This Very Short Introduction does exactly what a VSI should do. It introduces the reader to its subject and explains why it is significant, and it’s pitched at a non-academic audience in accessible language and with a coherent organisation of the content. Ritchie Robertson’s Goethe, a Very Short Introduction made me want to drop what I’m currently reading and find out more about this great German writer.

Goethe (Wikipedia Commons)Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a celebrity novelist at the age of 25! His debut novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (see my review) was an early example of the Sturm und Drang literary movement, but today its passionate evocation of hopeless young love would place it on the YA shelves (and the film studios would option it and he’d have a mega advance to set him up for life). But as Robertson explains in the preface, there is a lot more to Goethe than Werther.

Writing on the great issues of his time…

… Goethe produced masterpieces in almost every genre: poems on the largest and smallest scale, plays and novels in varied kinds, autobiography, aphorisms, essays, literary and art criticism. (p.xiii)

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Goethe looks like a respectable German intellectual in the portrait on my blog but he was actually quite the non-conformist in some ways. Robertson says that it’s wrong to think of him as a distant and, nowadays unexciting Victorian sage, and also as a serene Olympian figure above ordinary human passions. [*chuckle* Robertson, being an Oxford scholar, does not mean athletic; he means Olympian as in the Greek gods]. Goethe had to work hard at controlling his turbulent emotional experience and #scandal! he shacked up with his lady friend for many years instead of marrying her. But politically he was deeply conservative, and indeed his refusal, when he was in a position of power, to reform the death penalty for infanticide, led directly to the execution of a young woman. His literature, taken as a whole, reveals these contradictions, his irritation with petty restrictions, his questing nature and his reflections on the rapidly changing world he lived in. Robertson says that he was:

… … deeply marked by living through the French revolution and the twenty-plus years of war that followed it. Intellectually, he was shaped by the Enlightenment, and by its commitment to understanding the world by means of empirical and historical study, though he rejected the egalitarianism and irreligion of the Enlightenment’s radical wing. (p. xiv)

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Lionised in Germany now, Goethe was not so popular in his own day.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/12/14/goethe-a-very-short-introduction-by-ritchie-... ( )