As a young man, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe caused a sensation with The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a novel that understood the melancholy love-loss of youth. As Rüdiger Safranski adds in his magisterial biography, Werther also “marked a new epoch” and “introduced a new tone into the world, and a new will for subjectivity.” And although he lived to age 82, he didn’t outstay his creativity. Shortly before his death, he completed Faust (1831), a sprawling verse play that explored the limits of the cerebral, the sensual and the moral, and predicted, among other things, the production of artificial life in the laboratory. Weaving Goethe’s own words into the narrative whenever possible, Safranski writes lucidly of a truly Renaissance person: poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, impresario and chief minister of a German state. His aesthetic theory holds up today: Too much naturalism is dull; too much formalism becomes an affectation.
