Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In Weimar, where court life, literature, science, and public service met in unusually close quarters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe built one of the most varied careers in European letters. Born on 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt, then a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire, he became a poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. By the time of his death on 22 March 1832, his writing had helped shape German literature and had reached far beyond it, influencing literary, political, Christian, and philosophical thought in the Western world from the late 18th century onward.

Goethe grew up in a household that gave him a wide education. His father, Johann Caspar Goethe, had studied law in Leipzig and wanted his children to have advantages he felt he had missed. The young Goethe learned languages including Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and English, and also had lessons in dancing, riding, and fencing. Drawing first caught his passion, but literature soon took hold. Homer and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock were among his early favorites, and the theater fascinated him, especially puppet shows staged by occupying French soldiers at his home. That early love of performance would later echo in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.

From 1765 to 1768 Goethe studied law at Leipzig University, though he disliked memorizing judicial rules and preferred the lectures of the poet and professor Christian Fürchtegott Gellert. He wrote early poems, including the anonymous collection Annette in 1770, and began to move past easy admiration toward a sharper interest in writers such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Christoph Martin Wieland. The legend of Faust connected to Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig also made a strong impression on him, long before Faust became his most celebrated drama.

His first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, appeared in 1774 and brought him wide success. In 1775 he took up residence in Weimar, entering a rich intellectual and cultural setting under the patronage of Duchess Anna Amalia, a setting that formed the basis of Weimar Classicism. Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, ennobled him in 1782. Goethe did not simply write there. During his first ten years in Weimar he served on the Duke’s privy council, sat on war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines near Ilmenau, helped reform the University of Jena, and contributed to the planning of Weimar’s botanical park and the rebuilding of the Ducal Palace.

Goethe’s range kept widening. After a tour of Italy, he published his first major scientific work, Metamorphosis of Plants. In 1791 he became managing director of the theatre at Weimar, and in 1794 he began a friendship with Friedrich Schiller, whose plays he premiered until Schiller’s death in 1805. In these years Goethe published Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and in 1808 the first part of Faust. His poems later drew composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler. Goethe’s words still appeal because they join energy with discipline, imagination with work. As one of his sayings puts it, “What’s not started today is never finished tomorrow.”