Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Did You Know?

• Goethe's last words are usually abridged as 'Mehr Licht!' ('more light!'), though the original quote was longer and the exact phrasing is disputed.
• Many of Goethe's works, including Faust, the Roman Elegies, and the Venetian Epigrams, depict erotic passions and acts; some Venetian Epigrams were held back from publication due to their sexual content.
• Goethe was a freethinker who believed one could be inwardly Christian without following any Christian church, and he sharply distinguished between Jesus and the tenets of Christian theology.

Life

Goethe’s grandfather, Friedrich Georg Goethe, left Thuringia in 1687 and altered the spelling of his family name from Göthe to Goethe. He started out as a tailor in Frankfurt before opening a tavern, and the wealth he built supported his son and grandchildren. Friedrich Georg married twice. His first wife was Anna Elisabeth Lutz, daughter of burgher Sebastian Lutz; they had five children, among them Hermann Jakob Goethe. After Anna died in 1705, he wed Cornelia Schellhorn, born Walther, the widow of innkeeper Johannes Schellhorn, who had died the year before. With Cornelia he had four more children, including Johann Caspar Goethe, who would become the father of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Johann Caspar Goethe lived with his family in a large house in Frankfurt—now known as the Goethe House—at a time when the city was a free imperial city within the Holy Roman Empire. He had studied law in Leipzig and been named Imperial Councillor, but he never took part in Frankfurt’s official affairs. On August 20, 1748, at age 38, he married Catharina Elisabeth Textor, who was 17. Of their children, only Johann Wolfgang and his sister Cornelia Friederica Christiana survived past early childhood.

The young Goethe was taught by his father and private tutors in the usual subjects of the day: Latin, Greek, a little Biblical Hebrew, French, Italian, and English. He also learned dancing, riding, and fencing. Frustrated by his own unfulfilled ambitions, Johann Caspar made sure his children had every opportunity he had lacked. Though Goethe’s first great love was drawing, he soon turned to literature, with early favorites including Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Homer. He was deeply drawn to the theater and especially captivated by puppet shows put on each year by French soldiers stationed at his home—a fascination that later appeared in his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. He also enjoyed reading works on history and religion.

Literary work

Goethe’s early fame came from two works written before his move to Weimar: the tragedy Götz von Berlichingen (1773), which first earned him notice, and the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Werther is often credited as the catalyst for the Sturm und Drang movement, an early phase of Romanticism, and is sometimes called the world’s first best-seller. During his early Weimar years, before meeting Schiller in 1794, he started Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and composed the dramas Iphigenie auf Tauris, Egmont, and Torquato Tasso, along with the fable Reineke Fuchs. His friendship with Schiller produced the outline for Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, the idyll Hermann and Dorothea, the Roman Elegies, and the verse drama The Natural Daughter. After Schiller’s death in 1805, Goethe’s later period saw Faust Part One (1808), Elective Affinities (1809), the Persian-style poem collection West-Eastern Diwan (1819), his autobiography Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (published 1811–1833), Italian Journey (1816–1817), and several art treatises. Faust, Part Two was finished just before his death in 1832 and released later that same year. His writings had an immediate impact on literary and artistic circles. Goethe also admired Kalidasa’s Abhijñānaśākuntalam, an early Sanskrit work that reached Europe through an English-to-German translation.

Scientific work

Goethe’s scientific work was as intense as his literary fame. He wrote about morphology and color theory, and in the 1790s he ran galvanic experiments and studied anatomy alongside Alexander von Humboldt. His private mineral collection was the largest in Europe; he gathered 17,800 rock samples over his lifetime to understand geology as a whole. His focus on morphology and what later became known as homology shaped 19th-century naturalists, though his idea of transformation described a continuous metamorphosis of living things, not the transmutation of species. Homology—called “analogie” by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire—was later used by Charles Darwin to argue for common descent and variation. Working with an elephant’s skull lent by Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring, Goethe independently found the human intermaxillary bone in 1784, now called Goethe’s bone. Others had identified it earlier using different methods, but Goethe was the first to prove it existed in all mammals, challenging the belief that humans lacked it. The elephant skull, now known as the Goethean Elephant, is displayed in Kassel’s Ottoneum. During his Italian journey, Goethe developed a theory of plant metamorphosis, holding that the leaf is the plant’s archetypal form—he wrote that a plant is “all leaf, united so inseparably with the future bud that one cannot be imagined without the other.” He published Metamorphosis of Plants in 1790. His botanical ideas came partly from his gardening in Weimar.

Influence

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe left a deep mark on the nineteenth century, and many of his ideas have since become common currency. He wrote poetry, essays, and criticism, developed a theory of colours, and produced early work on evolution and linguistics. He had a strong interest in mineralogy, and the mineral goethite, a form of iron oxide, bears his name. His philosophical and aphoristic nonfiction influenced thinkers such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Cassirer, and Jung. Alongside Schiller, he was a central figure of Weimar Classicism. Schopenhauer ranked Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship among the four greatest novels ever written, alongside Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Don Quixote. Nietzsche listed Goethe as one of the thinkers he turned to for judgment, alongside Epicurus, Montaigne, Spinoza, Plato, Rousseau, Pascal, and Schopenhauer.

Goethe’s work contained many of the artistic tensions that would define the following century. He could be intensely emotional or strictly formal, write brief epigrams or sprawling epics. He argued that Classicism was the proper way to control art and called Romanticism a sickness, even as he wrote poetry full of vivid images and reshaped the formal rules of German verse. His poetry was set to music by nearly every major Austrian and German composer from Mozart to Mahler, and his influence reached French drama and opera. In a 1932 letter, Einstein praised Goethe as a poet without equal and one of the wisest people in history, adding that even his scholarly ideas deserve high regard and that his faults are those of any great man.