GOETHE: THE STORY OF A MAN (929 pp.) — Edifed by Ludwig Lewlsohn —Farrar, Straus ($10).
GOETHE'S WORLD (422 pp.)—Edited by Berthold Biermann—New Directions ($5).
GOETHE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: POETRY AND TRUTH FROM MY OWN LIFE (700 pp.)—Translated by R. O. Moon—Public Affairs Press ($5).
"Little woman, give me your little paw," said the dying Goethe to his daughter-in-law. Had these been his last words, the great Johann Wolfgang might today seem more human and approachable than generations of followers have made him out to be. Unfortunately he said later: "Open the blind of the other window, so that more light may come in!" This statement (abbreviated to the more impressive command: "More light!") has become Goethe's epitaph, supposedly expressing his yearning that greater illumination might come to the hearts of men. Somewhere along the road the "little paw" has been nearly forgotten.
It is not likely to turn up at the dignified International Goethe Bicentennial Convocation and Music Festival which will be held from June 27 through July 16 at Aspen, in the mountains of Colorado. The Goethe Bicentennial Foundation—whose board of directors includes such Goethe admirers as Herbert Hoover, Thomas Mann, Marshall Field, Walter Paepcke, chairman of the Container Corp. of America, and Novelist-Playwright Thornton Wilder—chose distant Aspen as the seat of homage because, in the words of Chairman Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago, "we thought such a celebration ought to require a pilgrimage." At Aspen, Goethe will be the center of round-table discussions, seminars, symposia and symphony concerts. There the philosophy of "the last Universal Man," will be re-examined in terms of 20th Century problems.
In three new books, non-pilgrims will have a chance to enjoy a less Olympian portrait. In Goethe: The Story of a Man, admirer Ludwig Lewisohn has assembled two enormous volumes of Goethiana, including letters, table talk, memoirs, extracts from Goethe's writings. In Goethe's World, Journalist Berthold Biermann has made a smaller, illustrated collection. Goethe's own story of his lively youth, Poetry and Truth, is also being published in time for the Aspen festival, in a new translation, the first in a century.
The Stars Look Down. When Goethe was born in Frankfurt in 1749, German music was already entering its day of unparalleled glory (Bach, Handel and Haydn were living, Mozart and Beethoven were soon to come); by comparison, German poetry and drama were blank pages. "Had I been born an Englishman," Goethe once confessed, "and had all those numerous masterpieces (of Shakespeare's) been brought before me ... they would have overpowered me, and I should not have known what to do."
From the cradle, Goethe had both talent and audacity. At seven, he believed that his future greatness was assured by the stars at his birth. When his mother told him that men have to get along without the aid of the stars, the little boy retorted: "I can't get along with what suffices other people."