Now he needed to connect those worlds [of the East] to the very different world in which he had made his life. He was beginning to see that this … would be his real subject, the one he would worry away at for the rest of his career: the great question of how the world joins up—not only how the East flows into the West and the West into the East but how the past shapes the present even as the present changes our understanding of the past, and how the imagined world, the location of dreams, art, invention, and, yes, faith, sometimes leaks across the frontier separating it from the “real” place in which human beings mistakenly believe they live.

IDEAS SIMILAR TO THESE occupied Goethe throughout his life, most intensively, however, early in the nineteenth century, during the involved creative process that brought forth the West-Eastern Divan. His youthful interest in the Middle East had arisen from his imaginative immersion in the world of the biblical patriarchs and a fascination with Muhammad as the founder of a new monotheistic faith. His encounter with Herder and his conception of a progressive history of humanity provided Goethe with a wider context for these concerns. The appearance in 1812 of Hammer-Purgstall’s translation of the Diwan by the Persian Hafez (Khāwaja Shamsu Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Shīrāzī) rekindled Goethe’s interest in the East, presenting him with a poet, a “twin,” whose artistry and attitudes struck vital chords deep within his being. Goethe sought to reflect on his life and world from the complex of perspectives offered by Hafez and the cultures that had nurtured him, emulating and incorporating, too, their manifold artistic traditions. His intensive study of the history, literature, and life of the people of the Middle East deepened his ambivalent relationship with the teachings of the Qur’an, acquainting him, too, with the culture and poetry of Arabia, especially the Moallakat and poets of the Islamic epochs, such as Mutanabbi and Tograi, with whom he felt a strong temperamental affinity. Goethe und die arabische Welt, Katharina Mommsen’s magisterial study, documents precisely how Goethe, through his poetic and intellectual powers, could integrate, in his personality and works, a fruitful dialectic of West and East, each no longer an “other” to the other, establishing the basis for his conception of Weltliteratur.