Fragment 8

Privy Councillor - (Geheimrat). Goethe was just 30 years old when Karl August elevated him to the rank of Privy Councillor, or Geheimrat. This honorific, combining both intellectual and moral leadership with political responsibilities, has today -in more democratic times -largely disappeared. And yet there is something undeniably alluring about such a role. Like Aristotle, who tutored Alexander the Great, it comes with mythical connotations of philosophical instruction. Karl August was just 18 years old when he first met Goethe, who was introduced to him in Frankfurt by the poet Knebel¹. Goethe had made a name for himself with the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (loosely based on the suicide of his erstwhile friend Jerusalem), and was known as a key figure in the so-called Sturm und Drang romantic movement. Legend has it that Goethe was seated in a group with Karl August. The Duke was talking about a romantic pamphlet he had read, and nobody cared, except Goethe who could recite the entire text. Karl August was intrigued and invited the poet to Weimar, promising to send a carriage. Goethe had originally meant to travel to Italy, but decided to wait. No carriage arrived. Two days passed and Goethe began to wonder whether it had all been a dream. Then, just as he was about to leave Frankfurt, the carriage appeared at his inn, taking him up north to the court. Leaving behind his romantic ideal of the Italian coast, Goethe entered into another life of political intrigue and etiquette. His purported task: to instruct the Duke to become a Naturmensch, a man of nature. The two men formed a close bond, traveling widely together, and initiating what became one of the great intellectual and cultural reigns of the late 18th century. Today we might shudder at the notion of a single person (nearly always a man) whispering in a ruler’s ear, but for Goethe it represented an almost unthinkable advancement of social status (perhaps only ever matched by Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith). As Goethe wrote to Charlotte, two days after the decision had been made: “it is amazing to me that, as if in a dream, with my thirtieth year I set foot on the highest rung of honor (…) “one never goes as far as when one does not know where one is going.”²

1. Knebel was the tutor of Karl’s brother, the young prince Frederick Ferdinand Constantin.

2. The line is a tacit reference to Christopher Columbus, who is said to have said the same of his journey to the Americas.