But the young Goethe returned home after two years, suffering from
mental strain. It may be that he was beginning to rebel emotionally
and intellectually against Classical restraints, for he spent the
next year or two in his Frankfurt home investigating some very
unclassical ideas. His mother had taken up Pietism, a kind of
fundamentalist Christianity that stressed the individual believer's
direct contact with God. In addition, Goethe discovered the works of
medieval mystics, who were sometimes described as magicians because
they believed in a secret knowledge accessible only to those who had
been initiated. These studies led Goethe to alchemy, which, in
medieval times, had represented a genuine attempt to understand the
world scientifically. In Goethe's time, the study of alchemy was in
part a means of re-creating the past.
When Goethe returned to university studies, he went to Strasbourg,
where he met a young theologian and philosopher named Johann
Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), who was beginning to make a mark
in German intellectual circles. Under Herder's influence, Goethe
became part of the Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress") literary
movement that emphasized naturalistic, individualistic, anti-
Classical feeling. (Classicism stresses form, structure, logic, and
rational thought.) The Sturm und Drang writers were obsessed with
the idea of liberated genius, sure that feelings were more important
than intellect, and impressed with the simplicity of folk poetry.
They believed in the natural goodness of man, admired William
Shakespeare, and saw literature as a means of searching for the
Absolute, or that which underlay all of existence. Most intellectual
historians see the Sturm und Drang movement as a forerunner of
Romanticism (which stressed feeling and nature) in the nineteenth
century, but in its search for originality and abstract truth, the
Sturm und Drang movement still had much in common with the
Enlightenment. Bear in mind, however, that much of Goethe's writing,
especially Part I of Faust, is usually thought of as Romantic.
In the early 1770s, Goethe wrote a novel in the form of letters, The
Sorrows of Young Werther, which indulges in emotions to a point you
may find difficult to tolerate now. At the end of the story, Werther
kills himself because he cannot live with the woman he loves, who's
already engaged. Werther, together with a play about a German outlaw
hero, Gotz von Berlichingen, brought Goethe fame and established him
as one of the leaders of the Sturm and Drang movement.
Almost incidentally, Goethe qualified as a lawyer during these years
and practiced in Frankfurt, where he witnessed the tragic case of a
young maidservant condemned to death for the murder of her baby.
Goethe felt deep compassion for the girl, who suffered from the
injustice of a social order that allowed men of the upper class to
ruin girls casually. He may have had a pang of guilt himself,
because he was something of a ladies' man. Throughout his life, from
