Worlds Elsewhere (9 page)

WEIMAR LEFT ONE IN LITTLE DOUBT
of its self-image. As the train sighed gently to a halt, I noticed the signs on the platform:
‘KulturBahnhof'.
It was the first time I had seen a station advertise its cultural credentials. The station itself, an elegant neoclassical edifice with a sweeping red-tiled roof, looked more like the seat of a minor princeling than the mere terminus of the Thuringian railway. At least two people who disembarked with me were carrying cello cases. Presumably they had been forewarned.

Outside, shaking out the knots in my legs, I joined a gaggle of tourists milling near a large-scale town map on a noticeboard. German cities weren't reticent about showing off their illustrious connections, but when it came to shameless name-dropping Weimar was surely in another league. Immediately in front of the station was Schopenhauerstrasse, with Rembrandtweg a few streets to the east. Further south were Schubertstrasse, Hegelstrasse, Kantstrasse, Beethovenplatz, Mozartstrasse.

Goethe and Schiller – who had, unlike nearly all the others, actually lived here – had been granted a
platz
and a
strasse
respectively, not to mention the famous double monument to them outside the Deutsches Nationaltheater. In fact the monument was everywhere: an image of it graced the front of every map of the town at the Weimar station bookshop.

Gutenbergstrasse, Luthergasse, Cranachstrasse, Bachgasse, Hummelstrasse, Lisztstrasse, Wagnergasse, Gropiusstrasse: one could plot a cultural history of Weimar – more, of Germany at large – through its street plan. Nearly everyone who was anyone in German cultural history had passed through the town, from the Reformation to the Bauhaus in 1919, the same year that the terms of the Weimar Republic were signed in the Nationaltheater.

Much of this rich history was down to the generous Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, whose patronage ensured that the arts flourished during Weimar's ‘golden age' and long afterwards. Duchess Anna Amalia (1739–1807) founded one of Germany's first public libraries – still open, a marvel of royal-icing Rococo – and coaxed the renowned actor Abel Seyler to play for her, as well as exhibiting talents of her own as a composer. Her son Karl August (1757–1828) continued the family business, inviting Goethe to join him as a privy councillor in 1776 and seeking Herder's advice on redesigning the educational system.

As I rattled my luggage noisily down the hill, Weimar seemed pleasant in a faintly aseptic way: cobbled streets and low-built, red-roofed buildings, their spotless facades coloured handsomely in caramel and mint-white. To the left, I could glimpse the broad green swath of the park that ran through the centre of town. Early on a Monday morning, bar the odd ambling tourist, hardly anyone was around. When the chimes of the town-hall clock in the main square sounded, the sound echoed weirdly. It wasn't just the street plan that put me in mind of a mausoleum.

The town did have a William-Shakespeare-Strasse, but – more interestingly – I had heard that at a house on Carl-August-Allee was a small memorial to the poet.

It didn't take long to find: a plain white villa, now housing local government offices, with a thin terracotta frieze running around it at first-floor level like a band of marzipan. It depicted scenes from Weimar's history. I craned my neck to see the memorial. Eventually I found a podgy-looking cherub, flesh dimpling around thighs and
ankles, with a mace in one hand and a bugle in the other, his head garlanded with laurels.

Strange as this was, altogether stranger was the cherub's backpack, which was in the shape of a miniature castle tower, crenellations and all. Stuffed into it was a bald head that was impossible to mistake – Shakespeare, like a gap-year memento brought home to show off to the neighbours. The memorial had been completed in 1864, to commemorate the tercentenary. Weimar's trophy cabinet of premier-league intellects was now complete.

On 20 September 1776, a troupe under the direction of Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, the most acclaimed actor of his day, gave a performance at the Hamburg National Theatre that changed the course of dramatic history. The reports were frenzied: one paper wrote that ‘the numerous audience in the playhouse was so attentive, so transported, that it seemed as if there were only one person present, only one pair of eyes, only one pair of hands, because the stillness was so universal, the silence so numbed'.

Such was the demand that Schröder's company acted the same show again and again; the following year they gave it an unprecedented fifteen times, and in Vienna a year later it was performed on another seventy-five occasions. Other troupes, big and small, were soon staging the play. According to one dramaturg, ‘royal cities and tiny market towns, splendid halls and wooden booths echo with [the hero's] name, and men and boys, virtuosi and reading teachers, First Heroes and letter-carriers, struggle over him and flaunt their immortality'. That hero was a prince; the play, yet again, was a version of
Hamlet.

I had an idea that one reason for this abrupt flare of interest was Goethe. Two years earlier, back in Frankfurt and by now determined to be a writer, he had published a book that had been even more of a sensation than Schröder's production.
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
(‘The Sorrows of Young Werther'), printed in 1774, relates the sensational story of a young artist who has fallen helplessly in love with a woman already committed to someone else. Told in the form of letters shared between Werther and a confidant, knowingly named ‘Wilhelm', it titillates readers with confession after confession, permitting them to eavesdrop on a world of forbidden passion. Building from Werther's
exuberance as he first begins to fall for Lotte, continuing through desperation as he realises the relationship is impossible, the story culminates in suicide, which Werther enacts via the poetic justice of the pistols owned by his lover's fiancé. The book's last line is stark: ‘No priest attended.'

Europe went wild for
Werther.
The 1774 edition passed through thirty reprints before the century was out and was translated into English, French and Italian. Young men began to wear clothes like him; women dabbed on ‘Eau de Werther'. Napoleon claimed it was a favourite. There was moral panic when a young German woman who drowned herself was found to have a copy in her pocket. The city of Leipzig banned the book entirely. It was partly because of its notoriety that Goethe had been invited by Karl August to Weimar.

Although
Werther
bore striking resemblances to Goethe's own triangular romance with a woman called Lotte Buff – which didn't hurt sales when those facts were revealed – I was more struck by its relationship to the writer he had exalted in
‘Zum Shakespeares Tag'.
In October 1771, the very month he had delivered the speech, he had set to work on his first major play,
Götz von Berlichingen.
A rumbustious account in no fewer than fifty-six scenes of the medieval knight and mercenary Gottfried of Berlichingen (famous for having had his hand shot away and replaced by an iron fist), it was a crazily ambitious undertaking. It was also heavily touched by Shakespeare's history plays, which Goethe had perhaps only just read. When Herder saw the manuscript, he exclaimed, ‘Shakespeare has quite ruined you.'

Werther,
too, was heavily in Shakespeare's debt – but here the resemblance was to one play alone, the text that had so captivated Schröder and German audiences:
Hamlet.

Young Werther was young Hamlet by another name. Over-intelligent, cripplingly sensitive, tragically ill-equipped to face the realities of the world, he drifts through his luckless love affair without ever managing to take hold of it. He, too, lacks a father; contemplating death, he describes the funeral of a female ‘friend' uncannily like the burial of Ophelia.

For sure, there were differences: it is hard to imagine even Shakespeare's Prince botching his death as Werther did, shooting himself above the right eye before haemorrhaging slowly. (Being sliced by an envenomed rapier looks positively wholesome by comparison.) But everywhere there are hints of Goethe's source: in Werther's
frenzied soul-searching, his emotional paralysis, his restless drift towards insanity. Early in the book, one of his letters to Wilhelm reads:

The lines read like an extrapolated version of Hamlet's ‘Denmark's a prison' (‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space'), bolted on to a speech from later in the same scene, ‘this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory'. A marvelling statement that follows in Shakespeare's text – ‘What a piece of work is a man' – returns to haunt Werther's final letter: ‘Who is this thing, the vaunted demigod, a man?'

After
Werther
's publication and his move to Weimar, Goethe lived in a cottage given to him by the ever-munificent Karl August, but six years later he moved to much grander accommodation on Am Frauenplan here in Weimar, the house where – barring a journey to Italy from 1786 to 1788 and a stint observing the Battle of Valmy – he would remain until his death in 1832.

Dutifully touristic, the morning after I arrived I toured the Goethehaus, aiming my cameraphone at the plank on the threshold painted with the word
‘Salve'
(‘welcome') and staying right to the end of an alarmingly thorough 3D video presentation about its architecture. Despite its considerable size – more stately home than
Haus,
I thought – the place was harried by school groups and coach parties. At least the thirteen-year-olds sniggering next to the poet's collection of nude classical statuary were having fun; everyone else, drifting around with audio guides clamped to their skulls, looked as if they were waiting on hold. The smell of lilies and furniture polish hung heavy in the air.

Writers' houses have always struck me as the least visitable of visitor attractions, the act of writing so private and undramatic – the creaking of pen across paper, the shuffle of pages – that it leaves almost
no imprint on physical space. The Goethehaus, magnificent though it was, felt no different. It was the morbidly tasteful presentation of a life rather than anything more tangible.

After an hour I gave up the house as a poor piece of detective work and retreated with my books to a glowering, wood-lined bar with tobacco-stained walls, filled prettily with beery bric-a-brac.

T. S. Eliot's pursed-lip view, aired in 1921, was that Goethe's borrowings from
Hamlet
were a form of Freudian projection – a way of making up for the deficiency in the poet's own creative powers. (Coleridge came in for the same criticism, that he had simply ‘made of Hamlet a Coleridge'.)

I wondered if it were fairer to say that, having encountered Shakespeare at a formative age, Goethe had spent the rest of his life trying to escape his clutches and never quite succeeding. Soon after arriving in Weimar, he had attempted to write a follow-up to
Henry IV Part II
that reversed Shakespeare's cold-blooded decision to banish Falstaff at the end of the play, conjuring prison scenes in which Sir John, Bardolph and Poins lament their plight but live in hope that somehow their fate will be reversed. The script was not to be: Goethe never got further than sketches.

He was more successful with
Egmont,
on which he began working at around the same time. A historical saga on the Dutch struggle for independence against Spanish tyranny, it began as a prequel to
Julius Caesar.
There were numerous mentions made of the
‘Cäsar'
project in letters and notes, but at some point Goethe seems to have destroyed the material. The crowd scenes that interspersed the action – obvious echoes of the holidaying, restive cobblers and carpenters in
Julius Caesar
's opening scenes – were all that remained.

But these early feints with Shakespeare were as nothing to the creative task that occupied Goethe for over twenty years, from the end of the 1770s until late middle age: the composition of the epic, multi-part project that became known as
Wilhelm Meister.
It was while writing
Egmont
that Goethe had first conceived the idea of writing about a young man attempting to find his creative path. In 1777 he began a story he called
Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung
(‘Wilhelm Meister's Theatrical Mission').

Its subject was unorthodox, even by the standards of that nascent, wet-behind-the-ears form known as the novel. Wilhelm Meister, the protagonist, a child when we first meet him, is obsessed by the idea
of going on stage. After falling in with a troupe of actors, he becomes involved with a married actress (another doomed romance), all the while attempting to write his own scripts. But when an older man called Jarno introduces him to the work of Shakespeare, Wilhelm is seized by an epiphany. After reading
Hamlet,
he becomes ever more convinced that his purpose in life is to stage the perfect production of that very play.

Goethe had trouble with
Wilhelm Meisters Theatralische Sendung
almost from the off, and only got six books into the projected twelve before abandoning it mid-flow. His ducal responsibilities in Weimar had begun to wear him down, along with an ill-starred relationship a little too close to the fiction he was writing (this time with the wife of Karl August's equerry). It would not be until 1794, seventeen years later, that he returned to the material.