Goethe – especially in the original German – may be a blank page to you. It’s an assumption that A N Wilson makes of readers of his characteristically provocative and accessible book about Germany’s greatest polymath. Wilson approaches his subject with the zest of a Germanophile crusader, one who thinks that England’s intellectual decline began in 1881 with the death of Thomas Carlyle (‘Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe’).

He may be right. Still, I’m willing to bet that, while we may not share Wilson’s (or Carlyle’s) good fortune in having Goethe’s complete works in German on our shelves, most of us can nod recognition to some of the great man’s most quotable aphorisms: ‘Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away’; ‘We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe’; ‘There’s nothing more frightening than ignorance in action.’ My favourite, because it speaks so powerfully to a biographer’s intuition, is from Faust, Part One: ‘A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.’ 

Germany since the time of Goethe (1749–1832) has revelled in new trans­lations of Shakespeare, leading to fresh perceptions of his work. Well-attended stagings of his plays continued throughout both wars in even the most provincial of German towns. Goethe has been less fortunate here in England, where his Faust, Part One (Faust, Part Two, written years later, was never intended for the stage) is less familiar than the splendid operatic versions created by Berlioz and Gounod. (Goethe, doubtless with Don Giovanni in mind, confided to his friend Johann Peter Eckermann that he would relish an opera setting by Mozart.) 

The work by Goethe with which English readers may be most familiar is not Faust but Elective Affinities (1809), a hauntingly sad portrait of the doomed relationships of four well-behaved, conventional people during turbulent times (the Napoleonic Wars). It inspired Ford Madox Ford (half-German himself) to write The Good Soldier, published in 1915, and John Banville, nearly seven decades later, to write his marvellous novella The Newton Letter. 

Elective Affinities was written at Weimar, where it is also set. It was at Weimar too that Goethe, shortly before his death, completed Faust, Part Two and his last Wilhelm Meister novel, as well as his great autobiography, Poetry and Truth. It would be interesting to know – Wilson doesn’t speculate – how much of this remarkable flowering in an octogenarian was due to the Boswellian encouragement of Eckermann. 

The first English biographer of Goethe was George Henry Lewes, who visited Weimar in 1854 (accompanied by George Eliot) in search of those who had first-hand memories of his subject. Lewes’s work is now out of print and out of date. The most recent is Nicholas Boyle. Two volumes of his magnificently detailed biography have already appeared, though they offer a substantial challenge to the non-academic reader (the second volume covers just thirteen years and runs to more than nine hundred pages). Other recent books on Goethe are not much more accessible. Rüdiger Safranski’s biography (published in English translation in 2017) is a demanding read, while David E Wellbery’s writings are the work of an interpreter and a historian rather than a biographer. 

Wilson aims to offer something more readable with this cheerily irreverent book. Goethe is described as ‘a functioning alcoholic’ who thought nothing of downing three bottles a day. Stieler’s respectful 1828 oil portrait Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is undercut by Wilson’s mischievous reminder that Tischbein’s later depiction of a toga-clad Goethe lolling in the Roman Campagna equipped him with two left legs. 

Goethe was already a famous man, celebrated as the author of the massively influential The Sorrows of Young Werther (Wilson queries the number of suicides Werther’s death may have inspired), when he arrived at Weimar in 1775. The young Duke of Saxe-Weimar, keen to secure such an ornament for his burgeoning court, acquired Goethe’s services for a whopping 1,200 thalers a year. Mozart, at the height of his powers, was earning around 300.

Wilson paints a memorable picture of what Goethe faced at the time of his arrival. Weimar was provincial both in its aspect – cows were regularly shepherded through its centre – and in its lack of culture. Goethe, encouraged by Anna Amalia, the duke’s widowed mother, and Charlotte von Stein, her quietly commanding lady-in-waiting, used his role as privy councillor to effect a dramatic transformation. Who can wonder that Faust was set aside, given that Goethe’s duties included reforming the University of Jena, sitting on the highways commission, overseeing the opening of local silver mines, providing a new weather service and even helping to shape the duchy’s war strategy (Napoleon’s troops, in 1806–7, occupied and looted both Jena and Weimar)?

It almost beggars belief that, alongside all of the above, Goethe spent twenty-six years writing and commissioning plays for the Weimar playhouse, while – after an ennobling ‘von’ had granted a middle-class writer the social upgrade that he’d craved – keeping company with the duke’s supper guests at Schloss Belvedere. Somewhere along the way, Goethe, an enthusiastic and knowledgeable botanist, found time to help create the Schloss’s magnificent botanical garden (containing over 7,500 plants and trees) and another, finer still, at Jena. 

Part of the pleasure of Goethe’s renowned table talk stemmed from the exceptional breadth of his scientific interests, which ranged from the study of stones to optics and atmospheric effects. Visiting Italy during the 1770s, he developed the notion that all plants are formed from an archetype, the Urpflanze. Back in Weimar, after observing a group of Bashkir Muslims at prayer, Goethe ‘immediately’ began to study Sufism. 

Wilson broadens our sense of the man when he describes Goethe’s twenty-eight-year relationship with Christiane Vulpius, the modestly born woman whom he eventually married (to protect her with his name while French soldiers were occupying and looting Weimar). Christiane, a hearty drinker, was known to Goethe’s mother as his ‘bed treasure’. Two lines quoted by Wilson suggest that he adored her: ‘The joys of pure, naked Love delight us/And the rocking bed-springs rattle in tune with our joy.’

Weimar shunned Christiane not because she was Goethe’s mistress, but because of her birth. Wilson quotes Schopenhauer’s mother sheepishly informing her son Arthur that ‘if Goethe is prepared to give her his name, the least we could do was to give her a cup of tea’, a line that reveals much about Weimar’s mindset.

Splendid on the social detail and the facts of Goethe’s life (there are just a few careless slips), Wilson lets himself and us down in a misguided attempt to turn Goethe’s encyclopedic and profoundly mysterious Faust, Part Two into an appealing read. After hailing Walt Disney’s extraordinary Fantasia as ‘a work of genius’, Wilson reminds us that the film began in Disney’s ‘fertile brain’ as a short animation of Goethe’s ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’. Fair enough, but does that entitle us to interpret Fantasia as, in Wilson’s words, ‘surely deliberately, a tribute to the poet who inspired the original Mickey Mouse scene – Johann Wolfgang Goethe’? 

Gladly though I’d recommend Wilson’s exuberant, wide-ranging book to a reader approaching Goethe for the first time, anybody wanting to explore the rich subtleties of Faust, Part Two should turn to Safranski or Wellbery, while awaiting volume three of Nicholas Boyle’s great work.