New life portraits
Two new biographies bring Goethe and Büchner into the present day – and are themselves first-rate literature.
DISTANT POET BECOMES APPROACHABLE. There really is no shortage of biographies or secondary literature of any kind on Germany’s number-one poet laureate. And yet Rüdiger Safranski’s 725-page view of Johann Wolfgang Goethe – “Goethe, Kunstwerk des Lebens” (Art of Life), published by Hanser – really fills a gap. To quote the weekly newspaper Die Zeit: “Rüdiger Safranski has succeeded in making the reader fall in love with Goethe all over again”.
Safranski, philosopher and author of well-known biographies of Schiller and Nietzsche, delved deeply into Goethe’s works, letters and diaries. He has unveiled a brilliantly written, extremely vivid picture of the classicist who no longer seems far removed, but very much present.
FOUNDING FATHER OF MODERNITY. Georg Büchner, born in 1813, died at the young age of 23, and yet he left behind an oeuvre of remarkable eloquence in the just over 200 pages of his three plays and the novella Lenz. Hermann Kurzke even sees in Büchner one of the founding fathers of modernity who was concerned with the fundamentals of human existence, “with rebelliousness, with a desire to change the world, even with having to accept its disastrousness.”
The emeritus professor of German philology from Mainz has written a compelling biography entitled “Georg Büchner – Geschichte eines Genies” (“Tale Of A Genius”, published by C.H. Beck). However, although sound in every detail, it is not so much a work of non-fiction as literature itself. Kurzke has found a very personal way of approaching his biographical subject. Where there is a lack of facts, he imagines, interprets, even fantasizes occasionally. Well worth reading.
