# Goethe and the Present

## GA 68c — 29 December 1889, Hermannstadt

### II. Woman in the Light of Goethe's World View — A Contribution to the Women's Question

If I have taken the liberty of claiming your interest today for a question that is currently stirring up a great deal of emotion and seems to urgently require an answer, and if I have set myself the goal of putting this question in the light of Goethe's world view, is not intended as a lecture on literary history. Rather, I hope that my remarks will awaken in you the conviction that has been deeply rooted in me for years: that this question can only be properly appreciated from this point of view, from the point of view of Goethe's world view. We Germans have a twofold task in relation to Goethe. One of these was once described by Berthold Auerbach, the much-loved storyteller of village tales, with the witty saying: We must be Goethe-ready. That is to say, we must be able to completely immerse ourselves in the lofty realm of ideas and the incomparably intimate content of feelings of the greatest German genius. We must feel what he felt and think what he thought. But that is only one aspect of our relationship with Goethe. For Goethe marks the beginning of a completely new cultural epoch in the Western world. He has shed new light on all of European culture. He has opened up new senses for us, taught us new ways of looking at things. These senses must soon arise in us, we must rise to these views, in order to continue the cultural work of our people in the direction - of course, as far as this is in the power of each of us - that has been indicated by Goethe. Anyone who does not see in Goethe this beginning of culture, from which everyone must start, who wants to somehow relate to the education of the present, simply does not understand his time. And I must unfortunately confess to you that your brothers in the heart of Europe, especially the younger generation, have by no means grasped their task in relation to Goethe. On the contrary, a certain frivolous way of thinking is asserting itself, one that turns up its nose at Goethe and believes that it has long since progressed beyond him, while in fact it still has a long way to go before it fully grasps him. Goethe is dismissed as an old man who is no longer sufficient for our new times. A new generation believes it has new ideals. Unfortunately, on closer inspection, these ideals usually prove to be quite immature products, which are miles away from the true needs of the time, while they seem to have been born of the time. And this our time, this our living present, is more, than one can believe with superficial observation, a child of Goethe, a child of our classical spirits. Our time is the time in which the individual asserts in every direction the original sovereign rights that divine power has placed in his soul. Man no longer wants to be patronized; no, he wants to be completely dependent on himself, on his insight, on his will. He no longer wants to seek the sacred, the divine self in the outside world, but delves into the depths of his own breast to get the God, to get the strength and courage of life from there.

From this urge of the individual to cast off all fetters and assert his inalienable rights of sovereignty, then also arises the movement that I have placed at the top of my remarks today: the question of the liberation of women from the supposed fetters that, according to the beliefs of certain people, their gender has so far imposed on a prejudiced world. Women no longer want to be tied to the family home, to the house; they want to step out into the open world and be on an equal footing with men in every activity. They want to take on the competition for existence with the male world, they demand a profession like the ones men have. It is an undeniable fact that the German people have so far participated the least in the extensive emancipation efforts of women. While in Russia, Switzerland, England and France, but especially in America, hundreds and hundreds of women have already entered the learned professions, the German people still stubbornly close the doors to higher learned professions to women. Is this just stubbornness or the conservative sense that suits the German so well, which has always been averse to any violent revolution because it did not want to admit that something so unreasonable could arise in history that it had to be overthrown at a stroke? Or is there perhaps a higher realization in this – even if many are completely unaware of it – that full equality for women does not even require complete assimilation, and that the latter contradicts the role and nature of women? That is the big question: are we dealing with a prejudice that must be eradicated over time, or are we dealing with a justified insight that has a right to resist the other peoples of Europe in this movement? Let us now let Goethe be our lodestar! He will guide us safely; for in him, all the depth of the German character is embodied in a single individual. Whatever has emerged in the German people as lofty and great comes to us in a personal unity in Goethe; we are all the more German the more Goethean we are. Wherever we need light, we look up to him with confidence. The turbulent life of the present casts disharmony into our hearts, we are overcome by dark moods, whole crowds of contemporaries fall prey to the gloomy world view of pessimism; we find release from all this only in the blissful calm of Goethe's harmonious world view. And what a deeply satisfying consciousness lies in this absorption in the world of ideas and will of our greatest national poet, when we consider it in the sense of Schiller's saying: And if you yourself cannot be whole, then join yourself to a whole! For man is nothing as an individual, his whole strength is rooted in the nation from which he comes, in the time to which he belongs.

> Those who succumb to loneliness soon feel alone,

as Goethe himself says. We can add: They must soon succumb to a spiritual death in their sad, isolated spiritual wasteland. Think with your people, with your time! That is what we must call out to every human being. And we think most harmoniously with our people when we think and feel with Goethe, the full and complete embodiment of all our national and contemporary strength. We have no right to complain that we thereby lose our independence in order to bow completely to a foreign authority; for man can only be free when he rises to the higher ideals of culture, where all the light of education is to be sought. Only then will he consciously participate in the development of his race, only then will he independently determine his goal with great ideals, while otherwise he will only grope blindly below and be dragged along with the others, a serving and certainly unfree member of the body of humanity.

Only by seeking the human perfection of Goethe and, where we find it, joining it, can we work on our great work of liberation. We can only become free with our people and in our time, not individually. To bow down under Goethe's authority when we have recognized its height is not servitude, but the Goethean form of freedom. And it is precisely by taking our lead from Goethe that we can best further this great work of our liberation. For in the great scheme of things, Goethe stands for nothing more than a newer process of purification and liberation from self-imposed fetters. What were these fetters? They were the fetters of unnaturalness, of the desire to imitate what was foreign, of the unfree, over-tender sensitivity from which the Germans languished before his time. He strives back to nature, to direct feeling and thinking. Man has an addiction to remove himself further and further from nature. We know that the only completely naive-natural people in Europe were the Greeks. When Goethe became acquainted with their magnificent works of art in Italy, he fell into a kind of rapture. For these immortal creations had an effect on him like the magnificent works of nature itself. In them, he saw the world spirit at work. The Greeks, as he felt vividly here, had overheard the laws from the creator of the world, according to which he had created the magnificent, sublime works of nature, and had formed their works of art in the manner of men in this Goethean sense. The Romans did not understand how to penetrate into the mysterious portals of the divine world workshop, and they simply imitated the Greeks. This is remoteness from nature, which, as humanity developed further, became ever more pronounced. It may be said that when Goethe appeared on the scene in Germany, very little of what prevailed in poetry, indeed in the emotional and intellectual life of the Germans, bore the stamp of original naive truth. Everything was contrived, everything assumed, everything a cliché. Goethe was the first to seek a direct contact with the spirit of the world. And therein lies the greatness of his mission. But he owes this greatness to a circumstance that we must consider if we want to properly appreciate his relationship to women and his relation to the female nature. This is his deeply ingrained religious trait, a trait that always manifests itself in him through an idealistic belief in the divine in all that is natural and human. From his youth he was dominated by a fundamental trait that is only innate in deeper minds: belief in the supernatural in nature, the presentiment of a higher being, which later became the quest for the idea, for the spirit in all things. The mysterious, this genuine child of science as well as of religion, was what always attracted him. In everything that came his way in life and in history, he sought the point where he could perceive the workings of a higher power. And that is what he always sought in woman, and often found. Man distances himself from nature, from the immediacy of feeling, when he must exhaust his spirit in a one-sided life's work: He becomes dry, pedantic, unnatural. He loses that freshness and naturalness from which all the magic of an unmediated nature emanates. But these are precisely the qualities that women retain, of course only where they remain completely women and do not strive to be like men. For women, it is not one mental or physical quality that comes to the fore, but rather they all develop in beautiful harmony and remain in full force. Thus nature appears purer, fuller, more divine in woman than in man, who has been made one-sided by nature. Thus women are our true messengers from God, in whom man finds what he has lost himself. And herein lies what man seeks; he must seek it with particular longing because he lacks it in himself and can only do without it with difficulty.

And that is what Goethe seeks above all. For him, being with a woman always means a spiritual rejuvenation, a renewed sense of brotherhood with nature, which repeatedly invigorates and fuels his poetic power. Delving into feminine values and female essence always generates renewed artistic ability in him. When he seems to distance himself from nature in a manly way, when the full force of naturalness seems to fade from his heart, then it is always love that envelops him in that mysterious magic that makes him capable of new creativity. In the face of this trait in Goethe's nature, all the reservations that arise again and again against the purity and nobility of Goethe's treatment of female nature must fade. Unfortunately, these reservations are still frequently enough encountered. An unnatural distinction is made between the poet and the man, and only the former is allowed, while so much is desired to attach some human failing to Goethe. But in this mind everything is in undivided unity. Goethe's poetic mission is directly connected with his human mission. And his poems are nothing but direct revelations of his most intimate and purest human nature. Yes, here and there in Goethe's work we can also find individual cynical, seemingly frivolous verses. But this speaks for nothing other than the infinite love of truth that always dominated him. He never wanted to appear as an angel, always as a human being, yes, as a human being with all faults. He preferred an open confession before the whole world. But that is not the point. The main thing is that there is never a frivolous or mean streak in his love, nothing of the bon vivant. It always emanates from the mind, and it is always connected with a deep appreciation of true feminine value. His love never demeans women. He always looks up reverently to feminine value. And that is the very Germanic way. We know from Tacitus that even our ancestors in ancient times revered something in women that foreshadowed the future, and that they honored wise women at springs and in groves. That is the essence of truly religious feeling: it always commands reverence from its bearer. And Goethe worshiped in the dust before the divine in woman. Women, above all, must recognize this. And then the gloomy shadows that still cling to Goethe's lofty personality will dissolve.

It has a powerful effect on Goethe's imagination when a new female figure enters the circles of his activity. His rich inner world then surrounds the revered being with all the magic of which his rich imagination is capable. For him, the beloved is more than another mortal can see in her, because the imagination sees deeper than the mind. It is a kind of halo with which the poet's imagination surrounds her. Then, always, an ideal figure detaches itself from reality. Love becomes a lofty love intoxication, and a new poem struggles from Goethe's breast. This was the case with Friederike in Sesenheim, with Lili in Frankfurt, with Frau von Stein, with Christiane, his wife, and finally with the women who entered his life late in life: Marianne Willemer and Ulrike von Levetzow. In each case, it is the love of a noble, idealistic person, not that of a bon vivant. My esteemed and beloved teacher, Professor Karl Julius Schröer in Vienna, rightly says:

> There is a piety in love again, as there was among the Greeks, and thus it is free of frivolity. If that de-divinized love is selfish, then this love, which is based on devotion, is the only passion that is free of selfishness.

To understand the truly spiritual nature of Goethe's love, one need only take a look at his often-challenged relationship with Frau von Stein. How did he see this woman, who led a life of renunciation, who did not want to be taken into account by anyone, who demanded nothing for herself but bestowed benefits on all around her? He writes about her, she appears to him

> like a goddess ascending to heaven. In vain that a human being stretches out his arms to her, that his eye craves a glance. She floats, lost in the heavenly radiance that surrounds her, to heaven.

And when we see the calming and blissful effect that this woman has on the young man, who enters Weimar's life full of the most furious passions in his chest, full of high spirits and excessive joy, then we can well understand his devotion to her exalted femininity. Who does not know the follies, the high-spirited pranks that Goethe and his ducal friend played in Weimar, but who does not also know the deep need in both of them to break out of this high-spiritedness and move on to a higher life! It was in such moods that Goethe wrote verses like these:

> What is the use of all the pain and pleasure? Sweet peace, come, oh come into my heart!

The sweet peace is brought to him by “the soother”, as he called his wife von Stein. Goethe's relationship with Christiane was also pure and noble. How tender is the following gesture: when he once finds her asleep in the room, he sits down very quietly beside her, lays a fruit and a flower in front of her and is enchanted by the thought that when she wakes up, she will immediately direct her gaze to the things that his loving hand has placed there. And how deeply his words touch our hearts when he speaks them as the one he loves is snatched from him by death: “The only gain of my life now is to mourn her death.” Marianne Willemer is the figure to whom we owe the most magnificent songs in the “Diwan”. Again, we have here the stirring of the poetic mood through the power of love. Even in his eighties, he writes his “Elegy” in the “Trilogy of Passion” out of the glow of passion and the imagination refreshed by the source of holy love, in which, so to speak, an apotheosis of love in the truly Goethean sense is contained. If we understand this magnificent poem, addressed to Ulrike von Levetzow, then we have the key to Goethe's love life in general. Ulrike von Levetzow was a young woman at the time, who was with her mother in Marienbad, where the poet was also staying. He was enchanted by her grace. Once again he was to feel all the bliss and sorrow of love, once again he was to heap the joys and sorrows of the earth on his bosom. The elegy contains the following: The poet has said goodbye; the bliss of the last kiss is still in his heart, and he finds the farewell difficult, he looks up at the sky, from which the star of day, the sun, has also already said goodbye. He sees clouds passing by, and his imagination transforms them into figures, changing figures of his beloved. He wants to hold on to her for a moment; but soon he remembers that the true image of his beloved can only be in his heart. And now he revives this image.

The rift with nature, as it occurs and must occur in man, can lead to bitter degeneration. That which he has lost slumbers in him as an irrepressible yearning, like a homeland that we have lost. Only love can bridge this yearning, only love can balance the conflict of nature that has been touched. If this love does not occur, then man remains for life a renegade, a being who has become estranged from his primal power and wanders a wrong path through life. Blind, selfish passions will then take the place of love. He who at first consumed himself in longing will seek to deaden himself in the frenzy of degrading sensual pleasure. He will never be able to see what is excellent, because, as Schiller said, there is only one power in the face of excellence: love. There you have the necessity of love derived from human nature. If we abolish love, we have done away with the divine self, or, because we cannot do that, we have turned away from the divine. But we carry out this apostasy when we alienate woman from her true nature, when we deprive her of her destiny of being the mediator of the divine, of nature, which appears directly naive. It is no coincidence that the emancipation movement first emerged in those European countries where love in the noble sense, as understood by the Germanic peoples, never took root. Where woman knows that she has her part to play in the whole process of human development in a way that corresponds to her nature rather than to his, and where she knows that she will be recognized and honored by the male world for her work, she does not strive beyond what is allotted to her in the plan of the world. It is a higher vision that seeks satisfaction in the harmony of different forces of action, and a lower one that would like to make everything the same. It is preferably the ideal side of culture that woman is the bearer and propagator of. What can be the reasons that should push woman out of her present position, out of the boundaries that history has drawn for her?

Firstly, the urge not to lag behind man in intellectual education and insight. Secondly, the urge not to be indebted to man for what provides her with the real basis for life.

When I consider that it was so often sensible, imaginative mothers who stood at the cradle of great men, when I look at the old woman Rat herself, Goethe's mother, who first stimulated the poetic sense of young Wolfgang by telling her fairy tales, it seems to me that this can easily be explained by the idea I have just developed about women's nature. If the divine power of nature is more purely and unadulteratedly expressed in women than in men, then it is plausible that the living influence of the mother on a person must be most fruitful at that age where everything is is still nature, everything is still naive, the heart is still whole and the head is not yet at all, the spirit has not yet broken away from its source, from nature, the division between idea and reality has not yet taken place, in a word: in childhood. Here lies a tremendous cultural influence that women have on the development of humanity, an influence that is more valuable than that which they can ever exert as doctors, civil servants or writers.