On his return to Frankfurt, he found it: the life of Götz von Berlichingen, an early 16th-century knight with an iron prosthetic arm whose autobiography Goethe had stumbled across in the city library. In six weeks, he drafted his first major work: Götz von Berlichingen, a sweeping five-act historical play charting its hero's changing military and sexual alliances in the disintegrating Holy Roman Empire. Against the backdrop of kidnappings, poisonings, suicides, affairs and the Peasants' War – “the plot devolves into complete chaos,” Bell notes – Goetz tries to firmly defend his honor and freedom to fight for whomever he wants. Loyal to the emperor, contemptuous of the aristocracy and sympathetic to the peasants' desire for liberation, if not their bloodlust, he is torn between medieval chivalry and modern self-preservation. He embodies a distinctly Goethean type: the exceptional man who, as Goethe worried, “meets the brute world” and must “renounce his high qualities and finally give them up entirely.”
The play, published in 1773 and first performed in Berlin the following year, was “a most beautiful, most exciting monster,” declared one critic. The mixture of high and low characters, settings and dialects flouted the rules of classical drama and marked the beginning of the German dramatic tradition. Success brought Goethe relief, but also anxiety. “I think it will be a while before I do anything that finds an audience again,” he wrote.
Not like that. The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, became his most influential work. It is now famous not only for the cult that supposedly arose from it (young people imitate the protagonist's yellow vest and his suicide), but also for its strange epistolary form and an even stranger story. The ardent young man Werther falls in love with Lotte, a simple country girl engaged to a reliable but boring man named Albert. Love transforms Werther. He is exquisitely and obsessively aware of the natural world around Lotte – the details of the mountains, valleys, walnut and linden trees under which she stands. In his letters, he presents Lotte as a naturally occurring phenomenon, an innate and inexpressible presence: “When I close my eyes, here, in the forehead, in the focus of my inner vision, her dark eyes remain.”
Falling in love was an early and harmless pleasure for Goethe. He wrote love letters that combined lush images of nature with innocent theories of emotion—a true “child of nature in the spirit of Rousseau,” as Bell describes him. “When I say ‘love,’ I mean the oscillatory sensation in which our heart floats, always moving back and forth in the same place,” Goethe mused in one of his drafts. “We are like children on a rocking horse: always on the move, always working and rooted to the spot.” The events in Werther were inspired by two contiguous love triangles: Goethe's infatuation with his friend Johann Christian Kästner's wife, Charlotte, and the suicide of neurotic lawyer Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, who shot himself with a pistol borrowed from Kästner.
But the story is not just about one person's unrequited love. The critic György Lukács insisted that it was “one of the greatest love stories in world literature” because Goethe was able to summarize his experiences and “dedicated a lifetime of his time to this love tragedy.” The prevailing Romantic view was that passion destroyed social order and should therefore be denied. “What terrible people, whose minds are completely absorbed in questions of etiquette,” exclaims Werther when he takes the position at court to try to forget Lotte. Every episode in the book – Werther's flight from home, his failure at court, his despair over Lotte's marriage – arises from his inability to instill his desires in an artificial and indifferent world. The stronger his feeling, the greater his isolation. He cannot imagine any other way out than to borrow two pistols from Albert and shoot himself in the head.
While Goetz gave German readers a glimpse into their past, Werther showed them their present. This was Goethe's first attempt to create what Lukács called an “educational novel” in which one learns a “practical understanding of reality.” In Werther this education concerns the true nature of desire. “All learned teachers and mentors agree that children do not know the reasons for their desires,” writes Werther. However, he does not understand that his desire to express the full force of his personality and his despair when he cannot do so are far from unique. Just as Lotte’s refusal seems scripted to him: “All this should be published,” he tells her, “and we could recommend it to educators,” so we see the passionate outpourings of Werther’s letters as imitating the poetry that an educated man of his time might be expected to absorb. Werther, in his self-deception, embodies another Goethean type, a yearning man – ordinary, but convinced of the extraordinary nature of his feelings. “Werther “became fashion because it was about fashion,” Boyle notes. When the book was published, both those who swooned over it and those who condemned it failed to grasp its satirical edge. It's good that they didn't do this. “Goetz” made Goethe's name in Germany, but “Werther” brought him international fame. He was twenty-five years old.
Weimar asked Goethe for help in 1774, a few weeks after Werther, and he responded enthusiastically. It was a match of convenience. The Dowager believed that Goethe would help her teenage son, the Duke, grow up to be a benevolent despot. Goethe believed that a small state would be a better test of his political acumen than a large one. “The duchies of Weimar and Eisenach will become an arena in which it will be possible to test whether a role in worldly affairs suits or not,” he wrote. He wasn't cheap, but he was a good catch – in the words of his valet, “lean, nimble and graceful.” He thought he had the fortitude to withstand the tedium and pettiness of the trial: “I am better able to realize the complete crapness of this our secular majesty.”
But as any administrator knows, it can be difficult to overcome crap. Goethe spent much of his time putting out fires—literally in villages, and figuratively in an overextended treasury, an understaffed university, and collapsing mines. At court he was perceived as “a minister and a cold person.” He valued “order, precision, speed” and “self-denial.” With the Duke things were different. Rumors of the adventures of the twenty-six-year-old poet and his eighteen-year-old prince were crude and probably exaggerated. “They dug potatoes out of the ground, cooked them on kindling in the forest, slept with girls in the forest, carved inscriptions on trees,” the friend said. Goethe, during his first decade in Weimar, lived half as a child of nature and half as a bureaucrat. He wrote shorter poems and plays, essays on minerals and anatomy, and more than a thousand letters to the court lady Charlotte von Stein, with whom he had a chaste and entangled affair. But he barely managed to complete the ambitious projects he had begun before his arrival—the play “Egmont” and his first full-length novel, “The Theater Mission of Wilhelm Meister.” By 1785, friends noted his sullenness and lingering illnesses. He asked the Duke for a respite to recuperate in the resort town of Carlsbad, and then secretly traveled to Italy.
