"It draws on a profound knowledge of European literature, its argument is coherent from beginning to end, it is compellingly written."--Times Higher Education Supplement. While in Weimar, Goethe wrote literature which gave his country an artistic and intellectual center and contributed to its subsequent unification. T.J. Reed's study traces this development in the face of social and political difficulties and in the context of German cultural history. Through close analysis, he weaves the careers of individual writers of the age into the broader pattern of historical events.

Based, in part, on close reading of manuscripts and sources at the Zurich Thomas Mann Archive, Reed's study has long established itself as the standard work in English on Mann's fiction and thought. In this new edition, Reed adds a chapter on the new documentation that has appeared since the first edition. He details the main currents in Mann scholarship over the last two decades, suggesting how we should now see the writer, the man, and the political figure, and, above all, the complex relationship between the three.