WHO is the greatest writer whose work you have never read? Many could come to mind, but for the biographer, critic, and novelist A. N. Wilson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the embodiment of German literature, is certainly among them.

In this passionate and intriguing book, Wilson invites his readers not to give up so easily. Whether, like me, you were put off by having to study Goethe’s Faust in school, or whether you have encountered Marlowe’s treatment of the saga of Dr Faustus, Wilson is able to show that you are indeed missing something — perhaps not so much the subtleties of Goethe’s poetry, which are easily lost in translation, but, rather, the work of one of the architects of modernity and one of its fiercest critics.

“Goethe lived for most of his adult life in a tiny little duchy in the now-vanished Roman Empire. He was completely a man of his time, and he was in many respects a conservative, even a reactionary. Yet such is his clarity of vision, and his interest in absolutely everything, he is also our contemporary.”

Goethe had first encountered the tale of Faust as a child, in a puppet show put on for entertainment by his grandmother. Yet his adult engagement with the story and its characters would become something much greater: “Goethe realized that he had been drawing out of the Faust legend a parable of his own; he had been writing about the emergence of modern humanity itself.”

And it is this, Goethe’s anticipation of modern humanity, that Wilson wants his readers to consider, and he does so by taking us on a whirlwind tour of Goethe’s world — a world that is changing, moving away from the certainties and institutions of religion, and yet cannot quite live without them. We encounter his other major works, the women in his life, his son, August, his foes and his friends, most importantly the other icon of the Weimar Classicism, Friedrich Schiller, and Goethe’s own troubled mind, that of a restless polymath who, in his theory of colour, presents a counterpoint to the Newtonian science that would come to dominate the modern world.

In many ways, the life of the 19th-century Weimar poet and literary icon is better documented than those of many others, not least owing to the efforts of his secretary, Eckermann, and those biographers and literary scholars who have followed him.

AlamyGoethe in the Roman Campagna by Tischbein (1787). The painting is reproduced in the book

Thus, Wilson’s book is not a warts-and-all biography, or a great debunking of a myth, but he looks at Goethe’s biography through the writing of his magnum opus, Faust, Parts One and Two, which would take most of his adult life, and presents him as a pioneer, “in his scorn for nationalism, his sense of the essential unity of European culture and politics, tempered by the knowledge that the world is not, and should not be, Eurocentric”, a pioneer of “world literature” indebted to Persian poets and Chinese philosophers.

One cannot and should not study the man without the myth that surrounds him, the way in which he and his legacy have been shaped not only by Goethe himself but by subsequent generations: “Goethe had long known himself to have become a symbol, and Goethe as a symbol would have a long afterlife.” Thus, “The Myth of Weimar” is fascinating and illuminating, and this chapter is itself a challenge to read Goethe’s recasting of the Faustian tragedy as an anticipation of the tragedy of modernity which lay ahead; for who today can think about Weimar without Buchenwald?

Wilson’s Goethe is indeed a tour de force, combining literary scholarship with a vision of cultural history and a critical reading of the world that we, citizens of the modern world, inhabit. If you think you know Faust, think again. Having spent an adult lifetime detesting all things Goethe for the aforementioned reasons, I was certainly made to think again by Wilson, who opens up a much wider vision of one of the great works of world literature and the man who created it — one that may have been easily lost on an impressionable high-school student.

Dr Natalie K. Watson is a theologian, editor, and writer, living in Peterborough.

Goethe: His Faustian life
A. N. Wilson
Bloomsbury £25
(978-1-4729-9486-8)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50