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Goethe helped establish German national culture, and his times became known as the ‘Age of Goethe’ (Lukacs 1968 [1947]). He cared about material progress and developing a country, where people’s homes and land were protected from disaster. As Carlyle’s essay on Goethe outlined, he believed in ‘the progress of the species’ (Carlyle 1893 [1832]: 243). He sympathised with the suffering of ordinary people and deplored oppressive rule:

To this stithy I liken the land, the hammer its ruler,

And the people that plate, beaten between them that writhes:

Woe to the plate, when nothing but wilful bruises

Hit it at random; and made, cometh no Kettle to view!

(Goethe in Carlyle 1893 [1832]: 243)

Art should reflect life and represent people’s immiseration. His earlier 1774 novel Werther or 1787 drama Egmont about the Dutch national struggle seemed to put him on the side of liberty. However, his subsequent politics put him on the side of the existing order and reaction (Goethe 1974 Vol. II Book 17: 352–3; Goethe 1989 [1774]). He was ‘No Apostle-of-Liberty’ rousing the masses when confronting the question of ‘what is to be done?’ (Carlyle 1893 [1832]: 243). His idea of government was removed from the people. He mistrusted democracy and people’s capacity to make or elect good leaders (Carlyle 1893 [1832]: 219). There should be enlightened administration over the people. A ruler’s progressive deeds would avert political revolution and substitute for democratic political freedom. Goethe was quiescent over the political repression in the years after the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna and measures such as the Carlsbad decrees, which expanded censorship and sought to purge the universities of political radicals (Piper 2010: 88). Unsurprisingly his patrician attitude alienated the younger generation restless under political oppression. The writer Thomas Mann, in his novel Lotte in Weimar, wrote ‘at the bottom of his heart he was opposed to the War of Liberation altogether, and to the agitation it brought in its wake’ (Mann 1968 [1939]: 108–9, 146).

Indicative of his political elitism was Goethe’s approach to the theatre as the classic public-political artistic form (Tocqueville 2003 [1835–1840]: 567–72). ‘Plays’, the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville observed, ‘represent, even among aristocratic nations, the most democratic element of their literature’ (Tocqueville 2003 [1835–1840]: 567). The theatre had to have broader popular appeal, and made the upper classes mix with other classes where there was the need to fill its seats. Accordingly, ‘The pit has often made laws for the boxes’ (Tocqueville 2003 [1840]: 568). When an aristocratic ethos ruled the theatre, its character showed the aristocratic control of society (Tocqueville 2003 [1835–1840]: 569). Tocqueville could be outlining Goethe’s directorship of the Weimar theatre and his political outlook as described by his Victorian biographer G. H. Lewes (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 434–50).

Yet Goethe’s Faust recognised the danger of a cultured elite holding the people in contempt (Goethe 1808 ‘Prelude’ in Wayne 1949: 31–37). The ‘spur of truth’ should draw from human drama and should not be cut off from life. Likewise philosophical methods of governance, drafted remotely and imposed remotely onto societies, excluded a living human spirit. ‘How shall our counsel serve to lead mankind?’ Faust’s assistant Wagner asked, if conceived ‘through a glass, remote and ill-defined’ (Goethe 1808 ‘Night’ in Wayne 1949: 49). Even in the theatre, Goethe was accused of being remote from the public and showing an aristocratic ‘contempt for the masses’ (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 442). Goethe was ‘no dramatist’, his Victorian biographer Lewes contended. His plays were either dramatic verse or dramatic novels rather than theatre drama, while his selection of stage productions represented ‘poetic works and antique restorations’ appealing to the ‘cultivated few’ (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 310, 435). He did not succeed in developing a popular national theatre. For that depended on drama, and drama required a popular rebellious element and a public audience acting as a jury on the work. Conversely his audience was chilled by the ‘pernicious’ courtly influence on the theatre and its acting—not least Goethe personally silencing lively students attending his plays (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 335, 338). As such, his Faust Prelude represented the tensions Goethe felt between his poetic ideals and the demands of the public. He made ‘the error of supposing a magnificent dome could be erected without a basis on our common earth’ (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 436). The final straw ending Goethe’s theatre directorship was his fallout with Weimar’s Duke Karl August over demands for a performing poodle on stage (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 448–50). That the demonic should fatally enter Faust’s dwelling in the form of a poodle was therefore apt!

Goethe’s later reactionary political views contrasted with those of his friend and collaborator Friedrich Schiller, whose writings on aesthetic education wanted to expand ideals of individual and political freedom (Miller 1970 [1959]; Schiller 1967 [1795]). ‘He preached the gospel of freedom’, Goethe observed, ‘while I defended the rights of nature’ (Goethe 1995 [1820]: 130). After their deaths, the public remembered the liberal Schiller more fondly than his patrician friend. Symbolically, a statue to Schiller was sponsored before a statue to Goethe (Piper 2010: 102–3). For all Goethe plumbed the depths of human nature, Schiller better understood political freedom, not just economic security, was important for our human dignity.