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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Goethe's Literary Essays : A Selection i... (by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe)
Goethe's Opinions on the World, Mankind,... (by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe)
Poems and translations from the German o... (by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Works (by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe)
Autobiography (by Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von)
Goethes Faust (by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe)
Goethe's Theory of Colours, Tr. From the... (by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe)
The Sorrows of Young Werther (by Von Goethe, J. W.)

The famous young Werther once questioned, “What is a life without romantic love?”

The answer is classicism. It is the level-headed and crafted restraint that comes after the pitfalls of romance. But don’t be fooled; it is not a life of puritanism. It is, to Goethe, love by all other means.

Born on August 28, 1749, in Frankfurt, Germany into wealth, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was the son of a man keen on providing Goethe with a wide range of lessons he himself never had, including dancing, riding, fencing, Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, English, and Italian. Although Goethe first exhibited more interest as a child in drawing, literature also became a great passion of his, and he consumed works by such authors as Homer and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock.

Goethe wrote his first and most well-known book, The Sorrows of Young Werther, at the age of 24, wherein he laid out a thinly-veiled story of his own encounter with unrequited love. The main character Werther meets and falls in love with Charlotte, a young woman already betrothed to another man. This most important anti-love affair set the course for the rest of his life.

“What is a life without romantic love?” It is a life of everything else.

Sorrows of Young Werther vaulted Goethe to literary fame, but he did not use it to further his career. Instead, he switched to civil service and became an advisor to the Duke of Weimar. He worked there for a good part of his life, learning skills of administration and governance, which which in turn allowed him to achieve such successes as establishing a national theatre and creating a modern urban park.

Goethe was a man of ideas, action and of travel as well. At age 37, he traveled to Rome, fulfilling a lifelong desire to find out what the country would awaken within him. There he composed a group of poems, The Roman Elegies, in which he speaks to the disillusionment of traveling as a tourist for sightseeing and about a woman, Faustina, with whom he fell in love . She helped crystallize his experience with Italy.

Goethe’s curiosities endeavored. When he returned from Italy, he began working on his first major scientific work, The Metamorphosis of Plants, wherein he presented discoveries on the homologous—or genetically similar—nature of leaf organs in plants, from photosynthetic leaves to the petals of a flower. Years later he published Theory of Colours, a study of the perception of color and the phenomena of refraction, chromatic aberration, and colored shadows.

Perhaps Goethe’s greatest literary achievement is Faust, a play he worked on for most of his life. He finished it after his 80th birthday. Faust tells the story of an impotent academic who makes a deal with the devil. Mephistopheles will grant Faust anything he wants in exchange for his soul. This story of a man who undergoes many transformations in an attempt to have a deeper understanding of life bears many similarities to Goethe’s own life.

A full life is, for Goethe, one in which romance transmutes into all other regions of life. He flirted with science, government, love, and the arts, and achieved noteworthy results in each area, but never fully abandoned himself in any. For more of Goethe’s writing, check out his Autobiography, some selected works, poetry, scientific works, and literary essays.

By Thad Higa