German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theater director, critic, and amateur artist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born on August 28, 1749, in Frankfurt am Main, and died on March 22, 1832, in Weimar, Saxe-Weimar. He is thought to be the most important literary figure to come out of Germany in the modern era.
J. Wolfgang von Goethe
The greatest German philosophers (who frequently drew from his works and ideas) and composers (who frequently set his works to music) are comparable in scope and stature to Goethe, who is the only German writer whose works have been translated into other languages. Due to his enormous impact on the literary landscape of the German-speaking countries, his writings have been referred to as “classical” since the end of the 18th century. From a European perspective, he is regarded as the most important and unrivaled figure of the Romantic movement as it is generally understood. He could be compared to William Shakespeare, Dante, and other Renaissance and High Middle Ages writers in terms of how they relate to the culture of the Enlightenment. His Faust is Europe’s greatest long poem since John Milton’s Paradise Lost, if not since Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and when properly edited, it is eminently stage worthy.
Commencing (1749–69)
Goethe was one of the few people connected to the German literary renaissance of the 18th century who could be regarded as bourgeois in the true sense of the word. He did not need princely sponsorship, at least during the first half of his life, like most of his contemporaries did, for his writing or positions as an official or academic. Frankfurt, where he was born and where his social attitudes were shaped, was and is a thriving financial and commercial center. It was a city-state within the Holy Roman Empire, but it was also practically an independent republic. The nobility and grand and petty sovereigns who played such an important role in Goethe’s later life had no bearing on his early experiences because he was a town child from a wealthy family in a primarily middle-class setting.
Sturm and Darang
Between April 1770 and August 1771, Goethe attended Strasbourg to complete his doctoral studies. Despite this, he had abandoned Christianity and had chosen an ecclesiastical law topic for his dissertation on the nature of ancient Jewish religion, which some might have found shocking. In contrast to many of his literary contemporaries who had backgrounds in theology, philosophy, or classical philology, he was practical from the start, and his legal training served him well at the bar.Although he may have wanted the dissertation, which questioned the validity of the Ten Commandments, to be accepted, he was forced to turn it in because it was deemed too scandalous. consider the Latin oral test for the licentiate in law, which by custom also bestowed the title of doctor dot.
However, Goethe also experienced a spiritual and intellectual awakening in Strasbourg that was akin to a conversion in its intensity. A well-known young literary intellectual named Johann Gottfried von Herder was in Strasbourg during the winter of 1770-1771 for an eye operation. During their lengthy discussions in the dimly lit room, Goethe learned to see language and literature in a novel, almost anthropological way: as the expression of a national culture, a part of the historically specific genius of a particular people, occasionally concentrated in the genius of individuals, such as Shakespeare, the anonymous Scottish border ballad writers, or, in 16th-century Germany, Martin Luther.
Herder soon started to think that Goethe might be destined for such a position in his own time, and in response to Herder’s enthusiasm for oral literature, Goethe collected a dozen folk songs were performed by elderly women in German-speaking towns near Strasbourg, and he also tried his hand at writing some of his own. Due in part to the influence of sentimental English literature from the time, such as Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), Goethe learned about the linguistic origins of his native language while riding through the Alsace countryside.
He realized Strasbourg Cathedral was a masterpiece of architecture and started an essay praising its architect, Von deutscher Baukunst (1773; “On German Architecture”), despite the fact that his mistaken perception of its Gothic style as being more German than French was then largely unappreciated. Finally, he had another romantic relationship. In the small village of Sessenheim, a Lutheran community, close to the Rhine River and situated on the pastor’s smallholding, Goethe discovered a bucolic paradise that seemed to embody everything he had grown to associate with the German way of life thanks to Herder.
He had a brief but intense relationship with Friederike Brion, one of the pastor’s daughters, but he was already terrified of marriage and the rigidity of commitment it seemed to entail. After receiving his licentiate from the university, he abruptly left Friederike and made his way back to Frankfurt. She seems to have had a breakdown, and for the next eight years and beyond, the theme of the betrayed woman permeates all of Goethe’s writing.
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