Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist and statesman, generally regarded as the greatest writer in the German language. His novel The Sorrows of Young Werther made him famous across Europe at twenty-four, and his two-part verse drama Faust, worked on for some sixty years, is the central work of German literature. For more than half a century he lived in the small duchy of Weimar, which he helped turn into the cultural capital of Germany.

Goethe was born on 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt am Main, a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire, into a wealthy family. His father, Johann Caspar Goethe, a lawyer with an imperial title but no office, educated his son and daughter at home in languages, drawing and music; his mother, Catharina Elisabeth Textor, was the daughter of the city's mayor. As a boy he saw the French occupation of Frankfurt during the Seven Years' War and attended a concert given by the seven-year-old Mozart.

His father sent him to study law in Leipzig in 1765, where he wrote light poems and plays in the elegant fashion of the time, before a serious illness sent him home in 1768. He completed his studies in Strasbourg in 1770 and 1771. There he met the critic Johann Gottfried Herder, who introduced him to Shakespeare, folk songs and the idea that true poetry springs from the spirit of a people rather than from rules. He was moved by the Gothic cathedral, which he praised as a German achievement, and fell in love with Friederike Brion, a pastor's daughter in the village of Sesenheim, for whom he wrote some of his first great lyrics.

Back in Frankfurt, practising law without much enthusiasm, Goethe became the leading figure of the Sturm und Drang, or Storm and Stress, a movement of young writers who rebelled against the rationalism of the Enlightenment in favour of feeling, nature and individual genius. His play Götz von Berlichingen (1773), about a rebellious knight of the sixteenth century, broke the classical rules of drama in imitation of Shakespeare.

In 1772, at the imperial court in Wetzlar, he fell hopelessly in love with Charlotte Buff, who was engaged to a friend. Out of this experience, and the suicide of an acquaintance, came The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a novel in letters about a sensitive young man whose unrequited love drives him to kill himself. It was a sensation across Europe: young men dressed like Werther in blue coats and yellow waistcoats, and critics blamed it for imitation suicides. Napoleon said he had read it seven times.

In 1775 the eighteen-year-old Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar invited Goethe to his court. Weimar was a small, poor duchy of about a hundred thousand people, but Goethe stayed there for the rest of his life. He became a member of the duke's privy council in 1776 and took on responsibility for mines, roads, the war commission and for a time the finances. He was ennobled in 1782, adding the von to his name. His intense, probably platonic friendship with Charlotte von Stein, a married lady of the court, shaped his writing in these years, though official duties left him little time to finish major works.

In 1786 he slipped away without warning to Italy, where he spent almost two years, mainly in Rome and Naples and in Sicily. Living among artists and studying classical ruins and Renaissance art, he found a new ideal of calm, balanced form. He returned to Weimar in 1788 with most of his official posts set aside, keeping charge of cultural and scientific institutions, and soon began living with Christiane Vulpius, a young woman who worked in a flower factory. Their relationship scandalised Weimar society; they had a son, August, in 1789, and married only in 1806, after French soldiers ransacked Weimar following the Battle of Jena.

The French Revolution disturbed Goethe, who distrusted sudden upheaval, and in 1792 he accompanied his duke on the failed allied invasion of France, witnessing the cannonade at Valmy. From 1791 to 1817 he directed the court theatre. In 1794 began his friendship with the playwright Friedrich Schiller, which lasted until Schiller's death in 1805. The two encouraged and criticised each other's work, and their partnership, together with Herder and Christoph Martin Wieland, is known as Weimar Classicism. Goethe completed the novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795 to 1796), the model for the German Bildungsroman, a novel about a young person's education through life, and the two men wrote a series of famous ballads.

The first part of Faust appeared in 1808. Based on the legend of a scholar who makes a pact with the devil, it shows Faust, weary of all learning, wagering his soul with Mephistopheles that he will never be satisfied with any moment, and then seducing and ruining the young Gretchen. The same year, at the Congress of Erfurt, Napoleon received Goethe and greeted him with admiration. His novel Elective Affinities (1809) treated marriage and passion as if they followed the laws of chemistry.

Goethe took his scientific work as seriously as his poetry. In 1784 he identified the intermaxillary bone in the human jaw, which supported his conviction that humans and animals share one plan of nature. In The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790) he argued that all the organs of a plant are variations of one basic form, the leaf, an idea later seen as an early contribution to morphology. His long Theory of Colours (1810) attacked Isaac Newton's account of light; its physics was wrong, but its observations on how people perceive colour influenced painters and psychologists, and for a time the young Arthur Schopenhauer worked with him on the subject.

In old age Goethe was a European celebrity, visited by writers and admirers from many countries. He wrote his autobiography, Poetry and Truth, the West-Eastern Divan (1819), poems inspired by the Persian poet Hafez, and promoted the idea of world literature, in which the literatures of all nations would learn from one another. His secretary Johann Peter Eckermann recorded his conversations. He finished the second part of Faust, a vast symbolic drama ranging through classical myth, politics and economics to Faust's final salvation, in 1831, and sealed the manuscript for publication after his death. He died in Weimar on 22 March 1832, aged 82. His supposed last words, more light, come from an account by a doctor who was not in the room.

Goethe shaped the modern German language and its literature more than any other writer, and his lyric poems were set by composers from Beethoven and Schubert to Wagner and Mahler. In the nineteenth century, as Germans sought a national identity before the unification of Germany, he was raised to the status of a national symbol, often alongside Schiller. Weimar's association with him was one reason the democratic republic founded after the First World War held its constituent assembly there. Today Germany's cultural institute abroad, the Goethe-Institut, bears his name, and his houses in Frankfurt and Weimar are museums. He remains a defining figure in the cultural history of Germany.