Goethe, Germany and the Birth of Modernity

Welcome to the Canon Club - everything you wanted to know about western civilisation but were afraid to ask. We aim to provide compelling talks on the key works of the Western canon, to fill in our missing knowledge on subjects that might once have been passed down as the foundation of a common culture.

For our next event, we are pleased to welcome Sebastian Milbank to talk about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a defining figure of the proto-Romantic movement Sturm und Drang.

As Sebastian explains:

"Goethe is perhaps the most paradoxical figure in Western history. A reactionary and a revolutionary, a romantic and a classicist, at once the symbol of German nationhood and of multicultural cosmopolitanism. Goethe, a restless and Protean figure, can be considered the first of the moderns.

Goethe’s Germany was a culture without a state, intellectually and culturally tied to modernising bourgeois societies in France and Britain, yet still frozen in the material and political conditions that reigned at the time of the Peace of Westphalia. Modernity, for Germany, was in certain often unacknowledged ways violently traumatic, as religious orthodoxy and the old political order shattered under the pressure of outside forces and ideas.

This talk will look at Goethe as a lens for understanding the significance of Germany’s relationship to the birth of modernity, and our current postmodern context. Ranging widely from the intensely modern psychological portraits of Elective Affinities, the expressionistic individualism of Young Werther, the Renaissance futurism of Faust and all the way to the cosmopolitan universalism of the East-West Divan, it will show just how many familiar threads lead back to Jena and Weimar."

Sebastian Milbank is a writer, editor and researcher, who works across political policy, journalism and academia. A philosopher and theologian by background, he has written extensively about culture and political theory, and is the author of two forthcoming books, on Christianity and paradox, and on Christianity and citizenship in the ancient world.

The talk will be held in The Library at Conway Hall (Holborn, London). Doors will open at 6:30pm. The talk itself will begin at 7 and will last for around 45 minutes, after which we will take a 15-minute break before returning for up to a half hour of questions, taking us to around 8:30. Drinks will be available from a pop-up bar all evening - we'd love to see you there!

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