AustLit

'For years, a prognostication by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe appeared on the masthead page of WLT: “These journals, as they reach a wider public, will contribute most effectively to the universal world literature for which we are hoping. There can be no question, however, of nations thinking alike. The aim is simply that they shall grow aware of one another, understand one another, and, even where they may not be able to love, may at least tolerate one another” (On Art and Antiquity, 1828). While many view Goethe as perhaps the quintessential European humanist writer of the early nineteenth century, he was also, as head of the War Commission of Saxe-Weimar in the 1780s and ’90s, later seen as “the poster boy for the ideology of romantic nationalism” (Natalie Bayer). As a war commissioner fighting for the duchy of Saxe-Weimar in the Battle of Valmy and the Siege of Mainz in 1792–93, Goethe witnessed the upheavals of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars firsthand. Writing in the 1820s, he commented: “The world is in such a turbulent state that every individual is in danger of being sucked into its vortex.” So much for tolerance among the nations.' (Introduction)