JOURNEY HOME – Goethe, Italy and the German Quest For Self-Discovery

Goethe’s Italian Journey is a literary cornerstone of Weimar Classicism. Escaping midlife crisis, going forth into the world, undertaking a Bildungsreise into the world of antiquity, the great German poet forges a place for himself. It is also the beginning of a new bourgeois tradition. Goethe’s account added fuel to an enthusiasm for Rome and Italy among German and European intellectuals that persists to this day.
Golo Maurer shows how Goethe’s experience of Italy became a model for subsequent generations. Karl Friedrich Schinkel travelled to Italy in the early 1800s, Richard Wagner later that century. The Mann brothers, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud (who called himself an “Italian pilgrim”) – it was Goethe who set the bar for them: “Upon entering this place, a new life, a new sense opens up to the thinking and feeling human being.”

Maurer’s book shows that Goethe’s journey to and through Italy was the first German quest for self-discovery. As such, it has been both an aesthetic topos and an autobiographical challenge for those who came after him.