Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe[a] (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German polymath and writer, who is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day.[3][4] Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic.[3] His works include plays, poetry and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and color.
Several terms redirect here. For other uses, see Goethe (disambiguation) and Gote (disambiguation).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang Goethe
28 August 1749
Free Imperial City of Frankfurt, Holy Roman Empire
22 March 1832 (aged 82)
Weimar, Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, German Confederation
Poet, novelist, playwright, natural philosopher, statesman
German
- Fiction (poetry
- novel
- romance
- drama)
- non-fiction (aesthetic criticism
- treatise
- article
- autobiography
- oration
- correspondence)
From 1770
5 (4 died young), including August von Goethe
- Cornelia Schlosser (sister)
- Christian August Vulpius (brother-in-law)
- Johann Georg Schlosser (brother-in-law)
- Ottilie von Goethe (daughter-in-law)
- Walther von Goethe (grandson)
Goethe took up residence in Weimar in November 1775 following the success of his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and joined a thriving intellectual and cultural environment under the patronage of Duchess Anna Amalia that had already included Abel Seyler's theatre company and Christoph Martin Wieland, and that formed the basis of Weimar Classicism. He was ennobled by the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, Karl August, in 1782. Goethe was an early participant in the Sturm und Drang literary movement. During his first ten years in Weimar, Goethe became a member of the Duke's privy council (1776–1785), sat on the war and highway commissions, oversaw the reopening of silver mines in nearby Ilmenau, and implemented a series of administrative reforms at the University of Jena. He also contributed to the planning of Weimar's botanical park and the rebuilding of its Ducal Palace.[5][b]
Goethe's first major scientific work, the Metamorphosis of Plants, was published after he returned from a 1788 tour of Italy. In 1791 he was made managing director of the theatre at Weimar, and in 1794 he began a friendship with the dramatist, historian, and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, whose plays he premiered until Schiller's death in 1805. During this period Goethe published his second novel, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship; the verse epic Hermann and Dorothea, and, in 1808, the first part of his most celebrated drama, Faust. His conversations and various shared undertakings throughout the 1790s with Schiller, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Johann Gottfried Herder, Alexander von Humboldt,[6] Wilhelm von Humboldt, and August and Friedrich Schlegel have come to be collectively termed Weimar Classicism.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer named Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship one of the four greatest novels ever written,[7][c] while the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson selected Goethe as one of six "representative men" in his work of the same name (along with Plato, Emanuel Swedenborg, Montaigne, Napoleon, and Shakespeare). Goethe's comments and observations form the basis of several biographical works, notably Johann Peter Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe (1836). His poems were set to music by many composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler.
Distant relatives of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe[edit]
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's father had an older half-brother, Hermann Jakob Goethe (1697–1761) from his grandfather Friedrich Georg Goethe's first marriage. In 1722, he married Susanna Elisabeth Hoppe (1704–1778), with whom he had seven children, among whom was a daughter Cornelia, who later became the ancestor of the famous scientist Johann August Streng (1830–1897), after whom the mineral Strengite was named. Cornelia Goethe was the daughter of Hermann Jacob Goethe and was the niece of Johann Caspar Goethe. In 1749, Cornelia Goethe married the merchant Ulrich Thomas Streng, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born.
Awards named after him