The Friday: At noon, as the clock strikes twelve

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born for dead 277 years ago. On birth as a political category, the "Veloziferian" age, and the question of what we are actually celebrating when we celebrate a dead man.

A child who does not breathe

It begins with a near-failure. On August 28, 1749, at noon—while the bells in Frankfurt am Main are striking twelve—a boy is born in the house on the Großer Hirschgraben who is not breathing. The child has turned blue; the midwife is overwhelmed; the family is in sheer distress. They rub him, warm him, and hold the small body up to the window’s light until, at some point—no record captures the exact moment—a first cry rings out through the room.

Six decades later, this same man would dispatch the event in a sentence that ranks among the most dispassionate in German prose: due to the midwife’s clumsiness, he had come into the world "for dead," and only through repeated efforts was he brought to behold the light of day. Not a word of horror, no retrospective panic. Instead, the Privy Councilor’s cost-benefit analysis follows immediately: the mishap had, after all, benefited his fellow citizens, for his grandfather—Magistrate Johann Wolfgang Textor—had subsequently hired an obstetrician and instituted training for midwives.

These two sentences already contain the entire physiognomy of the man whose two-hundred-and-seventy-seventh birthday we mark today: the event immediately followed by its ordering; the catastrophe promptly transformed into an institution. Anyone who writes about their own birth in this way has long since ceased to merely suffer it; they have taken charge of it.

And yet, the scandal of the sentence remains. The most famous German of modern times, the central luminary of an entire national literature, the man whose name today adorns institutes in Cairo, Nairobi, and São Paulo—he very nearly never came to be. Noon—a quiet infant—and things would have taken a different turn. It is worth starting right here on an August 28th. For birthdays do not celebrate the body of work; they celebrate the improbable fact that someone came into being.

Natality

Hannah Arendt gave a name to this phenomenon. *The Human Condition* (*Vita activa*) contains perhaps the most consoling idea in twentieth-century political philosophy: that human beings are not primarily defined by mortality, but by natality—by the fact of having been born. It is not death that determines our nature, but birth—the fact that, with every new arrival, something enters the world that cannot be derived from what came before. Arendt calls this *natality*, and she identifies it as the very root of action: we are capable of starting things because we ourselves are beginnings.

This argument runs counter to a powerful current of thought—to the philosophy that defines human existence in terms of "being-towards-death" and seeks the essential truth of existence in the act of dying. Arendt reverses this perspective by 180 degrees. Death is what makes us all the same; birth is what distinguishes us. And because political action is nothing other than the capacity to initiate something with an unknown outcome, birth—for Arendt—is not merely a biological fact, but a political category.

Viewed from this angle, the most commonplace of celebrations suddenly takes on a curious quality. A birthday is the only celebration where merit plays no role. We congratulate someone on something they did not achieve, to which they contributed nothing, and in which—literally speaking—they participated while unconscious. And therein lies its dignity. The birthday represents the last vestige of a culture that measures human beings not by their achievements, but by their sheer existence. In a society that increasingly ties a person’s value to visibility, output, and utility, the birthday cake is a subversive object.

The Sum of Existence

Goethe himself knew full well the significance of this date. In his family home in Frankfurt, the day had been a meager affair: a birthday pretzel here, a pair of black breeches in 1759, and—for his twelfth birthday—new shoes and a silver sword. It was not until his fifteenth birthday that the occasion was celebrated in a truly festive, sociable sense. As early as his student days in Leipzig, he began a habit he would maintain throughout his life: at the end of each year of his life, he would take stock, review his working methods, and make resolutions. On August 27, 1794, he wrote that this was the day the “sum of his existence” was to be tallied. It is the language of a merchant, not a poet, and it befits a man who spent his life keeping records, organizing collections, and labeling stones.

These resolutions were not mere intentions of the sort common today—resolutions often made without consequence. On August 28, 1808, he resolved to tackle his autobiography—*Dichtung und Wahrheit* (Poetry and Truth), the work that continues to shape our image of the child on the Hirschgraben to this day. The Weimar court had celebrated him since 1781; yet, as he grew older, he increasingly withdrew from the clamor. He had “always liked to observe the day quietly,” he assures us in his *Tag- und Jahreshefte* (Annals).

One might view this as affectation. Yet one can also recognize in it the process Hans Blumenberg described in *Work on Myth* (*Arbeit am Mythos*): the patient shaping of a figure until it is robust enough to endure for centuries. Blumenberg devotes the final section of his book to Goethe, and with good reason. Here we see a man who does not merely undergo the process of myth-making but actively drives it—organizing, illuminating, and composing his own past. The very title *Poetry and Truth* is an open admission: form takes precedence over fact. Goethe was the last person to succeed in becoming a myth during his lifetime, and the first who knew how to do it.

The Famulus and the Intermaxillary Bone

Anyone who thinks an aesthete is speaking here is thoroughly mistaken. In the spring of 1784, Goethe discovered the intermaxillary bone in the human skull—a bone that anatomy had previously denied humans possessed in order to distinguish them from animals. He wrote to Herder about this with an excitement unlike anything found in his literary correspondence. It was proof of an idea that would never let him go: that nature varies rather than leaps, and that all form is transformation.

From this idea grew half a lifetime’s work—morphology, the metamorphosis of plants, and finally the *Theory of Colours* (1810), that grand-scale assault on Newton which Goethe considered his best book, yet which the field of physics still does not take seriously today. He lost that battle, and rightly so. But the question he raised remains unresolved. A century later, Max Weber encapsulated it in a single concept: the "disenchantment of the world." According to Weber, mysterious forces no longer exist; there is only calculability—and the price paid for this is that science no longer provides an answer to the question of meaning.

Goethe’s counter-approach is the *Urphänomen* (primal phenomenon): seeing rather than dissecting; observing a phenomenon until it becomes a theory in itself. "The highest achievement would be to grasp that everything factual is already theory," he noted in his *Maxims*. This is not esotericism, but an epistemological stance—a refusal to torture nature until it confesses.

And here, as a habitual pilgrim to Bayreuth, I feel compelled to offer a bow tinged with mixed emotions: the most famous Wagner in German literature is not the Master of the Green Hill, but Faust’s *famulus*—that diligent overachiever who knows the world only from books and succeeds at everything except understanding. Wagner is the tragedy’s most timeless figure. Today, he sits in front of a screen and has the world summarized for him.

The Expressionless

It was the fiercest critic of the Goethe cult who wrote the most astute essay on Goethe. Walter Benjamin’s treatise on *Elective Affinities*—composed in 1922—is a frontal assault on the hagiographic prose prevalent at the time, which sought to explain the work through the poet’s life, thereby elevating the poet to the status of a saint. Benjamin separates the two with surgical detachment: the work owes no explanation to the life.

What he discovers in the novel is what he terms "the expressionless"—that moment when beautiful semblance shatters and something becomes visible that can no longer be resolved into meaning. The novel concerns people who believe they are ordering their affairs, yet are governed by chemical affinities against which they are powerless. It is Goethe’s most bitter text, written by a man of sixty who understood just how little sovereignty human sovereignty truly possesses.

Benjamin’s essay concludes with a sentence that carries the force of a creed: It is only for the sake of the hopeless that hope is given to us. One must place this sentence alongside the scene in the room on the Hirschgraben, where a child is not breathing yet is nonetheless being rubbed and warmed. Hope is not something derived from a situation; it is what one summons up to counter it.

Everything "Velociferic"

The year is 1825. Goethe is seventy-six; Europe is reorganizing itself; the first railways are running, and express coaches and steamships are shrinking distances that had remained constant for a thousand years. In a letter to his great-nephew Nicolovius—one he never actually sent—he coins a word that one would hardly attribute to him today: *velociferic*. *Velocitas*—speed—fused with Lucifer. Haste as the work of the Devil. Four years later, in the second version of *Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years*, he released the word into the public sphere—a neologism that carried its own diagnosis: speed is not neutral.

A few weeks later, in a letter to his friend Zelter, the diagnosis was spelled out clearly: everything was now "ultra," everything was relentlessly transcending its own limits—in thought and action alike; no one knew the element in which they were moving anymore. Young people were being stirred up far too early and then swept away by the whirlpool of the times. Wealth and speed were what the world admired. And the worst thing about his era was that it allowed nothing to reach maturity.

Allowing nothing to reach maturity. Two hundred years later, one need not look far to understand what is being discussed. Hartmut Rosa has provided the sociological foundation for this experience: modernity accelerates technologically, socially, and in the realm of everyday life all at once, and the result is not a gain in time but chronic breathlessness. What Rosa proposes as a counter-concept is *resonance*—a relationship with the world in which something answers us, rather than merely being available for use. In modern vocabulary, this is precisely Goethe’s *Urphänomen* (primal phenomenon).

This "Veloziferian" diagnosis has a twin sister born of the same mind: *Weltliteratur*—world literature. In 1827, Goethe told Eckermann that the era of national literature was over and the time for world literature had arrived. The two concepts belong together. Those who fear acceleration must desire exchange; those familiar with narrowness know that culture thrives only through interaction. Goethe was no mere preservationist. He was a man who understood that openness and slowness are not mutually exclusive but, rather, mutually dependent.

On the Kickelhahn

On August 27, 1831—the eve of his eighty-second birthday—Goethe had himself taken from Ilmenau up to the Kickelhahn. He was traveling with his grandchildren; it was the final journey of his life. Accompanied by the mining inspector Mahr, he climbed to the upper floor of the wooden hut where, fifty-one years earlier, he had stayed for eight days and written eight lines on the wall in pencil.

Mahr recorded what happened next. The old man read the verses, and tears streamed down his cheeks. Slowly, he drew a snow-white handkerchief from his dark brown coat, dried his face, and said softly: "Yes: just wait, soon you too shall rest." Then he fell silent for half a minute, gazed through the window into the dark spruce forest, and turned to make his descent. Seven months later, he was dead. I first read this scene as a schoolboy, in a yellow Reclam booklet, and understood nothing of it at the time. One understands it only much later.

Eighty-two years lie between the first breath—which no one recorded—and that final look into the forest. In between: *Werther*, Italy, the *Theory of Colors*, Weimar, the *Divan*, the sealed *Faust*. All of this constitutes his body of work, and works are open to dispute—just as the *Theory of Colors* was disputed, and as *Elective Affinities* is disputed to this day.

What is being celebrated today is something different—something both smaller and greater. It is the fact that someone made a start. That on an August day at noon, a child did not give up, even though he had every reason to do so. Arendt would have called it *natality*. The Frankfurt magistrate called it an occasion for administrative reform. And the man himself—who spent his life taking stock of his existence—would likely have said: The best way to celebrate is to keep working.

Sapere aude!

S.

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