"Johnson laments the fact that Goethe is no longer required material for German students. Apparently he has suffered the same fate at the hands of post-modern sensibilities that Shakespeare or Chaucer have in English-speaking universities. There is added irony in that Goethe began his intellectual life as a romanticist and freethinker (who never entirely accommodated himself to Christian orthodoxy); nevertheless, his increasingly conservative political opinions were shaped by the fact that he had witnessed the excesses of the French Revolution, the imperialism of Napoleon and the subsequent emergence of intolerant ideological movements.
(...) Johnson sums up his outlook as a Central European version of Burkean philosophy: “Goethe was always a conservative, never a reactionary. He believed neither in revolution nor restoration, but in reform.”"
in https://imlacsjournal.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/goethe-and-the-conse...
