II.

Early Friendships

In Strasbourg Goethe formed two friendships important for his literary life. One was with Friederike Brion, the daughter of a pastor of the town of Sesenheim; she later was the model for feminine characters in several of Goethe’s works, including that of Gretchen in his poetic drama Faust. The other friendship, which proved to be the most intellectually stimulating experience of his youth, was with the philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried von Herder. Through Herder, a literary critic with an exciting mind, Goethe became skeptical of the influence of the principles of French classicism that largely prevailed in Germany at the time, including those of the three dramatic unities which the French classical school had adopted from ancient Greek drama. Herder also taught Goethe to appreciate the plays of Shakespeare, in which the classic unities are largely discarded for the sake of direct emotional expression; and to realize the value of German folk poetry and German Gothic architecture as sources of inspiration for German literature.

As a result of Herder’s influence, Goethe, after he had received his law degree and returned to practice law in Frankfurt, wrote the tragedy Götz von Berlichingen (1773; trans. 1799). The play, modeled on those of Shakespeare, is an adaptation of the story of a German robber knight of the 16th century; to his exploits Goethe gave the significance of a national German revolt against the authority exerted by the emperor and the church in the early part of the 16th century. Götz von Berlichingen was of great consequence in German literary history. Together with the pamphlet Von deutscher Art und Kunst (Of German Style and Art, 1773), to which Goethe, Herder, and others contributed, the play inaugurated the important German literary movement known as Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), the forerunner of the German romantic movement. The following year, as the result of an unhappy love affair with Charlotte Buff, the fiancée of one of his friends, Goethe wrote the romantic and tragic tale The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774; trans. 1779). This work was the earliest important novel of modern German literature. It became the model for numerous tales of passionate subjectivity subsequently written in Germany, France, and elsewhere. Among Goethe’s other works written during the years 1772 to 1775 were the plays Clavigo (1774) and Stella (1775) and a number of short critical essays on literary and theological subjects.