Young Goethe's Political Fantasies

Summary

To this day, the image of the young Goethe as a political firebrand persists. The usual story is that he was a driving force in the rebellious Sturm und Drang's rejection of the status quo, whether socially or politically defined. In reference works and literary histories we can read that he was part of the movement's supposedly “zunehmend offene Opposition gegen die feudalistisch-absolutistischen Fesseln der Zeit” (increasingly open opposition to the feudal-absolutist shackles of those days), its struggle “um Befreiung von feudalen und absolutistischen Fesseln und um Herausbildung neuer, freierer Lebensverhältnisse,” its “Impulse für eine grundsätzliche Opposition und … das Streben nach radikaler Erneuerung.” This view is based partly on Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, in which the hero laments “die fatalen bürgerlichen Verhältnisse” (the awful civil conditions; G-MA, 1.2: 250), referring to class differences; or on the poem “Prometheus,” which supposedly represents “Kritik an den bestehenden Herrschaftsverhältnissen” (criticism of existing conditions of sovereign authority) or even “das Selbstbewußtsein der revolutionär gestimmten Kreise des Bürgertums” (the self-awareness of the middle-class circles that had a revolutionary consciousness). To present this position, critics have to provide an ingenious interpretation (one that apparently did not occur to the contemporary readers of “Prometheus” after it was published against Goethe's will) of what is essentially an apolitical poem that contains only religious heterodoxy. Or they have to ignore the fact that the young, unbalanced protagonist of Goethe's first novel rails against class distinctions but in the next breath admits that they are necessary and that they benefit him personally.