Chapter 32 considers the question of modernity as explored in Goethe’s Faust. In his hands, the cast of mind of the restless central character constitutes an analogy of modernity. The chapter argues that the duo of Faust and Mephistopheles epitomises the mood of Goethe’s own time, which paved the way for the modern industrial era. It demonstrates that Part I radicalises the revolt against tradition which is an essential part of the original Faust legend, while Part II thematises incipient capitalist economics and the manipulation of nature through technology.

Chapter 11 traces the development of Goethe’s Faust, from the first scenes drafted in the 1770s, when Goethe was in his twenties, to the end of Part Two, completed shortly before his death in 1832. The chapter highlights the at times uneasy combination of antiquated material and modern intention within the work, and the contradictions that resulted from its protracted genesis. At the same time, attention is drawn to the sheer power of Goethe’s language, to its rhythms and the characters that it creates. Goethe’s Faust, the chapter argues, is a masterpiece with flaws.

Chapter 14 traces the development of Romanticism and positions Goethe within it. It addresses the factors that shaped Romanticism, such as the rise of the prose novel and the revival of interest in folklore, and positions the movement in relation to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Above all, the chapter demonstrates that – despite his well-known ambivalence about aspects of Romanticism – Goethe contributed to it throughout his life, paving the way for it with his early works, and embodying many of its tendencies later on, above all in Faust.

Chapter 4 introduces the official duties that Goethe carried out in Weimar, from his membership of the Privy Council, to the various commissions (such as mining) for which he was responsible, to his leadership of the Weimar court theatre. It also explains the significance of civil service for middle-class men in Goethe’s time. Finally, the chapter reflects on the connections between Goethe’s work as a civil servant and his pursuits in the areas of literature and science, emphasising, at the same time, that these connections are often far from straightforward.

Chapter 6 explores the impact of the French Revolution on Goethe and examines the development in his responses, especially as reflected in the literary works he composed between 1789 and 1797. Goethe was horrified by the violence of 1789 and its aftermath; at the same time, he was critical of the French elites, and saw their fate as a warning to their German counterparts. This chapter highlights the ambivalence of his attitudes and aligns him with the reform conservatives, who favoured the maintenance of privileges but also reform from above.

The conclusion draws upon the findings of all the chapters to argue that Barbarossa scholars had often studied more a construct of post-Kulturkampf Germany than the medieval emperor himself. Rather than a sacraliser of the state who teamed up with Reichskanzler Rainald of Dassel (a stand-in for Otto von Bismarck) in order to hammer the Papacy into submission, Frederick I was a ruler determined to restore the greatness of the Empire by many different means, including papal and Arab alliances. This has been overlooked because of the dearth of sources for the later part of his reign, and because of the profound misunderstanding of Frederick’s Aquensian projects. By dismantling the historiography in an archaeological way, Sulovsky restores the connections apparent in the sources, and makes it clear that the increasing Romanisation of the Empire had radical consequences for authority and its expressions, both for the pope and the emperor. Therefore, much of what was described as a deliberate sacralisation of the Empire in opposition to the Papac, was in fact its gradual Romanisation. This was not a project spearheaded by German court, but by the self-conscious Italians, who wanted a Roman emperor to represent them, and not a German king.

The introduction explains the state of the scholarship regarding the sanctity of the state, starting with what is commonly believed. Sulovsky then traces the argument back to its intellectual roots, in the process showing that it is based on false premises that had more to do with the clash of Catholic and Protestant worldviews than with any medieval reality per se. The introduction of the phrase sacrum imperium, the translation of the Three Kings and the canonisation of Saint Charlemagne constituting a triad of sacralising acts is traced to Heinrich Appelt, the senior diplomatist who edited Frederick I’s diplomata. However, as Sulovsky shows, Appelt drew heavily upon Friedrich Heer, whose magnum opus Die Tragödie des Heiligen Reiches deeply influenced many scholars, though he is only reluctantly cited by them. Heer’s work is then shown to be a Catholic response to the Kulturkampf-dominated Prussian school, which formulated the original idea of the sacralisation of the state in 1910, but based on eighteenth-century German Protestant interpretations of imperial history. Thus, the introduction demonstrates that much of our knowledge rests on the presuppositions and axioms of a bygone ideological struggle.

Chapter 31 scrutinises the term Weltliteratur (world literature), often invoked but little understood. Weltliteratur is a motif in Goethe’s oeuvre, rather than a unified theory, and it either describes the increased international literary exchanges which are the result of modernisation, or it has a normative charge, suggesting that Weltliteratur enables intercultural understanding. The chapter considers the origins of and various sources for the concept, together with its key resonances and concerns; it also reflects on the role played by the term in the establishment of the modern academic discipline of comparative literature.

Chapter 2 introduces the two places which were the most significant in Goethe’s life: Frankfurt, the city of his birth, and Weimar, the duchy where he lived from the age of twenty-six. The chapter explains the differing political weight of Frankfurt and Weimar – Frankfurt being the nearest that the Holy Roman Empire had to a capital city, Weimar being altogether more provincial, though nonetheless the capital of one of the more important ‘old principalities’. Moreover, it sets the two places in the context of the upheavals of the time, examining, for example, Weimar’s shifting geopolitical allegiances during and after the Napoleonic era.

Chapter 33 analyses the challenges to normative definitions of family, gender and love posed by Goethe’s works. In Goethe’s time, such norms were a crucial factor in what Michel Foucault has called the ‘mechanisms of power’. The chapter demonstrates that Goethe defied conventions through his depiction of desire: there are many examples of same-sex attraction in his work, and desire is often also portrayed as fluid, shifting and non-exclusive. Further, the chapter highlights the importance of adoptive relations, which Goethe presents as being of the same order of validity as biological connections.

The first chapter deals with the phrase sacrum imperium in the period 1125–1167. It starts out as a rare occurrence in imperial Italy when the locals sought German imperial assistance and, at the same time, a staple phrase used by Latin diplomats to address the Byzantine emperor. However, Sulovsky shows that after the Second Crusade (1147–1149), the German imperial court increasingly adopted elements of the sacral terminology of the state, as used in the Byzantine east, when dealing with Italian affairs. When Barbarossa’s second Italian campaign (1158–1162) was being planned in early 1157, the term sacrum imperium finally appeared in a document issued by the imperial chancery. However, whereas previous scholars could not tell who the author behind the text was, Sulovsky argues that it was the senior notary Albert of Sponheim, who had introduced other innovations as well, and who had taken part in both the aforementioned crusade and in Frederick’s first Italian expedition as a high-level diplomat. Moreover, Albert adopted sacrum imperium both from the Italian and Byzantine usages to the German one, so that he could convince the letter’s addressee, his fellow crusader Otto of Freising, to join the Italian war.

Chapter 23 sets Goethe’s Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) in context. Colour had been the subject of intensive study, both aesthetic and scientific, in the eighteenth century, and the chapter reconstructs the many influences on Goethe and his contemporaries, from the recent discoveries of Herschel and Ritter, to earlier figures, above all Newton, but even Aristotle and Hippocrates. The chapter also presents the central tenets of Goethe’s Farbenlehre, with a particular focus on the theoretical first part, which offers a physiological theory of colours and deals with the physical nature of light.