II.

Early Friendships

In Strasbourg Goethe formed two friendships important for his literary life. One was with Friederike Brion, the daughter of a pastor of the town of Sesenheim; she later was the model for feminine characters in several of Goethe's works, including that of Gretchen in his poetic drama Faust. The other friendship, which proved to be the most intellectually stimulating experience of his youth, was with the philosopher and literary critic Johann Gottfried von Herder. Through Herder's influence Goethe became sceptical of the influence of the principles of French Classicism that largely prevailed in Germany at the time, including those of the three dramatic unities which the French Classical school had adopted from ancient Greek drama. Herder also taught Goethe to appreciate the plays of Shakespeare, in which the Classical unities are largely discarded for the sake of direct emotional expression; and to realize the value of German folk poetry and German Gothic architecture as sources of inspiration for German literature.

As a result of Herder's influence, Goethe, after he had received his law degree and returned to practise law in Frankfurt, wrote the tragedy Götz von Berlichingen (1773; trans. 1799). The play, modelled on those of Shakespeare, is an adaptation of the story of a German robber knight of the 16th century; to his exploits Goethe gave the significance of a national German revolt against the authority exerted by the emperor and the Church in the early part of the 16th century. Götz von Berlichingen was of great consequence in German literary history. Together with the pamphlet Von deutscher Art und Kunst (Of German Style and Art, 1773), to which Goethe, Herder (with two essays praising Ossian and Shakespeare), and others contributed, the play inaugurated the important German literary movement known as Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), the forerunner of the German Romantic movement. The following year, as the result of an unhappy love affair with Charlotte Buff, the fiancée of one of his friends, Goethe wrote the romantic and tragic tale Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779). This work was the earliest significant novel of modern German literature and it became the model for numerous tales of Enthusiasm—the fatal effect of a taste for absolutes, whether in love, art, or thought—subsequently written in Germany, France, and elsewhere. Among Goethe's other works written during the years 1772 to 1775 were the plays Clavigo (1774) and Stella (1775), and a number of short critical essays on literary and theological subjects. He became engaged to Lili Schöneman, daughter of a rich banker, but found the fashionable circles in which she moved restrictive of his artistic creativity. The refuge he sought from this affair was nature and it inspired many of his short lyric poems, such as Auf dem See.