Goethe as Ecophilosophical Inspiration and Literary Model

Abstract

If any single German writer comes close to the importance which Henry David Thoreau possesses in American culture as principal founder of the national ‘environmental imagination’ (Lawrence Buell), it is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Goethe’s standing as the greatest German writer in modern times is undisputed, and nature has been central to public interest in his work: “Nature is the concept which stood at the very centre of Goethe interpretation from the very beginning and still does today”, writes Karl Robert Mandelkow.¹ On the basis of his poems, novels, plays and essays, he was already understood by his friend and collaborator Schiller, together with his Romantic contemporaries, as an advocate of nature and a poet of sensual perception. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, the conception of nature expounded in his voluminous scientific studies has also been a matter of constant debate and served repeatedly as a source of inspiration. Arguments based on Goethe have been at the heart of an ‘alternative’ German discourse on nature and environment over the past century and a half, and Goethe’s influence on the literature of nature in Germany is greater than that of any other writer.