This is what happens when you go a couple days without writing birthday posts; you get a multi-car pile-up of Germans! Aight, let’s get to it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born #OnThisDay 1749 in Frankfort-am-Main, early sturmed and dranged in imitation of his idol Shakespeare, but then bestrode two centuries like a classically-proportioned colossus, with equal mastery (amazing, really) in poetry, novels, and letters.
Name a genre; chances are Goethe produced a classic specimen of it. His dramas include his Julius Caesar-style tragedy Egmont (review here: https://wp.me/p8d1Up-ad), Gotz von Berlichingen (translated by a young Walter Scott: https://tinyurl.com/y78pk98u ) Tasso, and Iphigenia in Tauris.
He also produced three epic poems: Hermann and Dorothea (1797; I recommend this Bowring translation, illustrated: https://tinyurl.com/y7bzbhya ), Faust Part I, and (in the very final years of his life, when he was as astonishingly productive as he ever was) Faust Part II.
Travel literature? I give you his Italian Journey. Lyric poetry? Goethe is known for writing some of the finest short poems in the German language. Letters? Goethe is considered one of literature’s greatest letter-writers. He also dabbled in minerology, geology, and horticulture.
His autobiography cuts off in the middle (disappointing).
But it shouldn’t be overlooked that Goethe is also considered the father of the German novel; he wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther, Elective Affinities, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years.
Young Werther is, famously (or notoriously), the novel that made a number of young men throughout Europe don black and (in some cases) commit suicide after the example of the protagonist. It is the story of a young man of immense romantic feelings for nature; he falls in love with Charlotte, who is betrothed to a man named Albert. Werther cannot let go of his love for Charlotte; she, however, must reject him. He shoots himself in the head, and then slowly dies. (My reaction to the book: This could all have been avoided. Seriously, listen to Benvolio’s sage advice and “examine other beauties”!)
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is, from what I’ve heard, a classic bildungsroman (or coming-of-age) novel. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer considered it one of the four greatest novels of all time.
So larger-than-life was Goethe, like Johnson, he produced a secondary literature he didn’t even write. So, for instance, Johann Peter Eckermann (aka Goethe’s Boswell) wrote his work Conversations with Goethe (1836; 1848) based on nine years of conversations with the author. Bettina von Arnim-Brentano produced an acclaimed novel, Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, based on loosely fictionalized versions of her correspondence with the poet.
Goethe is also notable for having led two completely different literary movements in Germany. Early on, he and Friedrich Schiller (together with lesser figures like August von Kotzebue) wrote many of the emotionally turbulent works known as the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) (like Werther or Schiller’s The Robbers) which so shocked European audiences and made contemporary drama in England, for example, seem tame by comparison. By the 1790s, Goethe and Schiller (who earlier had feuded) became the best of friends, and they led a new movement known as Weimar Classicism, which (in an almost completely opposite direction) became known for its serene calm and supreme intellectual beauty.
Up next (but it’s late, so tomorrow): G.W.F. Hegel, Goethe’s friend Johann Gottfried Herder, and Johann Georg Hamann. A bumper crop of 18th century Germans!
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