prize with his theory of the origins of language. Herder made his mark before
his own teacher, and prepared the way for the movement that would make
Kant its greatest name.
Now the Königsberg network begins to flow into the central network of
German intellectual life. In 1769 Herder met the 20-year-old Goethe on his
travels, both of them a few years prior to their fame. When Goethe went to
Weimar in 1775 as a court official, his first move toward building a literary
circle was to find a position for Herder. Goethe became the great energy star
of German literature, and as with all such figures his reputation casts a glare
that makes it difficult to see how he became that way. Goethe’s life well fits
the model that networks are the primary movers, and that individuals become
filled with creative energies to the extent of their centrality when the networks
reorganize around them.
Goethe from early on was a gregarious seeker of other intellectuals, both
the bright young aspirants and the established names. A few years after meeting
Herder, Goethe launched the Sturm und Drang movement with his drama
Goetz von Berlichingen about a rebel medieval knight; he quickly followed
this up in 1774 with a novel, Sorrows of Young Werther, which inspired a cult
of romantic suicide protesting unrequited love and social convention. Goethe
became a wonder of creative longevity and far-flung virtuosity because his
creations mirrored the modes of those around him in every phase of a prolif-
erating movement. Schiller’s 1781 drama The Robbers glorifying revolution
was a scandalous success. After he joined the Weimar circle in 1788, Goethe
and Schiller became friends and collaborators in journal publishing, spurring
each other on. Schiller produced his quasi-Shakespearean history plays, while
Goethe produced his own tragedies and historical dramas and worked up the
main part of Faust, incorporating themes of Spinozaist pantheism from one
wing of the Idealist movement. When the Romantic circle popularized trans-
lations of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and other foreign classics and produced its
own historical novels, Goethe turned his hand to the bildungsroman, produc-
ing Wilhelm Meister. In 1810, at the height of the Naturphilosophie movement,
Goethe published his Theory of Colors, an attempt to overcome mechanistic-
mathematical Newtonian optics by means of a qualitative, even animistic
theory of “the actions and sufferings of light” (Safranski, 1989: 178–184).
Goethe of course was no mere imitator; he created by conflict and opposition
within the turbulent attention space, energized by contemporary enthusiasms
while transmuting their materials into his own.
Goethe was a center for network contacts that brought him all the cultural
capital at its point of emergence. To a large extent this was because he was a
prime mover in assembling creative intellectual circles. Typically such groups
contain both an intellectual leader whose work publicizes the group and an626 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths