Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a German author, scientist, statesman, and theorist. He is widely considered to be the most canonic and influential writer in the history of German literature. His formulation of “world literature” (Weltliteratur) inaugurated subsequent discussions of the concept, and a great deal of scholarship has elucidated its cosmopolitan character. This is appropriate, for Goethe's concept of world literature directly questions the viability of national literature and calls for authors the world over to work together to bring about a literature informed by the knowledge and insights of literary discourses around the world.

What has been largely ignored, though I briefly treat this circumstance in my monograph The Idea of World Literature (2006), is that Goethe's concept of world literature emerged during a period of nascent nationalist sentiments in the nineteenth century. Such sentiments in late eighteenth-century Germany were localized and focused more on culture and language than on the ideal of forging a politically unified nation-state. German Romantics drew on mythic constructs and tropes to show that Germany was fundamentally more oriented toward fraternal universality than other European nations, particularly France, which evinced an odd mix of conceptual cosmopolitanism and nationalism (Höfer 2015). The Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, particularly in the years 1812 to 1815, changed all this. German poetry took on a more xenophobic, patriotic tone, seeking to inspire a sense of community among German speakers with regard to the French foe (Weber 1991). The Congress of Vienna met in 1814–1815 to deal with the new post-Napoleonic European political landscape. The goal of the Congress was to establish a stable, transnational, pan-European cosmos, but the atmosphere pervading Europe from this time up to the full flowering of political nationalist sentiments in 1848 can be characterized as one of uneasy cosmopolitanism, and it was in this atmosphere that Goethe's world literature paradigm was formulated and emerged in the 1820s and 1830s.

The issue of whether the Congress of Vienna bears a major degree of responsibility for the nationalisms that exploded into prominence in 1848 through its decrees has been the subject of debate. Hannah Alice Straus argues that the diplomats at the Congress foresaw this nationalism, feared its development, and took measures to thwart it “by freezing the federal constitution into a rigid system” (1949, 80). David King also notes the delegates' fear of nationalism “as a potentially dangerous force,” but sees later nineteenth-century criticism of the putative suppression of nationalism as “anachronistic” because it was by then a more powerful sentiment than it was in 1815 (2008, 318). Brian Vick concurs that the imputation of politically nationalist sentiment among Europe's peoples in the early nineteenth century “was itself largely a myth created by later nationalists” (2014, 4). Nevertheless, a certain stifling of nationalist sentiments is evident in Germany in the years subsequent to the Congress. A December 1835 decree, for example, forbade the Young Germany movement and discourses such as Goethe's comments on world literature encouraged cosmopolitan exchange. Yet, the attempt to thwart nationalism only succeeded in inflaming it among the writers associated with Young Germany, and the increasingly strident polemic against Goethe's paradigm, culminating in the vituperations of intellectuals such as Theodor Mundt and Georg Gottfried Gervinus, can be tied to the political pressure exerted against nascent nationalism. This explains why Young Germany authors turned against Goethe's paradigm after initial praise of this concept by adherents of the movement such as Ludolf Wienbarg. The political tension is also reflected in a certain anxious character in some of Goethe's pronouncements on world literature.

The first part of this chapter will explore how the evolution of Goethe's world literature paradigm arose in this particular atmosphere. Goethe's simultaneous discontent with patriotic fervor and political compulsion to embrace it at the time of the Congress of Vienna is evident in the awkward interplay between cosmopolitanism and nationalism in his drama Des Epimenides Erwachen (1815; Epimenides's awakening), a work commissioned to celebrate the Alliance's victory in the Napoleonic Wars. I will discuss this work in connection with the emergence of the concept of world literature, arguing that Goethe embraced an almost unique cosmopolitanism that recognized the discrete character of national literatures but at the same time focused on intellectual interchange among nations. The second part of this chapter will show how the emergence of a strongly nationalist discourse in the aftermath of the decree forbidding Young Germany either silenced or distorted Goethe's paradigm for some one hundred years. The chapter will also show, however, that the cosmopolitan resonance of Goethe's paradigm influenced the ideal of modern transnational intellectual discourse in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, culminating by the early twentieth century in the development of World Literature as a pedagogical discipline. The third and final part of this chapter will examine Goethe's influence on the emergence of literary modernism through figures as diverse as Sigmund Freud and Herman Melville (see Herman Melville and the “Harborless Immensities” of World Literature).

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a number of German intellectuals argued that a propensity toward cosmopolitan openness, toward the embrace of truly universal values and the ideal of world citizenship (Weltbürgertum) was a hallmark of the German people (Höfer 2015, 22–23). The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte believed the autochthonous attributes of the German language itself allows the development of a linguistic community that makes the Germans uniquely receptive to an education imbued with the universalist principles he espoused (Höfer 2015, 144). Some Early German Romantics believed that the ability of German to translate and dynamically incorporate all foreign poetic works in a poetic manner made Germany suited to spiritual leadership in Europe, a position that could be productively linked to the French Revolution in the social sphere (Huyssen 1969, 157). Such paradoxically patriotic cosmopolitanism was inimical to Goethe's far less mitigated embrace of border-crossing universalism, and constitutes a primary reason for his famously reserved attitude toward the German Romantics. More troubling to him was the strongly xenophobic element in some German poetry composed during and in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars in the years 1812–1816. To be sure, anti-French sentiments in connection with a defense of the German language are already evident in poetic works composed during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) by authors such as Johann Michael Moscherosch. Such an attitude is also prevalent in the reflections of the celebrated dramatist Heinrich von Kleist on the occasion of his visit to Paris in 1801 (Lefebvre 1989, esp. 152). However, authors such as Kleist and Moscherosch do not match the xenophobic intensity of the most famous German-language poem connected to the Wars of Liberation, Ernst Moritz Arndt's “The German's Fatherland” (1813, Des Deutschen Vaterland): “That is the German's Fatherland / Where wrath pursues the foreign band, / Where every Frank is held a foe, / And Germans all as brothers glow” (Arndt 1845, 333) (Das ist des Deutschen Vaterland, / Wo Zorn vertilgt den welschen Tand / Wo jeder Franzmann heißet Feind, / Wo jeder Deutsche heißet Freund [Arndt 1912, 127]).

This tribute to the Germans as pure and imbued with honest simplicity (bieder) might well reflect Goethe's sincere respect for his own people. These qualities precisely characterize the valorous German couple who are the eponymous hero and heroine of his epic poem Hermann und Dorothea (1798), a work which also suggests German valor and the capacity for resurrection in connection with the war against France, but in its pre-Napoleonic phase, which is to say during the French Revolution. However, in both works, xenophobia, chauvinism, and anti-Gallic fervor are utterly lacking. As we have seen, this is not the case with some of his contemporaries and predecessors. True to the spirit of the arrangement with Iffland, Goethe does pay tribute to the German people as victors in the Napoleonic Wars in Des Epimenides Erwachen. However, the tribute seems rather perfunctory, and what is really celebrated, as in Hermann und Dorothea, is the reemergence of private, domestic bliss not only after, but indeed as a consequence of, martial destruction. In Goethe, destruction and renewal/rebirth are inextricably intertwined. However, in both the play and the earlier epic poem, the renewal commemorated occurs more in the private, domestic, rather than in the public, national sphere.

My brief comparison of Goethe to his contemporaries and the equally brief reading of Des Epimenides Erwachen in the context of the Wars of Liberation and the Congress of Vienna suggest both an uneasy cosmopolitan atmosphere when Goethe developed his world literature paradigm, and a somewhat idiosyncratic, because largely unalloyed, internationalism informing his diverse pronouncements concerning world literature. Goethe never discussed world literature at length or in any cohesive manner. Instead, he made a series of somewhat disconnected remarks on this topic in various letters, diaries, and conversations between 1827 and 1831. More recently, post-1945 discussions were largely stimulated by Fritz Strich, who collected Goethe's 20 random pronouncements in the appendix to his monograph Goethe and World Literature, published in German in 1946. The first pronouncement, which appeared in the journal Kunst und Altertum (Art and antiquity) in January 1827, was inspired by a review in the French journal Le Globe of a French-language adaptation of his drama Torquato Tasso (1790). This hybrid transnational product convinced him both that a general world literature (allgemeine Weltliteratur) was in the process of being constituted, and that Germans would play an honorable role in this process, as all nations henceforth looked toward the Germans, praising, criticizing, and distorting their literary endeavors (Strich 1949, 349; Strich 1946, 397). It is difficult to say whether this Germanocentric perspective reflected the view that Germany stood at the center of a cosmopolitan universalism, or the more likely belief that German literature itself was to be equated with Goethe because, among German-language authors, his oeuvre received the lion's share of global attention. Goethe's pronouncement on world literature in conversation with his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann at the end of January 1827 is the most widely quoted remark on the subject: “National literature has not much meaning nowadays: the epoch of world literature is at hand, and each must work to hasten its coming” (“Nationalliteratur will jetzt nicht viel sagen; die Epoche der Weltliteratur ist an der Zeit, und jeder muß jetzt dazu wirken, diese Epoche zu beschleunigen” [Strich 1949, 349; Strich 1946, 397]). This assertion supports Peter Weber's argument that Goethe developed his concept of world literature in specific opposition to the program of a national literature (1975, 133–135). It can be surmised that this refutation of a national literary program and the call to accelerate (beschleunigen) the epoch of world literature betrays a prophetic anxiety on Goethe's part that the rising tide of German cultural nationalism was evolving into a political xenophobia such as is already somewhat evident in the poetry and critical writing of Arndt. Goethe may have hoped that this development could be blunted through a quickening of the process of cosmopolitanism in the literary, cultural sphere.

Goethe goes on to remark that neighborly relations developed from this sentiment, and instead of closing oneself off from the wider world, a spiritual need became manifest for a more or less free interchange (Strich 1949, 351; Strich 1946, 399–400). This notion of a free intellectual exchange or trade (geistigen Handelsverkehr) led some scholars (for example, Elster 1901), to argue that literary commerce was uppermost in Goethe's mind when he wrote about the world literature concept, and such commerce certainly played a role in his thinking. However, Goethe's overt linkage of the emergence of a world literature perspective with the catastrophic wars only concluded some 15 years previously reveals his continuing anxiety about still nascent nationalism. Notably, Goethe claims that, during and in the immediate aftermath of the war years, Europe's nations withdrew into a sort of solipsistic intellectual isolation, an isolation that would inevitably breed political xenophobia and cultural chauvinism of the sort, we might add, already evident in Arndt. Though these nations appear of their own volition to have thereupon remarked with interest upon the foreign (Fremdes) and indeed to have digested (in sich aufgenommen) this external element, Goethe's earlier and more famous imperative that the process of world literature be accelerated betrays an uneasiness that cosmopolitan world literary developments may ultimately be stymied and nationalism prevail. This was indeed the case in Europe from the later nineteenth century through the end of World War II.

In Conversations with Goethe, edited and published by Eckermann in 1836, Goethe opined that the lively literary discourse among German, French, and English writers allows for the correction of national cultural limitations. Thus Carlyle's biography of Schiller judges Goethe's friend and colleague in a manner quite distinct from that of a German. The Germans, on the other hand, have a greater clarity of perspective and ability to treasure Shakespeare's value than the English themselves (Strich 1946, 397–398; Strich 1949, 349). Goethe no doubt hoped as well that such cultural exchange and cross-national ameliorations would obviate the tensions stirred up among these countries by the recently concluded conflict. Eckermann dates the conversation in which this remark was made as having taken place on 15 July 1827, but the fact that the Conversations were first published in 1836, four years after Goethe's death, led to the circumstance that the authors connected to the Young Germany movement were the first to engage with the world literature paradigm. The 1835 edict that had recently forbidden Young Germany authors to publish was designed, among other things, to thwart the influence of its adherents' push for national unity. However, these adherents were not, at least at first, nationalistic in any chauvinist sense. Instead, they represented the vanguard of German liberalism, which espoused democracy, national unity, and like Goethe, cosmopolitan interchange among European lands. Thus in an 1835 essay published prior to the appearance of the Conversations, Ludolf Wienbarg praised the cosmopolitan spirit of Goethe's paradigm, expressing the hope that fraternal ties connecting the globe's peoples will grow ever stronger (Steinecke 1982, 164). Interestingly, Wienbarg, who calls Goethe, “the born protector of the young world literature,” regrets that the recently deceased author lived at a time when national life, the highest “potency” (Potenz) that can be experienced by a young or mature man, was completely dissolved, and that no one felt this lack more painfully than Goethe himself (Steinecke 1982, 156). In his 1795 essay “Literarischer Sansculottismus” (Literary sans-culottism), Goethe did indeed make Germany's lack of political unity responsible for its absence of “classical” authors, but he is not overtly troubled by this circumstance and expresses the belief that an invisible school is helping form capable writers (Goethe 1948–1954, vol. 14, 179–185). Indeed, Goethe was rather skeptical about the value of promoting a unified German national literature throughout the course of his life (see Weber 1998) and was never much interested in German national life in the political sphere. Wienbarg is, in fact, projecting the nascent, non-chauvinist nationalist proclivity of Young Germany in this passage, for political unity in a democratic state was their priority in their early years, and polemicizing in favor of this goal was a factor in the 1835 edict censoring their writing. However, one of the movement's most prominent members, Karl Gutzkow, asserted that literature which mirrored national life does not promote cultural enrichment and proclaimed: “We belong to the world and the nation” (Wir gehören der Welt und der Nation an; Steinecke 1982, 107, 108).

The early Young German cosmopolitanism did not find universal acceptance. As Hartmut Steinecke has noted, Wolfgang Menzel argued in the late 1820s that he, as a critic, would prioritize the needs of the people and the development of the nation in his writing (1982, 22). Former Young German adherent Theodor Mundt claimed that a clear enunciation of discrete nationalism constituted the essence of every literature and decried universalist tendencies in cultural life (1853, 567–568). Gervinus was an early detractor of Goethe's world literature paradigm from political principles. While he praised Goethe's underscoring of Germany's role in the emergence of the world literary age, he warned against the potentially damaging impact of its universalizing spirit (Gervinus 1853, 525–527). Like the authors of the Young Germany movement, Gervinus was a proponent of a unified but democratic nation. He was in favor of liberalism and federalism, a supporter of the goals of the 1848 Revolution. He viewed Goethe as standing at the pinnacle of German culture and argued that men of letters in the post-Goethean age should strive for national political rather than literary achievement because, after Weimar Classicism had passed, Germany was in a period of inevitable cultural decline. Despite the somewhat idiosyncratic nature of his consistent embrace of democracy even after 1848 he, as well as Mundt, can be seen as the instigators of a tendency to eschew the cosmopolitan dimension of Goethe's world literature paradigm, a tendency that was to last well into the modernist age. Indeed, as previously noted, the embrace of Goethean world literature as a cosmopolitan ideal was only widely revived after World War II, with the publication of Strich's Goethe and World Literature.

The globalist dimensions of Marx's famous proclamation in the 1848 Communist Manifesto exceed those of Goethe, who envisioned world literature mainly as a dialogue of national literatures: “The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature” (Die geistigen Erzeugnisse der einzelnen Nationen werden Gemeingut. Die nationale Einseitigkeit und Beschränktheit wird mehr und mehr unmöglich, und aus den vielen nationalen und lokalen Literaturen bildet sich eine Weltliteratur; Marx and Engels 1906, 18; Marx and Engels 1959, 466). Yet this was to be the last cosmopolitan enunciation of the paradigm for nearly a hundred years. Indeed, a number of German thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to see cosmopolitanism as an antiquated concept and nationalism as the ultimate telos of historical progress. In this view, Germany prior to unification was a “cultural state” (Kulturstaat) rather than the “nation-state” (Nationalstaat) it first became in 1871, and its transcendence of the initial phase leading to its realization as a unified political entity was an entirely positive development. This was the perspective of renowned historian Friedrich Meinecke, who remarked that Goethe had a sensibility for the national (den Sinn für das Nationale), but questioned whether he had a genuine national sensibility (nationalen Sinn) and accused him of political quietism (1907). Characteristic of a chauvinistic age is Meinecke's tacit praise of Goethe for detecting in the German national character the transcendence of nature-based limitations discernable in the characteristics of other nations, a circumstance elevating the German national character “toward the universally human” (zum allgemein Menschlichen) (1962, 52–53, 57).

The delay in the reception of Goethe's world literature paradigm does not mean it had no impact on the development of literary modernism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as Peter Goßens has argued, the paradigm remained resonant in literary discussions in the nineteenth century after Goethe's death but its enunciation evolved into a “form of transnational cultural experience” (2011, 125). For one of the central aspects of the modernism that began to take shape at that time is the transcendence of national and linguistic boundaries with respect to style, themes, and structure. Indeed, Thomas Mann (see Thomas Mann: National Monument and World Author) complained in his 1922 essay, “Nationale und internationale Kunst” (National and international art), that Goethe's proclamation of world literature had been realized through transnational blending at a time that came to be considered the era of high modernism. He somewhat sarcastically refers to the universalizing tendency as “democratic leveling” (Mann 1960, 871). This is not to say that Mann or anyone else argued that Goethe was in some fundamental way responsible for this modernist tendency. However, in his 1890 essay, “A World-Literature,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson specifically alludes to Goethe's paradigm in noting the border-crossing trends of modern literature: London literature is strongly influenced by that of the French, while the French have made Jane Austen a precursor to Émile Zola, and in Sweden, Brent Harte and Mark Twain generate more interest than the Swedish author Fredrika Bremer. In the second half of his brief article, Higginson proposes the study of world literature in the American academy (1890, 922–923), a proposal that began to be realized in the 1920s and developed more fully in the wake of World War II. Thus Goethe's world literature paradigm certainly played a role in the reception of literary modernism as a transnational phenomenon and had some influence on the shaping of world literature as a pedagogical discipline in the United States (see Pizer 2006, 83–114).

Of course, Goethe had an enormous impact not just on world literature as a discursive concept centering on transnational cultural dialogue, and later as a field of study, but also on the imaginative literature of the world. His novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774) inaugurated the Age of Sensibility in Western Europe. The creation of an eponymous protagonist whose solipsistic isolation drives him to suicide not only inspired an international wave of imitators, particularly in Germany, France, and England, but the representation in Werther of a self-centered subject suffering deep personal alienation in an uncaring, commerce-driven, and hierarchically ordered society evolved into a central topos of literary modernism. A novel published some 20 years later, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795) spawned a new genre, the Bildungsroman, or novel of education and acculturation, widely adapted and imitated across the world. As for his drama Faust (1808), while the Faust motif can be traced to the Middle Ages, the first part of Goethe's Faust was largely responsible for inspiring the French opera by Charles Gounod (1859). Strich, who focuses more on Goethe's relation to imaginative literature across the globe than on the world literature paradigm itself, notes that Faust inspired numerous authors to adapt the figure of Faust in their writings: Polish authors such as Adam Mickiewicz and Zygmunt Krasinski as well as Russian writer Alexander Pushkin (see Politics and Idiosyncrasies: The Global Parsing of Alexander Pushkin) and the Englishman, Lord George Byron, while Byron was himself immortalized in the figure of Euphorion in the second part of Goethe's Faust (Strich 1949, 260–262, 296–297, 304; Strich 1946, 302–303, 340–341, 349). Thomas Mann also adapted Faust's tragedy into a meditation on the intellectual currents leading to Germany's lapse into Nazism in his novel Doctor Faustus (1947), one of the canonic works of late modernism. Indeed, with the emergence of fascism and Nazism in the 1930s, Mann had begun to embrace the cosmopolitan element in Goethe's thought in a variety of his essays, such as “Goethe als Repräsentant des bürgerlichen Zeitalters” (1932; Goethe as representative of the bourgeois age), as a counterweight to political developments in Germany, and tacitly distanced himself from the somewhat anticosmopolitan stance he took in “Nationale und internationale Kunst.”

It is a common and accurate assertion that literary modernism is associated with the rise of mass industrialization and global capitalism in the Western world from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. While Goethe, who feared nationalism in post-Napoleonic Europe, welcomed the advent of what he called world literature, its homogenizing tendency in the era of modernism was deplored not only by the young Thomas Mann but also by historians such as Oswald Spengler, who associated it with uniformity in urban life in the Western world (1922, 128). More recently, Horst Steinmetz, citing the work of modernists such as Kafka, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, and Ionesco, finds this period was marked by a perception that experiences, occurrences, fates, and life constellations were similar everywhere and could take place anywhere (2000, 193). He contrasts this leveling effect of modernist world literature with how world literature manifests itself in the present age of globalization, where cultural diversity and a relative local autonomy come to the fore (Steinmetz 2000, 194). This assertion may be dubious, but there is no doubt that Goethe's world literature paradigm was drawn upon to diagnose the modernist condition, and it also influenced the contours of the subject in modernist literary fiction. I will conclude this chapter by highlighting a few examples of this trend. In doing so, I draw upon a recent book by one of the foremost current Goethe scholars, Jane Brown, whose Goethe's Allegories of Identity (2014) traces modern and modernist notions of subjectivity to trends in the eighteenth century evident primarily in the oeuvre of Rousseau and Goethe. Those influenced by Goethe include Melville, who is sometimes described as a modernist avant la lettre (see, for example, Dekoven 1984). In Melville's Pierre, Brown sees traces of both Werther and Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship in the eponymous protagonist's quest for identity through projection onto idealized women, as well as in his struggle to fight through a Werther-like solipsism. Brown also sees Goethe's role in Michel Foucault's articulation of the “decisive shift to a secular culture in European modernism” (2014, 182, 183). Broadly speaking, Brown seems to argue for Goethe's influence on secular psychologizing in modernist literature. She maintains, “it is widely accepted that Goethe contributed immensely to the depth psychology that corresponds to the shift to interiorized subjectivity,” and that this is particularly the case with respect to Freud, who drew upon Goethe prolifically throughout the course of his career (2014, 4). “Interiorized subjectivity” is appropriately associated with Rousseau, and Brown's book goes to some length to establish the influence of the French author in this regard. She notes, however, that it is Goethe who is “often seen as the father of modernity” (Brown 2014, 3), and this is due in no small part to the “interiorized subjectivity” with which Werther unsuccessfully and Wilhelm Meister successfully struggle.

In conclusion, we can say that Goethe served as a bridge to modernism in two fundamental ways. His world literature paradigm, which he conceived of as an intellectual border-crossing dialogue that could counter the hostility among nations born of the Napoleonic Wars, came to be associated with the homogenizing, leveling element sometimes praised and sometimes censured as a key feature of literary modernism. With respect to this period's tendency toward psychologizing, Goethe's poetic work was pioneering in its endeavor to give voice to an interiorized, often alienated, subject, an approach not only influential for modernist novels but also for Freud's development of psychoanalytic theory. These two facets of Goethe's contribution to modernism share something in common; they are part of Goethe's lifelong endeavor to transcend isolation and narrow-mindedness in the personal, political, and cultural domains. As Michael Minden has noted, Goethe sought “to write between self and world, such as to see and to show the continuity between them” (2011, 25–26). Throughout much of his life, he engaged in an often fraught struggle to become part of this wider world despite often provincial limitations that constricted his psyche, his nation, and his contemporary cultural milieu.

SEE ALSO: Bridge Essay: Empire: A Roman Masterwork; Introduction to World Literature 1771 to 1919; Bridge Essay: Nation: The Mighty Idea and the Novel