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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

April 04, 2023

Several terms redirect here. For other uses, see Goethe (disambiguation) and Gote (disambiguation).

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe[a] (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic.[3] His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour. He is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language, his work having a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day.[3][4]

Geheimrat

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe in 1828, by Joseph Karl Stieler
BornJohann Wolfgang Goethe
(1749-08-28)28 August 1749
Free Imperial City of Frankfurt, Holy Roman Empire
Died22 March 1832(1832-03-22) (aged 82)
Weimar, Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, German Confederation
OccupationPoet, novelist, playwright, natural philosopher, statesman
LanguageGerman
EducationLaw (LL.Lic.)
Alma mater
Periodfrom 1770
Genre
Literary movement
Notable works
Spouse
​
​
(m. 1806; died 1816)​
Children5 (4 died young), including August von Goethe
Parents
Relatives
Signature
Chancellor of the Exchequer of Duchy of Saxe-Weimar
In office
1782–1784
Superintendent of the ducal library and Chief Adviser of Saxe-Weimar (from 1775)
Comissioner of the War, Mines and Highways Commissions of Saxe-Weimar (from 1779)

Goethe took up residence in Weimar in November 1775 following the success of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). He was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August, in 1782. Goethe was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe became a member of the Duke's privy council (1776–1785), sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau, and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena. He also contributed to the planning of Weimar's botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace.[5][b]

Goethe's first major scientific work, the Metamorphosis of Plants, was published after he returned from a 1788 tour of Italy. In 1791 he was made managing director of the theatre at Weimar, and in 1794 he began a friendship with the dramatist, historian, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whose plays he premiered until Schiller's death in 1805. During this period Goethe published his second novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and, in 1808, the first part of his most celebrated drama, Faust. His conversations and various shared undertakings throughout the 1790s with Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder, Alexander von Humboldt,[6] Wilhelm von Humboldt, and August and Friedrich Schlegel have come to be collectively termed Weimar Classicism.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer named Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship one of the four greatest novels ever written,[7][c] while the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe as one of six "representative men" in his work of the same name (along with Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Montaigne, Napoleon, and Shakespeare). Goethe's comments and observations form the basis of several biographical works, notably Johann Peter Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe (1836). His poems were set to music by many composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler.

Life

Early life

Goethe's father, Johann Caspar Goethe, lived with his family in a large house (today the Goethe House) in Frankfurt, then a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire. Though he had studied law in Leipzig and had been appointed Imperial Councillor, Johann Caspar Goethe was not involved in the city's official affairs.[8] Johann Caspar married Goethe's mother, Catharina Elisabeth Textor, in Frankfurt on 20 August 1748, when he was 38 and she was 17.[9] All their children, with the exception of Johann Wolfgang and his sister Cornelia Friederica Christiana (born in 1750), died at early ages.

 
Goethe's birthplace in Frankfurt (Großer Hirschgraben)

His father and private tutors gave the young Goethe lessons in common subjects of their time, especially languages (Latin, Greek, Biblical Hebrew (briefly),[10] French, Italian, and English). Goethe also received lessons in dancing, riding, and fencing. Johann Caspar, feeling frustrated in his own ambitions, was determined that his children should have all those advantages that he had not.[8]

Although Goethe's great passion was drawing, he quickly became interested in literature; Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803) and Homer were among his early favorites.[11] He had a devotion to theater as well, and was greatly fascinated by puppet shows that were annually arranged[by whom?] in his home; this became a recurrent theme in his literary work Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

He also took great pleasure in reading works on history and religion. He writes about this period:

I had from childhood the singular habit of always learning by heart the beginnings of books, and the divisions of a work, first of the five books of Moses, and then of the Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses. ... If an ever busy imagination, of which that tale may bear witness, led me hither and thither, if the medley of fable and history, mythology and religion, threatened to bewilder me, I readily fled to those oriental regions, plunged into the first books of Moses, and there, amid the scattered shepherd tribes, found myself at once in the greatest solitude and the greatest society.[12]

Goethe also became acquainted with Frankfurt actors.[13] In early literary attempts he showed an infatuation with Gretchen, who would later reappear in his Faust, and the adventures with whom he would concisely describe in Dichtung und Wahrheit.[14] He adored Caritas Meixner (1750–1773), a wealthy Worms trader's daughter and friend of his sister, who would later marry the merchant G. F. Schuler.[15]

Legal career

Goethe studied law at Leipzig University from 1765 to 1768. He detested learning age-old judicial rules by heart, preferring instead to attend the lessons of the poet and university's professor Christian Fürchtegott Gellert. In Leipzig, Goethe fell in love with craftsman and innkeeper's daughter Anna Katharina Schönkopf and wrote cheerful verses about her in the Rococo genre. In 1770, he anonymously released Annette, his first collection of poems. His uncritical admiration for many contemporary poets vanished as he became interested in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Christoph Martin Wieland. By this time, Goethe had already written a great deal, but he discarded nearly all of these works except for the comedy Die Mitschuldigen. The restaurant Auerbachs Keller and its legend of Johann Georg Faust's 1525 barrel ride impressed him so much that Auerbachs Keller became the only real place in his closet drama Faust Part One. As his studies did not progress, Goethe was forced to return to Frankfurt at the close of August 1768.

Goethe became severely ill in Frankfurt. During the year and a half that followed, because of several relapses, the relationship with his father worsened. During convalescence, Goethe was nursed by his mother and sister. In April 1770, Goethe left Frankfurt in order to finish his studies at the University of Strasbourg.

In Alsace, Goethe blossomed. No other landscape has he described as affectionately as the warm, wide Rhine area. In Strasbourg, Goethe met Johann Gottfried Herder. The two became close friends, and crucially to Goethe's intellectual development, Herder kindled his interest in William Shakespeare, Ossian and in the notion of Volkspoesie (folk poetry). On 14 October 1772 Goethe held a gathering in his parental home in honour of the first German "Shakespeare Day". His first acquaintance with Shakespeare's works is described as his personal awakening in literature.[16]

On a trip to the village Sessenheim, Goethe fell in love with Friederike Brion, in October 1770,[17][18] but terminated the relationship in August 1771.[19] Several of his poems, like "Willkommen und Abschied", "Sesenheimer Lieder" and "Heidenröslein", originate from this time.

At the end of August 1771, Goethe acquired the academic degree of the Licentiate of Law from Strasbourg and established a small legal practice in Frankfurt. Although in his academic work he had expressed the ambition to make jurisprudence progressively more humane, his inexperience led him to proceed too vigorously in his first cases, and he was reprimanded and lost further ones. This prematurely terminated his career as a lawyer after only a few months. At this time, Goethe was acquainted with the court of Darmstadt, where his inventiveness was praised. From this milieu came Johann Georg Schlosser (who later became Goethe's brother-in-law) and Johann Heinrich Merck. Goethe also pursued literary plans again; this time, his father did not have anything against it, and even helped. Goethe obtained a copy of the biography of a noble highwayman from the German Peasants' War. In a couple of weeks the biography was reworked into a colourful drama. Entitled Götz von Berlichingen, the work went directly to the heart of Goethe's contemporaries.

Goethe could not subsist on being one of the editors of a literary periodical (published by Schlosser and Merck). In May 1772 he once more began the practice of law at Wetzlar. In 1774 he wrote the book which would bring him worldwide fame, The Sorrows of Young Werther. The outer shape of the work's plot is widely taken over from what Goethe experienced during his Wetzlar time with Charlotte Buff (1753–1828)[20] and her fiancé, Johann Christian Kestner (1741–1800),[20] as well as from the suicide of the author's friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem (1747–1772); in it, Goethe made a desperate passion of what was in reality a hearty and relaxed friendship.[21] Despite the immense success of Werther, it did not bring Goethe much financial gain because copyright laws at the time were essentially nonexistent. (In later years Goethe would bypass this problem by periodically authorizing "new, revised" editions of his Complete Works.)[22]

Early years in Weimar

 
Goethe c. 1775

In 1775, Goethe was invited, on the strength of his fame as the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, to the court of Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, who would become Grand Duke in 1815. (Karl August at the time was 18 years of age, to Goethe's 26.) Goethe thus went to live in Weimar, where he remained for the rest of his life[23] and where, over the course of many years, he held a succession of offices, including superintendent of the ducal library,[24] and was the Duke's friend and chief adviser.[25][26]

In 1776, Goethe formed a close relationship with Charlotte von Stein, an older, married woman. The intimate bond with her lasted for ten years, after which Goethe abruptly left for Italy without giving his companion any notice. She was emotionally distraught at the time, but they were eventually reconciled.[27]

Goethe, aside from official duties, was also a friend and confidant to Duke Karl August and participated in the activities of the court. For Goethe, his first ten years at Weimar could well be described as a garnering of a degree and range of experiences which perhaps could have been achieved in no other way. In 1779, Goethe took on the War Commission of the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, in addition to the Mines and Highways commissions. In 1782, when the Duchy's chancellor of the Exchequer left his office, Goethe agreed to act in his place and did so for two and a half years; this post virtually made him prime minister and the principal representative of the Duchy.[3] Goethe was ennobled in 1782 (this being indicated by the "von" in his name). In that same year, Goethe moved into what would be his primary residence in Weimar for the next 50 years.[28]

As head of the Saxe-Weimar War Commission, Goethe participated in the recruitment of mercenaries into the Prussian and British military during the American Revolution. The author W. Daniel Wilson [de] claims that Goethe engaged in negotiating the forced sale of vagabonds, criminals, and political dissidents as part of these activities.[29]

Italy

 
Goethe, age 38, painted by Angelica Kauffman 1787
 
Goethe, by Luise Seidler (Weimar 1811)
See also: Affair of the Diamond Necklace

Goethe's journey to the Italian peninsula and Sicily from 1786 to 1788 was of great significance in his aesthetic and philosophical development. His father had made a similar journey, and his example was a major motivating factor for Goethe to make the trip. More importantly, however, the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann had provoked a general renewed interest in the classical art of ancient Greece and Rome. Thus Goethe's journey had something of the nature of a pilgrimage to it. During the course of his trip Goethe met and befriended the artists Angelica Kauffman and Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, as well as encountering such notable characters as Lady Hamilton and Alessandro Cagliostro.

He also journeyed to Sicily during this time, and wrote that "To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything."[30] While in Southern Italy and Sicily, Goethe encountered, for the first time genuine Greek (as opposed to Roman) architecture, and was quite startled by its relative simplicity. Winckelmann had not recognized the distinctness of the two styles.

Goethe's diaries of this period form the basis of the non-fiction Italian Journey. Italian Journey only covers the first year of Goethe's visit. The remaining year is largely undocumented, aside from the fact that he spent much of it in Venice. This "gap in the record" has been the source of much speculation over the years.

In the decades which immediately followed its publication in 1816, Italian Journey inspired countless German youths to follow Goethe's example. This is pictured, somewhat satirically, in George Eliot's Middlemarch.[citation needed]

Weimar

 
Mining share certificate of the Ilmenau Kupfer- und Silber-Bergwerk for 20 Thaler, issued on 24 February 1784 in Weimar, signed in the original by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, also by the minister Christian Gottlob Voigt and by the German mineralogist and mining engineer Johann Karl Wilhelm Voigt. Registered to Carl Theodor Maria Freiherr von Dalberg, governor in Erfurt.
 
A Goethe watercolour depicting a liberty pole at the border to the short-lived Republic of Mainz, created under influence of the French Revolution and destroyed in the Siege of Mainz in which Goethe participated

In late 1792, Goethe took part in the Battle of Valmy against revolutionary France, assisting Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach during the failed invasion of France. Again during the Siege of Mainz, he assisted Carl August as a military observer. His written account of these events can be found within his Complete Works.

In 1794, Friedrich Schiller wrote to Goethe offering friendship; they had previously had only a mutually wary relationship ever since first becoming acquainted in 1788. This collaborative friendship lasted until Schiller's death in 1805.

In 1806, Goethe was living in Weimar with his mistress Christiane Vulpius, the sister of Christian A. Vulpius, and their son August von Goethe. On 13 October, Napoleon's army invaded the town. The French "spoon guards", the least disciplined soldiers, occupied Goethe's house:

The 'spoon guards' had broken in, they had drunk wine, made a great uproar and called for the master of the house. Goethe's secretary Riemer reports: 'Although already undressed and wearing only his wide nightgown... he descended the stairs towards them and inquired what they wanted from him.... His dignified figure, commanding respect, and his spiritual mien seemed to impress even them.' But it was not to last long. Late at night they burst into his bedroom with drawn bayonets. Goethe was petrified, Christiane raised a lot of noise and even tangled with them, other people who had taken refuge in Goethe's house rushed in, and so the marauders eventually withdrew again. It was Christiane who commanded and organized the defense of the house on the Frauenplan. The barricading of the kitchen and the cellar against the wild pillaging soldiery was her work. Goethe noted in his diary: "Fires, rapine, a frightful night... Preservation of the house through steadfastness and luck." The luck was Goethe's, the steadfastness was displayed by Christiane.[31]

Days afterward, on 19 October 1806, Goethe legitimized their 18-year relationship by marrying Christiane in a quiet marriage service at the Jakobskirche in Weimar [de]. They had already had several children together by this time, including their son, Julius August Walter von Goethe (1789–1830), whose wife, Ottilie von Pogwisch (1796–1872), cared for the elder Goethe until his death in 1832. August and Ottilie had three children: Walther, Freiherr von Goethe (1818–1885), Wolfgang, Freiherr von Goethe [de] (1820–1883) and Alma von Goethe [de] (1827–1844). Christiane von Goethe died in 1816. Johann reflected, "There is nothing more charming to see than a mother with her child in her arms, and there is nothing more venerable than a mother among a number of her children."[32]

 
Ulrike von Levetzow

Later life

After 1793, Goethe devoted his endeavours primarily to literature. By 1820, Goethe was on amiable terms with Kaspar Maria von Sternberg.

 
Goethe and Ulrike, sculpture by Heinrich Drake in Marienbad

In 1821, having recovered from a near fatal heart illness, the 72-year-old Goethe fell in love with Ulrike von Levetzow, 17 at the time.[33] In 1823, he wanted to marry her, but because of the opposition of her mother, he never proposed. Their last meeting in Carlsbad on 5 September 1823 inspired his poem "Marienbad Elegy" which he considered one of his finest works.[34][35] During that time he also developed a deep emotional bond with the Polish pianist Maria Szymanowska, 33 at the time and separated from her husband.[36]

In 1821 Goethe's friend Carl Friedrich Zelter introduced him to the 12-year-old Felix Mendelssohn. Goethe, now in his seventies, was greatly impressed by the child, leading to perhaps the earliest confirmed comparison with Mozart in the following conversation between Goethe and Zelter:

"Musical prodigies ... are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age." "And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt?" said Zelter. "Yes", answered Goethe, "... but what your pupil already accomplishes, bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child."[37]

Mendelssohn was invited to meet Goethe on several later occasions,[38] and set a number of Goethe's poems to music. His other compositions inspired by Goethe include the overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (Op. 27, 1828), and the cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First Walpurgis Night, Op. 60, 1832).[39]

Death

 
Coffins of Goethe and Schiller, Weimar vault

In 1832, Goethe died in Weimar of apparent heart failure. His last words, according to his doctor Carl Vogel [de], were, Mehr Licht! (More light!), but this is disputed as Vogel was not in the room at the moment Goethe died.[40] He is buried in the Ducal Vault at Weimar's Historical Cemetery.

Eckermann closes his famous work, Conversations with Goethe, with this passage:

The morning after Goethe's death, a deep desire seized me to look once again upon his earthly garment. His faithful servant, Frederick, opened for me the chamber in which he was laid out. Stretched upon his back, he reposed as if asleep; profound peace and security reigned in the features of his sublimely noble countenance. The mighty brow seemed yet to harbour thoughts. I wished for a lock of his hair; but reverence prevented me from cutting it off. The body lay naked, only wrapped in a white sheet; large pieces of ice had been placed near it, to keep it fresh as long as possible. Frederick drew aside the sheet, and I was astonished at the divine magnificence of the limbs. The breast was powerful, broad, and arched; the arms and thighs were elegant, and of the most perfect shape; nowhere, on the whole body, was there a trace of either fat or of leanness and decay. A perfect man lay in great beauty before me; and the rapture the sight caused me made me forget for a moment that the immortal spirit had left such an abode. I laid my hand on his heart – there was a deep silence – and I turned away to give free vent to my suppressed tears.

The first production of Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin took place in Weimar in 1850. The conductor was Franz Liszt, who chose the date 28 August in honour of Goethe, who was born on 28 August 1749.[41]

Descendants

Goethe married his long-time lover Christiane Vulpius in 1806. They had 5 children, of whom only their eldest son August von Goethe managed to survive into adulthood. One was stillborn, while the others died early. August had 3 children with Ottilie von Goethe: Walther von Goethe, Wolfgang and Alma. Alma died of Typhoid fever during the outbreak in Vienna, the month before her 17th birthday. Walther and Wolfgang neither married nor had any children. Walther's gravestone states: "With him ends Goethe's dynasty, the name will last forever.", marking the end of Goethe's personal bloodline. While he has no direct descendants, his siblings have.

Literary work

 
First edition of The Sorrows of Young Werther
 
1876 'Faust' by Goethe, decorated by Rudolf Seitz, large German edition 51x38cm

Overview

The most important of Goethe's works produced before he went to Weimar were Götz von Berlichingen (1773), a tragedy that was the first work to bring him recognition, and the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (German: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) (1774), which gained him enormous fame as a writer in the Sturm und Drang period which marked the early phase of Romanticism. Indeed, Werther is often considered to be the "spark" which ignited the movement, and can arguably be called the world's first "best-seller". During the years at Weimar before he met Schiller in 1794, he began Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship[42] and wrote the dramas Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris),[43] Egmont,[44] and Torquato Tasso[45] and the fable Reineke Fuchs.[46]

To the period of his friendship with Schiller belong the conception of Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years (the continuation of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship), the idyll of Hermann and Dorothea, the Roman Elegies and the verse drama The Natural Daughter.[47] In the last period, between Schiller's death, in 1805, and his own, appeared Faust Part One (1808), Elective Affinities (1809), the West-Eastern Diwan (an 1819 collection of poems in the Persian style, influenced by the work of Hafez), his autobiographical Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (From My Life: Poetry and Truth, published between 1811 and 1833) which covers his early life and ends with his departure for Weimar, his Italian Journey (1816–17), and a series of treatises on art. Faust, Part Two was completed before his 1832 death and published posthumously later that year. His writings were immediately influential in literary and artistic circles.[47]

Goethe was fascinated by Kalidasa's Abhijñānaśākuntalam, which was one of the first works of Sanskrit literature that became known in Europe, after being translated from English to German.[48]

 
Goethe–Schiller Monument, Weimar (1857)

Details of selected works

The short epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, or The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, recounts an unhappy romantic infatuation that ends in suicide. Goethe admitted that he "shot his hero to save himself": a reference to Goethe's own near-suicidal with a young woman during this period, an obsession he quelled through the writing process. The novel remains in print in dozens of languages and its influence is undeniable; its central hero, an obsessive figure driven to despair and destruction by his unrequited love for the young Lotte, has become a pervasive literary archetype. The fact that Werther ends with the protagonist's suicide and funeral—a funeral which "no clergyman attended"—made the book deeply controversial upon its (anonymous) publication, for on the face of it, it appeared to condone and glorify suicide. Suicide is considered sinful by Christian doctrine: suicides were denied Christian burial with the bodies often mistreated and dishonoured in various ways; in corollary, the deceased's property and possessions were often confiscated by the Church.[49] However, Goethe explained his use of Werther in his autobiography. He said he "turned reality into poetry but his friends thought poetry should be turned into reality and the poem imitated". He was against this reading of poetry.[50] Epistolary novels were common during this time, letter-writing being a primary mode of communication. What set Goethe's book apart from other such novels was its expression of unbridled longing for a joy beyond possibility, its sense of defiant rebellion against authority, and of principal importance, its total subjectivity: qualities that trailblazed the Romantic movement.

The next work, his epic closet drama Faust, was completed in stages. The first part was published in 1808 and created a sensation. Goethe finished Faust Part Two in the year of his death, and the work was published posthumously. Goethe's original draft of a Faust play, which probably dates from 1773–74, and is now known as the Urfaust, was also published after his death.[51]

The first operatic version of Goethe's Faust, by Louis Spohr, appeared in 1814. The work subsequently inspired operas and oratorios by Schumann, Berlioz, Gounod, Boito, Busoni and Schnittke, as well as symphonic works by Liszt, Wagner and Mahler. Faust became the ur-myth of many figures in the 19th century. Later, a facet of its plot, i.e., of selling one's soul to the devil for power over the physical world, took on increasing literary importance and became a view of the victory of technology and of industrialism, along with its dubious human expenses. In 1919, the world premiere complete production of Faust was staged at the Goetheanum.

Goethe's poetic work served as a model for an entire movement in German poetry termed Innerlichkeit ("introversion") and represented by, for example, Heine. Goethe's words inspired a number of compositions by, among others, Mozart, Beethoven (who idolised Goethe),[52] Schubert, Berlioz and Wolf. Perhaps the single most influential piece is "Mignon's Song" which opens with one of the most famous lines in German poetry, an allusion to Italy: "Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?" ("Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom?").

He is also widely quoted. Epigrams such as "Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him", "Divide and rule, a sound motto; unite and lead, a better one", and "Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must", are still in usage or are often paraphrased. Lines from Faust, such as "Das also war des Pudels Kern", "Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss", or "Grau ist alle Theorie" have entered everyday German usage.

Some well-known quotations are often incorrectly attributed to Goethe. These include Hippocrates' "Art is long, life is short", which is echoed in Goethe's Faust and Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

Scientific work

See also: Goethean science

As to what I have done as a poet,... I take no pride in it... But that in my century I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colours—of that, I say, I am not a little proud, and here I have a consciousness of a superiority to many.

— Johann Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe
 
Goethe in 1810. Gerhard von Kügelgen

Although his literary work has attracted the most interest, Goethe was also keenly involved in studies of natural science.[53] He wrote several works on morphology and colour theory. In the 1790s, he undertook Galvanic experiments and studied anatomical issues together with Alexander von Humboldt.[6] He also had the largest private collection of minerals in all of Europe. By the time of his death, in order to gain a comprehensive view in geology, he had collected 17,800 rock samples.

His focus on morphology and what was later called homology influenced 19th-century naturalists, although his ideas of transformation were about the continuous metamorphosis of living things and did not relate to contemporary ideas of "transformisme" or transmutation of species. Homology, or as Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire called it "analogie", was used by Charles Darwin as strong evidence of common descent and of laws of variation.[54] Goethe's studies (notably with an elephant's skull lent to him by Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring) led him to independently discover the human intermaxillary bone, also known as "Goethe's bone", in 1784, which Broussonet (1779) and Vicq d'Azyr (1780) had (using different methods) identified several years earlier.[55] While not the only one in his time to question the prevailing view that this bone did not exist in humans, Goethe, who believed ancient anatomists had known about this bone, was the first to prove its existence in all mammals. The elephant's skull that led Goethe to this discovery, and was subsequently named the Goethe Elephant, still exists and is displayed in the Ottoneum in Kassel, Germany.

During his Italian journey, Goethe formulated a theory of plant metamorphosis in which the archetypal form of the plant is to be found in the leaf – he writes, "from top to bottom a plant is all leaf, united so inseparably with the future bud that one cannot be imagined without the other".[56] In 1790, he published his Metamorphosis of Plants.[57][58] As one of the many precursors in the history of evolutionary thought, Goethe wrote in Story of My Botanical Studies (1831):

The ever-changing display of plant forms, which I have followed for so many years, awakens increasingly within me the notion: The plant forms which surround us were not all created at some given point in time and then locked into the given form, they have been given... a felicitous mobility and plasticity that allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places.[59]

Goethe's botanical theories were partly based on his gardening in Weimar.[60]

Goethe also popularized the Goethe barometer using a principle established by Torricelli. According to Hegel, "Goethe has occupied himself a good deal with meteorology; barometer readings interested him particularly... What he says is important: the main thing is that he gives a comparative table of barometric readings during the whole month of December 1822, at Weimar, Jena, London, Boston, Vienna, Töpel... He claims to deduce from it that the barometric level varies in the same proportion not only in each zone but that it has the same variation, too, at different altitudes above sea-level".[61]

 
Light spectrum, from Theory of Colours. Goethe observed that with a prism, colour arises at light-dark edges, and the spectrum occurs where these coloured edges overlap.

In 1810, Goethe published his Theory of Colours, which he considered his most important work. In it, he contentiously characterized colour as arising from the dynamic interplay of light and darkness through the mediation of a turbid medium.[62] In 1816, Schopenhauer went on to develop his own theory in On Vision and Colours based on the observations supplied in Goethe's book. After being translated into English by Charles Eastlake in 1840, his theory became widely adopted by the art world, most notably J. M. W. Turner.[63] Goethe's work also inspired the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, to write his Remarks on Colour. Goethe was vehemently opposed to Newton's analytic treatment of colour, engaging instead in compiling a comprehensive rational description of a wide variety of colour phenomena. Although the accuracy of Goethe's observations does not admit a great deal of criticism, his aesthetic approach did not lend itself to the demands of analytic and mathematical analysis used ubiquitously in modern Science. Goethe was, however, the first to systematically study the physiological effects of colour, and his observations on the effect of opposed colours led him to a symmetric arrangement of his colour wheel, "for the colours diametrically opposed to each other ... are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye."[64] In this, he anticipated Ewald Hering's opponent colour theory (1872).[65]

Goethe outlines his method in the essay The experiment as mediator between subject and object (1772).[66] In the Kurschner edition of Goethe's works, the science editor, Rudolf Steiner, presents Goethe's approach to science as phenomenological. Steiner elaborated on that in the books The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception[67] and Goethe's World View,[68] in which he characterizes intuition as the instrument by which one grasps Goethe's biological archetype—The Typus.

Novalis, himself a geologist and mining engineer, expressed the opinion that Goethe was the first physicist of his time and "epoch-making in the history of physics", writing that Goethe's studies of light, of the metamorphosis of plants and of insects were indications and proofs "that the perfect educational lecture belongs in the artist's sphere of work"; and that Goethe would be surpassed "but only in the way in which the ancients can be surpassed, in inner content and force, in variety and depth—as an artist actually not, or only very little, for his rightness and intensity are perhaps already more exemplary than it would seem".[69]

Eroticism

Many of Goethe's works, especially Faust, the Roman Elegies, and the Venetian Epigrams, depict erotic passions and acts. For instance, in Faust, the first use of Faust's power after signing a contract with the Devil is to seduce a teenage girl. Some of the Venetian Epigrams were held back from publication due to their sexual content. Goethe clearly saw human sexuality as a topic worthy of poetic and artistic depiction, an idea that was uncommon in a time when the private nature of sexuality was rigorously normative.[70]

In a conversation on 7 April 1830 Goethe stated that pederasty is an "aberration" that easily leads to "animal, roughly material" behavior. He continued, "Pederasty is as old as humanity itself, and one can therefore say, that it resides in nature, even if it proceeds against nature....What culture has won from nature will not be surrendered or given up at any price."[71] On another occasion he wrote: "I like boys a lot, but the girls are even nicer. If I tire of her as a girl, she'll play the boy for me as well".[72]

 
Goethe on a 1999 German stamp

Religion and politics

Goethe was a freethinker who believed that one could be inwardly Christian without following any of the Christian churches, many of whose central teachings he firmly opposed, sharply distinguishing between Christ and the tenets of Christian theology, and criticizing its history as a "hodgepodge of mistakes and violence".[73][74] His own descriptions of his relationship to the Christian faith and even to the Church varied widely and have been interpreted even more widely, so that while Goethe's secretary Eckermann portrayed him as enthusiastic about Christianity, Jesus, Martin Luther, and the Protestant Reformation, even calling Christianity the "ultimate religion",[75] on one occasion Goethe described himself as "not anti-Christian, nor un-Christian, but most decidedly non-Christian,"[76] and in his Venetian Epigram 66, Goethe listed the symbol of the cross among the four things that he most disliked.[77] According to Nietzsche, Goethe had "a kind of almost joyous and trusting fatalism" that has "faith that only in the totality everything redeems itself and appears good and justified."[78]

 
Portrait of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe by Ferdinand Jagemann, 1806

Born into a Lutheran family, Goethe's early faith was shaken by news of such events as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years' War. A year before his death, in a letter to Sulpiz Boisserée, Goethe wrote that he had the feeling that all his life he had been aspiring to qualify as one of the Hypsistarians, an ancient sect of the Black Sea region who, in his understanding, sought to reverence, as being close to the Godhead, what came to their knowledge of the best and most perfect.[79] Goethe's unorthodox religious beliefs led him to be called "the great heathen" and provoked distrust among the authorities of his time, who opposed the creation of a Goethe monument on account of his offensive religious creed.[80] August Wilhelm Schlegel considered Goethe "a heathen who converted to Islam."[80]

Goethe showed interest in other religions, including Islam, although Karic suggests that attempts to claim Goethe for any religion "is a pointless, Sysiphean task".[81] At age 23, Goethe wrote a poem about a river, originally part of a dramatic dialogue, which he published as a separate work called Mahomets Gesang ("Muhammad's Song"). [82][83] The poem's depiction of nature and forces within it is consonant with his Sturm und Drang years. [84] In 1819, he published his West–östlicher Divan to ignite a poetic dialogue between East and West. [85]

Politically, Goethe described himself as a "moderate liberal".[86][87][88] He was critical of the radicalism of Bentham and expressed sympathy for the prudent liberalism of François Guizot.[89] At the time of the French Revolution, he thought the enthusiasm of the students and professors to be a perversion of their energy and remained skeptical of the ability of the masses to govern.[90] Goethe sympathized with the American Revolution and later wrote a poem in which he declared "America, you're better off than our continent, the old."[91][92] He did not join in the anti-Napoleonic mood of 1812, and he distrusted the strident nationalism which started to be expressed.[93] The medievalism of the Heidelberg Romantics was also repellent to Goethe's eighteenth-century ideal of a supra-national culture.[94]

Goethe was a Freemason, joining the lodge Amalia in Weimar in 1780, and frequently alluded to Masonic themes of universal brotherhood in his work.[95] He was also attracted to the Bavarian Illuminati, a secret society founded on 1 May 1776.[96][95] Although often requested to write poems arousing nationalist passions, Goethe would always decline. In old age, he explained why this was so to Eckermann:

How could I write songs of hatred when I felt no hate? And, between ourselves, I never hated the French, although I thanked God when we were rid of them. How could I, to whom the only significant things are civilization [Kultur] and barbarism, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated in the world, and to which I owe a great part of my own culture? In any case this business of hatred between nations is a curious thing. You will always find it more powerful and barbarous on the lowest levels of civilization. But there exists a level at which it wholly disappears, and where one stands, so to speak, above the nations, and feels the weal or woe of a neighboring people as though it were one's own.[97]

Influence

 
Statue dedicated to Goethe in Chicago's Lincoln Park (1913)

Goethe had a great effect on the nineteenth century. In many respects, he was the originator of many ideas which later became widespread. He produced volumes of poetry, essays, criticism, a theory of colours and early work on evolution and linguistics. He was fascinated by mineralogy, and the mineral goethite (iron oxide) is named after him.[98] His non-fiction writings, most of which are philosophic and aphoristic in nature, spurred the development of many thinkers, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,[99] Arthur Schopenhauer,[100] Søren Kierkegaard,[101] Friedrich Nietzsche,[102] Ernst Cassirer,[103] and Carl Jung.[104] Along with Schiller, he was one of the leading figures of Weimar Classicism. Schopenhauer cited Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship as one of the four greatest novels ever written, along with Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Héloïse and Don Quixote.[7] Nietzsche wrote, "Four pairs it was that did not deny themselves to my sacrifice: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I must come to terms when I have long wandered alone; they may call me right and wrong; to them will I listen when in the process they call each other right and wrong."[105]

Goethe embodied many of the contending strands in art over the next century: his work could be lushly emotional, and rigorously formal, brief and epigrammatic, and epic. He would argue that Classicism was the means of controlling art, and that Romanticism was a sickness, even as he penned poetry rich in memorable images, and rewrote the formal rules of German poetry. His poetry was set to music by almost every major Austrian and German composer from Mozart to Mahler, and his influence would spread to French drama and opera as well. Beethoven declared that a "Faust" Symphony would be the greatest thing for art. Liszt and Mahler both created symphonies in whole or in large part inspired by this seminal work, which would give the 19th century one of its most paradigmatic figures: Doctor Faustus.

 
Second Goetheanum
 
Mendelssohn plays to Goethe, 1830: painting by Moritz Oppenheim, 1864

The Faust tragedy/drama, often called Das Drama der Deutschen (the drama of the Germans), written in two parts published decades apart, would stand as his most characteristic and famous artistic creation. Followers of the twentieth-century esotericist Rudolf Steiner built a theatre named the Goetheanum after him—where festival performances of Faust are still performed.

Goethe was also a cultural force. During his first meeting with Napoleon in 1808, the latter famously remarked: "Vous êtes un homme (You are a man)!"[106] The two discussed politics, the writings of Voltaire, and Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, which Napoleon had read seven times and ranked among his favorites.[107][108] Goethe came away from the meeting deeply impressed with Napoleon's enlightened intellect and his efforts to build an alternative to the corrupt old regime.[107][109] Goethe always spoke of Napoleon with the greatest respect, confessing that "nothing higher and more pleasing could have happened to me in all my life" than to have met Napoleon in person.[110]

Germaine de Staël, in De l'Allemagne (1813), presented German Classicism and Romanticism as a potential source of spiritual authority for Europe, and identified Goethe as a living classic.[111] She praised Goethe as possessing "the chief characteristics of the German genius" and uniting "all that distinguishes the German mind."[111] Staël's portrayal helped elevate Goethe over his more famous German contemporaries and transformed him into a European cultural hero.[111] Goethe met with her and her partner Benjamin Constant, with whom he shared a mutual admiration.[112]

In Victorian England, Goethe's great disciple was Thomas Carlyle, who wrote the essays "Faustus" (1822), "Goethe's Helena" (1828), "Goethe" (1828), "Goethe's Works" (1832), "Goethe's Portrait" (1832), and "Death of Goethe" (1832) which introduced Goethe to English readers; translated Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1824) and Travels (1826), "Faust's Curse" (1830), "The Tale" (1832), "Novelle" (1832) and "Symbolum" at a time when few read German; and with whom Goethe corresponded.[113][114] Goethe exerted a profound influence on George Eliot, whose partner George Henry Lewes wrote a Life of Goethe (dedicated to Carlyle).[115][116] Eliot presented Goethe as "eminently the man who helps us to rise to a lofty point of observation" and praised his "large tolerance", which "quietly follows the stream of fact and of life" without passing moral judgments.[115] Matthew Arnold found in Goethe the "Physician of the Iron Age" and "the clearest, the largest, the most helpful thinker of modern times" with a "large, liberal view of life".[117]

 
Goethe memorial in front of the Alte Handelsbörse, Leipzig

It was to a considerable degree due to Goethe's reputation that the city of Weimar was chosen in 1919 as the venue for the national assembly, convened to draft a new constitution for what would become known as Germany's Weimar Republic. Goethe became a key reference for Thomas Mann in his speeches and essays defending the republic.[118] He emphasized Goethe's "cultural and self-developing individualism", humanism, and cosmopolitanism.[118]

The Federal Republic of Germany's cultural institution, the Goethe-Institut, is named after him, and promotes the study of German abroad and fosters knowledge about Germany by providing information on its culture, society and politics.

The literary estate of Goethe in the Goethe and Schiller Archives was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2001 in recognition of its historical significance.[119]

Goethe's influence was dramatic because he understood that there was a transition in European sensibilities, an increasing focus on sense, the indescribable, and the emotional. This is not to say that he was emotionalistic or excessive; on the contrary, he lauded personal restraint and felt that excess was a disease: "There is nothing worse than imagination without taste". Goethe praised Francis Bacon for his advocacy of science based on experiment and his forceful revolution in thought as one of the greatest strides forward in modern science.[120] However, he was critical of Bacon's inductive method and approach based on pure classification.[121] He said in Scientific Studies:

We conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect. Viewed from within, no part of the animal is a useless or arbitrary product of the formative impulse (as so often thought). Externally, some parts may seem useless because the inner coherence of the animal nature has given them this form without regard to outer circumstance. Thus...[not] the question, What are they for? but rather, Where do they come from?[122]

 
Schiller, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Goethe in Jena, c. 1797

Goethe's scientific and aesthetic ideas have much in common with Denis Diderot, whose work he translated and studied.[123][124] Both Diderot and Goethe exhibited a repugnance towards the mathematical interpretation of nature; both perceived the universe as dynamic and in constant flux; both saw "art and science as compatible disciplines linked by common imaginative processes"; and both grasped "the unconscious impulses underlying mental creation in all forms."[123][124] Goethe's Naturanschauer is in many ways a sequel to Diderot's interprète de la nature.[124]

His views make him, along with Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Ludwig van Beethoven, a figure in two worlds: on the one hand, devoted to the sense of taste, order, and finely crafted detail, which is the hallmark of the artistic sense of the Age of Reason and the neo-classical period of architecture; on the other, seeking a personal, intuitive, and personalized form of expression and society, firmly supporting the idea of self-regulating and organic systems. George Henry Lewes celebrated Goethe's revolutionary understanding of the organism.[123]

Thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson would take up many similar ideas in the 1800s. Goethe's ideas on evolution would frame the question that Darwin and Wallace would approach within the scientific paradigm. The Serbian inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla was heavily influenced by Goethe's Faust, his favorite poem, and had actually memorized the entire text. It was while reciting a certain verse that he was struck with the epiphany that would lead to the idea of the rotating magnetic field and ultimately, alternating current.[125]

Books related to Goethe

  • The Life of Goethe by George Henry Lewes
  • Goethe: The History of a Man by Emil Ludwig
  • Goethe by Georg Brandes. Authorized translation from the Danish (2nd ed. 1916) by Allen W. Porterfield, New York, Crown publishers, 1936. "Crown edition, 1936." Title Wolfgang Goethe
  • Goethe: His Life and Times by Richard Friedenthal [de]
  • Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns by Thomas Mann
  • Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann
  • Goethe's World: as seen in letters and memoirs ed. by Berthold Biermann
  • Goethe: Four Studies by Albert Schweitzer
  • Goethe Poet and Thinker by E.M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby
  • Goethe and his Publishers by Siegfried Unseld [de]
  • Goethe by T.J. Reed
  • Goethe. A Psychoanalytic Study, by Kurt R. Eissler
  • The Life of Goethe. A Critical Biography by John Williams
  • Goethe: The Poet and the Age (2 Vols.), by Nicholas Boyle
  • Goethe's Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients, by Angus Nicholls
  • Goethe and Rousseau: Resonances of their Mind, by Carl Hammer, Jr.
  • Doctor Faustus of the popular legend, Marlowe, the Puppet-Play, Goethe, and Lenau, treated historically and critically. – A parallel between Goethe and Schiller. – An historic outline of German Literature , by Louis Pagel
  • Goethe and Schiller, Essays on German Literature, by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
  • Goethe-Wörterbuch (Goethe Dictionary, abbreviated GWb). Herausgegeben von der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen und der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Stuttgart. Kohlhammer Verlag; ISBN 978-3-17-019121-1
  • West-Eastern Divan: Complete, annotated new translation, including Goethe's 'Notes and Essays' & the unpublished poems, translated by Eric Ormsby, 2019. Gingko, ISBN 9781909942240
  • Goethe's Path to Creativity: A Psycho-Biography of the Eminent Politician, Scientist and Poet, translated by Deanna Stewart, New York, NY, Routledge, 2019. ISBN 9780429459535

Works

See also

Awards named after him

Notes

  1. ^ Pronounced /ˈɡɜːrtə/ GUR-tə, also US: /ˈɡʌtə, ˈɡeɪtə, -ti/ GUT-ə, GAY-tə, -⁠ee;[1][2] German: [ˈjoːhan ˈvɔlfɡaŋ fɔn ˈɡøːtə] ( listen).[2]
  2. ^ In 1998, both of these sites, together with nine others, were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the name Classical Weimar.[5]
  3. ^ The others Schopenhauer named were Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Don Quixote.[7]

References

Citations

  1. ^ "Goethe". Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
  2. ^ a b Wells, John (2008). Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd ed.). Pearson Longman. ISBN 978-1-4058-8118-0.
  3. ^ a b c Nicholas Boyle, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at the Encyclopædia Britannica.
  4. ^ "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -- Biography". knarf.english.upenn.edu. Retrieved 3 January 2023.
  5. ^ a b "Classical Weimar UNESCO Justification". Justification for UNESCO Heritage Cites. UNESCO. Retrieved 7 June 2012.
  6. ^ a b Daum, Andreas W. (March 2019). "Social Relations, Shared Practices, and Emotions: Alexander von Humboldt's Excursion into Literary Classicism and the Challenges to Science around 1800". The Journal of Modern History. University of Chicago. 91 (1): 1–37. doi:10.1086/701757. S2CID 151051482.
  7. ^ a b c Schopenhauer, Arthur (January 2004). The Art of Literature. The Essays of Arthur Schopenahuer. Retrieved 22 March 2015.
  8. ^ a b Herman Grimm: Goethe. Vorlesungen gehalten an der Königlichen Universität zu Berlin. Vol. 1. J.G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, Stuttgart / Berlin 1923, p. 36
  9. ^ Catharina was the daughter of Johann Wolfgang Textor, sheriff (Schultheiß) of Frankfurt, and of Anna Margaretha Lindheimer.
  10. ^ Kruse, Joseph A. (2018). "Poetisch-religiöse Vorratskammer – Die Hebräische Bibel bei Goethe und Heine". In Anna-Dorothea Ludewig; Steffen Höhne (eds.). Goethe und die Juden – die Juden und Goethe (in German). Walter de Gruyter. p. 71. ISBN 9783110530421.
  11. ^ Oehler, R 1932, "Buch und Bibliotheken unter der Perspektive Goethe – Goethe's attitude toward books and libraries", The Library Quarterly, 2, pp. 232–249
  12. ^ Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry, From My Own Life, Volume 1 (1897), translated by John Oxenford, pp. 114, 129
  13. ^ Valerian Tornius [de]: Goethe – Leben, Wirken und Schaffen. Ludwig-Röhrscheid-Verlag, Bonn 1949, p. 26
  14. ^ Emil Ludwig: Goethe – Geschichte eines Menschen. Vol. 1. Ernst-Rowohlt-Verlag, Berlin 1926, pp. 17–18
  15. ^ Karl Goedeke: Goethes Leben. Cotta / Kröner, Stuttgart around 1883, pp. 16–17.
  16. ^ "Originally speech of Goethe to the Shakespeare's Day by University Duisburg". Uni-duisburg-essen.de. Retrieved 17 July 2014.
  17. ^ Herman Grimm: Goethe. Vorlesungen gehalten an der Königlichen Universität zu Berlin. Vol. 1. J. G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, Stuttgart / Berlin 1923, p. 81
  18. ^ Karl Robert Mandelkow, Bodo Morawe: Goethes Briefe. 2. edition. Vol. 1: Briefe der Jahre 1764–1786. Christian Wegner, Hamburg 1968, p. 571
  19. ^ Valerian Tornius: Goethe – Leben, Wirken und Schaffen. Ludwig-Röhrscheid-Verlag, Bonn 1949, p. 60
  20. ^ a b Mandelkow, Karl Robert (1962). Goethes Briefe. Vol. 1: Briefe der Jahre 1764–1786. Christian Wegner Verlag. p. 589
  21. ^ Mandelkow, Karl Robert (1962). Goethes Briefe. Vol. 1: Briefe der Jahre 1764–1786. Christian Wegner Verlag. pp. 590–592
  22. ^ See Goethe and his Publishers.
  23. ^ Robertson, John George (1911). "Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 183.
  24. ^ Gosnell, Charles F., and Géza Schütz. 1932. "Goethe the Librarian." Library Quarterly 2 (January): 367–374.
  25. ^ Hume Brown, Peter (1920). Life of Goethe. pp. 224–225.
  26. ^ "Klassik Stiftung Weimar". www.klassik-stiftung.de (in German). Retrieved 3 January 2023.
  27. ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Stein, Charlotte von" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 25 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 871.
  28. ^ "The Goethe Residence". Klassik Siftung Weimar. Retrieved 29 July 2022.
  29. ^ Craig, Gordon A.; Wilson, W. Daniel. "The Goethe Case | W. Daniel Wilson". The New York Review of Books 2022. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved 22 July 2022.
  30. ^ Desmond, Will D. (2020). Hegel's Antiquity. Oxford University Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-19-257574-6.
  31. ^ Safranski, Rüdiger (1990). Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-79275-3.
  32. ^ Chamberlain, Alexander (1896). The Child and Childhood in Folk Thought: (The Child in Primitive Culture), p. 385. MacMillan. ISBN 9781421987484.
  33. ^ Gersdorff, Dagmar von [in German] (2005). Goethes späte Liebe (in German). Insel Verlag. ISBN 978-3-458-19265-7.
  34. ^ "Ulrika von Levetzowová". hamelika.cz (in Czech).
  35. ^ The encounter is described in Stefan Zweig's 1927 book, Decisive Moments in History
  36. ^ Briscoe, J. R. (Ed.). (2004). New Historical Anthology of Music by Women (Vol. 1). Indiana University Press. pp. 126–127.
  37. ^ Todd 2003, p. 89.
  38. ^ Mercer-Taylor 2000, pp. 41–42, 93.
  39. ^ Todd 2003, pp. 188–190, 269–270.
  40. ^ Carl Vogel [de]: "Die letzte Krankheit Goethe's". In: Journal der practischen Heilkunde (1833).
  41. ^ Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., 1954[page needed]
  42. ^ Ludwig, Emil (1928) Goethe: The History of a Man 1749–1833, Schiller and Wilhelm Meister Translated by Ethel Colburn Mayne, New York: G.P. Putnum's Sons.
  43. ^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1966). Iphigenia in Tauris. Manchester University Press. p. 15.
  44. ^ Sharpe, Lesley (July 1982). "Schiller and Goethe's 'Egmont'". The Modern Language Review. 77 (3): 629–645. doi:10.2307/3728071. JSTOR 3728071.
  45. ^ Lamport, Francis John. 1990. German Classical Drama: Theatre, Humanity and Nation, 1750–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-36270-9. p. 90.
  46. ^ "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Return to Weimar and the French Revolution (1788–94)". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 18 July 2021.
  47. ^ a b See, generally Schiller, F. (1877). Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, from 1794 to 1805 (Vol. 1). G. Bell.
  48. ^ Baumer, Rachel Van M.; Brandon, James R. (1993) [1981]. Sanskrit Drama in Performance. Motilal Banarsidass. p. 9. ISBN 978-81-208-0772-3.
  49. ^ . Pips Project. Archived from the original on 6 October 2007. See also: "Ophelia's Burial".
  50. ^ Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1848). "The Auto-Biography of Goethe. Truth and Poetry: From My Own Life". Translated by John Oxenford. London: Henry G. Bohn. p. [page needed] – via Internet Archive.
  51. ^ Goethe's Plays, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated into English with introductions by Charles E. Passage, Publisher Benn Limited, 1980, ISBN 978-0-510-00087-5, 978-0-510-00087-5
  52. ^ Wigmore, Richard (2 July 2012). "A meeting of genius: Beethoven and Goethe, July 1812". Gramophone. Haymarket. Retrieved 6 July 2012.
  53. ^ "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe". The Nature Institute. Retrieved 28 August 2008.
  54. ^ Darwin, C.R. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life (1st ed.). John Murray.
  55. ^ K. Barteczko; M. Jacob (1999). "A re-evaluation of the premaxillary bone in humans". Anatomy and Embryology. 207 (6): 417–437. doi:10.1007/s00429-003-0366-x. PMID 14760532. S2CID 13069026.
  56. ^ Goethe, J.W. Italian Journey. Robert R Heitner. Suhrkamp ed., vol. 6.
  57. ^ Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu Erklären. Library of Congress. Retrieved 2 January 2018.
  58. ^ Magnus, Rudolf; Schmid, Gunther (2004). Metamorphosis of Plants. ISBN 978-1-4179-4984-7. Retrieved 28 August 2008.
  59. ^ Frank Teichmann (tr. Jon McAlice) "The Emergence of the Idea of Evolution in the Time of Goethe" first published in Interdisciplinary Aspects of Evolution, Urachhaus (1989)
  60. ^ Balzer, Georg (1966). Goethe als Gartenfreund. München: F. Bruckmann KG.
  61. ^ Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Miller, Arnold V. (2004). Hegel's Philosophy of Nature: Being Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Translated from Nicolin and Pöggeler's Edition (1959), and from the Zusätze in Michelet's Text (1847). Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-927267-9.
  62. ^ Aristotle; Ross, George Robert Thomson (1906). Aristotle De sensu and De memoria; text and translation, with introduction and commentary. Robarts - University of Toronto. Cambridge The University press.
  63. ^ Bockemuhl, M. (1991). Turner. Taschen, Koln. ISBN 978-3-8228-6325-1.
  64. ^ Goethe, Johann (1810). . Archived from the original on 16 December 2021. Retrieved 16 November 2014.
  65. ^ "Goethe's Color Theory". Retrieved 28 August 2008.
  66. ^ . Archived from the original on 10 November 2011. Retrieved 26 June 2014.
  67. ^ "The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception". 1979. Retrieved 28 August 2008.
  68. ^ "Goethe's World View". Retrieved 28 August 2008.
  69. ^ 'Goethe's Message of Beauty in Our Twentieth Century World', (Friedrich) Frederick Hiebel, RSCP California. ISBN 978-0-916786-37-3
  70. ^ Outing Goethe and His Age; edited by Alice A. Kuzniar.[page needed]
  71. ^ Goethe, Johann Wolfgang (1976). Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche. Zürich : Artemis Verl. p. 686. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  72. ^ Bullough, V.L. (1990). History in adult human sexual behavior with children and adolescents in Western societies (Pedophilia: Biosocial Dimensions ed.). Springer-Verlag New York. p. 72. ISBN 978-1-4613-9684-0. Retrieved 27 April 2016.
  73. ^ The phrase Goethe uses is "Mischmasch von Irrtum und Gewalt", in his "Zahme Xenien" IX, Goethes Gedichte in Zeitlicher Folge, Insel Verlag 1982 ISBN 978-3-458-14013-9, p. 1121
  74. ^ Arnold Bergsträsser, "Goethe's View of Christ", Modern Philology, vol. 46, no. 3 (February 1949), pp. 172–202; Martin Tetz [de], "Mischmasch von Irrtum und Gewalt. Zu Goethes Vers auf die Kirchengeschichte", Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche [de] 88 (1991) pp. 339–363
  75. ^ Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Eckermann, Johann Peter; Soret, Frédéric Jacob (1850). Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret, Vol. II, pp. 423–424. Retrieved 17 July 2014.
  76. ^ Boyle 1992, 353[incomplete short citation]
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  78. ^ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, § 95
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  92. ^ Gemünden, Gerd (1998). Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination. University of Michigan Press. pp. 18–19.
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  100. ^ Rockmore, Tom (3 May 2016). German Idealism as Constructivism. University of Chicago Press. p. 131. ISBN 978-0-226-34990-9. Goethe's view attracted interest at the time; someone else influenced by Goethe is Schopenhauer.
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Sources

  • Mercer-Taylor, Peter (2000). The Life of Mendelssohn. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-63972-9.
  • Todd, R. Larry (2003). Mendelssohn – A Life in Music. Oxford, England; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-511043-2.
  • Unseld, Siegfried (1996). Goethe and His Publishers. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226841908.

Further reading

  • Bell Matthew. 1994. Goethe's Naturalistic Anthropology : Man and Other Plants. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Browning, Oscar (1879). "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. X (9th ed.).
  • Calder, Angus (1983), Scott & Goethe: Romantiscism and Classicism, in Hearn, Sheila G. (ed.), Cencrastus No. 13, Summer 1983, pp. 25–28, ISSN 0264-0856
  • Von Gronicka, André. 1968. The Russian Image of Goethe. Volume 1 Goethe in Russian Literature of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Von Gronicka, Andrè. 1985 The Russian Image of Goethe. Volume 2 Goethe in Russian Literature of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Hatfield Henry Caraway. 1963. Goethe: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Jane K. n.d. Goethe's Allegories of Identity. Philadelphia Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Maertz Gregory. 2017. Literature and the Cult of Personality: Essays on Goethe and His Influence. New York, NY:Columbia University Press.
  • Robertson, John George; Phillips, Walter Alison (1911). "Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). pp. 182–189.
  • Robertson, Ritchie. 2016. Goethe : A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Santayana, George (1910). "Goethe's Faust". Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, Volume 1: Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, Critical Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 139–202. Retrieved 22 September 2022.
  • Viëtor Karl and Bayard Quincy Morgan. 1950. Goethe the Thinker. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

April 04, 2023
johann, wolfgang, goethe, several, terms, redirect, here, other, uses, goethe, disambiguation, gote, disambiguation, august, 1749, march, 1832, german, poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre, director, critic, works, include, plays, poetry, . Several terms redirect here For other uses see Goethe disambiguation and Gote disambiguation Johann Wolfgang von Goethe a 28 August 1749 22 March 1832 was a German poet playwright novelist scientist statesman theatre director and critic 3 His works include plays poetry literature and aesthetic criticism as well as treatises on botany anatomy and colour He is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language his work having a profound and wide ranging influence on Western literary political and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day 3 4 GeheimratJohann Wolfgang von GoetheGoethe in 1828 by Joseph Karl StielerBornJohann Wolfgang Goethe 1749 08 28 28 August 1749Free Imperial City of Frankfurt Holy Roman EmpireDied22 March 1832 1832 03 22 aged 82 Weimar Grand Duchy of Saxe Weimar Eisenach German ConfederationOccupationPoet novelist playwright natural philosopher statesmanLanguageGermanEducationLaw LL Lic Alma materLeipzig University University of Strasbourg 1771 Periodfrom 1770GenreFiction poetrynovelromancedrama Non fiction aesthetic criticismtreatisearticleautobiographyorationcorrespondence Literary movementSturm und Drang Weimar Classicism Romanticism in scienceNotable worksFaust The Sorrows of Young Werther Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship Elective Affinities Prometheus Zur Farbenlehre Italienische Reise West ostlicher DivanSpouseChristiane Vulpius m 1806 died 1816 wbr Children5 4 died young including August von GoetheParentsJohann Caspar GoetheCatharina Elisabeth TextorRelativesCornelia Schlosser sister Christian August Vulpius brother in law Johann Georg Schlosser brother in law Ottilie von Goethe daughter in law Walther von Goethe grandson SignatureChancellor of the Exchequer of Duchy of Saxe WeimarIn office 1782 1784Superintendent of the ducal library and Chief Adviser of Saxe Weimar from 1775 Comissioner of the War Mines and Highways Commissions of Saxe Weimar from 1779 Goethe took up residence in Weimar in November 1775 following the success of his first novel The Sorrows of Young Werther 1774 He was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe Weimar Karl August in 1782 Goethe was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement During his first ten years in Weimar Goethe became a member of the Duke s privy council 1776 1785 sat on the war and highway commissions oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena He also contributed to the planning of Weimar s botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace 5 b Goethe s first major scientific work the Metamorphosis of Plants was published after he returned from a 1788 tour of Italy In 1791 he was made managing director of the theatre at Weimar and in 1794 he began a friendship with the dramatist historian and philosopher Friedrich Schiller whose plays he premiered until Schiller s death in 1805 During this period Goethe published his second novel Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea and in 1808 the first part of his most celebrated drama Faust His conversations and various shared undertakings throughout the 1790s with Schiller Johann Gottlieb Fichte Johann Gottfried Herder Alexander von Humboldt 6 Wilhelm von Humboldt and August and Friedrich Schlegel have come to be collectively termed Weimar Classicism The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer named Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship one of the four greatest novels ever written 7 c while the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe as one of six representative men in his work of the same name along with Plato Emanuel Swedenborg Montaigne Napoleon and Shakespeare Goethe s comments and observations form the basis of several biographical works notably Johann Peter Eckermann s Conversations with Goethe 1836 His poems were set to music by many composers including Mozart Beethoven Schubert Berlioz Liszt Wagner and Mahler Contents 1 Life 1 1 Early life 1 2 Legal career 1 3 Early years in Weimar 1 4 Italy 1 5 Weimar 1 6 Later life 1 7 Death 1 8 Descendants 2 Literary work 2 1 Overview 2 2 Details of selected works 3 Scientific work 4 Eroticism 5 Religion and politics 6 Influence 7 Books related to Goethe 8 Works 9 See also 10 Notes 11 References 11 1 Citations 11 2 Sources 12 Further reading 13 External linksLife EditEarly life Edit Goethe s father Johann Caspar Goethe lived with his family in a large house today the Goethe House in Frankfurt then a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire Though he had studied law in Leipzig and had been appointed Imperial Councillor Johann Caspar Goethe was not involved in the city s official affairs 8 Johann Caspar married Goethe s mother Catharina Elisabeth Textor in Frankfurt on 20 August 1748 when he was 38 and she was 17 9 All their children with the exception of Johann Wolfgang and his sister Cornelia Friederica Christiana born in 1750 died at early ages Goethe s birthplace in Frankfurt Grosser Hirschgraben His father and private tutors gave the young Goethe lessons in common subjects of their time especially languages Latin Greek Biblical Hebrew briefly 10 French Italian and English Goethe also received lessons in dancing riding and fencing Johann Caspar feeling frustrated in his own ambitions was determined that his children should have all those advantages that he had not 8 Although Goethe s great passion was drawing he quickly became interested in literature Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock 1724 1803 and Homer were among his early favorites 11 He had a devotion to theater as well and was greatly fascinated by puppet shows that were annually arranged by whom in his home this became a recurrent theme in his literary work Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship He also took great pleasure in reading works on history and religion He writes about this period I had from childhood the singular habit of always learning by heart the beginnings of books and the divisions of a work first of the five books of Moses and then of the Aeneid and Ovid s Metamorphoses If an ever busy imagination of which that tale may bear witness led me hither and thither if the medley of fable and history mythology and religion threatened to bewilder me I readily fled to those oriental regions plunged into the first books of Moses and there amid the scattered shepherd tribes found myself at once in the greatest solitude and the greatest society 12 Goethe also became acquainted with Frankfurt actors 13 In early literary attempts he showed an infatuation with Gretchen who would later reappear in his Faust and the adventures with whom he would concisely describe in Dichtung und Wahrheit 14 He adored Caritas Meixner 1750 1773 a wealthy Worms trader s daughter and friend of his sister who would later marry the merchant G F Schuler 15 Legal career Edit Anna Katharina Kathchen Schonkopf Goethe studied law at Leipzig University from 1765 to 1768 He detested learning age old judicial rules by heart preferring instead to attend the lessons of the poet and university s professor Christian Furchtegott Gellert In Leipzig Goethe fell in love with craftsman and innkeeper s daughter Anna Katharina Schonkopf and wrote cheerful verses about her in the Rococo genre In 1770 he anonymously released Annette his first collection of poems His uncritical admiration for many contemporary poets vanished as he became interested in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Christoph Martin Wieland By this time Goethe had already written a great deal but he discarded nearly all of these works except for the comedy Die Mitschuldigen The restaurant Auerbachs Keller and its legend of Johann Georg Faust s 1525 barrel ride impressed him so much that Auerbachs Keller became the only real place in his closet drama Faust Part One As his studies did not progress Goethe was forced to return to Frankfurt at the close of August 1768 Goethe became severely ill in Frankfurt During the year and a half that followed because of several relapses the relationship with his father worsened During convalescence Goethe was nursed by his mother and sister In April 1770 Goethe left Frankfurt in order to finish his studies at the University of Strasbourg In Alsace Goethe blossomed No other landscape has he described as affectionately as the warm wide Rhine area In Strasbourg Goethe met Johann Gottfried Herder The two became close friends and crucially to Goethe s intellectual development Herder kindled his interest in William Shakespeare Ossian and in the notion of Volkspoesie folk poetry On 14 October 1772 Goethe held a gathering in his parental home in honour of the first German Shakespeare Day His first acquaintance with Shakespeare s works is described as his personal awakening in literature 16 On a trip to the village Sessenheim Goethe fell in love with Friederike Brion in October 1770 17 18 but terminated the relationship in August 1771 19 Several of his poems like Willkommen und Abschied Sesenheimer Lieder and Heidenroslein originate from this time At the end of August 1771 Goethe acquired the academic degree of the Licentiate of Law from Strasbourg and established a small legal practice in Frankfurt Although in his academic work he had expressed the ambition to make jurisprudence progressively more humane his inexperience led him to proceed too vigorously in his first cases and he was reprimanded and lost further ones This prematurely terminated his career as a lawyer after only a few months At this time Goethe was acquainted with the court of Darmstadt where his inventiveness was praised From this milieu came Johann Georg Schlosser who later became Goethe s brother in law and Johann Heinrich Merck Goethe also pursued literary plans again this time his father did not have anything against it and even helped Goethe obtained a copy of the biography of a noble highwayman from the German Peasants War In a couple of weeks the biography was reworked into a colourful drama Entitled Gotz von Berlichingen the work went directly to the heart of Goethe s contemporaries Goethe could not subsist on being one of the editors of a literary periodical published by Schlosser and Merck In May 1772 he once more began the practice of law at Wetzlar In 1774 he wrote the book which would bring him worldwide fame The Sorrows of Young Werther The outer shape of the work s plot is widely taken over from what Goethe experienced during his Wetzlar time with Charlotte Buff 1753 1828 20 and her fiance Johann Christian Kestner 1741 1800 20 as well as from the suicide of the author s friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem 1747 1772 in it Goethe made a desperate passion of what was in reality a hearty and relaxed friendship 21 Despite the immense success of Werther it did not bring Goethe much financial gain because copyright laws at the time were essentially nonexistent In later years Goethe would bypass this problem by periodically authorizing new revised editions of his Complete Works 22 Early years in Weimar Edit Goethe c 1775 In 1775 Goethe was invited on the strength of his fame as the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther to the court of Karl August Duke of Saxe Weimar Eisenach who would become Grand Duke in 1815 Karl August at the time was 18 years of age to Goethe s 26 Goethe thus went to live in Weimar where he remained for the rest of his life 23 and where over the course of many years he held a succession of offices including superintendent of the ducal library 24 and was the Duke s friend and chief adviser 25 26 In 1776 Goethe formed a close relationship with Charlotte von Stein an older married woman The intimate bond with her lasted for ten years after which Goethe abruptly left for Italy without giving his companion any notice She was emotionally distraught at the time but they were eventually reconciled 27 Goethe aside from official duties was also a friend and confidant to Duke Karl August and participated in the activities of the court For Goethe his first ten years at Weimar could well be described as a garnering of a degree and range of experiences which perhaps could have been achieved in no other way In 1779 Goethe took on the War Commission of the Grand Duchy of Saxe Weimar in addition to the Mines and Highways commissions In 1782 when the Duchy s chancellor of the Exchequer left his office Goethe agreed to act in his place and did so for two and a half years this post virtually made him prime minister and the principal representative of the Duchy 3 Goethe was ennobled in 1782 this being indicated by the von in his name In that same year Goethe moved into what would be his primary residence in Weimar for the next 50 years 28 As head of the Saxe Weimar War Commission Goethe participated in the recruitment of mercenaries into the Prussian and British military during the American Revolution The author W Daniel Wilson de claims that Goethe engaged in negotiating the forced sale of vagabonds criminals and political dissidents as part of these activities 29 Italy Edit Goethe age 38 painted by Angelica Kauffman 1787 Goethe by Luise Seidler Weimar 1811 Goethe s residence and museum See also Affair of the Diamond Necklace Goethe s journey to the Italian peninsula and Sicily from 1786 to 1788 was of great significance in his aesthetic and philosophical development His father had made a similar journey and his example was a major motivating factor for Goethe to make the trip More importantly however the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann had provoked a general renewed interest in the classical art of ancient Greece and Rome Thus Goethe s journey had something of the nature of a pilgrimage to it During the course of his trip Goethe met and befriended the artists Angelica Kauffman and Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein as well as encountering such notable characters as Lady Hamilton and Alessandro Cagliostro He also journeyed to Sicily during this time and wrote that To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all for Sicily is the clue to everything 30 While in Southern Italy and Sicily Goethe encountered for the first time genuine Greek as opposed to Roman architecture and was quite startled by its relative simplicity Winckelmann had not recognized the distinctness of the two styles Goethe s diaries of this period form the basis of the non fiction Italian Journey Italian Journey only covers the first year of Goethe s visit The remaining year is largely undocumented aside from the fact that he spent much of it in Venice This gap in the record has been the source of much speculation over the years In the decades which immediately followed its publication in 1816 Italian Journey inspired countless German youths to follow Goethe s example This is pictured somewhat satirically in George Eliot s Middlemarch citation needed Weimar Edit Mining share certificate of the Ilmenau Kupfer und Silber Bergwerk for 20 Thaler issued on 24 February 1784 in Weimar signed in the original by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also by the minister Christian Gottlob Voigt and by the German mineralogist and mining engineer Johann Karl Wilhelm Voigt Registered to Carl Theodor Maria Freiherr von Dalberg governor in Erfurt A Goethe watercolour depicting a liberty pole at the border to the short lived Republic of Mainz created under influence of the French Revolution and destroyed in the Siege of Mainz in which Goethe participated In late 1792 Goethe took part in the Battle of Valmy against revolutionary France assisting Duke Karl August of Saxe Weimar Eisenach during the failed invasion of France Again during the Siege of Mainz he assisted Carl August as a military observer His written account of these events can be found within his Complete Works In 1794 Friedrich Schiller wrote to Goethe offering friendship they had previously had only a mutually wary relationship ever since first becoming acquainted in 1788 This collaborative friendship lasted until Schiller s death in 1805 In 1806 Goethe was living in Weimar with his mistress Christiane Vulpius the sister of Christian A Vulpius and their son August von Goethe On 13 October Napoleon s army invaded the town The French spoon guards the least disciplined soldiers occupied Goethe s house The spoon guards had broken in they had drunk wine made a great uproar and called for the master of the house Goethe s secretary Riemer reports Although already undressed and wearing only his wide nightgown he descended the stairs towards them and inquired what they wanted from him His dignified figure commanding respect and his spiritual mien seemed to impress even them But it was not to last long Late at night they burst into his bedroom with drawn bayonets Goethe was petrified Christiane raised a lot of noise and even tangled with them other people who had taken refuge in Goethe s house rushed in and so the marauders eventually withdrew again It was Christiane who commanded and organized the defense of the house on the Frauenplan The barricading of the kitchen and the cellar against the wild pillaging soldiery was her work Goethe noted in his diary Fires rapine a frightful night Preservation of the house through steadfastness and luck The luck was Goethe s the steadfastness was displayed by Christiane 31 Days afterward on 19 October 1806 Goethe legitimized their 18 year relationship by marrying Christiane in a quiet marriage service at the Jakobskirche in Weimar de They had already had several children together by this time including their son Julius August Walter von Goethe 1789 1830 whose wife Ottilie von Pogwisch 1796 1872 cared for the elder Goethe until his death in 1832 August and Ottilie had three children Walther Freiherr von Goethe 1818 1885 Wolfgang Freiherr von Goethe de 1820 1883 and Alma von Goethe de 1827 1844 Christiane von Goethe died in 1816 Johann reflected There is nothing more charming to see than a mother with her child in her arms and there is nothing more venerable than a mother among a number of her children 32 Ulrike von Levetzow Later life Edit After 1793 Goethe devoted his endeavours primarily to literature By 1820 Goethe was on amiable terms with Kaspar Maria von Sternberg Goethe and Ulrike sculpture by Heinrich Drake in Marienbad In 1821 having recovered from a near fatal heart illness the 72 year old Goethe fell in love with Ulrike von Levetzow 17 at the time 33 In 1823 he wanted to marry her but because of the opposition of her mother he never proposed Their last meeting in Carlsbad on 5 September 1823 inspired his poem Marienbad Elegy which he considered one of his finest works 34 35 During that time he also developed a deep emotional bond with the Polish pianist Maria Szymanowska 33 at the time and separated from her husband 36 In 1821 Goethe s friend Carl Friedrich Zelter introduced him to the 12 year old Felix Mendelssohn Goethe now in his seventies was greatly impressed by the child leading to perhaps the earliest confirmed comparison with Mozart in the following conversation between Goethe and Zelter Musical prodigies are probably no longer so rare but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt said Zelter Yes answered Goethe but what your pupil already accomplishes bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown up person bears to the prattle of a child 37 Mendelssohn was invited to meet Goethe on several later occasions 38 and set a number of Goethe s poems to music His other compositions inspired by Goethe include the overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage Op 27 1828 and the cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht The First Walpurgis Night Op 60 1832 39 Death Edit Coffins of Goethe and Schiller Weimar vault In 1832 Goethe died in Weimar of apparent heart failure His last words according to his doctor Carl Vogel de were Mehr Licht More light but this is disputed as Vogel was not in the room at the moment Goethe died 40 He is buried in the Ducal Vault at Weimar s Historical Cemetery Eckermann closes his famous work Conversations with Goethe with this passage The morning after Goethe s death a deep desire seized me to look once again upon his earthly garment His faithful servant Frederick opened for me the chamber in which he was laid out Stretched upon his back he reposed as if asleep profound peace and security reigned in the features of his sublimely noble countenance The mighty brow seemed yet to harbour thoughts I wished for a lock of his hair but reverence prevented me from cutting it off The body lay naked only wrapped in a white sheet large pieces of ice had been placed near it to keep it fresh as long as possible Frederick drew aside the sheet and I was astonished at the divine magnificence of the limbs The breast was powerful broad and arched the arms and thighs were elegant and of the most perfect shape nowhere on the whole body was there a trace of either fat or of leanness and decay A perfect man lay in great beauty before me and the rapture the sight caused me made me forget for a moment that the immortal spirit had left such an abode I laid my hand on his heart there was a deep silence and I turned away to give free vent to my suppressed tears The first production of Richard Wagner s opera Lohengrin took place in Weimar in 1850 The conductor was Franz Liszt who chose the date 28 August in honour of Goethe who was born on 28 August 1749 41 Descendants Edit Goethe married his long time lover Christiane Vulpius in 1806 They had 5 children of whom only their eldest son August von Goethe managed to survive into adulthood One was stillborn while the others died early August had 3 children with Ottilie von Goethe Walther von Goethe Wolfgang and Alma Alma died of Typhoid fever during the outbreak in Vienna the month before her 17th birthday Walther and Wolfgang neither married nor had any children Walther s gravestone states With him ends Goethe s dynasty the name will last forever marking the end of Goethe s personal bloodline While he has no direct descendants his siblings have Literary work Edit First edition of The Sorrows of Young Werther 1876 Faust by Goethe decorated by Rudolf Seitz large German edition 51x38cm Overview Edit The most important of Goethe s works produced before he went to Weimar were Gotz von Berlichingen 1773 a tragedy that was the first work to bring him recognition and the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther German Die Leiden des jungen Werthers 1774 which gained him enormous fame as a writer in the Sturm und Drang period which marked the early phase of Romanticism Indeed Werther is often considered to be the spark which ignited the movement and can arguably be called the world s first best seller During the years at Weimar before he met Schiller in 1794 he began Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship 42 and wrote the dramas Iphigenie auf Tauris Iphigenia in Tauris 43 Egmont 44 and Torquato Tasso 45 and the fable Reineke Fuchs 46 To the period of his friendship with Schiller belong the conception of Wilhelm Meister s Journeyman Years the continuation of Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship the idyll of Hermann and Dorothea the Roman Elegies and the verse drama The Natural Daughter 47 In the last period between Schiller s death in 1805 and his own appeared Faust Part One 1808 Elective Affinities 1809 the West Eastern Diwan an 1819 collection of poems in the Persian style influenced by the work of Hafez his autobiographical Aus meinem Leben Dichtung und Wahrheit From My Life Poetry and Truth published between 1811 and 1833 which covers his early life and ends with his departure for Weimar his Italian Journey 1816 17 and a series of treatises on art Faust Part Two was completed before his 1832 death and published posthumously later that year His writings were immediately influential in literary and artistic circles 47 Goethe was fascinated by Kalidasa s Abhijnanasakuntalam which was one of the first works of Sanskrit literature that became known in Europe after being translated from English to German 48 Goethe Schiller Monument Weimar 1857 Details of selected works Edit The short epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers or The Sorrows of Young Werther published in 1774 recounts an unhappy romantic infatuation that ends in suicide Goethe admitted that he shot his hero to save himself a reference to Goethe s own near suicidal with a young woman during this period an obsession he quelled through the writing process The novel remains in print in dozens of languages and its influence is undeniable its central hero an obsessive figure driven to despair and destruction by his unrequited love for the young Lotte has become a pervasive literary archetype The fact that Werther ends with the protagonist s suicide and funeral a funeral which no clergyman attended made the book deeply controversial upon its anonymous publication for on the face of it it appeared to condone and glorify suicide Suicide is considered sinful by Christian doctrine suicides were denied Christian burial with the bodies often mistreated and dishonoured in various ways in corollary the deceased s property and possessions were often confiscated by the Church 49 However Goethe explained his use of Werther in his autobiography He said he turned reality into poetry but his friends thought poetry should be turned into reality and the poem imitated He was against this reading of poetry 50 Epistolary novels were common during this time letter writing being a primary mode of communication What set Goethe s book apart from other such novels was its expression of unbridled longing for a joy beyond possibility its sense of defiant rebellion against authority and of principal importance its total subjectivity qualities that trailblazed the Romantic movement The next work his epic closet drama Faust was completed in stages The first part was published in 1808 and created a sensation Goethe finished Faust Part Two in the year of his death and the work was published posthumously Goethe s original draft of a Faust play which probably dates from 1773 74 and is now known as the Urfaust was also published after his death 51 The first operatic version of Goethe s Faust by Louis Spohr appeared in 1814 The work subsequently inspired operas and oratorios by Schumann Berlioz Gounod Boito Busoni and Schnittke as well as symphonic works by Liszt Wagner and Mahler Faust became the ur myth of many figures in the 19th century Later a facet of its plot i e of selling one s soul to the devil for power over the physical world took on increasing literary importance and became a view of the victory of technology and of industrialism along with its dubious human expenses In 1919 the world premiere complete production of Faust was staged at the Goetheanum Goethe in the Roman Campagna 1786 by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein Goethe s poetic work served as a model for an entire movement in German poetry termed Innerlichkeit introversion and represented by for example Heine Goethe s words inspired a number of compositions by among others Mozart Beethoven who idolised Goethe 52 Schubert Berlioz and Wolf Perhaps the single most influential piece is Mignon s Song which opens with one of the most famous lines in German poetry an allusion to Italy Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen bluhn Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom He is also widely quoted Epigrams such as Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself he must act in spite of it and then it will gradually yield to him Divide and rule a sound motto unite and lead a better one and Enjoy when you can and endure when you must are still in usage or are often paraphrased Lines from Faust such as Das also war des Pudels Kern Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss or Grau ist alle Theorie have entered everyday German usage Some well known quotations are often incorrectly attributed to Goethe These include Hippocrates Art is long life is short which is echoed in Goethe s Faust and Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship Scientific work EditSee also Goethean science As to what I have done as a poet I take no pride in it But that in my century I am the only person who knows the truth in the difficult science of colours of that I say I am not a little proud and here I have a consciousness of a superiority to many Johann Eckermann Conversations with Goethe Goethe in 1810 Gerhard von Kugelgen Although his literary work has attracted the most interest Goethe was also keenly involved in studies of natural science 53 He wrote several works on morphology and colour theory In the 1790s he undertook Galvanic experiments and studied anatomical issues together with Alexander von Humboldt 6 He also had the largest private collection of minerals in all of Europe By the time of his death in order to gain a comprehensive view in geology he had collected 17 800 rock samples His focus on morphology and what was later called homology influenced 19th century naturalists although his ideas of transformation were about the continuous metamorphosis of living things and did not relate to contemporary ideas of transformisme or transmutation of species Homology or as Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire called it analogie was used by Charles Darwin as strong evidence of common descent and of laws of variation 54 Goethe s studies notably with an elephant s skull lent to him by Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring led him to independently discover the human intermaxillary bone also known as Goethe s bone in 1784 which Broussonet 1779 and Vicq d Azyr 1780 had using different methods identified several years earlier 55 While not the only one in his time to question the prevailing view that this bone did not exist in humans Goethe who believed ancient anatomists had known about this bone was the first to prove its existence in all mammals The elephant s skull that led Goethe to this discovery and was subsequently named the Goethe Elephant still exists and is displayed in the Ottoneum in Kassel Germany During his Italian journey Goethe formulated a theory of plant metamorphosis in which the archetypal form of the plant is to be found in the leaf he writes from top to bottom a plant is all leaf united so inseparably with the future bud that one cannot be imagined without the other 56 In 1790 he published his Metamorphosis of Plants 57 58 As one of the many precursors in the history of evolutionary thought Goethe wrote in Story of My Botanical Studies 1831 The ever changing display of plant forms which I have followed for so many years awakens increasingly within me the notion The plant forms which surround us were not all created at some given point in time and then locked into the given form they have been given a felicitous mobility and plasticity that allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places 59 Goethe s botanical theories were partly based on his gardening in Weimar 60 Goethe also popularized the Goethe barometer using a principle established by Torricelli According to Hegel Goethe has occupied himself a good deal with meteorology barometer readings interested him particularly What he says is important the main thing is that he gives a comparative table of barometric readings during the whole month of December 1822 at Weimar Jena London Boston Vienna Topel He claims to deduce from it that the barometric level varies in the same proportion not only in each zone but that it has the same variation too at different altitudes above sea level 61 Light spectrum from Theory of Colours Goethe observed that with a prism colour arises at light dark edges and the spectrum occurs where these coloured edges overlap In 1810 Goethe published his Theory of Colours which he considered his most important work In it he contentiously characterized colour as arising from the dynamic interplay of light and darkness through the mediation of a turbid medium 62 In 1816 Schopenhauer went on to develop his own theory in On Vision and Colours based on the observations supplied in Goethe s book After being translated into English by Charles Eastlake in 1840 his theory became widely adopted by the art world most notably J M W Turner 63 Goethe s work also inspired the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to write his Remarks on Colour Goethe was vehemently opposed to Newton s analytic treatment of colour engaging instead in compiling a comprehensive rational description of a wide variety of colour phenomena Although the accuracy of Goethe s observations does not admit a great deal of criticism his aesthetic approach did not lend itself to the demands of analytic and mathematical analysis used ubiquitously in modern Science Goethe was however the first to systematically study the physiological effects of colour and his observations on the effect of opposed colours led him to a symmetric arrangement of his colour wheel for the colours diametrically opposed to each other are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye 64 In this he anticipated Ewald Hering s opponent colour theory 1872 65 Goethe outlines his method in the essay The experiment as mediator between subject and object 1772 66 In the Kurschner edition of Goethe s works the science editor Rudolf Steiner presents Goethe s approach to science as phenomenological Steiner elaborated on that in the books The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe s World Conception 67 and Goethe s World View 68 in which he characterizes intuition as the instrument by which one grasps Goethe s biological archetype The Typus Novalis himself a geologist and mining engineer expressed the opinion that Goethe was the first physicist of his time and epoch making in the history of physics writing that Goethe s studies of light of the metamorphosis of plants and of insects were indications and proofs that the perfect educational lecture belongs in the artist s sphere of work and that Goethe would be surpassed but only in the way in which the ancients can be surpassed in inner content and force in variety and depth as an artist actually not or only very little for his rightness and intensity are perhaps already more exemplary than it would seem 69 Eroticism EditMany of Goethe s works especially Faust the Roman Elegies and the Venetian Epigrams depict erotic passions and acts For instance in Faust the first use of Faust s power after signing a contract with the Devil is to seduce a teenage girl Some of the Venetian Epigrams were held back from publication due to their sexual content Goethe clearly saw human sexuality as a topic worthy of poetic and artistic depiction an idea that was uncommon in a time when the private nature of sexuality was rigorously normative 70 In a conversation on 7 April 1830 Goethe stated that pederasty is an aberration that easily leads to animal roughly material behavior He continued Pederasty is as old as humanity itself and one can therefore say that it resides in nature even if it proceeds against nature What culture has won from nature will not be surrendered or given up at any price 71 On another occasion he wrote I like boys a lot but the girls are even nicer If I tire of her as a girl she ll play the boy for me as well 72 Goethe on a 1999 German stampReligion and politics EditGoethe was a freethinker who believed that one could be inwardly Christian without following any of the Christian churches many of whose central teachings he firmly opposed sharply distinguishing between Christ and the tenets of Christian theology and criticizing its history as a hodgepodge of mistakes and violence 73 74 His own descriptions of his relationship to the Christian faith and even to the Church varied widely and have been interpreted even more widely so that while Goethe s secretary Eckermann portrayed him as enthusiastic about Christianity Jesus Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation even calling Christianity the ultimate religion 75 on one occasion Goethe described himself as not anti Christian nor un Christian but most decidedly non Christian 76 and in his Venetian Epigram 66 Goethe listed the symbol of the cross among the four things that he most disliked 77 According to Nietzsche Goethe had a kind of almost joyous and trusting fatalism that has faith that only in the totality everything redeems itself and appears good and justified 78 Portrait of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe by Ferdinand Jagemann 1806 Born into a Lutheran family Goethe s early faith was shaken by news of such events as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years War A year before his death in a letter to Sulpiz Boisseree Goethe wrote that he had the feeling that all his life he had been aspiring to qualify as one of the Hypsistarians an ancient sect of the Black Sea region who in his understanding sought to reverence as being close to the Godhead what came to their knowledge of the best and most perfect 79 Goethe s unorthodox religious beliefs led him to be called the great heathen and provoked distrust among the authorities of his time who opposed the creation of a Goethe monument on account of his offensive religious creed 80 August Wilhelm Schlegel considered Goethe a heathen who converted to Islam 80 Goethe showed interest in other religions including Islam although Karic suggests that attempts to claim Goethe for any religion is a pointless Sysiphean task 81 At age 23 Goethe wrote a poem about a river originally part of a dramatic dialogue which he published as a separate work called Mahomets Gesang Muhammad s Song 82 83 The poem s depiction of nature and forces within it is consonant with his Sturm und Drang years 84 In 1819 he published his West ostlicher Divan to ignite a poetic dialogue between East and West 85 Politically Goethe described himself as a moderate liberal 86 87 88 He was critical of the radicalism of Bentham and expressed sympathy for the prudent liberalism of Francois Guizot 89 At the time of the French Revolution he thought the enthusiasm of the students and professors to be a perversion of their energy and remained skeptical of the ability of the masses to govern 90 Goethe sympathized with the American Revolution and later wrote a poem in which he declared America you re better off than our continent the old 91 92 He did not join in the anti Napoleonic mood of 1812 and he distrusted the strident nationalism which started to be expressed 93 The medievalism of the Heidelberg Romantics was also repellent to Goethe s eighteenth century ideal of a supra national culture 94 Goethe was a Freemason joining the lodge Amalia in Weimar in 1780 and frequently alluded to Masonic themes of universal brotherhood in his work 95 He was also attracted to the Bavarian Illuminati a secret society founded on 1 May 1776 96 95 Although often requested to write poems arousing nationalist passions Goethe would always decline In old age he explained why this was so to Eckermann How could I write songs of hatred when I felt no hate And between ourselves I never hated the French although I thanked God when we were rid of them How could I to whom the only significant things are civilization Kultur and barbarism hate a nation which is among the most cultivated in the world and to which I owe a great part of my own culture In any case this business of hatred between nations is a curious thing You will always find it more powerful and barbarous on the lowest levels of civilization But there exists a level at which it wholly disappears and where one stands so to speak above the nations and feels the weal or woe of a neighboring people as though it were one s own 97 Influence Edit Statue dedicated to Goethe in Chicago s Lincoln Park 1913 Goethe had a great effect on the nineteenth century In many respects he was the originator of many ideas which later became widespread He produced volumes of poetry essays criticism a theory of colours and early work on evolution and linguistics He was fascinated by mineralogy and the mineral goethite iron oxide is named after him 98 His non fiction writings most of which are philosophic and aphoristic in nature spurred the development of many thinkers including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 99 Arthur Schopenhauer 100 Soren Kierkegaard 101 Friedrich Nietzsche 102 Ernst Cassirer 103 and Carl Jung 104 Along with Schiller he was one of the leading figures of Weimar Classicism Schopenhauer cited Goethe s novel Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship as one of the four greatest novels ever written along with Tristram Shandy La Nouvelle Heloise and Don Quixote 7 Nietzsche wrote Four pairs it was that did not deny themselves to my sacrifice Epicurus and Montaigne Goethe and Spinoza Plato and Rousseau Pascal and Schopenhauer With these I must come to terms when I have long wandered alone they may call me right and wrong to them will I listen when in the process they call each other right and wrong 105 Goethe embodied many of the contending strands in art over the next century his work could be lushly emotional and rigorously formal brief and epigrammatic and epic He would argue that Classicism was the means of controlling art and that Romanticism was a sickness even as he penned poetry rich in memorable images and rewrote the formal rules of German poetry His poetry was set to music by almost every major Austrian and German composer from Mozart to Mahler and his influence would spread to French drama and opera as well Beethoven declared that a Faust Symphony would be the greatest thing for art Liszt and Mahler both created symphonies in whole or in large part inspired by this seminal work which would give the 19th century one of its most paradigmatic figures Doctor Faustus Second Goetheanum Mendelssohn plays to Goethe 1830 painting by Moritz Oppenheim 1864 The Faust tragedy drama often called Das Drama der Deutschen the drama of the Germans written in two parts published decades apart would stand as his most characteristic and famous artistic creation Followers of the twentieth century esotericist Rudolf Steiner built a theatre named the Goetheanum after him where festival performances of Faust are still performed Goethe was also a cultural force During his first meeting with Napoleon in 1808 the latter famously remarked Vous etes un homme You are a man 106 The two discussed politics the writings of Voltaire and Goethe s Sorrows of Young Werther which Napoleon had read seven times and ranked among his favorites 107 108 Goethe came away from the meeting deeply impressed with Napoleon s enlightened intellect and his efforts to build an alternative to the corrupt old regime 107 109 Goethe always spoke of Napoleon with the greatest respect confessing that nothing higher and more pleasing could have happened to me in all my life than to have met Napoleon in person 110 Germaine de Stael in De l Allemagne 1813 presented German Classicism and Romanticism as a potential source of spiritual authority for Europe and identified Goethe as a living classic 111 She praised Goethe as possessing the chief characteristics of the German genius and uniting all that distinguishes the German mind 111 Stael s portrayal helped elevate Goethe over his more famous German contemporaries and transformed him into a European cultural hero 111 Goethe met with her and her partner Benjamin Constant with whom he shared a mutual admiration 112 In Victorian England Goethe s great disciple was Thomas Carlyle who wrote the essays Faustus 1822 Goethe s Helena 1828 Goethe 1828 Goethe s Works 1832 Goethe s Portrait 1832 and Death of Goethe 1832 which introduced Goethe to English readers translated Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship 1824 and Travels 1826 Faust s Curse 1830 The Tale 1832 Novelle 1832 and Symbolum at a time when few read German and with whom Goethe corresponded 113 114 Goethe exerted a profound influence on George Eliot whose partner George Henry Lewes wrote a Life of Goethe dedicated to Carlyle 115 116 Eliot presented Goethe as eminently the man who helps us to rise to a lofty point of observation and praised his large tolerance which quietly follows the stream of fact and of life without passing moral judgments 115 Matthew Arnold found in Goethe the Physician of the Iron Age and the clearest the largest the most helpful thinker of modern times with a large liberal view of life 117 Goethe memorial in front of the Alte Handelsborse Leipzig It was to a considerable degree due to Goethe s reputation that the city of Weimar was chosen in 1919 as the venue for the national assembly convened to draft a new constitution for what would become known as Germany s Weimar Republic Goethe became a key reference for Thomas Mann in his speeches and essays defending the republic 118 He emphasized Goethe s cultural and self developing individualism humanism and cosmopolitanism 118 The Federal Republic of Germany s cultural institution the Goethe Institut is named after him and promotes the study of German abroad and fosters knowledge about Germany by providing information on its culture society and politics The literary estate of Goethe in the Goethe and Schiller Archives was inscribed on UNESCO s Memory of the World Register in 2001 in recognition of its historical significance 119 Goethe s influence was dramatic because he understood that there was a transition in European sensibilities an increasing focus on sense the indescribable and the emotional This is not to say that he was emotionalistic or excessive on the contrary he lauded personal restraint and felt that excess was a disease There is nothing worse than imagination without taste Goethe praised Francis Bacon for his advocacy of science based on experiment and his forceful revolution in thought as one of the greatest strides forward in modern science 120 However he was critical of Bacon s inductive method and approach based on pure classification 121 He said in Scientific Studies We conceive of the individual animal as a small world existing for its own sake by its own means Every creature is its own reason to be All its parts have a direct effect on one another a relationship to one another thereby constantly renewing the circle of life thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect Viewed from within no part of the animal is a useless or arbitrary product of the formative impulse as so often thought Externally some parts may seem useless because the inner coherence of the animal nature has given them this form without regard to outer circumstance Thus not the question What are they for but rather Where do they come from 122 Schiller Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt and Goethe in Jena c 1797 Goethe s scientific and aesthetic ideas have much in common with Denis Diderot whose work he translated and studied 123 124 Both Diderot and Goethe exhibited a repugnance towards the mathematical interpretation of nature both perceived the universe as dynamic and in constant flux both saw art and science as compatible disciplines linked by common imaginative processes and both grasped the unconscious impulses underlying mental creation in all forms 123 124 Goethe s Naturanschauer is in many ways a sequel to Diderot s interprete de la nature 124 His views make him along with Adam Smith Thomas Jefferson and Ludwig van Beethoven a figure in two worlds on the one hand devoted to the sense of taste order and finely crafted detail which is the hallmark of the artistic sense of the Age of Reason and the neo classical period of architecture on the other seeking a personal intuitive and personalized form of expression and society firmly supporting the idea of self regulating and organic systems George Henry Lewes celebrated Goethe s revolutionary understanding of the organism 123 Thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson would take up many similar ideas in the 1800s Goethe s ideas on evolution would frame the question that Darwin and Wallace would approach within the scientific paradigm The Serbian inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla was heavily influenced by Goethe s Faust his favorite poem and had actually memorized the entire text It was while reciting a certain verse that he was struck with the epiphany that would lead to the idea of the rotating magnetic field and ultimately alternating current 125 Books related to Goethe EditThe Life of Goethe by George Henry Lewes Goethe The History of a Man by Emil Ludwig Goethe by Georg Brandes Authorized translation from the Danish 2nd ed 1916 by Allen W Porterfield New York Crown publishers 1936 Crown edition 1936 Title Wolfgang Goethe Goethe His Life and Times by Richard Friedenthal de Lotte in Weimar The Beloved Returns by Thomas Mann Conversations with Goethe by Johann Peter Eckermann Goethe s World as seen in letters and memoirs ed by Berthold Biermann Goethe Four Studies by Albert Schweitzer Goethe Poet and Thinker by E M Wilkinson and L A Willoughby Goethe and his Publishers by Siegfried Unseld de Goethe by T J Reed Goethe A Psychoanalytic Study by Kurt R Eissler The Life of Goethe A Critical Biography by John Williams Goethe The Poet and the Age 2 Vols by Nicholas Boyle Goethe s Concept of the Daemonic After the Ancients by Angus Nicholls Goethe and Rousseau Resonances of their Mind by Carl Hammer Jr Doctor Faustus of the popular legend Marlowe the Puppet Play Goethe and Lenau treated historically and critically A parallel between Goethe and Schiller An historic outline of German Literature by Louis Pagel Goethe and Schiller Essays on German Literature by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen Goethe Worterbuch Goethe Dictionary abbreviated GWb Herausgegeben von der Berlin Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Gottingen und der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften Stuttgart Kohlhammer Verlag ISBN 978 3 17 019121 1 West Eastern Divan Complete annotated new translation including Goethe s Notes and Essays amp the unpublished poems translated by Eric Ormsby 2019 Gingko ISBN 9781909942240 Goethe s Path to Creativity A Psycho Biography of the Eminent Politician Scientist and Poet translated by Deanna Stewart New York NY Routledge 2019 ISBN 9780429459535Works EditJohann Wolfgang von Goethe bibliographySee also EditYoung Goethe in Love 2010 Dora Stock her encounters with the 16 year old Goethe Goethe Basin a large crater on the planet Mercury Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Gymnasium W H Murray author of misattributed quotation Until one is committed Nature essay often mis attributed to GoetheAwards named after him Goethe Awards Goethe Prize Hanseatic Goethe PrizeNotes Edit Pronounced ˈ ɡ ɜːr t e GUR te also US ˈ ɡ ʌ t e ˈ ɡ eɪ t e t i GUT e GAY te ee 1 2 German ˈjoːhan ˈvɔlfɡaŋ fɔn ˈɡoːte listen 2 In 1998 both of these sites together with nine others were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site under the name Classical Weimar 5 The others Schopenhauer named were Tristram Shandy La Nouvelle Heloise and Don Quixote 7 References EditCitations Edit Goethe Merriam Webster Dictionary a b Wells John 2008 Longman Pronunciation Dictionary 3rd ed Pearson Longman ISBN 978 1 4058 8118 0 a b c Nicholas Boyle Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at the Encyclopaedia Britannica Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Biography knarf english upenn edu Retrieved 3 January 2023 a b Classical Weimar UNESCO Justification Justification for UNESCO Heritage Cites UNESCO Retrieved 7 June 2012 a b Daum Andreas W March 2019 Social Relations Shared Practices and Emotions Alexander von Humboldt s Excursion into Literary Classicism and the Challenges to Science around 1800 The Journal of Modern History University of Chicago 91 1 1 37 doi 10 1086 701757 S2CID 151051482 a b c Schopenhauer Arthur January 2004 The Art of Literature The Essays of Arthur Schopenahuer Retrieved 22 March 2015 a b Herman Grimm Goethe Vorlesungen gehalten an der Koniglichen Universitat zu Berlin Vol 1 J G Cotta sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger Stuttgart Berlin 1923 p 36 Catharina was the daughter of Johann Wolfgang Textor sheriff Schultheiss of Frankfurt and of Anna Margaretha Lindheimer Kruse Joseph A 2018 Poetisch religiose Vorratskammer Die Hebraische Bibel bei Goethe und Heine In Anna Dorothea Ludewig Steffen Hohne eds Goethe und die Juden die Juden und Goethe in German Walter de Gruyter p 71 ISBN 9783110530421 Oehler R 1932 Buch und Bibliotheken unter der Perspektive Goethe Goethe s attitude toward books and libraries The Library Quarterly 2 pp 232 249 Goethe Johann Wolfgang von The Autobiography of Goethe Truth and Poetry From My Own Life Volume 1 1897 translated by John Oxenford pp 114 129 Valerian Tornius de Goethe Leben Wirken und Schaffen Ludwig Rohrscheid Verlag Bonn 1949 p 26 Emil Ludwig Goethe Geschichte eines Menschen Vol 1 Ernst Rowohlt Verlag Berlin 1926 pp 17 18 Karl Goedeke Goethes Leben Cotta Kroner Stuttgart around 1883 pp 16 17 Originally speech of Goethe to the Shakespeare s Day by University Duisburg Uni duisburg essen de Retrieved 17 July 2014 Herman Grimm Goethe Vorlesungen gehalten an der Koniglichen Universitat zu Berlin Vol 1 J G Cotta sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger Stuttgart Berlin 1923 p 81 Karl Robert Mandelkow Bodo Morawe Goethes Briefe 2 edition Vol 1 Briefe der Jahre 1764 1786 Christian Wegner Hamburg 1968 p 571 Valerian Tornius Goethe Leben Wirken und Schaffen Ludwig Rohrscheid Verlag Bonn 1949 p 60 a b Mandelkow Karl Robert 1962 Goethes Briefe Vol 1 Briefe der Jahre 1764 1786 Christian Wegner Verlag p 589 Mandelkow Karl Robert 1962 Goethes Briefe Vol 1 Briefe der Jahre 1764 1786 Christian Wegner Verlag pp 590 592 See Goethe and his Publishers Robertson John George 1911 Goethe Johann Wolfgang von In Chisholm Hugh ed Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol 12 11th ed Cambridge University Press p 183 Gosnell Charles F and Geza Schutz 1932 Goethe the Librarian Library Quarterly 2 January 367 374 Hume Brown Peter 1920 Life of Goethe pp 224 225 Klassik Stiftung Weimar www klassik stiftung de in German Retrieved 3 January 2023 Chisholm Hugh ed 1911 Stein Charlotte von Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol 25 11th ed Cambridge University Press p 871 The Goethe Residence Klassik Siftung Weimar Retrieved 29 July 2022 Craig Gordon A Wilson W Daniel The Goethe Case W Daniel Wilson The New York Review of Books 2022 ISSN 0028 7504 Retrieved 22 July 2022 Desmond Will D 2020 Hegel s Antiquity Oxford University Press p 10 ISBN 978 0 19 257574 6 Safranski Rudiger 1990 Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy Harvard University Press ISBN 978 0 674 79275 3 Chamberlain Alexander 1896 The Child and Childhood in Folk Thought The Child in Primitive Culture p 385 MacMillan ISBN 9781421987484 Gersdorff Dagmar von in German 2005 Goethes spate Liebe in German Insel Verlag ISBN 978 3 458 19265 7 Ulrika von Levetzowova hamelika cz in Czech The encounter is described in Stefan Zweig s 1927 book Decisive Moments in History Briscoe J R Ed 2004 New Historical Anthology of Music by Women Vol 1 Indiana University Press pp 126 127 Todd 2003 p 89 Mercer Taylor 2000 pp 41 42 93 Todd 2003 pp 188 190 269 270 Carl Vogel de Die letzte Krankheit Goethe s In Journal der practischen Heilkunde 1833 Grove s Dictionary of Music and Musicians 5th ed 1954 page needed Ludwig Emil 1928 Goethe The History of a Man 1749 1833 Schiller and Wilhelm Meister Translated by Ethel Colburn Mayne New York G P Putnum s Sons Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1966 Iphigenia in Tauris Manchester University Press p 15 Sharpe Lesley July 1982 Schiller and Goethe s Egmont The Modern Language Review 77 3 629 645 doi 10 2307 3728071 JSTOR 3728071 Lamport Francis John 1990 German Classical Drama Theatre Humanity and Nation 1750 1870 Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 0 521 36270 9 p 90 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Return to Weimar and the French Revolution 1788 94 Encyclopaedia Britannica Retrieved 18 July 2021 a b See generally Schiller F 1877 Correspondence between Schiller and Goethe from 1794 to 1805 Vol 1 G Bell Baumer Rachel Van M Brandon James R 1993 1981 Sanskrit Drama in Performance Motilal Banarsidass p 9 ISBN 978 81 208 0772 3 The Stigma of Suicide A history Pips Project Archived from the original on 6 October 2007 See also Ophelia s Burial Goethe Johann Wolfgang von 1848 The Auto Biography of Goethe Truth and Poetry From My Own Life Translated by John Oxenford London Henry G Bohn p page needed via Internet Archive Goethe s Plays by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe translated into English with introductions by Charles E Passage Publisher Benn Limited 1980 ISBN 978 0 510 00087 5 978 0 510 00087 5 Wigmore Richard 2 July 2012 A meeting of genius Beethoven and Goethe July 1812 Gramophone Haymarket Retrieved 6 July 2012 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Nature Institute Retrieved 28 August 2008 Darwin C R 1859 On the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life 1st ed John Murray K Barteczko M Jacob 1999 A re evaluation of the premaxillary bone in humans Anatomy and Embryology 207 6 417 437 doi 10 1007 s00429 003 0366 x PMID 14760532 S2CID 13069026 Goethe J W Italian Journey Robert R Heitner Suhrkamp ed vol 6 Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu Erklaren Library of Congress Retrieved 2 January 2018 Magnus Rudolf Schmid Gunther 2004 Metamorphosis of Plants ISBN 978 1 4179 4984 7 Retrieved 28 August 2008 Frank Teichmann tr Jon McAlice The Emergence of the Idea of Evolution in the Time of Goethe first published in Interdisciplinary Aspects of Evolution Urachhaus 1989 Balzer Georg 1966 Goethe als Gartenfreund Munchen F Bruckmann KG Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Miller Arnold V 2004 Hegel s Philosophy of Nature Being Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences 1830 Translated from Nicolin and Poggeler s Edition 1959 and from the Zusatze in Michelet s Text 1847 Clarendon Press ISBN 978 0 19 927267 9 Aristotle Ross George Robert Thomson 1906 Aristotle De sensu and De memoria text and translation with introduction and commentary Robarts University of Toronto Cambridge The University press Bockemuhl M 1991 Turner Taschen Koln ISBN 978 3 8228 6325 1 Goethe Johann 1810 Theory of Colours paragraph No 50 Archived from the original on 16 December 2021 Retrieved 16 November 2014 Goethe s Color Theory Retrieved 28 August 2008 The Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object Archived from the original on 10 November 2011 Retrieved 26 June 2014 The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe s World Conception 1979 Retrieved 28 August 2008 Goethe s World View Retrieved 28 August 2008 Goethe s Message of Beauty in Our Twentieth Century World Friedrich Frederick Hiebel RSCP California ISBN 978 0 916786 37 3 Outing Goethe and His Age edited by Alice A Kuzniar page needed Goethe Johann Wolfgang 1976 Gedenkausgabe der Werke Briefe und Gesprache Zurich Artemis Verl p 686 Retrieved 27 April 2016 Bullough V L 1990 History in adult human sexual behavior with children and adolescents in Western societies Pedophilia Biosocial Dimensions ed Springer Verlag New York p 72 ISBN 978 1 4613 9684 0 Retrieved 27 April 2016 The phrase Goethe uses is Mischmasch von Irrtum und Gewalt in his Zahme Xenien IX Goethes Gedichte in Zeitlicher Folge Insel Verlag 1982 ISBN 978 3 458 14013 9 p 1121 Arnold Bergstrasser Goethe s View of Christ Modern Philology vol 46 no 3 February 1949 pp 172 202 Martin Tetz de Mischmasch von Irrtum und Gewalt Zu Goethes Vers auf die Kirchengeschichte Zeitschrift fur Theologie und Kirche de 88 1991 pp 339 363 Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Eckermann Johann Peter Soret Frederic Jacob 1850 Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret Vol II pp 423 424 Retrieved 17 July 2014 Boyle 1992 353 incomplete short citation Thompson James 1895 Venetian Epigrams Retrieved 17 July 2014 Venetian Epigrams 66 Wenige sind mir jedoch wie Gift und Schlange zuwider Viere Rauch des Tabacks Wanzen und Knoblauch und The cross symbol he drew has been variously understood as meaning Christianity Christ or death Friedrich Nietzsche The Will to Power 95 Letter to Boisseree dated 22 March 1831 quoted in Peter Boerner Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1832 1982 A Biographical Essay Bonn Inter Nationes 1981 p 82 a b Krimmer Elisabeth Simpson Patricia Anne 2013 Religion Reason and Culture in the Age of Goethe Boydell amp Brewer p 99 Karic Enes Goethe His Era and Islam p 100 Retrieved 14 December 2022 Mahomets Gesang The LiederNet Archive Retrieved 15 November 2022 Jolle Jonas 2004 The River and its Metaphors Goethe s Mahoments Gesang Jolle Jonas 2004 The River and its Metaphors Goethe s Mahomets Gesang MLN 119 3 431 450 doi 10 1353 mln 2004 0111 ISSN 1080 6598 S2CID 161893614 Dallmayr F 2002 Dialogue Among Civilizations NY Macmillan Palgrave p 152 Eckermann Johann Peter 1901 Conversations with Goethe M W Dunne p 320 Dumont returned Goethe is a moderate liberal just as all rational people are and ought to be and as I myself am Selth Jefferson P 1997 Firm Heart and Capacious Mind The Life and Friends of Etienne Dumont University Press of America pp 132 133 Mommsen Katharina 2014 Goethe and the Poets of Arabia Boydell amp Brewer p 70 Peter Eckermann Johann 1901 Conversations with Goethe M W Dunne pp 317 319 McCabe Joseph Goethe The Man and His Character p 343 Unseld 1996 pp 36 37 Gemunden Gerd 1998 Framed Visions Popular Culture Americanization and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination University of Michigan Press pp 18 19 Unseld 1996 p 212 Richards David B 1979 Goethe s Search for the Muse Translation and Creativity John Benjamins Publishing p 83 a b Beachy Robert 2000 Recasting Cosmopolitanism German Freemasonry and Regional Identity in the Early Nineteenth Century Eighteenth Century Studies 33 2 266 274 doi 10 1353 ecs 2000 0002 JSTOR 30053687 S2CID 162003813 Schuttler Hermann 1991 Die Mitglieder des Illuminatenordens 1776 1787 93 Munich Ars Una pp 48 49 62 63 71 82 ISBN 978 3 89391 018 2 Will Durant 1967 The Story of Civilization Volume 10 Rousseau and Revolution Simon amp Schuster p 607 Goethite Mineral Data webmineral com Retrieved 3 January 2023 Dahlin Bo 22 June 2017 Rudolf Steiner The Relevance of Waldorf Education Springer p 45 ISBN 978 3 319 58907 7 It is known but seldom paid much attention to that Goethe s natural studies had some influence on Hegel s philosophy Rockmore Tom 3 May 2016 German Idealism as Constructivism University of Chicago Press p 131 ISBN 978 0 226 34990 9 Goethe s view attracted interest at the time someone else influenced by Goethe is Schopenhauer Assiter Alison 29 April 2015 Kierkegaard Eve and Metaphors of Birth Rowman amp Littlefield p 126 ISBN 978 1 78348 326 6 Carl Linnaeus the botanist physician and zoologist who laid the foundation for modern biological naming was a major influence on Goethe The latter a well known influence on Kierkegaard writes of Linnaeus Murphy Tim 18 October 2001 Nietzsche Metaphor Religion SUNY Press p 53 ISBN 978 0 7914 5087 1 No one would deny that Goethe influenced Nietzsche but it is important to understand that relationship in very specific terms Luft Sebastian 2015 The Space of Culture Towards a Neo Kantian Philosophy of Culture Cohen Natorp and Cassirer Oxford University Press p 124 ISBN 978 0 19 873884 8 Goethe influenced Cassirer in a crucial aspect of his philosophy of the symbolic Bishop Paul 13 July 2020 Reading Goethe at Midlife Ancient Wisdom German Classicism and Jung Chiron Publications p 198 ISBN 978 1 63051 860 8 Goethe s influence on Jung was profound and far reaching Nietzsche Friedrich The Portable Nietzsche New York The Viking Press 1954 Friedenthal Richard 2010 Goethe His Life amp Times Transaction Publishers p 389 a b Broers Michael 2014 Europe Under Napoleon I B Tauris p 4 Swales Martin 1987 Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther CUP Archive p 100 Merseburger Peter 2013 Mythos Weimar Zwischen Geist und Macht Pantheon pp 132 133 Ferber Michael 2008 A Companion to European Romanticism John Wiley amp Sons p 450 a b c Gillespie Gerald Ernest Paul Engel Manfred 2008 Romantic Prose Fiction John Benjamins Publishing p 44 Wood Dennis 2002 Benjamin Constant A Biography Routledge p 185 Sorensen David R 2004 Goethe Johann Wolfgang von In Cumming Mark ed The Carlyle Encyclopedia Madison and Teaneck NJ Fairleigh Dickinson University Press p 200 ISBN 9780838637920 Tennyson G B 1973 The Carlyles In Clubbe John ed Victorian Prose A Guide to Research New York The Modern Language Association of America p 65 ISBN 9780873522502 a b Roder Bolton Gerlinde 1998 George Eliot and Goethe An Elective Affinity Rodopi pp 3 8 Wagner Albert Malte 1939 Goethe Carlyle Nietzsche and the German Middle Class Monatshefte fur Deutschen Unterricht 31 4 162 JSTOR 30169550 via JSTOR Connell W F 2002 The Educational Thought and Influence of Matthew Arnold Routledge p 34 a b Mundt Hannelore 2004 Understanding Thomas Mann Univ of South Carolina Press pp 110 111 The literary estate of Goethe in the Goethe and Schiller Archives UNESCO Memory of the World Programme Retrieved 29 September 2017 Richter Simon J 2007 Goethe Yearbook 14 Harvard University Press pp 113 114 Amrine F R Zucker Francis J 2012 Goethe and the Sciences A Reappraisal Springer Science amp Business Media p 232 Scientific Studies Suhrkamp ed vol 12 p 121 trans Douglas Miller a b c Roach Joseph R 1993 The Player s Passion Studies in the Science of Acting University of Michigan Press pp 165 166 a b c Fellows Otis Edward 1981 Diderot Studies Librairie Droz pp 392 394 Seifer Marc J 1998 Wizard The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla Biography of a Genius Citadel Press ISBN 978 0 8065 1960 9 Sources Edit Mercer Taylor Peter 2000 The Life of Mendelssohn Cambridge England Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 63972 9 Todd R Larry 2003 Mendelssohn A Life in Music Oxford England New York Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 511043 2 Unseld Siegfried 1996 Goethe and His Publishers University of Chicago Press ISBN 9780226841908 Further reading EditBell Matthew 1994 Goethe s Naturalistic Anthropology Man and Other Plants Oxford Clarendon Press Browning Oscar 1879 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol X 9th ed Calder Angus 1983 Scott amp Goethe Romantiscism and Classicism in Hearn Sheila G ed Cencrastus No 13 Summer 1983 pp 25 28 ISSN 0264 0856 Von Gronicka Andre 1968 The Russian Image of Goethe Volume 1 Goethe in Russian Literature of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century Philadelphia Pa University of Pennsylvania Press Von Gronicka Andre 1985 The Russian Image of Goethe Volume 2 Goethe in Russian Literature of the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century Philadelphia Pa University of Pennsylvania Press Hatfield Henry Caraway 1963 Goethe A Critical Introduction Cambridge MA Harvard University Press Jane K n d Goethe s Allegories of Identity Philadelphia Pa University of Pennsylvania Press Maertz Gregory 2017 Literature and the Cult of Personality Essays on Goethe and His Influence New York NY Columbia University Press Robertson John George Phillips Walter Alison 1911 Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol 12 11th ed pp 182 189 Robertson Ritchie 2016 Goethe A Very Short Introduction Oxford Oxford University Press Santayana George 1910 Goethe s Faust Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature Volume 1 Three Philosophical Poets Lucretius Dante and Goethe Critical Edition Cambridge MA Harvard University Press pp 139 202 Retrieved 22 September 2022 Vietor Karl and Bayard Quincy Morgan 1950 Goethe the Thinker Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press External links Edit Wikimedia Commons has media related to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Wikiquote has quotations related to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Wikisource has original works by or about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Poetry portal Philosophy portal Biography portalWorks by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in eBook form at Standard Ebooks Works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at Project Gutenberg Works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at Faded Page Canada Works by or about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at Internet Archive Works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at LibriVox public domain audiobooks Goethe on In Our Time at the BBC Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment In Our Time BBC Radio 4 discussion with Nicholas Boyle and Simon Schaffer 10 February 2000 Works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Zeno org in German At the Linda Hall Library Goethe s 1810 Zur Farbenlehre Atlas 1840 Goethe s Theory of Colours translated from the German with notes by Charles Lock Eastlake Works by and about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in University Library JCS Frankfurt am Main Digital Collections Judaica Free scores of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe s texts in the Choral Public Domain Library ChoralWiki Goethe in English at Poems Found in Translation Poems of Goethe set to music lieder net Goethe Quotes New English translations and German originals Retrieved from https en wikipedia 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