Goethe
Goethe
by Thomas Mann
June 1, 1932
FOR THIS ESSAY ON GOETHE, a task of which I feel so unworthy, I shall fall back upon a memory, a personal experience, to hearten myself for the venture and give it the stamp of authenticity, which is best and final in all things. I recall the emotions that crowded in upon me years ago when I found myself for the first time in Goethe’s childhood home on the Hirschgraben in Frankfurt. Those rooms and stairs I knew perfectly, in style and tone and atmosphere. Here was “ancestry,” as it is recorded in the book of my life, and the beginning, likewise, of something gigantic. I was at home and at the same time I was a late and shy guest in the realm of genius. The homelike and the grand rubbed shoulders. This bourgeois-patrician mansion, now become a museum, where reverence treads softly as at the cradle of a demi-god; this dignified and decorous setting, treasured and held sacred because of the son who left it behind—how far behind!—to grow to austere world stature—I gazed on all this, I breathed it in; and the discord between familiarity and awe in my breast was resolved into that feeling in which humility and self-assertion are one, into smiling love.
