Hans Carossa was a renowned physician and perhaps the only twentieth-century German author who convincingly revived Goethean thought. Carossa was not a spokesman for any literary school and was equally removed from social criticism and l'art pour l'art. Carossa did not define Goethean thought in scholarly abstractions; his goal as a physician and author is best described by the word Bildung, a Goethean term meaning the process of personal and professional self-realization through the experience of art and nature. Thus his works--limited to approximately 2,000 pages--are, in essence, autobiographical, and his life can be seen in many instances as a translation of his books into action.

During the twelve years of Hitler's Reich, Carossa chose not to emigrate; while Rosenberg and other Nazi ideologists claimed that Nazism was culturally rooted in Goethean Bildung, Carossa felt called upon to disprove this claim. To Carossa, Germany was not meant to play...