Goethe#
Summary#
Goethe represents a rare exception among Germans who embodied genuine masculine strength rather than the typical German weakness and sentimentality. Napoleon’s exclamation upon meeting him (“voila un homme!”) captures this surprise at finding an actual man where he expected to see merely a German. Nietzsche also associates Goethe with a moral approach that permits the “complaisant and wanton surrender to the emotions,” a bold letting-go of the reins permissible to wise old men for whom such indulgence “no longer has much danger.”