Civilized Competition: The Beginnings of the English Goethe Society and its Early Relations with the Goethe-Gesellschaft in Weimar

ABSTRACT The English Goethe Society (EGS) is the third oldest Goethe society in the world. Although it was founded solely as a literary society ‘to promote and extend Goethe’s work and thought’, the appointment of Friedrich Max Müller as the society’s first president suggested that the early founders of the EGS also saw it as playing an important diplomatic role in Anglo-German relations. This article demonstrates that from its founding in 1886 to the beginning of the First World War, the EGS experienced various crises, not least in its relations with other Goethe societies in Britain and with the Goethe-Gesellschaft in Weimar.