A Winter Journey in the Harz, The Italian Journey, Ilmenau, and the Campaign in France 1792—a seminar-style exploration of the hidden Goethe for the Faust Ensemble in four images.1
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749–1832]: the familiar image of the great poet, statesman, natural scientist, author of Faust, and central figure of Weimar’s cultural world is incomplete. Behind the public figure of Goethe lies a man who steps outside his role and plays with the world around him. Through four stages of Goethe’s life, Marcus Schneider explores the enigmatic inner world of this great spirit.
First, A Winter Journey in the Harz. Goethe had been serving as a minister at the court of Weimar for a year. The Grand Duke announces that the court will be traveling to Eisenach for a few days to hunt wild boar. Farmers were being plagued by these wild animals. Goethe sets off for the Harz Mountains [over 100 km north of Eisenach]. He was only 28 years old [1777] and rode through ice and frost without carriage or servants. By this time, having published Werther and Götz von Berlichingen, he was famous and now allowed himself the fun of staying at an inn under a false name.2 He regularly recorded his experiences in his diary and simultaneously reported them in letters to his beloved, Charlotte von Stein, in Weimar.3
Goethe in the Coal Shed
He stops at an inn between Eisenach and the mountains and learns that there are no rooms left because the court of Weimar has announced its arrival—the very court he was trying to escape. Goethe takes the empty coal shed as his lodging and sleeps on a cot. Through a knothole, he watches the entire royal retinue dining and leaves early in the morning, unrecognized. He proceeds to Wernigerode to visit a young man named Leberecht Plessing who had told Goethe that he was in a wretched state. Goethe, traveling incognito, says he is from Weimar and that this address had been recommended to him. They drink wine and Plessing pours his heart out, explaining that after reading Goethe’s Werther, he no longer wanted to live. “Have you ever seen Goethe?” asks Plessing, and Goethe replies, “From a distance—one can’t strike up a conversation with him.” Plessing does not realize until the very end that he is hosting Goethe. There are other such amusing stories from this trip to the Harz Mountains, which found their way into the ballad A Winter Journey in the Harz. Goethe stands alone atop the Brocken, which in Faust becomes the site of the witches’ sabbath. Enraptured and unrecognized, not lonely, but simply at one with himself, it seems, Goethe writes, “Here I am Man, am free to be.”4 Perhaps he felt the truth of this line from Easter Walk right here. Goethe in the cultural spotlight and Goethe on these lonely paths—are these the two souls within his breast?5
When Goethe takes on such roles, he resembles Faust, who seeks something other than what he lives. Even on his trip to Switzerland, he loves slipping into a foreign identity, wearing foreign clothes, speaking a different dialect, and keeping people in the dark about the fact that he is Goethe. This creates a space that he can fill as he sees fit without being constantly confronted by his doppelgänger. In a later letter he referred to the unfortunate man in Wernigerode as his doppelgänger. “Only poetry has kept me from becoming an unhappy soul like Plessing,” he says to himself. The Walpurgis Night scene then plays out with this doppelgänger that he carries with him, with this second person he harbors within himself. What does this do to von Stein’s wife, who knows nothing of this? This is Goethe from within. And up there on the Brocken, he absorbed impressions that made him think of his mother and his deceased sister and caused biblical verses to well up within him. Presumably, he did not want this to come to light.
From Duty to Liberty
Six years later Goethe is still a minister and has all but stopped writing. It is a time when his drawer is filled with half-finished manuscripts and he is living off his early fame. He notes that he has twelve handwritten plays in his desk drawer, and not a single one has a conclusion. He had written humorous sketches and comedic plays, such as the popular play The Fair at Plundersweilern.6 “Pegasus is in the yoke, the horse of the gods. Inspiration is wavering,” Goethe writes about his artistic crisis. During those first seven years in Weimar Goethe had taken on one official post after another.
One of those roles consisted in maintaining the parks and gardens of the castles in the duchy. This position opened Goethe’s eyes to new possibilities and led him to the study of botany. As a minister, he decided whether a road should be paved or covered with gravel or whether a forest should be cleared or reforested. He had to deal with issues of road construction and mining. This is when Goethe’s interest in mineralogy began to grow. He had to identify silver and salt mines and also reopen a disused mine—the Ilmenau mine on the edge of a forest. Here he encountered the liminal world between forest and cave—yet another source of inspiration for Faust. Goethe knew that this mine had been abandoned for a long time. He knew that the former miners had emigrated to Ireland and the United States because they could no longer make a living in Ilmenau. Goethe therefore decides to revive Ilmenau by founding a joint-stock company. Together with 185 shareholders, he celebrates the mine’s reopening at its entrance.
The Silence at the Mine
Then—for the only time in his life—Goethe delivers an already prepared and distributed opening speech announcing that the mining operation would be handed over to the shareholders and the people of Ilmenau. The Swiss Goethe scholar Adolf Muschg has investigated the remarkable events that took place with this inauguration.7 Goethe had gathered the shareholders together with the local representatives and representatives of the Weimar government. He then began to speak of Mother Earth who was to be reopened. They had gathered because they wished to accompany this opening of nature with all the inward force of deeds and the heart. Those assembled must learn to treat this child as fathers would, with law, with love, with conscience, so that fertility, and the blessing of that fertility, might return. Then he falls silent in the middle of the speech—first to astound, then to alarm his listeners. It does not appear as though he lost his train of thought. Instead, he stands there in silence, looking each and every one of them in the eyes. With deep seriousness, his mouth closed, and his large eyes, he gazes at them all. It was said that Goethe remained silent for a quarter of an hour, Adolf Muschg reports.
According to Muschg, this is the moment when Goethe wants to prove himself. Ilmenau becomes the litmus test. As Minister of Economic Affairs and as an employer, he wants to prevent the miners from continuing to emigrate and turn their backs on the Ilmenau mine. He wants them to find work and for the little town to become prosperous again. What overwhelmed Goethe at that moment, says Muschg, was the vision of the conclusion of Faust—the resolution of the knot made by the devil’s pact—as he stood before the mine, the main shaft. “On acres free among free people stand.”8 Goethe says he was still too young at the time for the conclusion of Faust. Nevertheless, Muschg suspects that something far in the future lay in this silence during the speech. Goethe wants to force something to happen; he wants to bring about something he does not speak of. Considering that he always spoke whenever guests were invited to dinner and that hardly anyone could get a word in edgewise when his torrent of words flowed, such a silence on the part of the poet comes as a shock. What is happening here is that Goethe is forming a union with the people.
Rudolf Steiner describes how, in intense moments of life, one gains an image of where one’s own path is leading—though it is difficult to determine whether it is a memory or a premonition. Accordingly, Muschg speculates that Goethe became conscious at that moment of the deep, primal impulses that had driven him to have this speech printed and distributed because it was so important to him to appear here not as a poet, but as someone responsible for the community. In Faust II, this sense of responsibility toward the community is evident in Faust’s land reclamation in the fifth act. Both possibilities seem to be important here when his speech fell silent: that Goethe had a premonition of Faust’s conclusion and that he sensed this was a moment of his own work beyond poetry. The mine was indeed put back into operation but went bankrupt again after a few years. The cost of extracting the ore was disproportionate to the profit. Nevertheless, the small town of Ilmenau has benefited, for the town thrives on the fact that Goethe was active there.
Flight to Italy
Charlotte von Stein [1742–1827] was Goethe’s closest confidante. His love resulted in 1,770 letters to her. She had originally appeared to him as a silhouette. In Goethe’s time it was customary to create such silhouettes in profile, and Goethe was fascinated by one such profile of Charlotte von Stein. He arrived in Weimar, and that is where this deep connection with Mrs. von Stein began [in Nov. 1775], with at least two letters exchanged back and forth every day. She sent him a basket of asparagus and lettuce from her garden. He replied with a poem. He was hired as a tutor for her children and thus came and went freely in the von Stein household. All biographers agree that it was not an erotic relationship. They often sat together in his garden. This went on year after year, but from the age of 35 onward, it no longer seemed to satisfy him. He wrote that what bound them together was, after all, a crystalline friendship.
Shortly before his 38th birthday [1786] he is in Karlsbad on the eve of his second lunar node and decides to travel to Italy. He confides in no one about his plan except Grand Duke August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. The duke grants him a year’s leave, which is later extended to a second year. Goethe is told to specify where the duke should transfer his salary. Mrs. von Stein knows nothing. She wants to surprise him with a gift in his desk drawer which he is to find on the night of his birthday: a box containing a precious quill pen. But Goethe is gone, and for months no one knows where he is or how long he will be away. The Grand Duke, a close friend of Goethe’s, covers for him and reveals nothing. Only after three months—when Goethe arrives in Rome—does he write about how strongly he had been drawn to Italy. That is when Mrs. von Stein learns that Goethe is in Italy. Then the game continues as it did in the Harz Mountains—he has written some things, but kept others secret.
A Cold Welcome
After two years, Goethe returns to the misty, gray north of Weimar and realizes how difficult it is to come back expecting that everyone has been waiting for him. Life has moved on. People have formed new relationships. Charlotte von Stein greets him with cool detachment, as if he had abandoned or betrayed her—which, in a way, he had. To bridge this distance, he writes her a long letter in which he says that it is not easy for him to write such a letter. “I will frankly admit that the manner in which you received me, the way others regarded me, wounded me deeply.”9 When we speak today of Goethe’s Italian journey, we are referring to the birth of the great classic during which Goethe found himself. But he paid for this “self-discovery” with a frosty loneliness in Weimar. Three weeks after his return [July 1788], he began a relationship with Christiane Vulpius [1765–1816], a flower seller who had hardly read a book. But it wasn’t until 18 years later [1806], during the French occupation of the German states, that he married her. French soldiers broke into his house to loot it and take up quarters, and Christiane stood in their way: “No one will be quartered in the Maison de Goethe!” Meanwhile, Goethe had hidden himself in the bedroom. That very same night, he went with Christiane to the nearby St. James’s Church, enlisted two passersby on the street as witnesses, and married Christiane late at night without celebration or a ring. He felt the need to make things right—with himself and the world.
Poetry in War
Writer and translator Thomas Steinfeld, has written a new biography of Goethe and justifies it (perhaps the hundredth biography of Goethe) by arguing that there is still a need to explore Goethe’s lesser-known aspects.10 He devotes 60 [of 784] pages to the theory of colors. Steinfeld says we forget that Goethe lived through years of war. As Minister of War and Foreign Affairs, he was compelled in the middle of his life [1792–93] to accompany his Grand Duke who wanted to invade France alongside Prussia. Goethe reluctantly joined this campaign. His carriage gets stuck in the mud, so he buys a horse to keep up with the officers. On a turbid, rainy day, between the Rhine and Paris, he then rides alone alongside his Grand Duke toward the front. On the ground lie screaming wounded soldiers, the dead who have bled to death, and dying horses; all around are shelled-out houses, women fleeing with children, and burning villages. The earth trembles from the thunder of the cannons.
What Goethe notes in his diaries, however, is not these shocking wartime experiences but rather cannon fever. Goethe observes and studies this illness which the soldiers suffer from, characterized by convulsions, fainting spells, anxiety attacks, and bouts of diarrhea. In the evenings, the officers sit together in their quarters and share their experiences. Goethe recounts that during a company’s assault on a hill the glinting bayonets appeared to him like a shower of stars above a fire. He had seen rock slabs that—in the evening light of the sun—appeared a different color than they actually were. The impression that the colors had shifted found its way into the “Easter Walk” in Faust. It is an experience from the battle, of how the huts—surrounded by greenery—shimmer in the glow of the evening sun. But this green is not the grass; it’s the complementary color on the retina. Goethe is surrounded by refugees and soldiers dying in the mud, and yet devotes himself to visual observations. In the most wretched of situations, he writes about a woolen blanket he has purchased and quotes from the Odyssey when Odysseus covers himself with a woolen blanket. Even in the most wretched of life’s circumstances, Goethe is able to enter a poetic state of mind in order to survive. Poetry keeps him alive.
Ode to Love
Like so much in Goethe’s life, one of his most beautiful poems has a deeper, secret meaning. He placed the lines on his wife’s breakfast table on the morning of the 25th anniversary of their first meeting in Weimar’s city park.
Found
Once in the forest
I strolled content,
To look for nothing
My sole intent.I saw a flower,
Shaded and shy,
Shining like starlight,
Bright as an eye.I went to pluck it;
Gently it said:
Must I be broken,
Wilt and be dead?Then whole I dug it
Out of the loam
And to my garden
Carried it home,There to replant it
Where no wind blows.
More bright than ever
It blooms and grows.Ich ging im Walde
so für mich hin,
und nichts zu suchen,
das war mein Sinn.Im Schatten sah ich
ein Blümchen steh’n
wie Sterne leuchtend,
wie Äuglein schön.Ich wollt’ es brechen,
da sagt’ es fein:
Soll ich zum Welken
gebrochen sein?Ich grub’s mit allen
den Würzlein aus,
zum Garten trug ich’s
am hübschen Haus.Und pflanzt es wieder
am stillen Ort.
Nun zweigt es immer
und blüht so fort.11
The poem depicts an encounter that took place 25 years earlier; it seems so unassuming, and yet, like Goethe’s entire life, it is a hymn to love.
Translation Joshua Kelberman; all footnotes by translator
Title image Carl Anton Graff, Bergwerk zu Ilmenau [Mine in Ilmenau], ca. early nineteenth century, watercolor, German Mining Museum, Bochum. Public domain.
Footnotes
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, A Winter Journey in the Harz, The Collected Works 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); first published in German as Harzreise im Winter (1789); Italian Journey, The Collected Works 6 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); first published in German as Italienische Reise (1816–17); Ilmenau am 3. September 1783, in Goethe’s Werke, vol. 2 (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1815); From My Life: Campaign in France 1792–Siege of Mainz, The Collected Works 5 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2026); first published in German as Kampagne in Frankreich 1792 (1822).
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, The Collected Works 11 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); first published in German as Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774); Goetz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, The Collected Works 7 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); first published in German as Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (1773).
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Selections from Goethe’s Letters to Frau von Stein, 1776–1789 (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1990), see letter of Dec. 2, [1777] and following.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Easter walk,” in Faust I, “Outside the City Gate,” lines 903–940. Line quoted in 940.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, line 1112 f. “Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast [. . .]”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern [The fair at Plundersweilern], first published anonymously in Neueröffnetes moralisch-politisches Puppenspiel (1774); revised ed. (1789).
- Adolf Muschg, “Goethe in Ilmenau: Mutmaßungen über ein Verstummen” [Goethe in Ilmenau: Speculations on a silence] in Der Schein trügt nicht: Über Goethe. 8 Goethe-Reden aus Anlaß seines 250. Geburtstags (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 2004).
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust II, line 11580.
- See footnote 3, letter of June 1, 1789.
- Thomas Steinfeld, Goethe: Porträt eines Lebens, Bild einer Zeit [Goethe: Portrait of a life, image of an era] (Berlin: Rowohlt Berlin, 2024).
- See footnote 1, “Found”; first published as “Gefunden” (1813).
