Booksology Goethe, the human being, fades from view while Wilson picks up and chews on topics such as the history of the Faust legend, the nature of the bildungsroman, freemasonry, suicide, anatomy (Goethe was an accomplished scientist), the inclinations of courtiers, the arts scene in Weimar when Goethe was young, Hume and Kant and the crisis of the Enlightenment, and so on.
Wilson’s book is engaging about Goethe’s influence on Freud. Goethe’s deep soundings of the self in “The Sorrows of Young Werther” were a forerunner of Freud’s concept of the unconscious.
Good, too, are the sections on Hitler’s obsession with “Faust,” in part for its great themes of ambition and striving for greatness and for its sense of tragic heroism. Goethe seemed to hold the German soul in his hands, Wilson writes, and Hitler sought to plug into that. The dictator’s readings were misreadings of the play’s ambiguities. Wilson notes that Goethe loathed German nationalism.
China’s authoritarian leader Xi Jinping is also an admirer of “Faust.” Wilson suggests that Goethe’s writing is like the Bible in the sense that its words “become the possession of any ideologue who was prepared to lay claim to them.”
Wilson communicates his passion for Goethe by urging the writer’s works upon us, as if reading them were a moral duty. Thomas Carlyle implored his readers to “Close thy Byron! Open thy Goethe!” Wilson thinks this motto needs updating:
Close thy Wikipedia, close thy Google, close thy Bible Fundamentalism and thy Richard Dawkin’s reductionism, close thy Culture Warriors on either side, close thy popular press and thy unpopular press, close thy BBC and thy New York Times, close thy mad distortions (both by Islamophobes and by the radicalized fanatics) of the beautiful sayings of Islam, and open thy Goethe, who so revered the Prophet and his writings!
Whew! I was willing to be sold. Alas, the quotations Wilson provides from “Faust” do not send the reader rushing to pick it up. He admits that Goethe “loses in translation more than any poet I have ever tried to read”and that “none of the translations of ‘Faust’ are really adequate.”
