An Age of Expectation

I dare to judge some things myself, since I myself was close to a center of German intellectual life for a while. From 1889 to 1897 I was in Weimar at Goethe's workplace, with which Herman Grimm was also connected. There one could feel how Goethe was the king of intellectual life and Herman Grimm his governor, accredited by the intellectual powers. One could feel with Herman Grimm how he tried to grasp everything that was connected to Goethe in a spiritual harmony of gestures. It was his endeavor to take Goethe spiritually. It was, so to speak, his endeavor to recognize the deceased Goethe, but one who lived on in his impulses, as weaving and living in the spiritual life in which one felt oneself to be included. It was the beginning of how we feel today, that the deceased are intimately connected with us, and that they live with us, as it were, only in a different form than before they passed through the gate of death. There was an effort to combine all the individual phases, all the individual moments of life into one gesture, with a spiritual gesture.