Goethe National MuseumInterior of the Goethe National Museum, Weimar, Germany. The years from 1788 to 1794 were lonely years for Goethe. His household was warm and happy enough, though no second child survived from Christianes repeated pregnancies. But outside the house, apart from Herder, who was increasingly disenchanted with Weimar, his only close friend was the duke. Personal loyalty to Charles Augustus partly explains Goethes hostility from the start to the French Revolution, of which Herder was a vocal supporter, and his accompanying Charles Augustus on campaigns against France in 1792 and 1793. These campaigns were Goethes first direct experience of war, and he found them a nightmare. He was lucky to survive the disastrous retreat from Valmy, in France, and to return home in December 1792, but he was back on campaign in 1793, observing the siege and virtual destruction of French-occupied Mainz. As a reward for his loyal support, Charles Augustus presented him with the freehold o

Goethes distance from the Revolution can be overstated, but, unlike many of his contemporaries, he clearly understood that Germanys political, social, and economic circumstances were so different from those of France that there could be no question of simply importing Revolutionary principles. He had a distaste for the hypocrisy of German intellectuals who ate the bread of princes while preaching their abolition, and his political attitude has been well described as enlightened feudalism. He disliked the militarism and centralism of modern, would-be rational states such as Prussia or, later, Napoleons France (which he thought promised hell on earth); he felt at home in Germanys multiplicity of states small enough for rulers and ruled to have a sense of personal obligation to each other; he believed in the possibility

, and necessity, of gradual and rational

But within the federal and feudal structure he thought established authority had an overriding right and duty to impose order, and he had little interest in procedures of representation or theories of the popular will. The creed was subtle, pragmatic, and benevolently paternalist, but it would be a travesty to see Goethe as a servile courtier or unprincipled egoist, though many have seen him in this light during his lifetime and afterward. After the remarkable effort of completing his collected edition, Goethe seems not to have known where to go next as a poet. A new prose drama, Der GrossCophta (1792; The Grand Kofta), was a failure on the stage in 1791. A satire on Freemasonry, it was also the first of several unsatisfactory or fragmentary attempts to deal in a literary form with recent events in France (Der Brgergeneral [1793; The Citizen-General]; Die Aufgeregten [1817; Agitation], written in 1793; Das Mdchen von Oberkirch [1895; The Maid of Oberkirch], written in 1795).