ABSTRACT
With his Gotz and his Werther Goethe has become the leader of a ‘movement’, of the younger generation of writers, one of whose plays, Sturm und Drang, is later to give the movement its name. Klopstock is still the undisputed great poet and master, Lessing the clearest and most penetrating mind, greatly feared as the supreme arbiter in the arts. Wieland remains the most popular author, with an extensive and varied output. Herder, for a short time the leader of the younger generation, has already had to cede this position to the young adept, who only recently had seen himself as his ‘moon’; it is from this moment that the great bitterness in Herder’s life begins. Goethe is seen as a man of unlimited possibilities; there seems to be nothing beyond his power to achieve. He is sought out on every side, sent invitations, urged to write; people flock to him from everywhere, either by letter or in person, and the house on the Hirschgraben is turned into an headquarters and an hostelry for writers. His father bends over his legal briefs and, with tolerable good grace, lets his son’s activities roar over his head. His mother, on the other hand, enters into it all delightedly; meals are prepared and beds made ready. She takes enthusiastic part in everything, sparing neither the grandfather’s precious wines nor her own advice. Before long she is mother to many; ‘Frau Aja’ as they call her, after a character in the popular old chap-book, The Four Children of Hemon. The older her husband gets, the younger she feels. This is the great moment of her life. She basks in the new-found fame of her darling Hans, her Hatschel-hans, a sunshine that seems all the warmer for the coldness of her daughter and the sorrow of her unhappy marriage. But now she has other children, naughty ones, good ones, needy ones, proud ones, dejected ones, aristocratic, and soon even princely, ones, and plebian ones. She mothers them all, though only for a time, because the whole Sturm und Drang movement is not to last for very long. Goethe is the first to sever himself, after a few years. He soon tires of movements as well as of people. There are still many metamorphoses for him to undergo.
