Reading Goethe used to be considered essential to Western civilization. For at least a century after his death in 1832, Goethe, alone among modern writers, was generally reckoned to be deserving of mention in the same breath as Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare. For a George Eliot or a Ralph Waldo Emerson, Goethe was the supreme high priest, not only of literature but of life itself. For Carlyle, he was “the Hero as Man of Letters.” For Matthew Arnold, he was “the physician of the Iron Age.” For T. S. Eliot, he was simply “the sage.” Thomas Mann wrote not only one novel about Goethe (Lotte in Weimar) but another (Doktor Faustus) as an homage to Goethe’s greatest work.

Nor were they exaggerating. Everything about Goethe was prodigious. He put German literature on the map under the banner of Sturm und Drang, a generation before Romanticism emerged, but transcended both movements. In 1775 he published the first true bestseller in modern history, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which created a European fashion for buff waistcoats, the costume of his melancholy hero—though the best-known factoid about Goethe, that Werther set off a spate of copycat suicides across Europe, Safranski dismisses as a myth. Napoleon told Goethe he had read Werther eight times. The novel had such an enormous impact, because it addressed a new phenomenon, pessimism or taedium vitae, which has plagued Western civilization ever since. It made Goethe the greatest