Goethe the Collective Being

In a self-description Goethe once said that, in his work, it was really a “collective being” who was speaking. By this he indicates a polyphony that can also be traced in his poetry collections. Several times in his life Goethe collected and arranged his poems, and he understood this too as an autobiographical challenge. Then again he calls his poems “fragments of a confession,” ascribes to them mere “contradictions,” and observes in conclusion how “little trace” of an existence is left behind. The lecture will discuss these self-descriptions, which will then be fleshed out in a reading of religious poems. These include, as well as the vehement farewell to the divine by “Prometheus,” also the conjuring of the spirits who communicate the meaning of life to us, and the reconstruction of transcendence on the ground that only reference to “The Divine” can provide the basis for morally correct action. All these are voices in the “collective being” that was Goethe.