Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 13th of October 1806, Napoleon's army poured into Weimar, and the least disciplined of the French soldiers, the so-called spoon guards, broke into the home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They drank his wine, made a great uproar, and called for the master of the house. Goethe, already undressed and wearing only his wide nightgown, came down the stairs to ask what they wanted. Late that night they burst into his bedroom with drawn bayonets. He was petrified. It was his companion Christiane Vulpius who raised the alarm, tangled with the marauders, and organized the defence of the house. Six days later, on the 19th of October 1806, Goethe married her at the Jakobskirche in Weimar. In his diary he wrote only: Fires, rapine, a frightful night. Preservation of the house through steadfastness and luck. Goethe lived from the 28th of August 1749 to the 22nd of March 1832, and he is widely regarded as the most influential writer in the German language. But the word writer barely contains him. He was a poet, a playwright, a novelist, a statesman, a theatre director, and a scientist who held the largest private mineral collection in Europe. How does one man come to write a best-selling novel, run a duchy, hunt for a hidden bone in the human skull, and pick a quarrel with Isaac Newton over the nature of colour? The answers begin with a tailor's grandson in Frankfurt.

• 2. A Frankfurt Inheritance

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  In 1687, Goethe's grandfather moved from Thuringia and changed the spelling of the family surname from Gothe to Goethe. He worked first as a tailor in Frankfurt, then opened a tavern, and the fortune he earned would support his son and grandchildren for the rest of their lives. His son, Johann Caspar Goethe, married Catharina Elisabeth Textor in Frankfurt on the 20th of August 1748, when he was 38 and she was 17. All of their children died young except two: Johann Wolfgang and his sister Cornelia Friederica Christiana. Johann Caspar had studied law in Leipzig and held the title of Imperial Councillor, yet he took no part in the official affairs of Frankfurt, then a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire. Frustrated in his own ambitions, he was determined that his children should have every advantage he had missed. The young Goethe learned Latin, Greek, a little Biblical Hebrew, French, Italian, and English, along with dancing, riding, and fencing. His great passion as a boy was drawing, but literature pulled at him too, with Homer and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock among his earliest favourites. He was fascinated by the puppet shows that occupying French soldiers arranged each year at his home, a memory that would resurface years later in his novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.

• 3. The Reluctant Lawyer

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  From 1765 to 1768, Goethe studied law at Leipzig University, and he detested it. He hated memorizing judicial rules and preferred to slip into the lectures of the poet and professor Christian Furchtegott Gellert. He fell in love with Anna Katharina Schonkopf, an innkeeper's daughter, and wrote cheerful Rococo verses about her. In 1770 he anonymously released his first collection of poems, Annette, and discarded nearly everything else he had written, sparing only the comedy Die Mitschuldigen. Making little progress, he was forced back to Frankfurt at the end of August 1768, where he fell severely ill and quarrelled with his father over a year and a half of relapses. In April 1770, Goethe left to finish his studies at the University of Strasbourg, and in Alsace he blossomed. There he met Johann Gottfried Herder, who became a close friend and kindled his interest in William Shakespeare, in Ossian, and in the idea of Volkspoesie, or folk poetry. On the 14th of October 1772, Goethe hosted a gathering at his parents' home to mark the first German Shakespeare Day. He earned his Licentiate in Law at the end of August 1771 and opened a small practice in Frankfurt, but his inexperience led him to proceed too vigorously in his first cases. He was reprimanded, lost clients, and within months his legal career was effectively over. He had better luck reworking the biography of a noble highwayman from the German Peasants' War into a colourful drama, Gotz von Berlichingen, which struck a chord with his contemporaries.

• 4. The Werther Phenomenon

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  In 1774, Goethe wrote the book that brought him worldwide fame: The Sorrows of Young Werther. Its plot drew on his time at Wetzlar, where he had taken up the practice of law again in May 1772, and on his feelings for Charlotte Buff and her fiance Johann Christian Kestner. It also drew on the suicide of the Goethes' friend Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. The short epistolary novel follows an obsessive young man driven to despair and destruction by his unrequited love for the young Lotte, and it ends in his suicide and a funeral that no clergyman attended. Because Christian doctrine held suicide to be sinful, and because suicides were denied Christian burial and often had their bodies mutilated, the anonymous book was deeply controversial. Critics felt it appeared to condone and glorify suicide. Goethe later admitted that he shot his hero to save himself, quelling a near-suicidal passion of his own through writing. Werther is often considered the spark that ignited the Romantic movement, and can arguably be called the world's first best-seller. Yet it brought Goethe little money, since copyright protection barely existed at the time. He would later answer that problem by periodically authorizing new, revised editions of his Complete Works. The novel still remains in print in dozens of languages.

• 5. The Weimar Statesman

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  In 1775, on the strength of Werther, Goethe was invited to the court of Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and he settled in Weimar for the rest of his life. The Duke's mother, Duchess Anna Amalia, had served as regent until that year and was one of the most important patrons of the arts of her day, turning her court into a centre of culture. Karl August came of age when he turned eighteen in 1775, and Goethe became his friend, confidant, and chief adviser. The duties piled up. Goethe joined the privy council, sat on the war and highway commissions, and in 1779 took on the War Commission of the Grand Duchy. He oversaw the reopening of silver mines at Ilmenau, reformed the University of Jena, and helped plan Weimar's botanical park and the rebuilding of the Ducal Palace. When the chancellor of the Exchequer left office in 1782, Goethe acted in his place for two and a half years, a post that virtually made him prime minister. That same year he was ennobled, which is the source of the von in his name, and he moved into the residence he would keep for the next 50 years. The work had a darker side. As head of the War Commission, Goethe took part in recruiting mercenaries for the Prussian and British military during the American Revolution. The author Daniel Wilson claims he engaged in negotiating the forced sale of vagabonds, criminals, and political dissidents. In 1776 Goethe also formed a close bond with Charlotte von Stein, a married woman seven years his senior, an intimacy that lasted ten years until he left abruptly for Italy without a word of notice.

• 6. The Italian Pilgrimage

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  To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, Goethe wrote, for Sicily is the clue to everything. His journey through the Italian peninsula and Sicily from 1786 to 1788 reshaped his aesthetic and philosophical thinking. His father had made a similar trip, and the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann had stirred a renewed interest in the classical art of ancient Greece and Rome, giving the journey the character of a pilgrimage. Along the way he befriended the artists Angelica Kauffman and Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, and encountered such figures as Lady Hamilton and Alessandro Cagliostro. In Southern Italy and Sicily he met genuine Greek architecture for the first time, as opposed to Roman, and was startled by its relative simplicity, a distinction Winckelmann had not recognized. The diaries of this period became his non-fiction Italian Journey, though that book covers only the first year. The second year is largely undocumented apart from a long stay in Venice, a gap in the record that has fed much speculation. After the book's publication in 1816 it inspired countless German youths to follow his example, a phenomenon George Eliot pictured somewhat satirically in Middlemarch.

• 7. The Schiller Years

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  In 1794, Friedrich Schiller wrote to Goethe offering friendship, ending a wary relationship that had lasted since the two first met in 1788. The collaboration lasted until Schiller's death in 1805, and Goethe premiered Schiller's plays throughout. Goethe had been made managing director of the theatre at Weimar in 1791. The conversations and shared undertakings of the 1790s, which drew in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Herder, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, and August and Friedrich Schlegel, came to be called Weimar Classicism. The works of these years run deep. To the period of the Schiller friendship belong Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, the idyll Hermann and Dorothea, the Roman Elegies, and the verse drama The Natural Daughter. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer named Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship one of the four greatest novels ever written. The American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson chose Goethe as one of six representative men, alongside Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Michel de Montaigne, Napoleon, and Shakespeare. After Schiller died, Goethe published Faust Part One in 1808, Elective Affinities in 1809, and the West-Eastern Diwan, an 1819 collection of poems in the Persian style influenced by Hafez. His epic closet drama Faust came together in stages. The first part created a sensation, and Faust Part Two was finished in the year of his death and published posthumously.

• 8. The Other Goethe, In Science

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  As to what I have done as a poet, Goethe wrote, I take no pride in it. He reserved his pride for colour science, claiming to be the only person in his century who knew the truth in that difficult field. He wrote works on morphology and colour theory, undertook Galvanic experiments, and studied anatomy with Alexander von Humboldt. By his death he had collected 17,800 rock samples to build a comprehensive view of geology. In 1784, with the help of an elephant's skull lent to him by Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring, he independently discovered the human intermaxillary bone, now called Goethe's bone, and was the first to prove its existence in all mammals. That skull, the Goethean Elephant, is displayed in the Ottoneum in Kassel. His theory of plant metamorphosis, published as Metamorphosis of Plants in 1790, held that from top to bottom a plant is all leaf. The mineral goethite, an iron oxide, is named after him, and the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, who had memorized the entire text of Faust, claimed an epiphany while reciting it led him to the rotating magnetic field and alternating current. In 1810 Goethe published his Theory of Colours, the work he considered his most important. He characterized colour as arising from the interplay of light and darkness through a turbid medium, and he was vehemently opposed to Newton's analytic treatment of colour. His empirical observations were largely accurate even where his aesthetic method failed the standards of mathematical analysis. He was the first to systematically study the physiological effects of colour, and his symmetric colour wheel anticipated Ewald Hering's opponent colour theory of 1872. The schoolboy who learned the beginnings of books by heart had become a man whose last words were abridged into a single dictum, more light.