There is nothing of the contextualizing — even, almost literally, the weighing — of Goethe. Here is someone who (according to Nicholas Boyle) has had more written about him than any other human being; a man each day of whose life has been — literally — accounted for; who in his time met the world and his wife (and they all left more or less pretentious, more or less acute, records of their impressions); who in his life wrote 12,000 letters, and received another 20,000; whose collected conversations top 4,000 pages: a vast fish, therefore, in a tiny pond (the population of the little town of Weimar, where he went in 1775 to spend a few weeks at the invitation of the young Duke Carl August, and ended up living out the last 57 years of his life, was just 6,000, as I read somewhere, though not in Safranski).

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For an English-language readership in particular, it’s a shame not to have Goethe’s English connections brought out: nearer his own time, the fervent admiration of Byron and Carlyle and Matthew Arnold (“the greatest poet of modern times … by far our greatest modern man”); nearer to ours, the — modest? or secretly immodest? — self-description of W. H. Auden as “a minor atlantic Goethe,” whatever that meant. Adapted from Tischbein’s famous painting, he was perhaps the least likely of Andy Warhol’s silk-screens: Goethe, in a broad-brimmed hat and off-white cloak, showing a bit of leg, semi-recumbent like Mme. Récamier against the Roman Campagna.

A further difficulty is that genius — as Montherlant says of happiness — “writes white.” It’s somehow always a little unconvincing, not least when, as here, it is translated. It’s as though efforts have been made to strip all the German out of Goethe, so that the translator, David Dollenmayer, has been required to translate everything of Goethe’s, whether it be two words or 20 lines. He does his best, but his words don’t have the patina of Goethe’s, and he should never have been asked to do it. This is not an approach to take with a poet, whether Baudelaire or Pushkin or Li Po: Give us something original, even if only for us to stare at uncomprehendingly. Distance is not the worst thing if awe or respect is to be engendered.

Safranski, who says he used only primary sources, is happiest writing an intellectual biography (he is a philosopher, author of books about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and the onetime host of a philosophical discussion group on German television). This too does his subject no favors. As Ritchie Robertson’s recent (and useful) “Goethe: A Very Short Introduction” says: “The image persists of Goethe as a distant and, nowadays, unexciting Victorian sage, and also as a serene Olympian figure above ordinary human passions. Nothing could be more false.” Unfortunately, Safranski, perhaps unaware of this Anglo-American take on his man, does too little to oppose it. The drier a topic, the better Safranski seems to like it, leaping with alacrity, say, from the beginning of Goethe’s sudden cohabitation with Christiane Vulpius to the next work-summary. It is all Nature, Religion, Aesthetics, Politics. And when Safranski was through with a work, it seemed squeezed or pulverized, and I felt little inclination to take out “Elective Affinities” or “Faust” or the “Roman Elegies.”