トーマス・マンが語るゲーテ：偉大な才能とブルジョワジーの起源
偉業のブルジョワ的起源トーマス・マンは、ゲーテの幼少期を過ごした家を回想し、その天才性と日常的な環境との間の独特な調和について論じる。
彼はゲーテを、古典的時代の代表者や永遠の巨人の視点だけで見るべきではなく、ブルジョワジー時代を象徴する人物として理解すべきだと主張する。
ゲーテ自身も、偉大な才能は貴族社会よりも中産階級といった「中流階層」に育まれると高く評価していた。
このように、天才でありながらもゲーテはブルジョワ的規範に沿った秩序と品性を保ち続けていたという。
原文の冒頭を表示（英語・3段落のみ）
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For this essay on Goethe, a task of which I feel so unworthy, I shall fall back upon a memory, a personal experience, to hearten myself for the venture and give it the stamp of authenticity, which is best and final in all things. I recall the emotions that crowded in upon me years ago when I found myself for the first time in Goethe’s childhood home on the Hirschgraben in Frankfurt. Those rooms and stairs I knew perfectly, in style and tone and atmosphere. Here was “ancestry,” as it is recorded in the book of my life, and the beginning, likewise, of something gigantic. I was at home and at the same time I was a late and shy guest in the realm of genius. The homelike and the grand rubbed shoulders. This bourgeois-patrician mansion, now become a museum, where reverence treads softly as at the cradle of a demi-god; this dignified and decorous setting, treasured and held sacred because of the son who left it behind—how far behind!—to grow to austere world stature—I gazed on all this, I breathed it in; and the discord between familiarity and awe in my breast was resolved into that feeling in which humility and self-assertion are one, into smiling love.
I cannot speak of Goethe except with love—with a sense of intimacy; if there be offensiveness in this, it is mitigated by the keenest awareness that he is incomparable. I may leave it to those who feel qualified by training and temperament to dwell upon his highest flights, from their purely intellectual standpoint as historians and commentators. It is quite another thing to share in Goethe’s substance, in its human guise; and it is only from the standpoint that I and others like me can speak of Goethe at all. Why deny that recognition, that right of intimacy, transcending the personal and embracing the national? This year the world at large is commemorating that great citizen; but only Germans can do so with the familiarity I have mentioned that comes through being a part of his substance. The dignified bourgeois setting as the home of one who was to be at home in all that is human; the world greatness with a bourgeois origin: this destiny, the result of good ancestry and tremendous growth, is nowhere found in such a typical form as in Germany; and everything German that has grown up from the bourgeois order to higher spiritual levels is smilingly at home in that Frankfurt birthplace.
※ 著作権に配慮し、引用は冒頭3段落までです。続きは元記事をご覧ください。