank, open character, who became Goethe's favorite, and whose name is immortalized in Goetz von Berlichingen.
"Why should I? The proud secretary of legation has already been in Berlin eight days, and wishes to prove to me that he cares little for Berlin philosophers. My noble friend, the great Lessing, cannot abide 'Gotz von Berlichingen; and Nicolai, Rammler, and Engel are the bitter opponents, the very antipodes of the rare genius and secretary of legation from Weimar.
"Goetz von Berlichingen," written in Goethe's earliest days of authorship, is German and in prose, "Faust" the greatest poem of these latter times, and rivaling the greatest poems of all time "Faust" is not strictly a drama: its wonderful successive scenes are not bound together by dramatic necessity.
In dealing with this difficulty, Schiller departs from his ordinary method of concentration and allows himself to be guided by the epical character of Tschudi's narrative. The result is that we have, somewhat as in Goethe's 'Goetz von Berlichingen', a succession of dramatic pictures, rather than a drama bound together by a severe logic.
"Goetz von Berlichingen" and "Werther" made the young Goethe one of the foremost men in German literature. That theory of his boyhood, that he was to be a lawyer or jurisconsult, could be maintained no longer even by his father.
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