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| German Literature | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
This German poet, playwright and author was
born on August 28, 1749 in midst of a middle class family;
he had a comfortable childhood and was greatly influenced
by his mother, who encouraged his literary aspirations. While
he was studying law at Leipzig University he showed his keenness
form literature and painting, as well as beginning to study
occultism, astrology and alchemy, encouraged by a friend of
his mother's, Katharina von Klettenberg.
Among the authors and philosophers that most
influenced Goethe during his lifetime are Johann
Gottfried von Herder and Friedrich
von Schiller. Together with the former, he wrote Of
German Style and Art (1773), which along with his tragedy
Götz von Berlichingen (1773) became the cornerstone
of the Sturm und Drang movement that searched
for a way back to intuitive knowledge and the pagan and magical
religiousness of ancient German traditions, as opposed to
the precepts of the French classical period. This movement
was to be the forerunner of German romantic literature.
The following year
the romantic tragedy The Sorrows of Young Werther,
was published, a fateful story of unrequited love and suicide
which was enormously successful with audiences and which turned
into standard play of the Romantic Period.
During 1775 Goethe
moved to Weimar, one of the most important intellectual and
cultural centers in Germany at the time, invited over by the
heir to the Duchy of Saxony-Weimar, Charles Augustus. He remained
there until his death in 1832.
Except for a few poems,
and outlines of poems that would later become form part of
his most famous work (the play Iphigenia in Tauris,
Faust), during the first ten years in Weimar he wrote
very little, being fully occupied with his positions in public
administration, as well as studying mineralogy, osteology
and geology.
Between 1786 and 1788 he lived in Italy where
he was confronted with and influenced by the greatness of
the Classical world. From that moment on his work began to
adopt and develop universal and timeless themes, which led
to ideas and forms that ended up by shaping what would later
be called the Classical Period in German literature. In 1794
Goethe met Friedrich von Schiller, with whom he was fast friends
until the latter passed away in 1805, the year that also marks
the beginning of an especially prolific stage for Goethe,
and which would last until his own death. Some of the most
prominent writings from this last stage of his life include
Elective Affinities (1809) and Wilhelm Meister's
Years of Apprenticeship (1821); his autobiography and
the second part of his dramatic poem, Faust, were published
in 1832, after his death.
