GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON (1749–1832), German poet, dramatist and philosopher, was born at Frankfort-on-Main on the 28th of August 1749. He came, on his father’s side, of Thuringian stock, his great-grandfather, Hans Christian Goethe, having been a farrier at Artern-on-the-Unstrut, about the middle of the 17th century. Hans Christian’s son, Friedrich Georg, was brought up to the trade of a tailor, and in this capacity settled in Frankfort in 1686. A second marriage, however, brought him into possession of the Frankfort inn, “Zum Weidenhof,” and he ended his days as a well-to-do innkeeper. His son, Johann Kaspar, the poet’s father (1710–1782), studied law at Leipzig, and, after going through the prescribed courses of practical training at Wetzlar, travelled in Italy. He hoped, on his return to Frankfort, to obtain an official position in the government of the free city, but his personal influence with the authorities was not sufficiently strong. In his disappointment he resolved never again to offer his services to his native town, and retired into private life, a course which his ample means facilitated. In 1742 he acquired, as a consolation for the public career he had missed, the title of kaiserlicher Rat, and in 1748 married Katharina Elisabeth (1731–1808), daughter of the Schultheiss or Bürgermeister of Frankfort, Johann Wolfgang Textor. The poet was the eldest son of this union. Of the later children only one, Cornelia, born in 1750, survived the years of childhood; she died as the wife of Goethe’s friend, J. G. Schlosser, in 1777. The best elements in Goethe’s genius came from his mother’s side; of a lively, impulsive disposition, and gifted with remarkable imaginative power, Frau Rat was the ideal mother of a poet; moreover, being hardly eighteen at the time of her son’s birth, she was herself able to be the companion of his childhood. From his father, whose stern, somewhat pedantic nature repelled warmer feelings on the part of the children, Goethe inherited that “holy earnestness” and stability of character which brought him unscathed through temptations and passions, and held the balance to his all too powerful imagination.
Unforgettable is the picture which the poet subsequently drew of his childhood spent in the large house with its many nooks and crannies, in the Grosse Hirschgraben at Frankfort. Books, pictures, objects of art, antiquities, reminiscences of Rat Goethe’s visit to Italy, above all a marionette theatre, kindled the child’s quick intellect and imagination. His training was conducted in its early stages by his father, and was later supplemented by tutors. Meanwhile the varied and picturesque life of Frankfort was in itself an education. In 1759, during the Seven Years’ War, the French, as Maria Theresa’s allies, occupied the town, and, much to the irritation of Goethe’s father, who was a stanch partisan of Frederick the Great, a French lieutenant, Count Thoranc, was quartered on the Goethe household. The foreign occupation also led to the establishment of a French troupe of actors, and to their performances the boy, through his grandfather’s influence, had free access. Goethe has also recorded his memories of another picturesque event, the coronation of the emperor Joseph II. in the Frankfort Römer or town hall in 1764; but these memories were darkened by being associated in his mind with the tragic dénouement of his first love affair. The object of this passion was a certain Gretchen, who seems to have taken advantage of the boy’s interest in her to further the dishonest ends of one of her friends. The discovery of the affair and the investigation that followed cooled Goethe’s ardour and caused him to turn his attention seriously to the studies which were to prepare him for the university. Meanwhile the literary instinct had begun to show itself; we hear of a novel in letters—a kind of linguistic exercise, in which the characters carried on the correspondence in different languages—of a prose epic on the subject of Joseph, and various religious poems of which one, Die Höllenfahrt Christi, found its way in a revised form into the poet’s complete works.
In October 1765, Goethe, then a little over sixteen, left Frankfort for Leipzig, where a wider and, in many respects, less provincial life awaited him. He entered upon his university studies with zeal, but his own education in Frankfort had not been the best preparation for the scholastic methods which still dominated the German universities; of his professors, only Gellert seems to have won his interest, and that interest was soon exhausted. The literary beginnings he had made in Frankfort now seemed to him amateurish and trivial; he felt that he had to turn over a new leaf, and, under the guidance of E. W. Behrisch, a genial, original comrade, he learned the art of writing those light Anacreontic lyrics which harmonized with the tone of polite Leipzig society. Artificial as this poetry is, Goethe was, nevertheless, inspired by a real passion in Leipzig, namely, for Anna Katharina Schönkopf, the daughter of a wine-merchant at whose house he dined. She is the “Annette” after whom the recently discovered collection of lyrics was named, although it must be added that neither these lyrics nor the Neue Lieder, published in 1770, express very directly Goethe’s feelings for Käthchen Schönkopf. To his Leipzig student-days belong also two small plays in Alexandrines, Die Laune des Verliebten, a pastoral comedy in one act, which reflects the lighter side of the poet’s love affair, and Die Mitschuldigen (published in a revised form, 1769), a more sombre picture, in which comedy is incongruously mingled with tragedy. In Leipzig Goethe also had time for what remained one of the abiding interests of his life, for art; he regarded A. F. Oeser (1717–1799), the director of the academy of painting in the Pleissenburg, who had given him lessons in drawing, as the teacher who in Leipzig had influenced him most. His art studies were also furthered by a short visit to Dresden. His stay in Leipzig came, however, to an abrupt conclusion; the distractions of student life proved too much for his strength; a sudden haemorrhage supervened, and he lay long ill, first in Leipzig, and, after it was possible to remove him, at home in Frankfort. These months of slow recovery were a time of serious introspection for Goethe. He still corresponded with his Leipzig friends, but the tone of his letters changed; life had become graver and more earnest for him. He pored over books on occult philosophy; he busied himself with alchemy and astrology. A friend of his mother’s, Susanne Katharina von Klettenberg, who belonged to pietist circles in Frankfort, turned the boy’s thoughts to religious mysticism. On his recovery his father resolved that he should complete his legal studies at Strassburg, a city which, although then outside the German empire, was, in respect of language and culture, wholly German. From the first moment Goethe set foot in the narrow streets of the Alsatian capital, in April 1770, the whole current of his thought seemed to change. The Gothic architecture of the Strassburg minster became to him the symbol of a national and German ideal, directly antagonistic to the French tastes and the classical and rationalistic atmosphere that prevailed in Leipzig. The second moment of importance in Goethe’s Strassburg period was his meeting with Herder, who spent some weeks in Strassburg undergoing an operation of the eye. In this thinker, who was his senior by five years, Goethe found the master he sought; Herder taught him the significance of Gothic architecture, revealed to him the charm of nature’s simplicity, and inspired him with enthusiasm for Shakespeare and the Volkslied. Meanwhile Goethe’s legal studies were not neglected, and he found time to add to knowledge of other subjects, notably that of medicine. Another factor of importance in Goethe’s Strassburg life was his love for Friederike Brion, the daughter of an Alsatian village pastor in Sesenheim. Even more than Herder’s precept and example, this passion showed Goethe how trivial and artificial had been the Anacreontic and pastoral poetry with which he had occupied himself in Leipzig; and the lyrics inspired by Friederike, such as Kleine Blumen, kleine Blätter and Wie herrlich leuchtet mir die Natur! mark the beginning of a new epoch in German lyric poetry. The idyll of Sesenheim, as described in Dichtung und Wahrheit, is one of the most beautiful love-stories in the literature of the world. From the first, however, it was clear that Friederike Brion could never become the wife of the Frankfort patrician’s son; an unhappy ending to the romance was unavoidable, and, as is to be seen in passionate outpourings like the Wanderers Sturmlied, and in the bitter self-accusations of Clavigo, it left deep wounds on the poet’s sensitive soul.
