In Strassburg he found a society whose ways of
living and thinking were equally different from those of Frankfort and
of Leipzig. Strassburg had not the bounded intellectual horizon which
made him feel himself an alien in his native town, nor, on the other
hand, did it offer the opportunities for frivolous distraction which
he found in the "little Paris." Strassburg had been a French town for
a hundred years, but there was no town in Germany more intensely
German in its sympathies and aspirations. The officials and the upper
classes in the town spoke French and were French in their tastes and
habits, but the great majority of its citizens clung to their national
traditions with the tenacity of the conquered. It is Goethe's own
testimony that his residence in Strassburg precisely at this period of
his life was a decisive circumstance for his future development. At
the moment of his arrival, he had not yet completely broken with
French models, and he would even appear to have had vague dreams that
he would eventually choose the French language as his literary
medium.[64] Ever responsive to the intellectual and spiritual
atmosphere in which he found himself, however, the intensely German
sympathies of his Strassburg circle definitely turned him from a
career which would have cut off his genius from its profoundest
sources.
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