ACCORDING TO HAROLD BLOOM, “every Goethe text, however divergent from the others, bears the mark of his unique and overwhelming personality, which cannot be evaded or deconstructed.” While Bloom is concerned with the force of Goethe's personality as it manifests itself in his works, the impact of his personality on German literary historiography is no less remarkable. To take but one example of his enduring iconic status, the successful Deutsche Literaturgeschichte by Wolfgang Beutin et al.—in its seventh expanded edition —conveys the essence of its subject matter by depicting the head of Goethe as the sole image on the front cover. Unscathed by the “Death of the Author,” Goethe the man continues to be at the centre of German literary history. On the back cover we find some also-rans: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Bertolt Brecht, and Christa Wolf. While these authors contribute to the project of German literary history as exemplary participants who are subject to the changing forces of literary taste and perhaps political correctness (Wolf has displaced Wolfgang Borchert), Goethe endures as the embodiment of all that is most valuable in over a millennium of writing in the German language.

In the following, it will be assumed that Goethe's role in German literary history is not just the result of his literary works and their reception by later scholars, but also the consequence of his strategies of self-projection.