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In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has been subsumed into the ‘Elizabethan age’. That the ‘age of Goethe’ (Goethezeit) should have become a standard term for the years spanning the Weimar poet’s active life – roughly, 1770 to 1830 – suggests, then, his overwhelming importance to the German psyche. Without Goethe, one might say, the great tradition of high culture that characterises modern Germany would never have begun; without Goethe, the archetypes of the national imagination – the raging Werther, the ageing Faust – would never have come into being.
