A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: German poet, novelist, playwright, courtier, and natural philosopher, one of the greatest figures in Western literature. He gained early fame with The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), but his most famous work was the poetic drama in two parts, Faust. The Romantic period in Germany (the late eighteenth and early nineteengh centuries) is known as the age of Goethe, and his stature derives not only from his literary achievements as a lyric poet, novelist, and dramatist but also from his often significant contributions as a scientist (geologist, botanist, anatomist, physicist, historian of science) and as a critic and theorist of literature and of art. Most of the available information about Goethes's earliest years comes from his autobiography, From my life: Poetry and Truth, 1811-1813. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1749, as the first child of Katherine Elisabeth Textor, the daughter of the mayor of Frankfurt , and the lawyer Johann Caspar Goethe, a leisured private citizen who devoted his energies to writing memories of his Italian journey, patronizing local artists, and, above all, educating his two survivng children, the future poet and his sister Cornelia. Goethe had a comfortable childhood and he was greatly influenced by his mother, who encouraged his literary aspirations. After troubles at school, he received at home exceptionally wide education. At an early age Goethe studied several languages, as well as art and music. At sixteen he was sent by his father to the University of Leipzig to study law, despite his own desire to study ancient literature in Goetitbusngen. An unhappy love affair inspired Goethe's first play, The Lover's Caprice (1767). In the fall of 1768 Goethe returned to Frankfurt, suffering from a serious illness. Some biographers have speculated that Goethe had contracted syphilis - at least his relationships with women were years distant. Goethe was sent to Strasbourg in March 1770 to finish his law degree. The seventeen months he spent in Strasbourg are usually identified as one of the major turning points in his career. Strasbourg was more German culturally than Leipzig; Goethe made it represent for himself and for German literary history the birthplace of a new, thoroughly German literature. The first step in this process was his discovery of the Strasbourg Cathedral and enthusiastic identification of the Gothic style as German. The second and more important step was his encounter with Johann Gottfried Herder, wo arrived in Strasbourg in September. The rather difficult Herder imparted to Goethe his enthusiasm for popular poetry, primitivism, recent speculation on the origins of poetry, the works of Johann Georg Hamann, the poems of Ossian (James Macpherson), and above all the novels of Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Oliver Goldsmith. In September 1771 Goethe returned to Frankfurt, ostensibly to begin a law career but in fact to begin the most visible literary career in German history. The four years between his return and his departure for Weimar contain the first flowering of his genius and constitute for many critics the high point of his career. During this time Goethe began to practice law both in Frankfurt and Wetzlar, seat of the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire; he also wrote book reviews, engaged in constant visiting with literary friends, functioned as the center of the Sturm und Drang movement, and traveled on the Rhine and in Switzerland. The autobiography describes three emotional entanglements in this period. In Wetzlar in 1772 he met Charlotte (Lotte) Buff and fell in love with her before discovering that she was engaged to his friend Johann Georg Christian Kestner. In 1774 he became involved in an uncomfortably close friendship with Maximiliane Euphrosine von La Roche Brentano, daughter of the novelist Sophie von La Roche and future mother of the poet Clemens Brentano, while she was adjusting with difficulty to her marriage to Peter Anton Brentano, a wealthy Frankfurt merchant. The following year he became engaged to Anna Elisabeth (Lili) Schoeneman, the daughter of a wealthy banker; although it inspired a spate of wonderful poems, the engagement was broken off in September 1775. Goethe had begun his career both as a great personality and as a great writer. In 1773 Goethe published an essay on the Strasbourg Cathedral, On German Architecture, in which he praised the Gothic style; it also appeared the same year in the manifesto of the Sturm und Drang movement, On German Culture and Art, edited by Herder. Goethe's dramas of the early 1770s are of three types: short satires, mostly from 1773, on literary and cultural themes; incomplete poetic dramas on great figures such as Caesar, Mahomet, Prometheus, Egmont, and Faust, the extant fragments of which are among Goethe's finest poems of the period; and a group of completed plays of more conventional form -the tragedy of Clavidgo, (1774), the drama Stella (1776), and the operettas Erwin and Elmire (1775 and Claudine von Villa Bella (1776), Clavidgo and Stella both deal with men like Weislingen who cannot be decisively faithful to a woman. In the first version of Stella the shaky hero is finally shared peacefully by the two women he has married; in 1787 Goethe gave the play a more conventional tragic ending. These four plays mark the beginning of a long series of operettas and operatic plays in Goethe's oeuvre. Goethes's most famous work of the 1771-1775 period is The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774. In this paradigmatic novel of eigtheenth-century sensibility, Werther traces in a series of letters the course of his love for Lotte, who is already engaged to a solid young offical when Werther meets her. The novel established Goethe as a European celebrity virtually overnight. To his distress it was widely misunderstood to glorify, rather than criticize, the fashionable melancholy of the age; he revised it extensively for the 1787 edition, the version in which it is now read. For his entire lifetime and beyond, The Sorrows of Young Werther was the work by which Goethe was known to the non-German world; only Faust has come to command the same kind of attention. In the fall of 1775 Goethe left Frankfurt to visit Weimar at the invitation of the young duke Karl August. He quickly became the duke's close personal friend, the general court wit, and the organizer of court theatricals. In 1776 he was awarded the rights of citizenship and assigned administrative responsibilities in the tiny duchy. Much of Goethe's time was spent traveling, either for offical reasons or in company with the duke. He also made two journeys of literary interest: to the Harz mountains in the winter of 1777 and to Switzerland in the fall of 1779. Shortly after his arrival in Weimar he had entered into an intense friendship with Charlotte von Stein, the wife of a court official: this relationship dominated his emotional life for the next twelve years. By the early 1780s Goethe was in charge of mines, roads, war, and finance; in 1782 the duke procured for him a patent of nobility. Just as important for his future development as the new location, occupation, and personal relationships was the broadening of Goethe's intellectual interests in Weimar: for the first time he became consistently interested in science. As when he studied alchemy, his interest extended beyond reading to collection and experimenting; but unlike his alchemical studies and some phrenological work he had undertaken for Lavater, his work in geology, anatomy, and botany led not only to literary results but to discoveries and scientific publications. In 1784 he demonstrated the existence of the human intermaxillary (premaxillary) bone and thereby the continuity of anatomical structures across species, and in 1787 he conceived an influential theory of metamorphosis in plants. Goethe continued to write operetta librettos and occasional satires for court entertainments; he also wrote a free adaption of Aristophanes' The Birds (1787). He worked intermittently on Egmont (1787) which he had began shortly before leaving Frankfurt; on successive versions, mainly in prose, of Torquato Tasso (1790). He also wrote Wilhelm Meister's Theatrical Mission, a lively fragement about the state of the German theather. The pressure of all these competing interests finally became too great, and Goethe fled to Italy in the morning of September 3, 1786. "In Rome I have found myself for the first time," Goethe wrote. He drew statues and ruins, collected antique and botanical samples, and was shocked by the primitive power of an ancient Greek temple - Renaissance art did not interest him. The journey ended Goethe's celibacy and inspired his play Iphigenia in autorbusris, and Roman Elegies, sensuous poems relating partly to Christiane Vulpius, who became Goethe's mistress in 1789. The ancient monuments he saw in Italy significantly influenced his growing commitment to classical view of art. His emotional dependence on Charlotte ended, and inspite of public pressure, he continued to live happily unmarried with Christiane. Apart from brief stays in Venice and Naples and a tour to Sicily, Goethe spent all of his time in Rome, visiting galleries and monument to study painting and sculpture. He revised an completed Egmont and part of Torquato Tasso for the edition of his works that was underway (1787-1790); he also added two scenes to the version of Faust he had composed before he left Frankfurt for Weimar, and selected from his Faust material scenes that he published in preliminary form as Faust: Ein Fragment (1790). Goethe returned from Italy as, he declared, an artist. Karl August relived him of all official obligations, except the directorship of the court theather, which was officially established in 1791, and of libraries and natural-historical and artistic collections in the duchy, including those at the University of Jena. In Weimar he devoted his energy to studies of all sorts. In addition from his early interest in geology, botany, and comparative anatomy he became passionately interested in optics, and in 1790 he began publishing increasingly anti-Newtonian essays about the theory of color and scientific method in general. Much of his time was devoted to studying Kant, Plato and Homer. His other major area of interest was art. The more academic development of his interests was reflected in his new friendships with the educator and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt and the art historian Hans Meyer; the latter, whom he had met in Italy, lived in his house from 1791 until 1802. During the French Revolution Goethe reported of his inconveniences in letters to his family when he was forced to leave his home and dear garden after the French army attacked Prussia. The French Revolution was the one political event that necessarily impinged on Goethe's life, not only because it was a topic of constant interest in all circles but also because the duke, who had entered the Prussian army, insisted that Goethe accompany him on campaigns to France in 1792 and to the Rhine in 1793. Goethe reported on these events in The Campaign in France in the Year 1792 and Siege of Mainz, published together in 1822. The year 1794 marks the beginning of Goethe's friendship with Schiller. He had come to Jena in 1789 as professor of history on an appointment arranged by Goethe, but the older poet had had two reasons for keeping his distance from the newcomer: not only had Schiller made his reputation as a powerful Sturm und Drang poet a decade after Goethe had renounced the movement, but he had recently given up poetry for immersion in Kant. Only in 1794 did a conversation after a lecture in Jena bring the two together into what rapidly became a mutually supportive and productive relationship. Much of Goethe's energy in the following years was devoted to Schiller's journal "Die Horen", published from 1795 to 1797, and then to his own successor journal, "Die Propoylaen", published from 1798 to 1800. Faust is Goethe's best-known work of the 1790s. Goethe had worked for the most of his life on this drama. It was based on Christopher Marlowe's Faust, and depicted a disillusioned scholar, who makes a pact with Satan. From 1797 to 1801, with Schiller's encouragement, Goethe rewrote the existing scenes, expanding some of them, and added the prologues, the pact scenes, and the Walpurgis Night segment to complete Part I of the drama, which was published in 1808. He introduces several important changes in the old legend of the scholar who makes a pact with the devil Mephistopheles: his Faust seeks not power through knowledge but access to transcendent knowledge denied to the human mind. The second part appeared in 1832. The death of Schiller in 1805 and the defeat of the Prussians at Jena in 1806 mark another major turning point in Goethes life. The concentration of leading German intellectuals at the University of Jena gradually dispersed, so that Goethe's loose ties to the younger Romantik generation were maintained at an increasins distance. He married in 1806 Christiane Vulpius, with whom he had lived nearly 18 years and wrote his autobiography, Poetry and Truth (1811-1833). Goethe continued his activities in art, history, science, and literature at what for anyone else would be considered a prodigious rate. He maintained his interest in classsical art, wrote a biography (1811) of Philipp Hackert, an artist he had known in Italy, and took great interest in the emerging talents of Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge. He collected manuscripts and coins, and began reading more widely in history. Goethe worked steadily in the five years following Schiller's death to complete his vast. Goethe's Theory of Colours (1810), which he sometimes called his single most important work. Goethe's wife died in 1816; the following year their son August married Otitbuslie von Pogwisch , who then ran the household she and August shared with Goethe. Also in 1817 Goethe resigned as director of the court theater after some forty years of supervising Weimar's theatrical life. Between 1817 and 1824 he published essays on morphology and general scientific topics in two series, continued his work in optics, read extensively in medicine, and began reading and writing about meteorology. A masterly novella, called simply Goethe's Novel, (1828); was written in 1826-1827. But Goethe also completed two major large-scale works: Wilhelm Meister's Travels (1821) and Faust, Part II (1832). At the age of 74 Goethe fell in love with the 19-year old Ulrike von Levetzow. He followed her with high hopes from Marienbad to Karlsbad, and then returned disappointed to Weimar. There he wrote The Marienbad elegy, the most personal poem of his later years. On March 22, 1832, less than two months after making his final revisions of Faust, Goethe died in Weimar, probably of a heart attack. He and Schiller, who died over a quarter of a century earlier, are buried together, in a mausoleum in the ducal cemetery. |
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