Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is Germany’s greatest poet, then and now. At the age of thirty-seven he was on the way to being the centre of a national culture, and a European celebrity. But at the moment (in 1786), he is simply on his way to Italy, a journey that was nothing grand or official. He is escaping as a private individual under a cover-name—escaping, on one level, from a decade labouring to help administer Weimar (one of eighteenth-century Germany’s mini-states), and, on a more intimate level, from an emotional entanglement with Charlotte von Stein, a married lady nine years older who is a prominent member of Duchess Anna Amalia’s court.
Over his early time in Weimar, Charlotte had helped this rough-diamond bourgeois writer to find his feet in an unfamiliar aristocratic scene. His gratitude shaped a close relationship between them—a love affair even? The clerihew is well-known:
Charlotte von Stein
went to bed at nine.
If Goethe went too,
nobody knew.
But surely in that tightly enclosed society, everybody would have known? Everything we do know about Charlotte’s character and life experience makes this affair unlikely. Yet Goethe’s letters, almost two thousand of them, often informal notes punctuating the day, certainly speak of love. Hers haven’t survived; she demanded them back when the relationship soured, which began with this Italian journey. So, the picture remains incomplete.
Goethe has left Weimar and the court behind him, telling no-one where he’s going, not even Charlotte, to her great resentment. But he does stay residually in touch, slipping in assurances of his love with successive batches of his travel diary. So at least she does know where he is now, though she may have been left cool by his reports. His clear enthusiasm surely signalled that he was in every sense moving beyond her.
It is a happy return after the decade of frustrated creativity in which several works were begun but none finished.
Those batches, thrown down almost daily over the eight weeks it took him to reach Rome are our text. Goethe never published it, didn’t think much of it, and many years later used it when writing the full formal account of the nearly two whole years he spent in Italy. It’s a surprise he didn’t then throw it away. That makes it the more precious, because it really is a work in itself: exuberant, charmingly informal, and spontaneous, shaped by a growing excitement as Rome comes tantalisingly closer.
And then—almost unbelievably, after years of longing and two missed opportunities—he is finally there. It feels like a destiny fulfilled, and his simple words “I am Goethe” when he meets his host in Rome, the painter Tischbein, convey the confidence in his restored free self. It is a happy return after the decade of frustrated creativity in which several works were begun but none finished.
Rather than finishing these works, he starts from the beginning, opening himself up to a world he knew from texts and images but is only now experiencing with all his senses and faculties. He sometimes feels overwhelmed by the realities pressing in on him from every side—landscape, climate, the cities on his route (Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Venice), ancient monuments, Renaissance art, Palladio’s architecture, history under every stone; and a new kind of people with an easy-going, out-of-doors, communal way of life. Among them he finds himself relaxing too, sloughing off the depression he had been suffering from under grey northern skies. He sums it up gratefully as a rebirth.
Material enough for a happy time—a happiness not of self-indulgence, but of a powerful mind fully and rewardingly engaged once more with the world—Italy was to remain a cherished memory, a pivotal moment in his life and career, and an inspiration for a new aesthetic in the years to come.
Featured image by Clay Banks via Unsplash. Public Domain.
